by Bruce Feiler
Despite the presence of all these stars, the person in the room who received the most deference was a gentle, gray-haired man with a Jay Leno jaw and slight stoop who sat quietly in the corner while the other men in the room exchanged introductory dirty jokes. He watched silently as the first song meeting came to order, listened as they played the demo of the cut and discussed possible directions for the instrumentation to take, and about a half an hour into the session—during a Diet Coke break—slowly rose to his feet. Immediately the conversation ceased. Everyone in the room rose as well. They all turned in his direction. One by one he wished them good-bye. (“I love you, man,” he told Don Cook, before repeating the same comment to Ronnie Dunn.) Then Harlan Howard, the most prolific hitmaker in Nashville history, the “Cole Porter of Country Music,” shuffled over to the youngest person in the room.
“Wade, son, I just want to tell you: You’ve got a real great team around you. A real A-plus group.” His voice was quiet, genuine Kentucky bourbon. It was the soothing spirit behind more than four thousand songs, among them over fifty number ones, including Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” “Everything in your life is just great right now. I’m so happy for you.”
Speechless, Wade smiled, took a short step back, and imperceptibly bowed his head. He had been anointed. And he knew it.
By just after three, the musicians were in place and the green lights on the control panel started to dance. There were forty-eight columns of green lights in all, each a slender six inches tall, and each one reaching for the bar of red lights above it in a seemingly neverending strobe that was a constant reminder of both the technological underpinnings and the glamorous potential of making a record in the Digital Age. Music may be art, but it’s also science.
“I’d like a little more groove than on the demo. A little action on the guitar and drums. You know, U2 does country.” Don Cook spoke from the upper deck of the control room. A native of San Antonio, Texas, he had dreamed as a teenager of becoming the next Bob Dylan. When that ambition proved too lofty, he moved to Nashville in 1971 to try his hand at writing country. He had his first Top 5 hit in 1977, Barbara Mandrell’s “Tonight,” and the following year had eleven chart singles. Over the next decade, he became one of Nashville’s most prolific songwriters, with twenty-five Top 10s and ten number ones. In 1991, he produced his first record, Brooks & Dunn’s smash debut, Brand New Man, and overnight became coveted as a producer for his keen song sense and strong commercial instincts. By 1994, riding a wave of popularity, he talked Sony Records into giving him his own boutique imprint (DKC) under its Columbia division. Wade was his first artist.
Despite his power, Don was known as one of the most affable men on Music Row. He had a quick smile and a sandy walrus mustache that served to distract attention from his balding head. He came to the studio on this day in blue jeans, loafers, and a generous-bellied, white button-down shirt with a monogrammed tennis racket on the pocket. He was relaxed and in effortless control: the Skipper to Wade Hayes’s Gilligan. “I’m pretty much of a working guy,” he said. “I don’t make such a big deal about myself. I’m not the artist. I’m the producer.” A lot of producers, he noted, are so insecure about what they contribute to the process that they create personas around themselves that make them seem like gurus, “the only way to God.” “That’s just patently not true,” Don said. “I’m just one of a bunch of guys who do the same thing. When you get me, you get whatever skills and talent I have. You pay a lot of money for it—” He chuckled. “And you get it. But I’m not a magician. If anything, I’m a hired hand.”
But what about the halo of power that seems to hover around the most famous producers in Nashville: Owen Bradley, Jimmy Bowen, Tony Brown? On Music Row they are often more mythologized than the artists.
“I once played golf with this golf pro,” Don said, “and of course he was a phenomenal golfer. But I expected that when he played fire would come off the end of his club, that the rest of us would stand at the tee box and just sigh every time he hit the ball.” It didn’t happen that way, though. “He dressed like we did,” Don said. “He interacted with the rest of us. He ate a tuna fish sandwich with us when the round was over. In our midst, though, he was just a fuck of a lot better than we were.” The pro shot a sixty-five; Don shot a ninety. “And it impressed the hell out of me,” Don said. “That a guy could just quietly be that thorough and that good. I would like to be thought of like that. Real power is just quality and what you can actually bring to the table when all the bullshit is done with.”
Sitting in the studio that afternoon, the absence of bullshit was pronounced. Far from an artiste, Don, a native of Texas, acted like the most popular kid in class, the kid who grew up to become the unanimous chairman of the social committee at the country club. He would rock back in his chair and listen to the musicians, then lean forward and press a red button labeled THE VOICE OF AUTHORITY that carried his words to the other side of the window where the musicians were gathered in the dimly lit studio, about the size of a doctor’s waiting room. “Any of you guys know why you can tell the toothbrush was invented in Oklahoma?”
Several of the band members, speaking into their microphones, chortled their nonresponses.
“Because anywhere else it would be called a teethbrush.”
Wade, the token Okie, laughed the loudest.
