Producing Country. Michael Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ knows what’s coming out of that place. He’s not going to go in there and start telling the engineer how to make a recording. He’s going to go in there and sit down. His job is to judge the recording musically. That’s the way the good producers did it. All of the Capitol guys used that system. In the early days, it was interesting to see guys like Lee Gillette and, later, Ken Nelson learn the business as we were learning too. Everybody was in the same boat. We knew we were dependent on each other to make the right kinds of recordings.

THE DINNING SISTERS, “BUTTONS AND BOWS” (1947), BEST OF THE DINNING SISTERS (COMPILATION, 1998, COLLECTOR’S CHOICE)

       JOHN PALLADINO

      Sometime in 1942, I came to Radio Recorders [in Los Angeles] and began working as an engineer. It was a very progressive studio. When tape came [in 1948, though it wasn’t fully adopted until the early 1950s], editing became part of the recording process. We did editing for two reasons. You either had errors that you are trying to dodge, or you were fighting time. Doing a session, you might not have the leisure of saying, “Another take; another take; another take.” Right away, during a take, the producer might say [to the engineer], “Let’s use the first half of the last take, and the second half of this one.” Usually, it was one edit, and not something that changed the feel of the record. Also, in those days we had a lot of time restrictions on records—singles, ten-inch LPs, twelve-inch LPs. We were restricted by the sheer physical properties of the formats.

       BOB IRWIN

      The earlier edits to analog tape that I’ve seen were not necessarily fix-oriented. I think the audience, the producers, the artists, and the music in general were much more forgiving back then and, ultimately, much more interesting. Rather than being fix-oriented, edits had to do with things like adding a solo from another take that was particularly fiery, or a vocal phrase or a chorus that was particularly touching, as opposed to so-and-so sang flat there. Let’s pick up “but love” from this take and put it in another. Which is what a lot of analog editing seemed to be based upon as time went on.

      Although I’m sure that they exist, I can’t off the top of my head give you an example of a country recording that I’ve worked on from the early ’50s where something went wrong and they fixed it with an edit, as opposed to calling for another take. I can remember—not song by song—but specific instances where I go, “My God, look at this. They took the solo from this one and put it into here. And listen why!”

      You start to see the big change occurring in the latter half of the ’50s. It took analog tape literally a good four, five, six years before it differed significantly from cutting to an acetate. I’d probably date it to the advent of multitracking, when Nashville got its first half-inch, three-track recorders in 1958. That’s when the whole arena pretty much changed. Up till that time they were still recording to full-track mono tape. It was just a different medium than the lacquer.

       KEN NELSON

      The first hit record I made was in Chicago with the Dinning Sisters—“Buttons and Bows.” During that period, Jimmy Petrillo, who was the president of the Musicians’ Union, had threatened to strike, and in fact they were going to strike. All the record companies got panicky, and that’s how I actually got started with Capitol [Records]. They were all trying to get in as many [recording] sessions as possible before the strike. The Dinning Sisters were in Chicago, so I recorded them.

      Later, when tape first came in, the Dinnings came out to Hollywood. Lee [Gillette] did the session. I did the one in Chicago because they had no choice. They were booked with me. But after the Dinnings recorded with Lee, they left to go to the airport to catch a plane back to Chicago. Lee listened to the tape, and there was a mistake in it. So he grabbed a cab and ran out to the airport and got the Sisters back. They didn’t do the whole thing, only the part where the mistake was made. It saved them a barrel of money.

MERLE TRAVIS, FOLK SONGS OF THE HILLS (ORIGINAL RECORDINGS, 1947, CAPITOL; COMPILATION, 1993, BEAR FAMILY)

      THOM BRESH (guitarist/producer/Travis’s son)

      Lee Gillette [producer at Capitol Records] was asking him to write more folk songs. Travis was irritated by that. “You don’t write a folk song,” he said. “People write folk songs. They come out of the ground—the hills. That’s why they’re called folk songs.”

      Lee Gillette said, “Well, just write something that sounds like a folk song.”

      “That’s why I sarcastically wrote ‘Sixteen Tons,’” he said. “First of all, you can’t load”—and he was serious—“you just can’t load sixteen tons of number-nine coal. No man can do that. It’s like John Henry.” He says, “I just gave it [‘Sixteen Tons’] to Lee Gillette, and Tennessee Ernie Ford sold it.” Travis used to use this line. He said, “Never did like that tune till Tennessee Ernie Ford sold about 5 million copies. Then, I got to where I loved it.”

      You could not get him to say that he wrote “Dark as a Dungeon.” “It’s a tune I made up.” He would not use the word “write,” “write a song.” He’d say, “Well, I didn’t write it. I just made it up. That’s why they’re not folk songs, because I made them up. I just put into rhyme and story what I saw around the coal mine.”

      They inducted him into the Smithsonian Institution as a great American folk song writer. He wouldn’t go to the ceremony. They put him in, but he wouldn’t go.

      When he got the letter, he said, “When is this induction?”

      I’m using a fictitious date. “It’s going to be June 3.”

      “Write on the calendar over there, ‘Sick.’” He said there was no way he could go in there and take credit for folk songs when he made them up. And that’s just the way it was, period, the end.

      He said he wrote “Dark as a Dungeon” after making love to a pretty girl in Redondo Beach. “I came out of her apartment. I got on a motor-cycle. It was dark, and I looked up. There was a lone street lamp up there.”

      He said, “I was going to go back out to the San Fernando Valley, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m supposed to be writing some of those folk songs.’ I sat there on a Harley-Davidson underneath that street lamp that looked like a lone miner’s lamp in the darkness. That’s what it looked like as far as what I thought—the image. I sat there and said, ‘Okay, folk songs usually come from the Irish. How do they write?’

      “I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Now listen ye children so young and so fine, and seek not your fortune in the dark, dreary mine.’”

      “I sat there,” he said, “and I wrote that verse in Redondo Beach on a Harley-Davidson”—or an Indian, I don’t remember which it was—“looking at a lone street lamp after making love to a pretty girl. That’s not a folk song.”

      But of course “Dark as a Dungeon”—if you look at it—is considered one of the great folk songs of that era. That whole coal-mining era was documented in music by Merle Travis. And that’s just the way it is, but to him that’s not the way it was at all. It’s just something that he knew something about.

      He could write about anything. He had a brilliant mind. He wrote all of those train segments for the old Johnny Cash TV show. If they did “Come On, Ride This Train,” СКАЧАТЬ