Let's talk about the Bing Crosby radio project.
It's probably the biggest splicing project ever done in analog tape. I did over 50,000 splices.
Just having to restore the splices that were on the original tapes?
The tapes were poorly stored. Many of them had been flooded, the boxes were melting and the tapes were molding, and I had to go through inch by inch with a camel hair brush to wipe off the mold, restore each of the splices, and fix where they had torn. It was acetate tape. It was before the poly tape that they use now.
That's more brittle, right?
It's brittle, and it doesn't stretch — it breaks. It just snaps. Which in some ways was a good thing, because if it stretches, you can't play it. If it snaps, you can put together the 30 pieces with a magnifying glass. [laughs]
How did that job come to your hands?
I had lived next door to Bing Crosby's daughter up at Indigo Ranch. The ranch was originally John Barrymore, Sr.'s place, Drew Barrymore's grandfather, and it was 60 acres overlooking the ocean with orchards and streams and waterfalls in Malibu. And my second-closest neighbor, who was about a quarter of a mile away (we had a good buffer), was Mary Crosby, Bing's daughter. We had been close friends over the years, and when she and her husband went up to Kathryn Crosby's (Bing's widow's house) by San Francisco, he was rummaging through the basement and he opened up this closet and it was like floor-to-ceiling with tapes.
Nobody had known?
Nobody had looked, and nobody had even known that these tapes existed. What they were is original masters of a radio show that was done from 1954 to 1956, some 53 years ago. They were played on the radio once and then stuck in a box and put on the shelf. So, 53 years later, he's rummaging through the basement looking for something, finds this closet of tapes, and is like, "Oh my god, these might be something special! Who knows?" They had no idea what was even on them. So, the son-in-law calls me up and says, "Richard, I know and respect your work. I know you've gone into retirement." I'd just sold the ranch and moved here, gotten rid of all my gear to Sonic Circus. He said, "What we're going to do is I'd like to hire you for a couple of days to come down to Capitol Records' studios, and we're going to go through a sampling of the tapes, and I'm going to have a bunch of world-famous guys there to decide who's going to do this project. Could you just sort of oversee this thing and make sure I don't get screwed?" So I went down to Capitol, and I'm not going to mention any names, but there were a couple of very prominent producers and engineers there that were handpicked to possibly do the restoration. The first guy takes one of the tapes, puts it up on the Studer, miss threads it, and snaps the tape. A master tape of an unreleased album.
These things make me nervous.
Yeah. Not only snaps it, but this was a 1-inch 8-track, and it was poly tape, so it didn't just snap — it stretched, and then broke into a number of pieces. And it was in the intro to the key song on the album.
Oh god.
Well, I just said, "Maybe we can fix it." He said, "That's impossible, that's the only copy of it." The next thing that happened is another one of these guys takes one of the 1/4-inch tapes, which is one of the radio show tapes, puts it up on an ATR, and hits rewind. The old splices in this acetate tape just come flying across the room, and the tape goes into 22 pieces. I stepped in at that point and said, "I'm gonna operate the tape." I started operating the tape, and then we had some things to mix down, and to EQ, and to change, and compress, and stuff like that, and nobody seemed to know what to do! So I just jumped in. I went over to the Neve console and started doing all the mixes and the playbacks and the copying. They wanted to go 96 kHz, 24-bit, so I set up everything, and we started making some copies. He went home that night, listened, and we came back the next day for the second day of this trial run, and a couple more stupid disasters happened with these guys. He called me up that night and said, "You know, you're the only guy in the world, I think, who can do this. Would you?"
I think there's a real difference between working in an archive capacity and being an engineer or producer.
I'd been handling old tapes, new tapes, digital tapes, everything for 35 years. It was just second nature to me. And I knew how to make splices. I know that you don't take an old tape, hit rewind, and walk away from the machine. You go through real slowly. In fact, as it ended up in the restoration, I hand-wound a half a mile of tape on close to six hundred reels. Now, let me tell you, hand winding, and checking every splice, and going through there with a camel hair brush and cleaning off the mold is a half a day operation per tape.
Oh yeah.
After you've hand-wound the thing back, you get one good play. So you either get it or you don't, and I'm one of those guys who had to do that all through my career. My first gold album was with Neil Young, and I learned quick-on that you're either ready, or he walks away and doesn't come back.
I've heard.
He does not put up with, "Let's do another take, I need to set the EQ a little different." It's like you get it, or he's gone. That's how I learned to do things. You don't show up when the session's about to start and expect to do stuff while they're waiting.
Right, exactly.
I didn't lose a single song. And the one that had been shredded at the beginning — as we were doing the initial playback of it, I was recording everything off onto a CD player, so it was 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, and I had the intro that got shredded.
Oh my god.
I went back and a couple days later put it back together and played it for him, and he was like, "This was impossible! Where did this come from?"
If you're dealing with real fragile tape like that, you have to always be recording, just in case.
Always. I mean what do you hurt, hard drive space?
Not these days.
That's right. And I had a very good digital assistant for the first part of the project. He was sharp, and I learned a lot about how to do the stuff. The guy was Stephen Couch. I used him for probably the first hundred tapes and ended up doing the rest of the project myself, inch by inch, tape by tape.
You moved the operations here to your house, too?
We did two days at Capitol, and then he closed it down. He was totally discouraged, and he called me and was like, "Can you do it?" I said, "I'll try." So I quickly called David Lyons, and said, "I need a tape machine!" I had just given him like 20 tape machines.
"It's probably the biggest splicing project ever done in analog tape. I did over 50,000 splices." — RK
I was gonna ask when we were first emailing about the project. I was thinking you must have kept one of the tape decks.
