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Through a music forum I'm a member of, I met Glenn Berger who was a recording engineer in his younger days and is now a psychotherapist. He's an excellent writer and occasionally sends me his latest article by email. I'll be posting his articles from time to time for those who are interested. This latest one is on Bob Dylan and 'Blood On The Tracks.'
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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/remembering-blood-on-the-tracks
MY RECORDING SESSIONS WITH BOB DYLAN
What it was like to be in the studio for Blood on the Tracks
By Glenn Berger on September 17, 2014
Michael Montfort / Getty Images
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the New York recording sessions for one of the greatest albums of all time, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. I am the only person alive, besides the man himself, who witnessed all of those sessions. At 18, I was apprentice to the legendary producer/engineer Phil Ramone. Dylan had chosen Phil to record the album, and I, his trusted assistant, would press the buttons.
The date that Dylan picked to begin recording was propitious. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. After making two records for Asylum, he decided to return to Columbia Records, the venerable label at which he started. The recording was to take place in studio A-1, at 799 7th Avenue in Manhattan. This room had belonged to Columbia until they sold it to Ramone in 1968 when it became A&R Studios. Not least of the astounding hits recorded there was "Like a Rolling Stone," Dylan's signature.
Dylan asked Ramone to put a band together. Phil chose Eric Weissberg, banjo and guitar player extraordinaire, and his "Deliverance Band," a bunch of top session players. I set up for drums, bass, guitars, and keyboard. I placed Dylan's mics in the middle of the room. In the midst of the hubbub, Dylan skulked in. He grunted hello and retreated to the farthest corner of the control room, keeping his head down, ignoring us all. No one dared enter his private circle.
As I dashed around the control room, getting everything set, John Hammond arrived. This lightened up the room. Hammond, a visionary record-man, had discovered Dylan. To any Dylan aficionado, this was a classic moment: Dylan and Hammond in this studio together again for Dylan's return to Columbia. Though the studio cats usually embodied the essence of cool, this time they were palpably pumped. It wasn't every day that you got to work with Dylan.
Having checked all the gear, I gave Ramone the go-ahead. He was fast. He got sounds on everyone in minutes. We were ready to rock. I gingerly approached Dylan and told him we could start whenever he liked. He nodded and let me lead him out to the studio. Dylan slung his acoustic guitar over his shoulder and placed his signature harmonica holder around his neck.
Standing inches from him, I brought the mics in close. Time stopped and the snapshot became clear. I was standing next to Bob Dylan: the little wiry body, the hipster-rabbi black vest and white shirt, the tangled up Jew-fro. He was 33 years old. He looked past me, to some place in another dimension. I ran away, back into the control room, as quickly as I could.
He called off a tune.
"Let's do 'If You See Her, Say Hello.'"
He barely rehearsed the song when he told us to record. The players were just beginning to figure out the changes and what to play. On the third try, he threw everyone off by playing a different song. The musicians stumbled. The cats tried to pick up on the new harmonies, but the keyboard player wasn't fast enough. Dylan waved his hand, signaling the keyboardist to drop out.
The musicians were rattled. Barely having recovered from the shock, after a run-through or two of the new song, Dylan changed songs midstream, again, without letting anyone know. Another of the cats crashed a wrong chord into what Dylan was playing, and Dylan swiped him down, too. One by one, the musicians were told to stop playing. This hurt. You could see it in the musicians' eyes as they sat silently behind their instruments, forced not to play by the mercurial whim of the guy painting his masterpiece with finger-paints.
No one would tell him he couldn't do this. After all, this was Dylan. But this was wrong. You're at least supposed to tell the musicians what song you're doing, let them learn the chords, and come up with an arrangement. The feeling went from tense to grim. It slowly began to dawn on the musicians that the dream of playing on a Dylan record was not going to happen.
We ended up with just Dylan and the bass player, Tony Brown. Tony sat inches from Dylan, watching his hands, trying to follow the chord changes as Bob made them, never knowing what chord or song was to come in the next moment. We cut an entire album's worth of material like that in six hours. Now, that blew my mind. The style of the time was set by guys I was working with like Paul Simon, who could take a year to make an album. Dylan did the whole thing on a Monday night.
My confusion deepened when we cut the whole thing two more times on different nights. The dark and painful vibe in the studio reflected the material Bob was recording. The songs of loss and heartache were riveting. Sitting by my tape machine, I could feel the burn of creation from the other side of the glass. Dylan was just a few feet away, his throat tight, sweating, feeling it deep, twisting his vowels,
"You're an eeeeeeeee-iihhhdiot, babe/It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves!"
