Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sense Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is Bob Margot. You know him, was
Speaker 1: a producer of Devo Stevie Wonder. He sings, he plays.
Speaker 1: Bob how'd you meet Stevie Wonder?
Speaker 2: Well, I'd like to say, just be clear, I'm not
Speaker 2: the producer of Stevie Wonder. I'm the associate producer of
Speaker 2: Stevie Wonder. Stevie gets very tense if I say co
Speaker 2: producer or producer, but that's neither here nor there. How
Speaker 2: did I meet Stevie? Stevie heard an album that my
Speaker 2: friend Malcolm Cecil and I did back in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: I guess, and he heard it was Tonto's expanding headband
Speaker 2: and it was all on electronica album that Malcolm and
Speaker 2: I did together at Media Sound, and it was all
Speaker 2: electronic and very off the wall, but it was at
Speaker 2: a time when the electronica was just finding its way.
Speaker 2: And I met Malcolm at the studio. He was the
Speaker 2: chief of maintenance and well technology basically more than maintenance.
Speaker 2: And I was a synthesizer bad boy at the studio
Speaker 2: with my Bogue synthesizer doing sound for commercials and stuff
Speaker 2: for the studio and I'm working at night, and we
Speaker 2: hooked up together and we ended up developing a very
Speaker 2: large synthesizer called Tonto the Original Neo Timberol Orchestra, and
Speaker 2: it was one instrument to be played by both of
Speaker 2: us at the same time. And we did a record
Speaker 2: for Herbie Mann's label Embryo called Tonto's Expanding Headband, which
Speaker 2: was my sort of peyote name, I guess. And Steve
Speaker 2: heard it, and he also heard a lot of music
Speaker 2: switched on Bach and a whole bunch of other stuff,
Speaker 2: and he was very curious. And on a Memorial Day
Speaker 2: weekend in nineteen seventy two, it was a weekend and
Speaker 2: there was no traffic outside and we hear him somebody
Speaker 2: calling up from the street. Because Malcolm's apartment was on
Speaker 2: the second floor, it was very quiet, and we were
Speaker 2: up there hanging out and the sky Ronnie Blanco brought
Speaker 2: Steve by the studios. We look out the window down
Speaker 2: to the front of the building and there's Steve's standing
Speaker 2: there and Ronnie yells up, hey, we got somebody here
Speaker 2: wants to hear the synthesizer. Well, he heard it, and
Speaker 2: that was the beginning of it all. He never left
Speaker 2: after that. That one weekend when the studio was closed,
Speaker 2: we recorded maybe fifteen tunes. He just got going. Steve
Speaker 2: got it right away. He's totally He has a mind
Speaker 2: like a vice. I mean, you can't. I mean even
Speaker 2: to this day. I was talking to him on the
Speaker 2: phone about uh. I was talking to him about Living
Speaker 2: for the City, that song that we recorded at Media
Speaker 2: and I said, Steve, what do you remember about us
Speaker 2: tracking that song? The first thing out of his mouth
Speaker 2: was this is like, I don't know. Forty years later
Speaker 2: it was raining. I mean, really, the guy has a
Speaker 2: mind that is so detailed oriented, and so the ability
Speaker 2: to memorize stuff. I guess it's because he's onsided. But
Speaker 2: we really hit it off of those that time, and
Speaker 2: I think what we were doing was very important as well.
Speaker 2: Primarily a part of it for me was the political
Speaker 2: aspects of what Steve was talking writing about, like Living
Speaker 2: for the City or Mister Noah All or any of
Speaker 2: these songs that were political. I'm ten years older than Steve.
Speaker 2: I'm eighty five. Steve is seventy five. Now I can't
Speaker 2: believe it, but in my high school days it was
Speaker 2: way before Steve, when I was fifteen or sixteen years old.
Speaker 2: It was Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act. It
Speaker 2: was the Norman Pettis Bridge. It was little black girls
Speaker 2: going to school in the South being escorted by white marshalls.
Speaker 2: It was sputnik. It was a very interesting time about
Speaker 2: civil rights in general, and very important time, and I
Speaker 2: learned a lot at that time. The reason I bring
Speaker 2: it up is I learned a lot about civil rights
Speaker 2: and I was very much a progressive lefty even in
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six. So when Steve came on the scene
Speaker 2: and he started writing songs like Living for the City
Speaker 2: and mister Noah All, I realized that we really were
Speaker 2: walking the same path, maybe different roads, to the same place.
Speaker 2: But when he started writing songs like that, I knew
Speaker 2: that I'd found home base. And most of the songs
Speaker 2: that I've done and music and artists that I've worked
Speaker 2: with over the years, the ones that have a political
Speaker 2: aspect to them, especially about civil rights, are ones that
Speaker 2: I tend to gravitate towards. And nuts. We met him
Speaker 2: and he said, oh, let's try recording something. We went
Speaker 2: in the studio. We never left for three and a
Speaker 2: half or four years. It was like a switch was thrown.
Speaker 2: It was magical. I thought it would go on forever.
Speaker 2: It didn't go on forever, but nothing in life goes
Speaker 2: on forever, you know. So I'm just glad I was
Speaker 2: there for the time we worked together and whatever roles
Speaker 2: we played. All I know that first album especially was
Speaker 2: just the three of us. No, he wasn't famous enough,
Speaker 2: although he'd had like ten albums, you know, R and
Speaker 2: B albums. You know, he was his own person, and
Speaker 2: we tried to reinforce the whole civil rights thing as
Speaker 2: much as we could in every way. It was very
Speaker 2: important to me, and it is still to this day
Speaker 2: important to me, and I hope that some young musicians
Speaker 2: are taking up the cause now for because through music,
Speaker 2: I hope maybe we can find some piece of quiet
Speaker 2: and some dignity and truth. It seems were very far
Speaker 2: from that right now. And I know I tried to
Speaker 2: carry the flag with Steve, the other black artist. During
Speaker 2: that time, I was doing a lot of that kind
Speaker 2: of political writing. Was more than gay, also an interesting
Speaker 2: man to say the least. But when we were on
Speaker 2: our own and Steve wasn't tethered to motown anymore. It
Speaker 2: was a really huge degree of freedom and the detective
Speaker 2: work between the three of us and the studio, and
Speaker 2: it was magical. I cannot tell you, you know. I think
Speaker 2: a lot of people even today are always trying to
Speaker 2: figure out the sound of our own wheels. And I
Speaker 2: don't know. I can't. Even looking back on it and
Speaker 2: spending two and a half years writing a book about it,
Speaker 2: I still don't really understand what the hell happened. It's
Speaker 2: just a kind of an isness. It felt natural and
Speaker 2: felt good, it felt truthful. It was magical.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's go back. How'd you become the mog expert?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a long story, off a short pier. I
Speaker 2: was originally a filmmaker. I graduated from the US Army
Speaker 2: Signal School and I was my big passion was photography,
Speaker 2: and I became a combat photographer and I went I
Speaker 2: was stationed in Stuttgart, Germany in the seventh Corps as
Speaker 2: a combat photographer, and I learned combat photography and how
Speaker 2: to use cameras and everything else. And when I got
Speaker 2: out of the service, I came back and settled in
Speaker 2: the East Village with the idea of going into the
Speaker 2: motion picture business, and in doing so, I got hooked
Speaker 2: up with Andy Warhol's crowd.
Speaker 1: Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, you come back
Speaker 1: from the army. I had to meet Andy Warhol. Well.
Speaker 2: I met a guy named Chuck Wine, who was Andy's
Speaker 2: blue eyed, blonde hair genius sort of guru, who was
Speaker 2: pontificating at the factory. I met him by accident at
Speaker 2: a gay coffee house in the West Village on Christopher Street,
Speaker 2: and he said, what are you doing. I said, I'm
Speaker 2: making movies. I have a little studio uptown on forty
Speaker 2: seventh Street, and I'm making documentaries for Paramount and a
Speaker 2: few things like that. And I was talking to Chillie Wilson,
Speaker 2: who had like a couple of soft porn houses on
Speaker 2: forty second Street, and all the young filmmakers were going
Speaker 2: there because you couldn't get a job as a filmmaker
Speaker 2: if you tried to go to a major company and say, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm a cinematographer of this, and then they say that's
Speaker 2: very nice, but are you in the union. No, I'm
Speaker 2: not in the union. Well you have to be in
Speaker 2: the union if we hire you. So then you go
Speaker 2: all and you go over to the union to say, well,
Speaker 2: we can't get you in the union because you don't
Speaker 2: have a job. I mean, it was sort of a
Speaker 2: catch twenty two. So there was a group of people
Speaker 2: who were making movies, you know, outside the union and
Speaker 2: outside the big things. One of the was Chellie Wilson.
Speaker 2: She made like she had a couple of these super
Speaker 2: soft porn you know, raincoat kind of theaters on forty
Speaker 2: second Street, and she'd give you forty seven thousand or
Speaker 2: five hundred bucks, make me, make make me a movie.
Speaker 2: She was a Greek lady. And I was getting ready
Speaker 2: to do one of those. It was going to be
Speaker 2: called Stripped and Strapped, and that fell out completely when
Speaker 2: I met Chuck Wine, who said, you know, we really
Speaker 2: want to do something. And a lot of them were
Speaker 2: really unhappy with Andy because he didn't pay anything. Everything
Speaker 2: was for free, and it was kind of a lass,
Speaker 2: a fair way of making movies with him. And it was,
Speaker 2: you know, a clutch of beautiful models and beautiful people
Speaker 2: who were upper crustaceans in New York, and it was
Speaker 2: kind of druggy and happening, and Andy was busy being
Speaker 2: trendy and stuff, and I slowly fell in with them,
Speaker 2: and then Chuck came to me and said, I want
Speaker 2: to make a movie, and I said, well, I want
Speaker 2: to make a movie. So we said we got in together.
Speaker 2: Let's make an above the first above ground underground movie.
Speaker 2: Let's make something that can be accessible to more people
Speaker 2: than a few people clutching around in the East village,
Speaker 2: that we can act actually do more than Empire or
Speaker 2: some of these films. And I said, yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2: And that turned into a film called Chow Manhattan that
Speaker 2: featured the life of Edie Sedgwick. Basically what turned into
Speaker 2: it turned into a five year opera. But in the
Speaker 2: process of doing that, I heard the mog synthesizer to
Speaker 2: answer your.
Speaker 1: Quest, No, I want to I want to go back.
Speaker 1: So when you're involved with Andy Child Manhattan, he's still
Speaker 1: on the way up. Everybody doesn't really know who he is,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And this is before the Paul Morrissey films
Speaker 1: and Joe Dallasandro.
Speaker 2: During during that time. Okay, so Joe Della Sandra lives
Speaker 2: across the street from my house. By the way, he's
Speaker 2: manager of the apartment building on the next block. Really, yeah,
Speaker 2: I didn't know you knew about Joe Dallas, of course,
Speaker 2: without going through all the superstars at Warholes. Paul America
Speaker 2: was there, he was there, Baby Jane Holtzer was there. Andy.
Speaker 2: I had one table at Maxis Kansas City with my
Speaker 2: with my little troop, and Andy had the other table
Speaker 2: in the corner under the red fluorescent light in the
Speaker 2: other corner, and we used to google back and forth,
Speaker 2: and Edie would come in like a princess who was
Speaker 2: like royalty, all decked out with the with the hair
Speaker 2: and all that stuff. And it was really a scene.
Speaker 2: And we got started making showm Manhattan. I brought adult
Speaker 2: adult cameras and stuff, and I actually had enough of
Speaker 2: a budget to offer people a salary.
Speaker 1: Ok okay, a couple of things. Did you interact directly
Speaker 1: with the Andy on occasion? And what was he like?
Speaker 1: We only know the public image.
Speaker 2: It was very sort of very mild bennered guy. He
Speaker 2: would let life happen around him. He wasn't really he
Speaker 2: wasn't an instigator. He was more of a He would
Speaker 2: have an amused kind of look, and people would want
Speaker 2: to take off their clothes in front of them. I
Speaker 2: don't know why it was, but people wanted to expose
Speaker 2: themselves to him and more, not just the clothes, but
Speaker 2: emotionally and stuff. But he was very uh, was very
Speaker 2: nonplussed about everything, very peaceful guy. I respected him, I
Speaker 2: respected his art. But the people were working with and
Speaker 2: never got paid. Everyone was hungry. A lot of people
Speaker 2: were seeing doctor Roberts, doctor Max Jacobs.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know this is a thing from the era
Speaker 1: Doctor feel Good. Their bands called Doctor Fulgod. Tell us
Speaker 1: about the original Doctor feel Good.
