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The Recording Angel

 

the typical 'Day in the Life' of a record producer does not exist. He may be doing different things on every day of the week. And that activity is multiplied ten-thousandfold, for the simple reason that the world is full of record producers, or aspiring record producers. It has struck me forcibly that, especially in the United States, the majority of young people with ambitions in the field of recording want, not to be top pop stars as one might have imagined, but top record producers.

 

When, in 1977, I won the Britannia Award for being the top British record producer of the last twenty-five years, I was asked after the presentation: 'What's your secret? What's the key to success in producing records?' There was no answer I could give. There is no single answer, and there is no simple answer. All I can offer, as I do now, is a series of sometimes disconnected observations, based on what those years have taught me, in the hope that they may be helpful to all those young aspirants.

 

But I must add a caveat; what has worked for me may be quite different from what has worked for other, equally successful producers. There is no magic formula.

 

 

When I joined the business in 1950 there was no such thing as a record producer. People like Oscar Preuss and myself were A and R men - Artists and Repertoire men, artists' managers.

 

The making of a record would start with myself and, say, Sidney Torch having lunch together and talking for a couple of hours about what should be on his next record. Leroy Anderson was very popular in those days, and we recorded numbers like 'Musical Typewriter', 'Sleighride', and 'Serenata'. The suggestions might come from him, or I might give him something from all the material that the publishers used to bring us. One I gave him was 'Ecstasy', a Spanish-sounding piece which proved quite a hit.

 

Then we would discuss who would be orchestrating the pieces, when the recording would take place and what size of orchestra he wanted. It would be my job to organise all those things, find the orchestrator, book the studio and arrange for the musicians to be booked. But when the appointed day came, it was really the engineer who was in charge. The pop end of EMI studios was run by Charlie Anderson and Laurie Bamber, and Charlie in particular was one of the very top engineers. They were of a gener­ation who really flew by the seat of their pants. They knew nothing of electronics, but they had great experience in the placing of the microphones and the acoustics of the studio.

 

Charlie's technique for handling strings in Number One studio was unequalled, but he was terribly jealous of his secret, and wanted no one to know how he did it. If a journalist wanted a photo of an artist, Charlie would go into the studio and re-arrange all the mikes in impossible positions, lest the world should discover his brilliant lay­out. Nor was it only the outside world he feared. If anyone, like myself, was in the control room with him, he would hunch over the control panel, covering the knobs with his hands, so that you never knew exactly what he was doing. It was rather like a schoolboy trying to stop his work being cribbed during an exam.



 

My function at the recording was very limited. Settling the way the piece was performed was the prerogative of the performer, Sidney Torch or whoever it was. The record­ing was Charlie's baby, and the ultimate aim of an engineer in those days was simply to recreate the sound as faithfully as possible. All that I could say would be something like: 'I think we might do with a bit more strings on that passage, Charlie,' or 'Can you keep the timps down? I think they're a bit heavy.' Or I might go out to Sidney, or whoever it was, in the studio and say, 'That seemed a bit slow to me. Can you speed it up?'

 

If it was a question of balance, I might ask Charlie if he could get anything better, and he might say: 'No, that's all I've got. I can't give you any more. They've got to play up from there.' In that case I would have to go and explain the problem to Sidney, and ask him if he would keep the timpani down and get the trumpets to pfay a bit louder, or whatever. Then he would listen to the playback and judge for himself. It was in those days that I learned that one of the most important aspects of record production is the ability to handle people. Tact is the prerequisite. That and patience come far above musicianship in the list of elements essential to being a good producer.

 

Tact had to apply to rny dealings with the engineers, too. Officially, of course, Charlie Anderson was supposed to do what I wanted. I could say, 'I'm sorry, Charlie, but I don't like what you're doing with the strings.' He would have to do something about it, and would probably mutter under his breath as he left the control room to move the mike about six inches, knowing full well that it would make not the slightest difference. In naval terms, I was the midshipman, a young whipper-snapper of twenty-four, while Charlie was the Master-at-Arms, a man of fifty with vast experience. The midshipman does not argue too often, if he has any sense, with the Master-at-Arms.

