音樂錄像 亞里安OMD with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

2010年6月8日

上世紀八十年代，來自英國利物浦的電子樂隊Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark，簡稱OMD，雖則以Orchestra自稱，實在只有四位成員，以低音結他手兼主音Andy McCluskey及鍵琴手兼主音Paul Humphreys為首，再加上鼓手及鍵琴手，早期OMD作品甚重post-punk風格，且經常引入一些實驗元素，跟當代其他英倫syn-pop電子組合不一樣。OMD於1986年推出The Pacific Age後便告解散，到上世紀九十年代變成Andy McCluskey一人繼續以OMD之名出過三張專輯。

直至2007年Andy McCluskey公布有關OMD重組消息，並以最原裝的四人陣容再度合作，他們開始為巡迴演出忙個不停，去年6月20日，OMD更以這個電幻古典演唱會來慶祝出道三十周年，並邀請Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra同台演出，在他們的家鄉Liverpool Philharmonic Hall內演出，這可說是OMD名副其實跟Orchestra碰上的第一次，共玩了十四首新舊選曲，全程交由管弦大樂團來重新解構編曲，Andy McCluskey負責主唱及低音結他，Paul Humphreys亦繼續邊彈電子琴邊唱。個人而言，由於OMD刻意沒有將自家的電子編曲跟樂團互動，感覺上總是有點若有所失。沒錯，當聽到Joan Of Arc、Souvenir及Maid Of Orleans這幾首本身極之莊嚴神聖的瑰麗經典，配套宏亮壯闊的管弦樂編曲，確有度身訂造的懾人氣魄。反觀深入民心的電子名作如Enola Gay、Electricity及Messages等，換上硬生生的古典新變奏，加入不太合襯的銅管樂吹奏，根本就衣不稱身，愈聽愈有不對勁之感。這令我想起之前譚校長的《愛的根源》專輯全新灌錄版本，玩中樂古典新編曲，同樣不倫不類，尷尬非常。值得一提，演唱會第二部分名為The Energy Suite，從英國著名設計名師Peter Saville的裝置設計出發，五首全新音樂作品Gas、Water、Air、Nuclear及Coal，代表英國及威爾斯五個不同能源發電廠之意，以音樂宣揚環保訊息，期待中除了OMD即將推出的全新專輯History Of Modern外，還有10月16日出席上海世博的演唱會。

亞里安｜音樂錄像

黃奇智 苦了月亮

2010年1月25日

電影《天水圍的日與夜》終結時是一個中秋賞月的場面：維多利亞公園的大草地上燭光點點，草地上滿坐着人，小孩子提着燈籠到處跑。幽暗而華麗的場景，背後響起的卻是上海年代的國語流行曲《明月千里寄相思》，音色矇矇矓曨的，分明來自另一個時代。

便 也想，既是當下的香港，要用國語歌曲，怎不找一首新近一點的，比如說，鄧麗君的《但願人長久》：蘇軾的詞，旋律配樂比較當代，錄音也更清晰、先進，聽上去 的感覺絢爛，跟畫面上燈火輝煌的2000年代香港高樓大廈和熱鬧場面也更配合。要說「寄相思」、「但願人長久，千里共嬋娟」，不是比「請明月代問候，思念 的人兒淚常流」，或是「請明月代傳信，寄我片紙兒慰離情」更能涵蓋「每逢佳節倍思親」的意義麼？

最近，因上海老牌歌星吳鶯音逝世，電台老歌節目和老歌歌迷們又把她的首本名曲《明月千里寄相思》拿出來大談特談。歌曲錄製於 1948 年，正是改朝換代的前夕。沒多久大批北人南下，「寄相思」，想是來到異地，憑歌寄意，抒發無限鄉愁的手段吧。

當 年的上海老歌（或稱「時代曲」），總帶有一點幽怨的情韻。為遠方情郎嘆息落淚的深閨怨女，也彷彿是一個很惹人遐思的形象。一位朋友在報上撰文懷念吳鶯音， 不免也提及這首「人隔千里路悠悠，未曾遙問心已愁」、「桌上寒燈光不明，伴我獨坐苦孤零」的《明月千里寄相思》。當年朋友的世叔伯們背着小孩談這歌，往往 談得涕淚交流。未曾親身經歷，這份似是過了頭的感傷沒法兒了解。托月色寄離思，自古的詩詞裏屢見不鮮。可是這般的哀怨感傷，令月色也添上化不開的苦澀，對 月亮未免有點兒不公平吧？

另有一首歌，寫於 1950 年代初的香港。那時南下的「北人」在香港耽久了，開始有些兒有家歸不得的憂慮了，寫鄉愁，就多了好些具體的感受：「遠去的愛情好像月光，它好似偎依在你身 旁，卻是這般渺茫」—疑真似幻，若即若離，這首虛無飄渺的《遙遠寄相思》，道盡了有家不能歸，記憶猶深卻無法觸摸的鄉愁。奈何演唱的張伊雯名氣不及吳鶯 音，樂曲的編排聽起來也不如《明月千里寄相思》的工整，雖然都是熱門歌曲，風頭卻給吳鶯音搶盡了。

豐子愷有一幅畫，上邊畫着擺了一把茶壺和 三只茶杯的桌面，欄杆外竹簾捲起，天上掛着新月一鈎。畫上的題詞是：「人散後，一鈎新月天如水」。看這畫，但覺穹蒼萬里，開闊中帶着好多微妙的層次—是惆 悵，還是兩三知己暢談，遺留下來愜意的餘韻？悠閒恬靜，這內中是否也帶有些憶故人的離思？

無窮回味，這向來是一幅很喜愛的畫。起碼，這裏邊的月亮不苦。

【列印文章】

Classic Tracks: Blondie 'Hanging On The Telephone'

Producer: Mike Chapman • Engineer: Peter Coleman
Published in SOS June 2008


The partnership between Blondie and producer Mike Chapman created a perfect pop record - and catapulted the group from the underground to mainstream chart success.

Richard Buskin

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Photo: GEMS/Redferns

If Blondie's Parallel Lines album was the New York erstwhile-punk band's finest hour (all 38 minutes of it) and a perfect encapsulation of top-drawer, high-tech 1978 pop-rock, then it also marked the career apex of its producer, Mike Chapman, a man who had already established himself with a form of music that has come to define its era.

In popular music terms, the 1970s was a decade that swung wildly from glam, reggae, progressive and AOR to metal, disco, corporate, punk, new wave, neo-mod and pure pop. And there, at both the start and end, was composer/producer Chapman, crafting glam rock — with writing partner Nicky Chinn — by way of acts like the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud, and then classic power pop on his own with Blondie, Pat Benatar and the Knack.

'Co-Co', 'Poppa Joe', 'Little Willy', 'Wig-Wam Bam', 'Block Buster' and 'Ballroom Blitz' by the Sweet; Suzi Quatro's 'Can The Can' and 'Devil Gate Drive'; Mud's 'Dyna-Mite' and 'Tiger Feet' — all are synonymous with the visual excesses of glittery jackets, flared trousers and platform shoes as much as they are with the glam music that melded pop melodies with crunching, fuzzy guitars and heavy drums, bathed in a sound that was a throwback to Sun Records in the mid-'50s. Featuring catchy songs often performed by talented musicians, the 'Chinnichap' formula certainly worked during the halcyon period of 1973-74, when it accounted for 19 Top 40 UK singles, including five chart toppers. And when glam's sparkle had faded, Chapman then caught a second wave with his aforementioned solo productions. Not that the partnership with Chinn had ever really been about songwriting once the hits began rolling in.
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From The Club To The Charts

"I first met Nicky in late 1969 when I was working as a waiter in the discotheque of a London club called Tramp," recalls Chapman, a native Australian who had relocated to the UK in June 1967, at the height of flower power. "That was the last real job I ever had. I was in a struggling band named Tangerine Peel and needed to do something to pay the rent. I'd been writing pop songs for a couple of years — all of which was second nature to me, having grown up listening to 'Peggy Sue', 'That'll Be The Day', 'Wake Up Little Susie', 'Blue Suede Shoes' and so on — and by 1969 I felt like I was on the right track. At the same time, Nicky was a regular customer at Tramp; a rich English kid with nothing better to do than go out every night and dance very badly. After he told me he'd heard I was in a band and that he, too, was a songwriter, I took my guitar to his apartment in Mayfair and we set about trying to write together.
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"Over the next two weeks we knocked out four little pop songs, but I quickly discovered that Nicky's musical taste was completely different from mine, and that would cause us a lot of problems as the years went on. He was into James Taylor, Carole King and Joni Mitchell — all of the things that I couldn't stand. I appreciate them now, but at that point, never having been much of an album buyer, I was more into great pop songs like the Archies' 'Sugar, Sugar' and all of the Creedence Clearwater material; anything with a big old hook, guitars and a great beat. The minute I saw him, David Bowie also influenced me, as did Marc Bolan in about 1970, but Nicky Chinn didn't understand any of that. I had to explain to him what it was all about while he'd sit there with a blank look on his face and ask me, 'Have you heard the new Joni Mitchell album?'

"One night, after I'd quit the job at Tramp to concentrate on my songwriting, we were sitting in Nicky's apartment and he said, 'Why don't we call Mickie Most?' I'd been talking about how great Mickie was, and so we looked in the phone book and there he was. I said, 'I'm not calling him. You call him,' so Nicky called, Mickie answered the phone, and he said, 'Sure, come in tomorrow and play me your songs.' The next day we went to his office — a huge, square room on Oxford Street, with a desk in each corner facing toward the middle. Mickie was sitting at one desk, blasting out music; Peter Grant, who was managing Led Zeppelin, was at another, making deals and cursing people in all four corners of the world; and then there was Ronnie Madison, who was trying to do the accounts; and Dave Most, Mickie's brother, who was a promo man, screaming at radio guys. I'd never seen anything like it."

While all this was going on, Chapman attempted to play five songs that he and Chinn had written, only for Mickie Most to stop him after about eight bars of each of the first four numbers, muttering, 'No, no, no, no.' Feeling dejected, Chapman nevertheless managed to make it all the way through the fifth song, a number titled 'Tom Tom Turnaround', and at the end of his performance Most asserted, "That's a hit." Which it was, after he cut it with an Australian trio named New World.
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The Glam Rock Sound
After Richard Dodd recorded the very first sessions with the Sweet, Peter Coleman was Chapman's full-time engineer all the way through the 1970s, helping him to shape the aforementioned glam rock sound that had been influenced by Tony Visconti's productions of T-Rex, which themselves had been influenced by records of the late-'50s and early-'60s.
"For me, a track like 'Ride A White Swan' was pure magic," Chapman says. "Its groove epitomised what I was trying to accomplish, and then, when I heard 'Hot Love', it was like, 'Oh, my God, that's it.' So Visconti was a big influence on me in terms of the sonic approach, while the grooves all came from the mid-to-late-'50s. On top of that, it was about what could be done with the drums to make them sound a bit different from everybody else, as well as how freaky we could get with the guitars and vocals. There was that kind of slapback echo sound together with very '70s-sounding rock guitars, and it was the combination of those elements that became the blueprint for glam rock, which all came out at once with Gary Glitter. Mike Leander put all of the elements together, as did Slade to a certain extent.
"Still, if you listen to those records side by side, they're all different. They all have the same sort of vibe to them, but none of the drum sounds are alike, none of the guitar sounds are alike, none of the vocal sounds are alike. All of us producers were trying very hard to sound different from one another, even though we were following the same path, and it's pretty hard to do that. When I listen to the emo kids these days, I can't tell the difference between one band and another, and that's because producers aren't trying to be different anymore, they're just trying to do what everybody else is doing. Back in 1973 and 1974, the challenge was 'Let's have a hit, but for God's sake, let's make it sound different to Gary Glitter, T-Rex and Slade.' For my part, I had the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud going all at once, and I had to make all three of them sound different, which they did."
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Hit Factory

"I understood why Mickie liked that song," Chapman says. "It was different to the other four that Nicky and I had written together. Nicky didn't write melodies, he saw himself as a lyricist, and those songs contained a lot of his lyrics. On the other hand, 'Tom Tom Turnaround' marked the beginning of me coming up with titles that would prompt him to look at me and go, 'What's all that about?' You can imagine what he said when I told him I was going to write songs with titles like 'Can The Can', '48 Crash' and 'Ballroom Blitz'.
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Photo: Roberta Bayley
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.

From 1970 to 1975, New World, the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud all required three hits a year, and the responsibility for this basically fell to Mike Chapman — an annual total of 12 hits.

"If somebody asked me to do that now I'd run screaming," he says. "I don't know how on earth I managed to do it, but I pulled it off. I was so focused on what I needed to do next, whether it was the next hit for the Sweet, Suzi Quatro or Mud, or whether Mickie needed another song for New World, like 'Living Next Door To Alice' before I cut it with Smokie. I was constantly aware of the requirements and my head was just full of all these bizarre words. They'd pop into my head and suddenly I'd go, 'That's it, that's the song.'

"In the beginning, with the first half-dozen songs that Nicky and I wrote together, I'd compose the melodies because he didn't have any musical knowledge. I'd play guitar, he'd sit there with a pen and paper, and we'd come up with the words together. But then, as the songs became more and more bizarre, it was pretty much me sitting there and writing these tunes while he didn't have a clue what the hell I was doing. It was impossible for me to explain what a title meant when I didn't know the meaning myself. And it's also very difficult to actually write a song with somebody who doesn't know what you're talking about to start with.

"So, pretty much what happened from that point was Nicky would go out and hustle the records, calling the record companies and chasing the promo guys. He was really, really good at that, and I couldn't have done it. His role in the partnership was never really to write songs with me or produce the records. It was to take care of the business side of things. That was his forté. And from 'Can The Can' onwards his contributions to the songs became less and less. He'd be out and about all day, I'd be sitting in his apartment with the guitar, and when he'd come back and ask, 'What have you got?' I'd generally have most of the song written. Then, once I had a first verse and chorus, he'd understand where I was going and he would sit down and try to help me with the words... There's a wonderful photo of us in the studio with Suzi, where I'm sitting at the console and he's in a corner reading the Financial Times."
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New Beginnings

As his relationships soured with both Nicky Chinn, with whom he didn't see eye to eye, and the Sweet, who appreciated neither his pop sensibilities nor his autocratic work methods, Mike Chapman determined to "get the hell out of England," and in 1975 he relocated to Los Angeles. There, while still churning out the hits for Smokie and Suzi Quatro, he could focus on a US market that hadn't afforded him much success, and it was in 1977 that Terry Ellis asked for Chapman's feedback on Blondie, who he was thinking of signing. Chapman subsequently saw the band play on three successive nights at the Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. After his rave review prompted the Chrysalis boss to purchase Blondie's contract from Private Stock Records, reissue their eponymous 1976 debut album and release the 1977 follow-up, Plastic Letters, Chapman was hired to produce the third LP.

By then, working with Mud, Suzi Quatro and Smokie, he had already produced albums containing others' material. Parallel Lines, on the other hand, was the first such project on which he contributed none of the songs. Instead, he was assigned by Terry Ellis to ensure that what Blondie brought to the summer 1978 sessions evolved into hit material, and ensure this he did. Following its release in September of that year, the album would hit number one in the UK chart, peak at number six in the US, and yield chart-topping singles in the form of 'Heart Of Glass' in the US and UK and 'Sunday Girl' in the UK, where 'Picture This' reached number 12 and 'Hanging On The Telephone' peaked at number five.

