A Conversation With.. Eddie Kramer

I’d been conversing back in forth with music man, Greg Godovitz the past couple years about cornering a music legend, recording engineer Eddie Kramer, for a sit-down interview. Greg and Eddie are tied up with the El Mocambo revitalization work. Eventually, the stars aligned, and Eddie conceded to do my Thursday morning interview show at CIUT 89.5 FM.

Any musician with just an ounce of audio curiosity would have bled to have Kramer record them. Kramer’s name resonated as loudly as the rock musicians whose names grace the front cover of so many new releases from the '60s on. He is the Picasso of sound reproduction. The tracks are bold, clean, and mixed with such precision you knew the escalation of time would never diminish their quality or artistry.

How do you pack one’s life history into fifty minutes? You can’t, by any means, so I chose to focus on the early years, Woodstock, Hendrix, photography and Kramer’s role in reviving the much beloved El Mocambo.

When I mentioned Kramer was coming in to my son Jesse, I saw in his eyes that ‘you’re not leaving me out of this’ look. Jesse has read nearly every book on contemporary music; from bios to studio to the good and bad of the business of music and is becoming a walking encyclopedia. Of course, he was coming in.

My apologies to Greg. I had to shorten this transcription from 9,000 words to near 4,000 and couldn’t include talk about the remix Eddie did of Greg’s early work. Another day, Greg, and many thanks.

The history here is the Beatles, Bad Company, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Kiss, Woodstock. It’s the history of contemporary music going back to the early '60s’ You live here now?

I'm proud to be a Torontonian because you know, living in LA. for about fourteen or fifteen years your blood gets thin, and when you come to Toronto you really have to put on piles of clothing to stay with it. We love it. We love Toronto very much - in fact, we can get on the streetcar and come in.

We sold our house, we sold our cars, we sold everything in L.A. and moved here, and we love it. The fact that you can just walk around and everywhere is great. And you stay fit, and the people are rather nice.

It gets better. You know what caught my attention before the show. DJ Dave James was just finishing up his dance music show and you are absorbed in his tracks. Then we start playing some Roy Hargrove, my theme off the top of my show, and you shift gears and become even more animated. Music touches you in so many ways.

It always has. I grew up studying classical music as a kid. By the time I was three or four I was really playing the piano. I think I had my first piano lesson when I was probably about four years old and continued studying classical music all the way until I left high school. In fact, my last three years in high school I dropped math and went to the South African College of Music and studied music instead. It was a weird thing, but I was able to get permission to do that. But they all thought I was completely crazy.

My mom and dad were wonderful. My late father was an amateur violinist, and he always encouraged me to play. Some of my earliest memories is standing up on a little stool, and there was a radiogram or a gramophone as you would call it and it played stacks of 78s in a row. It would be let’s say, the Brahms B flat Piano Concerto stacked up, and I knew at an early age by looking at the labels what record it was, and then I would just sit for a moment then stand up in the chair and conduct. Which was kind of stupid.

You must have made a decisive turn in your teens and thought I've got to get on the other side of the instrument and capture what I’m hearing?

I think it goes back to this early childhood where apparently in South Africa where I grew up, the voltage is 240, the main voltage, and when I was about three or four I managed to stick a steel knitting needle into one of these sockets, and it threw me across the room. True story. It threw me across the room, and my dad picked me up and walloped me and said, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ I haven't been the same since.

I always had a fascination with electronics as a young teenager but there was a moment in time when I was thirteen or fourteen, I heard jazz.

A friend of mine introduced me to jazz. I started listening to Charlie Parker and Oscar Peterson. It just changed me. My whole musical direction shifted from classical, although it's always been based on classical, but I just went, ‘Whoa Jazz’. This is happening you know. My dad was so pissed off at me.

Much to his chagrin I really got into boogie and jazz and started playing that and then the classics went down the toilet. That was the shift in my career. Also leaving South Africa in 1960. After all the Sharpeville riots and everything because my dad was very left wing - he said 'we got to get out of South Africa' and we emigrated back to England. My mum's English. She came to South Africa in 1939.

