You were in bands like The Psychotics, Men Working, and then Brandywine.
We were high school kids — all my friends. I have an early recording of one of those bands, Kenny and the Komotions, doing Jessie Hill's "Ooh Poo Pah Doo."
You were playing guitar?
Yeah. This was probably around '65 or something.
Where was this recording done?
In my parent's basement with one mic. Mono. I had a tape recorder. My parents got me one for Christmas. I took piano when I was a kid; but then a friend of a friend brought over a Gretsch Country Gentleman back in '62 or so. That's when I got interested in the guitar. My dad worked in the shipping department at Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of Bell Telephone, for 30 years. My mom worked on the assembly line for Johnson & Johnson. They always saved up a little bit of money and got me a really great Christmas present every year. In 1959 or 1960 I went to a New Year's Eve party with co-workers of my dad. I had never seen a tape recorder before — one of the guys was playing back music on it. He said, "Watch this." He rewound the tape, put on a blank tape, recorded my voice, and played it back for me. I was fascinated with tape recorders. I'd look them up in the encyclopedia, and I asked my parents for a tape recorder for the following Christmas. They got me a little Japanese 3-inch reel, battery-powered recorder. I got interested in guitars, and it went hand-in-hand. I had a guitar and a tape recorder, so I could record all of my bands. I hated school; I loved music. I was the guy who would figure out all of the songs, tell everybody else what to play, and write down the lyrics.
Were you recording to listen back and see how everything was coming together?
Just for fun. There was a thriving garage band community in Plainfield, New Jersey. I went to Essex County College for a minute, and then I worked at Union Carbide with chemical fumes and no masks. In the summer of '67 I went down to the Jersey shore and lived in the Seaside Heights area with a bunch of guys. I worked on the boardwalk at one of those game stands, where you try to throw the ball in or knock things over. Often when you won a prize it would be a record. Right down the street from where we rented our house was the guy who distributed those. I started driving around distributing the records for him, and as payment I would get albums. I was still in bands. Mike Bonagura has a lot to do with my story. When I was 15, he was ten. We'd practice at each other's houses. I met these people from South Plainfield through Mike, and I got into this band called The London Fog. Mike was in the band, and my good friend, Chip Miles, was the drummer. That lasted through the summer of '68.
Was the band gigging a lot?
We were always gigging. We did a lot of high school gigs. I remember getting my ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Commission] card so that I could play in nightclubs because I was under 21. There was a fellow named Barry Landers who managed The London Fog, as well as another band called The Cartoon. Some of the members mish-moshed; we got together and started being The Cartoon. There was some other band on Swan Song [Records] that Jimmy Page produced called The Cartoon, so we couldn't use the name. We somehow came up with the name Men Working. We actually had a session in November of 1970 with Men Working at MediaSound in New York City when it first opened. We got a demo deal with these original songs and signed to Richie Haven's label, Stormy Forest. Bob Margouleff was the engineer — he and Malcolm Cecil were staff engineers. They had the TONTO synthesizer in the room. There was a Scully 12-track at those Media sessions.
That's a format few people remember.
The 12-track? I think there are some pictures of that on my Facebook page. I think they had a Spectrasonics console at Media. We were there for three days or so with Bob Margouleff. Ted Baron was the producer, but Bob Margouleff took over. Bob was like, "Let's make this happen!" I have a few pictures of that session from MediaSound.
And you'd set up a home studio too?
That's when I built a little recording studio at Barry Lander's home. We used a rehearsal room and an extra bedroom downstairs. I had a mono Lafayette tape recorder, and later a Sony TC-630. It had sound-on- sound, and echo! I loved the echo. I would track us and then we would overdub on it. It was pretty simple. We would track everything live. We'd do the four-piece — keyboard, guitar, bass, and drums live. Then we'd overdub vocals, and maybe put some percussion on it.
Did you have a mixer?
