I ended up charging $100 an hour and still saving them a lot of money by not having to fly a guy down from Nashville and put him up overnight. I began thinking, "If I could get them to trust me to fix some of these things, it might be a way to break into the business." They started by letting me change tubes, and pretty soon I was aligning tape recorders, repairing them, fixing their amps and power supplies. In Atlanta, back then, when equipment went belly-up, they had to send it to Nashville or get somebody to come down and fix it. I've been a ham radio operator since I was a kid taking transmitters and receivers apart and putting them together. I wasn't from that industry, but I understood electronics pretty well. A lot of those guys came from the broadcast industry. The engineers didn't want anyone to know what they were doing. Engineering was especially hard to get into. At that time there wasn't any Full Sail, or anything like that. So you started doing some engineering around that time? We did have a doctor's office in the building, and we made friends with the doctor. There was a bottle shop just down Peachtree Road where we would go down and get bottles of Ripple for a dollar. The sessions were quite serious when I first got there. When you had strings – these were real strings Atlanta Symphony players. You have to remember, there were no synthesizers. They had two pianos – a regular grand and an upright with tacks on the hammers. They did a fuzz guitar sound using this little bitty amp that had a nail through the speaker cone. Not many things ran direct in those days. You wanted to keep above the noise floor, if the beginning of the song was quiet? You'd also have to push everything up at the beginning of the record, and then bring it back down as the song went on. You would have to push some frequencies, knowing that you were gonna lose those in the generations. You'd have to equalize going down, with tape hiss and all. You'd have to always be thinking ahead of what you planned on putting on there. So they would record on one 3-track machine and then mix that to another 3-track while adding more tracks?Įxactly. They would always begin by cutting the bass, drums, piano, and guitar –the rhythm section – on one track and the vocal on one track. Next to the studio there were railroad tracks, and any time a train would come by they'd have to stop recording. They had an EMT plate, but they also used a live echo chamber that was an old septic tank beneath the building. Everything was patched – they had this huge patchbay in the rack, all balanced at 600 ohms. For EQ we had a couple Pultec equalizers. It had these big 4-inch knobs, and your channel assignment was this lever switch with three positions – left, center, and right. I think the board was a modified Gates radio board. It was more like a glorified radio station. At Master Sound they recorded on two Ampex 350 1/2-inch machines, with tube electronics and the great big meters. In those days, a union session was three hours and you were expected to cut at least two, maybe three sides in that time. What was studio recording like at this time? A lot of times we would play percussion at the same time we did background vocals. I went from singing to doing percussion, like cowbell, tambourine, and congas. Besides doing promotion, I was a background singer and I sang on a lot of these records, plus a lot of jingles like Coca-Cola and Orkin Pest Control. In that room they cut hits by Billy Joe Royal, The Tams, the Classics IV, and the first Atlanta Rhythm Section. We were just down the hall from Bill Lowery's recording studio, Master Sound. I moved to Atlanta to work for them in 1966, doing promotion, management, band booking. Cobb, wrote all the Classics IV and Atlanta Rhythm Section hits. I also met a guy from Dothan, Alabama, named Buddy Buie, who managed Bobby Goldsboro and others. About this time I got hooked up with a promoter and manager named Bill Lowery, who managed Jerry Reed, Ray Stevens, Joe South, and a bunch of other performers. He always wanted to sing but we wouldn't let him. It was a rocket going off, just up the coast at Cape Canaveral! Bertie Higgins was the drummer in the band. We'd be on the stage, and suddenly all the windows would light up and everyone would run outside. We used to play in a little place in Cocoa Beach. In the early-1960s, after high school, I was the singer in a band traveling around Florida. I moved to Florida with my parents in 1960, to a small Gulf Coast town north of Clearwater. They were local "hits." I had a chance to go to Juilliard, but I didn't want to be a music teacher so I passed it up. We played sock hops all around the area, made some recordings, and the radio station played them. We had a doo wop group in high school in Louisville, Kentucky, although I was more into classical music at the time. I guess my career in music started in the '50s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |