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TAPING TRACKS

CREATING THE PERFORMANCE, 1950–1966

At first, in the early ’50s, magnetic tape was used as simply a new medium to do an old job: to capture musical performances. But a quick look at the recordings discussed in this chapter suggests an ensuing paradigm shift. Tape—mono, three-, and four-track—enabled the emergence of the record producer as a fully formed, recognizable figure. He distinguishes himself, less by what he captures (artists and repertoire: Don Law recording Lefty Frizzell singing “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time”), than by the performances he artfully creates—stages in order to capture (production: Don Law enabling Johnny Cash’s 1963 version of “Ring of Fire”). When Owen Bradley produces Patsy Cline’s massive hits, he records a sonic concept just as much as he records an artist. In the vocabulary of film studies, the producer’s purview is the mise-en-scène, in all of that term’s mystery.

As a means of controlling the market for country music, four major record companies—Decca, RCA, Columbia, and Capitol—developed a studio system in Nashville analogous to Hollywood’s. The catalyst that sped this integration of an industry was the Quonset Hut, an independent studio built in 1954–1955, and owned by Owen and Harold Bradley. The hits cut at this facility—especially those recorded by Owen Bradley (Decca), Chet Atkins (RCA), Don Law (Columbia), and Ken Nelson (Capitol)—were in a radio-friendly style that became known as the Nashville sound. It transformed the market for country from a strictly regional to a national audience. In fairly short order, RCA built its own “Studio B” in 1956. Columbia bought the Quonset Hut in 1962, and Owen Bradley converted a barn just outside of Nashville into another studio.

LEFTY FRIZZELL, LOOK WHAT THOUGHTS WILL DO (ORIGINAL RECORDINGS, 1950–1965; COMPILATION, 1997, COLUMBIA/LEGACY)

BOB IRWIN

A&R meetings are held at Sony Legacy, the same way they’re held at Sundazed and every other record company on the planet. Ideas are put on the table, discussed, and fine-tuned. Everyone knew and was in agreement that there had to be a good Lefty Frizzell compilation out there. The only things available were packages done years and years ago with pretty lousy transfers.

Back in the ’60s, when people started packaging country artists’ past works—works taken from lacquer sources—the whole MO was to get rid of any semblance of noise. Therefore, they cut off the whole top-end and low-end of the performances. You were left with what the American public, to this day, thinks a 78-rpm recording sounds like: [cups hands] like that. Which is not what a 78-rpm record sounds like, if you have a good record. The same thing is true of transcription lacquers [discs for radio broadcast], but I’m getting ahead of the story.

I knew that I wanted to focus primarily on the early period. And once I started reviewing it, going over things, I really wanted to push for a double-disc set. That’s not always, but very often, a tough sell to a record company that’s marketing driven. But it was agreed that we should do a two-CD set and, eventually, at some point distill it down to a single CD set to sell at a lesser price.

My next step was to start putting together the A&R for the package, which has to be centered on the obvious songs, the hits. I’ve always been intrigued that certain greatest-hits albums live their own life. It’s not only the Buffalo Springfield Retrospective. But that album to me and hundreds of other fans had a very deliberate sequence and deliberate feel of its own. It became an album unto itself, rather than just a collection of an artist’s songs.

That’s the way I’ve always tried to work when I’m doing a collection. After I have a centerpiece of the hits—the very obvious songs that have to be there—I try and disengage myself from popular opinion, from what other people expect you to put on there, and go with my heart. I go with songs that I think truly complement each other, and with what the artist might want people to hear. Indeed, if the artist is still with us, he’s the first person you talk to. Which was impossible to do with Lefty.

That meant I needed probably two weeks of studio time where I did nothing but listen—listen in the truest sense—not by listening to the bogus, horrible-sounding records and discs that were out there, but by going back to original lacquers, playing through them to get over-whelmed with that feeling. There’s not a better feeling in the world than sitting there with the transcription lacquer of a tune that someone’s never heard before and getting a lump in your throat because it’s so astounding. It’s the best high in the world in my book.

