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OVERTURE

WHAT IS A RECORD PRODUCER?

BOB THIELE (produced Buddy Holly, “Rave On”)

It was all left up to the A&R [artists and repertoire] guy in those days as to who to record, when to record, how much to spend. Then you worked closely with the sales department. But the A&R guy was the important guy. Everyone relied on the A&R man to have hit records.

Producers were in those days actually looking for the talent. They’d bring the artists to the attention of the executives at the company. The producers were pretty much on their own. As long as records were selling, the producer had it his way all the way through.

SCOTT HENDRICKS (produced Faith Hill, It Matters to Me)

A producer in country is different than a producer in other genres of music. A large part of our artists are not necessarily writers. One of the most important roles of producing in this format or genre is finding the songs and developing the direction for the artist that you’re going to be recording. That’s pretty different than other genres. We rely more on the songwriting community in Nashville than probably other communities do. It’s a very time-consuming process.

ROLAND JANES

(produced Travis Wammack, That Scratchy Guitar from Memphis)

If you’re in the studio and you’re participating in sessions, then you gradually go from one type of participation into another. Every musician on the session is really a producer, but they don’t have the final say. They kick in with their ideas. In essence they’re helping produce the record. I went from being a musician to being a recording engineer, working with producers in the booth with me. It’s a matter of educating yourself. You gain experience with every session you do. You learn what works and what doesn’t. The reason for going into production is because you have a better chance to make a little more money in different ways.

CHET ATKINS (produced Don Gibson, A Legend in My Time)

You just let the musicians play what they want to play, and you use whatever you hear when you run it down. Somebody will do something, and you’ll think, “Goddamn, we could expand on that. That might be good for this record.” That’s the way I did it. I don’t know how other people did it.

If you hear a mistake, you correct it. Later on in my career, we could do that, but at first we recorded in mono and, then, eventually went to stereo two-track. Then we went to three-track. Then we went to four, eight and sixteen and twenty-four and so forth. I used to record a lot of artists, about twenty-five people. Les [Paul] came up with that eight-track machine and, then, with the sixteen and so on. Ampex did. I told Les I was going to kick his ass for that. It caused me to have to do a lot more work and hire a lot more people.

BOB FERGUSON (produced Dolly Parton, Coat of Many Colors)

It reached the point where the company meant the artist. There were production people and vice-presidents and everything else, but somebody had to work directly with the artists. That is the role of the producer, to represent the company to the artist, and, conversely, to represent the artist back to the company. I don’t know how many I produced (one of the guys told me he counted fifty-one), but each artist comes with a different set of needs. My role, the role I assumed, was to find out the needs of each artist and try to fill them.

In your autobiography you mention three producers—Leonard Chess, John Hammond, and Phil Spector—who represent different modes of production. Spector is the auteur or producer-as-star….

JERRY WEXLER (produced Willie Nelson, Phases and Stages)

And Leonard Chess was a documentarian. A documentarian is somebody who goes out, hears or sees a performance, and takes that into the studio and replicates it. He saw Muddy Waters at a bar and recorded what he’d heard. John Hammond was the same kind of producer that I believe myself to be. He served the project. He tried to perceive the essence of the artist and then provided him with the most comfortable and fruitful setting to elicit what that essence might be. That has to do not only with attitude in the control room and the talk-back, it has to do with—once you’ve established the parameters—letting the musicians and the singer, if there is one, bring out the best in themselves. What you do is try to find the studio, the players, the arranger, the time, and the venue that will be most comfortable for them. And if they’re interested in your view of their material, to see whatever they may have self-written and to try to agree with them, reach an agreement about what will be the most appropriate for a particular session. If they don’t have material, then part of my job is to bring them a smorgasbord of songs for them to select from.

TOMPALL GLASER (produced Waylon Jennings, Honky Tonk Heroes)

I’ve pretty much made all the mistakes that there ever was. If a producer gets too involved in someone else’s work, he winds up overproducing it, and it ruins the soul in it. What really works the best, as far as drawing the artist out, is to just suck them dry, get every piece of input they’ve got, and then enhance it, make sure the music’s right. That’s what Owen Bradley always used to say, “If you get the music right, let the singer sing the song.” I think that’s probably the best.