The song ended with the plaintive moan of his harmonica, a final, clangorous chord, and then silence. We sat and waited.
Dylan turned to us in the control room and said, in his sarcastic snarl, "Was that sincere enough?"
A lifetime of ideals was washed away in one sentence. What could this possibly mean? He'd murdered his musicians with the aplomb of a psychopath; he recorded his album slapdash in a day and then did it again two times more; and now this? Was it sincereenough? The icon of an age, the guy who punctured all pretense, who brought down the whole hypocritical building, the guy who sneered at sanctimony — totally full of it?
Dylan didn't show up for the mix. While most artists were using the studio like an instrument, Dylan didn't care about the recording thing. He left it in Ramone's hands.
The author in Ramone's studio, 1974.
We were working 20-hour days. I hadn't slept more than three hours a night in a year. It was after midnight, just me and Ramone in the studio. I sat behind him, watching, listening. How did he get it so good that the heaviest cats in the world flocked to his door? I wanted the spell so I could have the magic, too.
Between takes, I asked him how he did it. At first he didn't respond. Then, without warning, he twirled around and was an inch from me, his face purple and trembling with rage.
"Who do you think you are, asking the great Ramone a question? You don't question what I do, you just obey!"
I realized Ramone must've thought I was busting him for a mistake. I tried to protest, to tell him I just wanted to learn... But every word just incensed him further. His voice got louder, the screams more insensible, the insults more vicious. "You're nothing! To you I am a god!"
It all started to swirl around me: the hours, the torment, the lack of sleep, "was it sinceeeeeeeeere enough..."
I hit the stop button on the tape machine. I ran out of the control room and through the silent hallway to the bathroom. Under the glaring fluorescent lights, I sat on the pot and blubbered. Despite my newfound certainty that I was utterly worthless, I knew that Ramone needed me to get through the mix. I had made the blood promise. I had to pull it up from somewhere and do my job.
I staggered back into the control room. The room was empty. I walked over to the console. I sat down in Ramone's chair and touched the sacred knobs. I saw little scraps of paper crumpled up on the board. I unfolded one, and in a mangled scrawl was written "Ramone is God." Suddenly feeling anxious, I re-crumpled the scrap, got up, and silently took my seat next to the tape machine.
We finished the record that night. I stayed up till dawn, splicing together the master mixes with a razor blade into the final order of songs.
While sitting in the control room working on overdubs during our next project, Judith, by Judy Collins, the phone rang. I heard Phil say, "Bob, it's amazing. Really, probably your best album ever. Don't worry. It's great."
Phil looked over at me with a perplexed look on his face. We shook our heads in disbelief. Dylan, insecure? Huh?
When we returned from the Christmas holiday, Phil sat down with me, pale and dispirited. Bob had panicked. While visiting his brother in Minnesota, over the break, he had decided to re-record a bunch of the tracks in Minneapolis. The album came out a few weeks later. When I got a copy, I quickly flipped it to the back. I did it all for the glory but I also liked the credit. My name was nowhere on the cover.
Now, in my fifties, in my middle-aged shrink uniform, to look at me no one would know I'd ever been there. I began to wonder if any of it was true. Then I remembered, there was proof. My name was on the take sheets I filled out as part of the assistant's job. I knew the Internet had everything and there were some major Dylan freaks out there. I Googled, "take sheets for Blood on the Tracks."
Amazingly, a guy named Michael Krogsgaard had posted the data. I scrolled down the page to find the information from our album. I read the words: Studio A, A and R Recording, September 16, 1974. New York City. 6PM - Midnight. Here it was! Or, so I thought.
The next line read, "Engineer: Phil/ Lenn."
Ah well. Dylan's final joke.
Forty years later, I wonder what lessons I learned from those days. Ramone and Dylan taught me, but I don't know how well. I've certainly been a major jerk in my day but never made anything immortal like these guys. I did come to understand that artists are not supposed to be nice. They're on a mission from beyond. They go down, deeper into themselves than any of us dare, go through Hell on the journey, steal the sacred fire, and bring it up to share with the rest of us. Who are we to judge the way they behave when they do that much for us?
And Phil. His job was to break me down so he could put me back together as a man. I carry his vision and standard with me in my fingers right to this moment. "That stinks, Berger, do it again," I hear him say. I'm always fighting with Phil, locked in the eternal struggle for domination of the universe. The old man still wins every time, damn him.
Blood on the Tracks. Dylan poured his guts into these songs and that's why they will long endure. He had access to the source in a way that I can only sweetly envy. I can see the brilliance, but it eludes my grasp like an eggshell in the bowl.