 

But all that was about to change. Starting in the business at the same time as myself was a new generation of young engineers, who had studied electronics and who were ready to adapt to the new techniques of tape-recording. The revolution was under way around the time I came back from my first trip to America. The youngsters had begun to be given their heads. Cliff Richard was being recorded by Peter Bown, an electronics wizard in his twenties; Malcolm Addey was recording Adam Faith; and working with me was a bright young engineer named Stuart Eltham.

 

Along with the new techniques came another change. In the United States, the capital of the record kingdom, with the largest record industry in the world, they started to talk about 'record producers'. That usage soon crossed the Atlantic. It was an indication of the changing role of the A and R man/producer, and of the increasing importance that was being attached to him. For the first time he started to get a bit of status, whereas previously he had been just another Joe Gubbins working in the factory.

 

Today, the producer's role has completely changed. He works with the engineer to create something which, in terms of normal acoustics, is not possible, something which is larger than life. He is there to superimpose his will on the artist, to steer the recording into the particular musical direction he wants.

 

He has become, in a sense, a star in his own right.

 

But not all record producers become stars. Today, anyone can be a record producer, and the awful thing is that practically everyone is! When I started, I joined an elite band of about a dozen people in the United Kingdom who produced records. Now, every third person I meet seems either to be a producer, or trying to be one. It has become the desirable thing to do. A student is more likely to go to music college with the idea of becoming a producer than of becoming a concert pianist. And for every one who goes to music college, there are ten thousand who don't, but who still want to become producers, and still do become producers.

 

All you need is the necessary money to go into a studio with a group of musicians. You will find Fred Flange, who lives at 29 Acacia Villas, down the road. Fred has got his own little group. Fred and you agree that the group is the bee's knees, and you sign him up, saying: 'I'll be your manager; I'll take 30%, and I'll make a record with you.' You rustle up something between £600 and £1000, and take the group into a studio. Whether you know anything about it at all, or (as most probably) not, you emerge at the end of the day with a little tape, usually with some ghastly noise on it. If you are extremely lucky, you can sell that tape to a record company. If you are luckier still, it could become a hit. It is that huge element of chance, rather like the pools, which attracts people to the idea. But it has nothing to do with the true profession of being a record producer, where the element of chance is not part of the game.

 

Not only can anyone become a record producer, but anyone can start his own label. When I started, there were very few record companies in this country. They were old-fashioned, almost feudal institutions; although they ground their employees into the dust, they were very strait-laced, and exceedingly honourable in their dealings with recording artists and others. Then came the revolu­tion, with the influx of American companies, the breaka­way of independent producers, and the setting-up of small record organisations. The power of the original companies has been dissipated to such an extent that they have almost become distributors of other people's records, and factories to produce them.

 

Today, a combination of will, energy and a certain amount of money is all that is required for starting a label. It is even easy to get records produced. You can hire a recording studio, either using an independent producer or settling for a do-it-yourself job. You can then take the master tape and have it processed, for a price, by any record company. You can order, say, five thousand discs, get the sleeves made up, and set out on your own. Of course, that does cost money, and if you don't know what you're doing you will burn your fingers. You also have to have distribution, which you can arrange by going to any shop, or chain of shops, and saying: 'Right, I'm marketing records. Will you stock them for me?' They usually will, whereas in the old days only recognised record dealers dealt in records.

 

In fact, most people don't go to all the trouble of starting a label, but organise licensing deals with the large record companies. Even a company iike AIR, before it actually makes a record, will first make an arrangement with a large company for the issue of that record. We made our own records and licensed them, through EMI, to Columbia, Parlophone, or whoever it was: a record would go out as, say, a Parlophone record, but also as an AIR production. We would pay the cost of recording and would recover it in the form of an advance and a royalty, out of which we would pay the artists. That is how many of the smaller production companies operate. But in 1976, we changed all that in our own case when we started the AIR label, and we will issue our records only on that label.

 

Anyone wanting to become a professional producer has two basic options open to him. He can become a staff producer with one of the large companies, in which case he gets a salary. Or he can become an independent pro­ducer, and forage for himself. The independent hires himself out to the highest bidder. He generally expects to get a royalty on the sale of the records, and he gambles that his skill will make that record sell. If he is good enough, he will demand an advance against those royalties, rather like an author's arrangement with a book publisher.