Speaker 2: Well, the original Doctor feel Good was a guy named
Speaker 2: doctor in real life, his nameless. He's gone now so
Speaker 2: I can say something, and he's in my book Shaping
Speaker 2: ste Just.
Speaker 1: To be clear, Bob has a new book called Shaping Sounds,
Speaker 1: Stevie Wonder Devo, the Synth Revolution and My Life behind
Speaker 1: the Music. So you can pick that up and get
Speaker 1: more detailed stories of the stories we're telling, but continue
Speaker 1: where you left off.
Speaker 2: So basically, Max was a doctor who was a vitamin specialist.
Speaker 2: I guess you can put that in quotes. I think
Speaker 2: most of his vitamins consisted of a methan, fhetamine, hydrochloride,
Speaker 2: and vitamin B and he was poking up everybody in town.
Speaker 2: It was rumored he was also poking up John Kennedy,
Speaker 2: and he traveled with Kennedy to meet Bruzhnev in Roma,
Speaker 2: Italy somewhere. Anyway, he was poking up the people in
Speaker 2: hair and everyone. He had a very nice practice, and
Speaker 2: he was giving out these vitamin shots. I said, it
Speaker 2: sounds pretty good. I opened up an account.
Speaker 1: I went.
Speaker 2: I tried it once or twice, and I absolutely hated it,
Speaker 2: and I never went back. But there were a bunch
Speaker 2: of people in my tribe that were used to look
Speaker 2: of it was fucking crazy.
Speaker 1: Okay, it was public. They didn't call it Doctor feel
Speaker 1: Good quite yet, but they were vitamin shots. But everybody
Speaker 1: knew they weren't vitamin shots.
Speaker 2: Right, You're exactly correct. It was really a scene, I
Speaker 2: have to tell you. But what happened was to answer
Speaker 2: your original question and not go off too far to
Speaker 2: the life. The thing that I really wanted to do
Speaker 2: is I wanted to put the means of production in
Speaker 2: the hands of the creatives themselves, instead of having a
Speaker 2: cameraman director of photography, like a whole bunch of people
Speaker 2: with pencil protectors and white shirts and equipment people and
Speaker 2: union and all this stuff. The equipment was getting lighter
Speaker 2: and lighter, and smaller and smaller. And since I really
Speaker 2: understood photography and everything, I said, I really want to
Speaker 2: make a documentary about the lifestyle of what was going
Speaker 2: on at that time, and I want to put the
Speaker 2: creative tools, cameras and recording equipment stuff in the hands
Speaker 2: of the creatives themselves to see what would happen. I mean,
Speaker 2: that was a very altruistic approach, to say the least.
Speaker 2: At any rate, Doctor feel Good was in there doing
Speaker 2: his stuff. Maxis, Kansas City was running full blast. I
Speaker 2: was moving around down in the East Village. I lived
Speaker 2: around the corner from the Fillmore East one block, actually
Speaker 2: around the corner on fifth Street. The Fillmore was between
Speaker 2: fifth and sixth on Second Avenue. Ellen Stewart was across
Speaker 2: the street with Lomma and the whole theater scene. Everything
Speaker 2: was churning down there like crazy. It was wonderful and creative,
Speaker 2: with the smell of pot smoke in the air and
Speaker 2: people sitting on the trash cans along the street there
Speaker 2: with the chained lids and stuff sitting there playing guitars
Speaker 2: and busking, and people on the streets, and the second
Speaker 2: Avenue Delhi and the Strami Sandwiches and the Ratners, and
Speaker 2: the whole thing was like really churning the smell of
Speaker 2: pot in the air. It was an interesting time. And
Speaker 2: I found myself one night in a dance club called Cerebrum,
Speaker 2: and I heard some bleeping and blooping happening from the
Speaker 2: sound booth and I went up there and sitting on
Speaker 2: the floor a couple of modules from a mode synthesizer,
Speaker 2: and I said to myself. The light bulb went off
Speaker 2: in my little Jewish head, and I said, this is
Speaker 2: the way to make the music for Chow Manhattan. And
Speaker 2: at that point in time, at that point and time,
Speaker 2: you know, at that point, was it already called Chold Manhattan.
Speaker 2: Who was that after it was all done? No, it
Speaker 2: was already we were already starting to call it Chow Manhattan.
Speaker 2: And David Weisman, who we called Raka, who worked with
Speaker 2: Chuck at the factory. He was also a maker of
Speaker 2: a designer of the movie build the movie posters, Ferato
Speaker 2: Premeger or people like that. He was swinging around doing
Speaker 2: stuff and we were already making posters that said Chol
Speaker 2: Manhattan and stuff. But I said, this is the way
Speaker 2: I could really put this in the hands of myself
Speaker 2: as a musician and as the people around me, and
Speaker 2: we could actually score the movie with the tongue, with
Speaker 2: the synthesizer, with the mog synthesizer. I called U Bob
Speaker 2: mog on the phone the next couple of days.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, wait, Bob MOGU was from Buffalo.
Speaker 2: Right, Oh, he was from Trumansburg, New York. Where's Trumansburg
Speaker 2: toward Buffalo? But so was he still in Trumansburg?
Speaker 1: Yes? Okay, and uh.
Speaker 2: He hooked me up with a guy named Walter Seer,
Speaker 2: who then went on to have a very wonderful studio
Speaker 2: in town called Seer Sound, which is one of the
Speaker 2: few tube studios. Walter was an incredible guy. He also
Speaker 2: had a tuba factory. He was a very interesting guy.
Speaker 2: And I ended up buying a Mog three off the
Speaker 2: floor from the name convention that happened in the coliseum
Speaker 2: when it was on Columbus Circle.
Speaker 1: Okay, just to be clear, when rock bands went on
Speaker 1: the road, they went with the mini mogue. By time
Speaker 1: you had the mini mogue, you had the arms way later.
Speaker 1: Getting my question, that's why by time you get to
Speaker 1: the mini mode, you got the ARP twenty six hundred.
Speaker 1: Before that, you have the ARP twenty five hundred. Okay,
Speaker 1: the arps you literally had to plug the cables in.
Speaker 1: When you get a mog, what are you actually getting
Speaker 1: when you got it? Well, you would today call a.
Speaker 2: Euro rack, but a giant analog version of a euro rack.
Speaker 2: Separate modules all tied together with a common power supply,
Speaker 2: but a where you would set the various modules in
Speaker 2: various serial order to create sounds.
Speaker 1: Right, so there'd be a sound generator. It's not as
Speaker 1: simple as you sit in a keyboard in plate. You
Speaker 1: had to create the sound and you would use the
Speaker 1: keyboard to trigger this sound.
Speaker 2: One of things to trigger the sound would be a keyboard,
Speaker 2: it could be other things. The first thing that Bob
Speaker 2: Mogue was really into was a therement. He was selling
Speaker 2: thereman kits to everybody, and that really was a very
Speaker 2: interesting instrument. And the reason that was of interest to
Speaker 2: me is there was a band called Lothar in the
Speaker 2: hand people, and Lothar was a theremin. And when Bob
Speaker 2: Mogue and Walter Seer brought my synthesizer, the one I
Speaker 2: bought off the floor to the studio, they brought a
Speaker 2: someone named Tom Fly, who later became a very major
Speaker 2: recording engineer at Record Plant, brought him along with his
Speaker 2: band called Lothar in the Hand People, which I ended
Speaker 2: up producing for Capitol Records.
Speaker 1: They were from Denver.
Speaker 2: Yes, a wonderful band, sort of a pre Devo in
Speaker 2: a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Just to be clear, wasn't that they started in the
Speaker 1: summer of sixty six? Were they using the theorem in
Speaker 1: before Good Vibrations?
Speaker 2: Yes, and they of course Tom Fly came in and
Speaker 2: Rusty and all the gang, Kim King and Tom I
Speaker 2: don't remember everyone, but we went in and I cut
Speaker 2: My first record with them was a song called Machines,
Speaker 2: and we started with the theoreman I got it. And
Speaker 2: also then we all started using the mode in my
Speaker 2: little studio at Centaur before it was called Tonto, and
Speaker 2: I made that first record with them, Lothar in the handPeople.
Speaker 2: Lothar was a theremin and that was really my total
Speaker 2: introduction to doing that stuff. And if you listen to
Speaker 2: that song Machines, you'll hear a little bit of Whippet
Speaker 2: in there. It's a strange connection, I know. Okay, Just
Speaker 2: to be clear, you already had the mogue when you
Speaker 2: worked with Lothar or not yet, I had the mug.
Speaker 2: Lothar brought the mog to my studio.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's it.
Speaker 2: That's a fly from from Lothar worked for Walter Seer.
Speaker 2: He was Walter Sear's gopher and he was the one
Speaker 2: who brought the thing on the handtruck and stuff to
Speaker 2: my studio on forty seventh Street. With all the rabbis
Speaker 2: where they're cutting diamonds in the building of the Funnies
Speaker 2: Paison and the whole deal, I couldn't tell them apart
Speaker 2: the hippies of the rabbis are all okay.
Speaker 1: What people don't realize. In the original days of synthesizers,
Speaker 1: it was very scientific. So in terms of song, you know, generator,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Did you just fiddled with it until you
Speaker 1: found sounds you liked?
Speaker 2: Yes, because there was nothing written about how to use
Speaker 2: the synthesizer and wrote the manual. Bob had some ideas,
Speaker 2: but you know, Bob was a you know, electronics engineer,
Speaker 2: white shirt, short sleeves, pencil protector kind of a guy,
Speaker 2: very mellow, easy going, and when we're having trouble with it,
Speaker 2: he'd come down from Schruminsburg and sit on the floor
Speaker 2: in the studio and solder up stuff for the keyboards
Speaker 2: that were drifting and not holding pitch and stuff, and
Speaker 2: he would invent stuff and it wasn't Wendy Carlos. Wendy
Speaker 2: was a precision guy. Steve heard Wendy's album, by the way,
Speaker 2: and that also kind of tweaked him to come and
Speaker 2: work with us because switched on Bach Switched On Bach
Speaker 2: a brilliant albums to this stay a brilliant album.
Speaker 1: But before we go too far down the minimog, I
Speaker 1: want to go back to CHOHn Manhattan for a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons. One who paid for it.
Speaker 2: Well, I had a little bit of a nest egg
Speaker 2: of my own and my very wealthy not really wealthy,
Speaker 2: I guess ing on the edge of being a silver
Speaker 2: spoon from Great Neck. But we didn't quite make silver spoonism.
Speaker 2: I was still sort of in this tainless steel silverware thing,
Speaker 2: but just a teetering on the edge of being in
Speaker 2: the silver spoon world. I was sort of in and
Speaker 2: out of it. And my very wonderful, permissive parents who
Speaker 2: came up with the original amount of money.
Speaker 1: Okay, so in nineteen sixties dollars over the five years
Speaker 1: from beginning to completion. How much money was invested in
Speaker 1: John Manhattan.
Speaker 2: I would say around two hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 1: Okay, sixty years later a who owns it? And did
Speaker 1: the money ever come back? Well, that's a good question.
Speaker 1: Who owns it? The ownership is in the hands of
Speaker 1: the David Weisman estate Raka as we used to call him,
Speaker 1: who really had the vision to try to finish the
Speaker 1: film ended up after a hiatus of about two years
Speaker 1: to shoot the remainder of the film and color, which
Speaker 1: I find to this day rather grotesque. I can't although
Speaker 1: I came out and helped them do the audio and stuff,
Speaker 1: I was really literally off the case after the black
Speaker 1: and white footage. That's where I really really lived with
Speaker 1: Chow and with ed and you know, I ended up
Speaker 1: living with d Where you get to tweets your two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty k in ever see a dollar back? Nope? Okay,
Speaker 1: Let's go back to Edie. Edie became a legend in
Speaker 1: the eighties when they wrote a book about her. But
Speaker 1: what do we know? It's the sixties is before the book.
Speaker 1: She comes from a family of some status, on the
Speaker 1: West coast drops out of Harvard, which Radycliffe rat same
Speaker 1: thing actually, but well no, not the same thing at
Speaker 1: the time. But whatever was she charismatic? What was or
Speaker 1: which is just that she came from a rich family?
