George Massenburg

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Says Podcast.
My guest today is producer, engineer, technical wizard George Massenberg. George,
you wanted to talk about skiing.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'd rather talk about AI.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
You'd rather talk about AI? Tell me your thoughts about AI.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
I think most of the public conversation has been misled
and is misleading. Kind of summarize it.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Okay, but let's sort of buy for Katie here. Are
you on the side of AI is scary or the
hype is too heavy.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
I'm certainly of the opinion that some tech millionaires are
making a lot more money promoting AI, and I've recently
found out a little bit more of the dollars where
the dollars move. But I'm not scared of anything. I
love technology. The misuse of technology I have problems with.

(01:16):
But I love fixing things. I love getting things to work.
And for the past couple of years, my programmers and
I have been working with AI to suggest code and
it speeds things up. By the way, it also gets
about half of what it states is fact wrong. That

(01:38):
is code that doesn't work or code that causes things
to crash, and code is code. I mean you have
to run code, and if it's wrong, it crashes. So
we have to be as careful as we are with
AI generating code. We don't do any generative AI with code.

(02:01):
We use it to wire controls in some of these
development applications.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
So, George, you just sent me a document saying why
does AI generated music sound so shitty? So why does
it sound so shitty?

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Well, there are a few reasons. Well, I guess the
reason at the top of my head is that we've
been years trying to make incrementally better music as we
learn how to live and how to communicate, how to listen,

(02:40):
how to spread out our interests that we allow other
kinds of music, other cultures in And it's certainly what
I'm trying to do is to make is to understand
better how to communicate with music, how to help artists
make music better, communicate what they're trying to say. And

(03:04):
by the way, that presumes that artists always have something
to say. And you may have an opinion on that,
but the bottom line is we love making music. This
group of seven of us, and you've interviewed half of us,
I think, but I've lived a life of music in

(03:26):
its group Bob, It's brought me tremendous joy when I
stumble on something I've been working very hard at and
finally I make it work or it clicks or it
has some magic, and it it affirms my life. It's
the best thing I could, best way I can put it.

(03:47):
I love music. Okay, that's your general philosophy. But just
restating the question, why does AI music sound so bad? Well,
here's the list. I'll work my way from the bottom up.
Missing the feel.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
AI.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
I mean, if you think of it in terms of
what AI doesn't do. It doesn't copy paste happiness. It
doesn't doesn't do joy. Joy is very personalized, its individual.
It doesn't have the tools yet to tell a story

(04:28):
in time, Bob. You know groove as well as any
of us. Groove is, in one way of looking at
groove is a story between musicians and time. Musicians for me,
musicians in the studio where a great guitar player proposes
a groove to somebody else in the room, and it's

(04:49):
what can you do with this, Bernard or whatever that
might be. Groove is a story in time, and you
hear groove that's written to me everywhere. Mariacchi, you know
the feel of mariachi is the feel of the groove.
How something to the uninitiated sounds a little bit like

(05:09):
a lurch off the forela, and that's groove, or in
one way of looking at that's groove. And AI doesn't
do groove. Now maybe eventually you could learn. But the
very heart of AI, the heart of AI, is nothing
but a machine that does a comparative analysis and a

(05:29):
thing called correlation, auto correlation, relative correlation. And the reason
it soaks up so much power is the way I works.
And you've heard it put this way. I know where
you take two call them data sets, and you sort
on the correlated parts of two data sets. I'll get

(05:51):
I'll get a lot simpiler in a minute, two correlated
parts of data sets, and you're building a large model library.
By the way, that's the expensive part of AI, is
building the large model library. But all you're doing is
finding commonality. And you're doing on more than this, but

(06:12):
it's very core. You're finding a commonality between data sets
and what I would propose in its most rudimentary form,
it's turning all of these different data sets looking for
commonality into mush into beige mush. Nothing too surprising. It

(06:36):
doesn't do anything terribly extraordinary or terribly Monday. Actually it's
all Munday, and if you want to look at it
that way. But it's selling some kind of genius that
I'm just not seeing. I think there's been tremendous room
for we practitioners who use AI to take an idea,

(06:59):
see what AI has to say about it, and then
adds something of our own. And one thing that I
would suggest is there's a lot of room to add
it of our own feeling and knowledge. And it's sets
of music and joy. There's no joy. Yeah, AI doesn't

(07:19):
do joy. Oh god, I'm sorry. I'm running on of
no no, no, no no no, I have these is
all going to get cut.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
No no, no, no, no no, this is this is genius.
Keep going. How'll come? Insiders like you and Don was
have no fear of AI and music and everybody on
the business side, and those who are not on the
inside creatively are freaking out.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
I love Don and for all the times that we've
been in the studio together, and you have to remember,
because you've been here with this, I know where we
spend about five minutes hacking, hacking, doing work and doing
some edits and then the next fifty five minutes telling stories.

(08:11):
And Don's stories are great, and he's worked with everybody,
and I just love working. He's a great guy to
hang with. Why does Don tend to think about it
the same way? It's the first I've heard of it.
I haven't talked to Tom in a couple of years ago,
and I would say that he's a thinking man's producer.

(08:33):
He's the thinking man's producer with a great, great field.
Now I'm surprised you haven't haven't heard that he's out
with us.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
With the Don has told me. He said, AI is
a tool, just like with the lin drum. He had
Lynn drum number three I think it was, and he
asked Roger len who had number two? Because Roger had
number one. He said Prince. And then Don messed around
with it, couldn't figure out any great thing. And then

(09:03):
he heard princes when doves cry. And then he says, Okay,
I see what you can do with it. And he
feels the same way about AI that yes, I feel this, Ye,
it will have us, but it's not going to replace
the underlying music.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
It's not going to replace the inspiration. So again you
know if you scroll to the bottom, no real intentionality.
AI doesn't get into a gig with the intention of
a quality even reviewing its quality. To ask another add

(09:44):
I think it was chat GPT if there was any
recycling of data in LIED and said, no, there's none.
But that's that's a lie. It does recycle data because
it does need to study its recommendations and make sure
it's not echoing one of those early completely racist AI

(10:07):
agents that put out like the worst recommendations, the worst language,
hateful speech. And you've read about that, and it may
have been early Meta that did that, just hateful, hateful speech,
and they went in and started fishing for ways to
limit that, they being the few programmers that really understand

(10:33):
how the AI algorithms were. So what I would what
my mind jumps to is is how great Prince was
because he you know, we all worked with Prince. In fact,
you remember Cavala Ruffalo, they managed Prince and they got

(10:54):
me the gag mastering some of the Prince stuff because
Bernie Grutman couldn't deal with it what Prince was making
him do. May he may rest in peace because he's
he was the genius. He was on with true independent inspiration.
But but that thing that he discovered because we saw
him use the drum machine, he used stock Lynn Lynn

(11:15):
Allen one. We saw Ellen one when when David David
Foster asked Roger Lynn to show it to him. So
that was that was number one where it was still
breadboards and uh boy, you could you could see the possibilities.
And Prince saw it in three D. He was musically

(11:39):
and I want to say, emotionally and technically a study
in real creativity. Let's go back to the beginning of George.
So where do you grow up? All over the place.
My father was an Air Force surgeon, so I grew
up in four or five different cities. My father was

(12:03):
from Macon, Georgia, mother was from at that time Pennsylvania.
My grandfather was a mukeeting bucket Exxon which was called
Standard Oil. And so the most memorable times in my
life were going to after they divorced, visit my father
in Macon, Georgia, and have this experience with Southern radio

(12:30):
that changed my DNA at the very heart is growing
up listening to when I was in Macon, listening to
race radio, listening to early black radio, and as near
as I can figure. My father was a surgeon for

(12:52):
the better part of the black community of Making, Georgia.
I don't know whether he was the surgeon for notable musicians,
but he might have been. So I've got something you're
going to have to cut out. My father was the
only surgeon in town that would put his hand up

(13:13):
a black man's ass to check for growths. And why
do we have to keep out? Oh? I love you
more and more, Bob Okay, use it. But he was.
He was. The quarter of his year was charity surgery.

(13:38):
He was, in my mind, a hero. Even though he
was a terrible alcoholic and hated being a doctor. He
did use it. But growing up in Making, Georgia expose
me to the early bird groups and I would turn
on the radio and I as a seven year old,
which is her raw sex pour out of the radio,

(13:59):
And I said, well that's for me. I didn't know anything,
but I loved music, and that was a side of
music that I wouldn't have heard any other way. So
that was Making. And we were also Scottsfield, Arizona, and
be fifty twos flew Over and my brother and my

(14:20):
nephew are service families in the Navy. My nephew is
an air boss on an aircraft carrier, and my brother
rose to I'm so proud of my brother. We grew
up miles apart. My brother went into service and was

(14:40):
in naval Rotzzi and interviewed with Rumsfeld. He was one
of the top ten guys in service. And we never
spoke for years and years and years, and then when
we did, we realized how much we loved each other.
But now I'm really getting farfield. I was a family

(15:00):
and I was you've interviewed ry Cooter would refer to
him as I was always a George. I was always
a marginal person. I felt that way. It was always marginal.
I was a terrible student. It was horrible.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
Wait a second, Okay, so only two kids in the family,
you and your brother.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Well, we have an extended family yet cousins and nephews,
and well in the primary family was my brother. And
who's older you or your brother? I was older and
I was a monster. I would I would fight with
my brother and do terrible things. But yeah, no, I

(15:47):
was older.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
Okay, Well, you must have been somewhat of a good
student if you got into Johns Hopkins.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, but boy. I didn't get along with anybody, and
I didn't realize until I tried to go back and
teach at university. I was at McGill for thirteen years,
and I view those years largely as misdirected and maybe wasted.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Wait wait, wait, just to be clear, your years at
Johns Hopkins or your year's teaching.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
My years A year and a half at Johns Hopkins,
and I finally left Johns Hopkins. I quit Johns Hopkins
at about the same time that everybody else was smart
was quitting university, and I got a job at a
recording studio. Okay, But later at McGill, I found that
it was very difficult to reach kids. I wasn't there

(16:46):
to serve the kids. I was there to serve the
administrative layer at the university. And when I fought it,
I was not welcomed. Okay, So when you were at McGill,
why was it so hard to reach students. I wasn't

(17:10):
silenced early, but I assumed that I could change the agenda.
And I came to McGill having just started doing video
in the studio, because at that time I had already
demonstrated as well as I could that video directors. We

(17:37):
were missing a lot, and so I wanted to do
it on my own. So I bought some professional cameras
and started taking doing video and the recording studio. This
would be very quick, don't worry. Started doing video on
the recording studio. My second engineers would double as videographers.

