Is it interesting being back at Power Station?
Yeah, to say the least! When I sold it I had nowhere to go. My friend, Jim Czak [Tape Op #49], owned NOLA Recording Studios; I used to go there. When the owners [of Avatar] came here, they didn't want me around. I still own the Power Station name, all the blueprints, and everything you see here is all documented. I just turned it over to Berklee, and I'll start working with them on the formulas. I was trying to find the formula to calculate the resonant frequency of those [control room] doors. When I [designed] this, I had a slide rule and a calculator that could barely multiply.
Did you have to teach yourself all of the acoustical math back then?
There are some mathematical expressions where my discipline didn't go that far. In New Jersey, where I lived, there were no books. Audio Cyclopedia [by Howard M. Tremaine], was all that was available. My mathematical disciplines were limited to high school. The best thing I did there that really helped me was geometry. I used it here, obviously, as you can see! This was all built with the Sabine Formula; the absorption coefficients and all of that. I had to be careful not to put in tile that could absorb too much sound, or it would unbalance the room. This is a 0.25 second reverberation time.
In the control room?
Yeah. See, the speakers move.
What? Oh, man. The speakers are on a motorized assembly.
Yeah. Here's why that is: Many years ago, people would build a studio, and the console was up against the glass, so they were used to working with the speakers really close. I had too many people say, "Oh, I don't want to work in that room. The speakers are too far away."
When you initially opened, were these the only speakers in the control room?
That's it. I also had Auratones. I blew them up lots of times, because I listen very, very loud. I want to feel like I'm really there. The Neve could pump it out; the musicians loved the way it sounded. I would tell people, "It isn't the studio. It's the musicians who make the sound." Back then, the rooms were all very dead so that you could get separation. I said, "This is not a good idea."
That was an interesting concept in the mid-'70s, because everyone was carpeting the heck out of the rooms.
Oh, yeah. Multitrack was coming into play. I said, "Why don't we just put separate rooms in there?" That idea came from Motown in Detroit, only they had smaller rooms. They had talkback into the headphones without interfering with anything. You couldn't do that in New York. If you hit that button, everything went out. They had 8-track in Motown when nobody had that. There were three 8-track machines; Motown, Atlantic, and a studio that was on the west coast. They all bought the tape from the same place. Motown was probably the first record label where the studio became an integral part of making the record. They would go in there, edit, and then put horns and strings on everything.
How did you end up visiting Motown's studios when you were young?
When I was in high school, in New Jersey, I wanted to get involved in the studio. In 1965, right up until about 1968, studios had reverberation chambers; they were rooms. At that time, I used to take off from school, play hooky, and go into the studio. I'd look at the album covers at the record store, and I'd see Bell Sound, Olmstead Sound, A&R Recording, Mirror Sound, and Associated Recordings. I'd look up the address, I'd go and knock on the door, and ask if I could come in and see the studio. They'd say, "No." At Bell Sound, you could walk down the hall and there was an elevator that went to the second floor. I got in the elevator, went up, and there was a receptionist there. She asked if she could help me, and I just said I was looking around. They figured I was with some of the musicians. They were on a break, and here came Jim Czak. I was just standing there, and didn't say anything to anybody. They all went back in, and Jim said, "Who are you?" I told him I wanted to see what a recording studio looked like. He said, "You stand over there and don't talk to anybody. On my next break, I'll come and show you around." From that day forward, we became the best of friends. I also befriended a guy named Bob Lifton, who had Regent Sound. I would go to Regent Sound, and there'd be a guy from Columbia Records, a guy from Capitol, and a couple of manufacturers. They would have coffee and he would let me sit in. I wasn't allowed to talk. I couldn't understand what they were talking about. All those guys were like advanced-degree engineers who worked for Columbia. They were talking about Motown, and the A&R department said, "We need songs like this, because these guys don't miss." They'd found songwriters, but they couldn't get the sound the way Motown sounded, out there [in NYC]. My father had a funeral home. Down under the garage was where he stored all the boxes, so if you pushed them all out, it would decay about four and a half seconds. I was listening to the Motown records, and something was different about them. I took [The Supremes'] "Where Did Our Love Go."
That's got some reverb on it.
Every half a second, there's a hand clap. I said, "I hear that [reverb], but it's decaying." On the records that were made in New York, The Four Seasons and all that, it stays a little while. Here's what I did: I had one VU meter. I cut off the incident sound, and I just left the reverb on there. I had to slow it down to a second, because the ballistics on the meter couldn't track a half a second. I slowed it down and I played it. I watched the VU meter. I calibrated it to zero, and I watched it. It was down 15 dB at a half a second. That means at one second, it's down 30 dB; and at two seconds, it's down 60 dB. That's the threshold of hearing. I wondered if that's what they were doing. I went underneath the garage, and I had a stopwatch. I was going to try to make it sound that way. Hit it first, and it's three and a half seconds. I started wheeling the boxes in and opening them up to absorb the sound until I got to two seconds. I said, "This must be what they're doing." I turned the bass and treble all the way up on the Fisher amplifier, because I was trying to match what they had done. I sent the sound from where it'll go out into the room with a short decay time. I had a one frequency [band] equalizer that Bob Lifton designed for me. He said, "What frequency do you want?" I said, "I'll take 5 kHz." I added that. What happened was I started to reintroduce that echo on The Supremes' record. I said, "This sounds exactly the same. I'm just making more of it." I put a Smokey Robinson record on next. Then I took The Toys record "A Lover's Concerto." That was a record made in New York, and it was an attempt to do the Motown sound. I put that EQ on there, because the Motown records were very bright, and I added that echo. Sure enough, it started to sound like Motown. I recorded that onto my little Wollensak tape recorder. I also did "1-2-3" by Len Barry. I said, "These records are starting to sound like they were done in Detroit."
You were mixing in your own reverb to simulate the Motown sound?
Yeah. I got on a bus with my tape recorder. I went into the meeting the guys were having, and I said, "I think I figured out what they're doing. I think it's a very short decay time in the echo chamber." The Columbia engineer said to me, "That's impossible." I said, "No. Do you want to hear it? I figured out what they're doing." He said, "No, I don't want to hear it. No engineer of any substance would ever design an echo chamber with anything less than three and a half or four seconds [of decay]. I wrote a white paper on the temperature effects of humidity on reverberation time and frequency response." I said, "Yeah, but I think this is what they're doing!" I was a high school kid. They wouldn't listen to me. I'd become friendly with Jim Czak, so I called him at Bell Sound. I said to Jim, "I think I figured out what they're doing in Detroit, and they won't listen to me." He said, "Call Motown and ask for the chief engineer." I said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah. What's the worst that could happen?" I called information, and got the phone number. I said, "I want to speak to the chief engineer." He said, "Mike McLean here." To this day, I'm still very good friends with Mike. I started to tell him the whole story about what I did. There was a long pause. He said, "Can you go to New York City?" Motown sent their acts to New York, The Supremes, The Temptations, and acts like that, to record here. They'd bring someone from Motown to make sure the engineering was the way that they wanted it. He said, "I want you to go to the hotel there and talk to this guy, Lawrence Horn [Motown producer]." I got on the bus and I walked over to Lincoln Center. Lawrence Horn says, "Mike McLean says you want to play me something." I played him what I had done on those records, and he asked how I figured it out. I told him the whole story. He said to me, "How'd you like to come to Motown in Detroit? We'd like to have you out there." I went back home, told my parents the whole story, and let them know the guys wanted to take me there. I'd never been out of New Jersey, except on a bus to New York. By now I'd played so much hooky from school. I was supposed to go to Rutgers and get my engineering degree. I went to my guidance counselor and he said, "Forget about Rutgers. You're never even going to graduate! Where do you go when you took off all the time?" I said, "I'm trying to figure out how to learn."
There were no schools for recording.