Speaker 2: What was her father and her family go all the
Speaker 2: way back to the American Revolution. Her family is buried
Speaker 2: at the Sedgwick Circle at Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Her family
Speaker 2: a bunch of very rich, ultra crustaceans who she actually
Speaker 2: grew up on the West Coast, very spoiled, very isolated,
Speaker 2: very drugged by her father, who was a bit of
Speaker 2: a monster. And she went to Radcliffe. She lasted there
Speaker 2: about two years, I guess her year and a half
Speaker 2: or two. Extremely talented as a sculptor and as a
Speaker 2: like her father, who was also really really weird guy.
Speaker 2: And when Chuck met her, she was at Radcliffe and
Speaker 2: she came to New York with Chuck and got invited
Speaker 2: to some parties that were Truman Capodi and a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of people like that, a bunch of crustaceans and
Speaker 2: super talents and you know, high high society people in
Speaker 2: New York who were into the painting and arts scene
Speaker 2: and stuff. And Andy's stuff, and she what happened with
Speaker 2: me in hers But she came to the studio and
Speaker 2: I was David and Raka and John Palmer brought her
Speaker 2: to the studio. Chuck brought her to the studio and
Speaker 2: it was in very low light. I had very sort
Speaker 2: of dark. It was in the evening and by studio,
Speaker 2: by office was very executive at fancy furniture and stuff.
Speaker 2: I fancied myself a film logul, although I was a puppy,
Speaker 2: and they brought her and I didn't realize how loaded
Speaker 2: she really was. But down the road, once we started
Speaker 2: shooting shooting, she ended up living at the Chelsea Hotel
Speaker 2: and about ten weeks or twelve weeks into the movie,
Speaker 2: she set the room on fire and trying to get
Speaker 2: out of the room, shed doorknobs through her brass got
Speaker 2: heated up and she burned both her hands, and everybody
Speaker 2: forgot her phone number. After they took her off to
Speaker 2: Saint Vincent's and they got her out of the hotel
Speaker 2: and no one would talk to her, and I was
Speaker 2: in the middle of shooting with her. I ended up
Speaker 2: living with her for about three or four months. And
Speaker 2: I can say this and I really mean it very emotionally.
Speaker 2: There were times when she was really high and there
Speaker 2: were times when she was really down, but there were
Speaker 2: the times in between when she was just Edie, and
Speaker 2: in those times I really fell in love with her.
Speaker 2: She was an incredibly sensitive, beautiful human being if she
Speaker 2: wasn't in the clutches of drugs, and it taught me
Speaker 2: some very great life lessons. She was an amazing human being.
Speaker 2: And when after two years, after everything went south and
Speaker 2: I went bankrupted and lost everything and the negatives were
Speaker 2: at the lab and everything, David came up with the
Speaker 2: money and he said, I want to shoot it on
Speaker 2: the West Coast. I want to shoot the rest of
Speaker 2: it in color. I came out and helped him, but
Speaker 2: I didn't love what he was shooting. But Edie, he said, SD,
Speaker 2: do you really want to finish the film? She was
Speaker 2: at the village hospital for a drug rehabilitation and stuff,
Speaker 2: and she said yes, and this was all she lived
Speaker 2: for to do that. But the minute she got on
Speaker 2: the set, she got drunk as a stunk and she
Speaker 2: stayed that way until she found Michael, her friend, and
Speaker 2: he got married, and soon after they got married, she
Speaker 2: passed away in bed next to him. One morning he
Speaker 2: woke up and she.
Speaker 1: Was gone, Okay, it's a different era. But if she
Speaker 1: walked into the room, did she have a presence, do
Speaker 1: she have charisma? Or she was just another good looking
Speaker 1: woman with his back.
Speaker 2: So no, no, no, never one of those Bobby, No, no, no.
Speaker 2: She had charisma and magic. You could just feel it.
Speaker 2: You could just feel the vibes. She was an incredible
Speaker 2: human being. And the Mogue synthesizer circling around a little bit,
Speaker 2: was intended to use for me to use. There was
Speaker 2: a guy who came over from the factory. His name
Speaker 2: was Geno Perserco. Oh, okay, just to be clear, you
Speaker 2: bought it, what'd you pay? About twenty twenty thousand dollars think,
Speaker 2: which is like two hundred today, easily right. And that
Speaker 2: turned into a whole other adventure. But once we started
Speaker 2: playing with the Mogue, I ran headlong into electronica. I
Speaker 2: was more interested in the Mogue than I was interested
Speaker 2: in filmmaking. And that when the whole thing went south
Speaker 2: and everything else, the only thing I was left with
Speaker 2: my Moge synthesizer. I went to a studio called Broadway
Speaker 2: Recording and Pat Jakes who was the owner. It was
Speaker 2: in the Broadway building where there what's his name doing
Speaker 2: his show now Saturday Night Live. Yeah right, yeah, that
Speaker 2: theater on the seventh floor was this independent studio up there.
Speaker 2: I ended up there, and I really spent hours and
Speaker 2: hours when the studio is closed, learning how to play
Speaker 2: the synthesizer, but even more than that learning at Centaur,
Speaker 2: my old studio really had. I became a synthesis long
Speaker 2: before I became a recording engineer. Malcolm Cecil, who I
Speaker 2: met at Media, who was the chief technologist for the studio,
Speaker 2: was also a spectacular musician and he played the back
Speaker 2: line at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, and he was a
Speaker 2: really fine musician. And we met at Media in the
Speaker 2: back of studio way and I walked into the studio
Speaker 2: of the recording console at the lid of the studio,
Speaker 2: so it was like the hood out of car. They
Speaker 2: don't make studios like that anymore. It actually was saggy
Speaker 2: in the middle. Everyone made their own consoles. Right standing
Speaker 2: here with his hands on his hips, and he said,
Speaker 2: you must be the guy with his English action. You
Speaker 2: must be the gully with the millig over there. And
Speaker 2: I said, yes, and what are you doing here? He said, Oh,
Speaker 2: I have what I said. Can you teach me how
Speaker 2: to use this? And he says, yeah, but you have
Speaker 2: to teach me how to use that, and he pointed
Speaker 2: at the synthesizer and we made a deal. We shook hands,
Speaker 2: and he really taught me how to be a first
Speaker 2: class recording engineer, uncompromising and very together on about how
Speaker 2: people listen to things. And so we traded and we
Speaker 2: hooked up and created a band called Tonto's Expanding Heads.
Speaker 1: The rest is history. The original mogue you had, how
Speaker 1: big a piece of furniture was it?
Speaker 2: It was as wide as this table to a keyboard
Speaker 2: wide and four decks high. Okay, so you have that.
Speaker 2: Prior to meeting Malcolm in the studio that were you
Speaker 2: making any money using the boat? Yes, I was doing
Speaker 2: some work with Richie Havens and Stormy Forest Records. I
Speaker 2: was doing commercial soundtracks like for Crazy Daisy toilet Paper
Speaker 2: which was a wipeout, you might say, and Trans Caribbean
Speaker 2: Airways and Ford to Reno. I was making sounds, you know, sounds,
Speaker 2: and the guys from the agencies would come over and
Speaker 2: sit in the back of the controller and say, hey, kid,
Speaker 2: can you make that sound a little more like a tablecloth?
Speaker 2: You know, it was that sort of thing. I knew
Speaker 2: I was not destined to be there very long doing that,
Speaker 2: but Malcolm was doing some sessions at night with the
Speaker 2: I'll think of it in a minute anyway. Jim Hall
Speaker 2: was great guitar player, by the way, and he was
Speaker 2: playing bass with Landey Cozan and doing stuff at the studio.
Speaker 2: This superb player and extremely knowledgeable guy, and we really
Speaker 2: hit it off and we started writing stuff together, which
Speaker 2: became an album that Herbie Man heard.
Speaker 1: Okay, you meet him, you make this handshake deal. What
Speaker 1: you have is one of the original mogues. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: but it becomes this massive thing called Tonto. Yes, how
Speaker 1: does that happen?
Speaker 2: Well, Malcolm and I would talk about creating, we'd play
Speaker 2: my mogue, and we kept starting to buy little modules
Speaker 2: more of this, and then Malcolm said, oh, let's see here,
Speaker 2: here's a surge. Here's some company called DARP, and here's
Speaker 2: this filter. And slowly we were ending up buying more
Speaker 2: and more modules from this guy and that guy, until
Speaker 2: the thing was on two reeled gurneys that we had
Speaker 2: a wheel together and taken to studio away to play.
Speaker 2: It was a monster and it was all kinds of
Speaker 2: wires in the original cases. When Jimmy Hendrix passed on,
Speaker 2: he left the studio behind called Electric Lady, and Electric
Speaker 2: Lady was really the first home studio because it was
Speaker 2: Jimmy Hendrix's studio right, And we had gotten to a
Speaker 2: place at Media where we couldn't stay there anymore. We
Speaker 2: would go at night and plan what we had in
Speaker 2: mind to do at the Chinese, Japanese something Mexican restaurant
Speaker 2: across the street. I used to get very loaded over
Speaker 2: there because they had bullis mono sodium glutamating the food,
Speaker 2: and I used to get feverish and have a headache
Speaker 2: from it. But we actually conceived Tonto on the tablecloth,
Speaker 2: on the paper tablecloth in that restaurant. And then there
Speaker 2: was no memory in any of these things. I mean memory.
Speaker 2: We all take memory for granted now on everything, right.
Speaker 2: We can just move one fader, one eye and everything
Speaker 2: is remembered. No matter what you did in the days
Speaker 2: when we were making music, if you didn't take it
Speaker 2: when you had it, it was the party was over.
Speaker 2: There's no memory. We couldn't start to work with Steve.
Speaker 2: We'd already been working with Steve for about a year.
Speaker 2: We had a huge library of songs and various states
Speaker 2: of completion. We were making records. You know, an album here, Well,
Speaker 2: this is going to be music of my Mind. No,
Speaker 2: this is going to be talking book. There were no
Speaker 2: album titles. We just started on that Memorial Day weekend
Speaker 2: recording songs one after the other, and they were all
Speaker 2: in various states of being done and stuff. And so
Speaker 2: you moved to Electric Lad, Yeah, we moved to Electric
Speaker 2: Lady because they would leave us alone. I wouldn't have
Speaker 2: to break down our sessions with Stevie at night because
Speaker 2: the cuff links were coming in in the morning, or
Speaker 2: there was going to be a pepto bismal ad in
Speaker 2: the studio way, and they needed to do string and
Speaker 2: horn dates and stuff. It became intolerable. We needed a
Speaker 2: place to work. And it happened just at the unfortunate
Speaker 2: time of Jimmy passing away. He hadn't used the studio
Speaker 2: for three weeks, and he went to London and he
Speaker 2: did stuff he shouldn't have done, and the studio was
Speaker 2: there with his shoes still warm under the console and
Speaker 2: Malcolm and I went down there at that time because
Speaker 2: we were looking for a place, and we walked in
Speaker 2: there and put our feet in those shoes with Steve
Speaker 2: and we never left. And the designer of that studio
Speaker 2: was someone who I'm deep, deeply friendly with to this stage,
Speaker 2: John Stork, who built Electric Lady for Jimmy. It was
Speaker 2: his first commission, and he saw what we were doing.
Speaker 2: He got very curious and we got to meet him
Speaker 2: and we said we needed some way of being able
Speaker 2: to control this as a real time performing instrument. I
Speaker 2: wanted to take it out of the lab and take
Speaker 2: it on the road. And he came down there and
Speaker 2: we talked and talked, and we conceived of these three
Speaker 2: arced cabinets that we could play when we were facing programming,
Speaker 2: but that we could turn around and face each other
Speaker 2: with the keyboards in the middle, so that we could
Speaker 2: perform live. And he was the one who came up
Speaker 2: with the cases. And during that year or year and
Speaker 2: a half that were a full time at Electric Lady,
Speaker 2: we got those cases built and we started stuffing all
Speaker 2: our gear into them and creating a unified powered supply.
