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LAWRENCE COHN
From the late ’20s to the late ’40s, the recording process was a direct-to-disc process. They [engineers] cut acetates; there were no tapes. Once the acetates were cut, they made impressions, and they got metal parts from the impressions, because the metal parts are much more durable. It was a more simplistic way of recording. There was just one micro-phone. Even Benny Goodman and the big bands in the ’30s recorded with only one microphone, an overhead mike. Someone came in here last year, and they turned down working in the studio because it didn’t have a ninety-six-track capability! I was reduced to hysterics. That’s all really bullshit. My God, we used to record the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, with one mike.
Those guys in the ’20s and ’30s were out there. They were documentarians. They had an ear for talent. They would set up the equipment, they would cut the tracks, and then onto the next person. Some guys were tremendously musical as producers.
Art Satherley went back and forth between country music and blues, and so did Tommy Rockwell, Don Law, and Frank Walker. It seems that none of them had a real specialization. In other words, they were all expected to record and to find rural gospel artists and blues artists, on the one hand, and white string bands on the other hand. They were very selective, and the selectivity was really occasioned by what they thought would sell. To my mind that’s the way producers are supposed to be.
When you acquire acetates, where do you get them?
We [Columbia/Legacy] have a huge archive back east at a place called Iron Mountain, which is about a hundred miles north of New York City. That’s where all the assets of this company are: metal parts that were recorded in the ’20s and ’30s; acetates from the late ’30s up to 1948, when we started to use tape; and all the tapes. They’re stored at this huge facility that looks like something out of James Bond. It’s the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen in your life. That’s where they were. They have a whole storage system.
There’s a regular procedure that producers go through. Once we decide that we’re going to do a project, then I do the research for the sides that I want or, generally, everything the guy recorded. We put in a request. There’s a whole methodology that we employ. It goes to the studio in New York. Then it goes up to the facility, Iron Mountain. They search it, and they get the stuff. And then I have it.
I did a thing called The Retrospective, which is a four-CD set. All the ’20s, ’30s stuff that we found—except for some of the very late ’30s blues stuff, around ’39, which were on acetate—everything was on metal parts. So the metal parts varied in quality. Some of them looked magnificent and hadn’t been played since 1926 or ’7. You put them on, and they were terrible. Others looked awful. They were stained, looked like they were ready to be thrown out. You’d play them, and they would be absolutely perfect. There was no rhyme or reason. We had no formula. We had to take every single track individually and set up for each track individually. In other words, we couldn’t make a setup that would work for all the things that we were doing. It was just impossible. Obviously, that compounded our work.
LAWRENCE COHN
The project was my idea. Luckily, I found the original acetates that were recorded at the sessions in the ’40s. They were in dreadful shape. There were a lot of tapes that had been done over the years, rechanneled stereo and all kinds of crappy endeavors. I destroyed those things and threw them away. As I said, we’d found the original acetates. They were beat up and scratched. We worked hard to clean them up and get them to where I felt they were really proper.
I remastered the thing three different times, because it was not quite right till the end, and then, of course, it was right. My engineer said I was hallucinating. I was hearing things. He locked me out of the studio at a point. He claimed I was giving him a nervous breakdown.
I said, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is that it just does not sound the way I want it to.”
In the end it came out very well. I found so many unissued alternate takes. I know Bill was very happy. He went on Nashville television, TNN, with the box and said that he felt it was the nicest thing that anyone had ever done for him, for his career. Unsolicited, he sent me an autographed picture saying, “Dear Larry, thanks for a great job.” I understand, from a friend of mine, who was his manager for many years, that he saw Monroe do that maybe four or five times in twenty-five years. So I was very proud. I was very happy that I could give it to him before he passed away.
BOB IRWIN
That’s the thing that’s most intriguing to me about country performers as opposed to rock ’n’ roll performers. And I don’t mean this to be disparaging at all toward rock ’n’ roll performers, but country guys were nailing this stuff in one to three takes. You listen to Bob Wills lacquers from the ’30s and ’40s [supervised by Don Law]. It’s pretty much—for all intents and purposes—the band producing themselves. When [guitarist] Eldon Shamblin blows a solo, the whole band stops. You hear them laugh, and then they kick up the next take. And like [Wills’s band] the Texas Playboys, many country musicians were, number one, in essence producing themselves and, number two, nailing stuff in two or three takes.
In the earlier days, when people were recording to lacquer or to full-track mono tape, I really do believe that, not just in Don Law’s case, but with most producers, it was much more in an A&R capacity than in a producer’s capacity. They let the groups be themselves more. Outside of certain miking techniques, which I’m sure was more the engineer’s responsibility than the producer’s, I can’t hear the producer. I could be wrong about that. Maybe Don Law was sitting there saying, “No, no, no, I don’t want that to sound like that. I want the mike over there.” But I’m going to bet that most of the time the engineer was doing that. Certainly, once you start hitting the mid-to-late ’50s and, especially, the early ’60s, you can hear producers’ trademarks all over the place. That’s not so much the case in the ’30s and ’40s. People weren’t picking producers. Producers were pretty much assigned, or the producers were picking which artists they were going to work with.
Could be his name, but Don Law (1902–1982) illustrates early record production—as a rule. He recalls any number of film directors from Hollywood’s studio era: professionals not considered auteurs.
Law immigrated to the States in 1924. By the end of the Depression, he was supervising recording sessions for the American Record Corporation, working with another pioneering A&R man, “Uncle” Art Satherley. When Satherley retired in 1952, Law was appointed head of Columbia’s country division. During the ’50s and ’60s, he produced a full roster of country legends: Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Dean, Ray Price, Johnny Horton, Marty Robbins, and the Statler Brothers.