Janice Brooks
From:
Pleasant Gap Pa
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Posted 28 Oct 2002 7:34 pm |
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Entertainment - Reuters/Variety Music
Producer Who Had Role on 'Layla,' 'Respect' Dead
Mon Oct 28,10:30 AM ET
MIAMI (Reuters) - Tom Dowd, a legendary record producer and engineer who
worked with Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, and a host of other stars spanning
jazz, soul and rock over 50 years, has died in south Florida at age 77.
Among the numerous hits he had a hand in was Derek and the Dominos'
"Layla," the rock classic featuring the dueling guitars of Clapton and the late
Duane Allman.
Dowd died on Sunday morning at a nursing home in Aventura after fighting a
respiratory disease for two years, his daughter, Dana Dowd, said.
"His contribution to music was immense. He covered so many genres over so
many years and touched so many lives. He loved what he did," she said.
Dowd worked at Atlantic records for more than 20 years before becoming a
sought-after independent producer in the mid-1960s. The roster of artists he
recorded with included jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, engineering "Giant
Steps" and "My Favorite Things," and Charles Mingus.
Soul diva Franklin was one of his personal favorites. Among the hits he
helped her create was "Respect." He recorded other black artists such as
Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles, Otis Redding and James Brown in Florida and
Memphis for Atlantic.
His relationship with Clapton was one of his most enduring, lasting from the
British guitarist's days with Cream through Derek and the Dominos and his
later solo successes. Clapton called him "the ideal recording man" in a 1996
interview.
He also produced the Allman Brothers Band in the southern rockers' heyday.
Their "Live at Fillmore East" was probably the recording he liked most that he
had worked on, he told Reuters in 2000.
Dowd, who worked out of the famed Criteria Studios in Miami for many years,
also recorded Neil Young, Rod Stewart and Lynyrd Skynyrd, including the ill-
fated band's anthem "Freebird."
He was considered a pioneer in the studio and is credited with introducing the
first eight-track recording machine into a major studio in 1957.
In later years, he lamented what he thought was the sorry state of the modern
pop music industry he saw as lacking in real talent and overly driven by
commercial interests.
He was recently honored with a National Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award.
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from mixonline.com:
Tom Dowd: LOOK AT A BRILLIANT CAREER, PART 1
Blair Jackson
Mix, Oct 1, 1999
In the hype-filled world of the music industry, where words like "legend" and
"masterpiece" have been cheapened by overuse, Tom Dowd truly is a
legendary figure who has presided over many acknowledged masterpieces.
He has worked his magic for six decades now, and few would be foolish
enough to bet against him opening a seventh decade with yet another great,
memorable project.
During his student days at Columbia University in the 1940s, Dowd pursued
two very different areas of interest: As a physicist with a strong background in
electronics, he worked on the infamous Manhattan Project, which developed
the atom bomb; as a musician, he played in the school's band and orchestra.
Fortunately for all of us, his love of music won out, and by the end of the '40s
he'd found a career that combined music and technology-he became a
freelance recording engineer. Originally working direct-to-disc, he helped
introduce Atlantic Records to stereo recording in 1952; two years later he
joined the company as a staff engineer and equipment designer. He
designed Atlantic's 8-track studio on West 60th Street in 1959 and started
recording there in 1960. These were glorious days for Atlantic Records. Often
working with Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Dowd tracked
many of the most exciting pop and jazz artists of the day. On the pop side, The
Drifters, The Coasters and Bobby Darin were just a few of the greats Dowd
captured at Atlantic's studios. He cut classic sides with the incomparable Ray
Charles that are still considered among the most soulful records ever made,
and his work with jazz giants such as Charles Mingus and John Coltrane
produced a number of landmark recordings, including Mingus' "Mingus'
Mood" and Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" (see this issue's "Classic Tracks"
on page 164.).
In the late '60s, working in New York, Muscle Shoals and wherever the music
took him, Dowd continued to show his versatility, cutting with the late, great
Otis Redding, Ben E. King and an up-and-coming soul and gospel belter
named Aretha Franklin-Dowd recorded most of her Atlantic hits. Dowd also
was behind the board for one of the most famous psychedelic albums of the
'60s: Cream's groundbreaking Disraeli Gears.
By the late '60s, Dowd had moved from engineering into production, where
his golden ears, his tremendous sense of organization, his affable nature and
even temperament made him ideal for the job. Besides his production work
with Aretha, Dowd worked on The Young Rascals' biggest hits, helmed three
of The Allman Brothers' classic early '70s albums (including their incendiary
Fillmore East set) and was behind the board at Criteria Studios for Derek &
The Dominoes' epic Layla album. Following that, he produced a string of hit
solo albums for Eric Clapton, including 461 Ocean Boulevard, which included
the Number One smash "I Shot the Sheriff." Among the other artists Dowd
produced in this era were Dr. John, Delaney & Bonnie, Buddy Guy & Junior
Wells, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Rod Stewart, with whom he worked on five
albums.
