LEGEND Your Song of the Day
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Rhody for the win on his 900th post. :rockon:
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Am now listening to 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers' a Stevie Wonder song performed by my favorite guitarist Jeff Beck and the stunning bassist Tal Wilkenfeld. Enjoy!
RocknRam29
Live, Love, Laugh, & Learn
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Going back to the 808 again for Friday. Anuhea is an Angel from Maui.
This is exactly what you want to hear from your lady...
This is exactly what you want to hear from your lady...
Ramsey
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Sun Dial is a legendary underground psychedelic, space rock band spearheaded by Guitarist/Singer Gary Ramone. I have and love every album Sun Dial has ever released. Gary is one of my favorite guitarist ever. I never let a Sun Dial CD leave my rotation. Gary is a shy man with an expressive guitar. He's been compared to David Gilmore to Jimmy Hendrix!
In the song Magic Potion Gary's agressive guitar sounds like a Kaleidoscopic striped tiger stalking a chainsaw mass murder into a tornado of daisies!
In the song Magic Potion Gary's agressive guitar sounds like a Kaleidoscopic striped tiger stalking a chainsaw mass murder into a tornado of daisies!
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The Jimi Hendrix Experience - 'All Along The Watchtower'
CLASSIC TRACKS: Jimi Hendrix Experience All Along The Watchtower
Produced by Eddie Kramer
With his searing version of 'All Along The Watchtower', Jimi Hendrix set a standard for Dylan covers that has rarely been equalled. Eddie Kramer was behind the glass as the sessions moved from London to New York.
By Richard Buskin
By 1968, Eddie Kramer had already earned his stripes as an engineer. A native of South Africa who had studied classical piano, cello and violin before developing twin interests in jazz and engineering, he'd relocated to England at age 19 and worked at Pye, his own KPS Studios, Regent Sound and Olympic through the mid-'60s, where he'd accumulated recording credits that included the Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, Traffic and, most notably, Jimi Hendrix. Kramer was, after all, the main man behind the board for most of the guitar virtuoso's brief time in the spotlight.
It was at Olympic that Kramer had previously sat alongside producer Chas Chandler and engineered Jimi's stunning 1967 debut, Are You Experienced?, which spawned the British hit singles 'Hey Joe', 'Purple Haze' and 'The Wind Cries Mary', as well as its follow-up, Axis: Bold As Love. And it was also at Olympic that, in early 1968, sessions commenced for Hendrix's third and arguably best effort, Electric Ladyland. Although not as consistent as its predecessors in terms of material and musical arrangements, this hallucinogen-soaked double album nevertheless featured the 25-year-old guitarist/vocalist/composer at the top of his game, showing off his breathtaking skills on classic cuts such as 'Voodoo Chile', 'Crosstown Traffic' and '1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)', while Eddie Kramer helped realise Jimi's sonic vision by pushing the technological envelope to its absolute limits.
Photos: Kramer Archives
Jimi Hendrix at the Datamix console at the Record Plant, New York, during the recording of the Electric Ladyland album.
"The fact that Jimi really had a great idea of what he wanted to hear enabled us to create sounds for him and enhance what he was giving us," Kramer says. "That really helped make Electric Ladyland unique."
Along with the aforementioned 'Crosstown Traffic', the tracks recorded at Olympic included one with which Hendrix would forever be associated even though he didn't write it: an exceptional interpretation of Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower'. The song's poetic, allegorical lyrics about social change had intrigued Hendrix when he first listened to Dylan's John Wesley Harding album, and in his version they would be infused with four blistering and distinctive guitar solos, aligning the song far more with its dramatic context than Dylan's much sparer rendering had. Other artists would cover the song, including the Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, U2 and the Dave Matthews Band, but Hendrix's intensely evocative version remains the most famous, and his arrangement was the one that Dylan himself subsequently adhered to.
Ahead In England
At Olympic the setup comprised a Dick Swettenham-designed Helios desk and Ampex four-track tape machine housed within what Eddie Kramer describes as "a wonderful, spectacular-sounding room. The modular console, with its great EQ, great reverb and great compression, was absolutely marvellous — we were ahead in terms of console design in England. In fact, that desk was so advanced, the American engineers would come over and say 'Wow, what an incredible board,' to which we'd say 'Yeah, but you've got eight-track.' We were so jealous of what was going on in America when we were stuck with this bloody four-track format where we had to go four to four to four all the time, even though in essence this really trained us to make decisions then and there about the stereo bounce — we had to be very accurate with our mixes, and that was a different kind of training because it forced you to be creative as the sound was being printed. That held me in good stead later on."
Eddie Kramer in New York, 1968.
While Hendrix's amp was screened off in the studio and miked with Neumann U67s, Mitch Mitchell's kit was positioned on a riser within a roofed, open-sided booth to give it depth and miked with a combination of U67s and AKG C12s.
"Initially there was no bass," says Kramer. "Jimi just played a six-string acoustic guitar while Traffic's Dave Mason played 12-string and Mitch was on drums. That's how Jimi wanted to cut it, and as a result the track had a marvellous, light feel thanks to the acoustic guitars that were driving it. Jimi not only loved the lyrics but also the chord sequences of 'All Along The Watchtower', and he just gave them a terrific bed to do a nice solo. He also showed Mitch how to turn the beat around on the intro, but Dave Mason couldn't get it together and he was up to about take 20 when [Rolling Stone] Brian Jones walked in. Actually, let me correct that: he staggered in. He was completely out of his brain.
Poor Brian, he was a good mate of Jimi's and we all loved him. Jimi could never say no to his mates, and Brian was so sweet. He came in and said 'Oh, let me play,' and he got on the piano, it was take 21, and we could just hear 'clang, clang, clang, clang, clang...' It was all bloody horrible and out of time, and Jimi said 'Uh, I don't think so.' Brian was gone after two takes. He practically fell on the floor in the control room... Dear Brian.
"It actually took about 27 takes to get the track going because Dave Mason couldn't get it together, but eventually he did and that was all that mattered. Jimi was driving the train. He always drove the train, whatever he was doing, and he had a magical ability, bar none, to take other people's material and make it his own. In fact, he also played bass on this track. When he said that's what he wanted to do, Noel [Redding] pissed off to the pub. He didn't want to know.
"Recording was always a learning process for Jimi, so each take would be different, and for 'All Along The Watchtower' there was no real rehearsal. Jimi just wanted to record the song. He loved Bob Dylan and he always carried his songbook with him. In this case, he was fascinated by the colour of the lyrics and the tone of the lyrics, and of course the chord sequences were wonderful, too. It was a very special song."
When asked about the techniques used to record Hendrix's guitar, Eddie Kramer's response is concise and to the point. "I'd stick a bloody mic in front of it and hope for the best," he jokes. "Nah, generally speaking it was either a 67 or [a Beyer] M160 or a combination of both, which I still use today. It might be slightly different, of course, but the basic principle's the same — a ribbon and a condenser, along with compression and EQ and reverb. All that stuff was always added during recording."
Ready For A Change
After the acoustic guitars, drums, bass and lead guitar for 'All Along The Watchtower' had been tracked, the Electric Ladylandsessions switched location to the US. Hendrix wanted to move back there, and when Record Plant owner Gary Kellgren invited Eddie Kramer to come work at his newly opened studio in New York City, the engineer jumped at the opportunity. He was, after all, ready for a change.
Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell behind his kit at the Record Plant.
"In England, if you were successful, people would do their utmost to cut you down," he says. "Nobody appreciated you — 'Oh, you flash bastard. How dare you make £95 a week when I'm making £50.' I couldn't stand that attitude and to this day it makes me very angry. I didn't feel at all appreciated."
Consequently, April 17, 1968, was the date of Eddie Kramer's arrival on American soil, and amid all the upheaval the Electric Ladyland project provided him with a strong sense of continuity despite the sudden change of environment and transition from four-track to 12-track. What's more, it also included the Record Plant's very first sessions, interspersed with Hendrix's frequent assignments on the road.
"We would get a week in the studio and then he'd be off, and then we'd get another week or 10 days and again he'd be off," Kramer recalls. "There I was, an emigré, establishing myself, getting into sessions, figuring out what America was all about. It was quite a challenge, and in the beginning it wasn't easy, but once I got used to the vibe I was flying. I loved it. The culture was so completely different — 'If you do a good job, you're gonna get paid, brother,' — and so was the technology for me, going from four to 12-track and bypassing eight-track completely. Hello. What a wake-up call.
