Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Says Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is producer, engineer, technical wizard George Massenberg. George,
Speaker 1: you wanted to talk about skiing.
Speaker 2: I'd rather talk about AI.
Speaker 1: You'd rather talk about AI? Tell me your thoughts about AI.
Speaker 2: I think most of the public conversation has been misled
Speaker 2: and is misleading. Kind of summarize it.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let's sort of buy for Katie here. Are
Speaker 1: you on the side of AI is scary or the
Speaker 1: hype is too heavy.
Speaker 2: I'm certainly of the opinion that some tech millionaires are
Speaker 2: making a lot more money promoting AI, and I've recently
Speaker 2: found out a little bit more of the dollars where
Speaker 2: the dollars move. But I'm not scared of anything. I
Speaker 2: love technology. The misuse of technology I have problems with.
Speaker 2: But I love fixing things. I love getting things to work.
Speaker 2: And for the past couple of years, my programmers and
Speaker 2: I have been working with AI to suggest code and
Speaker 2: it speeds things up. By the way, it also gets
Speaker 2: about half of what it states is fact wrong. That
Speaker 2: is code that doesn't work or code that causes things
Speaker 2: to crash, and code is code. I mean you have
Speaker 2: to run code, and if it's wrong, it crashes. So
Speaker 2: we have to be as careful as we are with
Speaker 2: AI generating code. We don't do any generative AI with code.
Speaker 2: We use it to wire controls in some of these
Speaker 2: development applications.
Speaker 1: So, George, you just sent me a document saying why
Speaker 1: does AI generated music sound so shitty? So why does
Speaker 1: it sound so shitty?
Speaker 2: Well, there are a few reasons. Well, I guess the
Speaker 2: reason at the top of my head is that we've
Speaker 2: been years trying to make incrementally better music as we
Speaker 2: learn how to live and how to communicate, how to listen,
Speaker 2: how to spread out our interests that we allow other
Speaker 2: kinds of music, other cultures in And it's certainly what
Speaker 2: I'm trying to do is to make is to understand
Speaker 2: better how to communicate with music, how to help artists
Speaker 2: make music better, communicate what they're trying to say. And
Speaker 2: by the way, that presumes that artists always have something
Speaker 2: to say. And you may have an opinion on that,
Speaker 2: but the bottom line is we love making music. This
Speaker 2: group of seven of us, and you've interviewed half of us,
Speaker 2: I think, but I've lived a life of music in
Speaker 2: its group Bob, It's brought me tremendous joy when I
Speaker 2: stumble on something I've been working very hard at and
Speaker 2: finally I make it work or it clicks or it
Speaker 2: has some magic, and it it affirms my life. It's
Speaker 2: the best thing I could, best way I can put it.
Speaker 2: I love music. Okay, that's your general philosophy. But just
Speaker 2: restating the question, why does AI music sound so bad? Well,
Speaker 2: here's the list. I'll work my way from the bottom up.
Speaker 2: Missing the feel.
Speaker 1: AI.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you think of it in terms of
Speaker 2: what AI doesn't do. It doesn't copy paste happiness. It
Speaker 2: doesn't doesn't do joy. Joy is very personalized, its individual.
Speaker 2: It doesn't have the tools yet to tell a story
Speaker 2: in time, Bob. You know groove as well as any
Speaker 2: of us. Groove is, in one way of looking at
Speaker 2: groove is a story between musicians and time. Musicians for me,
Speaker 2: musicians in the studio where a great guitar player proposes
Speaker 2: a groove to somebody else in the room, and it's
Speaker 2: what can you do with this, Bernard or whatever that
Speaker 2: might be. Groove is a story in time, and you
Speaker 2: hear groove that's written to me everywhere. Mariacchi, you know
Speaker 2: the feel of mariachi is the feel of the groove.
Speaker 2: How something to the uninitiated sounds a little bit like
Speaker 2: a lurch off the forela, and that's groove, or in
Speaker 2: one way of looking at that's groove. And AI doesn't
Speaker 2: do groove. Now maybe eventually you could learn. But the
Speaker 2: very heart of AI, the heart of AI, is nothing
Speaker 2: but a machine that does a comparative analysis and a
Speaker 2: thing called correlation, auto correlation, relative correlation. And the reason
Speaker 2: it soaks up so much power is the way I works.
Speaker 2: And you've heard it put this way. I know where
Speaker 2: you take two call them data sets, and you sort
Speaker 2: on the correlated parts of two data sets. I'll get
Speaker 2: I'll get a lot simpiler in a minute, two correlated
Speaker 2: parts of data sets, and you're building a large model library.
Speaker 2: By the way, that's the expensive part of AI, is
Speaker 2: building the large model library. But all you're doing is
Speaker 2: finding commonality. And you're doing on more than this, but
Speaker 2: it's very core. You're finding a commonality between data sets
Speaker 2: and what I would propose in its most rudimentary form,
Speaker 2: it's turning all of these different data sets looking for
Speaker 2: commonality into mush into beige mush. Nothing too surprising. It
Speaker 2: doesn't do anything terribly extraordinary or terribly Monday. Actually it's
Speaker 2: all Munday, and if you want to look at it
Speaker 2: that way. But it's selling some kind of genius that
Speaker 2: I'm just not seeing. I think there's been tremendous room
Speaker 2: for we practitioners who use AI to take an idea,
Speaker 2: see what AI has to say about it, and then
Speaker 2: adds something of our own. And one thing that I
Speaker 2: would suggest is there's a lot of room to add
Speaker 2: it of our own feeling and knowledge. And it's sets
Speaker 2: of music and joy. There's no joy. Yeah, AI doesn't
Speaker 2: do joy. Oh god, I'm sorry. I'm running on of
Speaker 2: no no, no, no no no, I have these is
Speaker 2: all going to get cut.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no, no no, this is this is genius.
Speaker 1: Keep going. How'll come? Insiders like you and Don was
Speaker 1: have no fear of AI and music and everybody on
Speaker 1: the business side, and those who are not on the
Speaker 1: inside creatively are freaking out.
Speaker 2: I love Don and for all the times that we've
Speaker 2: been in the studio together, and you have to remember,
Speaker 2: because you've been here with this, I know where we
Speaker 2: spend about five minutes hacking, hacking, doing work and doing
Speaker 2: some edits and then the next fifty five minutes telling stories.
Speaker 2: And Don's stories are great, and he's worked with everybody,
Speaker 2: and I just love working. He's a great guy to
Speaker 2: hang with. Why does Don tend to think about it
Speaker 2: the same way? It's the first I've heard of it.
Speaker 2: I haven't talked to Tom in a couple of years ago,
Speaker 2: and I would say that he's a thinking man's producer.
Speaker 2: He's the thinking man's producer with a great, great field.
Speaker 2: Now I'm surprised you haven't haven't heard that he's out
Speaker 2: with us.
Speaker 1: With the Don has told me. He said, AI is
Speaker 1: a tool, just like with the lin drum. He had
Speaker 1: Lynn drum number three I think it was, and he
Speaker 1: asked Roger len who had number two? Because Roger had
Speaker 1: number one. He said Prince. And then Don messed around
Speaker 1: with it, couldn't figure out any great thing. And then
Speaker 1: he heard princes when doves cry. And then he says, Okay,
Speaker 1: I see what you can do with it. And he
Speaker 1: feels the same way about AI that yes, I feel this, Ye,
Speaker 1: it will have us, but it's not going to replace
Speaker 1: the underlying music.
Speaker 2: It's not going to replace the inspiration. So again you
Speaker 2: know if you scroll to the bottom, no real intentionality.
Speaker 2: AI doesn't get into a gig with the intention of
Speaker 2: a quality even reviewing its quality. To ask another add
Speaker 2: I think it was chat GPT if there was any
Speaker 2: recycling of data in LIED and said, no, there's none.
Speaker 2: But that's that's a lie. It does recycle data because
Speaker 2: it does need to study its recommendations and make sure
Speaker 2: it's not echoing one of those early completely racist AI
Speaker 2: agents that put out like the worst recommendations, the worst language,
Speaker 2: hateful speech. And you've read about that, and it may
Speaker 2: have been early Meta that did that, just hateful, hateful speech,
Speaker 2: and they went in and started fishing for ways to
Speaker 2: limit that, they being the few programmers that really understand
Speaker 2: how the AI algorithms were. So what I would what
Speaker 2: my mind jumps to is is how great Prince was
Speaker 2: because he you know, we all worked with Prince. In fact,
Speaker 2: you remember Cavala Ruffalo, they managed Prince and they got
Speaker 2: me the gag mastering some of the Prince stuff because
Speaker 2: Bernie Grutman couldn't deal with it what Prince was making
Speaker 2: him do. May he may rest in peace because he's
Speaker 2: he was the genius. He was on with true independent inspiration.
Speaker 2: But but that thing that he discovered because we saw
Speaker 2: him use the drum machine, he used stock Lynn Lynn
Speaker 2: Allen one. We saw Ellen one when when David David
Speaker 2: Foster asked Roger Lynn to show it to him. So
Speaker 2: that was that was number one where it was still
Speaker 2: breadboards and uh boy, you could you could see the possibilities.
Speaker 2: And Prince saw it in three D. He was musically
Speaker 2: and I want to say, emotionally and technically a study
Speaker 2: in real creativity. Let's go back to the beginning of George.
Speaker 2: So where do you grow up? All over the place.
Speaker 2: My father was an Air Force surgeon, so I grew
Speaker 2: up in four or five different cities. My father was
Speaker 2: from Macon, Georgia, mother was from at that time Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: My grandfather was a mukeeting bucket Exxon which was called
Speaker 2: Standard Oil. And so the most memorable times in my
Speaker 2: life were going to after they divorced, visit my father
Speaker 2: in Macon, Georgia, and have this experience with Southern radio
Speaker 2: that changed my DNA at the very heart is growing
Speaker 2: up listening to when I was in Macon, listening to
Speaker 2: race radio, listening to early black radio, and as near
Speaker 2: as I can figure. My father was a surgeon for
Speaker 2: the better part of the black community of Making, Georgia.
Speaker 2: I don't know whether he was the surgeon for notable musicians,
Speaker 2: but he might have been. So I've got something you're
Speaker 2: going to have to cut out. My father was the
Speaker 2: only surgeon in town that would put his hand up
Speaker 2: a black man's ass to check for growths. And why
Speaker 2: do we have to keep out? Oh? I love you
Speaker 2: more and more, Bob Okay, use it. But he was.
Speaker 2: He was. The quarter of his year was charity surgery.
Speaker 2: He was, in my mind, a hero. Even though he
Speaker 2: was a terrible alcoholic and hated being a doctor. He
Speaker 2: did use it. But growing up in Making, Georgia expose
Speaker 2: me to the early bird groups and I would turn
Speaker 2: on the radio and I as a seven year old,
Speaker 2: which is her raw sex pour out of the radio,
Speaker 2: And I said, well that's for me. I didn't know anything,
Speaker 2: but I loved music, and that was a side of
Speaker 2: music that I wouldn't have heard any other way. So
Speaker 2: that was Making. And we were also Scottsfield, Arizona, and
Speaker 2: be fifty twos flew Over and my brother and my
Speaker 2: nephew are service families in the Navy. My nephew is
Speaker 2: an air boss on an aircraft carrier, and my brother
Speaker 2: rose to I'm so proud of my brother. We grew
Speaker 2: up miles apart. My brother went into service and was
Speaker 2: in naval Rotzzi and interviewed with Rumsfeld. He was one
Speaker 2: of the top ten guys in service. And we never
Speaker 2: spoke for years and years and years, and then when
Speaker 2: we did, we realized how much we loved each other.
Speaker 2: But now I'm really getting farfield. I was a family
Speaker 2: and I was you've interviewed ry Cooter would refer to
Speaker 2: him as I was always a George. I was always
Speaker 2: a marginal person. I felt that way. It was always marginal.
Speaker 2: I was a terrible student. It was horrible.
Speaker 1: Wait a second, Okay, so only two kids in the family,
Speaker 1: you and your brother.
Speaker 2: Well, we have an extended family yet cousins and nephews,
Speaker 2: and well in the primary family was my brother. And
Speaker 2: who's older you or your brother? I was older and
Speaker 2: I was a monster. I would I would fight with
Speaker 2: my brother and do terrible things. But yeah, no, I
Speaker 2: was older.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, you must have been somewhat of a good
Speaker 1: student if you got into Johns Hopkins.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but boy. I didn't get along with anybody, and
Speaker 2: I didn't realize until I tried to go back and
Speaker 2: teach at university. I was at McGill for thirteen years,
Speaker 2: and I view those years largely as misdirected and maybe wasted.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, just to be clear, your years at
Speaker 1: Johns Hopkins or your year's teaching.
