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INTERLUDE

THE PRODUCER AS DIRECTOR

STEVE CROPPER

The jobs of movie producer and record producer are totally different. The movie producer is the guy that goes around, gets the financing, does all that sort of stuff. That doesn’t mean he isn’t on set and he isn’t around. That doesn’t mean he isn’t giving suggestions to the director. But the director is the hands-on guy. So actually I’m a musical director rather than a record producer, but producer is what they coin it, so that’s what we go with. But there is a definite difference in the job.

PETE ANDERSON

You wear a multitude of hats, but basically it’s two jobs. One, you’re very much like the director of a film. You work on the script or the songs. You choose the cinematographer or the engineer. You get the locations or the studio. You help cast the actors or the musicians. You work with their performances. Everything that a director would do in a film is very much what a record producer does. Then, you’re also like a general contractor. A guy comes to you and says, “I want you to build a swimming pool in my backyard.” You go, “Okay, here are the drawings. Here’s what it’s going to look like. Here’s what it’s going to cost, and here’s how long it’s going to take. Give me half the money up front. When I’m done and you’re happy, give me the back half.” So those are the two broadest terms, I think, in trying to explain to people what a record producer does.

CRAIG STREET

It’s a weird, floaty, bizarre kind of a job. It’s a really ambiguous job. There’s such a wide range of what producers do that it’s hard for people to pin down. I think a contractor in construction or an architect or a film director is the easiest way to pin it down. And so, for example, that gives you the realm, the range of possibilities that opens up.

The thing that has always been the most interesting to me is when you have a group of people together in a room with the goal of doing one thing. The artist is always the boss, but people are always looking to the producer and going, “What do we do now?” Some producers lead with an iron fist, just like some film directors—Hitchcock. “This is how it goes. This is how it is storyboarded. This is exactly what we do.” Some architects—Frank Lloyd Wright—“this is how it is. This is the furniture you’re going to have. These are the curtains you’re going to have.”

Others, an architect like [John] Lautner or directors like Cassavetes and Fellini: “Let’s see what happens. Let’s invent another scene, right now. I know it’s not written down, but let’s do it.” You start to rely on the relationship with everybody in the room, the understanding that everybody has something to offer.

If there’s a method—and I say if, because I’m trying like mad for there not to be—then it’s a bit of a Tom Sawyer thing. I’m getting other people to paint the fence. I’m identifying who those people are. It’s a bit of being like a voyeur. I really get off on what happens when people get in a room together. Now the trick is to control who gets into the room. I know that if I put certain thinking, breathing, feeling musicians in a room with certain other musicians—in a room that’s a wonderful environment with some great songs—good stuff is going to happen. So those are the control factors, rather than coming in and telling somebody precisely what to play. Once people know that you’re trusting them to be them, you get a lot more out of musicians. That’s part of it. The other part of it is that I draw really heavily from sources that are non-musical.

DON LAW JR.

My father was successful in being able to carve out his piece. He existed somewhat autonomously down there [in Nashville]. He had to deal with New York, but for a lot of that time, for a lot of his career, he was his own fiefdom. Back when everything was under one roof, you had the artists, and you were in your own studios with your own engineers. It was pretty much all in-house in a way, kind of like the movie studios were. I always got the sense that he was pretty much left alone most of the time.

It took some effort on my father’s part to get Columbia to buy the Quonset Hut [Owen and Harold Bradley’s Music Row recording studio], but it was one of the early studios to get that music going. Then, all of a sudden, other companies started doing the same thing. Nashville became more of a central location.

The interesting thing about that market and those artists is that they did well consistently. If you looked at the popular-music market, there was a lot of variability in it, whereas the country market was pretty stable. My father was able to keep that fairly successful. At times he would outsell the popular music division. I remember he and Mitch Miller occasionally had their issues. But the Columbia division in Nashville did quite well for quite a long time. I think his track record spoke for itself.

JIM ED NORMAN

I guess it’s a pendulum that swings all the time. It starts off. There’re some good things that come from the system, but if you’re not careful, the pendulum swings too far. The system becomes more powerful. It begins to take over. If the artists aren’t careful, their art can begin to suffer. It declines because people serve the system rather than the muses, if you will. If there’s anything that a system like that [Nashville’s] has to do, it’s to be vigilant and not to create demands on people that are unrealistic.

I say we have to be vigilant and not let that happen, but I guess, to some extent, it’s a market-driven system. It takes care of itself. When the artistic community begins to complain about the quality of the music coming out of a particular system, it doesn’t take long for the energies that persist to revive the system, so that great music comes out of it. If the system has begun to take over, then, typically, something comes along that busts out of that situation.

When the creative people come to me, their frustration and their ire begin to rise to a level of out-and-out rancor—they’re just, “I hate what’s going on here! This stinks. This is terrible. How could this happen?”—I always tell them that it’s at these times that I have my greatest optimism because I know that out of that frustration will come someone challenging the system, the status quo, and that some fabulous music will come out of it.

A unique system and process developed in Nashville. There are times when that system serves the process extraordinarily well, and then there are times when the process maybe even impedes artistry, but then the frustration gets so high that the cork blows off, and once again in a cyclical sense a new kind of dynamic comes to the music and to the art.

MARSHALL CRENSHAW

Billy Sherrill is a good example of a super auteur-type country producer, somebody with an identifiable sound and a tremendous amount of style. Those Tammy Wynette records, I always compare them to Alfred Hitchcock productions. You can tell that he was really calculating about getting [the listener’s] attention and, then, exploding at certain moments. The records rise and fall and have so much drama in them. You get the sense that everybody playing on the records is of one mind. They’re spellbinding records; they’re effectively done. My guess is that Sherrill was very, very autocratic and, also, really focused. He knew what the hell he was trying to do.

BOBBY BRADDOCK

I always tell people, if they want to know the job of a music producer, I say, “Think of it this way: a director is to film as a producer is to recording.”

I’ll tell a little anecdote about a lesson that I learned from a master producer, something that I never forgot. Back in the mid-1970s, guitar guru Chet Atkins was producing his own album—co-producing it with Buddy Killen—and decided to record a song of mine, “West Memphis Serenade.” He liked the organ on my home demo, and wanted me to play the same thing on his session, and rented an organ just like the one I had at home. Toward the conclusion of the instrumental piece, I was using the organ drawbars to make a steel guitar sound.

The other musicians were hanging around the studio while Chet sat in the control room with Buddy as I was overdubbing an organ part. There was something that Chet wanted me to do differently, but rather than tell me over the talk-back, where everyone would hear it, he walked out into the studio and sat down next to me and said, almost in a whisper, “Why don’t you do that thing just half as much? Maybe do it every other time. What do you think?” I wasn’t about to argue with Chet Atkins and said, “Absolutely.” Then he went back into the control room, and I played it again, exactly as Chet had suggested.

“Hey, I like that,” he said over the talk-back; “let’s do it that way.” It was his idea but he was making it sound as if it were my idea. In the future, when I was a producer, I would always remember that kind gesture. Always leave musicians feeling good about themselves, and never do anything that might embarrass a musician in front of his or her peers.