Everything on that set was taken from the absolute original sources. Every single transcription lacquer was gone through by me. Every analog recording was gone through by me, up to that point—the early ’60s—which was the set’s predetermined stopping point. The earliest part of the disc, probably all of disc one, was very much discovery time. Nowadays, who cares if there’s a little bit of noise on the top end? You want to hear the cymbals. You want to hear the low end. The sounds that they were able to capture to lacquer were astounding. The dynamic range is jaw-dropping.

What did you learn from the tapes?

For example, from October 19, 1951, the original logsheet: Lefty in the studio put down songs like “I Love You (Though I Know You’re No Good)” “You’re Here, So Everything’s Alright”—one or two other songs. Next to each song in [producer] Don Law’s handwriting is “NG” for “No Good.”

You realize, that was a call. Don heard what was going on that day, and who knows, it could have been a million-and-one things. They were just plain old having a bad day. Lefty was having throat problems. Who knows? But Don brought Lefty back three months later, basically to re-cut all the songs. And those were the versions that were issued. That happens all the time.

MARTHA CARSON, “SATISFIED” (1951), SINGS (RCA/CAMDEN)

KEN NELSON

We used to record at the Tulane Hotel.* The thing about Nashville, you use mostly all the same musicians all the time, like Grady Martin and Harold Bradley and Pig [Robbins], the piano player. You had a group of musicians that you used on various sessions. I used Chet [Atkins] a lot when I first came to Nashville. He was playing guitar for me. In fact he did all the Martha Carson sessions. The artist usually knew who he wanted to use, and if he didn’t, I would pick the musicians. It was just that easy, or that was just the way it was.^†

HANK WILLIAMS, “I’LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE” (1952), 40 GREATEST HITS (POLYGRAM)

CHET ATKINS

Hank had a lot of help out of Fred Rose. Fred was a great, great fixer. I had a long conversation with Gene Autry once. He used to write for Gene, you know, all those hits back in the ’30s. Gene said, “You know, Fred’s the greatest song fixer I’ve ever known. He’s just wonderful at that.” And he was. He wrote a lot of songs and gave them away. Half the time, he was upset at ASCAP [the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers], and he didn’t want to put a song with them. He’d say, “Ah, you take it,” and give it to the artist. He was a wonderful, wonderful guy.

BUDDY KILLEN

I worked with Hank. I did a lot of transcriptions with him and a lot of radio with him and some television and worked on the road with him. We recorded those transcriptions in WSM’s studio. They shipped them out all over the country. We’d do mostly fifteen-minute programs. I don’t remember if I cut a session with Hank. I was one of the busiest bass players in town. I recorded with everybody.

Let me go back. I came to Nashville as a musician on the Grand Ole Opry. Then, I wrote a few songs out of desperation. It gave me an opportunity. I was doing demos. Tree [Publishing] had just started, and they were paying me ten dollars a night to stand all night long and sing on demos of songs that announcers at WSM wrote. Of course, they gave the songs to Tree, but nothing was happening. The songs weren’t getting cut, but by osmosis I started learning how to produce records.

I was a musician, and I was a songwriter. So I had sort of an innate understanding about music and songs. When Jack [Stapp, program director] called me down to WSM and asked me if I wanted to go to work for Tree [his company], I said, “I don’t know anything about publishing.”

“I don’t either,” he said. “We’ll learn together.”

That’s how it got started. Because I knew that I had to get out there and get the job done, I didn’t even have an office. I got Jack to get me a fifty-dollar tape recorder, and I went around. When I heard about a song or about a songwriter, I’d go see him and sign up a song with Tree. I found that I was capable of doing it all. It came together, just inter-locked without any real effort on my part. I innately knew what I was supposed to do.

I made a lot of mistakes businesswise because I wasn’t a businessman. They weren’t devastating things, just little decision-making processes that you go through. But I had a feel for the song. I had a feel for the music. I had a feel for if someone was good or not. When you’re a publisher or a producer, the most important thing you can have is an ear for the song. You must recognize a good song. I’m of the opinion that any producer who doesn’t make it, normally, it’s because he doesn’t recognize a great song. It starts with that song, and you know what? It ends with it.