Speaker 2: My years A year and a half at Johns Hopkins,
Speaker 2: and I finally left Johns Hopkins. I quit Johns Hopkins
Speaker 2: at about the same time that everybody else was smart
Speaker 2: was quitting university, and I got a job at a
Speaker 2: recording studio. Okay, But later at McGill, I found that
Speaker 2: it was very difficult to reach kids. I wasn't there
Speaker 2: to serve the kids. I was there to serve the
Speaker 2: administrative layer at the university. And when I fought it,
Speaker 2: I was not welcomed. Okay, So when you were at McGill,
Speaker 2: why was it so hard to reach students. I wasn't
Speaker 2: silenced early, but I assumed that I could change the agenda.
Speaker 2: And I came to McGill having just started doing video
Speaker 2: in the studio, because at that time I had already
Speaker 2: demonstrated as well as I could that video directors. We
Speaker 2: were missing a lot, and so I wanted to do
Speaker 2: it on my own. So I bought some professional cameras
Speaker 2: and started taking doing video and the recording studio. This
Speaker 2: would be very quick, don't worry. Started doing video on
Speaker 2: the recording studio. My second engineers would double as videographers.
Speaker 2: Would take one let's roll. They would put down their
Speaker 2: clipboard and pick up a camera and shoot the session.
Speaker 2: And I had a completely different experience with video, where
Speaker 2: I focused on the music and the performance and not
Speaker 2: what I came into it as a producer. Angry, an
Speaker 2: r person or whatever forces push a session over on
Speaker 2: its face. So I took that to mcgil where I
Speaker 2: was trying to make clear that we had a tremendous
Speaker 2: resource at mcgillan's and Music. We had some extraordinary performance
Speaker 2: and we had recording facilities one of the pre eminent
Speaker 2: recording programs in the world mcguil Sound Recording, and I
Speaker 2: tried to put it together. We had a tremendous director
Speaker 2: of the opera, Patrick Hanson, and we had wonderful donors
Speaker 2: Joe and Ivory and gave me discretionary use of some
Speaker 2: funds and so I could buy enough video to do
Speaker 2: pro video, and we changed video in Canada, I would
Speaker 2: submit where you know, we would keep keep it as research.
Speaker 2: Everything about about what I learned was about research, conducting
Speaker 2: research and doing it poorly, I mean, not good at it.
Speaker 2: But and I'm inconsistent and I'm lazy, But I did
Speaker 2: find that musicians were far better videographers far better. And
Speaker 2: this is way before anything Instagram or TikTok or anything issues.
Speaker 2: Make better videographers because they follow the music. They follow
Speaker 2: the music, and as videographers on a live presentation, they're
Speaker 2: irreplaceable because they know where the music is going, they
Speaker 2: know where the action is going in opera, and this
Speaker 2: is lost on the better part of the school and
Speaker 2: a professional context. You know, I was not very well accepted,
Speaker 2: and maybe it was my attitude. I still have a
Speaker 2: bad attitude.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait wait, bad attitude is the essence of
Speaker 1: rock and roll. But I want to and ask just
Speaker 1: a little bit more, what was the problem with connecting
Speaker 1: with the students.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, Well, this is going to be hard to admit,
Speaker 2: but I'm not a nice person when things go wrong,
Speaker 2: and I'm aggressive and more likely to be angry and
Speaker 2: accusatory and just awful and I hate me in the
Speaker 2: recording studio, and if you ask any of my second engineers,
Speaker 2: they would have to agree. And with students it worked
Speaker 2: less well because they thought, they felt strongly and rightly
Speaker 2: so that they were paying for an education. They were
Speaker 2: looking for their education. Why why they were looking for
Speaker 2: their idea what an education was or is? And what
Speaker 2: I needed is for students to pay attention and survey
Speaker 2: your academics bomb and ask them what their biggest problem,
Speaker 2: the biggest problems were and are. And it's the challenge
Speaker 2: in my mind and my book is the challenge of
Speaker 2: getting students to pay attention. That's extraordinarily difficult. And when
Speaker 2: I could capture the attention of and this is this
Speaker 2: is a graduate level course. Sound recording is a master's degree,
Speaker 2: three year degree, which is when I could get somebody
Speaker 2: on board with how to think about telling a story
Speaker 2: in video, because it's all about telling a story, same
Speaker 2: thing as music. We're there to tell stories. And that
Speaker 2: idea of coherence over time that first thing that an
Speaker 2: AIA agent has to deliver. On that list I sent
Speaker 2: you coherence of a story over time? How to get
Speaker 2: a story to hang together? I turned a couple of
Speaker 2: my graduates into the direction of being professionals, and they're
Speaker 2: all working and they're making a fuck ton of money.
Speaker 2: I think they are. But the ones I could reach
Speaker 2: I did extremely well with. So I was encouraged to
Speaker 2: think that this Jacqueline Hide demeanor would get a student's
Speaker 2: attention and allow me to move it move. The conversation
Speaker 2: on that was just mean, Okay, if.
Speaker 1: We've pulled back the lens, people from our generation all
Speaker 1: figured it out for themselves with your experience, how do
Speaker 1: you feel about music education on the road to creating
Speaker 1: professional artists?
Speaker 2: What a brilliant question and one that I should have
Speaker 2: been prepared for. We're still looking for brilliant artists, so
Speaker 2: let's start at the end and work our way back.
Speaker 2: Our challenge these days and finding in discovering brilliant artists,
Speaker 2: And I mean there are not many of them, Prince.
Speaker 2: There's he's one in ten million I haven't met, but
Speaker 2: a small handful of true geniuses and pop music, by
Speaker 2: the way, I know you watched the Billy Joel thing.
Speaker 2: I was so impressed with Billy Joel, and I've did
Speaker 2: a record with him and didn't see certain sides of
Speaker 2: him as far as writing went, and was very close
Speaker 2: to Phil Ramona, and I know what Phil brought to
Speaker 2: Billy Joel, and it wasn't always Billy Joel's idea. But
Speaker 2: to fill the point I was trying to make, or
Speaker 2: trying to lead into, is the idea that there's so
Speaker 2: much noise out there, and the industry is smaller and
Speaker 2: in competition with sports and with video games and with
Speaker 2: God knows what that you're likely to draw off how
Speaker 2: to find that brilliant person again, find that what on
Speaker 2: terms that I could I could relate to this, This person,
Speaker 2: Jimmy well Web is a good example of somebody, ah
Speaker 2: who I am in awe. The way he puts moving
Speaker 2: tones together and by the way he puts music, he
Speaker 2: puts lyrics together is idiosyncrasies. And there are men, there
Speaker 2: are many others that you and I have known that
Speaker 2: we would have to call brilliant, but they're harder and
Speaker 2: harder to find. I did. I started a record Tammy Emmanuel,
Speaker 2: who is that kind of idiosyncratic, complete genius, independent way
Speaker 2: of expressing himself and God knows where it comes from,
Speaker 2: but you know right away that this is a transcendent artist.
Speaker 2: So that's the problem. And the other thing is nobody
Speaker 2: picks me as a producer anymore. You know, I have
Speaker 2: this thing that I do where I'll do it once.
Speaker 2: When I got out of Earth Wind and Fire many
Speaker 2: many years ago, I had a lot of offers and
Speaker 2: I did a couple of them and realized that they
Speaker 2: didn't want any innovation whatsoever. They just wanted me to
Speaker 2: repeat what they thought were my ideas with earth Wind
Speaker 2: and Fire. And I didn't do the heavy lifting with
Speaker 2: her from the Fire, Marys wife did and I couldn't
Speaker 2: fulfill that dream, so I stopped taking work. I still
Speaker 2: won't answer the phone. But Tommy Emmanuel persisted, so I
Speaker 2: had to work with him. Also, he was brilliant, so
Speaker 2: I had to work with him. Linda persisted. A lot
Speaker 2: of these artists persisted, and that worked with him.
Speaker 1: Okay, there was a great explosion of artists in the
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies into the eighties. What you talked about
Speaker 1: the competition for interest sports and video games in the Internet.
Speaker 1: But do you believe the what is the problem that
Speaker 1: we're not having artists? Is there not dedicating the time?
Speaker 1: We can't find it, we can't amplify it. What is
Speaker 1: the real problem.
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know. Problem. Well, I think the challenge
Speaker 2: is allowing marginal people, is allowing a ryecoiter. For me,
Speaker 2: it was getting to know loll George and how he
Speaker 2: would craft a story, and how he suffered from music
Speaker 2: with this, with this incomprehensibly narrow view that he had
Speaker 2: to change the world with the song. I've put it
Speaker 2: like that before. Nobody's argued with me. But that's the
Speaker 2: why I saw old George and what he did to live.
Speaker 2: His music was idiosyncratic and independent, and people would pay.
Speaker 2: Bob you wrote some checks. People would pay for that
Speaker 2: in the sixties and seventies, and then people tried to
Speaker 2: simplify it and gave it to accountants. With the turn
Speaker 2: of the nineties and the experience of having artists like
Speaker 2: Michael Jackson go for what did he go for forty
Speaker 2: points to Walter forty five points? You know, and the
Speaker 2: artists took control, they took their music back, and they
Speaker 2: didn't they couldn't do that formula anymore where one out
Speaker 2: of twenty would fund the other nineteen. But you know,
Speaker 2: Michael wouldn't allow that. And then Braca, you should interview
Speaker 2: John Braga Braco wouldn't allow that.
Speaker 1: Well, I know, Brinck, I've talked a little bit. That's
Speaker 1: a good idea. Let's go back to Lowell. George, tell
Speaker 1: me about him suffering for the music.
Speaker 2: Well, first, it's well known that he overindulged, and that
Speaker 2: was not his about his friend. I mean when we
Speaker 2: did the rate you've heard about the Rainbow sessions that
Speaker 2: we did that turned into Waiting for Columbus, which it
Speaker 2: turned out to be a great record, and everybody had
Speaker 2: a hand in it. Who I want to say mattered,
Speaker 2: but he his his his wife Liz, had to sequester
Speaker 2: his funds so they wouldn't buy a lot of really
Speaker 2: nasty drugs. So before the Wednesday night show at the Rainbow,
Speaker 2: you could see loll in the lobby with an armful
Speaker 2: of T shirts selling T shirts for half price so
Speaker 2: he could make enough money to buy blow. And And
Speaker 2: that was the story of the the downfall of the
Speaker 2: production of the Rainbow.
Speaker 1: That was Lowell.
Speaker 2: That had to do with Lowell's imagination and what he
Speaker 2: could get away with, what he should get away with,
Speaker 2: what he shouldn't get away with. But he told a
Speaker 2: great story and he lived, He lived his he lived
Speaker 2: at the edges of his imagination. He's a great, great
Speaker 2: recond and a fisherman, loved to fish. He and jenneddiad
Speaker 2: bonded over fishing. So I don't know where I started
Speaker 2: that answer, I help, it didn't get to.
Speaker 1: Okay, how did you meet Lowell? George?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good story to it. The artist of
Speaker 2: my life was began as Emulou Harris, and I was
Speaker 2: a small recording studio in Hunt Valley, Maryland early on,
Speaker 2: and word got to Washington, d C. Where Tom and
Speaker 2: Emmy Lou lived, and she was doing her thing, playing
Speaker 2: her songs out of the folk scare of the late sixties,
Speaker 2: and I got to know, I mean, I did a
Speaker 2: couple tunes for her, and shortly thereafter she heard from
Speaker 2: her friend Lindron said that Lindron said was sick and
Speaker 2: she was going to come to do this record with
Speaker 2: John Starling, the leader of the Seldom scene. You probably
Speaker 2: never heard that name, but he had the great bluegrass
Speaker 2: and I come out of bluegrass. Bluegress in classical music
Speaker 2: and the bluegrass were a lot of these early bluegrass artists.
Speaker 2: Live to two track, where I really learned how to
Speaker 2: mix live to two track for Rebel Records, Country Gentlemen,
Speaker 2: the Osborne's Seldom Scene and and John Starling was no
Speaker 2: was throat doctor. And when Linda fell ill on the road,
Speaker 2: she went to stay with she. She canceled her gigs
Speaker 2: and this is seventy four. Canceled her gigs and went
Speaker 2: to live with John Starling and his wife, Issue Starling,
Speaker 2: also wonderful singer. And during that time We'll quit Little Feet,
Speaker 2: I'm out, fuck you guys, and was hanging out with
Speaker 2: Linda and so Lowell on this hiatus from Little Feet,
Speaker 2: wanted to get a song with Mike Aldridge, the dobo player,
Speaker 2: and he had this wacky tune called Everybody Slide is
Speaker 2: all about slide guitar. And just hung out and that's
Speaker 2: how I met Old George and we got to be friends.
Speaker 2: He was impressed that, rather then yelling at people to
Speaker 2: be quiet in the control, that I put on a
Speaker 2: pair of headphones and carried on. Nothing stopped me. And
Speaker 2: had proposed that we worked together, and we did a lot.
Speaker 1: Let's go back a little bit, fill in some detail.
Speaker 1: So what kind of kid were you. Were you like
Speaker 1: a member of the group playing sports? Were you a
Speaker 1: kid in your room reading and tinkering and book.
Speaker 2: Kind loath sports, and when I found out how to
Speaker 2: make gunpowder, I was making explosives and homemade rockets that
Speaker 2: didn't really produce anything, but didn't kill me either. Now
Speaker 2: I fiddled around with electronics. So my earliest experience was
Speaker 2: who was I was just talking to somebody about this
Speaker 2: is early on as a kid, I was talking to
Speaker 2: Jimmy Douglas. And if you have an interview Jimmy, you
Speaker 2: gotta know he's one of the greats. Jimmy Douglas and
Speaker 2: I are doing a podcast, and I'm and I tell
Speaker 2: this story, and he said, wait a second, that happened
Speaker 2: to me too, And as a three year old. As
Speaker 2: a four year old, he was wondering how light bulbs work.
Speaker 2: So each of us had the same experience where we
Speaker 2: unscrewed the light bulb and stuck our finger in the
Speaker 2: socket and got blown down, blown on our backs, but
Speaker 2: experienced the universe. I don't know how to make it
Speaker 2: more trivial sounding, but we learned a lot about electricity.
Speaker 2: So I was always impressed with this great power that
Speaker 2: electricity had. It. When I got my first piece of
Speaker 2: shit tape recorder, it was five years old, and it
Speaker 2: was just.
Speaker 1: We just slow down a little bit. You're five years old.
Speaker 1: It's the early fifties. This is long before the compact
Speaker 1: is set. What kind of cape recorder you get? And
Speaker 1: why do your appearance buy it for you? Well, it
Speaker 1: was a piece of shit. It was one of those
Speaker 1: thirty dollars recorders that had friction drive all the take
Speaker 1: up takes. But before then, I was fixing radios when
Speaker 1: I was five or six year old.
Speaker 2: One of the.
Speaker 1: First plait you're five or sixey, I got a soldering.
Speaker 2: Where does all this team I fix anything? Wait a second,
Speaker 2: I didn't fix anything. I just poked around and took
Speaker 2: things apart, and would generally lose all the screws and
Speaker 2: just poke around or replace the batteries, or there's a
Speaker 2: loose wire and I'd solder a wire. And I didn't
Speaker 2: do anything that was valued. But I had a soldering
Speaker 2: iron and by golly, and put it put it to work.
Speaker 2: But yeah, do you get the tape recorder? I got
Speaker 2: a tape recorder and it was a piece of shit.
Speaker 2: It's horror. I mean I was already doing sound in
Speaker 2: Baptist Church and I was away from my follower and
Speaker 2: moved up to Baltimore. I was at a church and
Speaker 2: they lost their sound engineer.
Speaker 1: In the.
Speaker 2: Baptist church would do a radio broadcast and I would
Speaker 2: sit back by the mixer, off the main secretary and
Speaker 2: just run, run, level, run the radio broadcasts. It got
Speaker 2: me out of going to church, which I have never
Speaker 2: really felt very good about except for the music. I
Speaker 2: love Catholicism for the music. You love Judaism for the justice.
Speaker 2: I tried to convert and it was too hard. But
Speaker 2: but early on I would anything that touched sound I
Speaker 2: thought was a miracle. And that's where I wanted to
Speaker 2: quote enturity, because his, his, his, his, his, His line
Speaker 2: was the music must be a miracle to be able
Speaker 2: to put that feeling through a wire. And that resonates
Speaker 2: me still with me still, Okay, I was. I wasn't
Speaker 2: good at anything. Wait a second, I don't want to
Speaker 2: claim to be good at anything. I didn't. I mean
Speaker 2: only occasionally when I fixed something and it was by accident.
Speaker 1: But were you the type of kid who had heath Kids,
Speaker 1: et cetera.
Speaker 2: Oh I did. I had one of the early heath
Speaker 2: Kid catalog computers, but also as early as high school
Speaker 2: when we're talking about over thirteen. I would be on
Speaker 2: the stage crew, and mostly it was an excuse to
Speaker 2: sneak backstage and smoke, which my mother discovered one day
Speaker 2: I was cutting French class and she happened to look
Speaker 2: in the auditorium where at my feed up on the
Speaker 2: balcony railing of smoking ball boy. That ended that. So
Speaker 2: I would I would do early stage crew, an early
Speaker 2: audio crew, and mixing.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're involved with this, you know, stage crew stuff.
Speaker 1: Are you listening to music?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, listening to classical music, mostly classical music. One
Speaker 2: of the earliest experiences was my mother and she had
Speaker 2: a subscription to a seventy eight music service and a
Speaker 2: thirty three to third music service, and I would wear
Speaker 2: records out. Earliest experience as we're listening to classical music
Speaker 2: on on shellac.
Speaker 1: Okay, how about Elvis and what came after Elvis? Was
Speaker 1: that something they interested you? The first forty five not
Speaker 1: at all. The first forty five I bought was Del Shannon. No,
Speaker 1: it was a ballad of New Orleans. Ballad of Ballad
Speaker 1: of New Orleans. Yeah, now I've forty five. But mostly
Speaker 1: I listened to radio pop radio and R and B.
Speaker 1: Baltimore had the greatest jocks in the world. They had
Speaker 1: a guy named Fat Daddy Paul Johnson, I think it
Speaker 1: was his real name, and you would have heard of
Speaker 1: this guy who was the hot DJ W W I N.
Speaker 1: And I remember coming home from when I was still
Speaker 1: in college, and this is a good story and so
Speaker 1: but I'll make it quick, coming home from the late
Speaker 1: night card game at AEPI API. Mostly we smoked pot
Speaker 1: and played cards, but I remember an all night poker
Speaker 1: session and I wasn't particularly good at poker, but I
Speaker 1: didn't lose too much either. But I remember coming home
Speaker 1: at six point thirty in the morning, driving home and
Speaker 1: Paul Johnson was playing Stay with Me Baby Lorraine Ellison
Speaker 1: and played it over and over and over again, five
Speaker 1: six times in a row, and every time just raved
Speaker 1: about what a great record. But it really struck me
Speaker 1: as how to connect how to connect that kind of
Speaker 1: performance with radio, because I know you remember the song.
Speaker 1: Everybody remembers the song, and everybody tried to do it.
Speaker 1: Linda tried to do it, and nobody could quite do
Speaker 1: Lauren Nellison. And by the way, that's a whole interesting
Speaker 1: story because that was a Phil Remont record where Frank
Speaker 1: had the studio booked. It was an early an R
Speaker 1: on forty eighth R recording and an ar got the
Speaker 1: call to do this session for Frank Sinatra, and so
Speaker 1: they booked an orchestra a band because it was all
Speaker 1: about room. And the day before.
Speaker 2: Frank canceled, and he canceled with the now famous line
Speaker 2: not today baby. And Phil gets the call. I've written
Speaker 2: this up if you want to read it. Phil gets
Speaker 2: the call, calls Jerry Ragvoy. You know it, says Jerry. Jerry,
Speaker 2: I've got the studio courtesy Frank for an afternoon. Can
Speaker 2: we put an act together? Do you have an act?
Speaker 2: And Phil and Jerry put together the Lauren Allison record
Speaker 2: off the cuff. They say some charts were written. I
Speaker 2: don't believe it. I think it was all head off,
Speaker 2: off the off the floor. But that's one of the
Speaker 2: great stories of Lorraine Allison was in the right place
Speaker 2: at the right time and knew the right people, and
Speaker 2: Frank was going where Paul Springs to get married. How's
Speaker 2: that for a story that one I haven't heard?
Speaker 1: So where were you when the Beatles broke? And what
Speaker 1: do you think about that?
Speaker 2: I didn't like the Beatles. I mean I watched it,
Speaker 2: watch the two early in Sullivan shows and recorded them.
Speaker 2: I had a better tape recorder by then and recorded,
Speaker 2: but I didn't didn't understand it in terms of what
Speaker 2: they were doing with my favorite tunes, you know, the
Speaker 2: he they did, like Twist and Shout and Isley's and
Speaker 2: they did some a lot of a lot of covers,
Speaker 2: and I didn't. I didn't get to really appreciate the
Speaker 2: Beatles until until Sergeant Pepper and what they did with
Speaker 2: that record, and then I got to work with him
Speaker 2: and we did a Boy. One of the records we
Speaker 2: did was got to Get You Into My Life. And
Speaker 2: I had known George pretty well by then because I
Speaker 2: had built his automation system for uh their at the
Speaker 2: Oxford Circus, and he had sued Neve. He among others,
Speaker 2: had sued Neve form ninety six, and so I was
Speaker 2: famous in the business for having got up in these face.
Speaker 2: But I don't think I gave him what he wanted
Speaker 2: on that record that he was with the Beg's and
Speaker 2: Peter Frampton, which was the first record I knew of
Speaker 2: to return platinum. Yeah, and you know the record it
Speaker 2: was not a good record, but it was a copy
Speaker 2: or an emulation of a pooky Valentine to the Beatles,
Speaker 2: where they just kind of copied Beatles arrangements and copied
Speaker 2: the Beatles sounds. And we did, we did got to
Speaker 2: get You into My life and from scratch arrangement, and
Speaker 2: we did it. I remember playing it for George, who
Speaker 2: immediately took it to Paul, and Paul listened to it
Speaker 2: over and over and over again for a whole Sunday,
Speaker 2: just listening to Maurice's vocals and the arrangement. And now
Speaker 2: I'm way off track, But the but the I didn't
Speaker 2: really like the Beatles until until George and realizing how
Speaker 2: much influence Georgie had, and for a while that was
Speaker 2: who I wanted to be. See. I think the notifications
Speaker 2: are a gift from God. Every time I say something
Speaker 2: I could really state as a fact, it goes off.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, not the middle of the screen.
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, stay center, stay centered in the screen. But
Speaker 1: as we're sitting here and you're getting phone calls and notifications,
Speaker 1: A are people looking for you all day long? And
Speaker 1: bybe you like that or do you find it interrupts
Speaker 1: your work?
Speaker 2: It very much interrupts my work, and so when and
Speaker 2: I don't know why I let it go like this,
Speaker 2: because when I used to mix extensively in this room,
Speaker 2: I would figure out a way to make sure the
Speaker 2: phones were turned off in other rooms and cookie doing
Speaker 2: what was happening my wife, And I don't know why
Speaker 2: did I not do that? I'm terribly sorry.
Speaker 1: Guys just drilled down on something. You said you built
Speaker 1: an automation system for George. Are you talking about something
Speaker 1: like the board flying fingers that type of thing.
Speaker 2: Well, it's flag faders and that was pretty much lifted.
Speaker 2: But that was a guy named Joe Martinson who saw
Speaker 2: the success I had with gm A automation and we
Speaker 2: were the first system that actually worked. Ask anybody, and
Speaker 2: especially when he came out he six failed and me
Speaker 2: was sued. Mark Crabtree was sued and developed the Red
Speaker 2: Hot Hatred for me. That was unequal in my life.
Speaker 2: And one thing he did was to offer me, however
Speaker 2: much money to buy my company, and then when I
Speaker 2: would sell it, he collected enough money from Joe Martinson
Speaker 2: to just copy my system, and that fun A little bastard.
Speaker 2: Joe Martinson tried to patent one of a broad array
Speaker 2: of ideas. Because we were building from scratch. We hated
Speaker 2: DeCamp ninety six, so we built the fader from scratch,
Speaker 2: built the hard disk processing from scratch. I programmed a
Speaker 2: Unix like automation system from scratch so that whenever you
Speaker 2: rolled tape, the system would locke into where you were, which,
Speaker 2: among other ideas, turned into ideas that stuck. And I
Speaker 2: didn't patent that. It was like the equalizer. I didn't
Speaker 2: patent the parametric I didn't know it was worth patenting.
Speaker 2: I should have. And then rained Olemy came along and
Speaker 2: copied parts of it, and that was another story, another nightmare.
Speaker 2: So all of these, I think at some point you're
Speaker 2: going to say, this guy is so full of shit.
Speaker 2: So I did bring my paper on autom and so
Speaker 2: I can show you that. I could show you the
Speaker 2: parametric equalizer paper that I delivered at seventy two.
Speaker 1: Let's go back before this, Okay, let's start with a
Speaker 1: parametric equalizer. How did you come up with the idea
Speaker 1: for that?
Speaker 2: A group of us came up with the guy I
Speaker 2: was working with, a guy named Burgess McNeil. I eventually
Speaker 2: started a company with had an idea and I had
Speaker 2: an idea and a friend of mine that had gone
Speaker 2: to Princeton, Bob Beushaw eventually worked for NSA had an
Speaker 2: idea and I put them together. But there was one
Speaker 2: thing missing and I had to make that work. It
Speaker 2: was the queue control or the width of a peak,
Speaker 2: and I figured it out and it took a lot
Speaker 2: of work, but that's what made the parametric equalizer unique
Speaker 2: and would have made it patentable. And it just came up.
Speaker 2: I came. I was recording music at that time I
Speaker 2: had done. I was running a directed two track studio.
Speaker 2: What did I do that you would have heard it?
Speaker 2: I did the demo for arthur' connelly that he took
Speaker 2: to Memphis and Steve and he wrote sweet soul music.
Speaker 2: But the demo that he went with where you lead me,
Speaker 2: I will follow. So that's the record we sold to
Speaker 2: Stacks and I did that in Baltimore, directed to track
Speaker 2: and so I was doing music when I wasn't doing commercials,
Speaker 2: and that was my recording studio experience. When I dropped
Speaker 2: out of Hobbins, I got a job doing commercials for
Speaker 2: Lean Shapeer, Golding Bank and car commercials, package commercials and
Speaker 2: learned how to how to work in the studio, but
Speaker 2: a lot of it. We invented the mixer. It was
Speaker 2: a two mixer that sounded great. Listened to Philadelphia records,
Speaker 2: listened to New York records. Early all the pop records
Speaker 2: were bell sad and a handful of studios. Later, an
Speaker 2: R much later, An R And figured all these records
Speaker 2: sound great because there's some piece of equipment that I'm missing.
Speaker 2: And so I built all this stuff. And it wasn't
Speaker 2: the equipment. It was the musicians and the arrangements and
Speaker 2: the writing, the songwriting. So I learned a lesson there.
Speaker 2: But there was a studio called it I Studios, Recordings
Speaker 2: in corporate and then it TI. So I'm really jumping around.
Speaker 2: So this must be very hard. Stop making excuses. You
Speaker 2: come up with the idea of the Pyrami metric equalizer
Speaker 2: with these other guys. Did you then have it manufactured?
Speaker 2: Oh no, I did it.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: I did all the design except for one piece of it.
Speaker 2: The mechanical design was done by another team. The company
Speaker 2: that we went with, which was a video manufacturing They
Speaker 2: manufactured video tunes for early merchery missions. And they had
Speaker 2: a team and they were out of market, and so
Speaker 2: they bought a recording studio and that was my recording studio.
Speaker 2: It turned it too it TI so you see it.
Speaker 2: I in early parmetric eq so that was that was
Speaker 2: my equ and I did it. I did the hard
Speaker 2: the almost impossible to realize how to vary the queue
Speaker 2: with a Vernier.
Speaker 1: Nob but I know that.
Speaker 2: We went to the guy that wrote the audio op
Speaker 2: and cookbook, TODG Shung Tomjong, who worked at Aircraft Armaments
Speaker 2: around the corner, and he looked at it and said,
Speaker 2: this is impossible. To do something else and I stuck
Speaker 2: to it and did it. So I did. I did.
Speaker 2: I generally am the one to stay up around the
Speaker 2: clock and figure out software, figure out design, and I
Speaker 2: just enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Okay, how did you decide ultimately to get into the
Speaker 1: hardware business.
Speaker 2: There was a piece missing, same thing as as now
Speaker 2: is something doesn't work, or there was a piece missing
Speaker 2: something doesn't In the case of an equalizer, it was
Speaker 2: I'm in the studio with a graphic, a seven band graphics,
Speaker 2: seven thirty one seven band graphic, and it's well, you know,
Speaker 2: the figures are sixty two one twenty five two fifty
Speaker 2: something something something. None of them were sharp enough to
Speaker 2: cancel a residence in a snare drum or an acoustic
Speaker 2: guitar or taken note excuse me, take a note out
Speaker 2: of a piano. So that was the gig is. I've
Speaker 2: got to build my own equalizer because we didn't have
Speaker 2: any money. We couldn't afford anything. And I built my
Speaker 2: own four track just because I needed one. But I
Speaker 2: didn't learn it from anybody. Got to work.
Speaker 1: What's your viewpoint on analog versus digital?
Speaker 2: Now, it's funny. It's funny that you should mention because
Speaker 2: I still have a very strong viewpoint on how to
Speaker 2: improve digital, and it has a lot to do with
Speaker 2: how good analog is. And I didn't bring up any
Speaker 2: of my examples, but I can show you some work
Speaker 2: I did on well more of the compressive of the
Speaker 2: DRC which I have. I think it's the best dynamic
Speaker 2: range controller ever made, very slow to teach people how
Speaker 2: to use it because it doesn't do that crunchy thing,
Speaker 2: and that's what people think a limitter does. Any rate
Speaker 2: back to an equ so the EQ was going back
Speaker 2: to the RCA Radio handbook and picking out a circuit
Speaker 2: called a te filter two resisters two capacitors, and all
Speaker 2: depending on how far apart the pastors are spread, you
Speaker 2: can make a sharp notch or a broad notch or
Speaker 2: broad them to a very wide range and move the
Speaker 2: game up and down on the notch and you have
Speaker 2: variable Q. Well, nobody had tried that before, and that
Speaker 2: was where I got into trouble at Hopkins, because I
Speaker 2: wanted to learn something in my first year systems course
Speaker 2: and the professor was, ah, was what I hear lately?
Speaker 2: Real warfare? Stupid? I mean, these the assistant professors were
Speaker 2: just fucking idiots, and I just had to get out
Speaker 2: of there. But I knew what I had already done,
Speaker 2: and he said, well, that's a possible and I use
Speaker 2: a circuit variation called a gyrator to turn a cheap
Speaker 2: capacitor into an adductor. It trans transforms is not the
Speaker 2: right word transforms. Reactants turned a deductor, which is why
Speaker 2: are around the back accord into a capacitor, which is
Speaker 2: two plates. He said, well, you can't do that, that's
Speaker 2: only a theoretical abstraction. Well, I've got one, and you're
Speaker 2: an idiot, so that wasn't very good. I didn't say
Speaker 2: you're an idiot under my breath. But all this stuff
Speaker 2: is there, Bob. You know everything that you see smart
Speaker 2: designs in plugins, it's all there. Apple and these other
Speaker 2: companies put it out there, put the tools out there
Speaker 2: for free, and you had to do something with it.
Speaker 2: So we built plugins. It's changed a lot, business has
Speaker 2: changed a lot.
Speaker 1: But let's go back. You had a few point ana
Speaker 1: line versus digital.
Speaker 2: Well, and here's the key thing about music, and I
Speaker 2: knew I would have to circle around the music, is
Speaker 2: that all our recording sounded not only better, much better,
Speaker 2: much better. The first digital machine I heard was Tom
Speaker 2: Stockin's Honeywell data recorder with a really awful front end,
Speaker 2: and I remember playing something back for Jeff Bercaro and
Speaker 2: at Sunset Tom Stockher was trying to make a business
Speaker 2: out of digital and there's a story before that, but
Speaker 2: at any rate, we Jeff would walk into the control
Speaker 2: and say, hey, man, where's the high hat And we
Speaker 2: had to say, well, it doesn't go up that high yet, Jeff,
Speaker 2: because it didn't. It had a fifty k badwidth sampling
Speaker 2: and high hat didn't sound like I had and it
Speaker 2: was sixteen bit, so all of that digital direction that
Speaker 2: I took was in response to hearing something that sounded
Speaker 2: awful emas awful awful fiddles didn't sound like fiddles. And
Speaker 2: I had just come out of real musicians playing on
Speaker 2: great microphones to an Ampex three hundred through a console
Speaker 2: that we built tube console using high trans conductance twelve
Speaker 2: A y sevens. It's pureless K two forty one D
Speaker 2: had put transfer. Its amazing And I remember this shit
Speaker 2: and it was immersive and small eye immersive, and I'm
Speaker 2: getting chills still remembering going out and doing remotes at
Speaker 2: the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where I'd take out a couple
Speaker 2: of mics and do a feed, an FM feed to WBL,
Speaker 2: the FM station in town, and nobody listened. So I
Speaker 2: could do anything. I could put the microphones anywhere I wanted,
Speaker 2: and the experimenting with an orchestra, I'd never lost that
Speaker 2: lust of experimenting with dorks room.
Speaker 1: So okay, the original sixteen bit digital was bad, but
Speaker 1: digital was improved after that.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, no, no, it wasn't sixteen bit. That's
Speaker 2: the key. The early Sony machines were, if you're lucky,
Speaker 2: twelve or thirteen bit monotonic. The digital goes like this
Speaker 2: up and a step. Well, early non monotonicity was what.
Speaker 2: It goes up, it goes way down that it goes
Speaker 2: up and then goes way down. It's not monotonic. So
Speaker 2: you're lucky if you get twelve bit accuracy out of it.
Speaker 2: So I knew right away that they were all fucked,
Speaker 2: and unfortunately I would have to tell them and made
Speaker 2: friends of the Ajax men of science who thought they
Speaker 2: knew everything and they didn't and couldn't because they were
Speaker 2: blocked blocked in they're thinking. So I got a better
Speaker 2: converter from Renee at DBX had done a different kind
Speaker 2: of converter, and I bought blocks from what we made
Speaker 2: our on converter. It started to sound better. But that's
Speaker 2: all I ever hoped for is if you can work better.
Speaker 2: I have a direction, that's what hey round up the posse.
Speaker 2: That's where we're going. I know the direction now it's
Speaker 2: not there yet, but I know where we've got to
Speaker 2: go with it. And so I'm working with Serus Semiconductor
Speaker 2: these days, who are really great engineers and sort of
Speaker 2: discovering the border borders of where I can go with
Speaker 2: design and digital. It's still is not there, but I
Speaker 2: love three eighty four. We did the Tommy Emmanuel one
Speaker 2: nine two, and I can say that I feel the difference.
Speaker 2: So I've got let me brag for a minute. So
Speaker 2: I've got the best headphones I can get. These are
Speaker 2: automatic research and I've also got well you've seen Audies.
Speaker 2: I'm a big fan of audis and all these are
Speaker 2: these guys that our audience can't see them, but I
Speaker 2: can flash them. These guys are you've seen these?
Speaker 1: I have them.
Speaker 2: This is the you have them? There you go. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm mixed the last two, three four dozen records I've
Speaker 2: done on these and I'll listen to them on speakers.
Speaker 2: I've got genleis now I'll listen to them on speakers.
Speaker 2: But this is where I do the critical listening where
Speaker 2: you can hear the grass grow. You know, I hear
Speaker 2: digital clicks, You're going to hear them first on Audies headphones.
Speaker 2: So you know, I'm friends with those guys. If I help,
Speaker 2: If I help these guys that have built something brilliant
Speaker 2: get the word out there, we're friends for life.
Speaker 1: Okay, If I said you could use state of the
Speaker 1: art digital or I gave you as much tape as
Speaker 1: you wanted, Which would you choose?