I had a little Altec mixer. Everything would be in mono. We started writing original songs at that point; but the songs weren't very good, and finally it fell apart. We actually got a record deal with Brandywine in the summer of '71 through Barry Landers, our manager. Barry was working for WMCA radio and also the New York Yankees. He knew all the celebrities and all the people who had box seats. Nat Tarnopol was the heir to the Brunswick Record label — his father had started the company. One day Barry said, "Hey, I'm managing a band." And Nat said, "Oh, have them make a record at my recording studio in Chicago." That's how the Brandywine record deal was struck — no paperwork! We drove out and Bruce Swedien [Tape Op #91] was the engineer. The music sounds terrible, but the recording is really good.
What studio was that?
Brunswick Recording Studios. It was a recording studio that Bruce had built. Bruce had a custom-made console — he had his own patchbay with his own logo; it was a Norwegian thing with a little ship. His tape deck was a 16-track [Ampex] MM 1000. The producer was Willie Henderson. It was a great experience. We had been in the Dick Charles studio in New York where we did a couple of demos, the MediaSound sessions, and some other 8-track studio. Besides recording with Bob Margouleff, this was the first time that had I really observed someone like Bruce who really knew what he was doing. He was a great guy to work with. We did the record in three days, and I played bass on it as well. We tracked with the guitar, and then I overdubbed the bass.
What a great experience as a musician, working with someone of that caliber!
He was great. Willie Henderson was going to sit there and smoke cigarettes, but Bruce had a great expression, "Hey, come on. Get out of the pool!" It's one I still use to this day. Or, "All you kids, back in the pool now." I still use that expression. I was able to watch him mic us up. I didn't know anything about recording studios. He was working for Brunswick Records, and it was in their building. I have rough mixes of that somewhere.
So that record, Aged, came out on Brunswick?
Yeah, I have a couple of copies. It came out, and it sold five copies. Chip's girlfriend came up with the name Brandywine. We drove out with all our gear, in a 1965 Plymouth that was overheating. In Chicago we stayed at a Holiday Inn, all of us in the same bed. On the way back, we drove straight non-stop to Jersey. I never saw a contract. When I first started, I didn't know anything about anything, let alone contracts and publishing. I was having fun recording, and I was having fun playing. I'm still not good at numbers! I'm lucky that I started out in my mom's basement and ended up in my own basement here, some 40 years later. After that record came out, my son Jason was born and I had to go back to work. That was when I started working for Ampeg and Altec. Altec was also University Sound, and Ampeg had the same distributer. EveAnna Manley's dad was Ampeg's big guy. He was the president for a while.
I've got one of those Ampeg B-15 bass amps from back then.
I love those. Jess Oliver [former Ampeg Vice President] was the one who came up with the design for that. He left Ampeg and started Oliver Amps. The band broke up. I was living in a small apartment and I couldn't afford it anymore, so I ended up living in my mom's basement.
You, your wife, and child were living in your mom's basement?
Yeah. We had a bedroom, but we all shared one bathroom. I got fired because I was always late for my job at Ampeg, so I was collecting unemployment and living in my parents' basement. I took the $120 that I had left in the bank, and I bought bicycles for my wife and myself. I don't know why. My dad was like, "You bum!" So we're riding bicycles, and we bump into Mike Bonagura. He says, "Eddie, my dad has a friend in Hillsborough, New Jersey named Tony Camillo. He's building a recording studio. They have an engineer and his name's Tony Bongiovi." He said we could come over there and make a record; Tony would do the engineering, and they would get us a record deal. I remember it took weeks. Mike kept calling Tony Camillo. This was in the summer of '72. Finally, Mike calls me up and says, "Hey, Tony's going to be there. We can check out the studio." We get there, and it's nothing. There's a Langevin console on the floor, dust all over everything, no window between the control room and the studio, and an empty room.
Was it a new structure or a house?
It was a new structure attached to Camillo's house. Actually, Bongiovi and Tony Camillo previously had a 4-track studio in Bound Brook, New Jersey; it was called Venture Sound. They kept the name. They got all the equipment from some studio that went bankrupt in Philadelphia. I saw Ampex written on the MM 1000 deck, and I knew what that was because I'd worked with Bruce. There were cardboard boxes full of [Neumann U] 67s, 87s and [RCA] 44s. There was a mono [Ampex] 440 deck and a stereo 440 deck, but nothing was wired up. I volunteered to help finish the place. The first task, under the guidance of Tony Bongiovi, was to work on a little echo chamber. It was pretty much the size of a closet. I remember Tony Bongiovi coming down and saying to Mike and I, "We have to coat this with this special epoxy." It was like a fiberglass epoxy resin.