But then, there’re other types of music to do. If a singer wants to get a certain type of a situation, and he doesn’t know how to get it and you do, then you kind of take the reins and lead him down the road a way until he gets the feel of it. You watch the [session] musicians that they don’t shuck him or you, either one. They get pretty slick in that studio. They’ll use the same licks over and over again. You think you’re getting the original ’cause you didn’t see them when they did it just yesterday.

STEVE CROPPER (produced Otis Redding, “Dock of the Bay”)

There are different types of producers. I refer to myself as a hands-on producer. I get involved with the music, with the songs, with the direction, with the musicians who are going to be on the session, and I’m usually on the session myself. I decide on the studio and the engineer. I call that a hands-on thing. I’m doing more than talking on the telephone, trying to make a deal and talking to the record executives. I talk to them very little, as little possible. I like to make the artist happy, and I like to make the manager of the artist happy. Unless you really know what you’re doing, it’s not worth making them unhappy. You can get a hit on them and say, “Well, I told you so,” but where does that get you? It gets you one hit record, and that’s all you get. If you make them happy and get a hit record, then you get them again and again and again, until you run out.

JERRY KENNEDY (produced Jerry Lee Lewis, Killer Country)

The approach I took was one I’ve seen the most or one any producer who’s been a musician usually takes: the approach that that’s a real team effort going on in there [in the studio]. If you’ve ever been on the other side of that glass with the guys, that’s where I came from. Maybe it’s true only here in Nashville, but I always felt that this is a great, creative bunch of musicians. I think it’s kind of neat to have sat back and let them inject things into what was going on. Anybody who didn’t, back when I was playing, usually had to pull teeth to get something to come off. Boy, I’ll tell you what, working with those guys was so great! It was hard to make a bad record in this town. There were bad songs. There weren’t very many bad records.

ALLEN REYNOLDS (produced Garth Brooks, No Fences)

The job varies according to what’s needed for an artist in a given situation. But my bias as a producer is and has always been toward performance. Two things are important. One is great material for the artist in question. So it may be a great song, but if it’s not great in the hands of the artist you’re working with, it doesn’t mean anything. Record labels never seem to understand that you have to find a song that’s a great song for the artist that you’re working with. Record companies tend to think, “Well, this is a great song. Paste it on Charlie over there, and it’ll be a hit for him.” You can’t do that. It has to be a song that the artist handles well—handles magically—and that they feel some enthusiasm for at least by the time you get through. As I’m saying that, I’m remembering Kenny Rogers doing “Lucille,” which was a huge record for him, and Larry Butler, the producer, told me Kenny didn’t really want to cut it. They did it in about the last fifteen minutes of the session. So I don’t want to generalize overmuch.

My handshake deal with the artist has always been this. First, we both look for songs. We meet and talk and listen together lots, and our hard work is basically done before we go to the studio. The studio is where you have fun. The deal is this: neither of us has to go into the studio and work with a song that either of us has serious problems with. If there’s a problem, we just keep looking until we find material that we both feel great about. We may not feel equally great, but we both feel great about it. And then you can go in there and do wonderful things.

The second thing that’s important is a great performance from the artist and the band, whatever the size, whether it’s a band or an orchestra. I like live. I don’t like quantizing.* I don’t like metronomes, click tracks. I like everybody there as much as I can—because to me the job is to catch that moment when a performance is given for the record that’s good enough to stand up to repeated listening. That’s where my bias is. I’m not heavy on technology. I’m heavy on the human aspect, and I always have been.

BLAKE MEVIS (produced George Strait, Strait from the Heart)

I’ve always looked at music as something that there is no right or wrong. It’s almost like fashion: what’s in or out. There’re some sounds that are in; some are out. They change from time to time. But I always think that the job of a producer is to make sure that it sounds different, that it stands out on the radio, that people reach over and, maybe, turn the knob up.