 

When we started AIR back in 1965 we set the standard for what royalties should be. We said that 2/c was the normal, basic royalty to which a producer should be en­titled. Today, that varies. Top producers get much more. I may get 4% or even more, depending on the circum­stances. The irony is that, when we achieved that break­through for the independent producers, we also won the battle for the staff producers. On top of his salary, any staff producer worth his salt will nowadays also receive a very handsome royalty.

 

When an independent producer is approached to make a record, that approach may come either directly from the artist or group, or it may corne from the record company. But we learned long ago that it is wiser not to deal with individual performers, however important or friendly they may be, on the question of money. So, if a group approaches me, my manager, who handles all negotiations, will say to their manager: 'These are our terms: so many per cent royalty; so many thousand dollars advance.' There is a fairly standard form of contract, by which the producer gets royalties and statements of account every three months, every six months, or whatever it is. But we always insist that, whatever the deal may be, we must be paid directly by the record company concerned. They send us the statements, and they send us the royalties, regardless of any payments they make to the artists.

 

The whole field is very negotiable. There might, for instance, be a group contracted to produce so many records for a company. That group might want to use their favour­ite independent producer, while the company might prefer to use one of its staff producers, which would probably mean they have to pay less in royalties. The outcome will depend on the particular situation. If, as in the case of the group America whom I record, the producer is recognised as being a vital link in the chain, in the sound of the final product, the record company will tend not to argue. In other circumstances, if it comes to a head-on disagreement, the group, if they believe a particular producer is essential to their success, may agree to take a lower royalty them­selves in order to accommodate the producer's demands.

 

It is all a matter of sale and demand, the original market­place. If you are in demand, you will obviously command a higher royalty than if you are just starting. And when you are just starting, it is the devil of a job to win acknowledgement in the business. Make no mistake, while it may be true that anyone can become a record producer, success as a professional producer is very hard to achieve. But once the breakthrough conies, you will be asked again; that is certain. There tends to be a fashion in producers. I have known cases where people have tried to sell records on the strength of their being 'A George Martin Production'.

 

But I think that that fashionable side of the business can be very dangerous. I have known many record pro­ducers who have been, like recording acts, mere flashes in the pan. They make a tremendous hit. Everybody wants to use them. Then they take a nose-dive and sink without trace. It is stamina, the ability to do a professional job year in, year out, that is hard to achieve. You can't rest on your laurels. You can't let up for a moment in seeking the best result of which you are capable. After more than a quarter-century in the business, I still always expect that next week people will say: 'George Martin! That old fuddy-duddy! We don't want him any more.'

 

But as long as one is wanted, the rewards can be very great indeed. If an album in America 'goes gold' - that is, sells half a million copies - it will earn the producer a small fortune. The retail price of an album is about eight dollars. A 3 % royalty works out at something over twenty cents an album. So a 'gold' album means 100,000 dollars for the producer.

 

With the successes that I have had in producing the group America - records like History, Hideaway, Holiday and Hearts - I was bringing something like half a million dollars a year into this country. That money, of course, went to my company, AIR, rather than to me, because it Was for my work as producer. It is only when I score, arrange, write film music or conduct a concert that the fees or royalties for my work come to me personally. I think History was the single album which made us most money. It was a compendium of America's hit singles -songs like 'Horse With No Name' - which they had asked me to put together as a special package. That didn't stop at gold. It went platinum. I believe they ended up selling something like two million copies; we made about $200,000 out of it, even though I had not produced all the tracks.

 

The other rewards of being a successful record producer are those which go on to the mantelpiece rather than into the bank balance. They are, of course, awards.

 

I often feel that, although winning is nice, the very fact of being nominated is almost as good, because by then the whole field has been narrowed down to about five names, and those five people must all have done pretty well. To me, an Oscar nomination was a great honour, evefi though, as I wrote earlier, I knew I had no chance of winning.