That stuff stinks.
I can still smell it, I swear. We were dizzy; it was one of those 95-degree New Jersey summers with 100% humidity, and the air conditioning wasn't working. That chamber was all that we used for reverb on those early Gladys Knight sessions, like "Midnight Train to Georgia" off the Imagination record. Tony Camillo got a plate [reverb] out of Holland-Dozier- Holland's studio later on. I started building baffles, and I helped wire some of the patchbay. I made a bank of VU meters and hooked them up to the outputs. I learned under Tony Bongiovi's guidance. He'd always be like, "Do this, and I'll be back," and then he never came back. Tony Bongiovi was some kind of "enfant terrible." He wrote a letter to the engineers at Motown Records, "I know how you're getting your sound with the Pultecs." He was like 16 or 17 — way before I met him. They flew him in to Motown and had him start working. Then he said, "I have this friend, Tony Camillo, who does arrangements." Tony Camillo went to Juilliard and has perfect pitch. You can give him a chart, or hum a melody, and he'll write it out. He still has a studio there. So I started wiring, getting together a headphone system, building a drum booth — you had to have a drum booth in 1972.
A dead drum booth.
Yeah, right. Everything was very dead. I put in the parquet floor and, eventually, the studio came together. Tony Bongiovi taught me how to align the machine with the test tapes, and do biasing and all that. He said, "Here's one channel. Watch me, and you do the rest."
Because he didn't want to do it! We all pass that on, as soon as we can.
Right. I was hanging out there every day, seven days a week, ten hours a day, collecting unemployment. About a month into the experience, Tony Bongiovi — who was working at MediaSound in New York as a staff engineer — calls and says, "Eddie, I've got a couple sessions today. Why don't you come in and I'll show you how this works." We took the bus into New York. At this time, you'd have morning sessions, afternoon sessions, and night sessions. Everything was three-hour blocks. This particular afternoon was Kool & the Gang on Delight Records. I was helping Tony set up the microphones for tracking, and I was watching him set up the patchbay. Tony tracks the song and they start doing vocals. Tony says, "Eddie, do the vocal. I've got to go out and get a sandwich. Do you want a sandwich?" The band were all really cool guys, and we were having fun. He had set everything up for me with the microphones. I did the vocals and punched it in. At the time you had to run over to the machine, go to input, and flip it in or else, when you went to record, there'd be an audible delay. I did that, and the singer says, "Okay, that was great. Let's do another track." So I thought, "I'll figure this out." And then I said, "Let's do percussion. Let's do a guitar overdub. I want to do some horns now!" I had to figure out all the headphones, patchbay, and such. Tony let me sink or swim.
Was he testing you?
Yeah, apparently he did the same thing to Bob Clearmountain and Ron Saint Germain when they were assistants. "Do this, and I'll be back." Everything was great and it was all working. The guys were happy with it. The punching-in was easy for me. I'm a musician and I feel the beat. I was always great at punching in, right off the bat. Tony was gone for quite a while, over two hours. We were finishing up, and they're like, "Let's make a rough mix." I thought, "How do I do that?" All of a sudden Bob Walters comes in. He was the manager of MediaSound, but I didn't know it at the time.
Oh no.
He walks into the studio acting really cordial with everybody, saying, "Hey, how are you doing?" He knew everybody's name. He looked at me and said, "Who are you? Where's Tony?" I swear to god, as if on cue, Tony opens the door and comes in with my sandwich. "Here's your sandwich, Eddie." Bob is like, "Who's Eddie?" Tony said, "He's a great engineer. I had him sit in for a little while when I went out and got a sandwich." That was my sink-or-swim moment. I knew that was what I wanted to do. I didn't want to be a musician anymore. I wanted to make records. It was a lot of fun, and I still enjoy doing it. Meanwhile, back at Venture Sound, Tony Bongiovi disappeared. I don't know what happened between Tony Camillo and Tony Bongiovi, but there was a falling out. Two months after I started there I'm the engineer at the studio. I negotiated my first week's pay. It was pretty much hands-on learning there, working with my friends before sessions started coming in. Mike Bonagura and I used to have drummer friends come down; we would bring in other pals and record ourselves.
Were you trying to put another band together?
Once I got into the studio, I never did. I used to record my friends, and I was writing some songs at the time, though I never really pursued that. Around the winter of '72 or '73 these three guys from Detroit came in: Bob Babbitt (one of the great Motown bassists), drummer Andrew Smith, and a singer-songwriter named Perry Boyd. Tony Camillo convinced them that they were going to be session players in New Jersey — that was an unheard of thing. Motown had moved to Los Angeles. They moved out to New Jersey without their families at first, and they had a bunch of songs. We'd do the tracks and start with a loop. That's what they did in Motown — make a hi-hat loop on a mono tape machine and play along to it. It'd be Andrew and Babbitt, or just drums. We did about eight or nine songs. This was all on the Langevin console. Tony Bongiovi had made a custom monitor section, a little thing that rolled around, and we used the Langevin for recording. I didn't have a lot of outboard gear, just a [Teletronix] LA-2A and a Pultec — the same models that I use today. Tony Camillo was great about bringing people in. When the sessions started coming in, we'd be using Babbitt and Andrew — and all the players from New York, like Allan Schwartzberg [drums], Steve Gadd [drums], Bob Mann [guitar], Jerry Friedman [guitar], Pat Rebillot [keyboards], Kenny Edwards [guitar] and the Brecker Brothers [saxophone, flute, trumpet, flugelhorn]. We did entire records in two or three days. Camillo would make these great Italian dinners for everybody.
What kind of sessions were you doing?
One of the first ones was Gladys Knight. We did the tracking, and we had our studio players. I remember we tried "Midnight Train to Georgia" a couple of times with Allan Schwartzberg on drums, Bob Babbitt playing bass and the NYC crew. We did backing tracks, but Gladys didn't like the first two versions. So Tony talked to Gladys and then told us, "We've got to do a track she likes. Sort of an Al Green vibe." It was Babbitt, Andrew, Jeff Mirinoff [guitar], and Tony on the track; four guys on a Sunday night. They cut it, and Camillo did a few piano overdubs. Neil Bogart was running Buddah Records; he loved Tony, so he gave him a couple of other projects. One project was The Cecil Holmes Soulful Sounds and [their album] The Black Motion Picture Experience. I mixed it in quad at one point at A&R studios. A friend of mine found a quad 1/4" cartridge copy for me. Cecil Holmes was an A&R guy.
Oh, so it's all cover songs [from Shaft, Trouble Man, etc.].
Yup. We did another one called Music For Soulful Lovers. Then we did a record with Ben Vereen, and we did one with Micki Grant, who had a Broadway musical hit.
Tony was doing the hustling, as well as getting the gigs lined up.
I went with Tony a couple of times to people's offices. He did a couple of films for Brut — the Fabergé perfume company — when they branched out into film and music. We also did a couple of awful movies. One was called Welcome to Arrow Beach, which was Laurence Harvey's last film. That was the first time I got to go to California, because I went with Tony to watch the mixing to picture. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel and flew back in a private jet. I got so involved with recording that I was working seven days a week, 15 hours a day, and I loved it. I was finally able to move out of my parents' house. I was living closer to the studio. Then we did a Chambers Brothers record [Unbonded]. I was really nervous about it because it was a name producer, Jimmy Ienner. He had done the early Raspberries records and worked with Three Dog Night. The usual gang played and did all the tracking, and then we did all of the overdubs and mixes. I remember my hands were sweating the first day, dripping all over the console, because this guy had made some records that I really liked. He worked at Record Plant. I'm like, "Oh my god, he's coming here, to New Jersey?" Record Plant was up there on my list, along with Trident Studios.
You find out through the grapevine, and see on records, that those are the places.