JIMMY BOWEN (produced Reba McEntire, My Kind of Country)

You have one type of producer who is heavy, heavy-handed. Heavy-handed sounds negative. It’s not meant that way. I use Burt Bacharach as an example. He and his lyricist, Hal David, wrote the song; he selected the musicians, he did the arrangement, and he told Dionne Warwick how he wanted her to do the song. He was very definite. That’s one kind of producer. I did that a lot in the ’60s in California with pop artists.

When I started working with Kenny Rogers, it started to dawn on me that there was another way. That was to help an artist to do their music, and to do everything you can to make it better. Fill in only when needed, and try never to insert your own thing. One thing I did learn from working with Sinatra: it was his music, not mine, even though with Frank I had to find the songs, get the arrangements and the musicians and all that. There was never any question about whose record it was when it was finished. With Phil Spector, those were his records. He was the artist and the producer. It didn’t really matter who sang the songs.

BLAKE MEVIS

A producer should help artists get their music on tape—and really stay out of the coloring process as much as possible, in the sense that it’s the artist’s music that has to be on tape, not the producer’s music. Every artist that you do should sound different. If you can accomplish that, then I think, hopefully, you’re doing the job of being invisible, yet you’re making sure that the quality of music is there. The technical part of the process is there, but at the same time you know it’s impossible to totally stay out of the process because you’re in it. If a producer’s music starts sounding alike and he’s got five different artists, then he’s being too intrusive.

PAUL WORLEY (produced Lady Antebellum, Need You Now)

I think it’s impossible for a producer to be invisible, but I think a producer should try to maximize the creativity and the point of view and the musical vision of the artist they’re working with. So in my view the role of the producer is a facilitator and a translator, someone who communicates the artist’s musical vision and direction to the engineers and the musicians and, ultimately, to the record company involved. He tries to give any specific project its own identity.

CRAIG STREET (produced k.d. lang, Drag)

Production in that way is what I’d call translucent. That is, it’s not transparent. It’s not not there. But it’s not completely apparent. It could be very much like the air that you breathe. If it weren’t there, you’d definitely know it.

PETE ANDERSON (produced Dwight Yoakam, This Time)

I think it’s important to be invisible. If the [film] director was a writer, you’re going to see influence. He’s directing his script, his writing. The producer’s never the songwriter. I mean sometimes he is, but it’s more in things that would be understood as technical that he appears. Things that you like to do technically in film are visible; in music they’re audible. So you’ve got to be a little bit more sophisticated or educated in it to pick up audible things that a producer would do—that he likes to do. I don’t think those are negatives. I always have sonic concepts for records and songs and artists that I work with. People that really, really knew the business would be able to go, “It sounds like you did that” or “That’s something you would do.” But it’s not anything that would in any way cloud the artist. If you start to have a formula, and people pick up that you have a formula, I think it’s really dangerous.

STEPHEN BRUTON (produced Alejandro Escovedo, Thirteen Years)

The production should be such that everyone wants to hear the recording again and again. I don’t think that you should have this [sounds a grand entry]: Stephen Bruton Productions. You might get in there and the song that they’ve been playing as a band—it’s their anthem—you listen to it and go, “This song would be best with you and a piano instead of a guitar.” If that’s what gets the song out, then that’s the way I go.

GURF MORLIX (produced Lucinda Williams, Lucinda Williams)

I’ve always felt like the producer’s job is to make the artist happy and to enable them to come out with the record they want. Maybe they don’t have the ability to get that done. That’s not their job. Their job is to come up with the concept. I figure the artist writes the songs; the artist has the vision. The producer’s role is to bring that to fruition. The artist should be satisfied with the work.

TONY BROWN (produced Steve Earle, Guitar Town)

I played with Elvis during the last year and a half of his life. To be able to play in that band with Ronnie Tutt, Jerry Scheff, David Briggs, James Burton, and Joe Guercio, who conducted orchestras for Streisand, Diana Ross, and you name it! If you get great musicians together, you have to find a way where they become one. Otherwise you don’t get to experience great music from great musicians. If they’re fighting and bickering, and it’s not harmonious, it’s just a bunch of shit.