"Instead of the Helios I was now sitting down at a Datamix board that was completely foreign to me, in a room that didn't sound the way that I was used to hearing things, and using a 12-track, one-inch Scully machine that was a horrible piece of crap. Good God, it was so noisy, it was horrendous. We scrapped it after the first couple of months and went straight from 12 to 16-track. When the songs we'd recorded at Olympic had been transferred from four-track half-inch to 12-track one-inch, Jimi had said 'Wow, man, now I've got eight more tracks to fuck around with. Cool!' and of course they all got filled up. But then we scrapped the bloody machine after transferring all of the 12-track tapes to 16-track.
"So, for instance, 'All Along The Watchtower', which had started four-track in England, was transferred onto the Scully and then the first Ampex 16-track, which was actually not a bad machine. In fact, listen to any of the tracks on that album and the lack of hiss is so apparent. That's down to the way we hit the tape — we hit it very hard and got all the necessary compression that came with it. Also, what with all the intensity that was going on, there was a fair amount of signal on the tape, and that really helped. It was quite a journey.
"Eventually, I got used to the Record Plant room, which was just a fairly live rectangular box with a couple of panels on the wall, made of pegboard with a little bit of fibreglass behind them. The control-room window was so thin, and the wall itself was so thin — we had these four huge 15-inch Tannoys mounted above the window, and when Jimi would blast we could hear him through the wall. There was virtually no soundproofing. The room was constructed out of breeze block, there were two thin curtains, and that was it. Very primitive. This was the antithesis of what I'd been used to in England, but nevertheless what we got out of it was magic. The board was fairly flexible: not a great-sounding console, but we made it work."
You Keep Me Hanging On
Chas Chandler, the former Animals bass player who had discovered Jimi in 1966 and since guided his career, was initially at the helm in New York as manager and co-producer to continue the work that had commenced in London. However, as has been well documented, he grew quickly tired of all the hangers-on attending the sessions, and decided that he wanted to opt out.
"Once Jimi got to the States I think his whole attitude changed towards what he was looking for musically," Eddie Kramer remarks. "I don't know whether this was aimed at having Chas leave — one could never tell — but there was definitely tension between them. Chas liked to run his sessions in a very strict, formal manner, without wasting time. He'd say 'We're here to work. The hangers-on must leave,' and it was left to me or Chas to tell the hangers-on to take a hike. Well, I guess that caused some friction and eventually Chas couldn't really take it any more. He hated wasting time, and if Jimi wanted to do 30 takes it would drive him nuts.
"Chas was the boss. Not musically, per se, but the boss in terms of not allowing any wasted time, and I think the restrictions he placed on Jimi for the first two albums were really good. I don't necessarily agree with what happened on the Electric Ladylandsessions, but without Chas there would have been no huge superstar. To start with, Chas recognised Jimi's talent, and then he was able to corral that raw talent and develop it and encourage it. He would sit with Jimi every night, helping him to write lyrics and helping him with the song structures, encouraging him to write. However, during that third album the sessions took their own course, and Jimi, with his strong vision, just allowed things to happen in a very casual way.
"Now, having said that, I also feel very strongly that he had a master plan, and as chaotic as it may have seemed to an outside observer it was actually quite well thought out. The classic example of this was 'Voodoo Chile', which was really created as a jam but a very, very calculated jam. I mean, after Chas left [the project], Jimi had wonderful aid and assistance from a quite unlikely source: the Scene club which was, fortunately for him, around the corner from the Record Plant. Having booked the session for seven o'clock, we'd be sitting there, tapping our fingers on the desk and twiddling our thumbs, wondering when he was going to show up. After he'd done this a few times we all knew this was Jimi's way of working. He'd be over at the Scene at 10 and show up at the studio at 12 or one, dragging behind him an entourage that included musicians whom he had sussed out as being the key players to try out that evening.
"You see, he had a specific plan in mind. There was a certain sound he was looking for, and he'd eyeball the musicians very carefully to make sure that they were going to be compatible with what he wanted to do. Generally speaking, he got the cream of the crop, because at that time, 1968, there were some phenomenal musicians around, and 'Voodoo Chile' was a classic example of Jimi figuring 'OK, I'm gonna get these guys in to play this particular song'. He'd bring them in at midnight or whenever, and everything would be ready: the amps, the mics, the headphones — I'd tested everything. Then he'd show them the song, and there'd be one run-through and one take, maybe two. Bam! It was done. So, to the outside observer there were the hangers-on and the whole rigmarole with onlookers, and sometimes that made it a bit challenging to work, but it never detracted from Jimi's goal. Chas may have commented 'Oh, he's playing to the gallery,' but it didn't seem to bother Jimi. In fact, it probably encouraged him to play more to the gallery, because maybe that was the vibe he was looking for.
"Chas was absolutely essential to Jimi's development as a writer and as a performer, as well as in terms of putting the band together, producing the records and giving Jimi the necessary discipline to come up with the goods. But with the Electric Ladyland album his role diminished as soon as the sessions moved to the States. You could tell there was a sea change in Jimi's behaviour, in his attitude and so on. I think the album as a whole has a journeyish feeling to it — and I'm not referring to the band, for Chrissakes. It rambles a bit, but it rambles with a purpose. And I love how there are so many different moods. Of all of Jimi's albums, it's the one that has the most moodiness — to some people it represents the most fun that you could have on a record. I mean, it was very daring to make a double album with all that experimentation. That was making a statement in 1968. And although it was looser than his previous records, it had a purpose, it had a focus. The purpose was 'Let's be loose!'
"I think this was Jimi expressing himself for the first time, completely unfettered. He could basically do anything he wanted — it was his album, from soup to nuts, and while it bears the stamp of Chas on some of the songs it very much shows Jimi's freedom in the creative process; the freedom to do a 14-minute opus like '1983...' Taking a chance to do something like that was very '60s."
Shy Guy
Hendrix recorded all of his vocals for the album at the Record Plant, and as usual a Beyer M160 was the mic of choice while a three-sided screen provided him with the desired privacy. "He'd always face the other way," says Kramer. "He hated to be looked at. He was very shy about his vocals. The truth was, he had a great style and I loved his vocals, but he hated them. He was so embarrassed by them. 'Oh man, was that OK?' 'Yeah man, it's cool.' 'No, I've got to do another one.' 'OK.' Jimi was not a great vocalist in the classic sense, but his vocal style suited what he did to the nth degree. I mean, it was very emotional and very personal, and I can't think of anybody else doing what he did. He was eminently capable, and the singing was an integral part of what he was doing, because he would often take a guitar solo and sing the melody line in unison with that solo — which is an old jazz trick — and it was wonderful."
Noel Redding at the Record Plant during the Electric Ladyland sessions; the bass on 'All Along The Watchtower' was played by Hendrix himself.
So, for that matter, was the constantly evolving 'All Along The Watchtower', recorded in consecutive layers: acoustic guitars, drums, bass and electric lead taped at Olympic, before the vocal and percussion overdubs took place in New York. "What's amazing to me is how the original four-track punches through so much at the end," Kramer remarks. "Jimi's loping bass line doesn't have any top end to it at all — it's just round and lovely — and you can hear him moving around on the bass as if it were a guitar. You see, he could play pretty much anything — the piano, a bit of drums. It was feel over technique in that department, whereas with stringed instruments like bass and guitar he was magnificent.
"When it came to the mix it was a case of Jimi and I doing it together and just making it sound as commercial as we possibly could. At least, that's what I was going for with the judicious use of compression and EQ and reverb. That's what we had at our disposal and I think it worked — that reverb on the offbeat is just one example."
He can say that again. It was Eddie Kramer who, with the few effects then at everyone's disposal, made highly innovative use of flanging, chorusing, looping and backwards tapes to realise the sonic vision inside Jimi Hendrix's head. As a result, the studio itself became yet another of the artist's instruments, plied like his guitars to mould sounds in his unique, groundbreaking style. Yet, while 16-track really opened up the doors in this regard, there is something to be said for limited resources inspiring creative thinking.
"When you recorded four-track you really had to have your act together," Kramer asserts, "and during the mix you knew you just couldn't screw it up, because this was the final one. In the transfer from the first four down to the two tracks of the next four-track machine, that first pass had to be absolutely spot-on. Of course, you could go back and remix it, but you wanted to avoid that if all possible. So, you just had to have it all there, and thank God we were taught correctly by great mentors: people like Bob Auger at Pye and Keith Grant at Olympic. They were really great teachers. You just rehearsed a song and got it right, got the EQ, got the compression, got all the bloody bits and pieces in there. And you knew in the final analysis that when you added the extra two tracks and bounced back to the first four tracks and then maybe went back one more time, all of those stages along the road had to be absolutely spot-on.
When Jimi Hendrix decided to build his own Electric Lady studio in New York, Eddie Kramer designed it and became the first head of engineering there.