No, there wasn't anything. Lawrence Horn came out and talked to my parents. He said, "We're going to watch your son," because I was only 17 years old. I got out there and they put me up at the St. Regis Hotel on West Grand Boulevard; I'd never even been in a hotel room. He said, "You can't leave the hotel. If you get hungry, just order something off of room service." I said, "What's that?" He said, "Well, there's a book here with all these things you can order." I have my own bed and my own bathroom. There's a TV in front of the bed. I never had anything like that where I lived. I called my mother to tell them I was okay. I didn't know what to order; the chateaubriand, chicken kiev, or fettuccine alfredo. When you grow up in an Italian family, whatever your mother puts in front of you is what you eat! You either identify it as chicken or macaroni. There are no exotic things. My mother said, "Get the chicken kiev, and tell them to make it without the cheese in the middle." It was really good. They instructed me to go downstairs and wait. At ten o'clock, someone was going to pick me up and drive me down six blocks, because Motown Studios was right down West Grand Boulevard. There it was; Hitsville U.S.A. They took me around, and I went in the control room. They were recording with [George] Ivy Jo Hunter, the producer. He wrote a song called "Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever" that The Four Tops did, and he was also one of the writers on "Dancing in the Street." There were several drummers, like Benny Benjamin. Earl Van Dyke was the piano player, and they had the three guitarists: Joe Messina, Eddie Willis, and Robert White. They plugged everything in direct. James Jamerson [bass] sat there with the three guitarists. They balanced each other; but then it came up on the console as line level, so you could patch it into equalizers and do all kinds of routing. You couldn't do that in New York. McLean figured that was the best way to do that, because they had no room. There were two little side rooms. They had the vibe player in there, Johnny Griffith played organ, and Jack Ashford and Eddie "Bongo" [Brown] were the two percussion guys. They could separate all this sound. I had a handler, and she said, "This is Ivy Jo Hunter. Everyone, this is Tony Bongiovi. He's here from New Jersey." Everybody said hi, and they all got up and started walking out the door to the parking lot. I saw Ivy Jo Hunter and said, "I know you! You wrote 'Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever' by the Four Tops." He said, "Come on, let me take you outside and let's talk about some of this." My handler saw this, grabbed me, and pulled me away from him. She said, "Ivy Jo Hunter, you leave that boy alone." Then she said to me, "Tony, you stay away from these people. Musicians. They're a bad influence." I didn't know it at the time, but they were drinking, and if anything would have gone wrong... I was a minor. I went there, then I went back to New Jersey and back to school. They asked where I'd been for the last four days, and I told them. Then they flew me out again. I was still in high school!
Did they want you to observe and learn how they were making records?
They said, "That's the tape library." They filed the records by song, not by artist. I'd pick up "This Old Heart of Mine," and it might have The Four Tops on it, maybe the Temptations, or maybe The Supremes. They said, "Take it downstairs. There's the 45. See if you can make [the tape] sound like that." It was 8-track, so somebody was with me to help me get started, but I realized that the record sounds different than the tape. They didn't put the horns and strings on all the time. The way they set up the session at the time was like this: track eight was bass, seven was drums, six was keyboard or piano, five was guitar, four was horns, three was strings, two was background voices, and one was the lead voice. But initially they set it up with 8-track, so they had the guitars on three tracks. Then we had to go back in and mix those eight tracks down to another machine and selectively put those things on and off. They had all these Pultecs – the Motown equalizers – and everything was patchable. I was able to see it. "This is what they do." The records sounded different than the tape. We used to speed stuff up in New York. That was common, and they would do that out there too. It might be the same track with three or four different artists. They just made copies of it. I had a temporary ID card. It expired in 1968, but I had a clip-on with my picture on it, and I saved that.
You started learning the multitracks and seeing what the process was.
When I came back my guidance counselor said to me, "I told Rutgers about your trip to Detroit." A guy from the university came to my high school and he said, "I'll tell you what we'll do. Because of what you've done out there, if you take summer school we'll let you in at the Busch Campus at the engineering school." I didn't have the grades to graduate! They had to push me through. I was getting tutored in calculus and asking, "What am I going to do with this?" My focus was on going to the studios. That summer of 1966 I went into New York, and I had this Motown ID card. Every studio, including Associated, Mirror Sound, Olmstead, Bell Sound, when they saw that I had it, that was the one thing that was missing in New York; somebody who knew how they did that [at Motown]. There I was, at 17 years old. They said, "You want a job?" I said, "Wow, let me think about this." Was I going to go to Rutgers, or take advantage of what I already knew? I went to work for this company called Peer/Southern Music at 1619 Broadway. They had a little demo studio with an Ampex 350 mono machine and a Fairchild lathe. I worked there. I used to take records, put them back on the Ampex 350 – a mono machine, and try to cut them. I could get pretty close to what they sounded like, except I couldn't get the Motown records to sound that way. It wasn't until fairly recently, when I started hanging around with Mike McLean again and asked him how he did those records, that I figured it out. He said, "We cut them at half speed." The equalizers had a switch on them so that when you cut them at half speed, the frequencies would automatically go down.
That's funny.