"I wasn't being used as a songwriter, but as a song manipulator and song construction consultant/technician," Chapman says. "There was a lot of stuff that needed to be put together, because as loose as the band were, their songs were even looser. Of course, being that I'd started out as someone who wasn't really into albums but into writing singles, I had done a complete turnaround, and I was loving every minute of it. You see, by then the only writing responsibilities I had were to come up with a hit or two each year for both Suzi Quatro and Smokie, and those were easy gigs because they were nice people to work with. There was no suffering on those sessions. Blondie, on the other hand, was all about suffering."
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Mud, Sweet & Suzi Quatro
It was through Nicky Chinn's own efforts that he and Mike Chapman became involved with the Sweet. This was after Chapman followed Chinn's advice to have a proper band demo their songs in the studio rather than record them himself on a small Revox multitrack tape machine. One of those songs was titled 'Funny Funny', and although not intended for the Sweet, it subsequently became the group's first hit after Mickie Most made a rare slip by allowing them to sign with RCA.
"Here was a Deep Purple-type rock band with a song called 'Funny Funny', but it was on the charts and that's all I cared about," Chapman remarks. "Then again, Phil Wainman was the producer, and it was difficult for me when we were cutting it in the studio. The song was in my head, I'd be trying to tell him what to do, and he ended up telling me to go sit in the back of the control room or leave the control room altogether. 'I'm the producer,' he'd say. 'Go away, you're getting on my nerves.' 'OK, sorry,' I'd reply. 'It's just that the song's in my head and I'd like to help you.'
"As the hits went on I slowly but surely inched my way closer to the console, and I started producing full-on in 1972 when Mickie Most called and asked me to work with Suzi Quatro. He had cut a few things with her but just couldn't find the right style, and to my surprise he called me at home one night and asked me to write a song for her and produce it. This was his big new artist that he'd found, and he handed me the opportunity on a plate. I was so excited. Within two days I came up with 'Can The Can', and a week or two later I was producing Suzi in the studio. Then, having decided we needed another band, Mud came along right after that, and so now I was producing Mud and Suzi Quatro, and also having a lot more to do with the Sweet's production as we got into tracks like 'Wig-Wam Bam' and 'Ballroom Blitz'."
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Meet The Band

"The Blondies were tough in the studio, real tough. None of them liked each other, except Chris and Debbie, and there was so much animosity. They were really, really juvenile in their approach to life — a classic New York underground rock band — and they didn't give a f*ck about anything. They just wanted to have fun and didn't want to work too hard getting it."

For Parallel Lines, the group's line-up comprised lead singer Debbie Harry, Clem Burke on drums, guitarists Chris Stein and Frank Infante, English bassist Nigel Harrison and keyboard player Jimmy Destri. Yet, even though Chapman loved Blondie's first two albums and was enamored with the group members' offbeat sense of humour, he doesn't mince his words with regard to what he describes as "musically the worst band I ever worked with."

"The only great musician among them was Frankie Infante," he asserts. "He's an amazing guitarist. The rest of them were all over the bloody place. Jimmy Destri was a pretty good songwriter, but he wasn't a great keyboard player. What he did, he did well, and I didn't ever try to push him beyond that because I knew there wasn't anything beyond that. Chris Stein was always so stoned, and although Clem Burke had all the right ideas, he had no sense of timing. I mean, he had a lot of ability, but I always felt he was trying too hard, and that's what I used to tell him.
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Mike Chapman with Debbie Harry and Ronnie Spector, who was visiting the session, and whose presence apparently made Debbie very nervous when doing vocal takes for 'Fade Away And Radiate'.
Mike Chapman with Debbie Harry and Ronnie Spector, who was visiting the session, and whose presence apparently made Debbie very nervous when doing vocal takes for 'Fade Away And Radiate'.

"If you're going to use the Keith Moon approach, you'd better be able to pull it off, because if you don't it's just going to be a shambles. Sure, there were some timing discrepancies on some of those Who records, but Keith Moon had the ability to do all that manic stuff and keep the groove solid at the same time. Clem hadn't learned how to do that yet — he would later on — and so although Nigel was a very competent bass player the rhythm section was totally out of whack.

"Nigel actually brought a lot to the table. He brought terrific songwriting, a sense of humour, and the fact that he was English added another dimension to the band. He got along great with Debbie and OK with Chris, whereas Chris never wanted Frankie in the band. The fact was, Frankie made Chris look like a terrible guitar player. Then again, I loved Chris, and I worked very, very hard with him for years and years because I felt he deserved my time. He, to me, was a wonderful, wonderful songwriter, a great songwriter, and he was always so concerned about his playing ability. I'd say to him, 'Why would you even worry about that when you're such a great songwriter? You can't be everything. Let Frankie play those solos.'

"He didn't like that idea, and so I'd send everybody else out of the studio and I would sit with Chris for hours and hours; just me recording and him playing to get all his parts right. I wanted him to get his parts right because I knew that was important to him. To this day, when he listens to those records, he knows the work that was put in and he's proud of it. And thank God we did that. I think a lot of other producers would have said, 'No, you're not playing that part right. I'll bring in a studio player.' But that was never an option with Blondie.

"Debbie is a great singer and a great vocal stylist, with a beautifully identifiable voice. However, she's also very moody. I love Debbie and I learned a lot from her about the psychology of recording vocals. Up until her I had been pretty barbaric in my approach to vocalists, like 'Get out there and sing!' Once I encountered Debbie, I learned how to soft-shoe it a little more. The vocals I got out of her I really had to fight for psychologically, and when I listen to them now I remember those sessions very clearly. They were tough times, with a lot of tears, a lot of disappearing into the bathroom for hours. She's a very emotional person and those songs meant a lot to her. When she was on — bang, it all happened really quickly. She'd never had to work hard in the recording studio prior to meeting me. She'd go in and do one pass and that was it. I'd have her out there, singing over and over again, until I felt that she had lost the plot, at which point I'd say, 'OK, that's it for today, let's try it again tomorrow.'

"Things like that didn't sit too well with her in the beginning, but it worked in the end. Musically, Blondie were hopelessly horrible when we first began rehearsing for Parallel Lines, and in terms of my attitude they didn't know what had hit them. I basically went in there like Adolf Hitler and said, 'You are going to make a great record, and that means you're going to start playing better.'"
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Blonde Ambition

"On Parallel Lines, I was given the responsibility by Terry Ellis to put this band at the top of the charts. He knew they could achieve that and I knew it, too, but I also knew that, given how they were when I began working with them, it might never happen. Terry said, 'Can you do it, Mike?' and I said, 'Yes, I can.' He said, 'OK, I'm going to leave you alone. You've got six months.' So I had to go in there and knock this band into shape."

In the event, the album took six weeks, not months, to record at the Record Plant in New York, before Mike Chapman and Peter Coleman opted to get away from the big city by taking care of the manual mix on an obscure Sphere console during about 10 days at a small studio named Forum in Covington, Kentucky. Indeed, since only five weeks were initially booked at the Record Plant, the final recording sessions were switched from that facility's Studio A to what Chapman now describes as "the slummy room at the top. It was a real bomb of a studio, but hey, a case of whatever we could get... There was an API console in the room that we started in, the main monitors were Westlakes, and we recorded to 24-track.
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Suffering the effects of Mike Chapman's incredibly high playback volume during mixing for Parallel Lines.
Suffering the effects of Mike Chapman's incredibly high playback volume during mixing for Parallel Lines.

"Back then, I liked pretty much any speakers that were big and loud. For nearfields, the only thing we had in those days were Auratones, and we'd normally just use one of those to check out the sound in mono, since we still had AM radio playing number one records. Then again, having grown up listening to everything on '11', I'd turn things up as loud as they could go, thinking that if it felt good and sounded good at that level it must be right. That having been said, for the early records that I produced in England I was always working on Neve consoles, and they all had that little mono speaker. Well, we would check all of our mixes back on that tiny little mono speaker. It sounded dreadful, but if your mix was good coming out of that, and at 4000 watts, then you knew you'd got it right."

