LEGEND Your Song of the Day
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Petula Clark - 'Downtown'
And just for a giggle...
Petula Clark 'Downtown'
Classic Tracks
The single 'Downtown' gave Petula Clark a worldwide hit and rejuvenated her career. Presiding over the session was engineer Ray Prickett, who tells us how it happened...
By Richard Buskin
Nowadays, orchestral pop hits are largely a thing of the past. It is no longer a common occurrence for contemporary singers to be tracked live in the studio alongside string, horn, and woodwind sections, as well as electric guitars, keyboards and drums. But it was the standard way of working back in October 1964, when Petula Clark recorded 'Downtown' at the Pye Studios on London's Marble Arch.
Released the following month, it became a number two UK hit that December and a US chart-topper in January 1965. This celebration of curing life's problems by revelling in the bright lights, neon signs and "music of the traffic in the city” was not only the perfect encapsulation of pre-psychedelic swinging '60s optimism, but also a classic example of the brilliantly arranged, instantly infectious three-minute single that melded mod sensibilities with showbiz polish. And to think, the lyrics penned by its English composer/producer were not even inspired by the attractions of his nation's suddenly in-vogue capital.
"'Downtown' was written on the occasion of my first visit to New York,” Tony Hatch would later recall. "I was staying at a hotel on Central Park and I wandered down to Broadway and to Times Square and, naively, I thought I was downtown — forgetting that, in New York especially, downtown is a lot further downtown, getting on towards Battery Park. I loved the whole atmosphere there and the song came to me very, very quickly.”
'We Need A Hit...'
The control panel of Pye's three-track Ampex (not the four-track used on 'Downtown'). Photo: British Pathé
A child star of film, TV, radio and record, known in the 1940s as 'Britain's Shirley Temple', Petula Clark had been signed to Pye since 1955 and enjoyed her first UK number one in 1961 with 'Sailor'. Although Alan A Freeman had produced that track, as he had all of Clark's recordings since 1949, his assistant on the 'Sailor' session was Tony Hatch, whose first song recorded by her was the 1963 flop 'Valentino'. Thereafter, Hatch took over as her producer and capitalised on Petula's popularity in Europe via some French-language releases.
At home, it was a different story. A string of nondescript singles meant that, by 1964, she was in dire need of an English-language hit, so Hatch visited her home in Paris to play her three or four songs he had acquired from music publishers on a trip to New York. Pet wasn't impressed... until she heard a few bars of an incomplete soul number that Hatch intended offering to the Drifters.
"We already knew that we had to make a record,” Hatch recalled in a 2009 interview with Gary James. "I had a studio booked with an orchestra, ready to do a new recording session with her. And she said, 'Aren't you working on anything yourself?' Reluctantly, I played her the idea of 'Downtown', because I'm always reluctant to play half-finished songs. She immediately saw tremendous potential in it. She was the one who said, 'Get that finished. Get a good lyric in it. Get a great arrangement and I think we'll at least have a song we're proud to record even if it isn't a hit.'”
The Session
A mono Ampex tape recorder from Pye's studio 1. Photo: British Pathé
The 'Downtown' session took place about two weeks later, on 16th October, 1964. Thirty minutes before it commenced, Tony Hatch was still fiddling with the lyrics in the studio's lavatory. This was because when he took charge of a production — as he had already done with the Searchers (for whom he'd penned the hit release 'Sugar & Spice' under the pseudonym Fred Nightingale) — he insisted on everyone recording together at the same time, be they members of a four-piece group or, as in this case, a large ensemble. The musicians assembled included eight violinists, two viola players and two cellists, four trumpeters and four trombonists, five woodwind players with flutes and oboes, percussionists, a bass player and a pianist. Also present was famed session drummer Ronnie Verrell (not Bobby Graham, as has been erroneously reported elsewhere), female vocal trio the Breakaways, whose backing-singer credits would soon range from Dusty Springfield to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and session guitarists Big Jim Sullivan, Vic Flick and Jimmy Page.
Cutting Engineer Derek Moore in one of Pye's two cutting rooms. Photo: British Pathé
"Quite often on the Hatch sessions, not only did we have Jim Sullivan and Jimmy Page, but also John McLaughlin sitting in as part of the rhythm section,” says engineer Ray Prickett, who recorded 'Downtown' in Pye's Studio 1. "Can you imagine being around that collection of talent? For 'Downtown', looking down on the live area from the upstairs control room, the drummer was in the far right corner, the bass player was to his left (again, from our perspective), the guitarists were about halfway along the right-side wall, the percussionists were at the near end of that wall, the pianist was in the middle of the studio and Tony's arranger Bob Leaper was conducting nearby. Opposite the control room, near the facing wall, was where Petula and the vocal group were set up, with a few small screens between and around them to provide a little bit of separation. The strings were to the left of them (as we were looking at the room) facing towards the conductor, and further left was the brass section, while the woodwind were in front of the string section.
"When you listened to any of the mics, there wasn't full 100 percent separation. Not by a long way, because that wasn't what we were aiming for. The way I saw it, and Tony agreed with this, was that the sound wasn't as good when we recorded different sections separately. When the whole orchestra plays together, something happens — all of the air is being moved by those instruments and that's what gives you a big, ambient sound. This is why there was minimal screening even around the vocalists; maximum separation would have defeated the object of having all those people playing in that room.
"Since their playing was well controlled, Pet Clark was somehow able to hear herself singing. The vocalists didn't use headphones as often in those days as they would later on, and there also wasn't much [loudspeaker] foldback. Until we replaced it with a Neve in 1965, we had a four-track Neumann desk in Studio 1. Later desks would actually have more controls for foldback than for mixing, and the trouble was, when you had the ability to work more than two or three different mixes of foldback, it became a bit of a pain. At that point, everybody wanted to hear their own little mix, and this, in my opinion, detracted from the spontaneity of the overall sound.”
Career Engineer
Engineer Ray Prickett in the control room of Pye's Studio 1. This and the following photos are taken from a 1963 Pathé newsreel which featured the Searchers recording their hit single 'Sugar & Spice'. While the session was artificially recreated for the film, the pictures show a fascinating view of Pye Studios as it was at the time 'Downtown' was recorded in the mid-1960s. Photo: British Pathé
Ray Prickett had no such concern when, as an 18-year-old in 1952, he gained his first studio experience. This was at a facility named Gui de Buive, where he worked with tape and direct-to-disk recording before landing a job three years later as a cutting engineer at IBC. In 1958, IBC became the first UK facility to be equipped with a stereo lathe, and it was there that Prickett also tracked easy listening, orchestral-pop sessions, including several produced by the aforementioned Alan Freeman (not to be confused with the disc jockey of the same name). This, in turn, paved the way for the fully fledged engineering work that Prickett did after moving to Pye in 1963, recording anyone from Lonnie Donegan and Kenny Ball to the Searchers and, of course, Petula Clark.