Cutting demos for Tree Publishing sounds like a crash course in production.

You learn what you don’t put on a record more than you learn what to put on it, because overproduction kills a record faster than under-production. If you cover up the song, you’ve pretty well done some damage. You’re going by your own gut feeling—that thing that hits your ear. You like it or you don’t like it. All of us are playing twenty questions. No one’s ever perfect in the assumption that they know what a hit record is. Sometimes, you’ll think something is going to be a great smash, and it comes apart on you. But after having produced records for a while, you start getting a feel for where you’re going.

When you go in to do a demo, you’re trying to give the star the feeling that you think the song should have when he records it. Even without realizing what you were doing, you were producing a record that wasn’t going to come out as a record but, instead, was going to come out cloned by somebody.

You’ve got to be careful about directing a demo toward one artist. Back in the early days of Tree, I tried to make the demo pretty generic, and yet present the song the best I could. If I did a demo directed toward Ernest Tubb, if he didn’t cut that song, then who was going to cut it? To keep from taking it toward one guy, you’d just give the song what it needed, that special quality, that special feeling. I think finding the feeling that the song should have on the demo is more important than anything else. You can doctor it up. You can add horns, strings, fiddle, or banjo, but when you hear the demo, if the feel of the song doesn’t grab you, then you’ve missed the most important part of it.

Hollywood may have employed a bunkhouse full of singing cowboys, but until High Noon (1952), film audiences heard country-and-western songs only when singers like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were onscreen. Dimitri Tiomkin’s soundtrack to High Noon altered that convention, announcing a new era in American cinema. It featured a Tiomkin-composed popular song, “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me),” sung by Tex Ritter. It played as opening credits rolled. With that song Hollywood’s orientation toward “the popular” decisively shifted. The relationship between song and score was reconceptualized, as was Hollywood’s relationship to the recording industry. The notion that a soundtrack could be a collection of pre-existing (already recorded) pop tunes began with “High Noon.”

TEX RITTER, “HIGH NOON (DO NOT FORSAKE ME)” (1952), HIGH NOON (BEAR FAMILY)

KEN NELSON

The first artist on Capitol Records was Tex Ritter [1942]. His first record was produced by Johnny Mercer, one of the founders of Capitol and a great songwriter.

I hadn’t heard the soundtrack from the movie [High Noon], but I made the record. Lee [Gillette] heard it. He said, “Hey, you darn fool, you forgot the drums!”

I said, “What drums?” Lee was a drummer, and so we went in and overdubbed the drums on “High Noon.” Overdubbing was pretty difficult at that time. I don’t think there was tape, but I’m not positive. We did it from the acetate. It worked out. Of course, we had great engineers. We had John Palladino and Hugh Davies. Palladino was tops as far as an engineer—a mixer—was concerned.

I was there to get the best I could out of the artist. I believe that the emotion in a record is the important thing. It was my job to see that everything was under control and to listen to the sound. My main job was to listen for mistakes, listen for the balance. Microphone placement at that time was a lot different than it is today when everybody’s got a microphone. We had microphones on the fiddle and on the steel [guitar] and on the piano, but the engineer would regulate it according to the sound. We didn’t let anything overshadow anything else. We tried to blend them.

That’s one of the problems with today’s music. Musicians are listening to themselves and not to the artist. They’re not listening as a group. I always said, “I want to hear every damn word.” That was my philosophy. Today, they make musical tracks, and then the singer sings to it. And that’s another thing that’s wrong. There’s no way that you can get the feel and the emotion. Then, of course, we didn’t have charts most of the time. I’d write down where the fill-ins were to come in, like if the steel was to come in. Then I’d have this list of the fills, and I’d sit beside the engineer and tell him what was coming up.

