Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with The Rolling Stones, The Who, LedZeppelin, The Eagles, Eric Clapton, The Faces . . .

by Glyn Johns

  The night before the gig, I was invited to go to a rehearsal in the ballroom of the enormous house they had rented on the island. This was an evening I will never forget. I sat alone in the middle of this large ornate ballroom on one of the gilded wooden chairs that littered the room, and was privy to a performance of a substantial part of the set they were to play the following day, and to their process of refining it to what I thought was perfection to start with. The concert itself was not as great. After less than an hour, Mr. Dylan got the hump and decided to leave. I think a couple of tracks were eventually used but I never heard them.

  • • •

  My next meeting with Bob Dylan was in 1984, when Bill Graham, who was managing him at the time, invited me to produce a live album Real Live, while he was on tour in Europe. Mick Taylor and Ian McLagan were in the band and I had not seen either of them for some years. I was a little wary of seeing Mick after my last experience of him with the Stones, but I was pleasantly surprised when I met him again. He seemed to be a reformed character.

  Some of the members of Dylan’s crew were unbelievably rude and uncooperative when I arrived in France to record the first gig. I was virtually thrown off the stage when I went to place my mics, and it was only the intervention of Bill Graham that prevented me from leaving there and then. The level of security around Dylan was ridiculous. I never quite discovered if it was because he employed a bunch of self-important arseholes, or if it was just his policy in order to preserve his privacy. I had never been in a situation that did not allow me to have a discussion with the artist I was working with before starting the project.

  Halfway through his set he would take a breather, leave the stage, and let the band do a song. Having not been allowed anywhere near him since I arrived, I decided that I would leave my truck at this point and catch him in the wings for a chat. Surprisingly, he was really charming and quite happy to discuss what we were doing, albeit briefly, before returning to the stage to complete the set. From then on, access was easier and I was able to keep him up to date with how we were doing from one performance to the next.

  We recorded five or six concerts all over Europe, ending up at Slane Castle in Ireland. The night before the gig, the local police station had been blown up by the IRA, so that was a little disconcerting, but I remember it was a fine summer’s day with the only negative being that a fan had drowned in the river bordering the property while trying to gain free access to the concert. Bono came and visited me in the truck to say hi before joining Dylan on stage to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which I might add he did not know the lyrics to. This did not discourage him in any way from making unintelligible sounds throughout. No one seemed to notice, as the performance received rapturous applause from the adoring fans. Perhaps my inability to remember lyrics would not have been a problem after all.

  Dylan returned to America when we finished, and I went home to do rough mixes of all the concerts to send to him so that we could discuss which songs and performances we should use on the record. Though we agreed on the songs, it turned out that he had a completely different idea about the performances, with him picking easily the worst examples of each track. I will never know if this was a test of some sort, but in my opinion the versions he chose were unusable. We spent several evenings on the phone talking about all manner of things. He was extremely pleasant and respectful, as in the end he agreed to use the takes that I was suggesting.

  Having finished the mixes in my studio at home, I took them to L.A. to master with Doug Sax at the Mastering Lab. This is the process for transferring the music from tape to disc.

  Out of courtesy, I asked Bob if he would like to attend, as he lived in L.A. It turned out that he had never been to a mastering session before and happily came along to check the process out. He stayed till the end of the session, then shook my hand and thanked me as I walked him out to his car. This turned out to be the most beaten-up, old convertible Cadillac I have ever seen, with virtually no paint left on the rusting body. So with a smile and a wave, he drove off into the afternoon sun, heading west down Hollywood Boulevard, and sadly, I have never seen him since.

  Sixties Sum-Up, Howlin’ Wolf, Humble Pie, Mad Dogs, Sticky Fingers, “Gimme Shelter,” and “Sympathy for the Devil”

  The sixties started with almost everything being recorded in mono on quarter-inch tape, in three-hour sessions. Singles were what sold. An album, if you were lucky enough to make one, would be done in a day in three separate three-hour sessions, rarely finishing after 10:30 p.m., and never during weekends. Artists hardly ever wrote their own material, so therefore songwriters were just that and hardly ever performed their own songs. The industry was run by a small number of corporate labels, who employed staff A&R men to sign and produce the talent.

  By the time the sixties were over, we were up to sixteen tracks on two-inch tape and albums were responsible for 80 percent of record sales, sometimes taking months to make, with everyone working seven days a week and very often all night. A&R men were confined to signing the talent and retaining an independent producer to make the record. The money advanced on signing a record contract had gone through the roof, with the deal almost certainly negotiated by a new breed of lawyer that had not existed ten years previously. The single was fast becoming just a promotional tool to sell albums, and the album sleeve had become an art form. All this driven by a massive increase of profits in the industry perhaps by as much as tenfold.

  • • •

  1970 started with a party at Ringo’s house on New Year’s Day. My overriding memory of that evening is hearing the sound of drums being played in another room in the house. I went to investigate and found Keith Moon giving Ringo’s four-year-old son, Zak, a lesson. Zak idolized Keith, who was his godfather. Amazingly, twenty-five years later he took Keith’s place in The Who, being one of the few drummers in the world who could come close to filling his shoes.