Not as informed about — or interested in — recording technology as he would become once computers entered the scene, Chapman would usually remedy a sonic problem by instructing engineer Peter Coleman to "just keep turning the knobs and I'll tell you when it's right."

"I used to act dumb by using a lot of that terminology in the studio," he now admits. "I did that for two reasons: I wasn't very technically proficient because I just hadn't paid enough attention over the years; and with most bands, especially Blondie, it was important for them to see me as somebody who was fighting for performance rather than trying to make them sound spectacularly hi-fi. I was there as one of the foot soldiers."

Evidently, this approach paid off. "He was a very good producer," Jimmy Destri later remarked. "He wasn't very technical, but he was very organic and he was a very good mixer on his own, too. I mean, he knew the console like nobody else I've ever seen. He would say things like, 'Jimmy, if you shut out the lights I'll be able to EQ by ear' without even looking at the console! He taught me a lot about making records, that's what Mike did. And he was another member of the band at that point, and he was just like in there with us. And from Parallel Lines and onwards, Mike was integral, he was really integral, as we couldn't go in the studio without him. As far as the recording process of those albums goes, we all learned a lot from Mike."

Not that his input was always appreciated. Tension was often a part of Blondie's make-up, and during the Parallel Lines sessions Nigel Harrison and Mike Chapman butted heads when the producer kept pushing the bass player to improve his performance.

"We almost came to blows," Chapman recalls. "He told me, 'Shut the f*ck up! What do you know? I'm trying my best,' to which I responded, 'Well, it's not good enough.' Still, no matter who I pissed off — and Jimmy was certainly among them — the Blondies all basically knew I would get it right. They sometimes didn't like the procedure, they didn't like the amount of time they had to spend doing it, but after we'd finished Parallel Lines they understood why I did what I did and they were all very proud of the record."
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Heart Of Glass

In geometric terms, parallel lines conform to a pattern but they don't connect, and neither do the characters in most of the songs on the aforementioned album: Harrison and Harry's 'One Way Or Another'; Destri, Harry and Stein's 'Picture This'; Harry's 'Just Go Away'; Stein's 'Sunday Girl' and 'Fade Away And Radiate'; Harry and Stein's 'Pretty Baby' and 'Heart Of Glass'; even non-band-member Jack Lee's 'Hanging On The Telephone'.

These were supplemented by Infante's 'I Know But I Don't Know', Destri's '11:59', Lee's 'Will Anything Happen' and an energetic cover of Buddy Holly and the Crickets' 'I'm Gonna Love You Too'. And as directed by Mike Chapman and adorned with Deborah Harry's slut-next-door appeal, this added up to a platinum-selling album. Yet only some of the songs were completely written when the participants first entered the studio.
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Blondie guitarist Frank Infante and bass player Nigel Harrison supporting Mike Chapman.
Blondie guitarist Frank Infante and bass player Nigel Harrison supporting Mike Chapman.

"Debbie and Chris had a great set of ears," says Chapman. "When they said they wanted to record a song, I never said, 'No', even if it was an outside song, and in this case there were three of those numbers right from the start. 'Heart Of Glass', on the other hand, was called 'Once I Had A Love' and they had it in a lot of different versions, but it wasn't right in any form."

Originally recorded by the band in 1975 with a relatively slow tempo and blues/reggae vibe, 'Once I Had A Love (aka The Disco Song)' made its way onto a digitally remastered 2001 reissue of Parallel Lines courtesy of a 1978 Chapman-produced demo.

"After they'd played me the covers, as well as some of their sketchy song ideas, I decided the first thing we should work on was 'Once I Had A Love'," Chapman now recalls. "I thought that track was the one that probably needed the most attention, because even though it was complete, it was wrong, and I knew that if we could get it right it might be a big hit. So there we were on the first day of rehearsals, in some little hole-in-the-wall on the Lower East Side, and all of the band members were being very, very cautious about having a new producer. This was not their idea, they would have gone back to Richard Gottehrer. And although they knew who I was and what I'd accomplished, they didn't quite understand what was going to happen. Neither did I.

"In discussing what to do with 'Once I Had A Love' I tried to include everybody, and after we played it a few times I said, 'Let's get rid of the reggae.' We then tried to do it as straight rock, but that didn't work, and I could see Debbie was getting a bit frustrated. So, I asked her, 'Debbie, what kind of music that's happening right now really turns you on?' She said, 'Donna Summer.' I said, 'OK, then how about us treating this song like it was meant for Donna Summer?' Thay all looked at me as if to say, 'What?' I said, 'Well, it's disco, right?' 'Yeah, it's disco,' they mumbled, but when Debbie then said, 'I like disco,' the others basically went along with it.

"Anyway, we fooled around with the song, and after a couple of hours of very intensive work we had it sounding pretty much the way it sounds today. We had a little Roland drum machine, and I said, 'Why don't we just put a groove together in this and play along to it?'

"At the same time, we also changed the title. I said, 'You can't call it 'Once I Had A Love'. The hook line in there is 'heart of glass'. Let's call it 'Heart Of Glass'.' So that's how the song evolved, and after leaving the studio that day all of us were on the street, getting cabs or whatever, and Debbie walked alongside me and said, 'Mike, I really like what you did with 'Heart Of Glass'.' 'Thanks, Deb.' 'You're welcome.' We had broken the ice. Still, recording 'Heart Of Glass' was tortuous. In those days, we didn't have MIDI, so we used the Roland drum machine and, because I added a time change in the middle, I had to actually sing through the song with that thing going at the same time, and then press the button to stop and start it again so that we were on the right beat."
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Group Dynamics

"You see, 'Heart Of Glass' was the only track that we put together piece by piece. Everything else was played together as a band, and since we didn't use click tracks for that whole album I set up a mic in the middle of the room. Debbie didn't want to sing scratch vocals, and I didn't want her to, either, because it would have blasted her voice. So while she and Peter Coleman sat in the control room and laughed at me, I would be in the live area with the rest of the band, keeping time and singing scratch vocals for all of the songs. I was isolated and wore a set of headphones, and I'd say, 'OK, here we go. Count it off, Clem, and watch me for your time.' Then I'd launch straight into it, getting very nasally while screaming and jumping up and down, and when I'd look into the control room Debbie would be in fits of laughter because I looked so stupid. We didn't have video cameras in those days — I wish we had. It was entertainment for her.
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The track sheet for 'Hanging On The Telephone'. Note track 24...
The track sheet for 'Hanging On The Telephone'. Note track 24...

"I had all the energy that the band needed. You know, 'Just take the energy from me.' That's why I liked to stand in the middle of the room with them and conduct and sing and scream and jump up and down. I didn't care if it ended up leaking onto the drum mics so long as the performance was right and the groove felt good. Never mind if I was completely out of tune. I'm sure that the vibe I gave off was part of the reason they were able to put that into the track.

"I basically served as the drum machine on most of the songs, whereas on 'Heart Of Glass' we used the Roland. It took us ages to get that part right. Then, when it came to the real drums, we had to record them one piece at a time, which none of us had ever done before. They were all looking at me like, 'Wow, this is cool. We're experimenting.' I said, 'Let's just have fun with this,' and by the end of that first day we had all of Clem's drums down. We put the kick drum down first, then a hi-hat after that, followed by a snare... He didn't want to do it this way at all, and he was very, very moody, but Debbie and Chris were running the show and they said, 'Just do it.' He hated it, and he probably still does, but at the end of that first day we had a great drum track and we all knew it.