"When I listen to those tapes now I'm still amazed that we actually got what we got. In the moment we didn't give a damn about convention or anything, we just did it, and tape was running most of the time. Occasionally we'd edit together takes, but not so much with Jimi. Mixes we would splice together, and there'd be lots of panning and loads of cups of tea, but his performances were pretty damned complete."
So, does Eddie Kramer consider Electric Ladyland to be an artistic high point for Jimi Hendrix? "His whole career was an artistic high point," comes the reply. "I think he really loved the record, although he was pissed at the fact that we were not allowed to go to the mastering. We gave it to the crew over at Columbia and they completely screwed it up, because they didn't know what to do with the phase content and all of that. It was subsequently remastered at Warners."
Eddie Kramer in 2002.
And once again in 1997, by Kramer himself, for the reissue on MCA. "I've completely screwed it up now," quips Kramer, who relocated to LA last year and recently worked on the restoration of the original Woodstock movie, to be released in 5.1. "No, seriously, I'm very proud of it. It sounds really good, the best it's ever sounded. When I listen to the original tapes I love hearing the conversations between myself and Jimi. They're always a lot of fun. He was a funny bloke in the studio, he was hilarious. He was always cracking jokes."
Following its release as a single in September 1968, 'All Along The Watchtower' climbed to number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, providing Jimi Hendrix with his only American Top 40 hit. The song went all the way to number five in the UK.
"Hendrix is the Robert Johnson of the '60s, and really the first cat to ever totally play electric guitar," wrote Tony Glover in his Rolling Stone review of Electric Ladyland. "Hendrix, psychedelic superspade??? Or just a damn good musician/producer? Depends on whether you want to believe the image or your ears. (And if you wanna flow, dig this on earphones, and watch the guitar swoop back and forth through your head.) Hendrix is amazing, and I hope he gets to the moon first. If he keeps up the way he's going here, he will."
CLASSIC TRACKS: Jimi Hendrix Experience All Along The Watchtower
Produced by Eddie Kramer
With his searing version of 'All Along The Watchtower', Jimi Hendrix set a standard for Dylan covers that has rarely been equalled. Eddie Kramer was behind the glass as the sessions moved from London to New York.
By Richard Buskin
By 1968, Eddie Kramer had already earned his stripes as an engineer. A native of South Africa who had studied classical piano, cello and violin before developing twin interests in jazz and engineering, he'd relocated to England at age 19 and worked at Pye, his own KPS Studios, Regent Sound and Olympic through the mid-'60s, where he'd accumulated recording credits that included the Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, Traffic and, most notably, Jimi Hendrix. Kramer was, after all, the main man behind the board for most of the guitar virtuoso's brief time in the spotlight.
It was at Olympic that Kramer had previously sat alongside producer Chas Chandler and engineered Jimi's stunning 1967 debut, Are You Experienced?, which spawned the British hit singles 'Hey Joe', 'Purple Haze' and 'The Wind Cries Mary', as well as its follow-up, Axis: Bold As Love. And it was also at Olympic that, in early 1968, sessions commenced for Hendrix's third and arguably best effort, Electric Ladyland. Although not as consistent as its predecessors in terms of material and musical arrangements, this hallucinogen-soaked double album nevertheless featured the 25-year-old guitarist/vocalist/composer at the top of his game, showing off his breathtaking skills on classic cuts such as 'Voodoo Chile', 'Crosstown Traffic' and '1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)', while Eddie Kramer helped realise Jimi's sonic vision by pushing the technological envelope to its absolute limits.
Photos: Kramer Archives
Jimi Hendrix at the Datamix console at the Record Plant, New York, during the recording of the Electric Ladyland album.
"The fact that Jimi really had a great idea of what he wanted to hear enabled us to create sounds for him and enhance what he was giving us," Kramer says. "That really helped make Electric Ladyland unique."
Along with the aforementioned 'Crosstown Traffic', the tracks recorded at Olympic included one with which Hendrix would forever be associated even though he didn't write it: an exceptional interpretation of Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower'. The song's poetic, allegorical lyrics about social change had intrigued Hendrix when he first listened to Dylan's John Wesley Harding album, and in his version they would be infused with four blistering and distinctive guitar solos, aligning the song far more with its dramatic context than Dylan's much sparer rendering had. Other artists would cover the song, including the Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, U2 and the Dave Matthews Band, but Hendrix's intensely evocative version remains the most famous, and his arrangement was the one that Dylan himself subsequently adhered to.
Ahead In England
At Olympic the setup comprised a Dick Swettenham-designed Helios desk and Ampex four-track tape machine housed within what Eddie Kramer describes as "a wonderful, spectacular-sounding room. The modular console, with its great EQ, great reverb and great compression, was absolutely marvellous — we were ahead in terms of console design in England. In fact, that desk was so advanced, the American engineers would come over and say 'Wow, what an incredible board,' to which we'd say 'Yeah, but you've got eight-track.' We were so jealous of what was going on in America when we were stuck with this bloody four-track format where we had to go four to four to four all the time, even though in essence this really trained us to make decisions then and there about the stereo bounce — we had to be very accurate with our mixes, and that was a different kind of training because it forced you to be creative as the sound was being printed. That held me in good stead later on."
Eddie Kramer in New York, 1968.
While Hendrix's amp was screened off in the studio and miked with Neumann U67s, Mitch Mitchell's kit was positioned on a riser within a roofed, open-sided booth to give it depth and miked with a combination of U67s and AKG C12s.
"Initially there was no bass," says Kramer. "Jimi just played a six-string acoustic guitar while Traffic's Dave Mason played 12-string and Mitch was on drums. That's how Jimi wanted to cut it, and as a result the track had a marvellous, light feel thanks to the acoustic guitars that were driving it. Jimi not only loved the lyrics but also the chord sequences of 'All Along The Watchtower', and he just gave them a terrific bed to do a nice solo. He also showed Mitch how to turn the beat around on the intro, but Dave Mason couldn't get it together and he was up to about take 20 when [Rolling Stone] Brian Jones walked in. Actually, let me correct that: he staggered in. He was completely out of his brain.
Poor Brian, he was a good mate of Jimi's and we all loved him. Jimi could never say no to his mates, and Brian was so sweet. He came in and said 'Oh, let me play,' and he got on the piano, it was take 21, and we could just hear 'clang, clang, clang, clang, clang...' It was all bloody horrible and out of time, and Jimi said 'Uh, I don't think so.' Brian was gone after two takes. He practically fell on the floor in the control room... Dear Brian.
"It actually took about 27 takes to get the track going because Dave Mason couldn't get it together, but eventually he did and that was all that mattered. Jimi was driving the train. He always drove the train, whatever he was doing, and he had a magical ability, bar none, to take other people's material and make it his own. In fact, he also played bass on this track. When he said that's what he wanted to do, Noel [Redding] pissed off to the pub. He didn't want to know.
"Recording was always a learning process for Jimi, so each take would be different, and for 'All Along The Watchtower' there was no real rehearsal. Jimi just wanted to record the song. He loved Bob Dylan and he always carried his songbook with him. In this case, he was fascinated by the colour of the lyrics and the tone of the lyrics, and of course the chord sequences were wonderful, too. It was a very special song."
When asked about the techniques used to record Hendrix's guitar, Eddie Kramer's response is concise and to the point. "I'd stick a bloody mic in front of it and hope for the best," he jokes. "Nah, generally speaking it was either a 67 or [a Beyer] M160 or a combination of both, which I still use today. It might be slightly different, of course, but the basic principle's the same — a ribbon and a condenser, along with compression and EQ and reverb. All that stuff was always added during recording."
Ready For A Change
After the acoustic guitars, drums, bass and lead guitar for 'All Along The Watchtower' had been tracked, the Electric Ladylandsessions switched location to the US. Hendrix wanted to move back there, and when Record Plant owner Gary Kellgren invited Eddie Kramer to come work at his newly opened studio in New York City, the engineer jumped at the opportunity. He was, after all, ready for a change.
Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell behind his kit at the Record Plant.
"In England, if you were successful, people would do their utmost to cut you down," he says. "Nobody appreciated you — 'Oh, you flash bastard. How dare you make £95 a week when I'm making £50.' I couldn't stand that attitude and to this day it makes me very angry. I didn't feel at all appreciated."
Consequently, April 17, 1968, was the date of Eddie Kramer's arrival on American soil, and amid all the upheaval the Electric Ladyland project provided him with a strong sense of continuity despite the sudden change of environment and transition from four-track to 12-track. What's more, it also included the Record Plant's very first sessions, interspersed with Hendrix's frequent assignments on the road.
