I just watched a documentary about Buddy Holly. Cricket’s drummer Jerry Allison destroyed 2 myths I thought were true. Holly didn’t write Peggy Sue for his girlfriend, it was called Cindy Lou for his niece but Allison got him to change it to show off to his future wife. And Allison didn’t forget his snare when they recorded Not Fade Away, he intended to use a cardboard box because he liked the sound.
The other interesting tale was that the version of That’ll Be The Day released had only been intended to be a demo and Allison had thrown in bits of smartass drumming because he had expected to redo it for release. This is similar to something I read years ago about Barry McGuire’s hit Eve Of Destruction. Songwriter PF Sloan got McGuire to record a demo version and the distinctive phrasing and insertion of vocal sounds was brought about by McGuire reading the lyrics as he sang because he had never heard the song before arriving to record it. The recording leaked out and became a hit without ever being redone.
Obviously there must be many more similar surprise stories. Got a favourite?
The reason Portishead got that unique, detached sound in their music, that kind of sounds like the drums are being played in the bathroom and someone outside is recording it, was because they recorded the drums in a bathroom, and someone outside recorded it!
“Weird Al” Yankovic and John “Bermuda” Schwartz (who is still Al’s drummer) recorded “Another One Rides The Bus” in the men’s room at their college radio station. Al is, of course, playing the accordion, and Bermuda is using the accordion case as a drum.
I can see it- there are tons of examples in pop music of unique sounds being achieved from drums in one room of an old castle, or guitar in the hallway, or tape recorder wrapped in a blanket, etc.
I can see it happening in this reality, but not on either Portishead record. All of the drums on Dummy are 12-bit sampler beats, and the drum stuff on the self-titled was recorded in a full band context in a live room in the studio. Then there’s the whole question of how to fit the drum kit in a bathroom, the question of monitoring, etc. Sounds more like an urban legend at every step.
Now, what I will concede is that they may have used a bathroom as a makeshift echo chamber - putting a speaker playing the track in it and a mic at the other end, then recording the reverb and mixing it back in. I can see this getting mutated into “they recorded the drums in the bathroom.”
Maybe urban legendy, but I heard that Mike Stern was playing at a club in New York when Miles walked in, heard him, and told him to be at the studio the next day. The next day, Stern was there, and Miles handed him the sheet music for Fat Time. It was a handful of chords written on a cocktail napkin. Stern asked how he should know when to go from chord to chord. Miles just shook his head and said “White cats.” What Stern thought was a warmup take ended up being what was used on the album.
When Pink Floyd was recording Wish You Were Here, some awful looking guy ended up hanging out in the studio. It turned out to be Syd Barret.
Gosh where to start - I have shared a few of these in other threads. As I have said in many of those, my drummer is a record producer who has worked with a bunch of folks and shared a few stories:
Vince Clark (Depeche Mode, Yaz, Erasure) - programmed his keyboard sequences using a computer program, where he would code in the note, the voicing, the duration and other parameters using numbers. So he had to think about what he wanted to hear, translate that to parameters, program them in and then listen and adjust. Apparently he got so good at this that he didn’t have to adjust much, by my buddy really pushed him to try more newfangled technology…
Tricky recorded Maxinquaye stoned out of his mind - I suppose no surprise there, but apparently it can very exhausting as the engineer when your artist wants to work on a kick-drum sound for 8 straight hours - and then ends up using the original track!
The Cure used old-school tube amps and laid down a bunch of tracks for Disintegration (I think) then got a sponsorship deal from a different amp company. The brought in those amps and recorded the rest of the album - then had to re-record much of it because they decided the amps didn’t cut through the mix.