"After that we put down sequenced parts with various different keyboards, trying to incorporate that Donna Summer vibe, and then we added lots of Chris's guitars with echoes on them. At that point I realised everybody was actually having fun with this track. Having made hit records for the past seven years, I had a handle on what I was trying to accomplish, and I knew that with each piece that we added we were getting closer and closer to our goal — which was to have this incredible track that didn't sound like anything else. It was a combination of all sorts of different things, and although Debbie's voice and the song's structure meant it was Blondie, it was Blondie as they had never sounded before. When Debbie sang it, she really did become Donna Summer, and I thought it was good that the track wasn't like anything else that was on the album."
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One Way Or Another

At the Record Plant, the recording setup for Parallel Lines was a traditional one. The drums were miked with a Neumann U47 on the kick and KM84s on the toms, snare and hi-hat, along with a couple of U87s overhead.

"After the basic track was cut, we'd go through the whole thing and tighten up the kick drum with the snare, by way of pencil erasing," Chapman says. "That meant using a pencil to hold the tape away from the head and erasing up to the kick drum. If a bass part was ahead of the kick, you could erase it so that it sounded like it was on top of the kick. That's very easy to do these days, but back then it was quite a procedure just to get the bottom end sounding nice and tight."

While the bass combined a DI signal with that from Nigel Harrison's amp, and the DI/amp method was also applied to recording Jimmy Destri's Farfisa synth, Frank Infante's Les Paul was recorded with a combination of Shure SM57 and AKG 414 mics on his Marshall cabinet.

"Chris had all kinds of weird and wonderful guitars," Chapman remembers, "and he also had some weird amps, although he liked Fenders, too. He didn't care so long as it sounded good in the control room."

Once the basic track was recorded, this would be followed by the lead vocal, backing vocals and then overdubs, and while there'd be plenty of the latter on subsequent albums, in the case of Parallel Lines it was rare for a song to utilise all 24 tracks. Not that this was always obvious in advance. Many of the songs, such as 'Sunday Girl', 'Picture This' and 'One Way Or Another', were still only half-written when the rehearsals took place, the last-mentioned simply comprising a riff with no melody or lyrics.

"Debbie started writing that song during the rehearsals and it was finished just prior to going into the studio," Chapman explains. "Then again, I don't think the lyrics to 'Sunday Girl' were written until we got to the studio, and the same probably applied to 'Picture This'. I also remember 'Fade Away And Radiate' being very sketchy at the rehearsal and Chris repeatedly saying, 'I want to get Robert Fripp, I want to get Robert Fripp'. I was thinking, 'Oh heavens, no! Who knows what he'll do?' As things turned out, having his guitar part was a good idea.

"'Pretty Baby' was in fairly good shape, but, as with many of the songs, Debbie didn't finish writing the lyrics until we were in the studio. In fact, a lot of the time she was still scratching out lyrics when I was asking her, 'Are you ready to sing?' 'Yeah, just a minute...' Some classic songs were quickly knocked out like that by our Debbie."
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Modern Times: Mike Chapman Today
"It's like the old days for me," says Mike Chapman with regard to producing LA 'blast pop' band the Automatic Music Explosion, among numerous recent new-artist projects. "Unlike alternative groups like the White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who I think are wonderful, today's emo-style bands are so contrived, all doing the same thing as each other. There's nothing special about them, whereas AME is like stepping back into the past with a fresh approach. It's pure pop music, they're great musicians, they put on a great live show and the whole album rocks like hell."
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Mike Chapman in his home studio in Conneticut with current project, the Automatic Music Explosion.
Mike Chapman in his home studio in Conneticut with current project, the Automatic Music Explosion.
That's quite an endorsement from a man who, in addition to following Parallel Lines with three more Blondie albums — Eat To The Beat (1979), Autoamerican (1980) and The Hunter (1982) — helmed projects during the '80s and '90s by Deborah Harry, the Divinyls, Lita Ford, Rod Stewart, Altered Images and Bow Wow Wow. After splitting with songwriting partner Nicky Chinn, Chapman also enjoyed compositional success with Tina Turner's 'Simply The Best' and Pat Benatar's 'Love Is A Battlefield' (both co-written with Holly Knight). And now, based on the East Coast, with a resumé that includes 140 Top Ten hits and estimated worldwide sales of 350 million records, he has "fallen in love with the whole package" that comprises AME: singer/songwriter/guitarist Matt Starr, lead guitarist Chris Price, bass player Jeff Covey, drummer The Max and singer/tambourine player Jodie Schell.
"Jodie's got an awesome presence onstage and an amazing, animal-like voice that can also sound cool, controlled and extremely sexy," he remarks. "When I saw Matt Starr basically running the show with his boundless energy, I knew that all I had to do was make a great record. We all know, in this day and age, that the music business is floundering. Nobody knows what they're doing, nobody knows where it's going, and everybody's so focused on so many things that nobody's focused on anything. With this band, and a number of other bands that I'm contemplating working with right now, all I need to do is focus on what I've always focused on: great songs and making a great pop record. And if I can pull that off, then no matter what the business is doing there will be a place for it.
"I believe that the old fashioned way of making pop records is still the best way, and so we cut these tracks on two-inch tape and dumped everything into the 48-track Otari Radar setup at my house where, in a Westlake-style room that I designed, there's also a 48-channel SSL K-Series console, two Otari MTR90 multitrack machines and a full-blown HD Pro Tools setup — I don't use Pro Tools, but since everybody else does, I have that to transfer stuff into my Radar. While the main speakers are custom-designed Radians, I still use [Yamaha] NS10s to monitor, and I recorded AME all-live just the same way as I've always done it, in the room together, and then comp'd each song from the best two or three takes.
"They know these songs back to front, and so the whole thing took a couple of weeks. No click tracks, just honest, straight-ahead rock & roll performances. That's what the business needs and that's what I'm coming back for. I work with a lot of young artists these days — the new artists are all I care about — and they're not letting anything stop them. The spirit is alive out there. They're still playing and they're still writing, and if the business could just figure things out, there are still people like me who can make great records with these kids. I'm telling you, there's a dozen bands that I've found in the last 12 months that I could put in the charts..."
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Hanging On The Telephone

One number for which she didn't have to put pen to paper was Parallel Lines' dynamic opening track, 'Hanging On The Telephone', which was also the opener on a 1976 EP by guitarist Jack Lee's short-lived LA power pop trio, the Nerves. Blondie had shared a bill with the Nerves on one of their first visits to the West Coast, and they had already worked on the song by the time they introduced it to Mike Chapman.

"That track was magic from the beginning," he says. "Unlike some of the others, it was an easy one to cut because it was more like Blondie's normal, frantic sort of style, and I also vibed it up a lot. Initially, they didn't know quite how much to put into it, but I told them, 'Look, this is more like the stuff on your first two records. Let's give it that sort of punk/new wave attitude.' I knew that the energy level on that track would make or break it. If we didn't have that energy we'd miss the point, because the musical structure of the song is very tense — it sits you on the end of your chair, and we had to have a track that did the same thing.

"They were all very much into giving it that full-on energy, and of course this was Clem's favourite way of playing. If he really liked something, that in itself added extra energy. So, I think we did four takes and I then took the best one to work on and fix things. If there was a guitar mistake or a bass mistake, we'd punch in and out. In those days, I didn't cut the tape a lot like I'd do later on."

While Burke's sharp drumming and Nigel Harrison's pumping bass are punctuated by Frank Infante's electrifying, punk-edged guitar lines, 'Hanging On The Telephone' is nevertheless powered right from the start by Deborah Harry's energetic, in-your-face vocals as she spits out the song's staccato-style opening lines with machine-gun rapidity: "I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall. If you don't answer, I'll just ring it off the wall. I know he's there, but I just had to call..."