I had been looking at record covers a lot, and getting a sense for who people were and what they were doing. We were in the mixing stage with Jimmy Ienner. Dave Domanich was an assistant. We were doing a tambourine overdub on one of the songs. Jimmy's playing, and he says, "I need some mood lighting." We dimmed the lights down and turned on these little colored lights. And then he goes, "No, shut them all down." We hear the tambourine fall, and he's like, "Stop, stop! I dropped the tambourine. Put on the lights." We turn the lights on and there's Jimmy bent over with his ass [showing], mooning us in the control room — this big, old, fat, Italian ass. It was one of the funniest moments.
So you broke the ice a little bit.
Yeah, he was a really nice guy. We did have another hit with "Dynomite" by Bazuka, the house band. That was Steve Gadd, Al Schwartzberg, Babbitt, Neil Jason, and all of the NYC players.
When did you leave Venture Sound?
It just became so much of the same with Tony Camillo — you could predict what was going to happen. Every session was the same. I wasn't getting discouraged, but I needed to branch out. I went to an AES convention and picked up a couple of audio magazines. I found an ad for an "Engineer Wanted" in the back of dB Magazine from Le Studio in Morin- Heights, Quebec. I knew there was a Trident console up there, so I called and Yaël Brandeis picked up. Her life and business partner is the great André Perry, who recorded John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance." I gave a little bit of my background and they said, "Sure, come on up." I gathered a bunch of albums in a bag, and I went up there. I met with André. Le Studio was incredible. The setting was on a lake; there's a glass wall on one side, a huge Yamaha grand piano, and a drum booth. You could change the acoustics in the room and make it live or deaden it up. They had a Trident console — the first A-Range in North America — and a Studer tape machine, as well as lots of outboard gear I'd never even seen, like an [Eventide] Omnipressor. It was incredibly beautiful. André Perry had a great studio in Montreal; then he bought all this property and built Le Studio. He interviewed me and they made a beautiful lunch — Yaël's a great cook. They hired me on the spot. I had to get working papers. I moved up to Canada in November of '75.
What projects did you do up there?
I actually produced a band called Lougarou, which turned into Garolou. They were a big French-Canadian band, and they sold a lot of records. Besides "Midnight Train to Georgia," it was the first gold record that I actually worked on. I did five records with those guys over the years. I worked with a lot of French-Canadian artists. Robert Charlebois was a big French-Canadian guy who I did a record with. Of course, we never hear about these people down here. Quebec is its own entity.
Even in Canada.
Yeah, even in Canada it is; you're right! It snows a lot more than it does here. At that time, they had one little ski hill. But when I went back in 1990 to do Jeff Healey it was a big resort, like Telluride. It'd grown that much in the 15 years since I was there. Nick Blagona was the staff engineer, and I was the second staff engineer. I learned a lot from Nick. Roy Thomas Baker came up there to do a band called Pilot. They had worked with Alan Parsons [Tape Op #42] on the first record with that big hit, "Magic." Roy Thomas Baker was getting hot at this time, and it was awesome. It was right when [Queen's] A Night at the Opera with "Bohemian Rhapsody" had come out. He puts it on the tape machine and goes, "I want to hear what the monitors sound like." I was like, "Wow, what is this?" It sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before in my entire life. Roy Thomas Baker was a huge inspiration to me.
This was for Pilot's Morin Heights album?
Yeah, I actually shot the cover photography. They took my pictures and gave me credit. Nick and I were co- engineers — we would split shifts on the Pilot record. I set up the drum booth before Roy got there. Roy gets there and he says, "What are these drums doing in there? Put them out in the room!" It was something I had never done before. So we did that, and then he said, "Where are the room mics? Get some of that lovely room ambience, and let's mix it in with the overheads." He came from an engineering background, and this was a revelation to me. When I recorded a guitar at Venture Sound I'd put a microphone right on it and then cover it with a moving blanket. The drums would be in the booth. Now here's Roy going, "Let's use the room sound." We did the same thing for all of the guitars. He would mic the back of a cabinet from 20-feet away. To this day, ambience is a big thing for me. It was really a great lesson to work with Roy and Nick Blagona. I was always boosting EQ, and here Nick is cutting frequencies! I'd never cut frequencies. Nick's Canadian, but he learned in England too. Working with Roy was great, and he was always funny. He'd get fire extinguishers and say, "Let's see what this sounds like on the microphone."
