Recording Engineer in Hollywood, 1979–81

July Series: If You’re Ever Marooned in the Year 1980 and Need to Make an Underground Hit Record in Hollywood, I Can Help

I know that many of you have vivid memories of the crucial political contest that was approaching its climax in the late summer and early fall of 1980, one that would cast the dice far, far into the future. Reagan, Thatcher, Solidarity, and the Pope were all on the move.

1980. Ricochet friends who’ve been kind enough to comment on my posts may well expect an erudite, detailed list of films that paint a portrait of historic drama in eastern Europe, a rising tide of humanity that would change the world irrevocably in only ten years. I listened to shortwave news broadcasts from overseas, subscribed to foreign magazines, and frequently picked up a daily paper from Europe or Australia at a busy newsstand. Before the internet, before cable news, this was about as connected as you could get.

But I spent a sweaty chunk of the summer dragging air conditioners from Latino East Los Angeles to a talented but ramshackle recording studio two blocks south of Hollywood Boulevard and a block east of Highland; hot property now that a major subway stop, and the annual Oscars, are only blocks away.

Thirty-five years ago, it was a rundown row of filmmaking technical support facilities built in the neighborhood’s boom years, the Twenties through the Sixties, before the need for more space and less congestion led to so many studio re-locations on greenfield sites. There were camera stores, recording studios like us, lighting equipment rental shops with generator trailers parked outside, and a few laboratory and darkroom combos for still photography.

When you were on a front desk shift at Program Studios, at whatever hour of the day, you kept the scheduling book, answered phone calls, called other employees in as needed, wrote out invoices and did bank runs. Some supplies, like recording tape, had to be stocked before weekends when they were most likely to be needed. We stayed as late as the musicians did, sometimes until dawn. Much of the west coast music industry was within a square mile.

Program had one mid-size “prime” recording studio and control room. The electronic equipment was good enough to turn out professional work, like album mastering to release, though most of its work was an assembly line of bands doing videos, bands doing demos, and bands doing backup tracks to other, more elaborately recorded work. We hosted the all-girl Go-Gos, their competitors, The Bangles, and other Los Angeles New Wave bands like the Plimsouls. We recorded gospel, solo violin, and talking books.

We also had a B studio, just as you’d expect reasonably professional but a step down in each department: fewer top-quality microphones, fewer tracks recorded, less room to stretch out. Occasionally we’d rent it for rehearsals without recording, as bands sometimes liked to do their final rehearsals in conditions close to what they’d soon face as “the real thing”. There was also “C”, usually a rehearsal-only studio down the corridor, with decent amplification and air conditioning, and not much else. When we were really busy, we could back a mobile control room to within a few feet of the C entrance and use it for recording. In the summer of 1980, an overheated market in rock singles was starting to cool down, but plenty of new bands came to town just to record a “Hollywood album”.

Back then, a recording engineer was, if not an exalted job, a thoroughly respected creative one. The young, relatively inexperienced bands we tended to get outside of prime time usually appreciated a little master sergeant guidance: “You can’t overdub the drums”, or “If you let her sing in the same room as the band, you’ll never be able to really edit her best moments later”.

The soundproof, air-conditioned studio had a glassed-in inner room, the drum booth, to give some acoustic isolation so the loud drums wouldn’t overpower the flute being recorded in the other room. Then and now band members and image-shapers like to hear stereo drums, that is the assorted elements of the drum kit spread out across the left-to-right sound field. This requires a certain type of brassy, bright and durable microphone, one for the high hat, one for the cymbals. The toms get another, cheaper pair, but the bass drum gets the most expensive mike of the kit, a big fat rolling pin of a microphone especially made to not distort under high sound pressure.