I know it's Dylan's blood on those tracks and that's what makes them great. But I take some small measure of solace for my pain and limitations by telling myself that along with his blood, there is also a little bit of mine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/remembering-blood-on-the-tracks
MY RECORDING SESSIONS WITH BOB DYLAN
What it was like to be in the studio for Blood on the Tracks
By Glenn Berger on September 17, 2014
Michael Montfort / Getty Images
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the New York recording sessions for one of the greatest albums of all time, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. I am the only person alive, besides the man himself, who witnessed all of those sessions. At 18, I was apprentice to the legendary producer/engineer Phil Ramone. Dylan had chosen Phil to record the album, and I, his trusted assistant, would press the buttons.
The date that Dylan picked to begin recording was propitious. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. After making two records for Asylum, he decided to return to Columbia Records, the venerable label at which he started. The recording was to take place in studio A-1, at 799 7th Avenue in Manhattan. This room had belonged to Columbia until they sold it to Ramone in 1968 when it became A&R Studios. Not least of the astounding hits recorded there was "Like a Rolling Stone," Dylan's signature.
Dylan asked Ramone to put a band together. Phil chose Eric Weissberg, banjo and guitar player extraordinaire, and his "Deliverance Band," a bunch of top session players. I set up for drums, bass, guitars, and keyboard. I placed Dylan's mics in the middle of the room. In the midst of the hubbub, Dylan skulked in. He grunted hello and retreated to the farthest corner of the control room, keeping his head down, ignoring us all. No one dared enter his private circle.
As I dashed around the control room, getting everything set, John Hammond arrived. This lightened up the room. Hammond, a visionary record-man, had discovered Dylan. To any Dylan aficionado, this was a classic moment: Dylan and Hammond in this studio together again for Dylan's return to Columbia. Though the studio cats usually embodied the essence of cool, this time they were palpably pumped. It wasn't every day that you got to work with Dylan.
Having checked all the gear, I gave Ramone the go-ahead. He was fast. He got sounds on everyone in minutes. We were ready to rock. I gingerly approached Dylan and told him we could start whenever he liked. He nodded and let me lead him out to the studio. Dylan slung his acoustic guitar over his shoulder and placed his signature harmonica holder around his neck.
Standing inches from him, I brought the mics in close. Time stopped and the snapshot became clear. I was standing next to Bob Dylan: the little wiry body, the hipster-rabbi black vest and white shirt, the tangled up Jew-fro. He was 33 years old. He looked past me, to some place in another dimension. I ran away, back into the control room, as quickly as I could.
He called off a tune.
"Let's do 'If You See Her, Say Hello.'"
He barely rehearsed the song when he told us to record. The players were just beginning to figure out the changes and what to play. On the third try, he threw everyone off by playing a different song. The musicians stumbled. The cats tried to pick up on the new harmonies, but the keyboard player wasn't fast enough. Dylan waved his hand, signaling the keyboardist to drop out.
The musicians were rattled. Barely having recovered from the shock, after a run-through or two of the new song, Dylan changed songs midstream, again, without letting anyone know. Another of the cats crashed a wrong chord into what Dylan was playing, and Dylan swiped him down, too. One by one, the musicians were told to stop playing. This hurt. You could see it in the musicians' eyes as they sat silently behind their instruments, forced not to play by the mercurial whim of the guy painting his masterpiece with finger-paints.
No one would tell him he couldn't do this. After all, this was Dylan. But this was wrong. You're at least supposed to tell the musicians what song you're doing, let them learn the chords, and come up with an arrangement. The feeling went from tense to grim. It slowly began to dawn on the musicians that the dream of playing on a Dylan record was not going to happen.
We ended up with just Dylan and the bass player, Tony Brown. Tony sat inches from Dylan, watching his hands, trying to follow the chord changes as Bob made them, never knowing what chord or song was to come in the next moment. We cut an entire album's worth of material like that in six hours. Now, that blew my mind. The style of the time was set by guys I was working with like Paul Simon, who could take a year to make an album. Dylan did the whole thing on a Monday night.
My confusion deepened when we cut the whole thing two more times on different nights. The dark and painful vibe in the studio reflected the material Bob was recording. The songs of loss and heartache were riveting. Sitting by my tape machine, I could feel the burn of creation from the other side of the glass. Dylan was just a few feet away, his throat tight, sweating, feeling it deep, twisting his vowels,
"You're an eeeeeeeee-iihhhdiot, babe/It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves!"
The song ended with the plaintive moan of his harmonica, a final, clangorous chord, and then silence. We sat and waited.
Dylan turned to us in the control room and said, in his sarcastic snarl, "Was that sincere enough?"
