Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music by Phil Ramone Read Free Book Online Page B

reflected the spontaneity inherent in the band’s sound.
    As Billy remembers, one such error occurred during the recording of “A Room of Our Own” for The Nylon Curtain :
    “In the part where I sing, ‘Yes, we all need a room of our own’ before I go into the final vamp, my drummer [Liberty DeVitto] got confused and started to play the beat backwards. He was still playing in time, but he suddenly turned the time signature inside out. There was a look of horror on Liberty’s face, but we could see Phil in the control room waving his arms, telling us, ‘Keep going! It sounds great!’”
    Mistakes that work in your favor can be technical too, as Billy learned when he erased part of a tape during another session for The Nylon Curtain .
    “On ‘Pressure,’ the noise that sounds like the horn of a French taxicab—that strange, breathless staccato beep —is actually a tape ofme singing every note in my repertoire,” Billy explained. “We recorded me singing the notes, and then loaded the tape into an effects gadget called an Emulator. Then, we overdubbed me hollering, ‘PRESH-AR!’ with the same inflection that a Royal Air Force captain might use to bark out a command like ‘TEN-HUT!’
    “While the master tape was running, I impulsively hit all the buttons on the tape machine to punch out everything but the section with the yelling. Phil was dumbstruck. ‘God! What did you do? You erased part of the song!’ Phil was right: for that one segment everything stops dead but my voice, but it was just what the track needed.”
    In this instance, I agreed with Billy: the inadvertent error added an inexplicable dimension to an already stylized song. A different artist (or producer) might have disagreed and asked for a retake, but I believed then (as I do now) that a producer’s role is to objectively guide the creation without stifling it.
    Amongst musicians and engineers, I’m known for recording rehearsals.
    Whenever possible, I arrange to hold rehearsals in the studio, where I can put up a few microphones and record it professionally. Portable digital recorders make it much easier to record a remote rehearsal; the best we could do outside of the studio twenty years ago was run a cassette, which wasn’t optimal.
    What’s the advantage of recording a rehearsal?
    Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like A Rock” is a prime example of how a rehearsal tape can be a lifesaver. Paul had made an acoustic guitar-and-vocal demo of the song, and the next day we rehearsed with the Dixie Hummingbirds, a vocal group that was well versed in the gospel vernacular.
    Among gospel quartets, the Hummingbirds were the most colorful—and versatile. While steeped in the tradition of jubilee gospel music of the 1920s, their sound was inflected with elements of hard gospel, blues, jazz, and pop. The secret to their distinctivestyle was “trickeration,” an overlapping-note technique in which a member of the group would pick up a note just before lead singer Ira Tucker finished it. Tucker was a physical performer who would jump, shout, and fall to his knees in prayer; there was always a great interplay between the Hummingbirds and their audience.
    In setting up the rehearsal I thought, how am I going to fit the group in the vocal booth? “Loves Me Like A Rock” is not a “booth” kind of song, nor are the Dixie Hummingbirds a group that’s accustomed to being confined. To solve the problem I sat them in a circle (which helped them feed off one another) and dropped a single Neumann U47 microphone in their midst. I put a second mike in front of Paul.
    The rehearsal was magnificent; everyone was clustered around the microphones, singing, shaking their heads, stomping their feet, and clapping while Paul played guitar and sang. It was the most unrestrained performance I’d heard in a long time: in the hands of that group—in that particular setting—the song was elevated to a whole other spiritual level. It was rollicking, earthy, and