 

Mind you, that sort of attitude can backfire. In 1976 Don Kirschner and the American CBS television network started the Rocky Awards, to honour people in the rock music industry. It was held in Los Angeles, and I actually flew from there to London the night before the ceremony, never dreaming that I could be in the running. I thought the 'producer of the year' award would go to Gus Dudgeon, who produces Elton John, or to John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, or Peter Asher, Jane's brother, who is probably the most successful producer in America right now. To my astonishment, I had hardly set foot back in England when I got a call to tell me that I had won, and that someone else had had to collect the award on my behalf. Apart from that, the whole thing was rather funny to me since I don't really regard myself as a rock producer at all.

 

That's the thing about these awards: you really don't know who has won until they open those envelopes. You just have to sit there and quake. Nor do I think that there is any question of it being 'his turn this year', where awards are concerned. They tend to be based on the hard facts of sales and so on.

 

Apart from the Rocky Award and the Britannia Award, I have won four Grammies, which are the music business's equivalent of Oscars. They are given by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in America. In England I have won an Ivor Novello Award for special services to music, though they are normally given to writers for their compositions.

 

The other kind of memento, of course, is the gold, silver, or platinum disc. I have rather a large collection of those, and it is with no disrespect, or lack of pride in them, that I now reveal the use to which they are put. They 'paper' the walls of the smallest room at my London home!

 

 

One of the main problems for the record producer is finding suitable material.

 

This is especially true when you are recording someone like Matt Monro or Shirley Bassey, who don't write their own songs. It is the job of the producer to find them the right ones. If you are a professional producer and people in the business know that you record Matt, or Shirley, or Cilia Black, they will send you songs with those people in mind. Even the public sends offerings. But that is not enough. You still have to search. You still have to ring up the publishers' offices.

 

You might think that they should be smart enough to send the stuff without being asked. But everyone isn't smart all the time. Sometimes, if you push them enough, they may produce something which they have not thought of as suitable anyway, because they tend to send you only the obvious ones. If you have had a hit with Cilia Black called 'You're My World', the next three months' mail will consist of songs exactly like 'You're My World'. It will not occur to anyone that you and Cilia might be interested in 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' or 'Baby, It's Cold Outside'.

 

Ideally, the producer should try not to stick to the same thing. He should give the artist the chance of doing some­thing different. He must keep his mind open. And he must keep the publishers' minds open, too.

 

 

It is not necessary to have a degree in physics in order to be a record producer. I am certainly no electronics expert, though I have inevitably picked up basic knowledge, like what a valve does and how a transistor operates.

 

Electronic wizardry is a matter for the engineer, and it is ironic to me to see those young engineers who came up with me - the generation after Charlie Anderson and his friends - now seeming rather old-fashioned, for all the enormous help they gave in improving our studios and our techniques. Today, there is a new brand of engineer push­ing his way up in the business.

 

There are no set rules for the relationship between the producer and the engineer. It is entirely a question of what works best. Geoff Emerick and I, for example, work very well as a team, because we work together so much, and respect what each other does. We keep our separate areas of responsibility quite definite. Our long collaboration has led to a deep understanding, so that I know in advance what he is going to do and he knows in advance what I want. With other engineers, especially in America, I have to give detailed instructions. I must say what kind of echo I want on the voice, what equalisation I like on the strings, the nearness or distance of sound that I require, the drum sound I like, the bass sound I prefer. It all has to be spelled out.

 

There is a race of men who are producer-engineers; they combine both functions. In theory I could do that. But I do not think it is a very good idea. I would not be able to see the wood for the trees. The essence of a producer's job is to be impartial. He must be able to see the whole picture, and make a value-judgement as quickly as possible. But when you are playing about with equalisation knobs, trim­ming limiters and compressors, varying the amounts of echo or reverberation time, and involving yourself in a million other technical activities, you tend not to listen to the music. And I am rather single-minded about that.

 

A producer's function is to listen to the sound, and to the music as an overall unit together, and from that he must judge the recording. An engineer's function is to ensure that, technically, it is the very best recording obtainable. If they are worrying about each other's area of responsibility, they are not doing their own jobs properly.

 

Equally, there can at times be a legitimate overlapping of function. In spite of the understanding that Geoff and I have built together, he won't know exactly what my score is like. He won't know precisely how I visualise the rela­tionship of the backing to the voice and the rhythm. He won't know that, although I have written the strings in a very high passage at one point, I do not want them to be very loud. Conversely, I may have written them in a very low passage elsewhere, and he cannot know that I want them not too soft. And since the dynamics of scoring a modern recording are such that many of these effects have to be artificially manipulated, I might well tend to override his controls in such cases.

 

He will get the main balance, according to his normal standards and to what he has come to expect with me, and I will put the fine touches in afterwards. That speeds up the whole process, and is better than if I said to him: 'That was a good run-through, Geoff. But next time, when the voice hits the word "told", will you pull back the strings . . . ?' It is much quicker, simpler, and more accu­rate if I do it myself. Nor does Geoff mind at all. It's a far cry from those early days, when the engineers hated your touching a thing. 'Keep your bloody hands off my controls!' It was almost a union matter.

 

I am in no way a typical record producer. I am a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, and it is fortunate for me that I have found a line of business which accepts versa­tility rather than genius.

 

One of the ways in which I am fairly unusual among producers is the degree to which I arrange and orchestrate. For the actual job of producing, that is not important. A top record producer does not in any way need the ability to translate everything literally into precise musical terms, into the precise technical language. He can hire an arranger to do that. But I do believe that he should have a working knowledge of music in an appreciative sense, a feeling for shape and form. He should be able, for example, to say to the arranger: 'I like your arrangement, but I think it's a bit heavy-handed, a little too ponderous.'

 

If he is not a musician, he will have to talk in broad terms like that. He won't have the vocabulary to say: 'You shouldn't have doubled the contra-bassoon there.' Equally, there are many non-musician producers who have acquired at least a part of that vocabulary through sheer experience. They are often very successful. They have worked all their lives in the record industry; they have clawed their way up, starting perhaps as messenger boys, moving up to the A and R department, listening all the time to record programmes and what the disc jockeys have to say, so that they know what people want and form a clear idea of what they like themselves. And over the years they have picked up the details in the fine print of musical language.

 

If they are lucky enough to have learnt their craft in a studio, starting as an assistant's assistant, they can gain by sheer observation. They can watch the violas and the violins playing and listen to their distinct sounds, and they will know from that when it is preferable to use the one rather than the other. Typical in this field are the engineers who have become producers in their own right. Geoff Emerick himself produced an album with the Camp-belltown Pipers, on which he worked with Paul McCartney. Glyn Johns is another. There is also Phil Ramone, a very fine producer, who recorded all the music for Barbra Streisand's film A Star Is Born and made many records with Paul Simon and Billy Joel.

 

Then again, there are record producers who do not pontificate on music at all. Norman Newell at EMI, for example, was most successful with records of shows. If something like Mame or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers came to town as an English production and EMI wanted an original-cast album of the English show, Norman would io it. He became expert at it. He was not a musician, but ie was an excellent producer.

 

There are no set rules. I even knew one very famous 'cord producer who made it his sole function to sit with feet up in the control room, watching the group in the idio below. Occasionally he would press the mike button 0 communicate with the studio and say, 'Absolutely fantastic!' Then he would release the button and beam all over his face. With this heavy chore behind him, he would get out his pot, roll a joint, light up and offer it round when the boys came out of the studio. That was his entire contribution. Having achieved all this, he would walk away with a hit record!

 

I will refrain from mentioning his name, but, believe me, it is extremely well-known.

 

 

The choice of recording studio is a matter for the artist and the producer. Every producer will have his own favour­ite, one in which he can work happily.

 

I naturally prefer to work at AIR Studios, not only because they are owned by my company, but more because I happen to think they offer better facilities and quality than can be found in most other places. The only reason for going outside would be if, for instance, I were using an eighty- or ninety-piece orchestra. Then I would prefer to use the Number One studio at Abbey Road, because of its ambience and long reverberation period.

 

But if, say, Cilla Black were to tell me that for some reason she would rather work at EMI, then at EMI we would work. Provided the studios were up to good modern standards, I would never quarrel with an artist on those grounds.

 

The advent of multi-track working, as I have described, was a great blessing to the professional producer. It gave him freedom to re-think. Like a painter in oils who doesn't like a couple of lines in his picture, he can go back over his work, erasing it and rilling in with something new.