  The first week of January was spent wrapping up Let It Be at Abbey Road and Olympic, and the Billy Preston album with George Harrison. Then I was off to the States for a couple of months, darting between L.A. and San Francisco, working with Steve Miller, Leon Russell, and a co-production with David Anderle for A&M with Lambert and Nuttycombe, a folk duo from Carmel Valley in Northern California. Their music was smooth and very laid-back, delivered with a wonderful blend of two-part harmony. They were great at what they did but sadly did not manage to catch the eye or ear of the public.

  I returned home at the end of March to start a grueling couple of weeks of all-nighters with The Rolling Stones and the first few sessions with Peter Frampton and Steve Marriott from the Small Faces, for Humble Pie’s first album. Not the most innovative album title.

  Then I received a call from Chess Records, asking if I would engineer some sessions at Olympic Studios with the blues legend Howlin’ Wolf. The great man was going to rerecord his most famous songs with the young English upstarts of the day who had taken the music business in Britain and America by storm, invariably using the black man’s blues as a vehicle. I could not pass up the opportunity.

  The experience proved to be extraordinary in several ways. First, how the guy from Chess ever got to be a record producer is beyond me. He proved to be totally incompetent on just about every level. He had the personality of a dead fish, and it quickly became obvious to me that he knew absolutely nothing about the blues.

  In an attempt to be as commercial as possible, he booked Ringo Starr and Klaus Voormann as the rhythm section. I am a huge fan of both these musicians but neither of them would know anything about the blues if they fell over them. I have no idea why they even agreed to do the sessions, particularly as Ringo came to me on the first day and asked me what the hell he was doing there, asking if I could help to get him and Klaus out of their commitment to the rest of the sessions. I suggested to the producer that he had made a mistake in booking them and perhaps I could persuade Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts to come
with Stu and play on the rest of the sessions. That night I rang Bill at his home in Suffolk, a couple of hours outside London. He was not that interested in coming to town the next day until I told him who the artist was. Like Stu and Charlie, he dropped everything and jumped in the car, thrilled at the opportunity to meet and play with the great man. Thank God they were available. So Ringo and Klaus were excused.

  The producer had contributed virtually nothing to the first session, and I felt, if anything, he was an obstruction to the proceedings. The next night with Charlie, Stu, and Bill present, things took a turn for the better, until he decided to play the band the original version of the song we were about to cut. He went to the turntable in the control room and put the record on and sat down and listened without realizing that it was playing at the wrong speed. That was the last straw for me and I banned him from the control room, asking him to stay in the studio with the musicians or wait in the hall.

  Wolf was a big man with a chest the size of a barrel and huge hands with fingers that appeared to be far too fat to play the guitar. His speaking voice was deep and sounded like someone had poured a couple of pounds of ground glass down his throat. He would sit in the control room with me while the musicians were learning the song in the studio and would tell me stories, explaining the lyrics he had written. I am embarrassed to admit that I did not understand a great deal of what he said, as he had an almost unintelligible accent. I would sit fascinated and enthralled, never letting on, trying desperately to interpret what he was telling me but not wishing to appear rude by asking him to repeat what he was saying. He was a gentle giant and I felt so privileged to be in his presence.

  The saddest thing about the whole experience was Wolf seemingly had no idea why he was there. He may have known who Eric Clapton was, but that was only because someone had told him. He did not seem to know who any of the other musicians were. It looked to me like he was being manipulated for commercial purposes by his label, without having much of a clue about what was going on. He was elderly, confused, and not in the best of health.

  The finest moment of the sessions came when we were about to cut “Little Red Rooster.” This song and the guitar riff it is based on were trademarks of Wolf’s and had been covered by the Stones quite early on.

  The musicians started to run it down when Wolf stopped them, came into the control room, opened his beat-up cardboard guitar case, and took out an ancient, equally beat-up F-hole acoustic guitar.

  He took the guitar into the studio and sat down opposite Eric, looking him fair and square in the eye, and said, “I am going to teach you how to play this. Somebody has to do it right after I am gone.”

  I ran to the tape machine and hit record as soon as I realized what was happening and recorded the old master teaching the young, awestruck pretender. It was an epic moment for all in the room.

  Eric was hugely respectful to Howlin’ Wolf and a big fan of Hubert Sumlin, the guitar player on most of the original tracks. He frequently said to the producer that he did not understand why the record was being made, as the definitive versions of all the songs already existed and he felt under enormous pressure to compete with them in some way. Particularly as Hubert Sumlin was present in the control room with me on some of the sessions.

  When we had finished recording I declined the request for me to mix the record, as the idea of spending any time in a room alone with the producer was quite abhorrent. I am sure he felt the same about me. So he took the tapes back to America and added some overdubs and mixed it there. I do not own a copy and have never listened to it, so I don’t know if he managed to ruin it, but I would suggest it is well worth checking out.