"Whenever Tony Hatch was with me in the control room, we had such a good understanding that, by the time he'd ask me to add something, I had already done it,” remarks Prickett, concurring with what Hatch himself told an interviewer in 2005: "Bob Leaper was my musical associate. I would do a run through of each item with the orchestra myself, check notes, et cetera, get the right feel, then Bob would take over when I went to the control room. I worked with balance engineer Ray Prickett so many times... he knew exactly what I wanted. I've always had a great rapport with musicians and studio personnel, so the job becomes an enjoyable team effort.”
Recording The Pye Way
Located inside ATV House, Pye had two studios: the 40 x 30 x 18-foot room where 'Downtown' was recorded and the 20 x 20 x 18-foot Studio 2. The former, in addition to its Neumann console, housed an Ampex four-track tape machine, Tannoy dual-concentric speakers inside Lockwood cabinets, an echo chamber, a couple of rooms with EMT 140 echo plates, and a good selection of mics that included Neumann U47s, M49s and an SM2 (and, later, U67s, U87s and KM84s), AKG C12s and Sennheiser MD421s.
Ray Prickett looking down from the control room into the live room of Pye's Studio 1.Photo: British Pathé
"I'd use three mics to record the drums,” Prickett explains. "Usually a 421 on the bass drum and then two 47s, 67s or 87s as overheads — whatever was available at that time. We would train a lot of young engineers at Pye, and one of them once came to me and said, 'Come and listen to this drum sound that I've got!' This was when we'd already upgraded to 16- or 24-track. He said, 'Listen to the snare. Doesn't it sound great?' and I said, 'Yes, great, great,' and then he asked me to listen to the bass drum. Eventually, I said, 'Let's listen to the whole lot together... Have you listened to the whole lot together?' 'Oh no,' he said, 'I haven't done that yet,' so I said, 'Well, then do it.' When he did, his face fell — he couldn't believe the top-less sound that he'd got. 'Why's that?' he asked me, to which I said, 'You've got too many mics too close together. You got so much phase shift there, you're losing all your top end. You've made it over-complicated.'
"That was basically my theory: if you've got too many mics on a drum kit, you get phase shift. Because a kit is a very tight little unit, you can't afford to put separate mics on the cymbals, hi-hat and so forth. Whatever happens, you're going to get spill, and the phase shift caused by the various spacings of the mics will detract from the overall sound. You should get a nice, clean, top-end sound on the kit, and that requires just two mics overhead and one on the bass drum.”
Without a doubt, this worked on 'Downtown'. Ronnie Verrell's drumming, deft yet with a light touch, features prominently — courtesy of a solid bass drum, heavy snare backbeat on the choruses and crisp ride cymbal — while fitting in with the rest of the instruments. A case of perfect blending rather than perfect separation, this was balancing done the organic, old-fashioned way, and the results speak for themselves.
"For the bass guitar, we didn't DI much in those days, so we would have miked the amp,” Prickett continues. "We of course did the same with the electric guitars, there would have been a mic on the acoustic, and for the piano I used the stereo SM2 — the lid would be partly open with the mic inside, and then we'd put a cover over the top just to keep some separation.
"For the strings, I'd use two mics as a stereo pair on the eight violins, and then one each on the pair of cellos and pair of violas. Then there would be no more than three mics on the woodwind section, two on the trumpets, another two on the trombones, and either U47s or U67s on the vocal and backing vocals.
"In all, we probably did four takes — sometimes we got away with less than that — and we also did some editing, maybe editing the brass middle-eight out of one take and inserting it into another take that we preferred because of the vocal. Working four-track, we'd always do a straight stereo mix of the entire orchestra and all of the other musicians, there and then, completely live. What we got on the session is what you hear on the record, and the other two tracks had Pet Clark and the backing singers.”
Whereas most British studios of that era adhered to a strict timetable — with sessions running from 10:00am to 1:00pm, 2:00pm to 5:00pm and 7:00pm to 10:00pm — Pye's engineers were used to often working beyond the regular recording sessions into the wee small hours so that they could finish a mix and meet the deadline for delivering the finished product to the pressing plant a few hours later.
"I got blacklisted at a very early stage in the business,” Ray Prickett laughs when asked whether such work practices contravened union rules. "Pye was actually a non-union studio and it was meant to be that way.”
For the mix of 'Downtown', since the stereo musical backing had already been mixed live, Prickett's main task was to just add the lead and backing vocals at the desired levels.
"We'd pan the mix as we went along,” he says, "usually with the rhythm mainly in the centre, the strings spread left and right, the trombones and trumpets split from the point of view of the stereo mix, and the woodwind panned across the middle. So, it was a nice big spread of sound.”
Aftermath
Evidently, the record-buying public agreed. Following its release, 'Downtown' not only ended a two-year chart absence in the UK for Petula Clark, but during its three-week stay at number two in December 1964, the single was only kept from the top spot by the Beatles' 'I Feel Fine'. Certified silver for domestic sales of over half a million, it also hit the top five in countries as far apart as Ireland and India, while going all the way to number one in the English-speaking territories of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia. Still, its greatest triumph was reserved for an America that was in the full throes of the so-called 'British Invasion'.
Given that Tony Hatch had first thought about writing 'Downtown' while standing in New York's Times Square (which, he didn't realise, is actually part of the city's midtown), he was concerned that Warner Bros A&R exec Joe Smith would think Petula Clark's unmistakeably English accent sounded ridiculous when she sang Americanisms such as the song's title, "sidewalk” instead of "pavement”, and "movie shows” instead of "cinemas”. He needn't have worried. As soon as Smith heard the record in Hatch's London office, he loved this "observation from outside of America” that, to his mind, was "just beautiful and just perfect.” In fact, such was Smith's enthusiasm, it even inspired Pye executives to give the single a stronger sales push in the UK, where it would scoop an Ivor Novello Award as 1964's 'Outstanding Song Of The Year'.
Released by Warner Bros that December, 'Downtown' repaid Joe Smith's faith by making its way into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 within five weeks. Then, on 25th January, 1965, it commenced a fortnight's stay at number one, making Petula Clark Britain's first female chart-topper in the US during the rock era (just over 12 years after Vera Lynn had achieved a similar feat). It also made her the first British girl singer to also earn a gold record in America for sales of one million copies, and the recipient of a Grammy for 1965's 'Best Rock & Roll Song'.
"She was a total professional and very easy to work with,” says Ray Prickett, who remained with Pye until 1978. His many other credits including all 14 of Petula Clark's subsequent consecutive US top 40 hits — 'Colour My World', tracked at LA's Western Recorders was credited by Phil Spector's drummer of choice, Hal Blaine, as featuring his best drum sound there. Additionally, Prickett recorded artists such as Donovan, Dionne Warwick, Trini Lopez, Sounds Orchestral, Jay & the Americans, and Françoise Hardy before going freelance and focusing on location work, mainly with military bands. He ended his 56-year career by retiring in 2008.
"I grew tired of working in the studio when there was no longer any longevity to what was being recorded and multitracking was making everything so time-consuming,” Prickett explains. "This was completely different to how things were up until the early '70s, when we worked quickly and compiled a great catalogue of material that would keep selling well into the future.”