"Debbie always got it right away whenever I tried to describe what to do, but a lot of the phrasing was totally down to her," Chapman states. "She has a strange way of delivering certain phrases, and I found myself accepting things from her that I never would have accepted from anyone else. I would have had other people change it, whereas with her I'd think, 'No, no, no, I've got to leave it like that,' or else it just wouldn't be her. For instance, in 'Hanging On The Telephone', the lines 'I heard your mother now she's going out the door. Did she go to work or just go to the store?' — I remember listening to those and thinking, 'This is the dumbest lyric I've ever heard.' However, it was so dumb, it was beautiful, it was brilliant, and when Debbie then sang it in her inimitable way it suddenly sounded even funnier. It just sounded like the weirdest, most bizarre thing I'd ever heard."

"I can't remember all of the specific phrasing issues, but I know there were many times with different songs where Debbie would phrase something in a very strange way and I'd think, 'Well, if I change that and make it normal, I'm going to take some of the character out of her voice.' It was always very important to me with the Blondies in general to present them the way they were. This wasn't a band that you messed around with or tried to reconfigure or reconstruct. Either it was going to work or it wasn't, and 'Hanging On The Telephone' was one of those cases of 'Just get out there and play it full-on!'

"I used to say to them, 'Think of being onstage. Imagine you're playing this to an audience, because we're trying to record something that you're going to have to listen to for the rest of your lives. So if this is not a high-energy performance, you're going to say, "How come we now do it better live than on the record?"' So many bands end up saying things like that: 'How come it always sounds better live?' Well, that's never going to happen with me as a producer. And in the case of 'Hanging On The Telephone', that's probably the best track on the album in terms of energy, although 'One Way Or Another' has a similar edge."
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This Is Blondie

Once Harry's lead vocal had been recorded and comp'd, she and Chapman then contributed the backing vocals, with him harmonising an octave under her on the chorus title line, as well as on the 'whoa-oh' chants as she insists, "Hang up and run to me," and the song races breathlessly towards its manic finale.

"That 'whoa-oh' backing was something that I came up with because I felt that it just sort of added even more energy to the end of the song," Chapman recalls. "Then, after we had the track down, I said, 'You know, we should put a telephone ring on the front of this.' The Blondies all thought that was stupid and too gimmicky, but I said, 'C'mon, guys! Gimmicky? This is Blondie. Let's give it a try!' I told Peter Coleman to call anyone he knew in London in order to record a British phone ring, and then once we stuck that on the front of the song they all went, 'Oh, yeah, that does sound pretty cool.' It certainly heightens the impact of the opening: the ring, then a pause and — wallop! — in it comes.

"That's the magic of Parallel Lines. Every track is perfect from top to bottom, and it's a beautiful album because it works in every respect. It's hard to find a flaw in it, and there aren't many records during your career that you can say that about."
Published in SOS June 2008

Classic Tracks: DEVO 'Whip It'

Producers: Devo, Robert Margouleff • Engineers: Robert Margouleff, Howard Siegel
Published in SOS July 2008

Technique : Classic Tracks


Armed with a subversive view of society and a command of catchy synth-pop, Devo burst into the charts in 1980 with weird classic 'Whip It'. Producer Robert Margouleff talks de-evolution...

Richard Buskin

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Photo: GAB Archives/Redferns

The outfits aren't what most people wear down on the farm: sleeveless black turtlenecks, black shorts and black boots, topped off by flowerpot hats — futuristic on a budget. But then, the central characters in Devo's 'Whip It' video aren't exactly your prototypical farm workers — while one woman is seduced by a cowboy, another has her clothes expertly removed by the band's bullwhip-wielding lead singer as he and his colleagues tell their audience to:

"Now whip it, into shape, shape it up, get straight, go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, it's not too late, to whip it, whip it good!"

Such was the philosophy of the 1980 single that, although only peaking at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, has since become a cult classic, not least because of the self-financed, S&M-laced video that still enjoys plenty of airplay on American TV. And all this despite the fact that it initially only served to fuel the widespread misinterpretation of the band's message.
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Evolution

Formed in Akron, Ohio, in 1972 by Kent State University art students Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale and Bob Lewis, Devo was founded on the theory that US society's regression — or 'de-evolution', hence the name — had resulted in dysfunctional, repressed, subservient citizens who were being forced to march to the same highly mechanised, assembly-line beat. This view had been reinforced when, on 4th May 1970, the Ohio National Guard wounded or killed several Kent State students who'd been protesting the American invasion of Cambodia, and the result was a synth-and-electronica-based group that boasted a series of clone-type outfits and harshly robotic, sometimes atonal music.
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Originally supplementing Mothersbaugh on vocals, Casale on bass and Lewis on slide guitar were Mothersbaugh's brothers Bob on lead guitar and Jim on home-made electronic drums, along with Casale's own brother Bob, also playing guitar. Then, in 1976, both Bob Lewis and Jim Mothersbaugh departed the band and Alan Meyers took over on drums. This was the five-piece line-up that would remain intact throughout the next decade and the peak of Devo's success. Indeed, it was in 1976 that the group's first music video, The Truth About De-Evolution (filmed two years earlier with Gerald Casale and all three Mothersbaugh brothers), won first prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and after this stirred the interest of David Bowie and Iggy Pop it led to a Warner Brothers record deal.

In the meantime, film commitments prevented Bowie from producing Devo's debut album, so Brian Eno stepped into that role and, due to ongoing negotiations over the aforementioned record deal, also funded the sessions. The result, 1978's Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, peaked at 78 in America and made number 12 in the UK. Nevertheless, the likes of Rolling Stone magazine totally missed the point, labelling the band members fascists due to the misperception of them embracing the social ills that they were in truth condemning — dehumanisation, conformity, repression.

In the studio, the new-wave band's meticulous work methods didn't match Eno's more intuitive style, and Ken Scott was therefore in the producer's seat for the 1979 follow-up, Duty Now For The Future. Robert Margouleff then helmed the third album, 1980's Freedom Of Choice, a far more synth-pop-oriented affair that, in addition to spawning several numbers that would be covered by other artists — the title track, 'Girl U Want' and 'Gates Of Steel' — also included 'Whip It', Devo's most well-known song and their biggest hit, peaking at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and being played in heavy rotation on MTV. Both the single and the album sold over a million copies.
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The Wonder Years

A native New Yorker whose production and/or engineering credits have included Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, Jeff Beck, Billy Preston, Bobby Womack, the Doobie Brothers, Depeche Mode, Dave Mason, Minnie Riperton, Joan Baez, the Isley Brothers, Steven Stills, Weather Report, Wilson Pickett and Little Feat, Robert Margouleff actually started out as a cinematographer and alumnus of Andy Warhol's Factory. Warhol's first Superstar, '60s counterculture icon Edie Sedgwick, was the subject of the cult classic movie Ciao! Manhattan that Margouleff shot for and co-produced. Yet, by the time he became involved with Devo just over a decade later, it was with a background that was steeped in synth work.
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Devo in 1980, displaying their usual degree of sartorial unity and, of course, 'Energy Dome' headgear.
Devo in 1980, displaying their usual degree of sartorial unity and, of course, 'Energy Dome' headgear.
Devo in 1980, displaying their usual degree of sartorial unity and, of course, 'Energy Dome' headgear.
Devo in 1980, displaying their usual degree of sartorial unity and, of course, 'Energy Dome' headgear.

In 1969, Margouleff and engineer/musician Malcolm Cecil collaborated with Robert Moog on developing the world's largest analogue synthesizer, TONTO — The Original New Timbral Orchestra. Then, in 1971, having used this device on various albums and film soundtracks, Cecil and Margouleff featured it on their own groundbreaking record, Zero Time, credited to Tonto's Expanding Head Band and one of the first albums to consist of completely electronic music.