 

But as the hard core of professional producers swelled into a vast army of amateurs, multi-track working assumed far greater importance. As records became better, musi­cians themselves became more involved in the studios, more aware of studio techniques. They also began to have more say in what the sounds should be like. I would think that today only about 20 % of records are made by profes­sional producers. The great majority are made by the groups themselves. As producers, they are amateurs; they simply do not have the experience. And as the multi-function power drill is for the home handyman, multi-track is the ideal tool for do-it-yourself recording.

 

Perhaps the classic example of what could be achieved with that tool is Mike Oldfield's creation, Tubular Bells. When he made that record he was a complete amateur, though the experience itself has turned him into a profes­sional. But he had the genius to know the sound he wanted. He achieved that record by working away in a studio, laying down a basic track, adding to it, subtracting from it, adding something else - putting a little bit of synthesiser here, a bit of strings there. He was painting a picture, but gradually. If you like, he was painting by numbers, slowly adding colours here and there, taking away a colour that didn't work once the other shades had been added.

 

For him, multi-track working was an absolute necessity. He had neither the experience nor the discipline to say in advance what he wanted. At the same time, it is probably true to say that if he had had that experience and disci­pline, it is unlikely that Tubular Bells would have emerged as such an imaginative work.

 

To a certain extent, it was a hit-and-miss way of working. But then, that was how someone as great as Picasso often worked. I remember a film which showed Picasso painting on a ground-glass screen. The cameraman used stop-frame photography, and you could see how the artist would start with his basic lines, then fill them in, a colour here and a colour there, until the picture became very full and very complex. Suddenly there came a point at which you real-sed that he was wiping out what he had done before, because it had given him the inspiration for something

se. The whole picture was changing, and the final result was quite different from his original thoughts.

 

Rock musicians tend to work that way. The degree of re-thought, the extent to which ideas are worked out we the recording, varies with the group, but a lot of tivity happens on the spur of the moment. That must o apply to the producer. If I am doing something of my own, and especially if I am working with a large orchestra, which is expensive, I have to work the whole picture out in advance. I have to get it right on the manuscript, even though there may still be small alterations on the day. But when the producer is working with a group, he is creating in the studio. He uses his own thoughts and those of the group, collating and assembling them and rejecting the ones that are no good. So another element in the make-up of a good producer becomes the ability to choose: to choose between what works and what does not work - and, what is most important, to choose quickly.

 

That is, if there is a producer. Today, particularly in America, there are three reasons why most groups are reluctant to engage one. First, because the producer's importance is so widely recognised today that they want the glory of saying they produced their record themselves. Secondly, since the producer now gets so much money in royalties, they would rather keep that income 'in the family'. Thirdly, they may feel that an experienced pro­ducer will inhibit their genius. They don't want some old fuddy-duddy slowing them down, especially if they are looking for something that no one has thought of before.

 

The consequence of all this is that many groups spend an enormous amount of time in the studio just playing around, 'doing their thing'. Two people from the group Deep Purple, for example, invented an instrument called a Gizmo. Closeted with this new toy, they spent no less than eighteen months in the studio making one record. Some said this was a trifle self-indulgent, but the fact was that they were trying to plumb the depths of their brain­child, and wanted to show off all the Gizmo's potential.

 

It is this sort of exercise which makes it essential that studio technology should be first-class - a technology at whose core lies multi-track working. If you were to record Shirley Bassey with a forty-piece orchestra, you would have three songs on tape within three hours, and as near a final mix as makes no difference. After the recording you might need a few hours just to titivate it a bit, but that's all. With a group, three tracks in three hours would be quite impossible.

 

We have come a long way from that first Beatle album, Please Please Me, which I started at ten o'clock one February morning in 1963, and which was all mixed and ready for issue by eleven o'clock that night!

 

 

Often, when a producer has to work with a group over a period to bring out an album, the general ambience of the place where they work is as important as the more obvious needs of good studio facilities. Occasionally, it may even be more important, and the producer may have to use a little ingenuity in order to work in a good location.

 

In 1970, I was asked to record Sea Train, a folk-rock group whose sounds I liked very much. They wrote their own songs, which three or four of them sang, with lots of harmonies. I was asked to record them in New York, in July, but I said: 'There is really no way that I want to go to New York and record in July. It gets so hot there, and one way and an'other we're going to be in a heavy city.' Besides, my youngest son, Giles, was still only a year old, and I did not want to be away from my family for too long.