A case in point: the 1964 recording of 'Downtown' which not only surfaces regularly on radio, TV shows and film soundtracks, but has also been remixed and re-released three times; in 1988, 1999 and 2003. What's more, in addition to the multitude of cover versions by anyone from Frank Sinatra to the B-52s, Petula Clark herself has re-recorded the song several times: in 1976 (with a then-trendy disco beat), 1984, 1988, 1996 and, in December 2011, as a duet with Irish rockers the Saw Doctors. Not bad for a chanteuse who has just turned 79.
"We had no idea that we were recording a monster,” she said when discussing the original, classic version in a 1999 radio interview with Kool FM in Phoenix, Arizona. "You never do. You just go in and do a song you like and it's the public who decides that it's going to be a hit...” .
Disc Cutting
Although Ray Prickett didn't work as a disc cutter at Pye, his previous experience in this field nevertheless proved beneficial to the records that he engineered.
"We had two cutting rooms with Scully lathes,” he says, "and I remember one of the engineers there asking me, 'Why is it we never have to do anything to your stuff other than just cut it?' I said, 'Well, I used to be a cutting engineer.' The guys there reckoned that all recording engineers ought to learn a little about cutting.
"As we all know, in those days the LP was really a compromise in terms of capturing what was on the tape — particularly the stereo LP. There would be two drivers running at a 45-degree angle to the surface, and you could actually cut a groove shaped in such a way that it would be almost impossible to separate when they were pressing — it was like an under-cut. That's why, if you listen to most records of that period, a heavy bass would usually be placed in the middle. Otherwise, if you put the bass on one side, it made it very difficult for cutting. These were the sorts of things one learned back then...”
And just for a giggle...
Petula Clark 'Downtown'
Classic Tracks
The single 'Downtown' gave Petula Clark a worldwide hit and rejuvenated her career. Presiding over the session was engineer Ray Prickett, who tells us how it happened...
By Richard Buskin
Nowadays, orchestral pop hits are largely a thing of the past. It is no longer a common occurrence for contemporary singers to be tracked live in the studio alongside string, horn, and woodwind sections, as well as electric guitars, keyboards and drums. But it was the standard way of working back in October 1964, when Petula Clark recorded 'Downtown' at the Pye Studios on London's Marble Arch.
Released the following month, it became a number two UK hit that December and a US chart-topper in January 1965. This celebration of curing life's problems by revelling in the bright lights, neon signs and "music of the traffic in the city” was not only the perfect encapsulation of pre-psychedelic swinging '60s optimism, but also a classic example of the brilliantly arranged, instantly infectious three-minute single that melded mod sensibilities with showbiz polish. And to think, the lyrics penned by its English composer/producer were not even inspired by the attractions of his nation's suddenly in-vogue capital.
"'Downtown' was written on the occasion of my first visit to New York,” Tony Hatch would later recall. "I was staying at a hotel on Central Park and I wandered down to Broadway and to Times Square and, naively, I thought I was downtown — forgetting that, in New York especially, downtown is a lot further downtown, getting on towards Battery Park. I loved the whole atmosphere there and the song came to me very, very quickly.”
'We Need A Hit...'
The control panel of Pye's three-track Ampex (not the four-track used on 'Downtown'). Photo: British Pathé
A child star of film, TV, radio and record, known in the 1940s as 'Britain's Shirley Temple', Petula Clark had been signed to Pye since 1955 and enjoyed her first UK number one in 1961 with 'Sailor'. Although Alan A Freeman had produced that track, as he had all of Clark's recordings since 1949, his assistant on the 'Sailor' session was Tony Hatch, whose first song recorded by her was the 1963 flop 'Valentino'. Thereafter, Hatch took over as her producer and capitalised on Petula's popularity in Europe via some French-language releases.
At home, it was a different story. A string of nondescript singles meant that, by 1964, she was in dire need of an English-language hit, so Hatch visited her home in Paris to play her three or four songs he had acquired from music publishers on a trip to New York. Pet wasn't impressed... until she heard a few bars of an incomplete soul number that Hatch intended offering to the Drifters.
"We already knew that we had to make a record,” Hatch recalled in a 2009 interview with Gary James. "I had a studio booked with an orchestra, ready to do a new recording session with her. And she said, 'Aren't you working on anything yourself?' Reluctantly, I played her the idea of 'Downtown', because I'm always reluctant to play half-finished songs. She immediately saw tremendous potential in it. She was the one who said, 'Get that finished. Get a good lyric in it. Get a great arrangement and I think we'll at least have a song we're proud to record even if it isn't a hit.'”
The Session
A mono Ampex tape recorder from Pye's studio 1. Photo: British Pathé
The 'Downtown' session took place about two weeks later, on 16th October, 1964. Thirty minutes before it commenced, Tony Hatch was still fiddling with the lyrics in the studio's lavatory. This was because when he took charge of a production — as he had already done with the Searchers (for whom he'd penned the hit release 'Sugar & Spice' under the pseudonym Fred Nightingale) — he insisted on everyone recording together at the same time, be they members of a four-piece group or, as in this case, a large ensemble. The musicians assembled included eight violinists, two viola players and two cellists, four trumpeters and four trombonists, five woodwind players with flutes and oboes, percussionists, a bass player and a pianist. Also present was famed session drummer Ronnie Verrell (not Bobby Graham, as has been erroneously reported elsewhere), female vocal trio the Breakaways, whose backing-singer credits would soon range from Dusty Springfield to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and session guitarists Big Jim Sullivan, Vic Flick and Jimmy Page.
Cutting Engineer Derek Moore in one of Pye's two cutting rooms. Photo: British Pathé
"Quite often on the Hatch sessions, not only did we have Jim Sullivan and Jimmy Page, but also John McLaughlin sitting in as part of the rhythm section,” says engineer Ray Prickett, who recorded 'Downtown' in Pye's Studio 1. "Can you imagine being around that collection of talent? For 'Downtown', looking down on the live area from the upstairs control room, the drummer was in the far right corner, the bass player was to his left (again, from our perspective), the guitarists were about halfway along the right-side wall, the percussionists were at the near end of that wall, the pianist was in the middle of the studio and Tony's arranger Bob Leaper was conducting nearby. Opposite the control room, near the facing wall, was where Petula and the vocal group were set up, with a few small screens between and around them to provide a little bit of separation. The strings were to the left of them (as we were looking at the room) facing towards the conductor, and further left was the brass section, while the woodwind were in front of the string section.
"When you listened to any of the mics, there wasn't full 100 percent separation. Not by a long way, because that wasn't what we were aiming for. The way I saw it, and Tony agreed with this, was that the sound wasn't as good when we recorded different sections separately. When the whole orchestra plays together, something happens — all of the air is being moved by those instruments and that's what gives you a big, ambient sound. This is why there was minimal screening even around the vocalists; maximum separation would have defeated the object of having all those people playing in that room.
"Since their playing was well controlled, Pet Clark was somehow able to hear herself singing. The vocalists didn't use headphones as often in those days as they would later on, and there also wasn't much [loudspeaker] foldback. Until we replaced it with a Neve in 1965, we had a four-track Neumann desk in Studio 1. Later desks would actually have more controls for foldback than for mixing, and the trouble was, when you had the ability to work more than two or three different mixes of foldback, it became a bit of a pain. At that point, everybody wanted to hear their own little mix, and this, in my opinion, detracted from the spontaneity of the overall sound.”