Considering the stakes, as well as the time and money that goes into writing, pitching, and selecting material, the process of actually recording a song in Nashville is suprisingly haphazard. First of all, the song itself is never really written down. There are no notes, no melodies, no little measures with tempos and crescendos jotted helpfully throughout. Instead, in the five minutes before a song is recorded forever, to be played on radio stations and home stereos potentially millions and millions of times, a representative of the band—in this case, the acoustic guitar player—sits down in front of a piece of white copy paper and pencils a series of numbers—1, 1, 3b, 2—that refer to the chords and that he then Xeroxes and distributes to his colleagues. These cryptic numbers, known collectively as the Nashville Number System, are part of the pidgin system of communication developed on Music Row in the 1950s. Though it has the obvious disadvantage of not capturing every note for posterity, the Nashville Number System does have several distinct advantages: It frees songwriters from having to notate different instruments, it frees musicians to improvise creative flourishes, and it frees self-taught artists from the embarrassment of not knowing how to read music. And ultimately it gives everyone involved in the recording process leeway to do whatever they want to a song—change the key, add a bridge, slow it down, speed it up.
It is this feature of recording—its chance—that makes the process even more remarkable. If you’re going to be dazzling, one wants to say, at least break a sweat. (Some pop music is recorded in this manner, though the bulk of recorded music is still done with the aid of notated music.) Instead, all those fanciful openings, those catchy licks between choruses, that soaring touch of fiddle in the middle of the second verse that makes you stop and stare at your radio are all made up entirely on the spot. Impromptu. A few might be included on the songwriter’s demo of the song, but most are invented by the studio musicians. “I think we need a little more Vince Gill in that opening,” somebody will say. “How ’bout some Alan Jackson energy on that fiddle bridge?” “Now, that’s George Strait.” For better or worse, these studio performers, having played on so many other records (musicians good enough to become session players rarely travel on the road; road musicians, like those in Wade’s band, are rarely invited to play on an album), bring the entire history of the genre into the room with them. That makes a recording session a little like “Afternoon at the Improv.”
“Doesn’t this haphazardness make you nervous?” I asked Don as the musicians started warming up. “Aren’t you worried that you won’t get it right in the few minutes you all gather to invent it?”
“Of course I’m nervous.” His vo
ice had a casual Southwestern aw-shucks quality to it. “But that’s why I live. If you’re not anxious, you’re not alive.” He paused. “And don’t forget, it’s also quite expensive to have these people here.”
And so it is. Each of these union musicians, part of the two dozen or so elite studio players in town called the A-list (on this day, one each for fiddle, drums, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, piano, and pedal steel guitar—the last being the free-standing instrument, sort of a guitar on a table, that gives country records their distinctive whine), was earning double union scale, or $500 for a three-hour session from 2-5 P.M. Then they received a catered dinner (lasagna on Monday, barbecue on Tuesday, steak on Wednesday), followed by another $500 each for an evening session from 7-10 that night. Add to that the price of the engineer—around $750 a day—an assistant, a rental fee for the studio, backup singers, and of course all that food (veal parmigiana on Thursday, salmon on Friday), and the cost of recording just the background instruments on an album in Nashville these days can top $20,000 a day. Then multiply that times eight or ten days.
Even for that cost, astronomical compared to Nashville budgets of the past (as late as 1980, a country album that sold 100,000 units was a phenomenal success; now it takes three times that just to break even), the productivity was impressive. By half past three, this de facto band, most of whom had played on Wade’s first album, as well as albums by Brooks & Dunn and the Mavericks (all produced by Don Cook), had tinkered with their instruments long enough to have devised a course of action. Don, staring into a Macintosh PowerBook with the list of songs on the screen, gave the signal to start. The engineer, Mike Bradley, who was seated on the lower level in front of the $250,000 cockpit panel, started rolling around in his chair like a mad scientist flicking switches and punching buttons. And suddenly—one, two, three, four—a deafening burst of music came pouring from the studio.
Don tapped along with his finger on the table. Mike hurriedly adjusted some levels. And Ronnie Dunn, sitting in the back, proudly swaggered up and down to the song he had written with his partner, Kix Brooks.
“We need more bass. More fiddle, too.” The instructions come at the end of the song. First from Don, then from the studio. “Hey, Bradley!” the fiddle player calls. “Can you give me more drums in my ear?” “How about some lyrics, too!” calls the drummer. “Do you want to sing higher?” Don asks. “No, that feels good,” says Wade. “Good, then give me more power in the choruses.”
After several more practices, they were ready to record. The instruments only—the tracks—were being laid at this stage. The lyrics would be rerecorded later. “Okay,” said Don, “let’s roll the tape.” The assistant disappeared into the back room. The red light went on above the door. And they recorded their first track of the day—pounding, rocking, heavier drums than the demo cut, a deeper, almost darker groove. Twice more they did it, on different strips of tape. Once a little faster. Once in a higher key, just to make sure. Each time Wade sang the lyrics, just to set the pace. “Times are hard / And the money’s tight / Day to day / We fight that fight / Nothing new / It’s the same old grind / Uphill all the way….” When they finished, Don called the entire team back into the control room.
“Was that swingin’ or what?” crowed Wade, picking up a carton of chewing tobacco and tucking a wad under his upper lip. “That sounds like a hit to me.”
“You can make Kix and Ronnie some more money,” said Don, to great laughter.
“Yeah,” Wade countered, “somebody needs to do that.”