I’d get with the art department. I had to approve pictures and liner notes. Sometimes I’d write them myself. Then I had to okay the record. I mean, after we recorded it, and it was put on a disc, I’d have to okay it—the sound and whether it was equalized correctly. That was all the job of the producer in the early days.

KITTY WELLS, “IT WASN’T GOD WHO MADE HONKY TONK ANGELS” (1952), THE KITTY WELLS STORY (MCA)

HAROLD BRADLEY

Paul Cohen came down here [to Nashville to supervise sessions for Decca Records] because it was cheaper to send down one man than it was to take Red Foley and his band—to pay for their transportation, their lodging, and their meals—to Cincinnati or to New York. It was cheaper for one man to come down. He’d stay for a month and record everybody in sight [notably, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Ernest Tubb, and Red Foley]. It was kind of like what I call the shotgun approach. You’re going to hit something, if you’ve got a wide enough shotgun. When he left Decca and started Todd Records, he didn’t have the luxury of doing that. That’s why he didn’t have any real success at Todd. He could only do artists one at a time. Your odds weren’t that good. Before, he recorded for a whole month. We [the session players] would be tied up for a whole month. We learned that Paul was really a good song man. He had no real musical talent, but he had a commercial ear for a song. If you sang a song to him and it struck his ear—he liked it—then, usually, he was right.

ELVIS PRESLEY, “THAT’S ALL RIGHT” (1954), SUNRISE (RCA)

ROLAND JANES

We generally worked on things until we got them pretty much right. That was one of the genius things about Sam Phillips. He was not afraid to take a song that wasn’t perfect in some detail and release it, as long as it had a good, overall feel to it. For example, on Elvis Presley’s record “That’s All Right,” in the middle he forgot the words. He goes into that “ah da-da de-de-de-de-de.” That wasn’t planned. That’s just the way it was. But then, that particular take had the right feel, and Sam was not afraid to leave that in there like that. Most producers wouldn’t have done that. They would’ve been scared to death. But Sam said, “No, that’s the cut I want—the one with the right feel.” That was what was most important to him. If the cut made you want to tap your foot or sing along, and the other cut—maybe it was a good cut—did not have that feel, then he would take the first one, even though it had one or two minor mistakes in it. I admired him for that.

THE LOUVIN BROTHERS, “WHEN I STOP DREAMING” (1955), WHEN I STOP DREAMING: THE BEST OF THE LOUVIN BROTHERS (ORIGINAL RECORDINGS, 1952–1962, CAPITOL; COMPILATION, 1995, RAZOR & TIE)

MARSHALL CRENSHAW

Some of those Louvin Brothers records are gorgeous in terms of sound, but some of the tracks that I didn’t put on the compilation, like a few of the early gospel tracks, had this funny echo effect on certain chorus lines, used to create interest. There’s one called “Pitfall” that’s pretty gimmicky. And so, Capitol was a little bit into occasional gimmicky production effects. But not too much. I’ve said Ken Nelson was a purist type of producer, but he sometimes wasn’t.

A couple of other tracks on the CD are from a Delmore Brothers tribute album that the Louvin’s did. They’re really simple recordings, but they’re perfectly rendered and beautiful. Part of it has to do with the instruments. On those tunes, Ira Louvin is playing a Martin tenor guitar that belonged to one of the Delmore Brothers. It’s a guitar with just the top four strings. Those Martin guitars from back then are delicate sounding. They have this nice top end.

KEN NELSON

Ira was more of a temperamental man, and Charlie was easygoing. Ira would get mad sometimes at Charlie—bawl him out once in a while—but never anything serious. Charlie, I guess, was just used to it. They were very easy to record. Whatever I said went. I was grateful for that.

Wesley Rose came to me and asked me to sign them. They were with Acuff-Rose [Publishing].

I said, “Great, I’ll take them.” Of course, I wouldn’t have taken them if I didn’t think they had some talent, but they were a fine team. Ira was a heck of a good writer.