Speaker 2: Well, I honestly if I had enough tape, and I
Speaker 2: don't think I would have enough tape, but if I did,
Speaker 2: I'd use both. And we did that with the earliest
Speaker 2: we did a director I did director desca tuc sacs
Speaker 2: where we had We were recording both on on this
Speaker 2: new got this another long fucking story, this new technology
Speaker 2: called DSD or direct steam stream digital. It was an
Speaker 2: engineer at Sony that I got to like. Cold Taka
Speaker 2: was the smart guy at the Shubora Jubbara factory and
Speaker 2: he was the that it talks on you Sodia to
Speaker 2: putting money into this black project in the corner of
Speaker 2: the factory. And we both discovered that the very earliest
Speaker 2: good converter, which was a crystal something crystal converter was
Speaker 2: a company before it was Cerrus. And discovered that one
Speaker 2: of the pins was the output of a modulator and
Speaker 2: if you took that pin, that one pin out of
Speaker 2: the chip and just ran it into a filter, that
Speaker 2: was the DDA converter was a resistor and a capacitor.
Speaker 2: It was the DDA converter coming out of a digital
Speaker 2: digital stream which was pulse with modulation, and so a
Speaker 2: talk and D show turned that into a product before
Speaker 2: uh Shaboya the Home office was ready and set the
Speaker 2: samp or a too fucking low. So there were better
Speaker 2: DSD processes that came out that were faster sabary. But
Speaker 2: here's the takeaway is that no matter how fast we went,
Speaker 2: and of late we're doing three eighty six and DSD
Speaker 2: times sixteen, which is sixteen bits wide at sixteen x
Speaker 2: fs sixteen times two point eight megaarants sixteen times, you
Speaker 2: can imagine the data rings and it's pretty fucking hard
Speaker 2: to hear. So I'm gonna have to say that eventually
Speaker 2: it'll get there, and maybe there'll be another way to
Speaker 2: do the converters. But the guys at Cerrus are about
Speaker 2: the best I've heard so far, So I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: liking digital. It's so much more convenient. If you have
Speaker 2: a mistake, we've learned how to LaVey attract together to
Speaker 2: fix one little mistake that casts this long shadow over
Speaker 2: a performance. But she had she had one note wrong
Speaker 2: in the chorus, and that colored her thinking. And I'm
Speaker 2: talking about a female artist, now you can guess that
Speaker 2: colored her thinking about the whole track, and a lot
Speaker 2: of artists are like it that you're one thing and
Speaker 2: forget about the track. So so early on I got
Speaker 2: really good at and I'm going to brag about it
Speaker 2: because we all got good using a Sony thirty three
Speaker 2: forty eight edit takes together before there were workstations. Before
Speaker 2: there was It's about the same time as Sodic Solutions,
Speaker 2: So there was a Sodic Solutions workstation, but it was
Speaker 2: very expensive and the converters were terrible, but I stayed
Speaker 2: friends with him. For you, that's Andy Moohr, who was
Speaker 2: one of that handful of digital engindeers that invented everything.
Speaker 2: Andy Moore sort of the when he worked for George Lucas,
Speaker 2: he invented this machine called the sound Droid, and he
Speaker 2: did it so that he could do one performance of
Speaker 2: the deep Note. You remember the Deep Note the t checks.
Speaker 2: He that was Andy Moore, the musician said now I
Speaker 2: could if I just had a powerful enough computer. So
Speaker 2: he got George to invest in Sprocket Systems and he
Speaker 2: was going to build at the edit Droid, at the
Speaker 2: sound Droid, and uh, he's he's really my bottle of
Speaker 2: a great university professor. He was at Stanford for all
Speaker 2: those years, and everybody remembers, and he wrote the basic papers.
Speaker 2: We still talk and he stole a musician. The point
Speaker 2: is is that he was always pushing the boundaries and
Speaker 2: it was an inspiration. There was always something better. So
Speaker 2: I'm constantly throwing the baby in the water.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about playback. What do you think about? Okay,
Speaker 1: this Vinyl revival. Louder is better. Let's simplify this, louder
Speaker 1: is better. Okay, the Vinyl Revival.
Speaker 2: This first studio that I got a job of, it
Speaker 2: had an early mentor press, had a record press, and
Speaker 2: shortly thereafter and I'm just in a high school at
Speaker 2: that point, and I'm going to go to work at
Speaker 2: this place of the summer, and I got introduced to
Speaker 2: their pressing plan, and so early on I knew how
Speaker 2: to master because we had a lath that was a
Speaker 2: model laith, but I invented the digital pitch. Since then
Speaker 2: it became the standard. You're welcome and a record press.
Speaker 2: It later had two fabels and two fine builds in
Speaker 2: the dirtiest environment ever in Pratt and Paki Street in
Speaker 2: downtown Baltimore, and I did labels and jackets wherever there
Speaker 2: was a need, I say, well, I could do that,
Speaker 2: and learned printing in graphic arts because I had to
Speaker 2: do it, and process photography, you know, the big cameras
Speaker 2: of the whole rooms process photography. In other words, anything
Speaker 2: that came along that interested me. I would try to
Speaker 2: fill a need and build something or make something. And
Speaker 2: I'm bragging, but I don't know any other way to
Speaker 2: put it. I learned how to press records. We learned
Speaker 2: how to master records of very automatic variable pitch systems.
Speaker 2: We had a better system, and eventually was Jerry Block
Speaker 2: who really came up with the working system. He was
Speaker 2: chief engineer of Sigma Sout for a long time. What
Speaker 2: you're getting under the idea that this life is in
Speaker 2: the technical world is a world of relationships. And I
Speaker 2: can't stress that about all of these different ideas were
Speaker 2: relationshipships that we had with other energy. The latest relationship,
Speaker 2: let's balance the one thing that the okay, but this
Speaker 2: latest relationship that is in an actually relationship. Barcodiari who
Speaker 2: was head engineer at Real World for Peter for a
Speaker 2: long time. Okay, carry on.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, okay. If you talked about being McGill
Speaker 1: and you described your personality. How you're angry, you're diffident, okay,
Speaker 1: and distracted, which it implied that way you were working
Speaker 1: and you were on the line as opposed to teaching.
Speaker 1: It has to be right. You're a guy who calls
Speaker 1: its street. There are many people who've worked, absolutely work
Speaker 1: behind the board, who have never created equipment. Never mind
Speaker 1: theorized how many people are on your level? Who can
Speaker 1: you talk to and have a fulfilling conversation.
Speaker 2: Well, I just met a couple of guys who now
Speaker 2: work for Bows, and we tried to interest them in
Speaker 2: the idea of supporting our show because we're looking for
Speaker 2: donors give us a bunch of money. And there are
Speaker 2: a couple of really smart guys still at this company
Speaker 2: that Bosbolt called McIntosh. Remember Macintosh amplifiers. Of course, when
Speaker 2: you heard a good system, you look behind the curtain
Speaker 2: and hey mc seventy five five. And so I had
Speaker 2: a conversation now four or five weeks ago with Chris
Speaker 2: and Mike, and you couldn't get us off the phone.
Speaker 2: We were talking about old designs that made Mackintosh special,
Speaker 2: especially the output transformer. And there aren't that many guys
Speaker 2: to talk to, And I want to say. I keep
Speaker 2: looking for them because I did find a young kid
Speaker 2: three years ago that was recommended to me as an
Speaker 2: analog engineer. The kid wants to be an analog engineer.
Speaker 2: All I want to do is take him to lunch
Speaker 2: and say, are you fucking kidding? You know that you'll
Speaker 2: never make any money. Nobody will understand a word you say.
Speaker 2: And he and I have been working together on new designs.
Speaker 2: So I have to invent the people to talk to.
Speaker 2: I have to go out and find somebody that I
Speaker 2: could train. And this this kid is brilliant. He's brilliant.
Speaker 2: Somebody will seal him.
Speaker 1: How about everyday life? Do you spend most of your
Speaker 1: time alone? Or do you have a social life in
Speaker 1: What are those people like?
Speaker 2: I have a wonderful circle of friends in Nashville, and
Speaker 2: you will have heard of many of them. And you
Speaker 2: have read the story about Randy Travis doing the Redo,
Speaker 2: which was ai of a song that he had written
Speaker 2: and that my friend Kyle Lenning had produced. Kyle Letning
Speaker 2: is good, and I go back to the beginning, back
Speaker 2: in time. Kyle Lenning bought one of my early automation
Speaker 2: systems when they cost ready for this one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty five thousand dollars. It made some money. It was
Speaker 2: one of the few things I didn't make money. And
Speaker 2: Kyle bought the idea and it wasn't his idea. It
Speaker 2: came from an art the record company. Generally, I'm not
Speaker 2: keen on talking about record companies in any kind of
Speaker 2: positive way, but had the idea, well, why don't we
Speaker 2: try to do that? But we do it right and
Speaker 2: right meant that Randy had to be involved with the song.
Speaker 2: So we're circling back to AI. Randy had to be
Speaker 2: involved with the song and it had to get past
Speaker 2: Kyle because Kyle it's an old analog engineer. It's not old,
Speaker 2: but he's in my my group. Mike Reid, you've certainly
Speaker 2: heard of Mike Read and one day you should interview
Speaker 2: Mike Reid. I'll tell him about it because we've all listened.
Speaker 2: We talked about it. Mike Reed, you recall, is the
Speaker 2: guy that went to uh Penn Penn State with Paterno
Speaker 2: and was writing string quartets and playing football. Mike Reed
Speaker 2: went to the what team did he go to? But
Speaker 2: head played three seasons in the NFL and then wrote songs.
Speaker 2: Was and still is a songwriter and a the funniest
Speaker 2: guy I've ever met in my whole life. And so
Speaker 2: we get together every Friday morning with Bill Stay. I'm
Speaker 2: surprised Bill didn't talk about this. I see Bill every
Speaker 2: Friday morning. We used to get together in Los Angeles
Speaker 2: every Tuesday and then every Thursday night. Now we get
Speaker 2: together here and have coffee every Friday. So Bill, Bill
Speaker 2: is if you'll allow me to rave about Bill, He's
Speaker 2: He's who I would like to grow up to be.
Speaker 2: Is Bill Stay is a mixer because he is all musical, bustle,
Speaker 2: Every twitch of his fingers, every twitch of his body
Speaker 2: is musical, is performing. He's my hero.
Speaker 1: Let's just go back playback. What's your viewpoint about vinyl
Speaker 1: versus other methods of playback today?
Speaker 2: Well, right now I'm listening to a one hundred ninety
Speaker 2: two k D day. I find that if you play
Speaker 2: a CDs back and up sample them to one hundred
Speaker 2: and ninety two, they sound better. So my favorite playback
Speaker 2: I can tell you is not Spotify. And the only
Speaker 2: reason I would go to Spotify is if I can't
Speaker 2: find a song any other way. But that guy's the
Speaker 2: dem Daniel act. Somebody should shoot him in the back
Speaker 2: of the dick. Okay, your favorite playback platform is Oops,
Speaker 2: my wife read that you have to be invented. My
Speaker 2: favorite platform would be a super high rate converter one two,
Speaker 2: three four with actually with an analog app that we've
Speaker 2: just built for the back end of a d d A,
Speaker 2: so it has yet to be invented. It's called a
Speaker 2: DAC follower. It is that little piece of linear gear,
Speaker 2: linear silicon go on the other end of digital analog
Speaker 2: converurner and everybody does it with the same circuitry, and
Speaker 2: we think we can do it better at doing it analog.
Speaker 2: So is there a place for analog? Yep?
Speaker 1: Okay, So, but in terms of what's commercially available today,
Speaker 1: cubas or co buzz, do you think, well, how do
Speaker 1: you feel about that? Shaking your head.
Speaker 2: What I heard a couple of years ago? Yeah, because
Speaker 2: it sucks. What I heard a couple of years ago sucked. Certainly.
Speaker 2: The only service that does immersive right is a service
Speaker 2: that does not use a codec. As soon as you
Speaker 2: neck down data streams, you're throwing away stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: the whole, the whole. All these guys that did that
Speaker 2: work in codex did the FP three and it was
Speaker 2: Carl Heinz Brandenburg and James Johnston and another guy that
Speaker 2: did most of the codex are. They're okay guys, especially
Speaker 2: James Shaunston. He's a really good scientist. Data scientist. Carl
Speaker 2: hides is hopeless. But it sounds like shit. And they
Speaker 2: did it based on what's called perceptual coding. Everything that's
Speaker 2: wrong about MP three's is because they depend on perceptual coding.
Speaker 2: You want to guess what that is, I'll just tell you.