"We would get a week in the studio and then he'd be off, and then we'd get another week or 10 days and again he'd be off," Kramer recalls. "There I was, an emigré, establishing myself, getting into sessions, figuring out what America was all about. It was quite a challenge, and in the beginning it wasn't easy, but once I got used to the vibe I was flying. I loved it. The culture was so completely different — 'If you do a good job, you're gonna get paid, brother,' — and so was the technology for me, going from four to 12-track and bypassing eight-track completely. Hello. What a wake-up call.
"Instead of the Helios I was now sitting down at a Datamix board that was completely foreign to me, in a room that didn't sound the way that I was used to hearing things, and using a 12-track, one-inch Scully machine that was a horrible piece of crap. Good God, it was so noisy, it was horrendous. We scrapped it after the first couple of months and went straight from 12 to 16-track. When the songs we'd recorded at Olympic had been transferred from four-track half-inch to 12-track one-inch, Jimi had said 'Wow, man, now I've got eight more tracks to fuck around with. Cool!' and of course they all got filled up. But then we scrapped the bloody machine after transferring all of the 12-track tapes to 16-track.
"So, for instance, 'All Along The Watchtower', which had started four-track in England, was transferred onto the Scully and then the first Ampex 16-track, which was actually not a bad machine. In fact, listen to any of the tracks on that album and the lack of hiss is so apparent. That's down to the way we hit the tape — we hit it very hard and got all the necessary compression that came with it. Also, what with all the intensity that was going on, there was a fair amount of signal on the tape, and that really helped. It was quite a journey.
"Eventually, I got used to the Record Plant room, which was just a fairly live rectangular box with a couple of panels on the wall, made of pegboard with a little bit of fibreglass behind them. The control-room window was so thin, and the wall itself was so thin — we had these four huge 15-inch Tannoys mounted above the window, and when Jimi would blast we could hear him through the wall. There was virtually no soundproofing. The room was constructed out of breeze block, there were two thin curtains, and that was it. Very primitive. This was the antithesis of what I'd been used to in England, but nevertheless what we got out of it was magic. The board was fairly flexible: not a great-sounding console, but we made it work."
You Keep Me Hanging On
Chas Chandler, the former Animals bass player who had discovered Jimi in 1966 and since guided his career, was initially at the helm in New York as manager and co-producer to continue the work that had commenced in London. However, as has been well documented, he grew quickly tired of all the hangers-on attending the sessions, and decided that he wanted to opt out.
"Once Jimi got to the States I think his whole attitude changed towards what he was looking for musically," Eddie Kramer remarks. "I don't know whether this was aimed at having Chas leave — one could never tell — but there was definitely tension between them. Chas liked to run his sessions in a very strict, formal manner, without wasting time. He'd say 'We're here to work. The hangers-on must leave,' and it was left to me or Chas to tell the hangers-on to take a hike. Well, I guess that caused some friction and eventually Chas couldn't really take it any more. He hated wasting time, and if Jimi wanted to do 30 takes it would drive him nuts.
"Chas was the boss. Not musically, per se, but the boss in terms of not allowing any wasted time, and I think the restrictions he placed on Jimi for the first two albums were really good. I don't necessarily agree with what happened on the Electric Ladylandsessions, but without Chas there would have been no huge superstar. To start with, Chas recognised Jimi's talent, and then he was able to corral that raw talent and develop it and encourage it. He would sit with Jimi every night, helping him to write lyrics and helping him with the song structures, encouraging him to write. However, during that third album the sessions took their own course, and Jimi, with his strong vision, just allowed things to happen in a very casual way.
"Now, having said that, I also feel very strongly that he had a master plan, and as chaotic as it may have seemed to an outside observer it was actually quite well thought out. The classic example of this was 'Voodoo Chile', which was really created as a jam but a very, very calculated jam. I mean, after Chas left [the project], Jimi had wonderful aid and assistance from a quite unlikely source: the Scene club which was, fortunately for him, around the corner from the Record Plant. Having booked the session for seven o'clock, we'd be sitting there, tapping our fingers on the desk and twiddling our thumbs, wondering when he was going to show up. After he'd done this a few times we all knew this was Jimi's way of working. He'd be over at the Scene at 10 and show up at the studio at 12 or one, dragging behind him an entourage that included musicians whom he had sussed out as being the key players to try out that evening.
"You see, he had a specific plan in mind. There was a certain sound he was looking for, and he'd eyeball the musicians very carefully to make sure that they were going to be compatible with what he wanted to do. Generally speaking, he got the cream of the crop, because at that time, 1968, there were some phenomenal musicians around, and 'Voodoo Chile' was a classic example of Jimi figuring 'OK, I'm gonna get these guys in to play this particular song'. He'd bring them in at midnight or whenever, and everything would be ready: the amps, the mics, the headphones — I'd tested everything. Then he'd show them the song, and there'd be one run-through and one take, maybe two. Bam! It was done. So, to the outside observer there were the hangers-on and the whole rigmarole with onlookers, and sometimes that made it a bit challenging to work, but it never detracted from Jimi's goal. Chas may have commented 'Oh, he's playing to the gallery,' but it didn't seem to bother Jimi. In fact, it probably encouraged him to play more to the gallery, because maybe that was the vibe he was looking for.
"Chas was absolutely essential to Jimi's development as a writer and as a performer, as well as in terms of putting the band together, producing the records and giving Jimi the necessary discipline to come up with the goods. But with the Electric Ladyland album his role diminished as soon as the sessions moved to the States. You could tell there was a sea change in Jimi's behaviour, in his attitude and so on. I think the album as a whole has a journeyish feeling to it — and I'm not referring to the band, for Chrissakes. It rambles a bit, but it rambles with a purpose. And I love how there are so many different moods. Of all of Jimi's albums, it's the one that has the most moodiness — to some people it represents the most fun that you could have on a record. I mean, it was very daring to make a double album with all that experimentation. That was making a statement in 1968. And although it was looser than his previous records, it had a purpose, it had a focus. The purpose was 'Let's be loose!'
"I think this was Jimi expressing himself for the first time, completely unfettered. He could basically do anything he wanted — it was his album, from soup to nuts, and while it bears the stamp of Chas on some of the songs it very much shows Jimi's freedom in the creative process; the freedom to do a 14-minute opus like '1983...' Taking a chance to do something like that was very '60s."
Shy Guy
Hendrix recorded all of his vocals for the album at the Record Plant, and as usual a Beyer M160 was the mic of choice while a three-sided screen provided him with the desired privacy. "He'd always face the other way," says Kramer. "He hated to be looked at. He was very shy about his vocals. The truth was, he had a great style and I loved his vocals, but he hated them. He was so embarrassed by them. 'Oh man, was that OK?' 'Yeah man, it's cool.' 'No, I've got to do another one.' 'OK.' Jimi was not a great vocalist in the classic sense, but his vocal style suited what he did to the nth degree. I mean, it was very emotional and very personal, and I can't think of anybody else doing what he did. He was eminently capable, and the singing was an integral part of what he was doing, because he would often take a guitar solo and sing the melody line in unison with that solo — which is an old jazz trick — and it was wonderful."
Noel Redding at the Record Plant during the Electric Ladyland sessions; the bass on 'All Along The Watchtower' was played by Hendrix himself.
So, for that matter, was the constantly evolving 'All Along The Watchtower', recorded in consecutive layers: acoustic guitars, drums, bass and electric lead taped at Olympic, before the vocal and percussion overdubs took place in New York. "What's amazing to me is how the original four-track punches through so much at the end," Kramer remarks. "Jimi's loping bass line doesn't have any top end to it at all — it's just round and lovely — and you can hear him moving around on the bass as if it were a guitar. You see, he could play pretty much anything — the piano, a bit of drums. It was feel over technique in that department, whereas with stringed instruments like bass and guitar he was magnificent.
"When it came to the mix it was a case of Jimi and I doing it together and just making it sound as commercial as we possibly could. At least, that's what I was going for with the judicious use of compression and EQ and reverb. That's what we had at our disposal and I think it worked — that reverb on the offbeat is just one example."
He can say that again. It was Eddie Kramer who, with the few effects then at everyone's disposal, made highly innovative use of flanging, chorusing, looping and backwards tapes to realise the sonic vision inside Jimi Hendrix's head. As a result, the studio itself became yet another of the artist's instruments, plied like his guitars to mould sounds in his unique, groundbreaking style. Yet, while 16-track really opened up the doors in this regard, there is something to be said for limited resources inspiring creative thinking.
