Producing Country. Michael Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ my heart. I go with songs that I think truly complement each other, and with what the artist might want people to hear. Indeed, if the artist is still with us, he’s the first person you talk to. Which was impossible to do with Lefty.

      That meant I needed probably two weeks of studio time where I did nothing but listen—listen in the truest sense—not by listening to the bogus, horrible-sounding records and discs that were out there, but by going back to original lacquers, playing through them to get over-whelmed with that feeling. There’s not a better feeling in the world than sitting there with the transcription lacquer of a tune that someone’s never heard before and getting a lump in your throat because it’s so astounding. It’s the best high in the world in my book.

      Everything on that set was taken from the absolute original sources. Every single transcription lacquer was gone through by me. Every analog recording was gone through by me, up to that point—the early ’60s—which was the set’s predetermined stopping point. The earliest part of the disc, probably all of disc one, was very much discovery time. Nowadays, who cares if there’s a little bit of noise on the top end? You want to hear the cymbals. You want to hear the low end. The sounds that they were able to capture to lacquer were astounding. The dynamic range is jaw-dropping.

       What did you learn from the tapes?

      For example, from October 19, 1951, the original logsheet: Lefty in the studio put down songs like “I Love You (Though I Know You’re No Good)” “You’re Here, So Everything’s Alright”—one or two other songs. Next to each song in [producer] Don Law’s handwriting is “NG” for “No Good.”

      You realize, that was a call. Don heard what was going on that day, and who knows, it could have been a million-and-one things. They were just plain old having a bad day. Lefty was having throat problems. Who knows? But Don brought Lefty back three months later, basically to re-cut all the songs. And those were the versions that were issued. That happens all the time.

MARTHA CARSON, “SATISFIED” (1951), SINGS (RCA/CAMDEN)

       KEN NELSON

      We used to record at the Tulane Hotel.* The thing about Nashville, you use mostly all the same musicians all the time, like Grady Martin and Harold Bradley and Pig [Robbins], the piano player. You had a group of musicians that you used on various sessions. I used Chet [Atkins] a lot when I first came to Nashville. He was playing guitar for me. In fact he did all the Martha Carson sessions. The artist usually knew who he wanted to use, and if he didn’t, I would pick the musicians. It was just that easy, or that was just the way it was.^†

HANK WILLIAMS, “I’LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE” (1952), 40 GREATEST HITS (POLYGRAM)

       CHET ATKINS

      Hank had a lot of help out of Fred Rose. Fred was a great, great fixer. I had a long conversation with Gene Autry once. He used to write for Gene, you know, all those hits back in the ’30s. Gene said, “You know, Fred’s the greatest song fixer I’ve ever known. He’s just wonderful at that.” And he was. He wrote a lot of songs and gave them away. Half the time, he was upset at ASCAP [the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers], and he didn’t want to put a song with them. He’d say, “Ah, you take it,” and give it to the artist. He was a wonderful, wonderful guy.

       BUDDY KILLEN

      I worked with Hank. I did a lot of transcriptions with him and a lot of radio with him and some television and worked on the road with him. We recorded those transcriptions in WSM’s studio. They shipped them out all over the country. We’d do mostly fifteen-minute programs. I don’t remember if I cut a session with Hank. I was one of the busiest bass players in town. I recorded with everybody.

      Let me go back. I came to Nashville as a musician on the Grand Ole Opry. Then, I wrote a few songs out of desperation. It gave me an opportunity. I was doing demos. Tree [Publishing] had just started, and they were paying me ten dollars a night to stand all night long and sing on demos of songs that announcers at WSM wrote. Of course, they gave the songs to Tree, but nothing was happening. The songs weren’t getting cut, but by osmosis I started learning how to produce records.

      I was a musician, and I was a songwriter. So I had sort of an innate understanding about music and songs. When Jack [Stapp, program director] called me down to WSM and asked me if I wanted to go to work for Tree [his company], I said, “I don’t know anything about publishing.”

      “I don’t either,” he said. “We’ll learn together.”

      That’s how it got started. Because I knew that I had to get out there and get the job done, I didn’t even have an office. I got Jack to get me a fifty-dollar tape recorder, and I went around. When I heard about a song or about a songwriter, I’d go see him and sign up a song with Tree. I found that I was capable of doing it all. It came together, just inter-locked without any real effort on my part. I innately knew what I was supposed to do.

      I made a lot of mistakes businesswise because I wasn’t a businessman. They weren’t devastating things, just little decision-making processes that you go through. But I had a feel for the song. I had a feel for the music. I had a feel for if someone was good or not. When you’re a publisher or a producer, the most important thing you can have is an ear for the song. You must recognize a good song. I’m of the opinion that any producer who doesn’t make it, normally, it’s because he doesn’t recognize a great song. It starts with that song, and you know what? It ends with it.

       Cutting demos for Tree Publishing sounds like a crash course in production.

      You learn what you don’t put on a record more than you learn what to put on it, because overproduction kills a record faster than under-production. If you cover up the song, you’ve pretty well done some damage. You’re going by your own gut feeling—that thing that hits your ear. You like it or you don’t like it. All of us are playing twenty questions. No one’s ever perfect in the assumption that they know what a hit record is. Sometimes, you’ll think something is going to be a great smash, and it comes apart on you. But after having produced records for a while, you start getting a feel for where you’re going.

      When you go in to do a demo, you’re trying to give the star the feeling that you think the song should have when he records it. Even without realizing what you were doing, you were producing a record that wasn’t going to come out as a record but, instead, was going to come out cloned by somebody.

      You’ve got to be careful about directing a demo toward one artist. Back in the early days of Tree, I tried to make the demo pretty generic, and yet present the song the best I could. If I did a demo directed toward Ernest Tubb, if he didn’t cut that song, then who was going to cut it? To keep from taking it toward one guy, you’d just give the song what it needed, that special quality, that special feeling. I think finding the feeling that the song should have on the demo is more important than anything else. You can doctor it up. You can add horns, strings, fiddle, or banjo, but when you hear the demo, if the feel of the song doesn’t grab you, then you’ve missed the most important part of it.

      Hollywood may have employed a bunkhouse full of singing cowboys, but until High Noon (1952), film audiences heard country-and-western songs only when singers like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were onscreen. Dimitri Tiomkin’s soundtrack to High Noon altered that convention, announcing a new era in American cinema. It featured a Tiomkin-composed СКАЧАТЬ