Speaker 2: It's that you know, it sounds enough like music so
Speaker 2: that we can pass it off if a listener isn't
Speaker 2: listening too carefully, that's perceptual coding. Perceptual coding is a
Speaker 2: little like how many animals are in this picture? Well,
Speaker 2: there's a bear behind the tree, isn't there? That's perceptual coding.
Speaker 2: And it just sucks. And at the bandwidth and data
Speaker 2: sizes or capabilities that we have now, there's no reason
Speaker 2: for it, and they're still doing perceptual according the best
Speaker 2: work I've heard has been Morton Lindberg at L two Records.
Speaker 2: L two Records. So you run through you were you
Speaker 2: see the immersive Gravvy Ive wought a couple and I'd
Speaker 2: have to say that Morton Ledbergh, that's the best work
Speaker 2: in the field, and he is relentless about quality and
Speaker 2: nobody knows it. So next time you see Morton Lindbergh,
Speaker 2: imagine that you could get one of his productions and
Speaker 2: listen to it. But that's what I'd use. I'd use
Speaker 2: a Morton Lindberg inspired system and a Morton Lindberg source.
Speaker 1: How about the fact that you know, listen in the
Speaker 1: late sixties and seventies, the goal was to get the
Speaker 1: best stereo you could have, and then we hit the
Speaker 1: leading yah ladies in nineties were a boombox became your stereo,
Speaker 1: and then.
Speaker 2: Airplans in the two stereos.
Speaker 1: And needless to say, a lot of records are kind
Speaker 1: cheaper than they used to be. But you have these
Speaker 1: records were going on here about You're trying to get
Speaker 1: the sound exactly right and the people are listening on
Speaker 1: these inferior playback systems. Doesn't that make you crazy?
Speaker 2: Well, something must make me crazy. But one of the
Speaker 2: things that you might have talked to Bill about is
Speaker 2: we had just listed his Telby Houston record. I was
Speaker 2: on the original what was called the National Recording Board,
Speaker 2: the National Recording Preservation Board with my friend Eric Schwartz,
Speaker 2: and this last year we listed the Telby Houston record. Now,
Speaker 2: you must have talked about that with Bill, because it
Speaker 2: was book in our minds. It is in our minds
Speaker 2: and our ears and our hearts. That was Shining City
Speaker 2: on the Hill and it was so good, and he
Speaker 2: was such a good live mixer that he could capture
Speaker 2: that off the floor. So there's so many stories I
Speaker 2: couldn't even beginuse. You should get built to tell them.
Speaker 2: But all our audience were high fi stories back when
Speaker 2: there was such a thing as a high Fi store,
Speaker 2: and that seduced us into thinking that it could be
Speaker 2: possibly the difference could possibly be heard by anybody. Now
Speaker 2: at the same time we're trying to do this, we're
Speaker 2: trying to do great music. So we have a couple
Speaker 2: of different tracks here that we're trying to satisfy because
Speaker 2: we learned pretty quickly that if it's just a technical
Speaker 2: presentation of some piece of shit music, then it's hopeless
Speaker 2: that it has to the music has to be there
Speaker 2: as well, which means everything about the music, the writing,
Speaker 2: the arrangement, the performance and the recording all have to
Speaker 2: all have to work. So here's where we come to
Speaker 2: the part in our story where John McBride at Blackbird
Speaker 2: Studios and you've been here, have you seen my play?
Speaker 1: I was going to ask you about your room at Blackbird.
Speaker 1: I've been there.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not my room. John paid for it, and
Speaker 2: I'll do anything for job because he.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I talked to John about it. He followed,
Speaker 1: you know, he gave me a tour.
Speaker 2: But that's but this was the other thing that a
Speaker 2: lot of rooms suck. You know, in Los Angeles, there
Speaker 2: are a handful of rooms that kind of work. Sony
Speaker 2: Studios works well, the Barbers Transit station works well. But
Speaker 2: uh so I thought, well, I've been dreaming this thing
Speaker 2: for years. I'll build a room so that too. So
Speaker 2: there's no part that I haven't tried to prove. That
Speaker 2: was the answer to a question three times ago.
Speaker 1: Well I have to ask you, you know, for those
Speaker 1: people haven't been there, the studio that you designed at Blackbird,
Speaker 1: where there are a number of studios, essentially there are
Speaker 1: all these It's not a flat surface, they're different I'd
Speaker 1: say probably one inch by half inch like a ruler
Speaker 1: size rods that come out from the side very densely. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1: Did it achieve the goal that you wanted it to.
Speaker 2: Depends on who I was promising or with. John said,
Speaker 2: if you come with me, I'll build the studio and
Speaker 2: support you. And I opened the studio in two thousand
Speaker 2: four or five, and the town took a collective yawn
Speaker 2: when they weren't hostile, and most people were just hostile.
Speaker 2: You know, I can't work in there. What are you crazy?
Speaker 2: That's not music. And they're making, as Nashville has done
Speaker 2: over the years, some of the worst sounding drek I've
Speaker 2: ever heard, and defending it, you know, and dissing me.
Speaker 2: You know, I did not. I arrived here on the
Speaker 2: back of the trio record, which I think to this
Speaker 2: day is a marvelous record. Is Dolly, Linda and Emmy,
Speaker 2: which I produced, is a marvelous record, and so many stories,
Speaker 2: And so they hated me when I came to town.
Speaker 2: They thought that I was could acclaim that I could
Speaker 2: make this kind of record for anybody. There were a
Speaker 2: couple of artists that did roots records. Mary Chapin Carpenter
Speaker 2: did that kind of record. Others did that kind of record.
Speaker 2: But they're just not getting back to getting back to
Speaker 2: some kind of innovation, and they're still making these god
Speaker 2: awful records, these god awful country records, and the business
Speaker 2: is long gone, that country music radio, the radio record,
Speaker 2: that radio hit record long gone. You know that you've
Speaker 2: written about it, and they just won't let go of it.
Speaker 2: So finally there are a couple of vacus. Oh what
Speaker 2: is Jack White? Jack White recorded in the room next
Speaker 2: to it, and he loved showing people around the room
Speaker 2: the studoc when he was doing some of those other
Speaker 2: records that he did. He's a good guy, by the way,
Speaker 2: Jack White. I love Jack. He invests from his heart
Speaker 2: to your original question about about Blackbird is John has
Speaker 2: poured his heart into it, and I don't I think
Speaker 2: that he is really delivered on his promise because I
Speaker 2: didn't delivered to John McBride what I promised him. I
Speaker 2: promised him that the studio would work, and it did.
Speaker 2: But what it did best was to provide a listing
Speaker 2: room in a totally immersive environment, a diffuse, a purely
Speaker 2: diffuse room. And it wasn't my idea. I mean I
Speaker 2: had an initial idea. Peter D'Antonio of RPG, and I
Speaker 2: seeded his thinking early on, but he did the best
Speaker 2: he could do. I did the best I could do,
Speaker 2: and that's what I decided to go teach because nobody
Speaker 2: liked it, nobody until recently.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, over this career of engineering producing having GML,
Speaker 1: did you make any money?
Speaker 2: Nope? Oh well yeah I did a couple of times. No,
Speaker 2: that's not true. I would say no, because, like everything else,
Speaker 2: just unpredictable. So I have made when when music failed me,
Speaker 2: I made money with gear when gear fe failed me,
Speaker 2: teaching was a pretty good gig, and so there was
Speaker 2: always something I can do. So it's only recently where
Speaker 2: you know, these bastards have devalued recorded music to the
Speaker 2: point where nobody pays engineers like the until Alicia Keys
Speaker 2: came along and a hired Eric and I and Michael
Speaker 2: Romanoski to do her catalog. And it was Anne Mitchelli
Speaker 2: whose vision it was to remix her catalog and it
Speaker 2: was hideously hard to do. That's that's that's a recipe
Speaker 2: for failure, trying to remix multi as immersive interfuse. I
Speaker 2: did my best, and I think I failed so much
Speaker 2: that I owed a lot of money because I think
Speaker 2: I failed and it's my responsibility. I told him we
Speaker 2: could do it. We didn't, So I'm sorry, and I'm
Speaker 2: sorry Alicia. And by the way, if you haven't interviewed Alicia,
Speaker 2: she is the most extraordinary artist of the geniuses that
Speaker 2: I mentioned, she's at the head table. She is completely brilliant.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're, you know, old in age, but historically did
Speaker 1: you just sit at home and wait for the phone
Speaker 1: to ring or did you beat the bushes for work?
Speaker 2: The funny you should mention because when we developed the equalizer,
Speaker 2: or when ITI wanted to put a product out, the
Speaker 2: parametric Equalizer, I was the one that walked to the
Speaker 2: round to studios. He got my engineer and this is
Speaker 2: seventy four to seventy five, got my engineer friends to
Speaker 2: listen to it, and that was hard to sell. So
Speaker 2: I've always been able to introduce ideas and introduce gear
Speaker 2: and sell stoff. With the equalizer, guys would look at
Speaker 2: it and say, well, it's interesting, but it needs clickstops.
Speaker 2: Is completely the opposite of what it was designed for.
Speaker 2: And it took a while, but it took guys that
Speaker 2: were particularly inspired to see the possibilities of having variables
Speaker 2: frequency and be able to tune a dip equalizer to
Speaker 2: take out a harmonic that was just driving you crazy,
Speaker 2: or a fundamental of a guitar, or the fundamental of
Speaker 2: a snare drum, so you could get that big fat
Speaker 2: snare drum. You're welcome.
Speaker 1: What about the AFIX World exciter? What was going on there?
Speaker 2: That's a guy named Marvin Caesar, and I had a
Speaker 2: big fight with him as well because it was bullshit. Oh,
Speaker 2: but the bigger bullshit was Q sound. It was the
Speaker 2: guy that was trying to voiced Q sound.
Speaker 1: So let's slow this down. You had to give a
Speaker 1: credit on the record on a fix didn't do anything Afix.
Speaker 2: No, yes, yeah, it was like it was an equalizer,
Speaker 2: and it had a particular kind of curve that you
Speaker 2: could call unique. It had a very steep filter, and
Speaker 2: there were problems with the filter. But at the end
Speaker 2: of the day, it didn't do enough to warrant a
Speaker 2: point on the record. Say as Q soun, he wanted
Speaker 2: a point on the record. Guy that did that.
Speaker 1: Q sound. The famous album was the Immaculate Collection, and
Speaker 1: you could hear something It did not sound like traditional
Speaker 1: stereo the whole thing failed, but it definitely sounded different
Speaker 1: from traditional stereo.
Speaker 2: But the idea of having what are called HRTF pinot cues.
Speaker 2: HRTF has head related transfer functions, and right now Sony
Speaker 2: vm ME three sixty, which you've written about Sony VMB
Speaker 2: three sixty, which alleges at doing a good job of
Speaker 2: storing these samples, and they do a pretty good job.
Speaker 2: But that's an idea Sony that we've been pushing for
Speaker 2: years and finally formalized it in Sony vm ME three sixty.
Speaker 2: What that is is something that was around even then
Speaker 2: and was around as a product with the roland RSS reverb.
Speaker 2: And so the way Peter Asher and I busted that
Speaker 2: is Boostin had a party at his house post Medata,
Speaker 2: and I fed Peter Asher, who was also very smart,
Speaker 2: exactly what that was, what HRTF simulation was. And the
Speaker 2: day before or maybe it was Lenny, one of the
Speaker 2: two had to sign the contract for points on Q sound.
Speaker 2: Peter went to a dinner party at most it was Christmas,
Speaker 2: He's Jewish party and told them that it really wasn't
Speaker 2: worth it, that the idea had already been patented by
Speaker 2: roland In RSS, and that was the end of that.
Speaker 2: So that's something that I love, really love to do,
Speaker 2: is the guys that are disinclined to be honest about inventions,
Speaker 2: disinclined to be clear about where IDs came from, disinclined
Speaker 2: to be respectful of patents. A boy, I'm at their throats.
Speaker 2: I think that's my job.
Speaker 1: Let's switch gears a little bit. You married, you have kids.
