When you acquire acetates, where do you get them?
We [Columbia/Legacy] have a huge archive back east at a place called Iron Mountain, which is about a hundred miles north of New York City. That’s where all the assets of this company are: metal parts that were recorded in the ’20s and ’30s; acetates from the late ’30s up to 1948, when we started to use tape; and all the tapes. They’re stored at this huge facility that looks like something out of James Bond. It’s the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen in your life. That’s where they were. They have a whole storage system.
There’s a regular procedure that producers go through. Once we decide that we’re going to do a project, then I do the research for the sides that I want or, generally, everything the guy recorded. We put in a request. There’s a whole methodology that we employ. It goes to the studio in New York. Then it goes up to the facility, Iron Mountain. They search it, and they get the stuff. And then I have it.
I did a thing called The Retrospective, which is a four-CD set. All the ’20s, ’30s stuff that we found—except for some of the very late ’30s blues stuff, around ’39, which were on acetate—everything was on metal parts. So the metal parts varied in quality. Some of them looked magnificent and hadn’t been played since 1926 or ’7. You put them on, and they were terrible. Others looked awful. They were stained, looked like they were ready to be thrown out. You’d play them, and they would be absolutely perfect. There was no rhyme or reason. We had no formula. We had to take every single track individually and set up for each track individually. In other words, we couldn’t make a setup that would work for all the things that we were doing. It was just impossible. Obviously, that compounded our work.
LAWRENCE COHN
The project was my idea. Luckily, I found the original acetates that were recorded at the sessions in the ’40s. They were in dreadful shape. There were a lot of tapes that had been done over the years, rechanneled stereo and all kinds of crappy endeavors. I destroyed those things and threw them away. As I said, we’d found the original acetates. They were beat up and scratched. We worked hard to clean them up and get them to where I felt they were really proper.
I remastered the thing three different times, because it was not quite right till the end, and then, of course, it was right. My engineer said I was hallucinating. I was hearing things. He locked me out of the studio at a point. He claimed I was giving him a nervous breakdown.
I said, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is that it just does not sound the way I want it to.”
In the end it came out very well. I found so many unissued alternate takes. I know Bill was very happy. He went on Nashville television, TNN, with the box and said that he felt it was the nicest thing that anyone had ever done for him, for his career. Unsolicited, he sent me an autographed picture saying, “Dear Larry, thanks for a great job.” I understand, from a friend of mine, who was his manager for many years, that he saw Monroe do that maybe four or five times in twenty-five years. So I was very proud. I was very happy that I could give it to him before he passed away.
BOB IRWIN
That’s the thing that’s most intriguing to me about country performers as opposed to rock ’n’ roll performers. And I don’t mean this to be disparaging at all toward rock ’n’ roll performers, but country guys were nailing this stuff in one to three takes. You listen to Bob Wills lacquers from the ’30s and ’40s [supervised by Don Law]. It’s pretty much—for all intents and purposes—the band producing themselves. When [guitarist] Eldon Shamblin blows a solo, the whole band stops. You hear them laugh, and then they kick up the next take. And like [Wills’s band] the Texas Playboys, many country musicians were, number one, in essence producing themselves and, number two, nailing stuff in two or three takes.
In the earlier days, when people were recording to lacquer or to full-track mono tape, I really do believe that, not just in Don Law’s case, but with most producers, it was much more in an A&R capacity than in a producer’s capacity. They let the groups be themselves more. Outside of certain miking techniques, which I’m sure was more the engineer’s responsibility than the producer’s, I can’t hear the producer. I could be wrong about that. Maybe Don Law was sitting there saying, “No, no, no, I don’t want that to sound like that. I want the mike over there.” But I’m going to bet that most of the time the engineer was doing that. Certainly, once you start hitting the mid-to-late ’50s and, especially, the early ’60s, you can hear producers’ trademarks all over the place. That’s not so much the case in the ’30s and ’40s. People weren’t picking producers. Producers were pretty much assigned, or the producers were picking which artists they were going to work with.
Could be his name, but Don Law (1902–1982) illustrates early record production—as a rule. He recalls any number of film directors from Hollywood’s studio era: professionals not considered auteurs.
Law immigrated to the States in 1924. By the end of the Depression, he was supervising recording sessions for the American Record Corporation, working with another pioneering A&R man, “Uncle” Art Satherley. When Satherley retired in 1952, Law was appointed head of Columbia’s country division. During the ’50s and ’60s, he produced a full roster of country legends: Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Dean, Ray Price, Johnny Horton, Marty Robbins, and the Statler Brothers.
DON LAW JR.
My father came from a formal English background. He was a member of the London Choral Society. He had two uncles who had been knighted. He came over [in 1924], and through family connections, he was given a job in the import-export steel business. He worked in New York. After the steel market collapsed, he decided, “I’m going to go south.”
He went down to Georgia, and he hooked up with a White Russian friend of the family. With backing, they started a large sheep ranch. The sheep got hit by some disease. My father described riding from dawn till dusk, doing an operation on these sheep—trying to save them and being unable to. He said it was catastrophic. So the White Russian friend went down to Brazil.
My father said, “I’m going to go see what cowboys are about.” He got on the bus and went to Dallas. He really had no idea what he was going to do. He went to work for Brunswick, who made bowling balls and phonograph records. They were bought by the American Record Corporation [in 1931]. There, he started working with another Englishman named Art Satherley, and he worked his way into doing field recordings. Then ARC took over Columbia [1934], whose home base was Bridgeport, Connecticut. That was before they were bought by CBS [in 1938]. My father and Satherley did the early recordings of Gene Autry—“Back in the Saddle Again” and the first recording of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—and a lot of the early Carter Family stuff.
LAWRENCE COHN
Don Law made all of the Robert