Career Engineer
Engineer Ray Prickett in the control room of Pye's Studio 1. This and the following photos are taken from a 1963 Pathé newsreel which featured the Searchers recording their hit single 'Sugar & Spice'. While the session was artificially recreated for the film, the pictures show a fascinating view of Pye Studios as it was at the time 'Downtown' was recorded in the mid-1960s. Photo: British Pathé
Ray Prickett had no such concern when, as an 18-year-old in 1952, he gained his first studio experience. This was at a facility named Gui de Buive, where he worked with tape and direct-to-disk recording before landing a job three years later as a cutting engineer at IBC. In 1958, IBC became the first UK facility to be equipped with a stereo lathe, and it was there that Prickett also tracked easy listening, orchestral-pop sessions, including several produced by the aforementioned Alan Freeman (not to be confused with the disc jockey of the same name). This, in turn, paved the way for the fully fledged engineering work that Prickett did after moving to Pye in 1963, recording anyone from Lonnie Donegan and Kenny Ball to the Searchers and, of course, Petula Clark.
"Whenever Tony Hatch was with me in the control room, we had such a good understanding that, by the time he'd ask me to add something, I had already done it,” remarks Prickett, concurring with what Hatch himself told an interviewer in 2005: "Bob Leaper was my musical associate. I would do a run through of each item with the orchestra myself, check notes, et cetera, get the right feel, then Bob would take over when I went to the control room. I worked with balance engineer Ray Prickett so many times... he knew exactly what I wanted. I've always had a great rapport with musicians and studio personnel, so the job becomes an enjoyable team effort.”
Recording The Pye Way
Located inside ATV House, Pye had two studios: the 40 x 30 x 18-foot room where 'Downtown' was recorded and the 20 x 20 x 18-foot Studio 2. The former, in addition to its Neumann console, housed an Ampex four-track tape machine, Tannoy dual-concentric speakers inside Lockwood cabinets, an echo chamber, a couple of rooms with EMT 140 echo plates, and a good selection of mics that included Neumann U47s, M49s and an SM2 (and, later, U67s, U87s and KM84s), AKG C12s and Sennheiser MD421s.
Ray Prickett looking down from the control room into the live room of Pye's Studio 1.Photo: British Pathé
"I'd use three mics to record the drums,” Prickett explains. "Usually a 421 on the bass drum and then two 47s, 67s or 87s as overheads — whatever was available at that time. We would train a lot of young engineers at Pye, and one of them once came to me and said, 'Come and listen to this drum sound that I've got!' This was when we'd already upgraded to 16- or 24-track. He said, 'Listen to the snare. Doesn't it sound great?' and I said, 'Yes, great, great,' and then he asked me to listen to the bass drum. Eventually, I said, 'Let's listen to the whole lot together... Have you listened to the whole lot together?' 'Oh no,' he said, 'I haven't done that yet,' so I said, 'Well, then do it.' When he did, his face fell — he couldn't believe the top-less sound that he'd got. 'Why's that?' he asked me, to which I said, 'You've got too many mics too close together. You got so much phase shift there, you're losing all your top end. You've made it over-complicated.'
"That was basically my theory: if you've got too many mics on a drum kit, you get phase shift. Because a kit is a very tight little unit, you can't afford to put separate mics on the cymbals, hi-hat and so forth. Whatever happens, you're going to get spill, and the phase shift caused by the various spacings of the mics will detract from the overall sound. You should get a nice, clean, top-end sound on the kit, and that requires just two mics overhead and one on the bass drum.”
Without a doubt, this worked on 'Downtown'. Ronnie Verrell's drumming, deft yet with a light touch, features prominently — courtesy of a solid bass drum, heavy snare backbeat on the choruses and crisp ride cymbal — while fitting in with the rest of the instruments. A case of perfect blending rather than perfect separation, this was balancing done the organic, old-fashioned way, and the results speak for themselves.
"For the bass guitar, we didn't DI much in those days, so we would have miked the amp,” Prickett continues. "We of course did the same with the electric guitars, there would have been a mic on the acoustic, and for the piano I used the stereo SM2 — the lid would be partly open with the mic inside, and then we'd put a cover over the top just to keep some separation.
"For the strings, I'd use two mics as a stereo pair on the eight violins, and then one each on the pair of cellos and pair of violas. Then there would be no more than three mics on the woodwind section, two on the trumpets, another two on the trombones, and either U47s or U67s on the vocal and backing vocals.
"In all, we probably did four takes — sometimes we got away with less than that — and we also did some editing, maybe editing the brass middle-eight out of one take and inserting it into another take that we preferred because of the vocal. Working four-track, we'd always do a straight stereo mix of the entire orchestra and all of the other musicians, there and then, completely live. What we got on the session is what you hear on the record, and the other two tracks had Pet Clark and the backing singers.”
Whereas most British studios of that era adhered to a strict timetable — with sessions running from 10:00am to 1:00pm, 2:00pm to 5:00pm and 7:00pm to 10:00pm — Pye's engineers were used to often working beyond the regular recording sessions into the wee small hours so that they could finish a mix and meet the deadline for delivering the finished product to the pressing plant a few hours later.
"I got blacklisted at a very early stage in the business,” Ray Prickett laughs when asked whether such work practices contravened union rules. "Pye was actually a non-union studio and it was meant to be that way.”
For the mix of 'Downtown', since the stereo musical backing had already been mixed live, Prickett's main task was to just add the lead and backing vocals at the desired levels.
"We'd pan the mix as we went along,” he says, "usually with the rhythm mainly in the centre, the strings spread left and right, the trombones and trumpets split from the point of view of the stereo mix, and the woodwind panned across the middle. So, it was a nice big spread of sound.”
Aftermath
Evidently, the record-buying public agreed. Following its release, 'Downtown' not only ended a two-year chart absence in the UK for Petula Clark, but during its three-week stay at number two in December 1964, the single was only kept from the top spot by the Beatles' 'I Feel Fine'. Certified silver for domestic sales of over half a million, it also hit the top five in countries as far apart as Ireland and India, while going all the way to number one in the English-speaking territories of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia. Still, its greatest triumph was reserved for an America that was in the full throes of the so-called 'British Invasion'.
Given that Tony Hatch had first thought about writing 'Downtown' while standing in New York's Times Square (which, he didn't realise, is actually part of the city's midtown), he was concerned that Warner Bros A&R exec Joe Smith would think Petula Clark's unmistakeably English accent sounded ridiculous when she sang Americanisms such as the song's title, "sidewalk” instead of "pavement”, and "movie shows” instead of "cinemas”. He needn't have worried. As soon as Smith heard the record in Hatch's London office, he loved this "observation from outside of America” that, to his mind, was "just beautiful and just perfect.” In fact, such was Smith's enthusiasm, it even inspired Pye executives to give the single a stronger sales push in the UK, where it would scoop an Ivor Novello Award as 1964's 'Outstanding Song Of The Year'.