The guitars are miked by having the microphones stuck right into the mouths of the giant amplifier loudspeakers, as they are regarded as being part of the instrument. The guitarists, if they sing, are miked with German Sennheiser or Neumann instruments. So is the lead singer, who is also in an isolation booth for cleanest recording and best results. Fortunately, there are dozens of snap-in pro audio sockets all over the room. Although the microphones are included as part of the studio rental, they are expensive house property that’s watched carefully; it’s not unknown for a musician to bring home a $800 “souvenir”. In all my shifts at Program as engineer and desk jockey, all I ever had missing was a tambourine, but you know that tambourine annoys me to this day, more than a third of a century later. It’s the principle of the thing.

The recording process is straightforward, with less of the start and stop stress of filmmaking. Unlike filming, with hot lights being switched on and every moment of film negative being worth lots of money, tape is cheap and there’s less of a difference between a rehearsal take and a production take. A good engineer records as fully and simply as possible.

Unlike most cinematography, in audio the fancy stuff comes later, after sessions with only a soloist or two to provide overdubbing. The mix is the big deal, and it’s where Seventies-Eighties technicians made or lost their reputations. This is where you could, with a band’s nervous trust, play star maker.

By that point in time, bands could sell or give away cassettes of their new material, high quality dubs “downwards” from master recordings good enough to have cut albums. That was the rub, technically speaking; although “everyone” (in music) had a cassette player, what really counted was how it did on vinyl, requiring a conversion and production process into a 33 or 45 rpm disc that no amateur seriously attempted. In this respect, it was like film; in the end it all had to come down to 35mm or it didn’t quite exist professionally. In music, ultimately to be taken seriously it had to be a vinyl LP record.

In both industries, what this once meant was gatekeeping: unless you were insanely rich, and often even if you were insanely rich, there were a very limited number of places that could finish and act as wholesalers for your work. This is no longer true, of course.

Aside from television production, then as now Hollywood’s mainstay of daily work, films were made on a one-off basis generally with a different shooting location, crew and director each time. Music, like TV, is more like filmmaking in the Thirties; you often came back to the same place, week after week, and worked with mostly the same people.

I got the post posted, and I don’t want to prolong it beyond your tolerant interest. But I’ve not managed to capture the sometimes poignant humanity in front of the microphones and behind the mixing board, writing modest checks gambling on the future career of their beloved, son, daughter, protegee, or simply, beloved; there are show business traditions as old as the human nature in the Bible.

There was a veteran promoter, a bit of a con man, but not a wholly bad guy who had been a hotshot producer in the Fifties and Sixties. Twenty years on, he attached himself to talent on the way up, but it was a thoroughly consensual attachment, and there was a funny gallantry about the old Playboy; think Scatman Crothers from “The Shining”, tossed out of the house by an angry wife, solemnly dedicating his working life to impressing very young white girls.

It ain’t PC, it ain’t nice: but it was the truth, and the funny thing was how much he genuinely fell for each one of “his girls”, deploying all of his fading gifts in their service. And paying their recording bills, year after year.

Remember Cher? Her mother had a country western act and recorded several self-released albums that I recall were mostly sold in the local Armenian-American community. At the time it seemed strange that this lady would timidly reach into her purse and pull out a pair of crumpled $100 bills at the end of a session; that’s what 3 hours cost in 1980.

Maybe the most emotion-packed recording sessions were with groups or bands who meant this as their shot, the time they saved up enough to take one crack at the big time. At the time and in retrospect, I admired the black bands that would join hands at the beginning of the day and pray for fruitful work; their only counterparts were a subsection of earnest, talented, culturally marginalized young whites who weren’t the Rolling Stones, but deserved better than toiling in obscurity in Dayton or Casper.

And there were the losers, not always with a clear demarcating line to help pick them out. Most of the bands ducked out the door to a convenient van to toke-up before a long, loose final late-night session. But there were plenty of others that obviously started their day with a coke spoon and joked their way through blown take after blown take of songs that could have made them household names today. Yep, it’s their fault, sure; but in many cases, they were genuinely talented, but immature people.

Sometimes I sit at my illustrious 2015 desk and think of those 1980 days of making sure that a drummer’s ex-girlfriend didn’t use a key to scrape the side of his car in the parking lot. Classy stuff.