Speaker 2: Well, no, I gave all my money to two ex
Speaker 2: wives and have of the most wonderful person in my
Speaker 2: life now and wish I had married her first, but
Speaker 2: I would have had to be robbing the cradle, and
Speaker 2: wonderful things happened to us every day. But the ex
Speaker 2: wives got the houses well especially. Oh here's a tidbit
Speaker 2: that you'll have to love. X two is a singer name,
Speaker 2: well sort of a singer name, Renee Armand, who was
Speaker 2: in John Denver's road band, but she also had some
Speaker 2: records on her own, and she got into the business
Speaker 2: as a writer. She married San Francisco Bay Captain talking
Speaker 2: about Captain Noah, very captain, nice guy. Her second marriage
Speaker 2: was to Jim Gordon. Her third marriage was to Jim Horne.
Speaker 2: Her fourth marriage there was a woman in here somewhere,
Speaker 2: so she married a woman in there. But fourth and
Speaker 2: fifth marriage was me and then she married a stock
Speaker 2: and security salesperson. So I've had a personal life all along.
Speaker 2: I just kept going for it. I can't but for
Speaker 2: the X two, the X one was loved by life.
Speaker 2: When just after I had designed the equ and we
Speaker 2: no longer did that, it was the next of years.
Speaker 2: I just had to get out of the country. What
Speaker 2: to do well? We moved to Paris and I lived
Speaker 2: in Paris for two years. Couldn't speak French to save
Speaker 2: my life. Do you speak French? Mom?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: I do not. You seem to me to be a
Speaker 2: guy that would be willing to learn.
Speaker 1: Well, the only thing in France now it's not like
Speaker 1: the seventies, not like the old days. A lot of
Speaker 1: people speaking English and they're not as denigrating as they
Speaker 1: used to be for those who can't speak French. But
Speaker 1: to what degree did your two marriages break up? Because
Speaker 1: the nature of the studio work is your work?
Speaker 2: In twenty four son, it was used at his excuse
Speaker 2: and it's still a challenge when I tell my wife
Speaker 2: that I'm going to do something and it's become chimerical.
Speaker 2: It just drifts off into the ozon. I really have
Speaker 2: to I have to be responsible. I've had to grow up.
Speaker 2: I just had a double fusion operation and I was
Speaker 2: fucked up. I had I have spinal synosis from lifting
Speaker 2: all that ship for all those years, and had two
Speaker 2: procedures and a labinectomy in a ten eleven hours day
Speaker 2: under propofault, and she coaxed me back to life, but
Speaker 2: I didn't want to do it. Take the exercise, will
Speaker 2: whatever it was, take the this horrible drug that they
Speaker 2: got paid. So I'm just coming out of that and
Speaker 2: I owe my life stenosis.
Speaker 1: You can't. You have to get the operation. But when
Speaker 1: you marry who's been married like three or four times before,
Speaker 1: this is like what's his name? King? You think it's
Speaker 1: going to be different with you? Well, what makes you
Speaker 1: think that the pattern's going to change?
Speaker 2: Because I'm supposed to be able to design that. I
Speaker 2: designed this other stuff and I was. I'm not that
Speaker 2: way anymore. I've got to work for it now. But
Speaker 2: I used to think that I could design my life
Speaker 2: and I can't. I couldn't and I can't. What I
Speaker 2: can do is be good as good as I could
Speaker 2: possibly be to my friends and the guys that have
Speaker 2: worked for me. I've got a guy doing manufacturing in Gmail,
Speaker 2: been with me for almost forty years, and just give
Speaker 2: him whatever he needs. Or my young assistant Kasrie Orrai,
Speaker 2: who I taught at Berkeley, and she said I'm going
Speaker 2: to move to Nashville and get a gig, and that
Speaker 2: was almost thirty years ago, and nobody would hire her,
Speaker 2: and I had to hire her, and every time I
Speaker 2: gave her something to do, she would excel at Kasri,
Speaker 2: could you learn photoshop? Yeah? How about my next Friday, Casri?
Speaker 2: How about Final Cut Pro?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Wednesday? And these people that have been so good to
Speaker 2: me and worth everything you had.
Speaker 1: This recovery from the operation and fusions are really you
Speaker 1: know it was just rated because I know somebody else
Speaker 1: had it is the most painful. But other than this interlude,
Speaker 1: what's keeping you busy? Into? What degree are you working now?
Speaker 2: Our work? Every day? I around two companies and we're
Speaker 2: doing I haven't talked about Studio Confidential, but you understand
Speaker 2: from Adam at Shortfire, who's been great, that we are
Speaker 2: doing a show.
Speaker 1: Talk about this show, this shows you're doing in February,
Speaker 1: How did this come to be.
Speaker 2: Well, it came to be what would have to admit
Speaker 2: by default, because we adjusted that how to do great
Speaker 2: immersive recording. I want to say that because we were
Speaker 2: brought together by Phil Ramon to do these projects which
Speaker 2: were which became DTS five point one, which became at
Speaker 2: most except that ATMOS is not very good. We came
Speaker 2: together and we couldn't get any work anymore. So I'm Elliott,
Speaker 2: and I've been friends with Elliott forever because we mix,
Speaker 2: We're of like minds and like hearts. The way we
Speaker 2: mix and the way we the way we listen, and
Speaker 2: I just have so much respect for him that he'll
Speaker 2: never suggest anything that I say, I can't do that. Never, never,
Speaker 2: I can't think of the thing. So we got together
Speaker 2: in this group run by another buddy, kind of a
Speaker 2: manager of the group, and the seven of us, all
Speaker 2: seven would get together have meetings that we'd have actual
Speaker 2: meetings at ah shows and then we'd have virtual meetings.
Speaker 2: But every time we got together there would be endless laughs,
Speaker 2: especially for med Journey, who's the funniest guy on earth.
Speaker 2: Before that Al Schmidt and before that Phil Ramon, and
Speaker 2: it all came from you know, at the show one
Speaker 2: year in two thousand and too, Phil mentioned it to
Speaker 2: a bunch of guys and then Al said, yeah, that'd
Speaker 2: be a good idea, and then and helped move it
Speaker 2: to Narris to the Recording Academy. Now it's the P
Speaker 2: and E Wing, But that group that we got together
Speaker 2: exists today as the Meta Alliance Music Engineers Technology Alliance
Speaker 2: and Elliot and I did a book that Jim sort
Speaker 2: of liked the idea. I don't think it did very well.
Speaker 2: It was the Drum Book How we all did drums.
Speaker 2: Thought that was going to be be great, didn't make
Speaker 2: any money, And then we did in the studio with
Speaker 2: the guys and we do demos back when Ed and
Speaker 2: Al Schmidt were participating, and then and then Phil died
Speaker 2: and looking for other people, and I chose Nico Bolas
Speaker 2: and and not in the pushy ways. So nobody thinks
Speaker 2: it's my idea. It was my idea, and Nico, you know,
Speaker 2: did Neil for all those years Bill Young and and
Speaker 2: then and then after Ed died, I've always wanted to
Speaker 2: invite Jimmy Douglas and had also talked to Sylvia Massey
Speaker 2: and they weren't ready, but then they were ready. So
Speaker 2: the seven of us now include Nico, Bolas, Jimmy and
Speaker 2: Sylvia Massey. And in the studio with the guys didn't work.
Speaker 2: So Elliott and I proposed doing sitting on stage and
Speaker 2: telling stories, which everybody hated. So Elliott and I said,
Speaker 2: this is a great idea. Let's just do it without
Speaker 2: the guys, and so we designed it and funded it,
Speaker 2: and eventually the guys fell in line, and we did
Speaker 2: a show at Bridgefield a year at the Ridgefield Playhouse
Speaker 2: in in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which we designed. We kind of
Speaker 2: we kind of scripted, but we scripted in the sense
Speaker 2: that we organized telling stories. I kept them on a
Speaker 2: spreadsheet and could work off a spreadsheet. And it was successful.
Speaker 2: It was the proof of concept, and I would be
Speaker 2: surprised if you hadn't seen it, because we were encouraged
Speaker 2: to do it by everybody we talked to, including my
Speaker 2: next door neighbor Gary Getzman, from when I lived on
Speaker 2: Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks. But we never really we
Speaker 2: never pursued it until we did it at Richfield, and
Speaker 2: then Elliott and I said, well, what the fuck, because
Speaker 2: we're both old, We're two old guys, and I had
Speaker 2: to do it. And so that's what Machine Center. The
Speaker 2: thing at Machine Center is a boy, Bob. If you
Speaker 2: could help us do anything, we would be in your
Speaker 2: debt for all time.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know I got the press release, but since
Speaker 1: I have you, yeah, because it talks about a window
Speaker 1: from February second to sometime later.
Speaker 2: In February March. First, how many shows are there going
Speaker 2: to be? Twenty eight? They're going to be twenty eight shows?
Speaker 2: And what is going to be different about those shows?
Speaker 2: Different stories and different ways of approaching it In this
Speaker 2: last in this last show we did we did Ron
Speaker 2: Robin seven stories. Each of us told one, and then
Speaker 2: in the second half we kind of loosened up a
Speaker 2: bit and told some stories that we couldn't fit into
Speaker 2: that fixed time. And this time, in one of the
Speaker 2: promo passes, we asked the audience if they had anybody
Speaker 2: that they'd like like to hear about, and some gentle
Speaker 2: souls said Phil Ramond. And we've each of us got
Speaker 2: about ten Philramonds stories, including that one I told you
Speaker 2: about Stay with Me Baby. So the way we do
Speaker 2: it is we get together on these calls and we
Speaker 2: just entered tain each other, and I write down a
Speaker 2: short version of the idea on a spreadsheet, and then
Speaker 2: we get together and decide which ones to be serious
Speaker 2: about and which ones to rehearse. And once we rehearse them,
Speaker 2: we know what kind of time they'll take and how
Speaker 2: to fit them in. So we're doing this, this show,
Speaker 2: and we're basically at living it, which just about everybody
Speaker 2: has told us won't work, and we don't think they're right.
Speaker 1: We just so we understand. Is it twenty eight? Is
Speaker 1: it like a Broadway play? Were there twenty eight performances
Speaker 1: of one show? Or is it different every night?
Speaker 2: It can be different every night, but that's a stretch.
Speaker 2: If we're lucky, each of us has well. We started up,
Speaker 2: I said everybody has to have one hundred shows. Couldn't
Speaker 2: do that, So then we got down to each one
Speaker 2: of us has to have thirty shows. That was too much.
Speaker 2: We finally got down to every one of us has
Speaker 2: to have at least eight shows, where we could rotate
Speaker 2: them if we feel so inspired, or we add one,
Speaker 2: but we give ourselves a break in that we've got
Speaker 2: one that's well rehearsed and we could just roll that
Speaker 2: story out, because you know, at the end of the day.
Speaker 2: That's what we did in the studio. We could tell
Speaker 2: stories and because you had to make people, there are
Speaker 2: a couple. Here's one of the things that AI doesn't
Speaker 2: do is it doesn't know how to tell a joke.
Speaker 2: So I started with AI asking an AI agent to
Speaker 2: tell me a joke, and it couldn't. But it could say, no,
Speaker 2: you tell me a joke, which meant that it was
Speaker 2: taking my joke and stealing it. And so I didn't
Speaker 2: tell any jokes. But AI doesn't do certain things at all.
Speaker 2: It does not do well this thing of coherence of
Speaker 2: a story, like a song, where you can have a
Speaker 2: last verse that wraps it up like a Jimmy Webleer,
Speaker 2: and I love you more that says, and I love
Speaker 2: you for all time. It's bad English that he famously repeats.
Speaker 2: But it's something today I couldn't do. I love you
Speaker 2: more than need I love you more than need you,
Speaker 2: but I and I need you for all time A.
Speaker 2: I couldn't do that because it dismays the laws of grammar.
Speaker 2: Couldn't do that. I can't do good vibrations, could not
Speaker 2: do good vibrations. Even if it did good vibrations. It
Speaker 2: couldn't imagine the way Brian Wilson put that together. So
Speaker 2: we can tell a story, we can tell sort of
Speaker 2: fucking Phil Remond, you'd be working. We did the second
Speaker 2: Duets record Lennon Segon some frack tracks, and we got
Speaker 2: started with with Phil Remone. Came to Northern California, we
Speaker 2: started recording, or we thought, but no. Bill Vermont started
Speaker 2: telling stories at eleven or twelve in the morning, and
Speaker 2: about the time six or seven o'clock rolled around and said, well,
Speaker 2: we got to eat dinner. We'll finish after dinner. Got
Speaker 2: back to it, hadn't recorded note one and Phil turns
Speaker 2: to us and said, well, are we going to get
Speaker 2: anything done today? So that kind of story. I've got
Speaker 2: a Linda's story about Linda eating a cherry pie off
Speaker 2: the floor, a cherry pie with a lard crust that
Speaker 2: she had the cook that we had in Northern California
Speaker 2: bake and do you think there's a lot of lard
Speaker 2: in Northern California. So I mean, we've got stories. So
Speaker 2: we've got stories.