Speaker 2: Because what we have now is what we had then
Speaker 2: is the original version of the euro rack where all
Speaker 2: these different manufacturers make Some guys make filters, some guys
Speaker 2: make oscillators, some guys make sequencers and stuff, but they
Speaker 2: all have a common language. When we built that, there
Speaker 2: was no common language. We had art modules or plus
Speaker 2: or minus five five vaults, a keyboard, mogue six vaults,
Speaker 2: other instruments that different, all different. We had to supply
Speaker 2: power for all of them and unify that so we
Speaker 2: could play a common thing. And Malcolm figured out a
Speaker 2: brain where we could control everything. But it was all
Speaker 2: analog and highly sensitive to temperature. I mean, we tried
Speaker 2: playing live down at the I think it was a
Speaker 2: church down at the Wall on Wall Street, Saint Thomas.
Speaker 2: We went in there and it was raining and lightning
Speaker 2: in the afternoon. We set up our old synthesizer before
Speaker 2: the cabinets, and the temperature changed. The whole thing went
Speaker 2: bonkers and it was turned into free playing. We couldn't
Speaker 2: play even trying to set it all up and bringing
Speaker 2: it in set up and the PA and the blah
Speaker 2: blah blah, and it was lightning and there was thunderstorm
Speaker 2: in the afternoon, and it was all kind of weird
Speaker 2: and strange with the stained glass windows and everything, and
Speaker 2: we bleeped and blooped our way through and people loved it.
Speaker 2: Malcolm was in his glory because he was a jazz player.
Speaker 2: Me I was having one heart attack after another trying
Speaker 2: to say how am I going to get the sequencer
Speaker 2: to do this, that.
Speaker 1: And the other.
Speaker 2: But things sort of leveled out and the whole thing
Speaker 2: with Steve became more and more consuming, and the rest
Speaker 2: is history.
Speaker 1: Okay. So when you buy your mogue and you're working
Speaker 1: on commercials, commercials, commercials, okay, you're in Manhattan. If someone
Speaker 1: wants to get those sounds, are you the only guy?
Speaker 1: Or is there another Bob mark lev in another studio?
Speaker 2: There was Wendy Carlos, and there was a duo out
Speaker 2: on the West coast that was it, oh Peter Nero.
Speaker 2: But we never really close y self center doing our
Speaker 2: own stuff, and once we got going with Steve, there
Speaker 2: was no looking up.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, So Steve comes a Memorial Day weekend nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two. He walks in, You give him a little
Speaker 1: demo and then he says, Okay, I'm gonna sit at
Speaker 1: the piano. We're gonna start making music.
Speaker 2: Basically, he said, he started noodling on the synthesizer and
Speaker 2: he start trying to play chords on it, and he says, guys, Malcolm, Malcolm,
Speaker 2: there's something wrong with this machine, I said, he said,
Speaker 2: I said, what is it? He says't, I won't play
Speaker 2: any chords. It only plays one note at a time.
Speaker 2: And Malcolm and his genius says Steve, think of the
Speaker 2: synthesizer like a saxophone or a trumpet. It makes one
Speaker 2: sound and you have to put your whole body and
Speaker 2: your whole mind into creating that one sound that has attitude.
Speaker 2: Like saxophone, it's just your mouth, you know, it's just
Speaker 2: one voice, and the synthesizer, each keyboard or whatever we're
Speaker 2: using to change voltage, is only one voice. It could
Speaker 2: have a whole bunch of content inside the sound, with
Speaker 2: the filters and the oscillators and the envelope generators and
Speaker 2: so forth, but in the end, it was a direct
Speaker 2: connection to just that one soulful sound that was in
Speaker 2: your head. And that's really what separated tanto from the
Speaker 2: rest of the instrument. Steve really got it, and especially
Speaker 2: when we Malcolm came up with the concept of the
Speaker 2: pitch bender because you can't play blues with it. You
Speaker 2: can't bend the notes. If you have just a keyboard,
Speaker 2: they're intervolic. One is one value, the next note is
Speaker 2: another value. But like with a guitar, if you want
Speaker 2: to play soulful guitar, you have to be able to
Speaker 2: pull the strings with your left hand so that you
Speaker 2: can get the bend to notes. They even have benders
Speaker 2: on the guitars for doing that. That's a part of
Speaker 2: the essence of it. And Malcolm invented the joystick, and
Speaker 2: we never really got full credit for it, but he
Speaker 2: took a model airplane controller put rubber bands under the
Speaker 2: joystick so when you let go of it, it would pop
Speaker 2: to the middle and one direction it was pitched, the
Speaker 2: other direction it was filter. When Stevie heard that the
Speaker 2: party was over, Steve got it and I don't know,
Speaker 2: under twenty seconds and you can really hear it on
Speaker 2: Bogion Reggae Woman, which was one of the first ones
Speaker 2: that we used the pitch bender on.
Speaker 1: Okay, he comes in, he's on a contract with Modeout,
Speaker 1: he's turned on. It's the Royal Day weekend. You're cutting
Speaker 1: songs essentially immediately.
Speaker 2: Yes, and we had to use a test tape because
Speaker 2: Malcolm didn't have the keys to the tape library, so
Speaker 2: we had to use a test tape for the first
Speaker 2: couple of tunes, and then the Malcolm got into the
Speaker 2: tape library. I didn't really have much of an idea
Speaker 2: who Steve was Ronnie Blanco who brought him and said,
Speaker 2: you know you met Steve before that. I said, really,
Speaker 2: I don't remember. He said, yeah, you were working in
Speaker 2: a session with Richie Havens and I brought Steve in
Speaker 2: in the back, but you were too busy to talk
Speaker 2: to him. But he was down there in the front
Speaker 2: of the media sound with Ronnie Blanco and I looked
Speaker 2: down there. Malcolm says, you know, we have a new client,
Speaker 2: and I said okay, and we went I'll show you
Speaker 2: the synthesizer Steve and he never left. I think is
Speaker 2: about three and a half. Okay, So obviously tanto is
Speaker 2: one instrument. He starts cutting.
Speaker 1: What is he doing? He's he's playing songs on the piano,
Speaker 1: and then you're building from there. What are you doing?
Speaker 2: Well? It depends on the song. One song down the road,
Speaker 2: which was interesting, was a song a little did he
Speaker 2: called superstition. Steve walked into the studio and says, turn
Speaker 2: up the drums. We used to keep everything set up
Speaker 2: as much as possible so Steve could move from one
Speaker 2: instrument to another. And he went in the studio and
Speaker 2: he played the drum track down one or two times.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know what the song was, of the
Speaker 2: melody or anything. He just played it out of his head.
Speaker 2: And then he came in and we put the clavenet
Speaker 2: parts down, and that became superstition. But Steve would play
Speaker 2: most of the time offender Rhodes clavinet or keyboard piano
Speaker 2: for the basic track, and he would sing sing the song.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it would keep those vocals that he did. But
Speaker 2: when we were doing music, in my mind, it was
Speaker 2: basically a It was basically a solo effort by Steve.
Speaker 2: There are few other players. Buzzy Featen from the name
Speaker 2: of the band escapes me, but he was there. Suddenly
Speaker 2: we had a little section of people who hung out
Speaker 2: and became their love.
Speaker 1: So stevee been making record for ten years. He had
Speaker 1: Fingertips Part two, et cetera. But he's not at the
Speaker 1: peak of his career. The first album commercially not successful
Speaker 1: second album that you work with him on his gargantuan
Speaker 1: talking book. When did you realize that he was so talented.
Speaker 2: The minute he started playing a piano and saying, I
Speaker 2: knew it it was And the other thing was that
Speaker 2: he had to like singing songs like Living for the City.
Speaker 2: It really sort of hit my youthful civil rights bone
Speaker 2: right in.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I just want to get this straight. He
Speaker 1: moves in. Is he you know the Stones famously write
Speaker 1: in the studio? Was he writing these songs in the
Speaker 1: studio and building them up? Would he come in with
Speaker 1: more than that?
Speaker 2: It depends on the song. Some stuff he wrote in
Speaker 2: the studio, some stuff he wrote it in his apartment,
Speaker 2: to some stuff he wrote on the road when he
Speaker 2: was traveling. He always had like a little kid of
Speaker 2: instruments that he would set up in his hotel room
Speaker 2: and he would he would write there. He had stuff
Speaker 2: in his head from Motown days that he didn't give
Speaker 2: to Motown and he didn't want to record them. He
Speaker 2: had lots of materia. His brain was overflowing. He was incredible,
Speaker 2: and it was such happy times too, you know, okay,
Speaker 2: really happy times.
Speaker 1: He comes to you in Memorial Day weekend seventy two.
Speaker 1: It's not that much long thereafter that he goes out
Speaker 1: opening for the Stones.
Speaker 2: We were already we were already working at Electric Lady
Speaker 2: by then.
Speaker 1: Okay, So when he goes out on the Stones and
Speaker 1: I remember seeing that he sang Superwoman was the first
Speaker 1: album music in my mind complete?
Speaker 2: I honestly don't remember.
Speaker 1: But that's a great question. Okay, Then let me ask.
Speaker 2: I don't have to answer.
Speaker 1: Okay. In the book, you make mention of the fact
Speaker 1: that you know there's basically you guys, there's a four
Speaker 1: album mark okay, and you make you say what came
Speaker 1: out on the third album could have been recorded the
Speaker 1: first month you guys will be working togetherret how did
Speaker 1: you decide what songs went on what album?
Speaker 2: Well, Steve would make some initial suggestions, then Malcolm and
Speaker 2: I would make our suggestions. Then we'd fight over it
Speaker 2: over inva Gooda's office, sitting on the floor on the
Speaker 2: on the shag pistachio green shag carpeting along with the
Speaker 2: dead plants and Vagoda's office, and we try to put
Speaker 2: lists together, and then we had to worry about which
Speaker 2: songs would work with which because everything we did was
Speaker 2: cross faded, which was long before the DJs started cross
Speaker 2: fading stuff. But we did it live. Steve, Me and
Speaker 2: Malcolm would sit at the console, the three of us,
Speaker 2: and we put these songs up on different machine, two
Speaker 2: different two track machines, and we cue everything up and
Speaker 2: rehearse it and record the entire album down a side
Speaker 2: at a time. It wasn't just one song. We thought
Speaker 2: in terms of albums, of how the songs related to
Speaker 2: one another, how they would cross fade together, if they
Speaker 2: would work together musically. It was much more of an
Speaker 2: enterprise about making albums, not songs, not just gone by
Speaker 2: the wayside unfortunately.
Speaker 1: But okay, you mentioned Joe Hannon Vogda, who I knew
Speaker 1: kind of well when he ultimately moved to the West Coast.
Speaker 1: He was famously Stevie's lawyer. He made the eight million
Speaker 1: dollars deal, etc. Etc. By time he moved to the
Speaker 1: West Coast, if you didn't know who he was, he
Speaker 1: came across as a homeless person, was wearing his sweatshirt
Speaker 1: and he.
Speaker 2: Was eating his contracts. You could see them that he
Speaker 2: was gnawing on the contracts. You have someone else's secretary
Speaker 2: writes stuff up. He had a doc written jurisprudence from Harvard,
Speaker 2: just so that you know. And I knew Vagodo when
Speaker 2: he was in a very legit law firm called Marshall
Speaker 2: and Vagoto which was on fifty seventh Street, and they
Speaker 2: were my lawyers during the child Manhattan days, so I
Speaker 2: knew Johanna, and Johannan was Richie Havens's lawyer as well.
Speaker 2: And I think I'm not entirely sure, but I think
Speaker 2: I introduced Johanna to Stevie, which in some ways I regret,
Speaker 2: because Johanna never took care of me and Malcolm properly.
Speaker 2: And that's the part of the reason that we parted
Speaker 2: company in the end. Had nothing to do with the
Speaker 2: music or a friendship or anything else. Really had to
Speaker 2: do with business. But that's neither here nor there. And
Speaker 2: that's okay. History.
Speaker 1: That's when you're in New York, you have long history.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have seen a picture of Johannan with
Speaker 1: a suit, but would he was very rare. That's not
Speaker 1: trying to say when he was in New York and
Speaker 1: he was working with Stevie then was he O? I mean,
Speaker 1: he always had his intellect, okay, but was he already like,
Speaker 1: you know, looking like wearing his sweatshirts, eating his uh.
Speaker 2: I knew him in a suit when I first met him. Okay, okay,
Speaker 2: but Johannan really came across as the savior of black
Speaker 2: musicians who were being taken mercilessly advantage of by the
Speaker 2: white establishment, who were still didn't come up with the
Speaker 2: concept of R and B. I think somebody at Atlantic
Speaker 2: came up with the concept of R and B before that,
Speaker 2: the big labels called black music race music, and I
Speaker 2: don't remember who it was. If I heard his name,
Speaker 2: i'd remember it. But he came up with the concept
Speaker 2: of R and B to make it more vanilla and everything.