Every night, there was so much chaos on that tour. Elvis would walk out on stage, and he was out of it. You could see some of the musicians going, “Oh, great.” They weren’t into it. And there I was, proud to be part of such a stellar band. We’d play. It was not together. We wouldn’t end together. We wouldn’t play together. There was a lot of bickering. Then, on one night or two nights of one of the tours, it was just magic. You’d feel like you had to hang on for dear life to play with Tutt and Burton and those guys.

I learned that when you cut records one person in a room can screw up the whole groove of everything. The best thing that you can learn for producing records is human psychology: how to get rid of that problem. If it’s a musician, let’s say, who’s messing things up ’cause he’s not playing right, he’s got a bad attitude, you need to know how to pull him out without causing a scene. Or if the artist is in a place where they’re causing the problem, best thing you can do is just shut it down. Without them, you’re screwed anyway. It’s like the old weak-link-in-the-chain proverb. You get all these great, talented people together, and if you can’t make them all communicate with each other, you’re not going to get something great. You’ll get something okay, because they’re good. But it won’t be great. You get something great when you’ve got everybody communicating with each other.

JIM ED NORMAN

(produced Kenny Rogers, Something Inside So Strong)

I had the conviction that a producer’s responsibility was to create a great work environment for the artist. You had to have great material, and you then had to bring people together. You had a creative management job: how you deal with the moment and the opportunity that everyone has when you’re collected together in the studio to work and to create. A producer has to give guidance and direction, but as much as anything, he has to create an environment in which the creative energies that are already inherent in the people that are there—who have come together that day—can flourish.

JIM ROONEY (produced Iris DeMent, Infamous Angel)

One of the things I think a producer needs to be, temperamentally, is a person able to make a lot of little, tiny decisions pretty quickly. In my own case I basically rely on my instincts. Because I also play and sing, I want the musicians or the artists to be as comfortable as possible and to forget about the fact that we’re making a record. In other words, I want them to focus on playing and singing and doing what they do. I want those conditions to be right for them. I don’t want the earphones to be nonfunctioning. I want them to be able to communicate easily. That means positioning them in the room so that they’re comfortable—things like that. It’s all kind of mundane in certain ways, but I think it’s extremely important to pay attention to those things.

I figured this out myself by watching other people and by being in circumstances that I found uncomfortable. One thing I never liked, as a musician or as an artist, was if I was ready to sing or ready to play, and the engineer or producer wasn’t ready to record. I found that very frustrating. I’ve seen the wind go out of the sails of a recording session for the simplest reasons.

PETE ANDERSON

I am a musician-producer as opposed to an engineer-producer. To be very broad and general, there are probably three ways you can get into this producing thing. One, you’re a producer like, let’s say, a Phil Ramone—who was an engineer and, then, crossed the line and became more musical. I come from a musical background: from playing guitar on sessions, being on the other side of the glass, being on the floor as a musician, and then having some concept of what I wanted to do technically with music—learning enough technical dialogue to communicate. [I wanted] to learn the language but not necessarily plug things in, EQ stuff, or do anything technical with my hands. And then there’s the kind of music collector, the musicologist. The greatest one is probably John Hammond Sr. He didn’t play an instrument that I know of, and he wasn’t a musician or an engineer. He was intelligent, astute, and had great taste. He signed countless great people throughout history. More and more, that particular style doesn’t exist.

CRAIG STREET

There was a record not long ago that I fired myself from because the artist wanted to do something that I absolutely did not agree with. What I was told coming into the record and did and delivered dutifully, the artist decided to do something different. It wasn’t just something different, it was like taking a circle made out of titanium and saying we want this to be a rubber square. “I am not an alchemist. I can’t do that. And I won’t do it. It’s boring.” I think the label was stunned that I just walked away—and walked away from back-end [earnings]. I think the artist couldn’t quite figure it out. But you have to do that sometime.

That’s one of the great lessons that I learned from T-Bone [Burnett], who has always been helpful and a champion. I remember seeing him walking away with his golf clubs.

“What’s going on?”

“We are not quite agreeing in there anymore. So I fired myself. I’m going to play golf.”

I’m like, “Cool, man, I like that! I’m going to remember that one. I’m going to use that someday.”

* Quantizing is a means of achieving absolute precision through digital music technology.