  • • •

  The next day I started an album with Jesse Ed Davis, the phenomenal Native American guitar player from Taj Mahal’s band. We met and got on really well while working on the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, so when he returned to England in May, I was happy to help him with a few sessions at Olympic for his first solo album.

  This was followed by finishing the Humble Pie album, mixing Stage Fright for The Band, and a further month of all-nighters with the Stones and Jimmy Miller, working on Sticky Fingers, with a two-week trip to L.A. in the middle for good measure, to work at A&M studios for Jerry Moss on Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

  The Rolling Stones had commissioned a state-of-the-art mobile recording unit in a truck and had given the job to Stu to organize. He in turn came to me for advice and assistance. In late September, the truck was finally finished and ready to test. So we took it to Paris to record the Stones in concert. Unfortunately the trip was wasted, as neither of the two 16-track tape machines that Stu had got some kind of deal on proved to be operable.

  A week after we returned from Paris, I was sent to New York to mix the music for the Maysles brothers’ documentary Gimme Shelter. They had shot the Stones’ American tour late in ’69 and I was to mix the music for all the footage of them playing. I had been on most of the tour and had recorded the live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! at what was supposed to be the last two gigs in Baltimore and finally at Madison Square Garden in New York. The Stones had come up with the idea of doing a free concert in San Francisco and had hurriedly tacked it on the end of the tour. So the day after Madison Square Garden, they all flew back to the West Coast to play at Altamont Speedway and I went home to England to attend my son Ethan’s christening the next day.

  So, eleven months later I found myself being ushered into a darkened office in New York by Albert and David Maysles in order for them to show me the finished edit of their film. One of them turned the projector on as they left the room, saying they would wait for me in the outer office.

  I thought I was going to see a movie about the tour: the usual backstage stuff in the dressing room before the show, the band getting on and off planes and into limos, with the odd footage of them playing in concert. However, I was taken completely by surprise as they had really made a film about the horrific events that took place at Altamont. I had been told in some detail about what happened that day by Stu and the band and felt extremely fortunate that I had missed the whole experience. Someone had the bright idea to get the local chapter of the Hells Angels to provide security around the extremely low, unprotected stage and pay them in beer. It did not take long for the violence that they are associated with to take over as they set about the crowd with pool cues and eventually stabbed a man to death right in front of the stage. Seeing what actually happened on the screen was far more disturbing than any oral account I had heard.

  I was one of the first people to see the film, and the brothers were waiting in the outer office with great anticipation to see my reaction to it. Which was not at all as they had expected. I came into the room having been seriously upset by what I had just seen, and stated that they could not possibly release it the way it was, as kids would go and see it assuming, as I had, that they were to see a movie about their favorite band and their music. My reaction was completely over-the-top; when the film was eventually released it was not promoted in a misleading way. I don’t blame the Maysles brothers at all for what they did. They decided to tag along to Altamont and what happened there ended up being far more thought provoking than anything they had shot on the road in the previous weeks. Their movie showed the arrogance and total incompetence of those who put together the free show at Altamont Speedway, resulting in some extreme violence, a murder, and an ugly end to the drug-induced “peace and love” movement of the late sixties. Which, in retrospect, may not be a bad thing.

  The song being played when the violence in the crowd kicked off was “Sympathy for the Devil.” Mick went across the stage to Keith and asked him to stop playing so that he could try and calm the audience down, announcing as they started playing again, “Something very funny always happens when we start playing that number.”

  In fact, there had been another scary incident that took place while this song was being played.
In the early summer of 1968, the French director Jean-Luc Godard convinced the band to be filmed for his movie One Plus One while the Stones were recording “Sympathy for the Devil” at Olympic Studios. Godard seemed a very strange little man to me and spent two nights shooting the same tracked camera run over and over again while the band worked on the song. In the middle of a take on the second night, the session was brought to an abrupt halt by a huge neon light fitting falling from the ceiling, missing Keith Richards by inches. It would most certainly have killed him if he had been standing a couple of feet to his right.

  Having been built as a cinema, the Olympic had an extremely high ceiling and the film crew had managed to set some very powerful lights alongside the massive neon light fittings that already existed there. They had then placed a large plastic sheet over the lot in order to diffuse the light. This had created an enormous build-up of heat that had eventually caused the ceiling and the roof above it to catch fire.

  Once we realized what was happening, a mild panic took over, with everyone running round like ants figuring out how best to deal with an attack on the nest. If you haven’t noted the whereabouts of the fire extinguishers near you in your place of work, I strongly recommend that you do, as you will most certainly deal with any incident involving a fire far more calmly and efficiently than I did.

  I grabbed the extinguisher off the wall in the control room, and when I finally figured out how to work it, the jet didn’t even reach halfway to the raging inferno in the ceiling and all I achieved was a wet puddle on the floor. It transpired that compressed straw had been used as sound insulation in the roof of the building, which needed to be particularly effective as it was directly under the flight path to Heathrow. We quickly managed to get all of the Stones’ gear out of the building while the film crew did the same with theirs. All this action being filmed with a handheld 16-millimeter camera by Godard, who stood calmly in the doorway with a disconcerting smile on his face.