It's a credit to Dowd that so many of the artists he recorded and produced
through the years kept asking to work with him again and again. His
partnership with Clapton stretched into the '80s; and his close relationship
with The Allman Brothers went well into the '90s, encompassing several more
fine albums. For Dowd, a life in music has always been about people first and
foremost, and about capturing those flashes of musical magic that transform
our lives and move our souls.
In this first installment of a two-part interview, we trace the 1999 TEC Awards
Hall of Fame inductee's early career, from the late '40s through the mid-'60s.
How did your work in physics and on the Manhattan Project put you in good
stead when you finally got into recording in the late '40s?
Having worked with such sophisticated electronic equipment, and being
musically sensitive, recording was child's play. We were still in the Stone Age
when it came to recording. I had no problem whatsoever just looking at the
equipment that existed and adapting to it in like a week's time, because we
were still cutting direct to disc, and that was primitive.
What kind of music were you working on at the beginning-big band?
In 1947 it was called predominantly "race," and it was either race or jazz.
Were you a jazz fan?
Yes. I [worked] with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Lennie
Tristano, George Shearing, Max Roach, those people. That was 1947. There
was a major strike in 1948 by the musicians. Put a big hole in things for a
while. But that helped us. Then, by the end of '48, beginning of '49, they
introduced tape machines to the studio, and that was another world. Then
there was a new generation of engineers that could make wonderful tapes but
couldn't put the damn tape on a record, [laughs] because of the parameters of
forgiveness on the tape that don't exist when you transfer to disc.
Was there anything in your personality that you had to adjust to get used to
working with musicians? Working with Dizzy Gillespie and working with
Charlie Parker are probably two different things.
No. I'd listen to records. I used to do all kinds of things for fun. If I had the
opportunity, I'd go down 52nd Street, I'd go down to the Village, I'd go up to
the Apollo and watch the amateur hour. And all of a sudden I'm recording
them, saying, "Hey, that's the guy who plays in so-and-so's band." Or, "I know
who that is!" I was making contact with these people, one on one, for the first
time.
And how did they strike you as a breed?
Boy, they were wild! [Laughs.]
You didn't really have a military head, as they say, did you?
Oh, no. Not at all. And the musicians knew nothing of my background.
The less said the better, probably.
Yeah. Probably all they knew was, "Oh, the kid knows what he's doing. Hey,
man, he put a microphone on the bass? He's crazy!"
Had that not been done?
See, we were using hand-me-down radio equipment. And I'd sit there and
listen to a quintet or something like that, and I'd say, "Man, I need a mic by the
piano-he's got a solo." And I'll put this mic up for the horns. And ask them to
step in and out when they're going to solo. I got a bass player and a guitarist
and a guitar-put a mic between the two of them and then adjust their dynamic.
And all of a sudden, when we played back the first acetate, they're looking at
each other and saying, "Hey man, that's cool." I got along famously with them.
There was little or no dialog that was like, "Man, what the hell are you doing?"
It was, "Hey, man, can you do this?" Or, "What's this you're doing?" And I'd
say, "Well, I'm trying to do this or that." And they'd say, "Okay, fine."
Were you aware of the accepted models of the day? Columbia had a certain
way of recording. Rudy Van Gelder wasn't really happening then yet, right?
No. There were several things that I finally became more sensitive to.
Columbia and RCA were radio stations. And the people who were doing all
the recording were generally the engineers who they would send out on the
nighttime gigs, for the dance bands at so-and-so. So when it came to
recording, those were the guys. And what do they do? They put up one
microphone for the band and one microphone for the vocal. "All right, this is
it."
Hope for the best.
And of course, don't let the meter go into the red. Well, by now I'm thinking
there's no high sound that goes into the red that's going to hurt the record. The
only things I have to worry about are the low frequencies. So I'm taking
advantage of what more I can get on the record that you're not accustomed to
hearing by using more than one mic.
And what are the prevalent mics of the day? This is pre-Neumann, obviously,
right?
No, we didn't have Neumann. We had [RCA] 44s, 77s, 639As; Western
Electric 639s. Salt shakers. Turners. That was about the best variety you could
have.
Studios were mostly abandoned radio-station rooms or something. [Laughs.]
With that lovely acoustic tile.