(17:58):
Would take one let's roll. They would put down their
clipboard and pick up a camera and shoot the session.
And I had a completely different experience with video, where
I focused on the music and the performance and not

(18:20):
what I came into it as a producer. Angry, an
r person or whatever forces push a session over on
its face. So I took that to mcgil where I
was trying to make clear that we had a tremendous
resource at mcgillan's and Music. We had some extraordinary performance

(18:44):
and we had recording facilities one of the pre eminent
recording programs in the world mcguil Sound Recording, and I
tried to put it together. We had a tremendous director
of the opera, Patrick Hanson, and we had wonderful donors

(19:04):
Joe and Ivory and gave me discretionary use of some
funds and so I could buy enough video to do
pro video, and we changed video in Canada, I would
submit where you know, we would keep keep it as research.

(19:31):
Everything about about what I learned was about research, conducting
research and doing it poorly, I mean, not good at it.
But and I'm inconsistent and I'm lazy, But I did
find that musicians were far better videographers far better. And

(19:53):
this is way before anything Instagram or TikTok or anything issues.
Make better videographers because they follow the music. They follow
the music, and as videographers on a live presentation, they're
irreplaceable because they know where the music is going, they

(20:16):
know where the action is going in opera, and this
is lost on the better part of the school and
a professional context. You know, I was not very well accepted,
and maybe it was my attitude. I still have a

(20:39):
bad attitude.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
Wait wait, wait wait, bad attitude is the essence of
rock and roll. But I want to and ask just
a little bit more, what was the problem with connecting
with the students.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
Oh boy, Well, this is going to be hard to admit,
but I'm not a nice person when things go wrong,
and I'm aggressive and more likely to be angry and

(21:27):
accusatory and just awful and I hate me in the
recording studio, and if you ask any of my second engineers,
they would have to agree. And with students it worked
less well because they thought, they felt strongly and rightly
so that they were paying for an education. They were

(21:49):
looking for their education. Why why they were looking for
their idea what an education was or is? And what
I needed is for students to pay attention and survey
your academics bomb and ask them what their biggest problem,

(22:10):
the biggest problems were and are. And it's the challenge
in my mind and my book is the challenge of
getting students to pay attention. That's extraordinarily difficult. And when
I could capture the attention of and this is this
is a graduate level course. Sound recording is a master's degree,

(22:31):
three year degree, which is when I could get somebody
on board with how to think about telling a story
in video, because it's all about telling a story, same
thing as music. We're there to tell stories. And that

(22:51):
idea of coherence over time that first thing that an
AIA agent has to deliver. On that list I sent
you coherence of a story over time? How to get
a story to hang together? I turned a couple of
my graduates into the direction of being professionals, and they're

(23:14):
all working and they're making a fuck ton of money.
I think they are. But the ones I could reach
I did extremely well with. So I was encouraged to
think that this Jacqueline Hide demeanor would get a student's
attention and allow me to move it move. The conversation

(23:35):
on that was just mean, Okay, if.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
We've pulled back the lens, people from our generation all
figured it out for themselves with your experience, how do
you feel about music education on the road to creating
professional artists?

Speaker 2 (24:03):
What a brilliant question and one that I should have
been prepared for. We're still looking for brilliant artists, so
let's start at the end and work our way back.
Our challenge these days and finding in discovering brilliant artists,

(24:23):
And I mean there are not many of them, Prince.
There's he's one in ten million I haven't met, but
a small handful of true geniuses and pop music, by
the way, I know you watched the Billy Joel thing.
I was so impressed with Billy Joel, and I've did

(24:45):
a record with him and didn't see certain sides of
him as far as writing went, and was very close
to Phil Ramona, and I know what Phil brought to
Billy Joel, and it wasn't always Billy Joel's idea. But
to fill the point I was trying to make, or
trying to lead into, is the idea that there's so

(25:06):
much noise out there, and the industry is smaller and
in competition with sports and with video games and with
God knows what that you're likely to draw off how
to find that brilliant person again, find that what on
terms that I could I could relate to this, This person,

(25:30):
Jimmy well Web is a good example of somebody, ah
who I am in awe. The way he puts moving
tones together and by the way he puts music, he
puts lyrics together is idiosyncrasies. And there are men, there
are many others that you and I have known that
we would have to call brilliant, but they're harder and

(25:56):
harder to find. I did. I started a record Tammy Emmanuel,
who is that kind of idiosyncratic, complete genius, independent way
of expressing himself and God knows where it comes from,

(26:17):
but you know right away that this is a transcendent artist.
So that's the problem. And the other thing is nobody
picks me as a producer anymore. You know, I have
this thing that I do where I'll do it once.
When I got out of Earth Wind and Fire many

(26:40):
many years ago, I had a lot of offers and
I did a couple of them and realized that they
didn't want any innovation whatsoever. They just wanted me to
repeat what they thought were my ideas with earth Wind
and Fire. And I didn't do the heavy lifting with
her from the Fire, Marys wife did and I couldn't

(27:06):
fulfill that dream, so I stopped taking work. I still
won't answer the phone. But Tommy Emmanuel persisted, so I
had to work with him. Also, he was brilliant, so
I had to work with him. Linda persisted. A lot
of these artists persisted, and that worked with him.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Okay, there was a great explosion of artists in the
sixties and seventies into the eighties. What you talked about
the competition for interest sports and video games in the Internet.
But do you believe the what is the problem that

(27:47):
we're not having artists? Is there not dedicating the time?
We can't find it, we can't amplify it. What is
the real problem.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Oh, I don't know. Problem. Well, I think the challenge
is allowing marginal people, is allowing a ryecoiter. For me,
it was getting to know loll George and how he

(28:18):
would craft a story, and how he suffered from music
with this, with this incomprehensibly narrow view that he had
to change the world with the song. I've put it

(28:39):
like that before. Nobody's argued with me. But that's the
why I saw old George and what he did to live.
His music was idiosyncratic and independent, and people would pay.
Bob you wrote some checks. People would pay for that
in the sixties and seventies, and then people tried to

(29:02):
simplify it and gave it to accountants. With the turn
of the nineties and the experience of having artists like
Michael Jackson go for what did he go for forty
points to Walter forty five points? You know, and the
artists took control, they took their music back, and they

(29:27):
didn't they couldn't do that formula anymore where one out
of twenty would fund the other nineteen. But you know,
Michael wouldn't allow that. And then Braca, you should interview
John Braga Braco wouldn't allow that.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
Well, I know, Brinck, I've talked a little bit. That's
a good idea. Let's go back to Lowell. George, tell
me about him suffering for the music.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Well, first, it's well known that he overindulged, and that
was not his about his friend. I mean when we
did the rate you've heard about the Rainbow sessions that
we did that turned into Waiting for Columbus, which it
turned out to be a great record, and everybody had

(30:13):
a hand in it. Who I want to say mattered,
but he his his his wife Liz, had to sequester
his funds so they wouldn't buy a lot of really
nasty drugs. So before the Wednesday night show at the Rainbow,

(30:41):
you could see loll in the lobby with an armful
of T shirts selling T shirts for half price so
he could make enough money to buy blow. And And
that was the story of the the downfall of the
production of the Rainbow.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
That was Lowell.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
That had to do with Lowell's imagination and what he
could get away with, what he should get away with,
what he shouldn't get away with. But he told a
great story and he lived, He lived his he lived
at the edges of his imagination. He's a great, great
recond and a fisherman, loved to fish. He and jenneddiad

(31:29):
bonded over fishing. So I don't know where I started
that answer, I help, it didn't get to.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Okay, how did you meet Lowell? George?

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Oh, that's a good story to it. The artist of
my life was began as Emulou Harris, and I was
a small recording studio in Hunt Valley, Maryland early on,
and word got to Washington, d C. Where Tom and
Emmy Lou lived, and she was doing her thing, playing

(31:59):
her songs out of the folk scare of the late sixties,
and I got to know, I mean, I did a
couple tunes for her, and shortly thereafter she heard from
her friend Lindron said that Lindron said was sick and

(32:22):
she was going to come to do this record with
John Starling, the leader of the Seldom scene. You probably
never heard that name, but he had the great bluegrass
and I come out of bluegrass. Bluegress in classical music
and the bluegrass were a lot of these early bluegrass artists.