Speaker 1: How many seats will be available? And does it cost
Speaker 1: to go?
Speaker 2: Yeah? It does. But you know we're having Trump with you,
Speaker 2: I can tell the truth because you've been here. It's
Speaker 2: been a challenge selling tickets. You know, we've got guys
Speaker 2: that have never done Instagram. Well what has Jimmy Douglas
Speaker 2: has and Sylvie has?
Speaker 1: But I have.
Speaker 2: So we've now got to dig deep into stuff that
Speaker 2: we can roll out and get some promotion to get
Speaker 2: people to come and pay from eighty to one hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty seat. Well, we've had to add students at
Speaker 2: half price. We've had to do a week of of
Speaker 2: prep work. Maybe we have a couple of free shows
Speaker 2: the first week. But it's been a struggle and very
Speaker 2: slowly we're selling tickets. But you know, we've got to
Speaker 2: get the word out there because we're not reaching our audience.
Speaker 2: We know we haven't. We have an audience.
Speaker 1: Okay, the press release talked about video distribution. What's going
Speaker 1: on there?
Speaker 2: Well, the very first thing I did when we did
Speaker 2: Ridgefield is I know how to do video, how to
Speaker 2: produce a director. So we did. We spent some money
Speaker 2: with good cameras. I did the rough edit we got
Speaker 2: We've never done a finished show out of Ridgefield, but
Speaker 2: I did the mastard and from that we got the
Speaker 2: sizzle reel. So that's the one that I'd hope you'd see,
Speaker 2: and eventually you saw it. Yeah, So that sold everybody.
Speaker 2: So then I went to my insiders. I went to
Speaker 2: Gary Gatsman and he's so busy he didn't have time
Speaker 2: for it. And we'll go back to Gary, and we
Speaker 2: were well positioned to pass the idea off and have
Speaker 2: somebody else do it. But I've never had that kind
Speaker 2: of involvement with a director where I trust them, because
Speaker 2: they all fucked me over the largest largest portion of
Speaker 2: my career. One thing I could say is that every
Speaker 2: video director I've ever worked with should be buried under
Speaker 2: thirty feet of sand at the bottom of the marrier
Speaker 2: this trench. They're just got off and I keep trusting them,
Speaker 2: and I've said I'm not trusting director any well unless
Speaker 2: it's certain classic guys. So well, so we decided to
Speaker 2: do it on a all but we didn't have enough money,
Speaker 2: so we thought put on a show.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know, I saw the sizzle reel send to
Speaker 1: me from the PR person. Is that sizzle reel on YouTube?
Speaker 2: We've tried to keep the stories off of YouTube so
Speaker 2: that they'd be fresh at the show.
Speaker 1: But I thought this is going to be different stories
Speaker 1: from the Ridgefield thing. Are they the same?
Speaker 2: It is, but we didn't want to show that one
Speaker 2: off because we might go back to it, particularly the
Speaker 2: one out deal Young and the red Neck.
Speaker 1: Listen, I'm gonna give you a place because it's my nature.
Speaker 2: Ah, you're good at it too.
Speaker 1: People go to see the band and to hear the
Speaker 1: same song multiple times. People would go to Hamilton multiple times.
Speaker 1: People are watching K pop demon Hunters. It is so
Speaker 1: hard to reach people. You of all people, and you're
Speaker 1: sitting with in the studio. I've heard the same stories
Speaker 1: multiple times and still laughed. You know. We have to
Speaker 1: so to put out something where people get a taste
Speaker 1: of it and spread the word. What you were doing
Speaker 1: is unique, But you're first going to appeal to an
Speaker 1: older demo that is hard to reach, who we're going
Speaker 1: to be unaware of it. So you have to literally
Speaker 1: do everything you can to reach these people. Don't hold
Speaker 1: anything back, Bob.
Speaker 2: If only I had talked to you in October, but
Speaker 2: I did so right now, we're redoing some of these
Speaker 2: so that we could connect better. So you're right, Oh,
Speaker 2: I can.
Speaker 1: Say, I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: a little bit further because it's not necessarily too late.
Speaker 1: You know, Todd Rungren is on TikTok telling how he
Speaker 1: recorded and wrote some of these songs. Okay, for a
Speaker 1: long time people wouldn't talk about that. Let's not talk
Speaker 1: about whether you should or shouldn't do it. Now. Jackson's Brown,
Speaker 1: of all people, is on TikTok telling his stories. Okay.
Speaker 1: So if each of you got on there and told
Speaker 1: the story on TikTok, the way the algorithm is, some
Speaker 1: people are gonna find it. And if you find something
Speaker 1: you like, you're gonna tell other people. You have to
Speaker 1: give yourself a fighting chance.
Speaker 2: You're right, You're right. By the way, I've got a
Speaker 2: great Jackson Brown story because he and all we're best friends,
Speaker 2: and we pretty much invented how do the modern vocal
Speaker 2: overdobe with Jackson and Old George a multi track.
Speaker 1: Jackson was famous for comping that infinitum.
Speaker 2: So that's what we turned it into. And what is
Speaker 2: your take on that? Well, what he didn't do was
Speaker 2: to avoid punching in a word in the chorus that
Speaker 2: if he just got down to it, he would punch
Speaker 2: a word or phrase of the course, which invariably didn't
Speaker 2: work because it has the wrong phrasing, the wrong breath,
Speaker 2: the wrong place in your voice where it comes from.
Speaker 2: And what we did with Lowell and Jackson was to
Speaker 2: record whenever we could a bigger track. So if we
Speaker 2: had one phrase that was wrong in the first chorus,
Speaker 2: we would never spin it, fly it a copy it
Speaker 2: from courts to chorus. We would also encourage the singers,
Speaker 2: which were Lola Jackson, to sing it from the top
Speaker 2: every time, even if you have just one line you
Speaker 2: need to fix, get lost in the song, sing the
Speaker 2: song again. So I could get on today and tell
Speaker 2: that story and get people to listen to it, and
Speaker 2: you would still cop and it became the Handley Cop.
Speaker 2: And there's a story in doing Handley Cops because he
Speaker 2: was just I mean, if Jackson was obdurate, Handily was crazed.
Speaker 2: Guys was JD. Southern And there's no better voice in
Speaker 2: the world than Henley. But boy, working for it is
Speaker 2: a drag. Never say yes again. But I can't say that.
Speaker 2: They never speak to me again.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I'll just talk one Henley's story. They
Speaker 1: had these shows before a COVID at Dodger Stadium, and
Speaker 1: then on the East Coast they called it the Classic
Speaker 1: one or some whatever, and that was the first time
Speaker 1: that the Eagles were out with Vince Gill and they
Speaker 1: were great. Oh, I remember that, okay. And then I
Speaker 1: in the next day, because there's a two day fair.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to Irving and I said, what did Don
Speaker 1: have to say, because you and me both know Don's
Speaker 1: a perfectionist, and he said, Don said that the monitor
Speaker 1: mix wasn't perfect and the horns were too aloud on
Speaker 1: a specific song. And I was very close. There's fifty
Speaker 1: thousand people there, and I could hear it a little bit.
Speaker 1: So I say to Irving, I say, you know, I
Speaker 1: heard that a little bit. I don't think anybody would notice.
Speaker 1: And he said, those little tiny things what make the
Speaker 1: difference between good and great? What makes it to like
Speaker 1: it average? To it really touches you. And I'm telling
Speaker 1: the story years later because yes, as my psychiatrist says,
Speaker 1: sometimes you change one thing and the whole picture changes.
Speaker 2: And you know what that particularly pertains to is one
Speaker 2: note out of tune in the chorus is somebody in
Speaker 2: the business, here's this one, and the whole vocal is attitude.
Speaker 2: She can't sing in tune. That came back to us
Speaker 2: any number of times, just one note. And when we
Speaker 2: went to doing autotune, well, when we went when we
Speaker 2: learned how to do autitude, well all you had to
Speaker 2: do was fix that one note flawlessly invisible weaving, and
Speaker 2: you change everyone's mind altitude. But you know what what
Speaker 2: this goes back to with Don is he was right, exactly,
Speaker 2: He's right. I've done vocals vocals with Don where he
Speaker 2: do a hard like a bizarre harmony that he would
Speaker 2: write that just me, you know, like a Jimmy Webb harmony.
Speaker 1: H.
Speaker 2: Two's and nines and elevens and just open harmonies and
Speaker 2: nail it, nail it. Maybe he say you to a
Speaker 2: bass guitar and nail the pitch that you gotta respect,
Speaker 2: that you gotta you gotta. I mean, Linda, is that
Speaker 2: kind of opperate.
Speaker 1: The other thing about it is most people don't care
Speaker 1: that much. There's a complete opposite philosophy of let's do
Speaker 1: it quick, down and dirty. Okay, but if you worry,
Speaker 1: most people are not willing. The other thing is you
Speaker 1: talked about Lowell George suffering. These people are suffering. For
Speaker 1: their art. It's not like they're going home putting their
Speaker 1: feet up on the couch and watching television and are happy.
Speaker 1: They're consumed by this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would I would argue that Linda has
Speaker 2: made the right choices. And when we started over see
Speaker 2: all the early records, Peter and Linda would do only
Speaker 2: live vocals. So part of why Linda kind of push
Speaker 2: for me going back and doing your work was that
Speaker 2: I had done you know, those earth, wind and fire vocals. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they they they I directed pitch from the control room.
Speaker 2: I did an overwhelming amount of work making those rand again.
Speaker 2: They remember the guys, remember, so asked Larry Dunn when
Speaker 2: you eventually interviewed Larry Dunn. And they didn't sing in
Speaker 2: tune until we really got a hold on how to
Speaker 2: direct their performance in the studio. And of course they're
Speaker 2: brilliant performances. Don't get me wrong, I can't sing, but
Speaker 2: why do I have it here? From pitch and for
Speaker 2: harmonies and how to make harmony's buzz. So so getting
Speaker 2: those right had a lot to do with that sound
Speaker 2: of earth, which let me go way out the limb.
Speaker 2: Change the sound of R and B markedly and quickly
Speaker 2: R and B was one thing before we did Earth
Speaker 2: Wind and Fire and another thing after not quickly. It
Speaker 2: was a different game. You know.
Speaker 1: One thing you did with Linda you cut a cover
Speaker 1: of Tom Petty's The Waiting, which is just phenomenal.
Speaker 2: Well, except that the background voices were wrong. Boy, I
Speaker 2: tried to redo that. That's an example of getting wrong.
Speaker 2: We got the background voices are so weighty that it
Speaker 2: just it was never bright because that bright happy thing
Speaker 2: had to play against the idea of the waiting is
Speaker 2: the hardest part, and it should have been more iron Boy.
Speaker 1: I wanted to read you this, but you've got a
Speaker 1: great performance out of her. Okay, we're gonna leave it here, George.
Speaker 1: I wish you luck with these performances. I say, I've
Speaker 1: seen the Sizzle Wheel. The stories are great for those
Speaker 1: people who you know, who are not insiders. This is
Speaker 1: just gold. This is stuff he can't get anywhere else
Speaker 1: that in most cases never been anywhere else.
Speaker 2: And never will go unless we do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know it's a tragic loss with al
Speaker 1: and Ed, especially Ed long before his time, but a
Speaker 1: character he was before.
Speaker 2: But Bobby, you're so patient. Thank you so much for
Speaker 2: getting me the opera. I wanted to talk to you forever,
Speaker 2: back when I was talking about that thing that we knew,
Speaker 2: that that Quincy did on the Brothers Johnson, I really
Speaker 2: wanted to talk to you about all these experiences i'd had.
Speaker 2: So you know, I'm sorry, I'm so long with I'm
Speaker 2: so ash.
Speaker 1: It is the spice of life. It's that's where that's
Speaker 1: where the new guy is. That's that's where the good
Speaker 1: stuff is. When people say I shouldn't go any deeper,
Speaker 1: I should go, that's where the stuff you want to hear.
Speaker 1: So there's still, you know, tons I want to hear,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna leave it for today. George, thank you
Speaker 1: for taking this time of my audience. Till next time.
Speaker 1: This is Bob Left sets