When I started working for Atlantic, I thought of all the different rooms I'd been
in New York over the years, and I thought, "Man, that room sounds good, but
that wall sucks." So all of a sudden, I'm adjusting my thinking. If I have an
opportunity, I don't want to do this and that. Some things I love, and there are
other things I hate, and there are some things that I realized I can just use a
pinch of, not a teaspoonful.
When you started working for Atlantic, did you know at the time that you'd be
helping them build a studio?
No. It was evolution. As Atlantic became more and more successful, some of
the productions called for more space. The staff was no longer three or four
people; it was like maybe ten or 11, and they were sitting on top of each other.
Heretofore, it had been that the accountant would come by once a week and
look at the books. It was a mom-and-pop operation. We used the office in the
front of the building as the studio. As it got bigger, they went and found space
at 157 West 57th Street. And they said, "All right, Dowd, you got the rest of the
top floor. Make the studio bigger." Well, there was just so far that I could make
the studio bigger because of the dimensions of the building in the first place.
But I did make it bigger, and that's when I scrapped the little portable stuff we
were using to make records and built a console. I started expanding a little bit.
Once in a while we'd get into where we're going to use ten strings. Well, I
couldn't record a full rhythm section and ten strings in that space if I stood on
my head. So we'd be using Capitol, we'd be using this room, that room. Still
going outside to record. And whenever we did that, I'd always have to go
along to either operate the controls or, at one point, I got very sneaky. I would
come along with our portable stereo machine and record whatever it was we
were doing in stereo, while the studio they were using was doing it in mono.
That's funny. What kind of machine were you using?
I had a Magnacord and a pile of toys that went with it. I could put up six or
eight microphones, and so forth. So I was recording a lot of things in 2-track.
This is '52, '53, '54, '55, while the studios were still recording the mono.
And how many inputs did that first console you built have?
The first console that we made our records on at Atlantic from 1950 until 1954
had four inputs. That was the whole nine yards, four inputs. People used to
say to me, "How the hell do you get that drum sound? What mic do you use?"
And I'd say, "I don't have a mic within ten feet of the drums." I couldn't afford
one-the damn drums were leaking in every place else I got. I didn't have any
control on what the drums were doing. [Laughs.] But people would try and
emulate that and they've got 17 mics on the drums!
What was your title at Atlantic?
I was the engineer. They'd call me up and say, "We need to master
something," or, "We're going to record tomorrow. Can you make it?" And I'd
show up in the office, and we'd move the desks back, and we'd record
something.
And we're on tape at this point, right?
By now, Atlantic was on tape. We were on quarter-inch mono.
Were there people who didn't like tape when it first came in, just like the way
people haven't liked every other new medium?
There were people who, when you'd say, "Use tape, it's better," they'd say, "All
right, yeah, but cut a disc at the same time." And you'd play the tape back, and
they'd say, "That's great. Use the disc." [Laughs.]
It's like the people running analog and digital together.
Precisely. You hit it on the head. But it was kind of a mixed-up situation. There
were people who did have a preference for, or stuck to the tradition of disc-
they didn't trust tape.
Don't you feel, though, that even the earliest tape had more dynamic range
than disc?
Absolutely. I still have-and I use them in demos once in a while-two Tito
Puente selections on tape that go back to 1951, 1952; mono, on-the-fly mix.
And they're brilliant; they sing. I played them to somebody off of the original 7-
1/2-inch [IPS] tape copy that I made when I made the album, and people say,
"My God! When was that done?" Tape was incredible in those days.
Do you think it's fair to say that what happened in those early days in New
York could only have happened in New York? Partially because of the greater
racial acceptance?
Well, New York was a breeding ground, but there were two or three other
places that were not as dynamic, but were also breeding grounds-Chicago,
Los Angeles, San Francisco. They were hot.
Of course, Los Angeles, with the film industry overseeing things, it kind of
gave a different slant to anything they did. As opposed to New York with all
the Broadway shows and the Philharmonic and the opera-there was a
different air about recording in New York than in California. Chicago had its
own germ going, as did San Francisco.
You were an early proponent of stereo, and you always seemed to be tracks
ahead of your contemporaries, going to 8-track early...
I remember when talk of 8-track first came up. I said, "It would be great if we
had 8-track because then we could do this and that and that." And they said,
"Find out how much it'll cost." So I got a quote on the phone, and they said,
"Well, go ahead." So all of a sudden, here it is the fall of 1957 and I've ordered
an 8-track machine. As I'm thinking about it, I realize I've got to now design or
convert the damn console I have to fit 8-track. I couldn't order one if my life
depended on it because nobody knew what the hell I was talking about!
