How did your career begin?
I guess my career in music started in the '50s. We had a doo wop group in high school in Louisville, Kentucky, although I was more into classical music at the time. We played sock hops all around the area, made some recordings, and the radio station played them. They were local "hits." I had a chance to go to Juilliard [School], but I didn't want to be a music teacher so I passed it up. I moved to Florida with my parents in 1960, to a small Gulf Coast town north of Clearwater. In the early-1960s, after high school, I was the singer in a band traveling around Florida. We used to play in a little place in Cocoa Beach. We'd be on the stage, and suddenly all the windows would light up and everyone would run outside. It was a rocket going off, just up the coast at Cape Canaveral! Bertie Higgins was the drummer in the band. He always wanted to sing but we wouldn't let him. I guess he got the last laugh [with his hit in 1982, "Key Largo"]. About this time I got hooked up with a promoter and manager named Bill Lowery, who managed Jerry Reed, Ray Stevens, Joe South, and a bunch of other performers. I also met a guy from Dothan, Alabama, named [Perry] Buddy Buie, who managed Bobby [Robert Charles] Goldsboro and others. Buddy and his writing partner, J.R. Cobb, wrote all the Classics IV and Atlanta Rhythm Section hits. I moved to Atlanta to work for them in 1966, doing promotion, management, band booking. We were just down the hall from Bill Lowery's recording studio, Master Sound. In that room they cut hits by Billy Joe Royal, The Tams, the Classics IV, and the first Atlanta Rhythm Section. Besides doing promotion, I was a background singer and I sang on a lot of these records, plus a lot of jingles like Coca-Cola and Orkin Pest Control. I went from singing to doing percussion, like cowbell, tambourine, and congas. A lot of times we would play percussion at the same time we did background vocals.
What was studio recording like at this time?
Things were done very quickly. In those days, a union session was three hours and you were expected to cut at least two, maybe three sides in that time. At Master Sound they recorded on two Ampex 350 1/2-inch machines, with tube electronics and the great big meters. Everything was rack mounted. It was more like a glorified radio station. I think the board was a modified Gates radio board. It had these big 4-inch knobs, and your channel assignment was this lever switch with three positions – left, center, and right. For EQ we had a couple Pultec equalizers. Everything was patched – they had this huge patchbay in the rack, all balanced at 600 ohms. They had an EMT plate, but they also used a live echo chamber that was an old septic tank beneath the building. Next to the studio there were railroad tracks, and any time a train would come by they'd have to stop recording. They would always begin by cutting the bass, drums, piano, and guitar –the rhythm section – on one track and the vocal on one track.
So they would record on one 3-track machine and then mix that to another 3-track while adding more tracks?
Exactly. You could only go three generations [of tape submixing]. You'd have to always be thinking ahead of what you planned on putting on there. You'd have to equalize [tracks] going down, with tape hiss and all. You would have to push some frequencies, knowing that you were gonna lose those in the generations. You'd also have to push everything up at the beginning of the record, and then bring it back down as the song went on.
You wanted to keep above the noise floor, if the beginning of the song was quiet?
Right. We'd have to plan it out. Not many things ran direct in those days. They did a fuzz guitar sound using this little bitty amp that had a nail through the speaker cone. They had two pianos – a regular grand and an upright with tacks on the hammers. You have to remember, there were no synthesizers. When you had strings – these were real strings; Atlanta Symphony players. The sessions were quite serious when I first got there. I mean, there were not many drugs. There was a bottle shop just down Peachtree Road where we would go down and get bottles of Ripple [fortified wine] for a dollar. We did have a doctor's office in the building, and we made friends with the doctor. I'll just say he helped keep us awake. [laughs]
So you started doing some engineering around that time?
Not at Master Sound. At that time there wasn't any Full Sail [University], or anything [school] like that. Engineering was especially hard to get into. The engineers didn't want anyone to know what they were doing. A lot of those guys came from the broadcast industry. I wasn't from that industry, but I understood electronics pretty well. I've been a ham radio operator since I was a kid; taking transmitters and receivers apart and putting them [back] together. In Atlanta, back then, when equipment went belly-up, they had to send it to Nashville or get somebody to come down and fix it. I began thinking, "If I could get them to trust me to fix some of these things, it might be a way to break into the business." They started by letting me change tubes, and pretty soon I was aligning tape recorders, repairing them, fixing their amps and power supplies. I ended up charging $100 an hour and still saving them a lot of money by not having to fly a guy down from Nashville and put him up overnight. In the '60s that was just killer! I was maintaining all the major studios in Atlanta – of course there were only five of them. Now I was torn. Did I want to do the electronics thing or make records? Just then Joe South (who'd had a hit with "Games People Play") came along and asked me if I wanted to engineer for him in his new studio. I told him I'd never done that, but I'd do my best for him. He had purchased an 8-track system, which was a converted 1-inch Ampex video deck custom-built in Texas by a man named Ron Newdoll. It had eight sets of [Ampex] 351 electronics. There wasn't much crosstalk and we didn't use any noise reduction. I remember the day they delivered all the gear to our new place, which was an office suite next to an insurance company in Doraville [a northern Atlanta suburb]. It was offices in front, and in the back was this warehouse. We decided to put the board in one room, the drums in another, and the amps in another. We hooked everything up, and Joe decided we needed to record something to test it all out. He took my guitar; he went out and sat on the curb in front of the building and played for a while. He came in and said, "I think I got something we can at least try." That's how we cut "Walk a Mile in My Shoes" that night! You remember the big A7 Altec [Lansing "Voice of the Theater"] speakers? We put one of those out in the warehouse and that was our echo send. A [Neumann] U 87 was our return. We had that A7 out there just cranked up; and I mean cranked up. We figured we would start work in the late afternoon and record 'til the office people showed up the next morning. Sometimes we were still working after they got there. The insurance company got us kicked out of there. I don't think we lasted a month! Then we moved into another office building in downtown Atlanta, right around the corner from Ted Turner's television station. We soundproofed the windows and we made one of the rooms into an echo chamber. We had an 8-track, a 4-track, and two 2-tracks. We had an EMT plate, some [Urei] 1176s, and some Pultec EQs. The board was a custom board by Ron Newdoll.
Can you talk about the process at that studio? Like, how were you mic'ing the drums?
We did a bass drum mic, a snare mic, and one overhead mic. We were using [Neumann] U 47s and U 67s. We had good mics.
How did you build your tracks?
We did bass, drums, keyboard, maybe guitar, and a scratch vocal. We would have the kick drum and the bass on the same track. We had to make sure they were in the pocket together, because you couldn't change it after that. For the drums, the whole trap set would be on two tracks, or else the snare would be by itself.
How difficult was it to punch in on those big Ampex machines?
We had to be careful. We had to be sure our relays and everything were clean. Otherwise there'd be a pop. We had to have kind of a feel for that machine, because there was a short delay time for that relay to kick in. It'd have to be a relay that was in good shape, or that we'd burnished the contacts on, to make sure there wasn't any dirt or corrosion in there to where it would make that "pop." We would always put the kick drum or the bass on tracks 1 or 8. You would have those things on the edge.