"When you recorded four-track you really had to have your act together," Kramer asserts, "and during the mix you knew you just couldn't screw it up, because this was the final one. In the transfer from the first four down to the two tracks of the next four-track machine, that first pass had to be absolutely spot-on. Of course, you could go back and remix it, but you wanted to avoid that if all possible. So, you just had to have it all there, and thank God we were taught correctly by great mentors: people like Bob Auger at Pye and Keith Grant at Olympic. They were really great teachers. You just rehearsed a song and got it right, got the EQ, got the compression, got all the bloody bits and pieces in there. And you knew in the final analysis that when you added the extra two tracks and bounced back to the first four tracks and then maybe went back one more time, all of those stages along the road had to be absolutely spot-on.
When Jimi Hendrix decided to build his own Electric Lady studio in New York, Eddie Kramer designed it and became the first head of engineering there.
"When I listen to those tapes now I'm still amazed that we actually got what we got. In the moment we didn't give a damn about convention or anything, we just did it, and tape was running most of the time. Occasionally we'd edit together takes, but not so much with Jimi. Mixes we would splice together, and there'd be lots of panning and loads of cups of tea, but his performances were pretty damned complete."
So, does Eddie Kramer consider Electric Ladyland to be an artistic high point for Jimi Hendrix? "His whole career was an artistic high point," comes the reply. "I think he really loved the record, although he was pissed at the fact that we were not allowed to go to the mastering. We gave it to the crew over at Columbia and they completely screwed it up, because they didn't know what to do with the phase content and all of that. It was subsequently remastered at Warners."
Eddie Kramer in 2002.
And once again in 1997, by Kramer himself, for the reissue on MCA. "I've completely screwed it up now," quips Kramer, who relocated to LA last year and recently worked on the restoration of the original Woodstock movie, to be released in 5.1. "No, seriously, I'm very proud of it. It sounds really good, the best it's ever sounded. When I listen to the original tapes I love hearing the conversations between myself and Jimi. They're always a lot of fun. He was a funny bloke in the studio, he was hilarious. He was always cracking jokes."
Following its release as a single in September 1968, 'All Along The Watchtower' climbed to number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, providing Jimi Hendrix with his only American Top 40 hit. The song went all the way to number five in the UK.
"Hendrix is the Robert Johnson of the '60s, and really the first cat to ever totally play electric guitar," wrote Tony Glover in his Rolling Stone review of Electric Ladyland. "Hendrix, psychedelic superspade??? Or just a damn good musician/producer? Depends on whether you want to believe the image or your ears. (And if you wanna flow, dig this on earphones, and watch the guitar swoop back and forth through your head.) Hendrix is amazing, and I hope he gets to the moon first. If he keeps up the way he's going here, he will."
I forgot about that song by the animals. It was a great one!
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The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
CLASSIC TRACKS: The Band 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'
Producers: The Band, John Simon • Engineers: John Simon, Robbie Robertson, Tony May
The origins of The Band as Bob Dylan's backing group are well known, but with songs like 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' they forged their own unique American sound.
By Richard Buskin
In the post-Civil War South, Virgil Cane recalls Union soldiers destroying the railroad on which he served, the April 1865 fall of the Confederacy capital of Richmond, Virginia, and the fate of his 18-year-old brother — 'proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave'. Not only had the war brought about more than 620,000 deaths, but, as Cane observes, it destroyed an entire way of life — 'You take what you need and you leave the rest,' he reasons, 'but they should never have taken the very best'.
A straightforward yet touching reflection on the sometimes devastating effects of fighting for what one believes in, 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' is an evocative slice of Americana, focussing on one of the most divisive and tragic periods in the nation's brief history. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the original version of this classic folk ballad, although sung by a native of Arkansas, was otherwise performed by a bunch of Canadians, including its composer who happened to be half-Mohawk Indian, half-Jew. They were, in short, the members of The Band.
Said songwriter, Robbie Robertson, had tapped into Southern pride and pain when visiting that region. "I liked the way people talked, I liked the way they moved," he recalled in a 1988 radio interview. "I liked being in a place that had rhythm in the air. I thought, 'No wonder they invented rock & roll here. Everything sounds like music...' I got to come into this world a cold outsider — cold literally from Canada — and because I didn't take it for granted, it made me write something like 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. These old men would say, 'Yeah, but never mind, Robbie. One of these days the South is going to rise again.' I didn't take it as a joke. I thought it was really touching that these people lived this world from the standpoint of a rocking chair."
Indeed, the aforementioned singer, Levon Helm, advised Robertson to excise a verse about Abraham Lincoln that might antagonize those who still raised the Confederate flag, and the result was a classic composition that, amid the late-'60s Civil Rights backlash against the traditional South, sensitively presented a Southern point of view.
"It took me about eight months in all to write that song," Robbie Robertson was later quoted as saying in Barney Hoskyns' book Across The Great Divide. "I only had the music for it, and I didn't know what it was about at all. I'd sit down at the piano and play these chords over and over again. And then one day the rest of it came to me. Sometimes you have to wait a song out, and I'm glad I waited for that one."
Introducing The Band
So were drummer/vocalist Levon Helm and guitarist Robertson's other colleagues in The Band; bass player/singer Rick Danko, pianist/singer Richard Manuel and organist Garth Hudson. This outfit, evolved from rocker Ronnie Hawkins' sidemen, the Hawks, had gained fame by association with Bob Dylan before stepping out on its own in 1968 and recording the widely acclaimed Music From Big Pink album that featured Robertson's minor chart hit 'The Weight' and a cover of Dylan's 'I Shall Be Released' among its 11 influentially roots-rock numbers about family traditions and rural life.
Flying in the face of the era's counter-culture psychedelia, this debut was surpassed both musically and compositionally by The Band's self-titled follow-up, released in September 1969, which spawned the singles 'Rag Mama Rag' and 'Up On Cripple Creek' in addition to 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. In the studio to produce both albums was John Simon, who has also been credited as one of the engineers on the second record, even though he insists that none existed for those sessions.
Born August 11th, 1941, in Norwalk, Connecticut, John Simon was taught to play both the fiddle and the piano from age four by his father, a country doctor and violinist. Before he was ten, JS was writing his own songs; in his teens he led and composed for several bands in addition to writing a couple of musicals; and at Princeton University he wrote three more shows and performed in several bands for which he composed original material, including one that he led to the finals of the first Georgetown Jazz Festival.
Thereafter, Simon joined Columbia Records in New York as a trainee producer and, after assisting on various cast recordings, novelty records and documentary albums, enjoyed his first pop success with the Cyrkle's 'Red Rubber Ball', which reached number two on the US charts in 1966. A couple of years later he co-produced the counter-culture music documentary You Are What You Eat, with Peter Yarrow and Barry Feinstein, and it was during the course of this project that he was introduced to The Band, for whom he subsequently assembled a demo tape that helped secure a contract with Capitol Records.
1968 was quite a year for John Simon. He produced Cheap Thrills by Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company, Child is Father to the Man by Blood, Sweat & Tears, the Songs of Leonard Cohen album and The Band's Music from Big Pink, while also working on Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends LP and tracks by 'Mama' Cass Elliot and Gordon Lightfoot. Quite a haul, and aside from the Leonard Cohen and Bookends projects, all done freelance before Simon then produced The Band — an ensemble that he describes as "incredibly selfless and pragmatic.
"They had very few ego problems," continues Simon. "None of The Band's members cared who played what instrument. Whatever worked for the song was good. They'd been playing together for years and were consummate musicians."
There's A Studio In My Pool House!
The initial sessions for Big Pink had taken place during the winter of 1967/68 at the studio that John Simon knew best — the former Columbia facility where he had first worked, subsequently owned by A&R Recording, located at 799 Seventh Avenue — before the album was completed at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. By the time work commenced on the second album in the winter of 1968/69, Capitol had been persuaded to supply a console, an eight-track 3M tape machine, Altec 604 monitors and an EMT echo chamber for The Band's own studio, set up in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills that had once belonged to Sammy Davis Jr and actor Wally Cox.
"Capitol took a long time delivering the stuff and installing the equipment," Simon recalls. "Meanwhile, Robbie was writing and we were rehearsing some of the songs, but the group had a deadline because they were playing a gig that [promoter] Bill Graham had put together in San Francisco. That meant we had to finish things up, and since we didn't quite finish them up we did 'Whispering Pines', 'Get Up Jake' and 'Jemima Surrender' at the old Hit Factory in New York, when Jerry Ragavoy owned it."
Photo: Elliott Landy/Redferns
The Band in the pool house studio, 1969.
Since there were purportedly no engineers on the sessions, Simon doesn't have specific recall of much of the equipment used.