Tell me about working with the Bee Gees.
They came up there to work on Children of the World with Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson. "Jive Talkin'" had already been a hit right before this. They recorded that at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami. There was a home a couple of miles away that the bands would stay in, and they had people cooking for them there. André Perry knew how to run a class operation. Karl Richardson was actually the official engineer, but Nick and I were there during the project. I basically hung out with Barry Gibb, rolled joints, and read paranormal books. That was a fun time. I wasn't up there very long.
What caused you to leave Le Studio?
I was down in New York one day, and who do I run into but Tony Bongiovi! He says, "Me and Bob Walters are leaving MediaSound and we're going to build a new studio. Want to come and be chief engineer?" I thought about it for a minute and said, "Sure, I'll come back." I was busy producing. So in September of '76, I left the studio at Morin-Heights. There was a little tension with André, because I had done a television show in Ottawa with him. He was also an audio consultant and he brought me along, but they didn't want to use André — they wanted to use me. I took the gig; André wasn't happy about that, because he didn't get a piece of the action. They paid me very, very well. It was fun with the TV show, with all of the guests. The Bay City Rollers were on.
Nice.
I was still on staff at Le Studio, but then Tony Bongiovi said, "Hey, we'll pay for your moving expenses." Tony was always working, so it was Bob Walters and I looking around for a building. He was still manager at MediaSound, and Tony was still on staff at Media; Ed Evans was still at MediaSound as a tech. I think he probably told Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #84] that he was going to be chief engineer as well — he told both of us the same thing. The woman I was living with and I had a daughter who was born in 1976, in September, right when the move was happening, so that was hectic. I moved back to New Jersey and we were looking for buildings. Tony was a producer. He says, "Eddie, come on and be a producer with me." The first thing that I came back to was The Ramones' Leave Home. When I got the record back it said "Engineer," and they spelled my name wrong! Tony's connection with The Ramones wa Tommy Erdelyi [Ramone] [Tape Op #46]. Tommy had been engineering at Record Plant, and he was an assistant when Tony was there. When the Ramones didn't want to work with Craig Leon on the second record, the only other producer Tommy knew of who he thought would do a good job was Tony Bongiovi. We did that at Sundragon, a tiny little studio with a completely dead room. It wasn't until we'd started doing Rocket to Russia at Media Sound that I was able to use the influence of Roy Thomas Baker and bring in the room mics. I did Talking Heads: 77 and a couple of other things in Sundragon. We finally found the building on West 53rd Street, where Power Station was. It was an old TV studio. Tony did all the acoustic design for the rooms, but I must say that was my concept. He wanted to build one studio here and then another studio on top with 12-foot ceilings, and I came up with the idea for it to be a pyramid. Then Ed Evans, Bob Clearmountain, Tony and myself worked on the concept [together]. Tony came up with the actual acoustical studio design for the dome room in Studio A. Somewhere around the house I actually have the blueprints, and it says, "Recording Studio on 53rd Street" at that address. That became Power Station.
The timing was great.
In the beginning at Power Station, we worked around the construction. The first project at Power Station was The Ramones' Rocket to Russia. We'd recorded the tracks at MediaSound. At that time I believe they had a Neve 8068 there. I was able to use my room mics! You can hear it on the Talking Heads mixes. We did the recording at Sundragon, in a small room. But during the mixing at MediaSound I put speakers out in the big room (Studio A) for the snare drum, and on a couple of Talking Heads songs you can really hear that.
To open it up a little bit more?
Yeah. It was Chris Frantz's idea. To keep the noise level down, I actually put gates on the microphones, so it did its thing. Don't blame me for the gated reverb of the '80s. That's not me. But I did do it in 1977! It worked really well! But the first project that we did at Power Station was vocals, a couple of guitar overdubs, and the mixing for Rocket to Russia. The only reverb we had was the staircase on the east side. We put a couple of JBL 4310s in there, as well as Neumann U-87s at different levels. There was no outboard gear.
I assume Power Station accumulated some gear pretty quickly.