"Eight-track-you're insane, Dowd!"
So I have to build the damn console, or convert what I have. By January of '58
the new machine rolls in the door. A week later I have it connected and I'm
recording. There is no difference in our approach to recording, except I'm
storing it differently. When they ask for something to be played back, I'm still
playing it back mono, mixing it on-the-fly. Or somebody says, "Hey, what was
that?" and I'd stop the tape and back it up and listen to one instrument and
everybody goes, "What's he doing?" It scared them all to death. [Laughs.]
Did Atlantic have live chambers?
I had a space in the back. Phil Ihele [another Atlantic engineer/tech] and I did
everything scavenger style. There was a lot of remodeling going on in that
area of Manhattan, and there were bathrooms and kitchens being remodeled
once a week in the neighborhood. Phil and I would go around to the different
places that were doing the refurbishing and, "You got any odd lots of tiles left
over?" If they're throwing them in the garbage, and we're paying them five
dollars a pound or something, and we're picking up discards and chips-we
don't want them regular, that's the last thing we want. We want them all
cracked and fractured and screwed up. Because of limitations in the building
we were in, we built the most irregular-shaped space you could ever imagine.
[Laughs.] And that served as an echo chamber. It was not a deep echo
reverberance or anything ideal, but it was voluminous, and gave things a little
rounder waveform than you'd be accustomed to hearing. We used that on
some recordings sometimes, but everything was tempered because it was not
ideal.
In the late '50s, you're doing these different kinds of sessions, it seems like-
you're doing jazz, you're doing The Coasters, you're doing pop like Bobby
Darin...
In February of '58, the first session on 8-track was Laverne Baker. Within the
next 90 days, I went through Bobby Darin, The Coasters, Charlie Mingus, Ray
Charles. I went through artists like you wouldn't believe. And everything
turned out gold, thank God. Everything we touched was right. The 8-track
contributed to it. I would be sitting in the studio doing The Coasters at 2
o'clock in the afternoon with Mike [Leiber] and Jerry [Stoller], and then Ahmet
would call me up and say, "Ten o'clock tonight we're going to do Mingus." You
want culture shock? Go from The Coasters to Charlie Mingus in ten hours.
Obviously, you're going for a completely different thing, right?
Yeah. This is like living in a submarine for a week and now you're walking on
the moon. It's like, "Whoa, what am I doing here?"
What was Mingus like? He had a reputation for being crusty, shall we say?
Mingus was a taskmaster. And a very, very serious musician. Completely
spiritual. They could rehearse this and that and so forth and so on, and there
was never a dictated, "That's the part you've got to play." It was never that. A
line might be notated but that's about it. Everything else was by the seat of the
trousers. And while we were recording, he might walk from behind wherever I
had him screened off around the room to get closer to some other musician to
give him an elbow while he was playing, and shake his head "yes" or shake
"no" or something. [Laughs.]
Gotta communicate, I guess.
Exactly. A lot of these people are playing with their heads down, engrossed in
what they're doing. Charlie, if he couldn't get their attention, he'd just pick up
the instrument and walk across the room while he's playing! And I'm going,
"Oh, God."
You're thinking, "Where's my follow mic?"
Right. The sound is changing, and the drums are louder all of a sudden.
There's nothing you can do. You're just like, "Okay, he did it. What am I going
to do, go out and yell at him?"
What did you do with Bobby Darin?
I guess I did his first five or six singles. "Splish Splash," "Early in the Morning,"
"Clementine." I did "Mack the Knife."
What was that session like?
He'd been playing that in-between crowd-he was playing to that new teenage
audience and to adults, too. It was a potpourri. He was playing Town and
Country and clubs that a different audience was going to. And this was on the
strength of records like "Dream Lover," "Queen of the Hop," "Splish Splash."
One day he came in and said, "I want to make a big band album." And they
look at him and say, "You're out of your..." Nobody's in his camp.
And he says, "Dammit, it's my money. I can do what I want. I'm going to make
this." So they figure, all right, and then they do everything they can to aid and
abet him. They're not going to have him throw his money away. It's their
money, too! By God, we got into the first session, which was the strings and
the horns. And we didn't have our own room going then, so I had to do it at
Fulton on West 40th Street. Later it was called Coastal. I brought equipment
into that studio, gave it to two or three other guys, set up the mics, and let them
operate the stereo machine while I went back upstairs and did the initial mix
recording because I knew the room like the palm of my hand. At the time, of
course, they only released the mono version.