A lifetime of ideals was washed away in one sentence. What could this possibly mean? He'd murdered his musicians with the aplomb of a psychopath; he recorded his album slapdash in a day and then did it again two times more; and now this? Was it sincereenough? The icon of an age, the guy who punctured all pretense, who brought down the whole hypocritical building, the guy who sneered at sanctimony — totally full of it?
Dylan didn't show up for the mix. While most artists were using the studio like an instrument, Dylan didn't care about the recording thing. He left it in Ramone's hands.
The author in Ramone's studio, 1974.
We were working 20-hour days. I hadn't slept more than three hours a night in a year. It was after midnight, just me and Ramone in the studio. I sat behind him, watching, listening. How did he get it so good that the heaviest cats in the world flocked to his door? I wanted the spell so I could have the magic, too.
Between takes, I asked him how he did it. At first he didn't respond. Then, without warning, he twirled around and was an inch from me, his face purple and trembling with rage.
"Who do you think you are, asking the great Ramone a question? You don't question what I do, you just obey!"
I realized Ramone must've thought I was busting him for a mistake. I tried to protest, to tell him I just wanted to learn... But every word just incensed him further. His voice got louder, the screams more insensible, the insults more vicious. "You're nothing! To you I am a god!"
It all started to swirl around me: the hours, the torment, the lack of sleep, "was it sinceeeeeeeeere enough..."
I hit the stop button on the tape machine. I ran out of the control room and through the silent hallway to the bathroom. Under the glaring fluorescent lights, I sat on the pot and blubbered. Despite my newfound certainty that I was utterly worthless, I knew that Ramone needed me to get through the mix. I had made the blood promise. I had to pull it up from somewhere and do my job.
I staggered back into the control room. The room was empty. I walked over to the console. I sat down in Ramone's chair and touched the sacred knobs. I saw little scraps of paper crumpled up on the board. I unfolded one, and in a mangled scrawl was written "Ramone is God." Suddenly feeling anxious, I re-crumpled the scrap, got up, and silently took my seat next to the tape machine.
We finished the record that night. I stayed up till dawn, splicing together the master mixes with a razor blade into the final order of songs.
While sitting in the control room working on overdubs during our next project, Judith, by Judy Collins, the phone rang. I heard Phil say, "Bob, it's amazing. Really, probably your best album ever. Don't worry. It's great."
Phil looked over at me with a perplexed look on his face. We shook our heads in disbelief. Dylan, insecure? Huh?
When we returned from the Christmas holiday, Phil sat down with me, pale and dispirited. Bob had panicked. While visiting his brother in Minnesota, over the break, he had decided to re-record a bunch of the tracks in Minneapolis. The album came out a few weeks later. When I got a copy, I quickly flipped it to the back. I did it all for the glory but I also liked the credit. My name was nowhere on the cover.
Now, in my fifties, in my middle-aged shrink uniform, to look at me no one would know I'd ever been there. I began to wonder if any of it was true. Then I remembered, there was proof. My name was on the take sheets I filled out as part of the assistant's job. I knew the Internet had everything and there were some major Dylan freaks out there. I Googled, "take sheets for Blood on the Tracks."
Amazingly, a guy named Michael Krogsgaard had posted the data. I scrolled down the page to find the information from our album. I read the words: Studio A, A and R Recording, September 16, 1974. New York City. 6PM - Midnight. Here it was! Or, so I thought.
The next line read, "Engineer: Phil/ Lenn."
Ah well. Dylan's final joke.
Forty years later, I wonder what lessons I learned from those days. Ramone and Dylan taught me, but I don't know how well. I've certainly been a major jerk in my day but never made anything immortal like these guys. I did come to understand that artists are not supposed to be nice. They're on a mission from beyond. They go down, deeper into themselves than any of us dare, go through Hell on the journey, steal the sacred fire, and bring it up to share with the rest of us. Who are we to judge the way they behave when they do that much for us?
And Phil. His job was to break me down so he could put me back together as a man. I carry his vision and standard with me in my fingers right to this moment. "That stinks, Berger, do it again," I hear him say. I'm always fighting with Phil, locked in the eternal struggle for domination of the universe. The old man still wins every time, damn him.
Blood on the Tracks. Dylan poured his guts into these songs and that's why they will long endure. He had access to the source in a way that I can only sweetly envy. I can see the brilliance, but it eludes my grasp like an eggshell in the bowl.
I know it's Dylan's blood on those tracks and that's what makes them great. But I take some small measure of solace for my pain and limitations by telling myself that along with his blood, there is also a little bit of mine.