All those Motown 45s were done that way. I had offers from every studio in New York, so I had to make a decision. The day that I was supposed to take my SATs, I was on a plane to Detroit. After I came back, the guidance counselor asked what I was doing. I wasn't even going to graduate. I wanted to keep going to Motown. They showed me how everything worked. Berry Gordy was always a fan of young people; Motown was "The Sound of Young America." They had plenty of writers, singers, and musicians, but I was on the engineering side. They needed people like me – there weren't that many. Of course, in New York City I called my own shots. I went from zero to full-time, never one day having to work in a tape library or get coffee for anybody. There was a studio going up called Apostolic Studios at 53 East 10th Street. They had the very first Automated Processes [API] console in there, as well as a 12-track, 1-inch machine.
Oh, the 12-track 1-inch. Almost forgotten in history.
My first job was for $250 a week. What I did was I used to take peoples' 8-tracks, and I would punch in like 2, 3, 5, and 7 in between [the tracks].
On the 12-track tape?
Yeah. I'd erase a little bit [of the adjacent tracks], but I could add extra tracks and ping-pong.
I always wondered if you could do that!
Yeah. You roll it off at 12 kHz so the bias doesn't bleed in. All that freedom of being able to create those techniques came as a direct result of me being at Motown. In New York, you're the engineer and the producer can't touch anything. But out there, if you were the producer and wanted to try something, you sat down and put the tape up. They had hit, after hit, after hit. That jumpstarted my career. From there, I started working with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. He played piano, and he could read and write music. There was one thing we did, where he played every other note. Then we went back and overdubbed the in-between notes. It took a long time to do that! I cut a record on a Sunday morning at Apostolic Records [by Everything Is Everything] called "Witchi Tai To." I worked with Shadow Morton, who did the Shangri-Las records. He was really tough to work with.
Really? Was he a taskmaster?
He just stayed up all night; 25 or 30 hours. By now I was 18. They didn't need me anymore at Apostolic because they had a full-time guy take my place, so I went to work for Record Plant. That's where I hooked up with Jimi Hendrix. I cut "All Along the Watchtower," and I cut "Izabella" – I worked on a lot of his records. They had the DayGlo paint, and he was coming in and getting stoned all the time.
You were like a house engineer in these situations?
Yeah. The daytime guy was Eddie Kramer [Tape Op #24], but they put me on at night because no one wanted to work that. They had a couch I could sleep on. It was Mitch Mitchell [drums], Noel Redding, the bass player, and Jimi Hendrix with four Marshall amplifiers. We had to use dynamic microphones because we couldn't put pads [on the mics]. Everything would overload. From there, I had Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland. They wanted to make a record in New York, so they said, "Tony, you're working. Can you find us any musicians?" From working in the studio doing jingles, I got to know some of the musicians. I booked Record Plant. Tony Camillo did the arrangements. In one session I cut "Band of Gold," "Give Me Just a Little More Time," and "Mind, Body, and Soul" right there at Record Plant with Brian Holland sitting next to me. That was the most incredible writing and producing team ever. Once word got out, I did a Vanilla Fudge record there [Near the Beginning]. They put Tony "Motown" Bongiovi for the engineering credit, but Motown made them take the "Motown" off. But everybody wanted to work with me after that.
Did you end up at Media Sound after Record Plant?
Chris Stone fired me from Record Plant.
He was the owner.
Yes. Gary Kellgren hired me, and then he went to California to open Record Plant in California. The majority of the clients wanted to work with me, because I had hits in the Top 10. I was doing all the sessions. They were just getting a 16-track machine. Chris Stone said, "Why don't you hand some of that work out to the other engineers?" I said, "Fine!" But it wouldn't work. The clients wouldn't work with anybody but me. He called me in one day and said, "We're going to have to let you go." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because you don't have a good feel for working with other people." Chris Stone figured that if I left, they'd have no choice [of who to work with]. All the clients were on 12-track, 1-inch. So I left, and someone said, "There's a studio that just put a 12-track, 1-inch in called Media Sound." I went there and met Bob Walters, who later became my partner in Power Station. I put the word out, and everybody came over to Media Sound. I mixed the Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More album. There are crowd sounds on there and helicopters flying; none of that happened. We had to put in crowd sounds. There was a place where you'd rent sounds. Baseball sounds are the best crowd sounds. You'd hear the crack of the bat and then everybody cheering. That was done on 16-track; all the microphones were on stage, so there was no crowd noise. A lot of times the microphones would fail.
It was like studio recording!