Released by Warner Bros that December, 'Downtown' repaid Joe Smith's faith by making its way into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 within five weeks. Then, on 25th January, 1965, it commenced a fortnight's stay at number one, making Petula Clark Britain's first female chart-topper in the US during the rock era (just over 12 years after Vera Lynn had achieved a similar feat). It also made her the first British girl singer to also earn a gold record in America for sales of one million copies, and the recipient of a Grammy for 1965's 'Best Rock & Roll Song'.
"She was a total professional and very easy to work with,” says Ray Prickett, who remained with Pye until 1978. His many other credits including all 14 of Petula Clark's subsequent consecutive US top 40 hits — 'Colour My World', tracked at LA's Western Recorders was credited by Phil Spector's drummer of choice, Hal Blaine, as featuring his best drum sound there. Additionally, Prickett recorded artists such as Donovan, Dionne Warwick, Trini Lopez, Sounds Orchestral, Jay & the Americans, and Françoise Hardy before going freelance and focusing on location work, mainly with military bands. He ended his 56-year career by retiring in 2008.
"I grew tired of working in the studio when there was no longer any longevity to what was being recorded and multitracking was making everything so time-consuming,” Prickett explains. "This was completely different to how things were up until the early '70s, when we worked quickly and compiled a great catalogue of material that would keep selling well into the future.”
A case in point: the 1964 recording of 'Downtown' which not only surfaces regularly on radio, TV shows and film soundtracks, but has also been remixed and re-released three times; in 1988, 1999 and 2003. What's more, in addition to the multitude of cover versions by anyone from Frank Sinatra to the B-52s, Petula Clark herself has re-recorded the song several times: in 1976 (with a then-trendy disco beat), 1984, 1988, 1996 and, in December 2011, as a duet with Irish rockers the Saw Doctors. Not bad for a chanteuse who has just turned 79.
"We had no idea that we were recording a monster,” she said when discussing the original, classic version in a 1999 radio interview with Kool FM in Phoenix, Arizona. "You never do. You just go in and do a song you like and it's the public who decides that it's going to be a hit...” .
Disc Cutting
Although Ray Prickett didn't work as a disc cutter at Pye, his previous experience in this field nevertheless proved beneficial to the records that he engineered.
"We had two cutting rooms with Scully lathes,” he says, "and I remember one of the engineers there asking me, 'Why is it we never have to do anything to your stuff other than just cut it?' I said, 'Well, I used to be a cutting engineer.' The guys there reckoned that all recording engineers ought to learn a little about cutting.
"As we all know, in those days the LP was really a compromise in terms of capturing what was on the tape — particularly the stereo LP. There would be two drivers running at a 45-degree angle to the surface, and you could actually cut a groove shaped in such a way that it would be almost impossible to separate when they were pressing — it was like an under-cut. That's why, if you listen to most records of that period, a heavy bass would usually be placed in the middle. Otherwise, if you put the bass on one side, it made it very difficult for cutting. These were the sorts of things one learned back then...”
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- Haole
@Prime Time
Good stuff there Brudda with the docs. The history and story of Reggae is very cool. It's been an interest of mine since I was just a little guy. My Mom took me to see Bob in Honolulu in the late 70's (I was just a kid) because I was already into the Reggae sound. Weird how I've always been drawn to it,,, even though it wasn't "cool" or even something most people ever heard on the radio. I searched it out on my own and I learned as much as I could about it growing up. I've seen and read just about everything there is on Reggae... In my living room I have a large hardcover book out for easy access entitled "REGGAE EXPLOSION, The Story of Jamacian Music" by Chris Salewicz & Adrian Boot. People always enjoy flipping through it,,, lots of pics and stories about all of Reggae's history and artists. Inside that book I also keep a very high quality copy of the September '76 edition of High Times magazine... Bob is on the cover and the heading above "High Times" says "Reggae in Kingston - the New Nashville!" Cool interviews of Bob and Peter Tosh are in it, and they're written to read just the way they really pronounced things.
Thanks for posting those.
Good stuff there Brudda with the docs. The history and story of Reggae is very cool. It's been an interest of mine since I was just a little guy. My Mom took me to see Bob in Honolulu in the late 70's (I was just a kid) because I was already into the Reggae sound. Weird how I've always been drawn to it,,, even though it wasn't "cool" or even something most people ever heard on the radio. I searched it out on my own and I learned as much as I could about it growing up. I've seen and read just about everything there is on Reggae... In my living room I have a large hardcover book out for easy access entitled "REGGAE EXPLOSION, The Story of Jamacian Music" by Chris Salewicz & Adrian Boot. People always enjoy flipping through it,,, lots of pics and stories about all of Reggae's history and artists. Inside that book I also keep a very high quality copy of the September '76 edition of High Times magazine... Bob is on the cover and the heading above "High Times" says "Reggae in Kingston - the New Nashville!" Cool interviews of Bob and Peter Tosh are in it, and they're written to read just the way they really pronounced things.
Thanks for posting those.
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- Jun 23, 2010
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- 18,300
- Name
- Haole
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2010
- Messages
- 18,300
- Name
- Haole
Thought it would be nice to give praise to The Most High on this beautiful Sunday Morning.
In case you've ever wondered why I have "H.I.M." listed under my avatar name, it stands for His Imperial Majesty... and the second song is "H.I.M."
In case you've ever wondered why I have "H.I.M." listed under my avatar name, it stands for His Imperial Majesty... and the second song is "H.I.M."
Petula Clark - 'Downtown'
And just for a giggle...
Petula Clark 'Downtown'
Classic Tracks
The single 'Downtown' gave Petula Clark a worldwide hit and rejuvenated her career. Presiding over the session was engineer Ray Prickett, who tells us how it happened...
By Richard Buskin
Nowadays, orchestral pop hits are largely a thing of the past. It is no longer a common occurrence for contemporary singers to be tracked live in the studio alongside string, horn, and woodwind sections, as well as electric guitars, keyboards and drums. But it was the standard way of working back in October 1964, when Petula Clark recorded 'Downtown' at the Pye Studios on London's Marble Arch.
Released the following month, it became a number two UK hit that December and a US chart-topper in January 1965. This celebration of curing life's problems by revelling in the bright lights, neon signs and "music of the traffic in the city” was not only the perfect encapsulation of pre-psychedelic swinging '60s optimism, but also a classic example of the brilliantly arranged, instantly infectious three-minute single that melded mod sensibilities with showbiz polish. And to think, the lyrics penned by its English composer/producer were not even inspired by the attractions of his nation's suddenly in-vogue capital.
"'Downtown' was written on the occasion of my first visit to New York,” Tony Hatch would later recall. "I was staying at a hotel on Central Park and I wandered down to Broadway and to Times Square and, naively, I thought I was downtown — forgetting that, in New York especially, downtown is a lot further downtown, getting on towards Battery Park. I loved the whole atmosphere there and the song came to me very, very quickly.”
'We Need A Hit...'