"I remember we needed a piano," he says, "and instead of getting a grand piano we got an old upright that we picked up some place in town. Meanwhile, Levon got his drums from a pawn shop, a set with wood rims... We miked the piano and general utility stuff with some old Sennheisers — we must have had a lot of those — and we had a couple of Neumann U87s for vocals, as well as Electro-Voice RE15s for brightness. I always used a pretty awful mic on the snare drum — an Altec 'saltshaker' — which was a suggestion of [producer/engineer] Roy Halee, whom I knew at Columbia Records. Aside from that, we used some old Pultec outrigger equalisers, the EMT plate and we also had a shower stall that we used for echo — we put a speaker and a mic in there.
"Sammy Davis had this pool house; a big, cavernous, barn-like room — and we had the mixing console in there along with the instruments. And what we would do to get our sound was do rough takes during our rehearsals, listen back to those rough takes, fix them up again, and then by the time we were ready to do it we didn't have to do any monitoring of the sound. The bass was recorded direct, the guitars were recorded with amps, and I know the drums were sitting behind some baffles in the room... The photo of that set-up on the album cover [and above] is pretty accurate, although we removed the baffles and a lot of the mics — aside from one RE15 — so that you could see the drums.
"If you were sitting at the board and looked around in a clockwise fashion, Garth was up against the wall at nine o'clock, Levon was up against another wall at one o'clock, the piano was up against a wall at around three o'clock, and the guitar and the bass were in the middle, or the mandolin or whatever they were playing. In fact, there's also a photo of me sort of playing — I don't play — the guitar, with Robbie trying different EQs with headphones at the board. That was for 'Rag Mama Rag', because Rick has the fiddle and Levon the mandolin."
Preparations...
Robbie Robertson wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on the second album, yet he hadn't done so when the sessions commenced.
"Robbie and his wife Dominique had just had their first child," Simon explains, "and the three of them, along with me and my wife, went to Hawaii the week before we were scheduled to start work. Well, he worked up some things there and I was just a pair of ears, and we also worked on some things for my own album. I actually began writing a song while we were there called 'Davy's On The Road Again' that Manfred Mann later had a hit with, and I asked for Robbie's advice on that and he gave me the chorus. So, we were bouncing things back and forth."
Next stop, Sammy Davis Jr's pool house, by which time 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' had been written. However, this was not the case regarding numerous other tracks, including 'Look Out Cleveland', 'Get Up Jake' and 'King Harvest'.
"When we finally got all the equipment from Capitol together, we decided to hear what it sounded like," Simon recalls. "This was in the middle of the night, so we put on the most recent record that we liked, which was a Dr. John album [Babylon] that had a song ['The Patriotic Flag-Waiver'] with snatches of 'My Country Tis Of Thee' and 'America The Beautiful' in the chorus. Our wives were with us, and suddenly one of them ran in, saying, 'The cops are here! The cops are here!' We immediately went outside to see what was going on and it turned out that we'd also hooked the sound up to the outdoor pool speakers, so this patriotic song was just blasting through the Hollywood canyons."
Two Days Per Song? Luxury!
Once recording commenced, each song was worked on separately; great care being taken to capture the sound of every instrument courtesy of proper mic placement (so much for no engineering). At the same time, the musicians had to learn their parts, entailing a work schedule of about two days per song — the first day routining it, the next day recording.
Photo: Elliott Landy/Redferns
Photographer Elliott Landy is pictured (right) in this rarely published photo. It was taken with a Widelux camera, a rare mechanical Panoramic 35mm film camera. It was not "stitched" together electronically as it might be today.
"For us, that was quite luxurious," Simon asserts. "Sure, some people were taking a lot longer by then, but that was often necessitated by the fact that a lot of the bands had no talent and they therefore had to do things over and over and over again. In fact, my contention for how multitrack developed is that it was an answer to these artists' inability to record things live and need to overdub instead. However, once eight-track was established, it became a new art form."
When Simon first heard 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down', Robbie Robertson was writing it at the piano — contrary to his usual method of writing with the guitar — and the chord progression had already been figured out. Then, when it came time to record, Robertson played acoustic guitar, Hudson played the organ, Manuel played piano and sang the high harmony, Danko played bass and sang the middle harmony, and Helm was on drums and lead vocal.
"Garth may have used a Lowry organ," Simon comments. "He definitely had some instrument that bent, producing that kind of slide-whistle sound you can hear from the second verse onwards. I'm not sure how he got that — he may have got it with the left hand, using a dial on some electronic instrument, or he may have done it with a Lowry organ which had a pitch bender that you could operate with the side of your foot... Garth also played a little bit of trumpet on that song that you can barely hear until the end.
"The only thing that was a little bit tricky rhythmically on that song was the fact that at the end of each verse there was a drum roll for the tempo to stop, and so it was important for everyone to be together at the downbeat of the chorus. That's something which most bands wouldn't attempt to do, because they don't have the ability."
You Don't Need An Engineer To Engineer
"Robbie's stated goal to me at the start of the second album, was that he wanted me to teach him everything I knew so that he could take over and I wouldn't be around for the next album," Simon recalls. Not that he was phased by this.
"I thought, 'That's fine'. I had other things I was going to do, and I loved working with those guys. It was one of the joys of my life. In fact, I wanted to join The Band at one point but Robbie said, 'Look, we've already got two piano players.'
"As much of a guitar player and a songwriter as he was, Robbie didn't know anything about recording at this point. He didn't know what a track sheet was, didn't know what it meant for a VU meter to go into the red. However, there also wasn't much that I taught him, and I think he realised that pretty quickly."
Okay, but who pushed the faders?
"Mostly me," comes the reply, "with Robbie taking over when I was playing." Indeed, Simon contributed tuba, horn and keyboards to the Band sessions. "Still, we didn't really need to push the faders," he continues. "We'd get everything set-up and then leave the faders and everyone would play. That was about it until it came to mixing time, and none of us had engineering degrees — we just did it.
"I myself don't think engineers are that important when it comes to making music. I honestly don't. I'm happy listening to a very scratchy old recording of Robert Johnson or Bessie Smith or Bix Biederbecke — I'm much more interested in the music. And of course it's lovely if you can get a sound that's just gorgeous and feels like you're in a concert hall when you hear a full symphonic orchestra — that requires an engineer, because I think the real challenge for engineers is recording large ensembles. I don't think there's much to recording a small group, especially one instrument at a time — there's hardly anything to it!
"I've spent so much time in studios wasting time, waiting for an engineer to fiddle with this and fiddle with that, whereas all I care about is that there's no break-up, no feedback, no distortion. That's all the engineer's supposed to do. And that's all they ever had to do when I broke into the business. The engineer was just responsible for a clean sound, nothing special. I mean, some of the great, classic blues tracks that came out of Chess in Chicago were down to just two microphones in a room!"
Mixing 'Dixie'
Of the eight tracks on tape, a couple each were initially assigned to stereo drums and stereo piano — one of the latter shared with guitar — while single tracks were used for the bass, organ and lead. These were then bounced down and three tracks made available for all the vocals, with another for the aforementioned trumpet part.
"When we were ready for mixing, there would always be two tracks of drums, one track of bass, independent vocals where possible, and that would mean the guitar and piano would be combined," Simon explains, "with the guitar up the middle and the piano on two tracks. Then again, while the lead vocal was often overdubbed, in this case Levon sang and played drums at the same time because of that tempo thing that had to be right for the transition into the chorus. That wasn't easy, but Levon had been doing it live, so he'd sort of make way for his vocal and support it as opposed to being a bashy drummer who'd cause drum leakage getting into the vocal microphone. What's more, we'd have the opportunity to try those things the day before and get them right; get the mic positioning right and use a mic that had a good rejection factor for the back end of it. I can't be sure what mic we used in this case, but it may well have been a U87.
"I know we tried a lot of live track-combining, maybe putting three vocals on two tracks; splitting one vocal between two, so those vocal levels would be locked at the moment of being recorded."
The mix itself was done at A&R Recording in New York by John Simon and Tony May, who Simon describes as "an excellent engineer who taught me a lot. One of the things that he taught me when getting a mix going was to start with the bass and get it so it hung around minus seven on the VU meter, then bring the bass drum up to match that, then take the bass down and make the snare drum match the bass drum, and then leave the whole kit up, bring the bass back in and have a good foundation to work with.
"Tony and I did a lot of hands-on stuff for that second album. This was pre-automation and everything had to be mixed by hand, so there was a lot of fader-moving up and down and sometimes you had to have four hands on the faders instead of two in order to get things right".
Looking Back
When listening to the eight-tracks more than three decades later, Simon admits that in his opinion the sound is "fabulous. Not hyped up, no embellishments. We didn't limit the crap out of everything. Instead of digital echoes or digital reverbs we used real echo. The effects we did use back then came out of the guitar amp, and Allison in Nashville had just come out with a noise gate that we sometimes used. Basically, we'd try anything that came our way. Sometimes the companies would give us stuff and we'd just hook it in and see what we could do with it.
