I learned that when you cut records one person in a room can screw up the whole groove of everything. The best thing that you can learn for producing records is human psychology: how to get rid of that problem. If it’s a musician, let’s say, who’s messing things up ’cause he’s not playing right, he’s got a bad attitude, you need to know how to pull him out without causing a scene. Or if the artist is in a place where they’re causing the problem, best thing you can do is just shut it down. Without them, you’re screwed anyway. It’s like the old weak-link-in-the-chain proverb. You get all these great, talented people together, and if you can’t make them all communicate with each other, you’re not going to get something great. You’ll get something okay, because they’re good. But it won’t be great. You get something great when you’ve got everybody communicating with each other.
JIM ED NORMAN
(produced Kenny Rogers, Something Inside So Strong)
I had the conviction that a producer’s responsibility was to create a great work environment for the artist. You had to have great material, and you then had to bring people together. You had a creative management job: how you deal with the moment and the opportunity that everyone has when you’re collected together in the studio to work and to create. A producer has to give guidance and direction, but as much as anything, he has to create an environment in which the creative energies that are already inherent in the people that are there—who have come together that day—can flourish.
JIM ROONEY (produced Iris DeMent, Infamous Angel)
One of the things I think a producer needs to be, temperamentally, is a person able to make a lot of little, tiny decisions pretty quickly. In my own case I basically rely on my instincts. Because I also play and sing, I want the musicians or the artists to be as comfortable as possible and to forget about the fact that we’re making a record. In other words, I want them to focus on playing and singing and doing what they do. I want those conditions to be right for them. I don’t want the earphones to be nonfunctioning. I want them to be able to communicate easily. That means positioning them in the room so that they’re comfortable—things like that. It’s all kind of mundane in certain ways, but I think it’s extremely important to pay attention to those things.
I figured this out myself by watching other people and by being in circumstances that I found uncomfortable. One thing I never liked, as a musician or as an artist, was if I was ready to sing or ready to play, and the engineer or producer wasn’t ready to record. I found that very frustrating. I’ve seen the wind go out of the sails of a recording session for the simplest reasons.
PETE ANDERSON
I am a musician-producer as opposed to an engineer-producer. To be very broad and general, there are probably three ways you can get into this producing thing. One, you’re a producer like, let’s say, a Phil Ramone—who was an engineer and, then, crossed the line and became more musical. I come from a musical background: from playing guitar on sessions, being on the other side of the glass, being on the floor as a musician, and then having some concept of what I wanted to do technically with music—learning enough technical dialogue to communicate. [I wanted] to learn the language but not necessarily plug things in, EQ stuff, or do anything technical with my hands. And then there’s the kind of music collector, the musicologist. The greatest one is probably John Hammond Sr. He didn’t play an instrument that I know of, and he wasn’t a musician or an engineer. He was intelligent, astute, and had great taste. He signed countless great people throughout history. More and more, that particular style doesn’t exist.
CRAIG STREET
There was a record not long ago that I fired myself from because the artist wanted to do something that I absolutely did not agree with. What I was told coming into the record and did and delivered dutifully, the artist decided to do something different. It wasn’t just something different, it was like taking a circle made out of titanium and saying we want this to be a rubber square. “I am not an alchemist. I can’t do that. And I won’t do it. It’s boring.” I think the label was stunned that I just walked away—and walked away from back-end [earnings]. I think the artist couldn’t quite figure it out. But you have to do that sometime.
That’s one of the great lessons that I learned from T-Bone [Burnett], who has always been helpful and a champion. I remember seeing him walking away with his golf clubs.
“What’s going on?”
“We are not quite agreeing in there anymore. So I fired myself. I’m going to play golf.”
I’m like, “Cool, man, I like that! I’m going to remember that one. I’m going to use that someday.”
* Quantizing is a means of achieving absolute precision through digital music technology.
1
CUTTING TRACKS
CAPTURING THE PERFORMANCE, 1927–1949
Very soon after 1877, the invention that Edison called a phonograph articulated in such a way as to serve the interests of corporate capital; which is to say, technologies for recording and reproducing sound worked to the distinct advantage of newly formed record companies—not musicians. Entertainment companies, in the guise of their designees, artists and repertoire (A&R) men, managed musical production by controlling all facets of preproduction.
Cutting tracks to disc allowed A&R men only limited control of the production phase of record-making. Hence, they don’t talk much about time spent in studios, because production happened outside that space. Early producers were tasked with choosing who (artists) and what (repertoire) to record. They crafted deals more than they crafted sounds. They functioned as agents of “artificial selection,” in a Darwinian sense of the term. However invisible (or inaudible) the manifestations of their control may have been, in seeking to ensure the survival and profitability of corporate interests, A&R men profoundly shaped, even defined, country music. They were mediating figures, standing between artist and record company, artist and technology, and artist and public.
• • •
Interviewed in his Hollywood office in 1959, Ralph Peer (1892–1960) informed Lillian Borgeson that the recording sessions he supervised back in the 1920s yielded nothing more than movable pieces in a complex financial game. Records weren’t end products, packaged goods, or software necessary for newfangled hardware. And they sure weren’t timeless treasures. They were a means to accruing copyright royalties. That’s where the real money lay.
As a young man hired to produce “race records,” Peer had learned this lesson well. The money he made for the General Phonograph Company’s OKeh label could have filled a caravan of red wheelbarrows. In 1923, when Peer and Atlanta businessman Polk Brockman scored a hit recording with Fiddlin’ John Carson, they initiated what would later become known as “country music.” Peer called it “hillbilly” music. Years later, when Borgeson pressed him to recall the “hillbillies” he’d recorded, Peer responded, “Oh, I tried so hard to forget them.”
Presumably, Peer wasn’t referring to Jimmie Rodgers or to the Carter Family—unforgettable “discoveries” of his 1927 recording expedition to Bristol, Tennessee. But it’s a safe bet he didn’t want to talk about country music’s patriarchs. His fondest memories undoubtedly revolved around the deal he struck with the Victor Talking Machine Company and any number of talented hillbillies. Compared to the strip-mining techniques favored by other A&R men, where songs were bought out-right for measly sums of cash, Peer employed an approach to American song that country scholar Richard Peterson, in Creating Country Music (1997), labeled “deep-shaft mining.” At OKeh Records