Speaker 1: Wait, Johannen literally called it R and B.
Speaker 2: Well, Johannan, there was somebody at Atlantic who came.
Speaker 1: Up with that. He popularized it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, but Johannan was turned out to be the
Speaker 2: He was always represented black musicians who were being unjustly
Speaker 2: treated by the white establishment in the record business. He
Speaker 2: was there, He came across as that, and of course
Speaker 2: the shirt tails were out and he was always a
Speaker 2: little corner of spittle coming out of his mouth. I
Speaker 2: can remember we came out here for Steve to sign
Speaker 2: this deal. Malcolm and I came out on that trip.
Speaker 2: We stayed at them at the Hallmark Motor Hotel, which
Speaker 2: is across the street on Sunset. It's another place now,
Speaker 2: but it's the same deal across the street from the
Speaker 2: Pancake House there. And we took him up to Motown
Speaker 2: because he didn't drive, and he was out negotiating the
Speaker 2: deal with Stevie for Stevie, right, And we took him
Speaker 2: there because we thought we would go and filter around
Speaker 2: Motown and make friends and stuff. Since where we were
Speaker 2: out here and we're sitting out in the office and
Speaker 2: out in the outside office, and he's in there with
Speaker 2: Ewart Abner and a whole bunch of those guys, right,
Speaker 2: and Malcolm and I are sitting there were here smack smack.
Speaker 2: Where did you go to law school? You know? And
Speaker 2: we knew the Goda had done his job well and
Speaker 2: he made Stevie a fabulous steal. He did, and he
Speaker 2: was an interesting guy. We remained friends over the years.
Speaker 2: He's gone now, but he was early a piece of work.
Speaker 2: His father was a cantor. Yes, he was very Jewish.
Speaker 2: We used to go to Canter's out here the other
Speaker 2: kind of cantors, right, and have a nice pastromola sandwich
Speaker 2: together in a bowl of Coleslaw. And Malcolm and I
Speaker 2: really you know, got to know him. But in the
Speaker 2: end there was kind of a little resentment from us
Speaker 2: because he really didn't take care of us. We felt
Speaker 2: we were like a hippie family and he didn't see
Speaker 2: it quite like that. And you know, I think that's
Speaker 2: the reason that in the long run, boy Steve and
Speaker 2: me and Malcolm won are separate ways.
Speaker 1: Okay, how did the go to end up playing the
Speaker 1: judge in the interlude and living in the city?
Speaker 2: That was interesting. We were making living for the city
Speaker 2: and we needed to create that montage, which is sort
Speaker 2: of like a soap opera.
Speaker 1: Whose idea was that, well.
Speaker 2: I think I don't really remember rightly, but we all
Speaker 2: contributed to it, right And Milton Stevie's older brother was
Speaker 2: New York just like I pictured it, and we recorded
Speaker 2: that and I put that aside. Then it was four
Speaker 2: o'clock in the morning and in the middle of the
Speaker 2: winter or something. I was standing outside at four in
Speaker 2: the morning with my naugra. There was a big oil
Speaker 2: truck delivering heating oil. To media and I said, rev
Speaker 2: up your engine. He revved up the engine. That's the
Speaker 2: engine from the flow. And then I said, well, Stevie's
Speaker 2: going to get lock up. We need a judge or
Speaker 2: some Stevie said, And if a Goda was around, we
Speaker 2: said go to ten years Agdas said that and uh,
Speaker 2: we pieced it all together and spun it all in.
Speaker 2: There was no digital memory or anything like that. We
Speaker 2: had to do. Everything had to be done physically, you know,
Speaker 2: spun at the right thing, and we cooked that stuff up.
Speaker 1: Okay. In the book, you know, after that interlude, Stevie
Speaker 1: comes back with a more motive, gruff voice and in
Speaker 1: the book you tell how you got it. Can you
Speaker 1: tell that story a little ways.
Speaker 2: We needed to have Stevie really feel gruff and angry,
Speaker 2: and Malcolm would bait him and say he'd stop the type.
Speaker 2: Stevie hated when we did that right, and he said,
Speaker 2: you got to really sound angry. And he tried it
Speaker 2: a couple times, and we wouldn't give him any tea,
Speaker 2: and we made.
Speaker 1: Fun of him.
Speaker 2: Malcolm made a little fun of him and stuff, and
Speaker 2: he would stop the tape until Stevie was genuinely getting
Speaker 2: pissed off with us. I don't know whether he ever
Speaker 2: got over it, but anyway, we did that and until
Speaker 2: he got good and angry, and then he sang that
Speaker 2: really gruff final verse for the song. And that song
Speaker 2: to me, probably, I would say in now I'm eighty
Speaker 2: five years old. Now I can't believe that, but I
Speaker 2: think that that probably singularly was one of the most
Speaker 2: important songs I think I've ever recorded in my career.
Speaker 1: Okay, but also you'd said earlier, as in the book,
Speaker 1: then even though that comes out of Inner Visions, which
Speaker 1: is the third of your four album run with him,
Speaker 1: that it's recorded very early. Yes, it was recorded at media.
Speaker 1: So why did it take so many albums to come out?
Speaker 2: Why you can ask the question because I have no idea.
Speaker 2: It's just the way things happened.
Speaker 1: We go through.
Speaker 2: I used to keep a little sort of little book
Speaker 2: like you have when you go to high School's a
Speaker 2: little black and white speckled little notebook, right. I used
Speaker 2: to keep a look of the songs in the words
Speaker 2: say RTM at the end, ready to mix, and I'd
Speaker 2: have a list of song needs congus, the song needs this,
Speaker 2: the song needs that. Steve would keep track of it
Speaker 2: in his incredible memory, and we would just fill in
Speaker 2: the blanks as we were working, and Steve would pick
Speaker 2: on what he wanted to work on for that thing.
Speaker 2: We'd work on one song for three hours, another song
Speaker 2: for four hours, and we'd go away and whatever, and
Speaker 2: we'd do other things and come back to them, but
Speaker 2: the song. We had an archive of songs, and there
Speaker 2: are many more songs that are still in Spee's archives.
Speaker 2: I don't even remember. It was one Malcolm recorded upright
Speaker 2: based on one of the first songs recorded, called Crazy Letters,
Speaker 2: which was wonderful. But these string bass took it to
Speaker 2: a kind of a jazz place, and when we started
Speaker 2: working with the synthesizer, one note per keyboard, so everything.
Speaker 2: If you listen to those records, you will see how
Speaker 2: few instruments there really are on them. They're all very
Speaker 2: very simple, and there's not a lot of waterfalls and
Speaker 2: big string parts and orchestrations, any of that kind of
Speaker 2: R and B stuff that was coming out of Motown
Speaker 2: and all the other black labels during that time, big
Speaker 2: string dates and stuff. Everything was elemental and close. And
Speaker 2: the important thing is that we're just talking. When I
Speaker 2: came on board before you got here. We're talking about microphones.
Speaker 2: I said, you know, I recorded most of these records, Malcolm,
Speaker 2: and I recorded with an R twenty dynamic microphone that
Speaker 2: had proximity to it. And I said, that's really very
Speaker 2: important because for two reasons. One reason is Stevie could
Speaker 2: touch the mic and know where he was without having
Speaker 2: to see it, without creating microphone noise. And the second
Speaker 2: reason was even more that the microphone felt very close
Speaker 2: and very intimate because of the proximity effect. Like this
Speaker 2: right then, Steve would sing down the mic with this
Speaker 2: kind of closeness. It was the same kind of thing
Speaker 2: that Bing Crosby was doing when he had the microphone
Speaker 2: in front of the whole big band, and the whole
Speaker 2: big band was as laud Bing Crosby's voice was as
Speaker 2: loud as the entire big band behind him, because the
Speaker 2: microphone allowed us to rearrange reality. And that's what turned
Speaker 2: Big Crosby into a into a crooner. Von Monroe, Bing Crosby,
Speaker 2: you know, all of those great singers you know, came
Speaker 2: out because they could sing close to the mic and
Speaker 2: create this kind of intimate, close feeling. There's not a
Speaker 2: lot of reverber echo. It was very close feeling, and
Speaker 2: we're doing it now. We're most of these artists sing
Speaker 2: close for that reason, because it makes the voice sound
Speaker 2: very personal and intimate and close, and you can rearrange
Speaker 2: reality inside the audio stream by virtue of the mike proximity.
Speaker 1: Okay, first album comes out out first half of seventy two,
Speaker 1: Music of My Mind. No one is expecting anything from
Speaker 1: Stevie Wonder. It gets good reviews. You heard a little
Speaker 1: bit of Superwoman on underground FM rock radio, but doesn't
Speaker 1: really make a commercial impact. In the fall comes Talking Book,
Speaker 1: which is a monster which in reality for my I mean,
Speaker 1: you can't believe what's on it. Okay, it's got superstition,
Speaker 1: got sunshine in your life, of.
Speaker 2: My life, I love my life.
Speaker 1: Whatever. Did you guys know what that was?
Speaker 2: No? All we knew it was good and it felt right,
Speaker 2: and it was really starting to really harvest stuff from it.
Speaker 2: I don't even think Steve knew how powerful it was,
Speaker 2: but we were really hitting on all cylinders. We really
Speaker 2: got the whole idea. How the you he's the synthesizer.
Speaker 2: Steve was really starting to really exercise his chops. A
Speaker 2: lot of confidence, and the feeling in the room was magical.
Speaker 1: Okay, so famously and you mentioned this in the book
Speaker 1: and we've all heard it secondhand. Stevie offers Superstition to
Speaker 1: Jeff Beck, but then takes it back. Yes, can you
Speaker 1: tell us? Were you there in the room when I
Speaker 1: went on went down? Yes? I was so what happened?
Speaker 2: Steve actually wrote Superstition on the Road when he was
Speaker 2: with the Stones. It was in his mind. But when
Speaker 2: we got back to Electric Lady, he had me and
Speaker 2: Malcolm running around the studio asking about everything that was
Speaker 2: bad luck, crack in the mirror, cracking the looking glass,
Speaker 2: don't walk under a ladder, all of that stuff. We
Speaker 2: were running around with our little notepads trying to trying
Speaker 2: to come up with everything that was about superstition. Steve
Speaker 2: had that song in his mind, and we had already
Speaker 2: tracked it but hadn't mixed it. And then Steve whent
Speaker 2: it was just coming in off the road from the Stones,
Speaker 2: and Malcolm and I were working with Jeff Beck and
Speaker 2: his band. I don't remember the guy's names.
Speaker 1: Max middle Tin, the rough and Ready.
Speaker 2: Stuff, the rough and ready stuff, and we were working
Speaker 2: in the studio when It was in the late afternoon.
Speaker 2: We were working with Becky had just come in off
Speaker 2: the road with his band and we were tracking for
Speaker 2: a couple of days. Malcolm had played with beck at
Speaker 2: Ronnie Scott's back in the day, so you know, we
Speaker 2: weren't a bunch of strangers to him. And we were
Speaker 2: working in the studio and Steve came in and so
Speaker 2: we were doing stuff that made Stevie I think a
Speaker 2: little jealous. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong, but I
Speaker 2: don't know. Steve was such a prince in those days,
Speaker 2: I can't tell you. And then he had a radiant
Speaker 2: smile that was just incredible, really beautiful human being. And
Speaker 2: Jeff said, Steve said, well, would you play on would
Speaker 2: you play on Looking for a Pure Love? And Jeff said, yeah,
Speaker 2: but I want to get a song in exchange, and
Speaker 2: Steve said, well, what about Superstition? We had the track
Speaker 2: already on multi track, it wasn't mixed, and then went
Speaker 2: in and uh, Jeff played the drums and we cut
Speaker 2: a track of it with Jeff playing the drums. Really yeah,
Speaker 2: and that went down, and I don't know, I think
Speaker 2: Steve thought better of it. I know that the people
Speaker 2: of Motown. When they heard about that, they were pretty
Speaker 2: adamant about it. I tried to really stay away from
Speaker 2: the motowners. It's all intensely political and stuff going down
Speaker 2: there with black superiority and the new black labels, and
Speaker 2: we're doing stuff for ourselves. And you know, here are
Speaker 2: two little white Jewish boys, one from London and one
Speaker 2: from New York working with Steve. And I think in
Speaker 2: some ways I was a certain amount of resistance to
Speaker 2: us at Motown. I'm not entirely sure. I can't put
Speaker 2: my finger on it, but you know, you do get
Speaker 2: those feelings, especially after my youth and my sort of
Speaker 2: attention to human rights and stuff, and I was a
Speaker 2: little sensitive to it, I guess.