"When I hear The Band now, I remember what a great time it was. It was fabulous, a very free time, flower-power and 'make love, not war', and while fighting in Vietnam was not our decision, we could have music, thank you very much. So, musically it was an incredible period, with everyone using it to express themselves, and the guys we're talking about here were so very talented."
Though not a chart hit for The Band, 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' did become a popular radio track, before the song's first cover, by Joan Baez, went Top Five in 1971. Still, this version was replete with lyrical errors, the most notorious of which — by inserting 'the' before 'Robert E. Lee' — transformed an esteemed General into a steamboat.
As John Simon says, "that's just sloppy...
CLASSIC TRACKS: The Band 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'
Producers: The Band, John Simon • Engineers: John Simon, Robbie Robertson, Tony May
The origins of The Band as Bob Dylan's backing group are well known, but with songs like 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' they forged their own unique American sound.
By Richard Buskin
In the post-Civil War South, Virgil Cane recalls Union soldiers destroying the railroad on which he served, the April 1865 fall of the Confederacy capital of Richmond, Virginia, and the fate of his 18-year-old brother — 'proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave'. Not only had the war brought about more than 620,000 deaths, but, as Cane observes, it destroyed an entire way of life — 'You take what you need and you leave the rest,' he reasons, 'but they should never have taken the very best'.
A straightforward yet touching reflection on the sometimes devastating effects of fighting for what one believes in, 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' is an evocative slice of Americana, focussing on one of the most divisive and tragic periods in the nation's brief history. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the original version of this classic folk ballad, although sung by a native of Arkansas, was otherwise performed by a bunch of Canadians, including its composer who happened to be half-Mohawk Indian, half-Jew. They were, in short, the members of The Band.
Said songwriter, Robbie Robertson, had tapped into Southern pride and pain when visiting that region. "I liked the way people talked, I liked the way they moved," he recalled in a 1988 radio interview. "I liked being in a place that had rhythm in the air. I thought, 'No wonder they invented rock & roll here. Everything sounds like music...' I got to come into this world a cold outsider — cold literally from Canada — and because I didn't take it for granted, it made me write something like 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. These old men would say, 'Yeah, but never mind, Robbie. One of these days the South is going to rise again.' I didn't take it as a joke. I thought it was really touching that these people lived this world from the standpoint of a rocking chair."
Indeed, the aforementioned singer, Levon Helm, advised Robertson to excise a verse about Abraham Lincoln that might antagonize those who still raised the Confederate flag, and the result was a classic composition that, amid the late-'60s Civil Rights backlash against the traditional South, sensitively presented a Southern point of view.
"It took me about eight months in all to write that song," Robbie Robertson was later quoted as saying in Barney Hoskyns' book Across The Great Divide. "I only had the music for it, and I didn't know what it was about at all. I'd sit down at the piano and play these chords over and over again. And then one day the rest of it came to me. Sometimes you have to wait a song out, and I'm glad I waited for that one."
Introducing The Band
So were drummer/vocalist Levon Helm and guitarist Robertson's other colleagues in The Band; bass player/singer Rick Danko, pianist/singer Richard Manuel and organist Garth Hudson. This outfit, evolved from rocker Ronnie Hawkins' sidemen, the Hawks, had gained fame by association with Bob Dylan before stepping out on its own in 1968 and recording the widely acclaimed Music From Big Pink album that featured Robertson's minor chart hit 'The Weight' and a cover of Dylan's 'I Shall Be Released' among its 11 influentially roots-rock numbers about family traditions and rural life.
Flying in the face of the era's counter-culture psychedelia, this debut was surpassed both musically and compositionally by The Band's self-titled follow-up, released in September 1969, which spawned the singles 'Rag Mama Rag' and 'Up On Cripple Creek' in addition to 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. In the studio to produce both albums was John Simon, who has also been credited as one of the engineers on the second record, even though he insists that none existed for those sessions.
Born August 11th, 1941, in Norwalk, Connecticut, John Simon was taught to play both the fiddle and the piano from age four by his father, a country doctor and violinist. Before he was ten, JS was writing his own songs; in his teens he led and composed for several bands in addition to writing a couple of musicals; and at Princeton University he wrote three more shows and performed in several bands for which he composed original material, including one that he led to the finals of the first Georgetown Jazz Festival.
Thereafter, Simon joined Columbia Records in New York as a trainee producer and, after assisting on various cast recordings, novelty records and documentary albums, enjoyed his first pop success with the Cyrkle's 'Red Rubber Ball', which reached number two on the US charts in 1966. A couple of years later he co-produced the counter-culture music documentary You Are What You Eat, with Peter Yarrow and Barry Feinstein, and it was during the course of this project that he was introduced to The Band, for whom he subsequently assembled a demo tape that helped secure a contract with Capitol Records.
1968 was quite a year for John Simon. He produced Cheap Thrills by Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company, Child is Father to the Man by Blood, Sweat & Tears, the Songs of Leonard Cohen album and The Band's Music from Big Pink, while also working on Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends LP and tracks by 'Mama' Cass Elliot and Gordon Lightfoot. Quite a haul, and aside from the Leonard Cohen and Bookends projects, all done freelance before Simon then produced The Band — an ensemble that he describes as "incredibly selfless and pragmatic.
"They had very few ego problems," continues Simon. "None of The Band's members cared who played what instrument. Whatever worked for the song was good. They'd been playing together for years and were consummate musicians."
There's A Studio In My Pool House!
The initial sessions for Big Pink had taken place during the winter of 1967/68 at the studio that John Simon knew best — the former Columbia facility where he had first worked, subsequently owned by A&R Recording, located at 799 Seventh Avenue — before the album was completed at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. By the time work commenced on the second album in the winter of 1968/69, Capitol had been persuaded to supply a console, an eight-track 3M tape machine, Altec 604 monitors and an EMT echo chamber for The Band's own studio, set up in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills that had once belonged to Sammy Davis Jr and actor Wally Cox.
"Capitol took a long time delivering the stuff and installing the equipment," Simon recalls. "Meanwhile, Robbie was writing and we were rehearsing some of the songs, but the group had a deadline because they were playing a gig that [promoter] Bill Graham had put together in San Francisco. That meant we had to finish things up, and since we didn't quite finish them up we did 'Whispering Pines', 'Get Up Jake' and 'Jemima Surrender' at the old Hit Factory in New York, when Jerry Ragavoy owned it."
Photo: Elliott Landy/Redferns
The Band in the pool house studio, 1969.
Since there were purportedly no engineers on the sessions, Simon doesn't have specific recall of much of the equipment used.
"I remember we needed a piano," he says, "and instead of getting a grand piano we got an old upright that we picked up some place in town. Meanwhile, Levon got his drums from a pawn shop, a set with wood rims... We miked the piano and general utility stuff with some old Sennheisers — we must have had a lot of those — and we had a couple of Neumann U87s for vocals, as well as Electro-Voice RE15s for brightness. I always used a pretty awful mic on the snare drum — an Altec 'saltshaker' — which was a suggestion of [producer/engineer] Roy Halee, whom I knew at Columbia Records. Aside from that, we used some old Pultec outrigger equalisers, the EMT plate and we also had a shower stall that we used for echo — we put a speaker and a mic in there.
"Sammy Davis had this pool house; a big, cavernous, barn-like room — and we had the mixing console in there along with the instruments. And what we would do to get our sound was do rough takes during our rehearsals, listen back to those rough takes, fix them up again, and then by the time we were ready to do it we didn't have to do any monitoring of the sound. The bass was recorded direct, the guitars were recorded with amps, and I know the drums were sitting behind some baffles in the room... The photo of that set-up on the album cover [and above] is pretty accurate, although we removed the baffles and a lot of the mics — aside from one RE15 — so that you could see the drums.
"If you were sitting at the board and looked around in a clockwise fashion, Garth was up against the wall at nine o'clock, Levon was up against another wall at one o'clock, the piano was up against a wall at around three o'clock, and the guitar and the bass were in the middle, or the mandolin or whatever they were playing. In fact, there's also a photo of me sort of playing — I don't play — the guitar, with Robbie trying different EQs with headphones at the board. That was for 'Rag Mama Rag', because Rick has the fiddle and Levon the mandolin."
Preparations...
Robbie Robertson wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on the second album, yet he hadn't done so when the sessions commenced.