 

The group's manager was Bennett Glotzer, who used to be in partnership with Albert Grossman, who handled the Band and Bob Dylan. He said, 'Look, most of the group live up in Massachusetts. If you thought it was a good idea, we could probably record up there. What do you think?'

 

The idea intrigued me, and I flew up from New York to have a look at Marblehead, the little town where they lived. I discovered that there were houses to rent in the summer, and I started working on the notion of equipping our own studio in one of them. I soon found the ideal house. It was huge, empty, almost derelict, and stood in its own grounds on Marblehead Neck, which was effec­tively an island, connected to the town by a causeway. It had a very large sitting-room, about twenty-five feet by sixteen, which we could use as a studio, and right next door to that was another room which was suitable for a control room.

 

To help me I brought over Bill Price, one of AIR's best engineers at that time, who now runs Wessex Studios, and 3 ordered the felt boards we would need to make the face acoustically right. From a firm in Rhode Island we red a very good recording desk. The 3M company rented a sixteen-track machine. Dolby Laboratories gener­ously lent me the Dolby units free, in return for publicity on the venture; and I shipped my own loudspeakers over from London, since I was used to their sound. Then we hired a good piano locally, and spent about a fortnight setting the whole thing up.

 

It was an idyllic summer, and we stayed there from July until October. Bennett had rented another house near the 'studio', for Judy and me and the children, Lucy and Giles, and we would spend most mornings on the beach. Then we would start recording at two in the afternoon, with a break at seven, when I would cycle home for supper, returning to work until about two in the morning.

 

But there were a few problems locally. Marblehead is a charming New England town, famous for yachts and boating, but there was an extremely right-wing WASP -white Anglo-Saxon Protestant - element among its inhab­itants. We discovered this early on, when the owner of the house we lived in told us that when he had first moved into the district he had been asked to sign a document declaring that he would not sell his house to a Jew, a Catholic, or a coloured person.

 

He had refused. But when we descended on this bigoted backwater, a rock group whose bass and fiddle players were Jewish and whose keyboard player had a black girl­friend, one can understand how there came to be a certain amount of opposition. This first showed when Judy and I and the kids were sitting on the beach one day, a perfectly public beach, and a woman came up and told us to get off it. 'We don't want your sort here at all,' she thundered. The irony was that she was the wife of a man Norman Newell knew very well. Norman had written to him to tell him we were coming, and he had been looking forward to it. His wife, not knowing who we were, blew it completely, of course, establishing an immediate atmosphere of dis­cord, not to say intense hatred!

 

It is true that we were, I suppose, acting illegally, and should not have been making a record in a private house, but we were not disturbing anyone. It was the fact that we were there at all which really offended the populace.

 

The houses were all detached, and stood in their own grounds, but there were no fences between the plots, and the well-mown lawns ran into one another. Our next-door neighbour was an eye specialist, and before we moved in our landlord told us, The man next door has heard all about you, Mr Martin. He's very anxious to meet you. He admires your work immensely, and I'm sure he'll be calling on you before very long.'

 

'Thank you very much,' I said. Tm not really looking for that, but it's nice to know that people do appreciate what one is doing.'

 

Well, we moved in, and a week went by, two weeks, a month. We saw them across the lawns, but they ignored us completely. We weren't worried. If that was the way they felt, then fine.

 

But one Sunday Lucy, who was a precocious child of four, wandered across the lawn to talk to the man as he was cleaning his car, and we could hear her little voice piping across the stretch of green. 'What car have you got?' asked Lucy.

 

'This is a Lincoln Continental.'

 

'Oh.'

 

There was a pause, and then - shamed into conversation, I suppose - he asked her, 'What car does your daddy have?'

 

'Oh, we've got a Rolls-Royce.' Now, at the time, this was perfectly true, though it happened to be a rather old Silver Cloud. Not that they knew that!

 

Lucy persisted. 'Do you have a boat?'

 

'No, but I suppose you do,' said the man, obviously feeling his sense of superiority slipping.

 

'Oh, yes,' said Lucy. 'Daddy always takes the boat to Greece, every summer.'