Speaker 1: Okay, So just staying with Jeff Beck for a minute,
Speaker 1: you know, my interactions with Jeff were relatively minimal, and
Speaker 1: he was friendly to me. But he's got a reputation
Speaker 1: as a terror. However, I think he's literally the best
Speaker 1: rock guitarist since you work with him. How many thoughts
Speaker 1: about Jeff.
Speaker 2: He's monster musician, It's all I can tell you. I've
Speaker 2: never like went out to dinner with Jeff Beck. I
Speaker 2: never went to a party at his house. We never
Speaker 2: went out hotel and partied together, did any of that.
Speaker 2: The only thing I knew about him, and it was
Speaker 2: with Stevie as well. I've never been to Stevie's house
Speaker 2: in the sixty seventy years that I've known him, never
Speaker 2: been to his house. I've never been to Jeff Beck's house,
Speaker 2: and never partied together or went to social events together
Speaker 2: or anything. The only time I knew those guys is
Speaker 2: when we were working in the studio, and that's where
Speaker 2: we were, and that's where we belonged, and that's where
Speaker 2: I was at one with myself in my art. And
Speaker 2: what I tried to do is to bring the best
Speaker 2: of my brain to bear and to get the artists
Speaker 2: to perform to the limits of their potential. That really
Speaker 2: is my job.
Speaker 1: To this day. Okay, so Talking Book is I did the.
Speaker 2: Cover photography incidentally.
Speaker 1: Okay, tell us that story.
Speaker 2: Morning I came in, Steve said, you've got to do
Speaker 2: her for Talking Books. He had it all arranged to
Speaker 2: He had all his hair, corn road and a beautiful
Speaker 2: Ola Hudson slashes mother strangely enough, guns and roses. His
Speaker 2: mother is Ela Hudson. She was a ballet dancer, musician
Speaker 2: and a premier costume designer and somehow I don't know.
Speaker 2: I wasn't involved in the in the concept of it.
Speaker 2: But we were six o'clock in the morning. We all
Speaker 2: came out of the studio. It was a chilly morning,
Speaker 2: and they said, we got to find a place to
Speaker 2: do it, and I already I had heard that we
Speaker 2: were going to do it. I brought my camera. We
Speaker 2: went up on the Hollywood Hills under the Hollywood sign
Speaker 2: and took that photograph and Abner sent me three hundred
Speaker 2: bucks for it.
Speaker 1: So that's a mega success. To what degreed? Does the
Speaker 1: team feel pressure to follow that up with inter visions?
Speaker 1: No pressure? Okay? Then the next question is how about
Speaker 1: the pressure on fulfilling this first finale? There was no pressure,
Speaker 1: but we were there were business issues that were going
Speaker 1: on at that time because and I really don't want
Speaker 1: to get into the details of a business thing. Well,
Speaker 1: give us the bottom line that we weren't being given
Speaker 1: a proper royalty, just to be clear, Yeah, were you
Speaker 1: getting any royalty or was it? Okay, you were not
Speaker 1: getting a royalty, right, although we assumed we would. Right
Speaker 1: then that kind of came to a head, Okay, that
Speaker 1: at the end of at the end of fulfilling this.
Speaker 1: But if it came to a head at the end
Speaker 1: of fulfilling this, when did it start to boil? When
Speaker 1: did you bring it up?
Speaker 2: Well started to come up when we started working on
Speaker 2: fulfilling this because we just felt, you know, sooner or
Speaker 2: later that's something that Steve would take care of us
Speaker 2: properly for what we did. But Steve didn't it the
Speaker 2: same way we did. And that's entirely fine. That's the way.
Speaker 2: That's the way the music business is. It's the inness
Speaker 2: of the business and so you know, but we were
Speaker 2: definitely going in different directions. And what happened the final
Speaker 2: the final straw was that we always had an open
Speaker 2: mic in the studio with Steve because Malcolm or I
Speaker 2: would recite the lyrics of uh a few bars ahead
Speaker 2: of where he was. You know you were you know
Speaker 2: you said you are the Malcolm saying you all the
Speaker 2: china of my life, and then Steve.
Speaker 1: Udio you are the sunshine. Right.
Speaker 2: It was sort of that kind of thing, how how
Speaker 2: can anyone remember lyrics to hundreds of songs?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: But uh, So there was an open mic and there
Speaker 2: were a bunch of people in the control room who
Speaker 2: were making a lot of noise, and it was already
Speaker 2: getting kind of tenderhooks and already was starting to find
Speaker 2: its way into the studio about you know, our business relationship,
Speaker 2: and and Malcolm turned around to some of the people
Speaker 2: were some of the groupies who were hanging out in
Speaker 2: the control and says, would you mind keeping it down
Speaker 2: so we can hear Stevie. And Stevie heard it in
Speaker 2: his zerophones and he said to Malcolm, don't you talk
Speaker 2: to my friends like that. And I remember it. I
Speaker 2: remembered it. And that's when the angels left the room.
Speaker 2: Malcolm stood up and walked out and never turned around.
Speaker 2: I tried to put the thing back together, but it
Speaker 2: didn't happen. And I still feel badly about it to
Speaker 2: this day. But I know that, you know, our times
Speaker 2: come and go, and nothing is forever. We did what
Speaker 2: we were supposed to do. We delivered, he delivered. We
Speaker 2: made some great, great music together and it speaks for itself.
Speaker 1: Okay, did you actually have a conversation with Stevie where
Speaker 1: you said we're going our separate ways?
Speaker 2: No, it just happened. The next night I came into
Speaker 2: the studio. The lock had been broken off our private
Speaker 2: tape vault, and Stevie came and took his tapes.
Speaker 1: That was it.
Speaker 2: But you know, Steve's made good. He's given us good
Speaker 2: credits and everything else at all his concerts. Now, I
Speaker 2: went on and did some work for him. Malcolm did
Speaker 2: some work for him, and I'm on good terms.
Speaker 1: With Steve now, okay, But I got a slightly different question.
Speaker 1: The next album is Songs in the Key of Life. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: you don't get the associate producer credit. At this point
Speaker 1: in time, that is seen as his masterpiece. I have
Speaker 1: never agreed. I was a big fan. I bought that
Speaker 1: album when it came out. I have two questions. One,
Speaker 1: there was that album, Songs in the Key of Life,
Speaker 1: then there was Hotter than July, and then since then
Speaker 1: Steve has never reached that he could get. So I
Speaker 1: have two questions. One to what degree was the material
Speaker 1: on the albums after you left? Had you already worked
Speaker 1: on it, or was totally new?
Speaker 2: I have no idea. I've never followed. I never followed
Speaker 2: up after that, and Songs in the Kia Life. I
Speaker 2: had nothing to do with the people he took on
Speaker 2: after me, and Malcolm was my assistant, Garyo who was
Speaker 2: started as my tape operator, and John Fishback, who was
Speaker 2: the owner of Crystal Studios, which was the first studio
Speaker 2: we came to before we got to the record plant
Speaker 2: on the West Coast, and they're both very first class engineers,
Speaker 2: but I don't think that they had the love and
Speaker 2: the passion that we had for Steve, nor did they
Speaker 2: have the sort of the political sensitivities that I had
Speaker 2: about human rights and the passion for what Stevie was
Speaker 2: singing about. They were just you know, pushing buttons and
Speaker 2: pulling the up and down, and very frankly, if you
Speaker 2: look at the output that we had with Steve in
Speaker 2: the three years or whatever number of years that we
Speaker 2: were together, we were doing one album every year and
Speaker 2: a half. In some cases there was two albums in
Speaker 2: a year, and we also did a mini Ripperton album,
Speaker 2: and we also did a Serrita Wright album and a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of other stuff with Steve. We were busy
Speaker 2: in pushing things forward at all times. And then when
Speaker 2: Steve went back on his own, it was, you know,
Speaker 2: one album every year and a half or two years
Speaker 2: to get around to doing something, okay, and that's fine.
Speaker 2: He already did he already is they say, he already
Speaker 2: shot his watch. He made a place, he did something
Speaker 2: that changed the culture, materially changed the culture. Malcolm and
Speaker 2: I could have never done that on our own. It
Speaker 2: was Steve in that vehicle that he had, that bit
Speaker 2: of magic that he had that I hope that we enabled,
Speaker 2: and I think the results speak for themselves. I have
Speaker 2: nothing but love and respect for Steve. Okay, but slicing
Speaker 2: and dicing a little bit more. You mentioned Steve's car accident,
Speaker 2: since you were there before and after. Yes, did he
Speaker 2: make a full recovery or was he different? Well, I
Speaker 2: can't say that was He made a full recovery, but
Speaker 2: he was different. I think his near brush with death
Speaker 2: changed his way he perceived the world. He was much
Speaker 2: more spiritual when he came back, and he was he
Speaker 2: was different, a little different, but he wasn't disabled or anything.
Speaker 2: But I think his view of life changed. He had
Speaker 2: the near death experience and that was really pretty savage.
Speaker 2: He almost didn't make it, you know, and you know,
Speaker 2: to this day, I love Steve. I care about him.
Speaker 2: I know that we'll never repeat the same thing over
Speaker 2: you know, but he's a good man, and he's long,
Speaker 2: he's lived long, and he has a beautiful family, and
Speaker 2: I only wish him well and I'm glad we had
Speaker 2: the time the gods put us together. For the time
Speaker 2: we were together. We can't change that either, right.
Speaker 1: So how many years after fulfilling this was it until
Speaker 1: you reconnected?
Speaker 2: About twenty years?
Speaker 1: And what happened when you picked up the phone?
Speaker 2: Well, he called me every now and again. He said,
Speaker 2: come on down to see the show. And he gave
Speaker 2: me in Malcolm nice credits at one of the shows,
Speaker 2: one of those toys r Us right things that he does,
Speaker 2: and he had a video of Malcolm from the East
Speaker 2: Coast and I stood up and stuff, and he gave
Speaker 2: us really nice credits and he read he performed those
Speaker 2: albums in the incomplete right for me, and it was
Speaker 2: And then I think I did one three years ago.
Speaker 2: I said, you know, you might want to have a
Speaker 2: little of my vibe on one of your songs, said
Speaker 2: come down and play moge on one of my songs,
Speaker 2: which I did about three or four years ago. And
Speaker 2: we talked to each other on the phone rarely, but
Speaker 2: not a lot, you know.
Speaker 1: Okay, So it ended with you and Steve? How much
Speaker 1: did that fucked you up? Emotionally?
Speaker 2: It left me feeling a little angry and a little
Speaker 2: disappointed and hurt. But you know, I went on and
Speaker 2: did other things. Steve was my only client. I had
Speaker 2: Billy Preston, I had Richie Havens, had the Isley Brothers.
Speaker 2: I had Dave Mason. You know, Okay, so let's just go.
Speaker 2: You have those, how do you end up working with Divo? Well,
Speaker 2: Divo or Big R and B fans And as a
Speaker 2: matter of fact, Mark motherslaw wrote the forward to my book. Yes,
Speaker 2: he's a wonderful person. As a matter of fact, I'm
Speaker 2: in between stuff with them in this coming week. And
Speaker 2: they really had an idea of who they were. They
Speaker 2: looked us up, looked me up because I would work
Speaker 2: with Steve. They knew I understood Electronica and R and B,
Speaker 2: and I knew when I heard Devo. I heard them
Speaker 2: at the star Wood back in the day, standing up there,
Speaker 2: lurking around in the balcony with all the greats, the
Speaker 2: near grates and the end grades, and all the guys
Speaker 2: in their letter jackets from all the record companies would
Speaker 2: hang up there, hover around up there and need or
Speaker 2: dervs and stuff. And I saw them perform and I said,
Speaker 2: you know, this really interesting band. I really liked them,
Speaker 2: and I went and met with them. They came to
Speaker 2: the record They came to the studio and they were
Speaker 2: all dressed up with hard hats. They came out of
Speaker 2: a car, all wearing hard hats and coveralls and hip
Speaker 2: boots and stuff with a canister stripped to the hard
Speaker 2: hat with a with a hose that was running up
Speaker 2: their no And when they got out of the parking
Speaker 2: lot at the record plant, the whole place went completely bonkers.