The control panel of Pye's three-track Ampex (not the four-track used on 'Downtown'). Photo: British Pathé
A child star of film, TV, radio and record, known in the 1940s as 'Britain's Shirley Temple', Petula Clark had been signed to Pye since 1955 and enjoyed her first UK number one in 1961 with 'Sailor'. Although Alan A Freeman had produced that track, as he had all of Clark's recordings since 1949, his assistant on the 'Sailor' session was Tony Hatch, whose first song recorded by her was the 1963 flop 'Valentino'. Thereafter, Hatch took over as her producer and capitalised on Petula's popularity in Europe via some French-language releases.
At home, it was a different story. A string of nondescript singles meant that, by 1964, she was in dire need of an English-language hit, so Hatch visited her home in Paris to play her three or four songs he had acquired from music publishers on a trip to New York. Pet wasn't impressed... until she heard a few bars of an incomplete soul number that Hatch intended offering to the Drifters.
"We already knew that we had to make a record,” Hatch recalled in a 2009 interview with Gary James. "I had a studio booked with an orchestra, ready to do a new recording session with her. And she said, 'Aren't you working on anything yourself?' Reluctantly, I played her the idea of 'Downtown', because I'm always reluctant to play half-finished songs. She immediately saw tremendous potential in it. She was the one who said, 'Get that finished. Get a good lyric in it. Get a great arrangement and I think we'll at least have a song we're proud to record even if it isn't a hit.'”
The Session
A mono Ampex tape recorder from Pye's studio 1. Photo: British Pathé
The 'Downtown' session took place about two weeks later, on 16th October, 1964. Thirty minutes before it commenced, Tony Hatch was still fiddling with the lyrics in the studio's lavatory. This was because when he took charge of a production — as he had already done with the Searchers (for whom he'd penned the hit release 'Sugar & Spice' under the pseudonym Fred Nightingale) — he insisted on everyone recording together at the same time, be they members of a four-piece group or, as in this case, a large ensemble. The musicians assembled included eight violinists, two viola players and two cellists, four trumpeters and four trombonists, five woodwind players with flutes and oboes, percussionists, a bass player and a pianist. Also present was famed session drummer Ronnie Verrell (not Bobby Graham, as has been erroneously reported elsewhere), female vocal trio the Breakaways, whose backing-singer credits would soon range from Dusty Springfield to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and session guitarists Big Jim Sullivan, Vic Flick and Jimmy Page.
Cutting Engineer Derek Moore in one of Pye's two cutting rooms. Photo: British Pathé
"Quite often on the Hatch sessions, not only did we have Jim Sullivan and Jimmy Page, but also John McLaughlin sitting in as part of the rhythm section,” says engineer Ray Prickett, who recorded 'Downtown' in Pye's Studio 1. "Can you imagine being around that collection of talent? For 'Downtown', looking down on the live area from the upstairs control room, the drummer was in the far right corner, the bass player was to his left (again, from our perspective), the guitarists were about halfway along the right-side wall, the percussionists were at the near end of that wall, the pianist was in the middle of the studio and Tony's arranger Bob Leaper was conducting nearby. Opposite the control room, near the facing wall, was where Petula and the vocal group were set up, with a few small screens between and around them to provide a little bit of separation. The strings were to the left of them (as we were looking at the room) facing towards the conductor, and further left was the brass section, while the woodwind were in front of the string section.
"When you listened to any of the mics, there wasn't full 100 percent separation. Not by a long way, because that wasn't what we were aiming for. The way I saw it, and Tony agreed with this, was that the sound wasn't as good when we recorded different sections separately. When the whole orchestra plays together, something happens — all of the air is being moved by those instruments and that's what gives you a big, ambient sound. This is why there was minimal screening even around the vocalists; maximum separation would have defeated the object of having all those people playing in that room.
"Since their playing was well controlled, Pet Clark was somehow able to hear herself singing. The vocalists didn't use headphones as often in those days as they would later on, and there also wasn't much [loudspeaker] foldback. Until we replaced it with a Neve in 1965, we had a four-track Neumann desk in Studio 1. Later desks would actually have more controls for foldback than for mixing, and the trouble was, when you had the ability to work more than two or three different mixes of foldback, it became a bit of a pain. At that point, everybody wanted to hear their own little mix, and this, in my opinion, detracted from the spontaneity of the overall sound.”
Career Engineer
Engineer Ray Prickett in the control room of Pye's Studio 1. This and the following photos are taken from a 1963 Pathé newsreel which featured the Searchers recording their hit single 'Sugar & Spice'. While the session was artificially recreated for the film, the pictures show a fascinating view of Pye Studios as it was at the time 'Downtown' was recorded in the mid-1960s. Photo: British Pathé
Ray Prickett had no such concern when, as an 18-year-old in 1952, he gained his first studio experience. This was at a facility named Gui de Buive, where he worked with tape and direct-to-disk recording before landing a job three years later as a cutting engineer at IBC. In 1958, IBC became the first UK facility to be equipped with a stereo lathe, and it was there that Prickett also tracked easy listening, orchestral-pop sessions, including several produced by the aforementioned Alan Freeman (not to be confused with the disc jockey of the same name). This, in turn, paved the way for the fully fledged engineering work that Prickett did after moving to Pye in 1963, recording anyone from Lonnie Donegan and Kenny Ball to the Searchers and, of course, Petula Clark.
"Whenever Tony Hatch was with me in the control room, we had such a good understanding that, by the time he'd ask me to add something, I had already done it,” remarks Prickett, concurring with what Hatch himself told an interviewer in 2005: "Bob Leaper was my musical associate. I would do a run through of each item with the orchestra myself, check notes, et cetera, get the right feel, then Bob would take over when I went to the control room. I worked with balance engineer Ray Prickett so many times... he knew exactly what I wanted. I've always had a great rapport with musicians and studio personnel, so the job becomes an enjoyable team effort.”
Recording The Pye Way
Located inside ATV House, Pye had two studios: the 40 x 30 x 18-foot room where 'Downtown' was recorded and the 20 x 20 x 18-foot Studio 2. The former, in addition to its Neumann console, housed an Ampex four-track tape machine, Tannoy dual-concentric speakers inside Lockwood cabinets, an echo chamber, a couple of rooms with EMT 140 echo plates, and a good selection of mics that included Neumann U47s, M49s and an SM2 (and, later, U67s, U87s and KM84s), AKG C12s and Sennheiser MD421s.
Ray Prickett looking down from the control room into the live room of Pye's Studio 1.Photo: British Pathé
"I'd use three mics to record the drums,” Prickett explains. "Usually a 421 on the bass drum and then two 47s, 67s or 87s as overheads — whatever was available at that time. We would train a lot of young engineers at Pye, and one of them once came to me and said, 'Come and listen to this drum sound that I've got!' This was when we'd already upgraded to 16- or 24-track. He said, 'Listen to the snare. Doesn't it sound great?' and I said, 'Yes, great, great,' and then he asked me to listen to the bass drum. Eventually, I said, 'Let's listen to the whole lot together... Have you listened to the whole lot together?' 'Oh no,' he said, 'I haven't done that yet,' so I said, 'Well, then do it.' When he did, his face fell — he couldn't believe the top-less sound that he'd got. 'Why's that?' he asked me, to which I said, 'You've got too many mics too close together. You got so much phase shift there, you're losing all your top end. You've made it over-complicated.'