“We were worried about Christmas,” Ronnie said.
“Okay,” Don announced when the laughter died down, “what do you say we play it back and listen?”
For most of the rest of the afternoon session, the musicians tinkered with that first track alone. They paced back and forth between the control room and studio, practiced their parts, recorded additional takes, then shuffled back behind Don’s chair to hear their work replayed on two of the largest speakers I’d ever seen. In general the mood was Sunday afternoon subdued. “I think people do their best work when they’re calm and things are peaceful,” Don explained, “and when the anxiety-provoking parts of their life are locked outside the door.” Indeed, with no windows, only one faint clock, and a giant steer skull hovering on the wall, the session had an oddly timeless feel, except for the technology, which anchored it irretractibly in the present. Elvis, in his day, didn’t have computers, nor million-dollar recording equipment. Wade Hayes had all of that and more.
When the recording age dawned in earnest in Nashville in the mid-1950s, studios were constructed like padded rooms in sanitoriums, with thick insulation in the walls, carpet on the ceiling, and foam rubber stuffed into every nook and cranny. The reason, Mike Bradley explained to me, was that all the instruments were placed into an open room and it was important that sound from one instrument not interfere with the others. “You needed things dead, so the room didn’t ring,” he said. (Like many studio veterans, he constantly peppers his speech with the studio musicians’ own private lingo: “It’s out of pocket”; “It’s overgrooved”; “Open it up”; “Bring it on down”; “There’s not enough pulse”; “There’s too much meat”; “Put the wang on it”; “Take the vibe off;” “That’ll stick ’em to their seats”; and my favorite from the week, from Wade himself, “That’ll make ’em rub some monkeys.”)
Beginning in the 1980s, though, the sound coming out of Nashville started to change: less dead, more alive. The padding was replaced with cloth wallpaper, the carpeting was removed in favor of tile, and isolation booths were constructed around the perimeter of the studio, enabling the acoustic instruments, like the guitar and piano, to be separated from the harder instruments, like the electric guitar and drums. “Back then drums weren’t nearly as predominant in records as they are now,” explained Mike, himself a roly-poly, soft-spoken man who had been working as an engineer on Music Row for twenty years and was recently awarded the first-ever Engineer of the Year Award from Music Row magazine. “You wanted them to sound good, but they weren’t as much of the overall sound. We are looking now for a big bright roomy drum sound, where you can actually use the room. When I record the drums these days I actually put room mikes out so that I can record how they make sound in the room, not just the way they sound six inches away from the microphone.”
Other changes were made as well. The bright orange and red lights of the past were replaced with softer bulbs—75- and 100-watt—and subtler colors—blues and grays. (“With softer light, I think you can stay in here longer without feeling you’re in a Kroger,” Mike said.) A series of RPG defusers—small panels of wood arranged at different depths, like children’s blocks—were suspended from the ceiling to disperse sound. And the dense exterior walls were rebuilt using three sheets of common drywall separated by fiberglass sound-deadening boards. Though much more effective in keeping out street sounds, these walls are still not completely impenetrable to low-grade rumbling, which explains why many studio owners in Nashville rose up in protest when Reba McEntire announced her intention to build a helicopter landing pad on top of her new management palazzo on Music Row. Faced with such pressure, Reba backed down and the biggest threats to pristine sound nowadays are the chokings and honkings of tourist RVs that drive the wrong way down Music Row’s one-way maze. “Harry, look, there’s MCA.” “Oh, my God, there’s Wynonna’s truck!”
The net effect of all these changes is that studios these days yield a more urgent, snappier sound. “If you go into the hallway out there and holler against the wall, it’s going to bounce back and you’re going to hear a slapback,” Mike said. “If that wall, instead of being flat, has different angles on it, like those in the studio, you’re going to get reflections bouncing back in different directions, at different times, making what you hear sound less blunt, like when you’re in your shower.”
“Is that why shower acoustics are so good?” I asked him.
“I wouldn’t say the
y’re good. It’s a square chamber, and parallel walls are the biggest dangers in acoustics because anything that’s parallel allows waves to bounce back and forth. Instead of being defused, they just keep going. It produces flutters that are hard to use.”
“So, in fact, people think they sound good in the shower when actually they sound worse?”
“It sounds good in the sense that you have a natural reverb, but if you try to record in the shower you’re going to hear what we call ‘flutter tones.’ This studio, because the walls are not parallel, gives you something more usable.”
After several takes spread out over several hours, Don Cook was satisfied that they had a usable version of the song, a basic track of all the instruments that could then be slowly improved. Here’s where the benefits—and perhaps the drawbacks—of modern technology became apparent. With the basic track laid, the musicians were released from the studio and wandered into the lounge, where they nibbled on Chex, sucked on cherry fireballs, and watched endless loops of “Headline News.” From there they were summoned back to their places one at a time, where they replayed their parts—over and over—until each note was perfect and each lick unblemished. The steel guitar player in particular, Bruce Bouton, took so long at this stage that a few of his colleagues snuck out to run errands. “If a doctor told me I had six months to live,” Don Cook joked, “I’d spend it with a steel player ’cause it’d feel like two years.”