Also, Wesley asked me to sign Roy Acuff. I did. But at that time, Capitol wasn’t too hot on country stuff. It was called “hillbilly.” I couldn’t get any publicity from the sales or promotion department on Roy. He had a pure country sound. Anyway, I put out I don’t know how many records but couldn’t get off the ground. I made an album with him.

Finally, Wes came to me and said, “Ken, Roy just isn’t happy. He isn’t making it on Capitol. Would you release him?”

“Okay,” I said. So I released him [from his contract]. And then, I had put this album out, and the darn album started to sell like crazy. One day, I was in with the promotion department. They asked me, “Why the heck did you let Roy Acuff go?”

I said, “Because you idiots wouldn’t do a damn thing about him.” I think the album is still selling.

FERLIN HUSKY, “GONE” (1956), VINTAGE COLLECTIONS (CAPITOL)

KEN NELSON

I went into the studio with Ferlin Husky, and I think I was about the first one to add a female voice to the Jordanaires [backing vocals]. We recorded “Gone.” It was a smash hit, and as a result of that record, all the record companies—I just got a letter from Millie [Kirkham] the other day, who sang on the record. She said that since “Gone,” which was, of course, many years ago, she’d worked her butt off. Everybody wanted her on their records.

MERLE TRAVIS, THE MERLE TRAVIS GUITAR (1956, CAPITOL)

THOM BRESH (guitarist/producer/Travis’s son)

He was a real interesting character to produce. I’ve thought many times, what would it be like if he were here today with this kind of technology? It would be incredible what you could do. Today, you could take something like a Roland VS880 hard-disk recorder and a couple of mikes and go anywhere, just sit there at his house. Let him be real comfortable, get his ice-tea and his cornbread, and sit there and play. Say, “If you make a mistake, just play that part again, and we’ll put it together.”

Travis loved to edit, even clear back in the ’50s when he was doing albums. There was a song he did on the famous, what they call “Yellow Album” for Capitol, which is Travis Guitar. He plays “Bugle Call Rag.” In the middle of it, he’s got this lick—really a hot lick.

People have tried to play it, but Travis says, “No, I did that with a capo on the second fret with an open position. We just cut [edited] that in. It was a technique so people would try to figure out how to do it.” He said he played like hell and then, when it got to that place, he stopped [the tape]. He put a capo on the second fret and did this one little fill thing [and stopped the tape again]. And then, it went right back into the other tuning without the capo.

Everybody says, “How do you get that sound?” He just loved things like that. He had a couple of big Berlant-Concertones [tape recorders] that Capitol put Ampex heads on for him. He had those at the house where he would sit and record—woodshed some things out. He liked to overdub at the house. I don’t know if any of those recordings got out. I heard a couple of things, but it’s hard to tell whether they were them or not. He was always doing something with different tunings, or he’d do a lick and cut it in. He liked to cut things in. He said, “If people are going along playing [with the record], they’ll say, ‘How’d he do that?’”

He and Les Paul were both working with what he liked to call that Mickey Mouse guitar, where they’d slow the tape to half-speed [thus doubling playback speed]. Back then, Les was even doing it with [acetate] cutters, but Travis was messing with it at the same time. Of course, Les had it refined to a “T.” Travis just knew he liked that, where you slow the recording down to half-speed and do these licks around it. He was an innovator as much as he could be for the time. It shows with the solid-body Bigsby [guitar] and different things that he did in his life.

Years ago, he was looking for a tape. He was having some drinks with Judy Garland one night. They both got rocking pretty good, and they cut at his home studio, I think he said, eight or nine songs. We hunted all over the place looking for that. He wanted me to hear it. One night, he was looking through all of these boxes of tapes, but they were all out of order. He said, “I just wanted you to hear this one thing Judy and I did. It was so good. We just had a ball that night.” That would be something to find. It was done during both of their heydays. I don’t think he was more than forty years old at the time.