Speaker 2: They were doing this film about radioactivity or something down
Speaker 2: down the street, and they came over at their lunch hour,
Speaker 2: but they scandalized the entire studio. But I understood what
Speaker 2: they were looking for and to keep it simple again,
Speaker 2: not a lot of voices, and not to try to
Speaker 2: make them what they weren't to have some high end
Speaker 2: producer and imprint their own the producer sound on their music.
Speaker 2: I really realized that the best thing I could do
Speaker 2: with Devo is to get them to sound like who
Speaker 2: they were. My job is to get them to perform.
Speaker 2: It's not there my job to sound like oh, Margolev
Speaker 2: produced this record. I wanted them to be the earthy
Speaker 2: sound that they were. The important thing was to understand
Speaker 2: the bottom end, which is really R and B, which
Speaker 2: I really got from Steve.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're in the studio with them. Different producers have difference.
Speaker 1: Some want to reorganize the song, some add sounds. What
Speaker 1: did you add in that particular project. I got them
Speaker 1: to perform with about who they were. My job was
Speaker 1: to get them to get their instruments to sound the
Speaker 1: best they could and to get them to perform being themselves.
Speaker 2: And what I did is I brought them all into
Speaker 2: the control room like I did with Stevie, and we
Speaker 2: had QUAD monitoring in the control room and I put
Speaker 2: their mixes up in QUAD so when we were tracking,
Speaker 2: with the exception of the drums, which I had to
Speaker 2: have in the studio, but it was loud, it was
Speaker 2: accurate and they could really feel the music inside of them.
Speaker 2: And also I used three or four different guitar amps
Speaker 2: at the same time, all with different sounds, so that
Speaker 2: we could mix and get the sound so I would
Speaker 2: have to overdub stuff and to keep it as simple
Speaker 2: and as rudimentary as possible, and to keep it earthy
Speaker 2: and together again, I go all the way back to
Speaker 2: Lothar and the hand people.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, So were you surprised when Whip It became
Speaker 1: a cold favorite? Actually, I hit no.
Speaker 2: I wasn't surprised. I knew it would happen because it's
Speaker 2: a it's a beautifully elemental recording, and it's so simple.
Speaker 2: Five notes up, two notes down, bah bah bah bom
Speaker 2: bomb bomb ba ba bah bah bum bomb bomb five
Speaker 2: notes up, two notes down. Very simple, very straightforward, and
Speaker 2: very forward looking in the social condition. And that was
Speaker 2: something that really appealed to me politically as well. Again,
Speaker 2: something that I understood and I got where they were
Speaker 2: coming from. And if you look at their lyrics today
Speaker 2: and you look at their music today, you see how
Speaker 2: how they were looking into the crystal ball because that's
Speaker 2: where we.
Speaker 1: Are right and they were all art students. They had
Speaker 1: that sensibility. So you make that record, it's incredibly successful.
Speaker 1: They don't call you for the next record. How do
Speaker 1: you feel about that.
Speaker 2: Life, I have no feelings about it. I would have
Speaker 2: liked it, But those guys, say, you know, they're very
Speaker 2: all of them, Both Jerry and Mark are both very
Speaker 2: highly individualistic. They had very specific ideas of their own
Speaker 2: and I think that Cherry wanted to do. They originally
Speaker 2: originally wanted to do their produce their next album on
Speaker 2: their own. They made it known to me. All I
Speaker 2: do is my business is in the present. When I'm there,
Speaker 2: That's what I'm doing. I'm not looking about the next record.
Speaker 2: I'm not looking at that. If the gods had wanted
Speaker 2: me to do the next record, I would have done
Speaker 2: the next record.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're producing records. But like every producer, business
Speaker 1: starts to dry up. So what was that like? What
Speaker 1: was that like?
Speaker 2: It was like the long glide path. I ended up
Speaker 2: doing a lot of records, as they say, moving more
Speaker 2: toward jazz. One particular day in Shadowfax was my favorite.
Speaker 2: I was already starting to experiment more with about hearing,
Speaker 2: which is something I discovered with Stevie and quad mixing,
Speaker 2: and that sort of has found its way now sixty
Speaker 2: years later with Dolby Atmos. But originally back in seventy
Speaker 2: two when we built this control room with the record plant,
Speaker 2: when we moved there with Steve, we had a thing
Speaker 2: called QS. I don't know if you remember.
Speaker 1: Of course, there were two computing. There was QS at sq.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course it didn't work very well, but
Speaker 2: we built that control room. John Store came out, who
Speaker 2: built the Electric Lady, and Tom Hidley, who is the
Speaker 2: chief of maintenance at the record plant, and Gary Kelgrin,
Speaker 2: God bless his soul. It was a visionary and a
Speaker 2: true psychedelic fellow in every way. He said, you know,
Speaker 2: come to the record plant. We were looking. We were
Speaker 2: working at Crystal when we first came out here, and
Speaker 2: we couldn't stay there because Crystal was all the hippies
Speaker 2: from Laurel Canyon were making their records there and Steve
Speaker 2: sucked up all the oxygen. No one could go there
Speaker 2: because he was there. At twenty four to seven with us,
Speaker 2: we had a move and meet Gary and Chris said, well,
Speaker 2: come come over to the record plant. We'll build a
Speaker 2: room for you if you booked the room for a year.
Speaker 2: We liked that whole concept. We went up to Gary's house.
Speaker 2: It was on Camino pal Merrow. I think it was
Speaker 2: the old Canadian Embassy. Looked like some haunt. That house empty,
Speaker 2: no furniture, but the exception of the dining room had
Speaker 2: a big long table and as you could seat like
Speaker 2: twelve people for dinner, a big chandelier, and the whole
Speaker 2: deal in the kitchen at the end. You could look
Speaker 2: there right and we start there and we negotiated, and
Speaker 2: the hummed and drummed and stuff, and Gary brings out
Speaker 2: the cavasier bottle and we poured the sniffers and we're
Speaker 2: all standing up holding our glasses. We've made the deal,
Speaker 2: and we clinked the glasses and there's an earthquake right
Speaker 2: right at the moment. The whole house going like this
Speaker 2: and that, and I could look through the kitchen and
Speaker 2: see the water coming down from the swimming pool down
Speaker 2: toward the kitchen, and I knew that the gods had
Speaker 2: something good to say. And John came out and we
Speaker 2: built this wonderful studio B and we had quad monitors
Speaker 2: in it because we were doing quad a lot in England.
Speaker 2: Deco was doing a lot of classical music, and PolyGram
Speaker 2: and people like that were doing Quad. And there's some
Speaker 2: rock and roll records. I think one of the Beatles records,
Speaker 2: the White One, was in the stereo quadraphonic Quadrophenia was
Speaker 2: in but it didn't go over with the public because
Speaker 2: no one wanted to spend the money for a new,
Speaker 2: different kind of wacky cartridge for their turntable and add
Speaker 2: another amplifier and more speakers. All the wives would go crazy,
Speaker 2: don't put that speaker under the piano, or and take
Speaker 2: that subwolfer out of the fireplace. And it was a
Speaker 2: lot of that stuff going on. So it really didn't happen.
Speaker 2: But what happened was we built a QUAD control room
Speaker 2: with an API board that had a QUAD monitor section
Speaker 2: and we mixed try to make Superstition in Quad and
Speaker 2: it sounded great when it was on tape, but when
Speaker 2: we tried to get it into the vinyl, it was
Speaker 2: not there. You couldn't get the separation. But what that
Speaker 2: did for us is I was able to monitor in
Speaker 2: Quad with Stevie's. One of the things that really made
Speaker 2: those records different, and what made DEVO different was they
Speaker 2: were monitored while we were recording in Quad and they
Speaker 2: had them in the control room and they could hear
Speaker 2: the clavinet over here and the guitar over there, and
Speaker 2: the synthesizer over here, and the background vocals behind me
Speaker 2: and stuff, and you know, at like one hundred dB
Speaker 2: or a ninety dBSPL sound pressure level, and it was
Speaker 2: loud and it was full, and it filled us with music.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a perscenim march with the music in front
Speaker 2: of us, and we're looking at these three guys sawing
Speaker 2: away on their instruments inside of a perscenium march. We
Speaker 2: were occupying the same space as the music. And that
Speaker 2: is really what's happening, finally coming now that we can
Speaker 2: handle it technically to do things like that. But back
Speaker 2: in the day, that was the only place you could
Speaker 2: really deliver like that was in the control room. And
Speaker 2: I often used that device in my work, and it
Speaker 2: was very evident on Stevie's stuff. Most of that stuff
Speaker 2: was done that way, with the exception that we had
Speaker 2: to use the studio for vocals and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: But when we were tracking instruments, Stevie Stack was in
Speaker 2: the control room. Devo's instruments were performing in the control
Speaker 2: Mono or Hermano no earphones, right, and it's a different thing.
Speaker 2: You know. I have a big thing right now about
Speaker 2: the noise canceling headphones, which I think are very dangerous
Speaker 2: because they deprive you of auditory information that you need
Speaker 2: to have with the background noise and cross talk. When
Speaker 2: you listen without headphones on sound that comes from your left,
Speaker 2: you also hear a delayed signal to the right and
Speaker 2: so forth your head. You're shapier ears. All those things
Speaker 2: give you visual cues that enable you to decide where
Speaker 2: sound is coming from, where you're gonna and it really
Speaker 2: affects your cognition about how you understand words. When all
Speaker 2: these kids are listening on these noise canceling earphones, they're
Speaker 2: depriving themselves of the ability to get those auditory cues,
Speaker 2: and I think people suffer from it and stuffer about
Speaker 2: really being able to really achieve the correct cognition. It's
Speaker 2: a kind of a phasia, and I think it's very
Speaker 2: very dangerous what's going on with noise canceling.
Speaker 1: Just you know, you made me think of Stevie. I
Speaker 1: know people worked with Stevie. Stevie, of course, as you say,
Speaker 1: is unsighted when he was born. They cut these tendons
Speaker 1: in the eye that they discovered later regulate your time clock.
Speaker 1: So people who had that cup before, like Stevie, they
Speaker 1: don't have the same sense of evening morning.
Speaker 2: And I used to call it Stevie time. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: committed four in the morning. It didn't make any difference
Speaker 2: to him, right. That was one of the things Malcolm
Speaker 2: and I really were on top of. The thing is
Speaker 2: I had experience with unsided people. When I was in
Speaker 2: high school. We had this woman, her name was Tommy Kylin.
Speaker 2: She was onsided. She was a teacher and I took
Speaker 2: her to the Bunny Slope at Basky Up in Stockbridge
Speaker 2: when I was in high school. The teacher how to
Speaker 2: ski a little bit, fall over the place and everything.
Speaker 2: But so I had a degree of sensitivity towards Stevie's predicament.
Speaker 2: We always used to make sure that all the instruments
Speaker 2: are always in the same place, that Steve got a
Speaker 2: verbal picture for me and Malcolm exactly where the bathroom was,
Speaker 2: where the coffee was, There's stairs here, the door handles
Speaker 2: over here. We'd always try to create a picture an
Speaker 2: image that he could sound like, for example, recording the drums.
Speaker 2: I'd hate to go circle around on Steve. But the
Speaker 2: thing is, how does Steve know where the tom toms
Speaker 2: are or where the symbols are if he can't see them.
Speaker 2: So we would make sure to make sure that what
Speaker 2: he heard in the headphones was an exact stereo mix
Speaker 2: of his drum kit. So if he was hitting the
Speaker 2: drum over here to the left or to the right,
Speaker 2: and the other drums to the left or the high hat,
Speaker 2: they would all come up in his headphones in stereo,
Speaker 2: so that he could have a spatial relationship with the
Speaker 2: instrument he was playing. And if you listen to the
Speaker 2: Stevie Wonder records, you'll see that all the high hats
Speaker 2: are on the left because that's where Stevie had them,
Speaker 2: So it's okay. There was that kind of sensitivity going
Speaker 2: on in terms of how Stevie listened.
Speaker 1: It was very.
Speaker 2: Important to do things like that. We didn't make a
Speaker 2: big deal out of it, but that's why Steve could.