(32:42):
Live to two track, where I really learned how to
mix live to two track for Rebel Records, Country Gentlemen,
the Osborne's Seldom Scene and and John Starling was no
was throat doctor. And when Linda fell ill on the road,

(33:06):
she went to stay with she. She canceled her gigs
and this is seventy four. Canceled her gigs and went
to live with John Starling and his wife, Issue Starling,
also wonderful singer. And during that time We'll quit Little Feet,

(33:26):
I'm out, fuck you guys, and was hanging out with
Linda and so Lowell on this hiatus from Little Feet,
wanted to get a song with Mike Aldridge, the dobo player,

(33:47):
and he had this wacky tune called Everybody Slide is
all about slide guitar. And just hung out and that's
how I met Old George and we got to be friends.
He was impressed that, rather then yelling at people to
be quiet in the control, that I put on a
pair of headphones and carried on. Nothing stopped me. And

(34:10):
had proposed that we worked together, and we did a lot.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Let's go back a little bit, fill in some detail.
So what kind of kid were you. Were you like
a member of the group playing sports? Were you a
kid in your room reading and tinkering and book.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
Kind loath sports, and when I found out how to
make gunpowder, I was making explosives and homemade rockets that
didn't really produce anything, but didn't kill me either. Now
I fiddled around with electronics. So my earliest experience was

(34:52):
who was I was just talking to somebody about this
is early on as a kid, I was talking to
Jimmy Douglas. And if you have an interview Jimmy, you
gotta know he's one of the greats. Jimmy Douglas and
I are doing a podcast, and I'm and I tell
this story, and he said, wait a second, that happened

(35:14):
to me too, And as a three year old. As
a four year old, he was wondering how light bulbs work.
So each of us had the same experience where we
unscrewed the light bulb and stuck our finger in the
socket and got blown down, blown on our backs, but
experienced the universe. I don't know how to make it

(35:39):
more trivial sounding, but we learned a lot about electricity.
So I was always impressed with this great power that
electricity had. It. When I got my first piece of
shit tape recorder, it was five years old, and it
was just.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
We just slow down a little bit. You're five years old.
It's the early fifties. This is long before the compact
is set. What kind of cape recorder you get? And
why do your appearance buy it for you? Well, it
was a piece of shit. It was one of those
thirty dollars recorders that had friction drive all the take

(36:22):
up takes. But before then, I was fixing radios when
I was five or six year old.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
One of the.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
First plait you're five or sixey, I got a soldering.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Where does all this team I fix anything? Wait a second,
I didn't fix anything. I just poked around and took
things apart, and would generally lose all the screws and
just poke around or replace the batteries, or there's a
loose wire and I'd solder a wire. And I didn't
do anything that was valued. But I had a soldering

(37:01):
iron and by golly, and put it put it to work.
But yeah, do you get the tape recorder? I got
a tape recorder and it was a piece of shit.
It's horror. I mean I was already doing sound in
Baptist Church and I was away from my follower and

(37:24):
moved up to Baltimore. I was at a church and
they lost their sound engineer.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
In the.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Baptist church would do a radio broadcast and I would
sit back by the mixer, off the main secretary and
just run, run, level, run the radio broadcasts. It got
me out of going to church, which I have never

(37:50):
really felt very good about except for the music. I
love Catholicism for the music. You love Judaism for the justice.
I tried to convert and it was too hard. But
but early on I would anything that touched sound I

(38:13):
thought was a miracle. And that's where I wanted to
quote enturity, because his, his, his, his, his, His line
was the music must be a miracle to be able
to put that feeling through a wire. And that resonates
me still with me still, Okay, I was. I wasn't

(38:36):
good at anything. Wait a second, I don't want to
claim to be good at anything. I didn't. I mean
only occasionally when I fixed something and it was by accident.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
But were you the type of kid who had heath Kids,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Oh I did. I had one of the early heath
Kid catalog computers, but also as early as high school
when we're talking about over thirteen. I would be on
the stage crew, and mostly it was an excuse to
sneak backstage and smoke, which my mother discovered one day

(39:12):
I was cutting French class and she happened to look
in the auditorium where at my feed up on the
balcony railing of smoking ball boy. That ended that. So
I would I would do early stage crew, an early
audio crew, and mixing.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
Okay, so you're involved with this, you know, stage crew stuff.
Are you listening to music?

Speaker 2 (39:50):
Oh? Yeah, listening to classical music, mostly classical music. One
of the earliest experiences was my mother and she had
a subscription to a seventy eight music service and a
thirty three to third music service, and I would wear
records out. Earliest experience as we're listening to classical music

(40:15):
on on shellac.

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Okay, how about Elvis and what came after Elvis? Was
that something they interested you? The first forty five not
at all. The first forty five I bought was Del Shannon. No,
it was a ballad of New Orleans. Ballad of Ballad
of New Orleans. Yeah, now I've forty five. But mostly

(40:46):
I listened to radio pop radio and R and B.
Baltimore had the greatest jocks in the world. They had
a guy named Fat Daddy Paul Johnson, I think it
was his real name, and you would have heard of
this guy who was the hot DJ W W I N.
And I remember coming home from when I was still

(41:07):
in college, and this is a good story and so
but I'll make it quick, coming home from the late
night card game at AEPI API. Mostly we smoked pot
and played cards, but I remember an all night poker
session and I wasn't particularly good at poker, but I
didn't lose too much either. But I remember coming home
at six point thirty in the morning, driving home and

(41:34):
Paul Johnson was playing Stay with Me Baby Lorraine Ellison
and played it over and over and over again, five
six times in a row, and every time just raved
about what a great record. But it really struck me
as how to connect how to connect that kind of

(42:02):
performance with radio, because I know you remember the song.
Everybody remembers the song, and everybody tried to do it.
Linda tried to do it, and nobody could quite do
Lauren Nellison. And by the way, that's a whole interesting
story because that was a Phil Remont record where Frank
had the studio booked. It was an early an R

(42:26):
on forty eighth R recording and an ar got the
call to do this session for Frank Sinatra, and so
they booked an orchestra a band because it was all
about room. And the day before.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Frank canceled, and he canceled with the now famous line
not today baby. And Phil gets the call. I've written
this up if you want to read it. Phil gets
the call, calls Jerry Ragvoy. You know it, says Jerry. Jerry,

(43:06):
I've got the studio courtesy Frank for an afternoon. Can
we put an act together? Do you have an act?
And Phil and Jerry put together the Lauren Allison record
off the cuff. They say some charts were written. I
don't believe it. I think it was all head off,
off the off the floor. But that's one of the

(43:28):
great stories of Lorraine Allison was in the right place
at the right time and knew the right people, and
Frank was going where Paul Springs to get married. How's
that for a story that one I haven't heard?

Speaker 1 (43:44):
So where were you when the Beatles broke? And what
do you think about that?

Speaker 2 (43:50):
I didn't like the Beatles. I mean I watched it,
watch the two early in Sullivan shows and recorded them.
I had a better tape recorder by then and recorded,
but I didn't didn't understand it in terms of what
they were doing with my favorite tunes, you know, the
he they did, like Twist and Shout and Isley's and

(44:13):
they did some a lot of a lot of covers,
and I didn't. I didn't get to really appreciate the
Beatles until until Sergeant Pepper and what they did with
that record, and then I got to work with him
and we did a Boy. One of the records we

(44:36):
did was got to Get You Into My Life. And
I had known George pretty well by then because I
had built his automation system for uh their at the
Oxford Circus, and he had sued Neve. He among others,
had sued Neve form ninety six, and so I was

(44:56):
famous in the business for having got up in these face.
But I don't think I gave him what he wanted
on that record that he was with the Beg's and
Peter Frampton, which was the first record I knew of
to return platinum. Yeah, and you know the record it

(45:16):
was not a good record, but it was a copy
or an emulation of a pooky Valentine to the Beatles,
where they just kind of copied Beatles arrangements and copied
the Beatles sounds. And we did, we did got to
get You into My life and from scratch arrangement, and

(45:37):
we did it. I remember playing it for George, who
immediately took it to Paul, and Paul listened to it
over and over and over again for a whole Sunday,
just listening to Maurice's vocals and the arrangement. And now
I'm way off track, But the but the I didn't

(45:57):
really like the Beatles until until George and realizing how
much influence Georgie had, and for a while that was
who I wanted to be. See. I think the notifications
are a gift from God. Every time I say something
I could really state as a fact, it goes off.
I'm sorry, not the middle of the screen.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
Okay, yes, stay center, stay centered in the screen. But
as we're sitting here and you're getting phone calls and notifications,
A are people looking for you all day long? And
bybe you like that or do you find it interrupts
your work?

Speaker 2 (46:34):
It very much interrupts my work, and so when and
I don't know why I let it go like this,
because when I used to mix extensively in this room,
I would figure out a way to make sure the
phones were turned off in other rooms and cookie doing
what was happening my wife, And I don't know why

(46:57):
did I not do that? I'm terribly sorry.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
Guys just drilled down on something. You said you built
an automation system for George. Are you talking about something
like the board flying fingers that type of thing.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
Well, it's flag faders and that was pretty much lifted.
But that was a guy named Joe Martinson who saw
the success I had with gm A automation and we
were the first system that actually worked. Ask anybody, and
especially when he came out he six failed and me

(47:37):
was sued. Mark Crabtree was sued and developed the Red
Hot Hatred for me. That was unequal in my life.
And one thing he did was to offer me, however
much money to buy my company, and then when I

(47:57):
would sell it, he collected enough money from Joe Martinson
to just copy my system, and that fun A little bastard.
Joe Martinson tried to patent one of a broad array
of ideas. Because we were building from scratch. We hated
DeCamp ninety six, so we built the fader from scratch,
built the hard disk processing from scratch. I programmed a

(48:21):
Unix like automation system from scratch so that whenever you
rolled tape, the system would locke into where you were, which,
among other ideas, turned into ideas that stuck. And I
didn't patent that. It was like the equalizer. I didn't
patent the parametric I didn't know it was worth patenting.
I should have. And then rained Olemy came along and

(48:44):
copied parts of it, and that was another story, another nightmare.
So all of these, I think at some point you're
going to say, this guy is so full of shit.
So I did bring my paper on autom and so
I can show you that. I could show you the
parametric equalizer paper that I delivered at seventy two.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Let's go back before this, Okay, let's start with a
parametric equalizer. How did you come up with the idea
for that?