This in turn led to not only more studio work and a second Tonto album, but also to a highly successful, award-winning relationship with Stevie Wonder, comprising the early-'70s albums Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions (for which Margouleff and Cecil won a Grammy) and Fulfillingness' First Finale. All benefited immeasurably from the assorted contributions of the two men as associate producers, engineers, synth programmers and/or electronic musicians. As for the TONTO synthesizer, having had its Moog parts replaced with Serge Modular components, it was retired during the 1980s and, before moving in permanently with Malcolm Cecil, lived for a year as a guest in the Sunset Boulevard studio of Mark Mothersbaugh.

"I was sitting in the front office at the Record Plant when I first set eyes on Devo," Margouleff now recalls. "A Volkswagen with dark windows pulled into the parking lot and all of them got out wearing jumpsuits, black rubber boots, red helmets, tanks attached to the helmets, and hoses from the tanks running up their noses. Everyone at the studio was completely nonplussed but we didn't show it — this was the Record Plant, so any freak was alright with us. Anyway, Devo knew of my work with Stevie Wonder, and when they came into the building they were very upfront, asking me if I'd be interested in working with them on the production of Freedom Of Choice. Having finished working with Stevie, I was looking for interesting things to do next, and since Devo's music related to my roots in electronica this seemed like a very natural match."
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The R&B Connection
Given the themes and targets of Devo's message — mankind's de-evolution due to conformity, emotional repression, domination, dehumanisation and toxic waste — and the fact that the robotic, sometimes discordant music was intended to convey this every bit as much as the lyrics and the band's physical image, I ask Margouleff how this fits smoothly with his R&B influence.
"It was basically in the grooves, in the bottom end," comes the reply. "We set up the grooves for the songs so that the songs were not self-consciously about the top end. If you play the record, you'll hear that the bass, the kick and the rest of the drums are very, very prominent and dry in the mixes, so you feel like you're standing next to the kit. In the case of the drums, I always put the hi-hat on the left because that's where the drummer would hear it from his own perspective, at least if he's right-handed. He's the only one who actually hears the drums in surround and stereo — if you're 10 feet away from the kit, it's mono. So, when you hear the tom-toms move around in a fill or you hear the rhythmic pattern of the hi-hat — whether it's on one of Stevie's records or on Devo's record — you hear it from the point of view of the drummer, and the result is that the whole track is much more tactile, and that the listeners stop viewing it as an object and become subjectively involved in the sound.
"The motion of music is as important as the sound. In other words, I might put a rhythm guitar on one side and then an opposing rhythm on the other side so that the music moves back and forth from left to right, providing a motif energy that's musical. On the other hand, when you do a fill on the tom-toms that moves through the mix from left to right, that motion itself is in time and is musical. The idea, therefore, is to understand that there's motion in music, and to take advantage of that emotive motion to help convey and move the track forward. Even the slightest differences can make a track more powerful — OK, let's play another rhythm guitar track so that there's one on the left and one on the right. Or, if the hi-hat's on the left, let's put an opposing instrument on the right, like a shaker with another rhythm so that the rhythms are in motion. That's another R&B trick."
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Synth Secrets

LA's Record Plant on Third Street was the venue for the recording and mix of the album, with the equipment in Studios A and B based around API consoles, 24-track 3M tape machines and Tom Hidley-designed Westlake monitors. Robert Margouleff co-produced with the band and co-engineered with Howard Siegel, who progressed from being his assistant to being the man in charge of the faders when Margouleff was in production mode. And while this naturally resulted in Freedom Of Choice being more synth-based than Devo's previous efforts, the record also had more of an R&B flavour, due to Margouleff's experience with that particular genre.
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Robert Margouleff today.
Robert Margouleff today.

"It was a communal thing," he says. "You have to understand that Mark and Jerry are very smart and extremely talented, and so my job was really just to help channel that and bring a different point of view to the mix. Which I did. There were several weeks of rehearsing and routining the material, and when we got to the studio they were writing all the time. They're so creative. All I did was try to provide some parameters. Music, you see, is sort of like screwing — you don't think about the past or the future and you don't think about what makes the wheels turn. You're inside the creative space, you're in the moment, and so there are no thoughts of manipulation. You know, 'If I tell Mark this, I'm sure he'll do that.' There weren't any producer mind-games on the Devo album. We were all equal in the studio environment, and it was an especial privilege to work with Mark, who's an awesomely talented man, writing the songs, writing the lyrics and singing them. While Jerry was more the visual guy in terms of what the band looked like, Mark was its musical soul.

"Those guys were not undisciplined. They knew where they were going and what they had to say. Theirs was a very strong political message that only now, nearly 30 years later, is on the front burner. Back then, they were the ones who were talking about global warming and toxic pollution, which is why they wore those funny clothes to protect themselves from the environment. That's what I liked about the record — it's really very political, and that's why I was so fervent about it."
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Mixing Microphones

There was plenty of mic experimentation on Freedom Of Choice, no two tracks were recorded the same way, and Margouleff's preference for constantly rolling tape meant there was always the chance of capturing happy accidents."Generally speaking, the drums were recorded with an [Electro Voice] RE20 on the kick," he says, "as well as [a Shure] SM57 on top of the snare, an SM58 underneath, a [Neumann] KM84 on the hi-hat, [Neumann] U87s on the tom-toms and [AKG] 414s for overheads. Depending on the track, boom mics were either 87s or 414s. I also used an RE20 on some of the vocals and an 87 on others. I like the quality of those mics — I used an RE20 on Stevie, as well. It's a dynamic microphone with a very nice presence, and you have to work it very, very close, but the results are quite spectacular.

"In the studio, the drums were positioned in front of the window, facing toward the control room where the other musicians often played. To me, the control room and the studio are one space, and from early on in my career I would have loved to completely do away with the glass between them. On this record, the bass and the keyboards were DI'd, while the guitars were a combination of amps and directs. There would have been three or four mics on each amplifier, but I don't now recall what they were.

"Basically, we would lay down a scratch track, the guys would work to it, and then Mark or Jerry would come into either the control room or the studio and sing their ass off. What I would do was take a pair of small speakers and put them out of phase so that there'd be a cancellation in the centre, and then I'd put the vocal mic right there. Again, that's a technique that Malcolm Cecil and I often used when working with Stevie Wonder.

"I like very dry-sounding records. If you listen to the ones that Malcolm and I worked on with Stevie, you'll note there's very little effect on anything. The vocals are very close and there's not a lot of reverb. To me, reverb implies distance, whereas what I want to do is have the audio occupy the same space as the listener. That has always been my credo in terms of how I mix records. Very close and not too effected; that's the feel I aim for, and you can hear it on Freedom Of Choice. My only regret is that we couldn't remix it for surround back then, because it would have been really fantastic."

Indeed, given the opportunity, Margouleff would remix the album in 7.1 surround right now at Mi Casa Multimedia in Hollywood, which is the three-studio, state-of-the-art, audio-for-DVD complex that he co-owns with musician and engineer Brant Biles.
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The Tribe Of Devo
For Margouleff, another aspect to a record's subjectivity is the manner in which the music is created serially — although it takes three and a half minutes to hear the song, it might have taken six weeks to record it one track at a time. All of which brings him to the subject of overdubbing; of decompressing the minute.
"There was a certain amount of overdubbing on Freedom Of Choice," he says, "but the real aim was to get as much down in one pass as possible, and also for me to keep that feeling of closeness. That's what I think really made Devo happen. With the vocals we'd sometimes do three or four passes and then I'd comp them all together, but it was very different to today when people do things on Pro Tools or Nintendo or whatever they call it. It's turned music making into a very solitary activity, whereas for me the tribal quality of people performing together in the studio is something that cannot be emulated by somebody sitting alone in the living room or bedroom, plinking one note at a time in some sort of serial fashion with a mouse. It is not the same kind of experience.
"There was a tribalism about Devo that really lent itself to people working together, and of course that was helped by the fact that there were two sets of brothers. Those guys grew up together in Ohio and had a very close relationship all their lives, and that created a very different kind of ambience which, in itself, was an important part of the overall structure. At the same time, they really knew they had something going on, and I, too, had a sort of feeling of invulnerability. During the five years I'd worked with Stevie, every record I touched had gone gold or platinum, and when I worked with Devo the planets were all still converging. It was like a blinding flash of light, a moment in time when everything was right, and so there was a collective confidence about what the Devos and I were doing. Those guys brought me a great blessing, and for that I'm eternally thankful. Their message was really, really important, and I still believe in that message."
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The Margouleff Theory Of Engineering