"That was basically my theory: if you've got too many mics on a drum kit, you get phase shift. Because a kit is a very tight little unit, you can't afford to put separate mics on the cymbals, hi-hat and so forth. Whatever happens, you're going to get spill, and the phase shift caused by the various spacings of the mics will detract from the overall sound. You should get a nice, clean, top-end sound on the kit, and that requires just two mics overhead and one on the bass drum.”
Without a doubt, this worked on 'Downtown'. Ronnie Verrell's drumming, deft yet with a light touch, features prominently — courtesy of a solid bass drum, heavy snare backbeat on the choruses and crisp ride cymbal — while fitting in with the rest of the instruments. A case of perfect blending rather than perfect separation, this was balancing done the organic, old-fashioned way, and the results speak for themselves.
"For the bass guitar, we didn't DI much in those days, so we would have miked the amp,” Prickett continues. "We of course did the same with the electric guitars, there would have been a mic on the acoustic, and for the piano I used the stereo SM2 — the lid would be partly open with the mic inside, and then we'd put a cover over the top just to keep some separation.
"For the strings, I'd use two mics as a stereo pair on the eight violins, and then one each on the pair of cellos and pair of violas. Then there would be no more than three mics on the woodwind section, two on the trumpets, another two on the trombones, and either U47s or U67s on the vocal and backing vocals.
"In all, we probably did four takes — sometimes we got away with less than that — and we also did some editing, maybe editing the brass middle-eight out of one take and inserting it into another take that we preferred because of the vocal. Working four-track, we'd always do a straight stereo mix of the entire orchestra and all of the other musicians, there and then, completely live. What we got on the session is what you hear on the record, and the other two tracks had Pet Clark and the backing singers.”
Whereas most British studios of that era adhered to a strict timetable — with sessions running from 10:00am to 1:00pm, 2:00pm to 5:00pm and 7:00pm to 10:00pm — Pye's engineers were used to often working beyond the regular recording sessions into the wee small hours so that they could finish a mix and meet the deadline for delivering the finished product to the pressing plant a few hours later.
"I got blacklisted at a very early stage in the business,” Ray Prickett laughs when asked whether such work practices contravened union rules. "Pye was actually a non-union studio and it was meant to be that way.”
For the mix of 'Downtown', since the stereo musical backing had already been mixed live, Prickett's main task was to just add the lead and backing vocals at the desired levels.
"We'd pan the mix as we went along,” he says, "usually with the rhythm mainly in the centre, the strings spread left and right, the trombones and trumpets split from the point of view of the stereo mix, and the woodwind panned across the middle. So, it was a nice big spread of sound.”
Aftermath
Evidently, the record-buying public agreed. Following its release, 'Downtown' not only ended a two-year chart absence in the UK for Petula Clark, but during its three-week stay at number two in December 1964, the single was only kept from the top spot by the Beatles' 'I Feel Fine'. Certified silver for domestic sales of over half a million, it also hit the top five in countries as far apart as Ireland and India, while going all the way to number one in the English-speaking territories of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia. Still, its greatest triumph was reserved for an America that was in the full throes of the so-called 'British Invasion'.
Given that Tony Hatch had first thought about writing 'Downtown' while standing in New York's Times Square (which, he didn't realise, is actually part of the city's midtown), he was concerned that Warner Bros A&R exec Joe Smith would think Petula Clark's unmistakeably English accent sounded ridiculous when she sang Americanisms such as the song's title, "sidewalk” instead of "pavement”, and "movie shows” instead of "cinemas”. He needn't have worried. As soon as Smith heard the record in Hatch's London office, he loved this "observation from outside of America” that, to his mind, was "just beautiful and just perfect.” In fact, such was Smith's enthusiasm, it even inspired Pye executives to give the single a stronger sales push in the UK, where it would scoop an Ivor Novello Award as 1964's 'Outstanding Song Of The Year'.
Released by Warner Bros that December, 'Downtown' repaid Joe Smith's faith by making its way into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 within five weeks. Then, on 25th January, 1965, it commenced a fortnight's stay at number one, making Petula Clark Britain's first female chart-topper in the US during the rock era (just over 12 years after Vera Lynn had achieved a similar feat). It also made her the first British girl singer to also earn a gold record in America for sales of one million copies, and the recipient of a Grammy for 1965's 'Best Rock & Roll Song'.
"She was a total professional and very easy to work with,” says Ray Prickett, who remained with Pye until 1978. His many other credits including all 14 of Petula Clark's subsequent consecutive US top 40 hits — 'Colour My World', tracked at LA's Western Recorders was credited by Phil Spector's drummer of choice, Hal Blaine, as featuring his best drum sound there. Additionally, Prickett recorded artists such as Donovan, Dionne Warwick, Trini Lopez, Sounds Orchestral, Jay & the Americans, and Françoise Hardy before going freelance and focusing on location work, mainly with military bands. He ended his 56-year career by retiring in 2008.
"I grew tired of working in the studio when there was no longer any longevity to what was being recorded and multitracking was making everything so time-consuming,” Prickett explains. "This was completely different to how things were up until the early '70s, when we worked quickly and compiled a great catalogue of material that would keep selling well into the future.”
A case in point: the 1964 recording of 'Downtown' which not only surfaces regularly on radio, TV shows and film soundtracks, but has also been remixed and re-released three times; in 1988, 1999 and 2003. What's more, in addition to the multitude of cover versions by anyone from Frank Sinatra to the B-52s, Petula Clark herself has re-recorded the song several times: in 1976 (with a then-trendy disco beat), 1984, 1988, 1996 and, in December 2011, as a duet with Irish rockers the Saw Doctors. Not bad for a chanteuse who has just turned 79.
"We had no idea that we were recording a monster,” she said when discussing the original, classic version in a 1999 radio interview with Kool FM in Phoenix, Arizona. "You never do. You just go in and do a song you like and it's the public who decides that it's going to be a hit...” .
Disc Cutting
Although Ray Prickett didn't work as a disc cutter at Pye, his previous experience in this field nevertheless proved beneficial to the records that he engineered.
"We had two cutting rooms with Scully lathes,” he says, "and I remember one of the engineers there asking me, 'Why is it we never have to do anything to your stuff other than just cut it?' I said, 'Well, I used to be a cutting engineer.' The guys there reckoned that all recording engineers ought to learn a little about cutting.
"As we all know, in those days the LP was really a compromise in terms of capturing what was on the tape — particularly the stereo LP. There would be two drivers running at a 45-degree angle to the surface, and you could actually cut a groove shaped in such a way that it would be almost impossible to separate when they were pressing — it was like an under-cut. That's why, if you listen to most records of that period, a heavy bass would usually be placed in the middle. Otherwise, if you put the bass on one side, it made it very difficult for cutting. These were the sorts of things one learned back then...”
She did some great songs. Didn't see do one called "My Love"?