Speaker 2 (49:16):
A group of us came up with the guy I
was working with, a guy named Burgess McNeil. I eventually
started a company with had an idea and I had
an idea and a friend of mine that had gone
to Princeton, Bob Beushaw eventually worked for NSA had an
idea and I put them together. But there was one
thing missing and I had to make that work. It

(49:36):
was the queue control or the width of a peak,
and I figured it out and it took a lot
of work, but that's what made the parametric equalizer unique
and would have made it patentable. And it just came up.
I came. I was recording music at that time I

(49:56):
had done. I was running a directed two track studio.
What did I do that you would have heard it?
I did the demo for arthur' connelly that he took
to Memphis and Steve and he wrote sweet soul music.
But the demo that he went with where you lead me,
I will follow. So that's the record we sold to

(50:17):
Stacks and I did that in Baltimore, directed to track
and so I was doing music when I wasn't doing commercials,
and that was my recording studio experience. When I dropped
out of Hobbins, I got a job doing commercials for
Lean Shapeer, Golding Bank and car commercials, package commercials and

(50:37):
learned how to how to work in the studio, but
a lot of it. We invented the mixer. It was
a two mixer that sounded great. Listened to Philadelphia records,
listened to New York records. Early all the pop records

(50:58):
were bell sad and a handful of studios. Later, an
R much later, An R And figured all these records
sound great because there's some piece of equipment that I'm missing.
And so I built all this stuff. And it wasn't
the equipment. It was the musicians and the arrangements and

(51:21):
the writing, the songwriting. So I learned a lesson there.
But there was a studio called it I Studios, Recordings
in corporate and then it TI. So I'm really jumping around.
So this must be very hard. Stop making excuses. You

(51:41):
come up with the idea of the Pyrami metric equalizer
with these other guys. Did you then have it manufactured?
Oh no, I did it.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
I did.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
I did all the design except for one piece of it.
The mechanical design was done by another team. The company
that we went with, which was a video manufacturing They
manufactured video tunes for early merchery missions. And they had

(52:12):
a team and they were out of market, and so
they bought a recording studio and that was my recording studio.
It turned it too it TI so you see it.
I in early parmetric eq so that was that was
my equ and I did it. I did the hard
the almost impossible to realize how to vary the queue

(52:36):
with a Vernier.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Nob but I know that.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
We went to the guy that wrote the audio op
and cookbook, TODG Shung Tomjong, who worked at Aircraft Armaments
around the corner, and he looked at it and said,
this is impossible. To do something else and I stuck
to it and did it. So I did. I did.
I generally am the one to stay up around the

(53:01):
clock and figure out software, figure out design, and I
just enjoy it.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
Okay, how did you decide ultimately to get into the
hardware business.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
There was a piece missing, same thing as as now
is something doesn't work, or there was a piece missing
something doesn't In the case of an equalizer, it was
I'm in the studio with a graphic, a seven band graphics,
seven thirty one seven band graphic, and it's well, you know,
the figures are sixty two one twenty five two fifty

(53:36):
something something something. None of them were sharp enough to
cancel a residence in a snare drum or an acoustic
guitar or taken note excuse me, take a note out
of a piano. So that was the gig is. I've
got to build my own equalizer because we didn't have
any money. We couldn't afford anything. And I built my

(53:57):
own four track just because I needed one. But I
didn't learn it from anybody. Got to work.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
What's your viewpoint on analog versus digital?

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Now, it's funny. It's funny that you should mention because
I still have a very strong viewpoint on how to
improve digital, and it has a lot to do with
how good analog is. And I didn't bring up any
of my examples, but I can show you some work

(54:38):
I did on well more of the compressive of the
DRC which I have. I think it's the best dynamic
range controller ever made, very slow to teach people how
to use it because it doesn't do that crunchy thing,
and that's what people think a limitter does. Any rate

(54:58):
back to an equ so the EQ was going back
to the RCA Radio handbook and picking out a circuit
called a te filter two resisters two capacitors, and all
depending on how far apart the pastors are spread, you
can make a sharp notch or a broad notch or
broad them to a very wide range and move the

(55:21):
game up and down on the notch and you have
variable Q. Well, nobody had tried that before, and that
was where I got into trouble at Hopkins, because I
wanted to learn something in my first year systems course
and the professor was, ah, was what I hear lately?

(55:46):
Real warfare? Stupid? I mean, these the assistant professors were
just fucking idiots, and I just had to get out
of there. But I knew what I had already done,
and he said, well, that's a possible and I use
a circuit variation called a gyrator to turn a cheap
capacitor into an adductor. It trans transforms is not the

(56:11):
right word transforms. Reactants turned a deductor, which is why
are around the back accord into a capacitor, which is
two plates. He said, well, you can't do that, that's
only a theoretical abstraction. Well, I've got one, and you're
an idiot, so that wasn't very good. I didn't say
you're an idiot under my breath. But all this stuff

(56:36):
is there, Bob. You know everything that you see smart
designs in plugins, it's all there. Apple and these other
companies put it out there, put the tools out there
for free, and you had to do something with it.
So we built plugins. It's changed a lot, business has

(56:57):
changed a lot.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
But let's go back. You had a few point ana
line versus digital.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Well, and here's the key thing about music, and I
knew I would have to circle around the music, is
that all our recording sounded not only better, much better,
much better. The first digital machine I heard was Tom
Stockin's Honeywell data recorder with a really awful front end,
and I remember playing something back for Jeff Bercaro and

(57:27):
at Sunset Tom Stockher was trying to make a business
out of digital and there's a story before that, but
at any rate, we Jeff would walk into the control
and say, hey, man, where's the high hat And we
had to say, well, it doesn't go up that high yet, Jeff,
because it didn't. It had a fifty k badwidth sampling

(57:48):
and high hat didn't sound like I had and it
was sixteen bit, so all of that digital direction that
I took was in response to hearing something that sounded
awful emas awful awful fiddles didn't sound like fiddles. And

(58:13):
I had just come out of real musicians playing on
great microphones to an Ampex three hundred through a console
that we built tube console using high trans conductance twelve
A y sevens. It's pureless K two forty one D
had put transfer. Its amazing And I remember this shit

(58:33):
and it was immersive and small eye immersive, and I'm
getting chills still remembering going out and doing remotes at
the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where I'd take out a couple
of mics and do a feed, an FM feed to WBL,
the FM station in town, and nobody listened. So I
could do anything. I could put the microphones anywhere I wanted,

(58:57):
and the experimenting with an orchestra, I'd never lost that
lust of experimenting with dorks room.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
So okay, the original sixteen bit digital was bad, but
digital was improved after that.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Oh no, no, no, no, it wasn't sixteen bit. That's
the key. The early Sony machines were, if you're lucky,
twelve or thirteen bit monotonic. The digital goes like this
up and a step. Well, early non monotonicity was what.
It goes up, it goes way down that it goes
up and then goes way down. It's not monotonic. So
you're lucky if you get twelve bit accuracy out of it.

(59:36):
So I knew right away that they were all fucked,
and unfortunately I would have to tell them and made
friends of the Ajax men of science who thought they
knew everything and they didn't and couldn't because they were
blocked blocked in they're thinking. So I got a better

(01:00:00):
converter from Renee at DBX had done a different kind
of converter, and I bought blocks from what we made
our on converter. It started to sound better. But that's
all I ever hoped for is if you can work better.
I have a direction, that's what hey round up the posse.
That's where we're going. I know the direction now it's

(01:00:21):
not there yet, but I know where we've got to
go with it. And so I'm working with Serus Semiconductor
these days, who are really great engineers and sort of
discovering the border borders of where I can go with
design and digital. It's still is not there, but I
love three eighty four. We did the Tommy Emmanuel one

(01:00:43):
nine two, and I can say that I feel the difference.
So I've got let me brag for a minute. So
I've got the best headphones I can get. These are
automatic research and I've also got well you've seen Audies.
I'm a big fan of audis and all these are

(01:01:05):
these guys that our audience can't see them, but I
can flash them. These guys are you've seen these?

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
I have them.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
This is the you have them? There you go. Well,
I'm mixed the last two, three four dozen records I've
done on these and I'll listen to them on speakers.
I've got genleis now I'll listen to them on speakers.
But this is where I do the critical listening where
you can hear the grass grow. You know, I hear

(01:01:36):
digital clicks, You're going to hear them first on Audies headphones.
So you know, I'm friends with those guys. If I help,
If I help these guys that have built something brilliant
get the word out there, we're friends for life.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
Okay, If I said you could use state of the
art digital or I gave you as much tape as
you wanted, Which would you choose?

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Well, I honestly if I had enough tape, and I
don't think I would have enough tape, but if I did,
I'd use both. And we did that with the earliest
we did a director I did director desca tuc sacs
where we had We were recording both on on this

(01:02:35):
new got this another long fucking story, this new technology
called DSD or direct steam stream digital. It was an
engineer at Sony that I got to like. Cold Taka
was the smart guy at the Shubora Jubbara factory and

(01:02:59):
he was the that it talks on you Sodia to
putting money into this black project in the corner of
the factory. And we both discovered that the very earliest
good converter, which was a crystal something crystal converter was
a company before it was Cerrus. And discovered that one

(01:03:19):
of the pins was the output of a modulator and
if you took that pin, that one pin out of
the chip and just ran it into a filter, that
was the DDA converter was a resistor and a capacitor.
It was the DDA converter coming out of a digital

(01:03:42):
digital stream which was pulse with modulation, and so a
talk and D show turned that into a product before
uh Shaboya the Home office was ready and set the
samp or a too fucking low. So there were better

(01:04:03):
DSD processes that came out that were faster sabary. But
here's the takeaway is that no matter how fast we went,
and of late we're doing three eighty six and DSD
times sixteen, which is sixteen bits wide at sixteen x
fs sixteen times two point eight megaarants sixteen times, you

(01:04:26):
can imagine the data rings and it's pretty fucking hard
to hear. So I'm gonna have to say that eventually
it'll get there, and maybe there'll be another way to
do the converters. But the guys at Cerrus are about
the best I've heard so far, So I mean, I'm
liking digital. It's so much more convenient. If you have

(01:04:48):
a mistake, we've learned how to LaVey attract together to
fix one little mistake that casts this long shadow over
a performance. But she had she had one note wrong
in the chorus, and that colored her thinking. And I'm
talking about a female artist, now you can guess that

(01:05:11):
colored her thinking about the whole track, and a lot
of artists are like it that you're one thing and
forget about the track. So so early on I got
really good at and I'm going to brag about it

(01:05:31):
because we all got good using a Sony thirty three
forty eight edit takes together before there were workstations. Before
there was It's about the same time as Sodic Solutions,
So there was a Sodic Solutions workstation, but it was
very expensive and the converters were terrible, but I stayed
friends with him. For you, that's Andy Moohr, who was

(01:05:54):
one of that handful of digital engindeers that invented everything.
Andy Moore sort of the when he worked for George Lucas,
he invented this machine called the sound Droid, and he
did it so that he could do one performance of
the deep Note. You remember the Deep Note the t checks.