 

This also happened to be perfectly true. We had a nine-foot inflatable dinghy, which we took on our package tours to Greece. Not that they knew that!

 

Within an hour there was a knock on the door, and we were invited round for cocktails. But we never disillusioned them about the age of the Rolls or the nature of the boat!

 

Since the whole operation had been rather expensive, had agreed with Bennett Glotzer to do a second album while we were there, so after Sea Train I set to work with Winter Consort. It was a semi-classical group, and a very unusual combination. It was led by Paul Winter, who played a sort of classical saxophone, as well as being a folk writer. Then there was Paul McCandless, who played oboe, and cor anglais and other wind instruments. Ralph Towner played classical guitar, piano, and pipe organ. The cello was in the hands of David Darling, whose brother was a space scientist at Cape Kennedy. There was a Fender bass player. And to complete the line-up there was a man playing what they called 'traps' - drums, that is - which was their only concession to rock-and-roll. He had the most incredible collection of weird instruments: bongos, conga drums, African urdus, marimbas, and an enormous twelve-foot-long xylophone called an amarinda, which required three people, sitting cross-legged, to play it.

 

The album was called Icarus, and was, I think, the finest record I have ever made. It didn't sell particularly well, but a lot of people took notice of it. And it had one special distinction. The title song, 'Icarus', also went out as a single, and David Darling's brother gave a copy to one of the Apollo crews.

 

That was how it came to be the first record taken to the moon, though I don't think they had the facilities for playing it!

 

 

One of the great virtues of a good record producer is patience. But impartiality is almost equally essential.

 

That may be one reason why I have never gone out of my way to write tunes or songs with the specific aim of making them hits, although I think I could do so. There are ways of manufacturing a hit. There is a kind of dictionary of good bits to put in a song; you take those and juggle them around, and you have a hit. But, just as film work becomes what I called a golden treadmill, so the making of hits tends to turn one into a machine. Again, it means giving up everything else. Most important of all, I am certain that if I had started aiming for hits, I would not have been as good a record producer, because then I would have become biased.

 

What is more, although I enjoy making my own records from time to time, I would be embarrassed if they were to transform me into a recording star, because that would lead to ambivalence in my relationships with the artists I produce. It is very difficult to work with somebody else. You have to be in tune with that person, and you have to get over any ego problems. If one side always takes, and the other is always giving, talent is suppressed. If a very talented artist browbeats a very talented producer into such a state that he cannot express himself, the producer's talent is wasted; he is ineffective. The same is true the other way round. A successful record has to be a real expression of everyone's talent. That was true when I recorded Ella Fitzgerald, and it is true when I work with Jimmy Webb. It was true when I made successful record­ings with Jeff Beck; it is true when I get together with my friends Cleo Laine, John Dankworth and that marvellous classical guitarist John Williams.

 

And it was never more true than in all those years I worked with the Beatles. There were no clear lines of demarcation. It was more a question of being a good team than of isolating individuals as being producer, arranger or songwriter. When I arranged, I worked closely with John, Paul or whoever it was, and they arranged with me. To hark back to an example - the use of the piccolo trumpet on 'Penny Lane': it is true that I arranged it, but equally true that Paul was thinking up the notes. If I had been left to myself, I honestly do not think I would have written such good notes for David Mason to play.

 

I must emphasise that it was a team effort. Without my arrangements and scoring, very many of the records would not have sounded as they do. Whether they would have been any better, I cannot say. They might have been. That is not modesty on my part; it is an attempt to give a factual picture of the relationship. But equally, there is no doubt in my mind that the main talent of that whole era came from Paul and John. George, Ringo and myself were subsidiary talents. We were not five equal people artisti­cally: two were very strong, and the other three were also-rans.

 

In varying degrees those three could have been other people. The fact is, we were not. Although you could say °f a successful football team that it might have done as well with another goalkeeper, or another centre-forward, the fact remains that that goalkeeper and centre-forward are in the team, and as part of it they cannot be discounted. And I did win one battle in the industry - not only for myself, but for all who take a pride in their ability to produce good records. After our first successes, the labels and sleeves bore the legend 'Produced by George Martin'.

 

 


Date: 2015-02-28; view: 982


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