Moving to England in 1960 was a critical moment because you can imagine the scene there was just bursting, and then you see the Beatles on TV for the first time. Holy, look at those guys. Check this out. And then by 1962, I was in the studio as a young punk engineer. I just said, ‘yeah’, that's it, this is what I have to do.

Jesse King: When you first started you were doing classical recordings working at Pye Studios. How did that transition from working in that kind of atmosphere inspire? Were you assisting then?

I was an assistant engineer and I thank God I had the best training guys around and the best engineers. There was a guy - Bog Walger - and we're at Pye Studios and one day we're doing the Kinks, the next day we're at Town Hall recording a ninety-piece symphony orchestra with three microphones, so I got this fantastic classical training as well as this rock thing. It was crazy. There were no schools for engineering. You just learned by making mistakes.

Jesse King: Did you have a similar situation at EMI? I read they had everything in position and you even had to wear the lab coat. They never moved the drums. The new guy never had this freedom.

No, every place that I ever worked was a very independent kind of studio. From Pye, I had my own studio for a while. That was fun. I was cutting tracks on my own and after that, I went to Olympic Studios. And that's where the magic happened.

Jesse King: When was that?

It would be late '66.

Bill King: And what did Olympic have that was different?

Well, it was like it was a crossover point because Olympic was a famous studio before it became ‘the Olympic’. After that they were doing stuff with The Troggs and a lot of commercials. It was only four-track at that time, but they were about to move from Cotton Street which is right in the center of London to Bonds, which is a little suburb and they had built this gorgeous new facility which is in an old movie house and that's where I started to record Jimi Hendrix and The Stones and all the rest. That's where the magic happened.

Bill King: I'm still fascinated with the '50’ and '40s recordings with Sarah Vaughan and others. These recordings sound magnificent. Even the other day we listened to Frank Sinatra at the Sands with the Basie Orchestra. I still don't know how they did that.

This is fine, fine engineering. You know you're trained to record mono. You get the balance right on everybody. And that's your training and it's embedded in my brain. You start with mono then you go to stereo then you go to a three-track then you go to four and then when you come to America you jump from four to twelve-track or sixteen and it's like, what?

Jesse King: That was the Scully machine that you were not a big fan of I think.

Well, the Scully twelve track was the biggest piece of junk ever. However, the Scully eight-track was wonderful. Those are the two Scully eight tracks I took up to Woodstock to record which is another story for another day.

Bill King: Woodstock, I would figure that was a significant challenge?

That is a mild understatement. I've always said that Woodstock for me was three days of drugs and hell. And it was incredible.

I get a phone call from the film company and they say, “would you like to record this? We got this festival up in Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix is going to be the headliner and you know we do live recording stuff. Would you mind coming up and taking care of us again?” No problem.

I remember it was a Friday morning about 4:00 a.m. 3:00 or 4:00 o'clock and this young lady beeps. ‘Come on, we’re driving up’ and it’s a two-hour drive or whatever and we get within a mile of Woodstock and you can't go any further. We parked the car on the side of the highway and walked the last mile. Near this ridge I'm looking down at Woodstock and it’s 6:00 a.m. and the sun's coming up. You can see the stage and outlined are these cranes on top of the stage and they’re still building it and I'm looking at it and thinking in about three hours I'm going to have to be recording and it looks like a construction site. I’m thinking there's no way in hell that's going to happen, but it did. It was the most incredible experience I think for everybody who was there. Fortunately, there was a collection of great tech guys from the Fillmore East. The Fillmore East was where I used to record all the time. It was a great, great venue. There was an eight-track in the basement that I used to use to record with.

All of that gear plus all the tech guys from the Fillmore came up with their sound gear and Bill Hanley, who did all the sound. I was in a tractor-trailer behind the stage about two hundred yards away. At a certain point all the communication between myself and the stage guys went out and I'm standing there at the side of the tractor-trailer waving my arms going 1, 2, 3. Nobody knew which mic line was going. It was amazing.

I remember standing on the stage just before it started and looking out at the sea of people there must have been a half million out there and Bill Graham from Fillmore standing next to me and he said, ‘Eddie if these people decide to riot we're screwed.’ Thanks, Bill, I'm going to go back to my truck.