"Robbie and his wife Dominique had just had their first child," Simon explains, "and the three of them, along with me and my wife, went to Hawaii the week before we were scheduled to start work. Well, he worked up some things there and I was just a pair of ears, and we also worked on some things for my own album. I actually began writing a song while we were there called 'Davy's On The Road Again' that Manfred Mann later had a hit with, and I asked for Robbie's advice on that and he gave me the chorus. So, we were bouncing things back and forth."
Next stop, Sammy Davis Jr's pool house, by which time 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' had been written. However, this was not the case regarding numerous other tracks, including 'Look Out Cleveland', 'Get Up Jake' and 'King Harvest'.
"When we finally got all the equipment from Capitol together, we decided to hear what it sounded like," Simon recalls. "This was in the middle of the night, so we put on the most recent record that we liked, which was a Dr. John album [Babylon] that had a song ['The Patriotic Flag-Waiver'] with snatches of 'My Country Tis Of Thee' and 'America The Beautiful' in the chorus. Our wives were with us, and suddenly one of them ran in, saying, 'The cops are here! The cops are here!' We immediately went outside to see what was going on and it turned out that we'd also hooked the sound up to the outdoor pool speakers, so this patriotic song was just blasting through the Hollywood canyons."
Two Days Per Song? Luxury!
Once recording commenced, each song was worked on separately; great care being taken to capture the sound of every instrument courtesy of proper mic placement (so much for no engineering). At the same time, the musicians had to learn their parts, entailing a work schedule of about two days per song — the first day routining it, the next day recording.
Photo: Elliott Landy/Redferns
Photographer Elliott Landy is pictured (right) in this rarely published photo. It was taken with a Widelux camera, a rare mechanical Panoramic 35mm film camera. It was not "stitched" together electronically as it might be today.
"For us, that was quite luxurious," Simon asserts. "Sure, some people were taking a lot longer by then, but that was often necessitated by the fact that a lot of the bands had no talent and they therefore had to do things over and over and over again. In fact, my contention for how multitrack developed is that it was an answer to these artists' inability to record things live and need to overdub instead. However, once eight-track was established, it became a new art form."
When Simon first heard 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down', Robbie Robertson was writing it at the piano — contrary to his usual method of writing with the guitar — and the chord progression had already been figured out. Then, when it came time to record, Robertson played acoustic guitar, Hudson played the organ, Manuel played piano and sang the high harmony, Danko played bass and sang the middle harmony, and Helm was on drums and lead vocal.
"Garth may have used a Lowry organ," Simon comments. "He definitely had some instrument that bent, producing that kind of slide-whistle sound you can hear from the second verse onwards. I'm not sure how he got that — he may have got it with the left hand, using a dial on some electronic instrument, or he may have done it with a Lowry organ which had a pitch bender that you could operate with the side of your foot... Garth also played a little bit of trumpet on that song that you can barely hear until the end.
"The only thing that was a little bit tricky rhythmically on that song was the fact that at the end of each verse there was a drum roll for the tempo to stop, and so it was important for everyone to be together at the downbeat of the chorus. That's something which most bands wouldn't attempt to do, because they don't have the ability."
You Don't Need An Engineer To Engineer
"Robbie's stated goal to me at the start of the second album, was that he wanted me to teach him everything I knew so that he could take over and I wouldn't be around for the next album," Simon recalls. Not that he was phased by this.
"I thought, 'That's fine'. I had other things I was going to do, and I loved working with those guys. It was one of the joys of my life. In fact, I wanted to join The Band at one point but Robbie said, 'Look, we've already got two piano players.'
"As much of a guitar player and a songwriter as he was, Robbie didn't know anything about recording at this point. He didn't know what a track sheet was, didn't know what it meant for a VU meter to go into the red. However, there also wasn't much that I taught him, and I think he realised that pretty quickly."
Okay, but who pushed the faders?
"Mostly me," comes the reply, "with Robbie taking over when I was playing." Indeed, Simon contributed tuba, horn and keyboards to the Band sessions. "Still, we didn't really need to push the faders," he continues. "We'd get everything set-up and then leave the faders and everyone would play. That was about it until it came to mixing time, and none of us had engineering degrees — we just did it.
"I myself don't think engineers are that important when it comes to making music. I honestly don't. I'm happy listening to a very scratchy old recording of Robert Johnson or Bessie Smith or Bix Biederbecke — I'm much more interested in the music. And of course it's lovely if you can get a sound that's just gorgeous and feels like you're in a concert hall when you hear a full symphonic orchestra — that requires an engineer, because I think the real challenge for engineers is recording large ensembles. I don't think there's much to recording a small group, especially one instrument at a time — there's hardly anything to it!
"I've spent so much time in studios wasting time, waiting for an engineer to fiddle with this and fiddle with that, whereas all I care about is that there's no break-up, no feedback, no distortion. That's all the engineer's supposed to do. And that's all they ever had to do when I broke into the business. The engineer was just responsible for a clean sound, nothing special. I mean, some of the great, classic blues tracks that came out of Chess in Chicago were down to just two microphones in a room!"
Mixing 'Dixie'
Of the eight tracks on tape, a couple each were initially assigned to stereo drums and stereo piano — one of the latter shared with guitar — while single tracks were used for the bass, organ and lead. These were then bounced down and three tracks made available for all the vocals, with another for the aforementioned trumpet part.
"When we were ready for mixing, there would always be two tracks of drums, one track of bass, independent vocals where possible, and that would mean the guitar and piano would be combined," Simon explains, "with the guitar up the middle and the piano on two tracks. Then again, while the lead vocal was often overdubbed, in this case Levon sang and played drums at the same time because of that tempo thing that had to be right for the transition into the chorus. That wasn't easy, but Levon had been doing it live, so he'd sort of make way for his vocal and support it as opposed to being a bashy drummer who'd cause drum leakage getting into the vocal microphone. What's more, we'd have the opportunity to try those things the day before and get them right; get the mic positioning right and use a mic that had a good rejection factor for the back end of it. I can't be sure what mic we used in this case, but it may well have been a U87.
"I know we tried a lot of live track-combining, maybe putting three vocals on two tracks; splitting one vocal between two, so those vocal levels would be locked at the moment of being recorded."
The mix itself was done at A&R Recording in New York by John Simon and Tony May, who Simon describes as "an excellent engineer who taught me a lot. One of the things that he taught me when getting a mix going was to start with the bass and get it so it hung around minus seven on the VU meter, then bring the bass drum up to match that, then take the bass down and make the snare drum match the bass drum, and then leave the whole kit up, bring the bass back in and have a good foundation to work with.
"Tony and I did a lot of hands-on stuff for that second album. This was pre-automation and everything had to be mixed by hand, so there was a lot of fader-moving up and down and sometimes you had to have four hands on the faders instead of two in order to get things right".
Looking Back
When listening to the eight-tracks more than three decades later, Simon admits that in his opinion the sound is "fabulous. Not hyped up, no embellishments. We didn't limit the crap out of everything. Instead of digital echoes or digital reverbs we used real echo. The effects we did use back then came out of the guitar amp, and Allison in Nashville had just come out with a noise gate that we sometimes used. Basically, we'd try anything that came our way. Sometimes the companies would give us stuff and we'd just hook it in and see what we could do with it.
"When I hear The Band now, I remember what a great time it was. It was fabulous, a very free time, flower-power and 'make love, not war', and while fighting in Vietnam was not our decision, we could have music, thank you very much. So, musically it was an incredible period, with everyone using it to express themselves, and the guys we're talking about here were so very talented."
Though not a chart hit for The Band, 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' did become a popular radio track, before the song's first cover, by Joan Baez, went Top Five in 1971. Still, this version was replete with lyrical errors, the most notorious of which — by inserting 'the' before 'Robert E. Lee' — transformed an esteemed General into a steamboat.
As John Simon says, "that's just sloppy...
Ramsey
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Yeah, and I've been checking the recordings out on Amazon. Which Bob Marley album is your favorite? I want to make sure and get that one from the get go! I have a greatest hits of Bob Marley, a CD I purchased 20 years ago. Yet, I love the album tracks that don't get radio play.
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Natty Dread (Expanded) 1974 would be my fav. Love all the songs, but especially songs # 4, 5, and 6... you may not have ever heard those.
Ramsey
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Ramsey
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- Ramsey
Oh, What the Hell. I want to share one of my favorite albums of all time. Neutral Milk Hotel's Airplane over the Sea. Jeff Magnum is NMH. He wrote this album in a closet in Colorado. He was poor and staying with a friend. This album sounds like a man singing a dirge at his best friend's funeral in New Orleans circa 1889. Jeff's flawless lyrics immersed in a raw emotion avalanche, echoing thru eternity, going on a hundred years now!
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This is probably the best written song of all time. Although American Pie was his big hit, this is my favorite song from his hits. Just soothing while telling a very sad story.