(01:06:19):
He that was Andy Moore, the musician said now I
could if I just had a powerful enough computer. So
he got George to invest in Sprocket Systems and he
was going to build at the edit Droid, at the
sound Droid, and uh, he's he's really my bottle of
a great university professor. He was at Stanford for all

(01:06:42):
those years, and everybody remembers, and he wrote the basic papers.
We still talk and he stole a musician. The point
is is that he was always pushing the boundaries and
it was an inspiration. There was always something better. So
I'm constantly throwing the baby in the water.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
Let's talk about playback. What do you think about? Okay,
this Vinyl revival. Louder is better. Let's simplify this, louder
is better. Okay, the Vinyl Revival.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
This first studio that I got a job of, it
had an early mentor press, had a record press, and
shortly thereafter and I'm just in a high school at
that point, and I'm going to go to work at
this place of the summer, and I got introduced to
their pressing plan, and so early on I knew how

(01:07:45):
to master because we had a lath that was a
model laith, but I invented the digital pitch. Since then
it became the standard. You're welcome and a record press.
It later had two fabels and two fine builds in
the dirtiest environment ever in Pratt and Paki Street in
downtown Baltimore, and I did labels and jackets wherever there

(01:08:12):
was a need, I say, well, I could do that,
and learned printing in graphic arts because I had to
do it, and process photography, you know, the big cameras
of the whole rooms process photography. In other words, anything
that came along that interested me. I would try to

(01:08:33):
fill a need and build something or make something. And
I'm bragging, but I don't know any other way to
put it. I learned how to press records. We learned
how to master records of very automatic variable pitch systems.
We had a better system, and eventually was Jerry Block

(01:08:54):
who really came up with the working system. He was
chief engineer of Sigma Sout for a long time. What
you're getting under the idea that this life is in
the technical world is a world of relationships. And I
can't stress that about all of these different ideas were

(01:09:15):
relationshipships that we had with other energy. The latest relationship,
let's balance the one thing that the okay, but this
latest relationship that is in an actually relationship. Barcodiari who
was head engineer at Real World for Peter for a
long time. Okay, carry on.

Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
No, no, no, okay. If you talked about being McGill
and you described your personality. How you're angry, you're diffident, okay,
and distracted, which it implied that way you were working
and you were on the line as opposed to teaching.
It has to be right. You're a guy who calls

(01:10:00):
its street. There are many people who've worked, absolutely work
behind the board, who have never created equipment. Never mind
theorized how many people are on your level? Who can
you talk to and have a fulfilling conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
Well, I just met a couple of guys who now
work for Bows, and we tried to interest them in
the idea of supporting our show because we're looking for
donors give us a bunch of money. And there are
a couple of really smart guys still at this company
that Bosbolt called McIntosh. Remember Macintosh amplifiers. Of course, when

(01:10:42):
you heard a good system, you look behind the curtain
and hey mc seventy five five. And so I had
a conversation now four or five weeks ago with Chris
and Mike, and you couldn't get us off the phone.
We were talking about old designs that made Mackintosh special,

(01:11:03):
especially the output transformer. And there aren't that many guys
to talk to, And I want to say. I keep
looking for them because I did find a young kid
three years ago that was recommended to me as an
analog engineer. The kid wants to be an analog engineer.

(01:11:24):
All I want to do is take him to lunch
and say, are you fucking kidding? You know that you'll
never make any money. Nobody will understand a word you say.
And he and I have been working together on new designs.
So I have to invent the people to talk to.
I have to go out and find somebody that I

(01:11:45):
could train. And this this kid is brilliant. He's brilliant.
Somebody will seal him.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
How about everyday life? Do you spend most of your
time alone? Or do you have a social life in
What are those people like?

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
I have a wonderful circle of friends in Nashville, and
you will have heard of many of them. And you
have read the story about Randy Travis doing the Redo,
which was ai of a song that he had written
and that my friend Kyle Lenning had produced. Kyle Letning

(01:12:24):
is good, and I go back to the beginning, back
in time. Kyle Lenning bought one of my early automation
systems when they cost ready for this one hundred and
thirty five thousand dollars. It made some money. It was
one of the few things I didn't make money. And
Kyle bought the idea and it wasn't his idea. It

(01:12:47):
came from an art the record company. Generally, I'm not
keen on talking about record companies in any kind of
positive way, but had the idea, well, why don't we
try to do that? But we do it right and
right meant that Randy had to be involved with the song.
So we're circling back to AI. Randy had to be
involved with the song and it had to get past

(01:13:09):
Kyle because Kyle it's an old analog engineer. It's not old,
but he's in my my group. Mike Reid, you've certainly
heard of Mike Read and one day you should interview
Mike Reid. I'll tell him about it because we've all listened.
We talked about it. Mike Reed, you recall, is the
guy that went to uh Penn Penn State with Paterno

(01:13:34):
and was writing string quartets and playing football. Mike Reed
went to the what team did he go to? But
head played three seasons in the NFL and then wrote songs.
Was and still is a songwriter and a the funniest

(01:13:55):
guy I've ever met in my whole life. And so
we get together every Friday morning with Bill Stay. I'm
surprised Bill didn't talk about this. I see Bill every
Friday morning. We used to get together in Los Angeles
every Tuesday and then every Thursday night. Now we get
together here and have coffee every Friday. So Bill, Bill

(01:14:17):
is if you'll allow me to rave about Bill, He's
He's who I would like to grow up to be.
Is Bill Stay is a mixer because he is all musical, bustle,
Every twitch of his fingers, every twitch of his body
is musical, is performing. He's my hero.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
Let's just go back playback. What's your viewpoint about vinyl
versus other methods of playback today?

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
Well, right now I'm listening to a one hundred ninety
two k D day. I find that if you play
a CDs back and up sample them to one hundred
and ninety two, they sound better. So my favorite playback
I can tell you is not Spotify. And the only
reason I would go to Spotify is if I can't

(01:15:13):
find a song any other way. But that guy's the
dem Daniel act. Somebody should shoot him in the back
of the dick. Okay, your favorite playback platform is Oops,
my wife read that you have to be invented. My
favorite platform would be a super high rate converter one two,

(01:15:38):
three four with actually with an analog app that we've
just built for the back end of a d d A,
so it has yet to be invented. It's called a
DAC follower. It is that little piece of linear gear,
linear silicon go on the other end of digital analog

(01:15:59):
converurner and everybody does it with the same circuitry, and
we think we can do it better at doing it analog.
So is there a place for analog? Yep?

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):
Okay, So, but in terms of what's commercially available today,
cubas or co buzz, do you think, well, how do
you feel about that? Shaking your head.

Speaker 2 (01:16:23):
What I heard a couple of years ago? Yeah, because
it sucks. What I heard a couple of years ago sucked. Certainly.
The only service that does immersive right is a service
that does not use a codec. As soon as you
neck down data streams, you're throwing away stuff, you know,

(01:16:45):
the whole, the whole. All these guys that did that
work in codex did the FP three and it was
Carl Heinz Brandenburg and James Johnston and another guy that
did most of the codex are. They're okay guys, especially

(01:17:10):
James Shaunston. He's a really good scientist. Data scientist. Carl
hides is hopeless. But it sounds like shit. And they
did it based on what's called perceptual coding. Everything that's
wrong about MP three's is because they depend on perceptual coding.
You want to guess what that is, I'll just tell you.

(01:17:32):
It's that you know, it sounds enough like music so
that we can pass it off if a listener isn't
listening too carefully, that's perceptual coding. Perceptual coding is a
little like how many animals are in this picture? Well,
there's a bear behind the tree, isn't there? That's perceptual coding.
And it just sucks. And at the bandwidth and data

(01:17:56):
sizes or capabilities that we have now, there's no reason
for it, and they're still doing perceptual according the best
work I've heard has been Morton Lindberg at L two Records.
L two Records. So you run through you were you
see the immersive Gravvy Ive wought a couple and I'd

(01:18:17):
have to say that Morton Ledbergh, that's the best work
in the field, and he is relentless about quality and
nobody knows it. So next time you see Morton Lindbergh,
imagine that you could get one of his productions and
listen to it. But that's what I'd use. I'd use
a Morton Lindberg inspired system and a Morton Lindberg source.

Speaker 1 (01:18:41):
How about the fact that you know, listen in the
late sixties and seventies, the goal was to get the
best stereo you could have, and then we hit the
leading yah ladies in nineties were a boombox became your stereo,
and then.

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
Airplans in the two stereos.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
And needless to say, a lot of records are kind
cheaper than they used to be. But you have these
records were going on here about You're trying to get
the sound exactly right and the people are listening on
these inferior playback systems. Doesn't that make you crazy?