Speaker 2: It really sort of helped his performance. And what my
Speaker 2: job was as a producers to get every artist I
Speaker 2: worked with, whether it was Billy Preston or Stevie or
Speaker 2: Devo or Shadow Facts or David Sanborn or any of
Speaker 2: those people, to get them to perform to the limits
Speaker 2: of their potential and what I needed to do in
Speaker 2: the studio to make that happen. And my job is
Speaker 2: not to be a personality and say, oh, this is
Speaker 2: a Robert Margolette record or this is a heimiancle record
Speaker 2: or whatever. It's the artists performing at their best.
Speaker 1: Okay, So ultimately you get into movie sound for home video.
Speaker 1: Tell us about that.
Speaker 2: Well, what happened was I was very engaged with my
Speaker 2: where The big question my life has always been is
Speaker 2: where does the sound come from? And it was during
Speaker 2: a time when I sort of my jazz days were
Speaker 2: running down, and I was traveling to Japan and doing stuff,
Speaker 2: and I really wasn't fully fulfilled, and I I went
Speaker 2: to hear a couple of conferences Tom Tom Okay, Tom Holman, Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: Tom Holman was very much into specialization. I was into
Speaker 2: the spatialized audio because of the way I was working
Speaker 2: in the studio, and there's something I wanted to see happen,
Speaker 2: and it so happened that it was during a time
Speaker 2: when the motion picture business, especially New Line Cinema, which
Speaker 2: was a new and very revolutionary independent bunch of people
Speaker 2: were taking the New Line Cinema theatrical library and transposing
Speaker 2: them onto DVDs, and the soundtracks were all miserable and
Speaker 2: sounded terrible, and I said, I think I know how
Speaker 2: to really make that happen, and we made a deal
Speaker 2: with I made a deal out of my living room,
Speaker 2: my house on just below Runyon Canyon. I was living
Speaker 2: on hillside. In my apartment, I put a kind of
Speaker 2: a home studio together, but it was more than a
Speaker 2: home studio. But I started mixing with my friend Brandt
Speaker 2: at that time, and Malcolm and I had long gone
Speaker 2: our separate ways, and I was done with traveling to
Speaker 2: Japan and going to down to Rio to do rock
Speaker 2: and Rio and do all these different kinds of things.
Speaker 2: But I lacked the kind of an identity. And when
Speaker 2: I discovered what was going on with the motion picture business,
Speaker 2: I knew that I could take a motion picture soundtrack
Speaker 2: which was really designed for an auditorium with two or
Speaker 2: three hundred people in it on a next curve which
Speaker 2: they called it was a theatrical curve for auditoriums and
Speaker 2: optical audio that it left a lot to be desired.
Speaker 2: And I found that it was just when pro tools
Speaker 2: started happening, and I found that I could re engineer
Speaker 2: those soundtracks and really make them come to life. And
Speaker 2: we did a lot of very major pictures like that,
Speaker 2: including Lord of the Rings. In the Sound of Music
Speaker 2: which was on six track mag and I was able
Speaker 2: to sort of turn that all that stuff around and
Speaker 2: to really make all those soundtracks become award winning soundtracks,
Speaker 2: and a lot of directors actually came to work with
Speaker 2: us and they were all amazed by it. I ended
Speaker 2: up renting a house and outpost the States and turned
Speaker 2: it into three recording studios, and we had a brilliant
Speaker 2: run of about ten years of doing that of actually
Speaker 2: how defining how home theater audio worked, what worked, and
Speaker 2: what didn't work, and there's a lot of science going on.
Speaker 2: And we had went from five dot one to six
Speaker 2: dot one to seven dot one and then twelve dot one,
Speaker 2: and I was sort of at the bottom of that.
Speaker 2: I worked closely with doctor Floyd Toole at JBL and
Speaker 2: we did a lot of listening and a lot of
Speaker 2: critical listening, and fortunately we were working with a company
Speaker 2: like Newline. We all worked with others as well, but
Speaker 2: the New Line really gave us our head and we
Speaker 2: developed it. We had a very very very brilliant twelve
Speaker 2: year run.
Speaker 1: Okay, that ends, the business goes bankrupt, You stay at
Speaker 1: a friend's house and then you end up in a
Speaker 1: permit in the valley This raises the question that you
Speaker 1: weren't getting royalties on the Stevie stuff. How you survive
Speaker 1: and financially all these years later. Well, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Uh, I don't know, right Lee. I just I survived.
Speaker 2: I got you know, there was so I lost everything
Speaker 2: I had. I went down the tubes for about a
Speaker 2: million bucks, a little bit more than a million dollars,
Speaker 2: and I went down to the courthouse and that judge says, well,
Speaker 2: young man, what are you going to do about it?
Speaker 2: And I said, your honor.
Speaker 1: He says yes.
Speaker 2: I said, you can't get blood out of a stone.
Speaker 2: And I've never come back fully from that. But I've
Speaker 2: had enough royalties over the years, not from Steve directly,
Speaker 2: but enough all the way around, between that and my
Speaker 2: engineering and mixing and having a studio a little mixing
Speaker 2: room in my house and stuff. I've done a lot
Speaker 2: of different made a lot of different records. You might say.
Speaker 2: I've always been a journeyman, producer, director, point or finger pointer, fader,
Speaker 2: jockey guy. And somehow I always managed to come up standing,
Speaker 2: come out of it standing up one way or another.
Speaker 2: And I'll tell you this, I wouldn't have it any
Speaker 2: different at age eighty five. I look back at my adventures,
Speaker 2: the good times in the bad times, and I look
Speaker 2: at all of it, and I know that I've I've
Speaker 2: done what I was supposed to do on the planet.
Speaker 2: And you know, my God exists in my head, and
Speaker 2: sooner or later I'll become startists like everybody else. But
Speaker 2: I'll tell you this, I've had a fantastic run.
Speaker 1: And you've been fantastic today once again, you were listening
Speaker 1: to Bob Margolev, who has a new book Shaping Sounds
Speaker 1: Stevie Wonder Devo the Synth Revolution in my life Behind
Speaker 1: the Music, Bob, I want to thank you so much
Speaker 1: for taking this time with my audience.
Speaker 2: You know something, it's my great pleasure to meet you
Speaker 2: finally and put a face to the voice read your
Speaker 2: I read your stuff very much all the time. You
Speaker 2: are real, Maven when it comes to putting down this
Speaker 2: meanings and understanding our business in a way that very
Speaker 2: few people do. And I think your insight into what's
Speaker 2: going on is extremely important to what's happening next, especially
Speaker 2: with the advent of AI, and I think that we're
Speaker 2: the wheel is getting to turn in a big way again.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure we have all the answers to it,
Speaker 2: but I think that it's also unavoidable. And I urge
Speaker 2: your listeners to embrace the change and not put your
Speaker 2: head in the sand and deny the existence of the
Speaker 2: new thinking, and understand it and embrace it and make
Speaker 2: some new music with it, because I want to hear
Speaker 2: something new. I'm tired of eight bars of this and
Speaker 2: eight bars of that. It feels like basket weaving After
Speaker 2: a while. How many times can you do the two
Speaker 2: on the floor and backbeat and stuff tap tap tap.
Speaker 2: We have to take music somewhere else. Look how far
Speaker 2: we've come from Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Perry
Speaker 2: Como and Bing Crosby, No, all the blues from the
Speaker 2: South and all of that stuff that's come along. Where
Speaker 2: are we stepping next? What's can it take us to
Speaker 2: a place that means something that's just not in the
Speaker 2: you know, I just went to the get a haircut,
Speaker 2: and I was sitting in the barber cherry yesterday. I
Speaker 2: love the barber Chairy. You don't have it now. It's
Speaker 2: a stylist, but I and I was listening to it.
Speaker 2: I couldn't understand one word of what they were saying
Speaker 2: on the music, it was coming over the thing, and
Speaker 2: I don't know what it's doing socially, you know, I
Speaker 2: don't know if we're moving, if we're moving the dials
Speaker 2: the right way. Yet that to find our to find
Speaker 2: our huge shot.
Speaker 1: I mean a couple of things. One in the hay
Speaker 1: here you're older than I am by thirteen years. But
Speaker 1: is that all? Yes, okay, okay, But when music, let's
Speaker 1: just call it post beatles, post beatles through sometime in
Speaker 1: the seventies, music really drove the culture. If you wanted
Speaker 1: to know what was going on, you listened to the radio,
Speaker 1: listen to a record. But it was made by middle
Speaker 1: class people. No one ever wanted their kid to be
Speaker 1: in the arts, okay, but there were kids. I mean,
Speaker 1: I went I went to public high school. I know,
Speaker 1: you ended up going to a school in Stockbridge. But
Speaker 1: they're always kids. They might be nice, they might be beautiful, whatever,
Speaker 1: but they were the art kids. They were different, and
Speaker 1: those kids made the music. As a result of the
Speaker 1: hard economics of today's society, there's not as much of
Speaker 1: a middle class, and the people who were brought up
Speaker 1: in the middle class, they don't want to fall below.
Speaker 1: So they go to work for the bank, they work
Speaker 1: and tech. Those people used to be artists and they
Speaker 1: could say no. So for me, what's going on with
Speaker 1: the music now is it's sort of like pre beetles.
Speaker 1: There's a business. You can hear a good ditty whatever,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't drive the culture. And as I say,
Speaker 1: you put it very eloquently before I started to talk
Speaker 1: just now about the future and pushing the edge of
Speaker 1: the envelope. The other thing, of course, being that every
Speaker 1: three or four years it was always a new sound.
Speaker 1: There hasn't been a new sound in like fifteen eighteen years.
Speaker 1: It's I'm waiting for the revolution too. Well.
Speaker 2: You know, music is also kind of an athletic thing.
Speaker 2: You have to be able to move your fingers a
Speaker 2: certain way or your mouth a certain way. You have
Speaker 2: to be able to use a musical instrument. It's a
Speaker 2: nicet thing. It's a physical expression that you have when
Speaker 2: you play the saxophone that you want to make it
Speaker 2: wail and feel like the blues. And I think there
Speaker 2: are players out there who are playing the blues again.
Speaker 2: I just did an album of blues album with Gary Myrick,
Speaker 2: for example, which is quite.
Speaker 1: You know, that first Gary Myric album. I saw me
Speaker 1: know she talks in stereo. It's such success there on that.
Speaker 1: I did that record, you know love that. I saw
Speaker 1: him at the Roxy when he did it. I own
Speaker 1: that Album's a huge fan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I did that record. Okay, yeah, so yeah, it's uh.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's still playing the blues. He's in the
Speaker 2: seventies and the dude can really play. I just made
Speaker 2: a record with him last year. The guy is just
Speaker 2: really incredible when it comes to that. There are these
Speaker 2: nests of really good players. But we're into a place
Speaker 2: right now where music is in kind of a state
Speaker 2: of flux. I don't really know what we think we're
Speaker 2: listening to. I mean we have, you know, all the
Speaker 2: big concert dates and people playing out live, and I
Speaker 2: think that's where the music is going in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways, because there is a kind of a beauty
Speaker 2: and imperfection. Yeah, definitely, And in live playing there is
Speaker 2: a lot of imperfection, and I think that that's what
Speaker 2: we're looking at. We're looking at the randomness of real musicianship.
Speaker 2: It's not so much the formulated kind of computer music
Speaker 2: is one thing. A lot of this computer stuff is
Speaker 2: all very clever and very good and very sequenced and everything.
Speaker 2: But in the end, it doesn't have any soul. It
Speaker 2: doesn't relate to anything meaningful than a bunch of bubbling
Speaker 2: noises from a computer. We need to have something that's
Speaker 2: going to address our faci physical issues. We have to
Speaker 2: talk about what Donnie is doing in Iran as they
Speaker 2: say Iran and stuff, and all these people hunking and
Speaker 2: blowing off steam in every direction and threatening old men,
Speaker 2: threatening each other with bombs and stuff. But somewhere inside
Speaker 2: of us there's still a thing called a soul and
Speaker 2: a sensitivity and a childlike beauty that is the innocence
Speaker 2: of art and the discovery of beauty and truth. And
Speaker 2: I think that we need to look for that again
Speaker 2: more than anything. Ah Man, We're gonna leave it at that,
Speaker 2: Bob Now, by Cracky, I can wave my cane at
Speaker 2: you right head on down the hill once I get
Speaker 2: my parking validated.
Speaker 1: Right till next time. This is Bob left, SAIDs