On the 2nd (??) Asia album, Steve Howe changed strings - after every take of every solo. :rolleyes: At one point he wanted to change guitars, and turned to hand his current guitar to his tech. The tech wasn’t there, so instead of putting the one down and picking up the new guitar, he spent 15 minutes finding the tech (who was taking a pre-arranged break) chewed him out, brought him into the studio and had him hand him the guitar
On the same album, my buddy was so excited because he is a drummer and he was setting up Carl Palmer’s massive drum kit. He spent hours getting it set up, then went into the control room. The producer, who knew my buddy was excited about the impending drum session said “prepare to have your every fantasy dashed” - and sure enough, Palmer came and proceeded to demonstrate that he couldn’t keep time if his life depended on it. Later, when my buddy was re-doing a couple of drum set-ups, he was playing kit, and Geoff Downs and Steve Howe came in and said “wanna be our drummer?” just to yank on Palmer’s chain (he was still in the room at the time). I also heard a story where my buddy was required to tune the drum kit in a very specific way - it took hours to get correct - and when it was done, Palmer came in, played one fill and said “oh - that doesn’t work - never mind”
Apparently Cindy Lauper only functions well in the studio if you take absolutely no crap from her and come at her super intense. Otherwise, she makes no decisions, ties everyone up in knots by saying what they’re playing isn’t right but offering no input on what IS right, etc. My buddy is a very gentle guy - wouldn’t hurt a flea - so working with her was tough. Finally he blew up at her when he saw her reduce a studio musician to tears for no reason - and when he did, Lauper straightened up and did her job…
there are others, but you get the idea…
Oh, and if you read **Here There and Everywhere by Geoff Emerick ** you get the most amazing stories about the Beatles from Revolver to the White Album…
The recording of the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster” gave birth to an urban legend. Singer Billy Beck made a Minnie Riperton-type of inhaling screech that was supposed to sound like a scream of excitement. A tale grew up around this scream that turned it into the sound of a woman being murdered during the recording of the song. According to one of the stories, the scream was that of the model on the “Honey” album. Either she had been burned by the honey, which had been heated to make it flow, or else it was a liquid plastic that scarred her when it was removed. In any event, the legend says that she went to the studio to seek compensation for her medical expenses and the Ohio Players’ manager stabbed her to death.
Stories from The Grateful Dead’s early days in the studio are about what you’d expect, but I remember a couple from the documentary “Anthem to the Beauty” that still make me chuckle.
Early in their career they asked their label for permission to take equipment to the desert to record hot air and then to the mountains to record cold air. They would then mix them together and use that as the background noise for the album.
Producer David Hassinger stuck with the band through four studio changes and a cross country move while making Anthem of the Sun. But when Bob Weir (who apparently was still fascinated by the different sounds of air), asked him to create the sound of “thick air” he got up and started muttering to no one in particular, "Thick air. They want thick air. . . " as he walked out the door and off the job.
From then on a lot of their days in the studio went something like: “Wow there’s a lot of buttons here. I wonder what that button does. Wow man. Huh-huh. I wonder what *that *button does. Woah. Wait, wait, I wonder what they do together man.” By the time they finished Aoxomoxoa they owed Warner Bros a couple hundred thousand dollars in studio fees. I think they made enough to pay them back though.
Non-geezers probably don’t know that Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” is the true story of how Machine Head was recorded.
Purple DID plan to record the album at a gambling house (the Montreaux Casino). Some stupid with a flare gun DID burn the place down during a Zappa concert. Funky Claude DID pull some people out. The band DID end up recording at the cold and empty Grand Hotel. And what an album they came up with.
During the recording sessions for Iron Maiden’s The Number Of The Beast, producer Martin Birch was involved in a minor traffic accident. Nobody was injured, but his auto repair bill wound up being exactly £666. Birch was so freaked out, he insisted they raise the bill to £667 before he would pay it.
Some of the sounds in the original Myst soundtrack were made by blowing bubbles in a toilet with a plastic tube stuck down in the trap. Not kidding, I saw the “making of Myst” years ago when I got the game version with the extra “making of” movies.
As I understand it, “while my guitar gently weeps” should have been titled “while Eric Clapton’s guitar gently weeps” because the signature guitar solo was actually played by Eric Clapton
Not sure where I read it, but the sound of thunder on “We Walk” off R.E.M.'s first album Murmur are actually slowed-down and echoed tracks of someone banging billiard balls together on the studio’s pool table. Sounded like thunder before I read it, now it sounds exactly like pool balls colliding.
I get a kick out of the story I read here on the Dope about Pete Townshend saying “I saw you!” to Keith Moon at the end of “Happy Jack”. Moon was regularly banished from the studio during vocals recordings for being a nuisance and made a game of sneaking back in.
This helps solidify my feelings that Palmer is a horribly overrated and shitty drummer.