"We have to serve the music," Margouleff continues. "The music can't serve the engineering. So, if, for example, there was leakage between the instruments when I was working with Devo or Stevie, then there was leakage. In fact, in terms of recording drum sounds, leakage is beneficial. I don't want to make every drum completely separate and try to get total isolation between one tom-tom and the next as well as the kick drum. On the contrary, I will sometimes even put close but ambient mics in the room to help create a sense of space without creating a sense of distance. You have to place things, you have to create a space for the song, and at the same time you also have to understand that, in many cases, the recording process is not a tool of reportage relating to a real event. You know, here's the band, here's the stage and you're sitting in the first, second or third row. That just doesn't happen on a pop record.

"A pop record is not objective but very subjective. You might place instruments where they aren't traditionally supposed to be. You can put them anywhere, and I was always striving to get the band as close as possible, falling off the proscenium arch and into the audience, so that the listeners would feel like they're moving inside the band. It wasn't about the bass player standing to the left and therefore his bass sound coming out of the left speaker. Then again, there were rules that we did have to adhere to back then in terms of vinyl — in some cases the bottom end had to be placed in the centre or else it would pop the needle out of the groove.

"There's a physiological need for people to hear things a certain way. Our brains are very interesting. Things that we hear behind us can be considered a threat because we can't see them; we can't attach a visual cue to the audio. However, what's so beautiful about the record world is its subjectivity. It creates a space within which we're allowed to do our own visualisation of the song. Unfortunately, what's happened since the late-'80s is that every song has become a report for a gymnastic exercise — if you look at an R&B video, everyone's doing a hula dance, thrusting their hips, whereas the Devo video for 'Whip It' told a very specific story. It had very deep, psychological overtones. And that was fine, even though the video was just a commercial to help sell the record.

"The record itself is a very subjective thing. When I was young, we'd go down into the cellar, light up a big joint, turn off the regular lights, turn on some red lights, sit between the loudspeakers, crank up the volume and listen to the Jefferson Airplane or Pink Floyd, and it really took us to a different place that wasn't attached to our eyeballs. It was only attached to our ears. It didn't make any difference if the guitarist weighed 300 pounds, hadn't taken a bath in two weeks and was playing in dirty underwear. Devo, on the other hand, had to hook a visual image to what they wanted to say because they had a very strong message. Still, the reality of the record is that there is no visual cue other than what they chose to create after the fact.

"The subjectivity is really what we were reaching for, although not in a conscious way. It was something that felt natural to me. What's more, having worked for several years with Stevie, who is blind, I gained a very, very different point of view about the tactile nature of audio — how it feels and where the sound is coming from. Freedom Of Choice was mixed with that in mind, and that's what made it different. It has that subjective, close feel to it, and that was sort of my hallmark."
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Juggling

Working on three or four tracks at any one time, Devo and Robert Margouleff crafted a record that was not only more musically cohesive than the first two albums, but also boasted a greater level of sophistication, as the synthesizers blended with guitars to create a more dehumanised yet less dissonant sound. Such was the case with 'Whip It', whose sonic appeal was based on the kind of mid-tempo, 4/4 'motorik' beat favoured by German bands such as Neu! and Kraftwerk, as well as a lead guitar riff inspired by the one that Roy Orbison plays on 'Pretty Woman', some Minimoog synthesizer parts, a bass line produced with the 'Devobox', which was a custom-made Moog synth, and, of course, those good old whipping sounds, created with an Electronic Music Laboratories [EML] ElectroComp 500 synthesizer.
ClassicTracks_04.eps.s
Photo: Chris Walter
Devo performing on American Bandstand, 1980.
Devo performing on American Bandstand, 1980.

Where many people missed, and continue to miss, the point on 'Whip It' was in the fact that the lyrics, alternately sung by Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, aren't offering sage sadomasochistic advice — "When something's going wrong, you must whip it. When a good time turns around, you must whip it. You will never live it down unless you whip it" — but are cynically mocking how Americans often resort to violence in order to overcome adversity or claw their way to the top. Ditto the chorus, on which Mothersbaugh barks a bunch of orders that culminate with "Whip it good!" Despite the sexual overtones and provocative visual imagery, the song really isn't about S&M or auto-eroticism. Some people would just prefer it to be.

"Jerry's idea for the 'Whip It' video was just a master stroke," Margouleff continues. "It looked so amateur that it felt like early YouTube, yet it became a total classic because those guys really had their finger on the pulse. They came up with the precursors of rap and of YouTube, and that was not totally unconscious on their part.

"Although the chorus is catchy, it's actually less melodic than the verses, and that was a precursor of rap," Margouleff remarks. "Neither Mark nor Jerry were super-great singers, but they were talented as songwriters, both lyrically and musically. They were able to present the unexpected and make people work to understand it."

Supporting that contention are not only the aforementioned lyrics, but also the trademark non-standard time signatures — for its instrumental break, 'Whip It' reconfigures the main riff into a 6/4 tempo.
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Q: Are We Not Men?

From start to finish, Freedom Of Choice took about six weeks to complete, with Margouleff having a pretty strong concept of what each finished track should sound like by the time he was ready for the mix.

"The important thing is to enhance it, hold it, blow on the coal a little to make it glow and sort of create a homogenous entity," he states. "The reality is that the record itself is the performance. It's different pieces of the same entity, and in the end it's not a bunch of instruments being recorded together, but one humongous instrument with a lot of tentacles. When you play a synthesizer you begin to realise that a synth is not something that imitates real instruments. That's been something of a misnomer over the years. It's really about taking vibrating electrons and creating a new reality. So you have to create a space for that reality to live in, and to be able to blur the line between where the real instruments end and the electronica instruments begin is part of the art of making this kind of unified entity. After all, the synthesizer is a musical instrument. It is its own thing, and on Freedom Of Choice it conveys the feeling of being displaced from the mainstream of society, which was part of Devo's message. Many people did tap into that.

"Anyone whose job is to massage the medium and store the information must have an understanding of what's going into the microphones. While someone's playing the piano, I'm playing the recording console, and once the music is down on tape it's then a totally subjective thing as to what the perspective should be; what I want to hear more of or less of. That's about art and how you hear things. It has nothing to do with any report of reality. For this record, the guys and I all had ideas, we all had our areas of expertise, and they knew what they wanted to hear, too. So they had to have smiley faces when I was finished with the mix. There was no negativity in the studio. We were all going in the same direction, but we just played different instruments.

"Howard Siegel and I mixed with what I like to call 'armstrong automation' — that's when you move the faders with your hands. We liked that. And while every song had its own perspective, in the case of 'Whip It' we knew it needed to have maximum energy. It really does hang on the groove — bom-bom-bom-bom-bom, 'Whip it good!' — which is a very strong motif figure, and we really wanted to make sure that was clear. 'Whip it good' has a veiled S&M energy..."

Veiled?

"OK, I'm being kind. There's definitely a masked brutality, but it also means you're going to whip the trials and tribulations of life. You're going to beat the world. You're going to whip it good. 'Whip It' hurts so bad and hurts so good. Pain is supposed to be bad, but here it's 'Whip it good'. And the song is good. It's a great track, absolutely perfect. Some people didn't understand it at the time, but art comes back to haunt us.