Speaker 2 (01:19:21):
Well, something must make me crazy. But one of the
things that you might have talked to Bill about is
we had just listed his Telby Houston record. I was
on the original what was called the National Recording Board,
the National Recording Preservation Board with my friend Eric Schwartz,

(01:19:45):
and this last year we listed the Telby Houston record. Now,
you must have talked about that with Bill, because it
was book in our minds. It is in our minds
and our ears and our hearts. That was Shining City
on the Hill and it was so good, and he
was such a good live mixer that he could capture

(01:20:08):
that off the floor. So there's so many stories I
couldn't even beginuse. You should get built to tell them.
But all our audience were high fi stories back when
there was such a thing as a high Fi store,
and that seduced us into thinking that it could be

(01:20:31):
possibly the difference could possibly be heard by anybody. Now
at the same time we're trying to do this, we're
trying to do great music. So we have a couple
of different tracks here that we're trying to satisfy because
we learned pretty quickly that if it's just a technical
presentation of some piece of shit music, then it's hopeless

(01:20:58):
that it has to the music has to be there
as well, which means everything about the music, the writing,
the arrangement, the performance and the recording all have to
all have to work. So here's where we come to
the part in our story where John McBride at Blackbird

(01:21:19):
Studios and you've been here, have you seen my play?

Speaker 1 (01:21:21):
I was going to ask you about your room at Blackbird.
I've been there.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
Well, it's not my room. John paid for it, and
I'll do anything for job because he.

Speaker 1 (01:21:32):
Well, I mean I talked to John about it. He followed,
you know, he gave me a tour.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
But that's but this was the other thing that a
lot of rooms suck. You know, in Los Angeles, there
are a handful of rooms that kind of work. Sony
Studios works well, the Barbers Transit station works well. But
uh so I thought, well, I've been dreaming this thing
for years. I'll build a room so that too. So

(01:21:57):
there's no part that I haven't tried to prove. That
was the answer to a question three times ago.

Speaker 1 (01:22:05):
Well I have to ask you, you know, for those
people haven't been there, the studio that you designed at Blackbird,
where there are a number of studios, essentially there are
all these It's not a flat surface, they're different I'd
say probably one inch by half inch like a ruler
size rods that come out from the side very densely. Okay, okay.

(01:22:31):
Did it achieve the goal that you wanted it to.

Speaker 2 (01:22:37):
Depends on who I was promising or with. John said,
if you come with me, I'll build the studio and
support you. And I opened the studio in two thousand
four or five, and the town took a collective yawn

(01:23:03):
when they weren't hostile, and most people were just hostile.
You know, I can't work in there. What are you crazy?
That's not music. And they're making, as Nashville has done
over the years, some of the worst sounding drek I've
ever heard, and defending it, you know, and dissing me.

(01:23:23):
You know, I did not. I arrived here on the
back of the trio record, which I think to this
day is a marvelous record. Is Dolly, Linda and Emmy,
which I produced, is a marvelous record, and so many stories,
And so they hated me when I came to town.

(01:23:46):
They thought that I was could acclaim that I could
make this kind of record for anybody. There were a
couple of artists that did roots records. Mary Chapin Carpenter
did that kind of record. Others did that kind of record.
But they're just not getting back to getting back to

(01:24:06):
some kind of innovation, and they're still making these god
awful records, these god awful country records, and the business
is long gone, that country music radio, the radio record,
that radio hit record long gone. You know that you've
written about it, and they just won't let go of it.

(01:24:28):
So finally there are a couple of vacus. Oh what
is Jack White? Jack White recorded in the room next
to it, and he loved showing people around the room
the studoc when he was doing some of those other
records that he did. He's a good guy, by the way,
Jack White. I love Jack. He invests from his heart

(01:24:52):
to your original question about about Blackbird is John has
poured his heart into it, and I don't I think
that he is really delivered on his promise because I
didn't delivered to John McBride what I promised him. I
promised him that the studio would work, and it did.

(01:25:12):
But what it did best was to provide a listing
room in a totally immersive environment, a diffuse, a purely
diffuse room. And it wasn't my idea. I mean I
had an initial idea. Peter D'Antonio of RPG, and I
seeded his thinking early on, but he did the best

(01:25:33):
he could do. I did the best I could do,
and that's what I decided to go teach because nobody
liked it, nobody until recently.

Speaker 1 (01:25:45):
Okay, So, over this career of engineering producing having GML,
did you make any money?

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
Nope? Oh well yeah I did a couple of times. No,
that's not true. I would say no, because, like everything else,
just unpredictable. So I have made when when music failed me,
I made money with gear when gear fe failed me,

(01:26:17):
teaching was a pretty good gig, and so there was
always something I can do. So it's only recently where
you know, these bastards have devalued recorded music to the
point where nobody pays engineers like the until Alicia Keys

(01:26:38):
came along and a hired Eric and I and Michael
Romanoski to do her catalog. And it was Anne Mitchelli
whose vision it was to remix her catalog and it
was hideously hard to do. That's that's that's a recipe
for failure, trying to remix multi as immersive interfuse. I

(01:27:02):
did my best, and I think I failed so much
that I owed a lot of money because I think
I failed and it's my responsibility. I told him we
could do it. We didn't, So I'm sorry, and I'm
sorry Alicia. And by the way, if you haven't interviewed Alicia,
she is the most extraordinary artist of the geniuses that

(01:27:26):
I mentioned, she's at the head table. She is completely brilliant.

Speaker 1 (01:27:34):
Okay, we're, you know, old in age, but historically did
you just sit at home and wait for the phone
to ring or did you beat the bushes for work?

Speaker 2 (01:27:49):
The funny you should mention because when we developed the equalizer,
or when ITI wanted to put a product out, the
parametric Equalizer, I was the one that walked to the
round to studios. He got my engineer and this is
seventy four to seventy five, got my engineer friends to
listen to it, and that was hard to sell. So

(01:28:10):
I've always been able to introduce ideas and introduce gear
and sell stoff. With the equalizer, guys would look at
it and say, well, it's interesting, but it needs clickstops.
Is completely the opposite of what it was designed for.
And it took a while, but it took guys that

(01:28:31):
were particularly inspired to see the possibilities of having variables
frequency and be able to tune a dip equalizer to
take out a harmonic that was just driving you crazy,
or a fundamental of a guitar, or the fundamental of
a snare drum, so you could get that big fat

(01:28:52):
snare drum. You're welcome.

Speaker 1 (01:29:04):
What about the AFIX World exciter? What was going on there?

Speaker 2 (01:29:09):
That's a guy named Marvin Caesar, and I had a
big fight with him as well because it was bullshit. Oh,
but the bigger bullshit was Q sound. It was the
guy that was trying to voiced Q sound.

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):
So let's slow this down. You had to give a
credit on the record on a fix didn't do anything Afix.

Speaker 2 (01:29:33):
No, yes, yeah, it was like it was an equalizer,
and it had a particular kind of curve that you
could call unique. It had a very steep filter, and
there were problems with the filter. But at the end
of the day, it didn't do enough to warrant a
point on the record. Say as Q soun, he wanted

(01:29:54):
a point on the record. Guy that did that.

Speaker 1 (01:29:58):
Q sound. The famous album was the Immaculate Collection, and
you could hear something It did not sound like traditional
stereo the whole thing failed, but it definitely sounded different
from traditional stereo.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):
But the idea of having what are called HRTF pinot cues.
HRTF has head related transfer functions, and right now Sony
vm ME three sixty, which you've written about Sony VMB
three sixty, which alleges at doing a good job of

(01:30:40):
storing these samples, and they do a pretty good job.
But that's an idea Sony that we've been pushing for
years and finally formalized it in Sony vm ME three sixty.
What that is is something that was around even then
and was around as a product with the roland RSS reverb.
And so the way Peter Asher and I busted that

(01:31:03):
is Boostin had a party at his house post Medata,
and I fed Peter Asher, who was also very smart,
exactly what that was, what HRTF simulation was. And the
day before or maybe it was Lenny, one of the
two had to sign the contract for points on Q sound.

(01:31:28):
Peter went to a dinner party at most it was Christmas,
He's Jewish party and told them that it really wasn't
worth it, that the idea had already been patented by
roland In RSS, and that was the end of that.
So that's something that I love, really love to do,

(01:31:52):
is the guys that are disinclined to be honest about inventions,
disinclined to be clear about where IDs came from, disinclined
to be respectful of patents. A boy, I'm at their throats.

(01:32:15):
I think that's my job.

Speaker 1 (01:32:17):
Let's switch gears a little bit. You married, you have kids.

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
Well, no, I gave all my money to two ex
wives and have of the most wonderful person in my
life now and wish I had married her first, but
I would have had to be robbing the cradle, and
wonderful things happened to us every day. But the ex

(01:32:47):
wives got the houses well especially. Oh here's a tidbit
that you'll have to love. X two is a singer name,
well sort of a singer name, Renee Armand, who was
in John Denver's road band, but she also had some
records on her own, and she got into the business

(01:33:08):
as a writer. She married San Francisco Bay Captain talking
about Captain Noah, very captain, nice guy. Her second marriage
was to Jim Gordon. Her third marriage was to Jim Horne.

(01:33:32):
Her fourth marriage there was a woman in here somewhere,
so she married a woman in there. But fourth and
fifth marriage was me and then she married a stock
and security salesperson. So I've had a personal life all along.
I just kept going for it. I can't but for

(01:33:55):
the X two, the X one was loved by life.
When just after I had designed the equ and we
no longer did that, it was the next of years.
I just had to get out of the country. What
to do well? We moved to Paris and I lived
in Paris for two years. Couldn't speak French to save

(01:34:16):
my life. Do you speak French? Mom?