Ramsey
Starter
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2013
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- 610
- Name
- Ramsey
Lord's of Acid oozes sex and ...err acid! Led by Praga Khan ( His dad, Jos Engelen is a world famous physicist, who oversaw the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator) The apple didn't fall far from the tree of carnal knowledge. Praga Khan accelerated acid, brains and sex down a hole, into an intensely pleasurable sound explosion.
So many great songs to choose from! Today I choose Crablouse. Crablouse begins warm and slow, like the first suggestive glance the blonde at the bar broadcasts towards you, she quickly escalates into beat rhythm heaven, followed by a crab hangover hell chaser.
The lyrics are risqué to say the least. If you wish to read the lyrics I've posted a link below the video.
http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/l/lords_of_acid/crablouse.html
So many great songs to choose from! Today I choose Crablouse. Crablouse begins warm and slow, like the first suggestive glance the blonde at the bar broadcasts towards you, she quickly escalates into beat rhythm heaven, followed by a crab hangover hell chaser.
The lyrics are risqué to say the least. If you wish to read the lyrics I've posted a link below the video.
http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/l/lords_of_acid/crablouse.html
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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...
This was great song!
I FOUND I! I was a kid and lost a love, or thought I did, and played this over and over.....crazy huh?
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Good find!
One for Ramsey...
I'm enjoying this mix of tunes from everyone here that runs the gamut from old pop tunes to electronica, reggae, rap, classic rock, prog rock and everything in between. Keep 'em coming.
BatteringRambo
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Chic - 'I Want Your Love'
Now this is dance music at its best with Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards as the rhythm section and producing.
Now this is dance music at its best with Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards as the rhythm section and producing.
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Here's a cool nugget for you...
Bob Marley has a bunch of children. You may not know that not all of them were with his wife Rita. Rita was a member of the I - Threes. They were the 3 ladies who sang backup vocals on many of his songs. Bob was very promiscuous,,, and it was a very hard thing for Rita to endure.
One of Bob's girlfriends was Cindy Breakspeare,,, who just happened to be Ms World btw. Well, they had a son together who's name is Damian Marley.
There's a pic of Cindy in Damian's video here (2:16 mark). There's also a guest singer in this song... Bobby Brown.
Damian's nickname is Jr Gong... because his siblings think that he is most like his father.
Bob Marley has a bunch of children. You may not know that not all of them were with his wife Rita. Rita was a member of the I - Threes. They were the 3 ladies who sang backup vocals on many of his songs. Bob was very promiscuous,,, and it was a very hard thing for Rita to endure.
One of Bob's girlfriends was Cindy Breakspeare,,, who just happened to be Ms World btw. Well, they had a son together who's name is Damian Marley.
There's a pic of Cindy in Damian's video here (2:16 mark). There's also a guest singer in this song... Bobby Brown.
Damian's nickname is Jr Gong... because his siblings think that he is most like his father.
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RocknRam29
Live, Love, Laugh, & Learn
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BatteringRambo
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@Prime Time you rock man. I only uploaded a screen shot from Rhapsody. I'm either lazy at that particular moment or can't find it on youtube and then...even if I find it have issues trying to post on here. Maybe I should get Tapatalk again. Ehhh I'm too lazy and blazed. Ahhh here's a gem band for ya'all! Yes again fuckin drugs had an affect re: Paul Kossoff.
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Yes indeed...the band Free. Might as well make one of their tunes the Song of the Day.
Paul Kossoff committed slow suicide
MARTIN KIELTY
Kossoff, Rodgers, Fraser and Kirke in Free
The bassist recalls the harrowing moment he and a Free roadie tried to kidnap Kossoff in an attempt to get him off drugs after the band had split up. Realising he wasn’t going to accept their help, the pair were left with no option but to let him continue with his lifestyle choice – and that was the point at which Fraser bade his former colleague goodbye.
Kossoff continued his downward spiral after Free’s final split in 1973, and died in 1976 aged 25 while preparing for a tour with his band Back Street Crawler.
Fraser’s story is a Classic Rock exclusive excerpt from his book All Right Now: Life, Death and Life Again, in which he recounts the ups and downs of working with Kossoff, Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke in Free, his struggle with accepting he was gay, and his fight against AIDS which kept him out of the limelight until he reinvented himself in recent years.
The ebook is available from McTrax, Fraser’s production firm, which has released his new album On Assignment along with Spirit In Me, the debut record by Fraser’s protege Tobi.
Excerpt from All Right Now: Life, Death and Life Again by Andy Fraser and Mark Hughes
I think Koss felt especially vulnerable after we split. In the band he’d been covered, protected, from his insecurities as a player. Although he did what he did fantastically well, with such emotion and conviction, he was actually quite a basic player.
Yet because of how well he did what he did in the band, and how fantastic he was live, he’d built up this big reputation and people were talking of him in the same breath as the guitar greats – Hendrix, Peter Green, Eric Clapton. These guys were Koss’ heroes and he didn’t, in his heart of hearts, believe he was worthy of comparison to them.
So when you took the band away I think there was a real feeling of vulnerability and I think the terrible consequence of that was his drug intake. Koss was looking for a way out, I think. It had all fallen apart. He didn’t feel confident that the fame and adulation being poured on him was justified and with the band falling apart he had no-one to lean on.
I think he somewhere in his mind followed in the footsteps of his heroes like Hendrix and the other drug people. If people saw him on stage and he was bad then the excuse was it was because he was drugged – as opposed to he was bad. It’s a weird psychological thing. I think he wanted out and it was like a slow suicide.
One of our roadies, Jim McGuire, who had stayed with me throughout all the breakups, had told me about the state Koss had got into. I’d been around to see him and it was pitiful. In the wake of All Right Now he’d bought this little place in Golborne Mews, near Portobello market. Blackwell had originally bought it, fixed it up, but when Koss expressed an interest in it, he sold it to him in a pretty good deal. This was where I went.
It was just two rooms basically, one upstairs and one downstairs, connected by a spiral staircase. You walked in the door and the place was just full of druggies, completely out of it, looked like hundreds of them lying on the floor, leaning against the walls.
Koss was upstairs, surrounded by more of them, handing him stuff, and was just making no sense. When you’re in that stage between ‘mandies’ and heroin, all sorts of other stuff tends to get included; ‘Hey, have a hit of coke to wake you up, Koss,’ or ‘Ooh, look what I’ve got for you today, Koss.’ All these low-lifes leeching off him. It was horrible.
Jim and I agreed we had to get him out of there. We stepped over the bodies and basically kidnapped him. He was too out of it to resist and so was everyone else. We drove him down to Esgairs in Surrey where there was nowhere for him to go. Over the next few days we tried to talk to him, cajole him, reason with him, saying if you’re in there, Koss, we’re trying to reach you. But there was nothing we could do. He resented being there and didn’t want to be helped. In the end we just had to take him back, which gave us a horrible feeling of failure.
It was like finding a baby in a dumpster, rescuing it then putting it back in the dumpster after a few days. It felt criminal placing him back in such a bad environment. This was in the days before rehab, before addiction was properly understood, but even with that understanding if you don’t want to be helped there is no helping you – and that’s how it was with Koss.