We did "Mack the Knife" and "La Mer" [Charles Trenet's French hit recorded in
English as "Somewhere Beyond the Sea"]. That whole series of four songs,
we did in three hours. We were going by union scale, and we were employing
35 or 40 men, and everything was three hours with two five-minute breaks on
the hour. The whole damn album was cut in three sessions.
I love that version of "La Mer."
It's a wonderful version. I argued about which was the best take of "Mack the
Knife." I always used to tease Ahmet and say we put out the wrong version.
He says, "Yeah, but the wrong version sold 6 million records. Shut up!"
[Laughs.]
Did you know it was going to be a hit?
Oh, man, your bones just kind of shook when we did the damn thing.
Everything about it was incredible.
This was another world. When we started so many dates outside, and couldn't
tote the 8-track machine every place we went, the next gun to the head was,
"Dowd, we're going to have to build a bigger studio."
But when I was doing Bobby Darin, The Coasters and all of those things, if
they were done at Atlantic, they were done on 8-track. So that ultimately,
when stereo came around, you just whip out the old tape, remix it and issue it.
"Here it is in stereo." Those 8-tracks paid for themselves a couple of times
over 20 years later.
The only times the multitrack went out of the studio was when I did Herbie
Mann down at the Village Gate and I also did the MJQ someplace; I can't
recall. I know we tried Lincoln Center and I walked out before the downbeat
and said, "Pull the equipment. This place is impossible."
The other place that I took it that really paid for it a hundred times over, was
when I took it to the Copacabana for Bobby Darin at the Copa. That was done
on 8-track. After that, in New York, it became fashionable to have a truck, and
later you could hire two 8-track machines or whatever configuration you
wanted.
Let me ask you a question about a transitional time. You're there doing this
incredible jazz, R&B, pop stuff. In 1966 The Beatles' Revolver comes out and
there are all those effects and backwards parts. In a way, it's the antithesis of
the live approach you've been using...
Revolver. This is when I'm doing The Young Rascals. And I'm doing a lot of
Stax sessions. I'm flying in and out of Memphis every fifth week. Or going
down to Muscle Shoals. And I'm doing the Rascals and things like that back in
New York. I'm doing "Under the Boardwalk" with The Drifters and working with
Solomon Burke. I was doing a lot of Otis Redding and a lot of Booker T & The
MGs. When Revolver came out, the ones that it impressed the most were the
Rascals. Everybody else said, "It's an English group, and they're trying this
and that and fine, fine, fine." That's how I felt. But the Rascals went ballistic
when they heard Revolver, and they wanted us to try and emulate everything-
every sound and everything they read the way the Revolver album was
recorded.
I will say this about the album: They were unknown to us, and they didn't know
what we were doing, or what I was doing. That was all done on 3- and 4-track,
and they were bouncing tracks. And in bouncing tracks, they didn't realize that
the heads on the machine were out of phase. They were monitoring
everything in stereo, in 2-track. And when you play the album in mono, some
things dropped out, some things disappeared. It was a fright.
The Rascals are saying, "Man, that [effect] is what made it a hit. That's what
made it a hit." And I'm thinking, "You idiots. It's good songs and good singing.
That's all that it is." If you didn't have a good song, if you didn't have good
singing, forget it.
Which The Beatles always did have.
Yeah, exactly.
So it didn't make you start experimenting on things?
It didn't get me to go in a different direction, no.
What was it that took you down to Stax and Muscle Shoals originally?
It was Jerry Wexler. By then Atlantic had four or five promo men out on the
road-in the West, the middle of the country, up and down the East Coast.
Ahmet was flying from Los Angeles to London and stopping over in New York
to answer the phone once in a while. Otherwise, he was signing artists in
England or signing artists in Los Angeles. Nesuhi was doing nothing but jazz,
and Jerry was doing the pop and R&B, but we were not doing so much R&B.
We didn't have any blues stuff. This disturbed Jerry, and a couple of the guys
said, "Oh, you ought to hear this little record company down in Memphis. And
then there's this guy down in Muscle Shoals that has a rhythm section." We
started listening to their records, and Jerry made one or two phone calls and a
couple of deals and the first thing you know, we're distributing Stax records
through the United States, but not in the Memphis/New Orleans area. When
Jerry hears a couple of records coming out of Muscle Shoals, he says, "Man,
that rhythm section is really tight. And they're different from the guys in
Memphis. We ought to use them." So he's flying in and out of Muscle Shoals
once or twice to record, to get a different sound, or a more authentic blues
traditional sound to things than we'd get in New York. But Jerry is averse to
flying, so after he makes one trip here and one trip there, he says to me, "Go
down there and take this artist with you and make a record." And that's how I
started commuting to Alabama and Tennessee.
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