Speaker 1 (01:34:18):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:34:18):
I do not. You seem to me to be a
guy that would be willing to learn.

Speaker 1 (01:34:24):
Well, the only thing in France now it's not like
the seventies, not like the old days. A lot of
people speaking English and they're not as denigrating as they
used to be for those who can't speak French. But
to what degree did your two marriages break up? Because
the nature of the studio work is your work?

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):
In twenty four son, it was used at his excuse
and it's still a challenge when I tell my wife
that I'm going to do something and it's become chimerical.
It just drifts off into the ozon. I really have
to I have to be responsible. I've had to grow up.

(01:35:04):
I just had a double fusion operation and I was
fucked up. I had I have spinal synosis from lifting
all that ship for all those years, and had two
procedures and a labinectomy in a ten eleven hours day

(01:35:24):
under propofault, and she coaxed me back to life, but
I didn't want to do it. Take the exercise, will
whatever it was, take the this horrible drug that they
got paid. So I'm just coming out of that and
I owe my life stenosis.

Speaker 1 (01:35:44):
You can't. You have to get the operation. But when
you marry who's been married like three or four times before,
this is like what's his name? King? You think it's
going to be different with you? Well, what makes you
think that the pattern's going to change?

Speaker 2 (01:36:05):
Because I'm supposed to be able to design that. I
designed this other stuff and I was. I'm not that
way anymore. I've got to work for it now. But
I used to think that I could design my life
and I can't. I couldn't and I can't. What I
can do is be good as good as I could

(01:36:27):
possibly be to my friends and the guys that have
worked for me. I've got a guy doing manufacturing in Gmail,
been with me for almost forty years, and just give
him whatever he needs. Or my young assistant Kasrie Orrai,
who I taught at Berkeley, and she said I'm going
to move to Nashville and get a gig, and that

(01:36:47):
was almost thirty years ago, and nobody would hire her,
and I had to hire her, and every time I
gave her something to do, she would excel at Kasri,
could you learn photoshop? Yeah? How about my next Friday, Casri?
How about Final Cut Pro?

Speaker 1 (01:37:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:37:03):
Wednesday? And these people that have been so good to
me and worth everything you had.

Speaker 1 (01:37:12):
This recovery from the operation and fusions are really you
know it was just rated because I know somebody else
had it is the most painful. But other than this interlude,
what's keeping you busy? Into? What degree are you working now?

Speaker 2 (01:37:31):
Our work? Every day? I around two companies and we're
doing I haven't talked about Studio Confidential, but you understand
from Adam at Shortfire, who's been great, that we are
doing a show.

Speaker 1 (01:37:46):
Talk about this show, this shows you're doing in February,
How did this come to be.

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
Well, it came to be what would have to admit
by default, because we adjusted that how to do great
immersive recording. I want to say that because we were
brought together by Phil Ramon to do these projects which
were which became DTS five point one, which became at

(01:38:18):
most except that ATMOS is not very good. We came
together and we couldn't get any work anymore. So I'm Elliott,
and I've been friends with Elliott forever because we mix,
We're of like minds and like hearts. The way we
mix and the way we the way we listen, and
I just have so much respect for him that he'll

(01:38:39):
never suggest anything that I say, I can't do that. Never, never,
I can't think of the thing. So we got together
in this group run by another buddy, kind of a
manager of the group, and the seven of us, all
seven would get together have meetings that we'd have actual

(01:39:01):
meetings at ah shows and then we'd have virtual meetings.
But every time we got together there would be endless laughs,
especially for med Journey, who's the funniest guy on earth.
Before that Al Schmidt and before that Phil Ramon, and
it all came from you know, at the show one

(01:39:25):
year in two thousand and too, Phil mentioned it to
a bunch of guys and then Al said, yeah, that'd
be a good idea, and then and helped move it
to Narris to the Recording Academy. Now it's the P
and E Wing, But that group that we got together
exists today as the Meta Alliance Music Engineers Technology Alliance

(01:39:49):
and Elliot and I did a book that Jim sort
of liked the idea. I don't think it did very well.
It was the Drum Book How we all did drums.
Thought that was going to be be great, didn't make
any money, And then we did in the studio with
the guys and we do demos back when Ed and

(01:40:12):
Al Schmidt were participating, and then and then Phil died
and looking for other people, and I chose Nico Bolas
and and not in the pushy ways. So nobody thinks
it's my idea. It was my idea, and Nico, you know,

(01:40:32):
did Neil for all those years Bill Young and and
then and then after Ed died, I've always wanted to
invite Jimmy Douglas and had also talked to Sylvia Massey
and they weren't ready, but then they were ready. So

(01:40:56):
the seven of us now include Nico, Bolas, Jimmy and
Sylvia Massey. And in the studio with the guys didn't work.
So Elliott and I proposed doing sitting on stage and
telling stories, which everybody hated. So Elliott and I said,

(01:41:18):
this is a great idea. Let's just do it without
the guys, and so we designed it and funded it,
and eventually the guys fell in line, and we did
a show at Bridgefield a year at the Ridgefield Playhouse
in in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which we designed. We kind of

(01:41:40):
we kind of scripted, but we scripted in the sense
that we organized telling stories. I kept them on a
spreadsheet and could work off a spreadsheet. And it was successful.
It was the proof of concept, and I would be
surprised if you hadn't seen it, because we were encouraged

(01:42:03):
to do it by everybody we talked to, including my
next door neighbor Gary Getzman, from when I lived on
Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks. But we never really we
never pursued it until we did it at Richfield, and

(01:42:24):
then Elliott and I said, well, what the fuck, because
we're both old, We're two old guys, and I had
to do it. And so that's what Machine Center. The
thing at Machine Center is a boy, Bob. If you
could help us do anything, we would be in your
debt for all time.

Speaker 1 (01:42:45):
Okay, you know I got the press release, but since
I have you, yeah, because it talks about a window
from February second to sometime later.

Speaker 2 (01:42:55):
In February March. First, how many shows are there going
to be? Twenty eight? They're going to be twenty eight shows?
And what is going to be different about those shows?
Different stories and different ways of approaching it In this
last in this last show we did we did Ron

(01:43:16):
Robin seven stories. Each of us told one, and then
in the second half we kind of loosened up a
bit and told some stories that we couldn't fit into
that fixed time. And this time, in one of the
promo passes, we asked the audience if they had anybody

(01:43:38):
that they'd like like to hear about, and some gentle
souls said Phil Ramond. And we've each of us got
about ten Philramonds stories, including that one I told you
about Stay with Me Baby. So the way we do
it is we get together on these calls and we

(01:43:59):
just entered tain each other, and I write down a
short version of the idea on a spreadsheet, and then
we get together and decide which ones to be serious
about and which ones to rehearse. And once we rehearse them,
we know what kind of time they'll take and how
to fit them in. So we're doing this, this show,

(01:44:20):
and we're basically at living it, which just about everybody
has told us won't work, and we don't think they're right.

Speaker 1 (01:44:29):
We just so we understand. Is it twenty eight? Is
it like a Broadway play? Were there twenty eight performances
of one show? Or is it different every night?

Speaker 2 (01:44:40):
It can be different every night, but that's a stretch.
If we're lucky, each of us has well. We started up,
I said everybody has to have one hundred shows. Couldn't
do that, So then we got down to each one
of us has to have thirty shows. That was too much.

(01:45:00):
We finally got down to every one of us has
to have at least eight shows, where we could rotate
them if we feel so inspired, or we add one,
but we give ourselves a break in that we've got
one that's well rehearsed and we could just roll that
story out, because you know, at the end of the day.

(01:45:21):
That's what we did in the studio. We could tell
stories and because you had to make people, there are
a couple. Here's one of the things that AI doesn't
do is it doesn't know how to tell a joke.
So I started with AI asking an AI agent to
tell me a joke, and it couldn't. But it could say, no,

(01:45:42):
you tell me a joke, which meant that it was
taking my joke and stealing it. And so I didn't
tell any jokes. But AI doesn't do certain things at all.
It does not do well this thing of coherence of

(01:46:05):
a story, like a song, where you can have a
last verse that wraps it up like a Jimmy Webleer,
and I love you more that says, and I love
you for all time. It's bad English that he famously repeats.
But it's something today I couldn't do. I love you
more than need I love you more than need you,

(01:46:26):
but I and I need you for all time A.
I couldn't do that because it dismays the laws of grammar.
Couldn't do that. I can't do good vibrations, could not
do good vibrations. Even if it did good vibrations. It
couldn't imagine the way Brian Wilson put that together. So
we can tell a story, we can tell sort of

(01:46:47):
fucking Phil Remond, you'd be working. We did the second
Duets record Lennon Segon some frack tracks, and we got
started with with Phil Remone. Came to Northern California, we
started recording, or we thought, but no. Bill Vermont started
telling stories at eleven or twelve in the morning, and

(01:47:09):
about the time six or seven o'clock rolled around and said, well,
we got to eat dinner. We'll finish after dinner. Got
back to it, hadn't recorded note one and Phil turns
to us and said, well, are we going to get
anything done today? So that kind of story. I've got
a Linda's story about Linda eating a cherry pie off

(01:47:32):
the floor, a cherry pie with a lard crust that
she had the cook that we had in Northern California
bake and do you think there's a lot of lard
in Northern California. So I mean, we've got stories. So
we've got stories.

Speaker 1 (01:47:53):
How many seats will be available? And does it cost
to go?

Speaker 2 (01:47:58):
Yeah? It does. But you know we're having Trump with you,
I can tell the truth because you've been here. It's
been a challenge selling tickets. You know, we've got guys
that have never done Instagram. Well what has Jimmy Douglas
has and Sylvie has?

Speaker 1 (01:48:14):
But I have.