ELVIS PRESLEY, “BLUE MOON” (1956, RCA), SUNRISE AND ELVIS PRESLEY (1956, RCA)

ROLAND JANES

Here’s one of the mistakes that people make. They think the magic was in the room [at Sun Records]. Let me tell you something. Although it was a well-designed room, the magic was in the people at that particular time in history. Now, the room was suited for recording. It was a rented building, but Sam designed the ceiling and everything. It worked out well, although you were limited as to the number of instruments you could record. But we didn’t record with the lot of instruments. The magic was generally in the combinations of people, and that included the engineer, the musicians, and what have you.

One of the secrets of good sound over there [at Sun] was Sam had the ability to add a little bit of slapback echo on whatever he wanted—usually on the vocal. Also you got a little bleed, even in the vocal, from the different instruments. You got that little touch of slapback echo that added a little body to what you were doing. It was part of the magic of the overall situation.

Sam had a way of recording. He had three tape recorders in the room. He had two Ampex recorders. He used one of them to record on, and he used the other one in case he wanted to run a copy of the tape. Now the third machine was a wall-mounted Ampex. He would record the desired signal onto machine number one. Machine number two just sat there unless you wanted to run a copy later. Machine number three, which was the mounted machine, he could take whatever signal he wanted from whichever instrument or vocal, and he sent that to the third machine, and it recorded along with the desired signal that went to the first machine. Then, at the same time that would be playing back through the console. So you had your desired signal. Then you had a slapback signal that came out of the third machine. You got that by delay. He recorded the third machine at the slow speed so you could get a wider delay in between the notes or what have you. That’s how he created and got the slapback effect.

The way most people got it, they recorded on your one machine and ran it back through the board and then back to the same machine. When you did that, everything that went onto the machine had slapback on it. Sam, using the other machine in his method, he could have slapback on one thing and not on the rest of the band. Or whatever combination he wanted. That’s the reason he had the good slapback, and he could have a good clean slapback. Everything wasn’t slapping back all over the place.

We hung around the studio. Someone would say, “What are you doing tomorrow? You want to come in and record with Jerry Lee?” Everything was really laid back—not really laid out and planned out like the sessions are nowadays. It wasn’t always the same musicians on sessions. It was a matter of whoever was available. If someone was out of town, we didn’t let that stop us. We’d take somebody else and go ahead and do the session.

They were great musicians. Carl Perkins, I thought, was a fine musician. Of course there was Scotty [Moore]. Scotty had his own sound. We each had our distinct sound. But in the final analysis you can almost always tell it was a Sun Record sound, even though played by different people in a different manner. In a different style even. It still had the Sun signature to it.

The slapback might’ve had something to do with it, but everything didn’t have slapback on it. Maybe the engineers had a lot to do with it. Engineers have a hell of a lot more to do with a good record than people realize—usually more so even than the producers. A lot of the records I’ve worked on over the years, the producer is out in the lobby on the telephone through about 90 percent of the session. So, basically, if you get good communication between the musicians and the engineer, then you’re going to get yourself a pretty good session. It may not be a hit every time, but it will be a pretty good session. If the engineer has worked both sides of the glass, and a lot of the musicians out in the studio have worked both sides of the glass, they can communicate almost without saying a word.

CHET ATKINS

Elvis was one of the most talented people I’ve ever met. Goddamn, he was always shaking something on his body. I loved him. His first session [produced by Steve Sholes], I told my wife, “You’ve got to come down and see this dude. You won’t get a chance anymore. He’ll be so hot.” So she came down and watched a few minutes and went home. I never did ask her, “What did you think?” Of course, she loved him. A lot of people love Elvis now who didn’t love him back in those days.

I talked to Scotty, once, his guitar player. We were talking. I said, “Why’d he shake his leg like that?” He said, “You know, he did that instead of patting his foot.” Most musicians will pat their foot to keep time, but he’d shake his leg, and it’d make the girls squeal. And so he’d exaggerate it.

What is now known as the “Million Dollar Quartet” was a chance gathering (and a casual recording session) of Mt. Rushmore figures—Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins—at Sun Studios.

THE MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, THE COMPLETE MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET (1956, RCA/SONY BMG)

JACK CLEMENT