Speaker 2 (01:48:15):
So we've now got to dig deep into stuff that
we can roll out and get some promotion to get
people to come and pay from eighty to one hundred
and thirty seat. Well, we've had to add students at
half price. We've had to do a week of of
prep work. Maybe we have a couple of free shows

(01:48:38):
the first week. But it's been a struggle and very
slowly we're selling tickets. But you know, we've got to
get the word out there because we're not reaching our audience.
We know we haven't. We have an audience.

Speaker 1 (01:48:51):
Okay, the press release talked about video distribution. What's going
on there?

Speaker 2 (01:48:59):
Well, the very first thing I did when we did
Ridgefield is I know how to do video, how to
produce a director. So we did. We spent some money
with good cameras. I did the rough edit we got
We've never done a finished show out of Ridgefield, but
I did the mastard and from that we got the

(01:49:21):
sizzle reel. So that's the one that I'd hope you'd see,
and eventually you saw it. Yeah, So that sold everybody.
So then I went to my insiders. I went to
Gary Gatsman and he's so busy he didn't have time
for it. And we'll go back to Gary, and we

(01:49:44):
were well positioned to pass the idea off and have
somebody else do it. But I've never had that kind
of involvement with a director where I trust them, because
they all fucked me over the largest largest portion of

(01:50:04):
my career. One thing I could say is that every
video director I've ever worked with should be buried under
thirty feet of sand at the bottom of the marrier
this trench. They're just got off and I keep trusting them,
and I've said I'm not trusting director any well unless

(01:50:24):
it's certain classic guys. So well, so we decided to
do it on a all but we didn't have enough money,
so we thought put on a show.

Speaker 1 (01:50:36):
Okay, you know, I saw the sizzle reel send to
me from the PR person. Is that sizzle reel on YouTube?

Speaker 2 (01:50:45):
We've tried to keep the stories off of YouTube so
that they'd be fresh at the show.

Speaker 1 (01:50:49):
But I thought this is going to be different stories
from the Ridgefield thing. Are they the same?

Speaker 2 (01:50:55):
It is, but we didn't want to show that one
off because we might go back to it, particularly the
one out deal Young and the red Neck.

Speaker 1 (01:51:02):
Listen, I'm gonna give you a place because it's my nature.

Speaker 2 (01:51:07):
Ah, you're good at it too.

Speaker 1 (01:51:09):
People go to see the band and to hear the
same song multiple times. People would go to Hamilton multiple times.
People are watching K pop demon Hunters. It is so
hard to reach people. You of all people, and you're
sitting with in the studio. I've heard the same stories

(01:51:32):
multiple times and still laughed. You know. We have to
so to put out something where people get a taste
of it and spread the word. What you were doing
is unique, But you're first going to appeal to an
older demo that is hard to reach, who we're going

(01:51:54):
to be unaware of it. So you have to literally
do everything you can to reach these people. Don't hold
anything back, Bob.

Speaker 2 (01:52:06):
If only I had talked to you in October, but
I did so right now, we're redoing some of these
so that we could connect better. So you're right, Oh,
I can.

Speaker 1 (01:52:16):
Say, I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go
a little bit further because it's not necessarily too late.
You know, Todd Rungren is on TikTok telling how he
recorded and wrote some of these songs. Okay, for a
long time people wouldn't talk about that. Let's not talk
about whether you should or shouldn't do it. Now. Jackson's Brown,

(01:52:38):
of all people, is on TikTok telling his stories. Okay.
So if each of you got on there and told
the story on TikTok, the way the algorithm is, some
people are gonna find it. And if you find something
you like, you're gonna tell other people. You have to
give yourself a fighting chance.

Speaker 2 (01:53:01):
You're right, You're right. By the way, I've got a
great Jackson Brown story because he and all we're best friends,
and we pretty much invented how do the modern vocal
overdobe with Jackson and Old George a multi track.

Speaker 1 (01:53:17):
Jackson was famous for comping that infinitum.

Speaker 2 (01:53:22):
So that's what we turned it into. And what is
your take on that? Well, what he didn't do was
to avoid punching in a word in the chorus that
if he just got down to it, he would punch
a word or phrase of the course, which invariably didn't
work because it has the wrong phrasing, the wrong breath,

(01:53:46):
the wrong place in your voice where it comes from.
And what we did with Lowell and Jackson was to
record whenever we could a bigger track. So if we
had one phrase that was wrong in the first chorus,
we would never spin it, fly it a copy it
from courts to chorus. We would also encourage the singers,

(01:54:11):
which were Lola Jackson, to sing it from the top
every time, even if you have just one line you
need to fix, get lost in the song, sing the
song again. So I could get on today and tell
that story and get people to listen to it, and
you would still cop and it became the Handley Cop.
And there's a story in doing Handley Cops because he

(01:54:33):
was just I mean, if Jackson was obdurate, Handily was crazed.
Guys was JD. Southern And there's no better voice in
the world than Henley. But boy, working for it is
a drag. Never say yes again. But I can't say that.

(01:54:55):
They never speak to me again.

Speaker 1 (01:54:58):
Well, I mean, I'll just talk one Henley's story. They
had these shows before a COVID at Dodger Stadium, and
then on the East Coast they called it the Classic
one or some whatever, and that was the first time
that the Eagles were out with Vince Gill and they

(01:55:18):
were great. Oh, I remember that, okay. And then I
in the next day, because there's a two day fair.
I'm talking to Irving and I said, what did Don
have to say, because you and me both know Don's
a perfectionist, and he said, Don said that the monitor
mix wasn't perfect and the horns were too aloud on

(01:55:42):
a specific song. And I was very close. There's fifty
thousand people there, and I could hear it a little bit.
So I say to Irving, I say, you know, I
heard that a little bit. I don't think anybody would notice.
And he said, those little tiny things what make the

(01:56:03):
difference between good and great? What makes it to like
it average? To it really touches you. And I'm telling
the story years later because yes, as my psychiatrist says,
sometimes you change one thing and the whole picture changes.

Speaker 2 (01:56:21):
And you know what that particularly pertains to is one
note out of tune in the chorus is somebody in
the business, here's this one, and the whole vocal is attitude.
She can't sing in tune. That came back to us
any number of times, just one note. And when we
went to doing autotune, well, when we went when we
learned how to do autitude, well all you had to

(01:56:42):
do was fix that one note flawlessly invisible weaving, and
you change everyone's mind altitude. But you know what what
this goes back to with Don is he was right, exactly,
He's right. I've done vocals vocals with Don where he
do a hard like a bizarre harmony that he would

(01:57:03):
write that just me, you know, like a Jimmy Webb harmony.

Speaker 1 (01:57:07):
H.

Speaker 2 (01:57:09):
Two's and nines and elevens and just open harmonies and
nail it, nail it. Maybe he say you to a
bass guitar and nail the pitch that you gotta respect,
that you gotta you gotta. I mean, Linda, is that
kind of opperate.

Speaker 1 (01:57:27):
The other thing about it is most people don't care
that much. There's a complete opposite philosophy of let's do
it quick, down and dirty. Okay, but if you worry,
most people are not willing. The other thing is you
talked about Lowell George suffering. These people are suffering. For

(01:57:48):
their art. It's not like they're going home putting their
feet up on the couch and watching television and are happy.
They're consumed by this.

Speaker 2 (01:57:58):
Yeah, and I would I would argue that Linda has
made the right choices. And when we started over see
all the early records, Peter and Linda would do only
live vocals. So part of why Linda kind of push

(01:58:20):
for me going back and doing your work was that
I had done you know, those earth, wind and fire vocals. Yeah,
they they they I directed pitch from the control room.
I did an overwhelming amount of work making those rand again.
They remember the guys, remember, so asked Larry Dunn when

(01:58:41):
you eventually interviewed Larry Dunn. And they didn't sing in
tune until we really got a hold on how to
direct their performance in the studio. And of course they're
brilliant performances. Don't get me wrong, I can't sing, but
why do I have it here? From pitch and for
harmonies and how to make harmony's buzz. So so getting

(01:59:04):
those right had a lot to do with that sound
of earth, which let me go way out the limb.
Change the sound of R and B markedly and quickly
R and B was one thing before we did Earth
Wind and Fire and another thing after not quickly. It
was a different game. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:59:26):
One thing you did with Linda you cut a cover
of Tom Petty's The Waiting, which is just phenomenal.

Speaker 2 (01:59:37):
Well, except that the background voices were wrong. Boy, I
tried to redo that. That's an example of getting wrong.
We got the background voices are so weighty that it
just it was never bright because that bright happy thing
had to play against the idea of the waiting is
the hardest part, and it should have been more iron Boy.

Speaker 1 (02:00:01):
I wanted to read you this, but you've got a
great performance out of her. Okay, we're gonna leave it here, George.
I wish you luck with these performances. I say, I've
seen the Sizzle Wheel. The stories are great for those
people who you know, who are not insiders. This is
just gold. This is stuff he can't get anywhere else

(02:00:21):
that in most cases never been anywhere else.

Speaker 2 (02:00:25):
And never will go unless we do it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:27):
Yeah, and you know it's a tragic loss with al
and Ed, especially Ed long before his time, but a
character he was before.

Speaker 2 (02:00:38):
But Bobby, you're so patient. Thank you so much for
getting me the opera. I wanted to talk to you forever,
back when I was talking about that thing that we knew,
that that Quincy did on the Brothers Johnson, I really
wanted to talk to you about all these experiences i'd had.
So you know, I'm sorry, I'm so long with I'm
so ash.

Speaker 1 (02:01:00):
It is the spice of life. It's that's where that's
where the new guy is. That's that's where the good
stuff is. When people say I shouldn't go any deeper,
I should go, that's where the stuff you want to hear.
So there's still, you know, tons I want to hear,
but we're gonna leave it for today. George, thank you
for taking this time of my audience. Till next time.

(02:01:23):
This is Bob Left sets

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Bob Lefsetz

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