All of the artists who played the festival elevated their game. And look how many bands that were doing decently you know, like Santana, who all became icons because they just performed the magic at Woodstock. After that fact, look at all of the exposure they got.

Bill King: I think before that Monterey Pop sort of put Otis and others on the map too.

And Jimi. That’s a little bit of Woodstock.

Bill King: The new Hendrix?

This is an album that we put together last year that took us a year to do. It’s myself, Janie Hendrix and John McDermott and the three of us. We do all of Jimi's albums. There are three albums, and this is the last of the trio. Billy Cox and Buddy Miles and there is also Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell on this as well.

Most of this album is Jimi live in the studio. These tracks he was doing were not the final, final, final master but so close yet it shows this other side of Jimi. This is '69.

He was recording a lot of the stuff and this was his year of transition and experimentation. He was trying to find this new direction and you could tell it's funky, it’s R&B, it’s blues, it's got all the rest of that stuff and it's hard driving and the performance on this is just mind-blowing. He's got all of the stuff on it. Not only the bass lines and what Buddy is doing and what Bill’s doing, but Jimi at one point in let’s say, ‘Mannish Boy.’ is singing in unison with the guitar doing all that and playing rhythm and lead which is his traditional way of doing things. When you listen to the guitar parts they're like impossible to play like that. I don't know anybody who can play like that.

Jesse King: Was this a multitracked session?

This happened to be sixteen tracks because it was '69. It was at Record Plant, New York City and Jimi was on his own in '69. What was I doing? I was building Electric Lady Studios for him. I was doing Zeppelin, Woodstock and all of that nonsense. But it was basically Jimi trying to find new directions. He would go to Record Plant. He’d go to the Hit Factory or whatever studio he could get into. He was living in the studio and thank God he was, and the tape was rolling.

We got these wonderful tracks. Just imagine Jimi would be at the Record Plant on 44th Street on 8th Avenue and then two blocks up Eighth Avenue at 46th was the Scene Club which is where he'd be every bloody night finding out who was gonna jam. He would be jamming at the Scene and then come back to the Record Plant dragging fifteen or twenty people with him. It was an amazing scene. Imagine Jimi walking down 8th Avenue with the hat and an entourage. He’d stopped traffic literally, and then just walk into the Record Plant they were ready for him. Bang. In fact, that’s the way ‘Voodoo Child’ was done. Who's in town?

Steve Wynn was in town and Jack Cassidy and they're jamming over there at the Scene and he drags their asses back over to the studio and its midnight and we're all set up with the drums. They weren't just thrown in a corner. They were specifically where I placed them. The amps are all set. Headphones set. Jimi walks in with the guys. One rehearsal, one take ‘Voodoo Child’ done and tested live.

You can hear the Fender amplifier he was using, and Fender Showman double stacked, you know ten eight-inch speakers and that sound of that amp you can hear is so different than the Marshalls. And when those opening notes start, and you hear his voice and that's live on the floor, and that’s why it sounds like it does.

There were no egos involved. No managers saying,’ hey you can't do blah, blah or you can't have this.’  These are a bunch of guys who love each other.

On this new album, it's all of Jimi's friends. There are two tracks on this new album, Both Sides of the Sky with Stephen Stills. In fact, there's a track called ‘Woodstock’ on this album.

Stephen Stills comes running into the Record Plant one night, ‘hey Jimi,  check this out. I've got a song and it was written by Joni Mitchell and it’s called ‘Woodstock’. He said, ‘do you want to play it man. Come on let’s jam.’ They jammed on the song. Jimi plays bass then later switches to guitar. And this is like the demo before it was released like maybe six months later. When you hear this track you go, it's what Crosby Stills and Nash took from what Jimi and Steve had done and turned it into the final version.

Bill King: A moment of truth here. Noel Redding? It's been said his bass parts were replaced by Jimi’s own.

Not true. What is true is the fact that Jimi loved to play bass and Noel would get really really pissed off. He would go over to the pub and get drunk and always had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about it. I loved Noel’s playing. I thought Noel was an amazing bass player for that trio.

Jesse King: I wanted to mention not only is the album out but there's also vinyl. And I think this is key for collectors.

Absolutely. This album Both Sides of the Sky, the vinyl is phenomenal. 180-gram vinyl and it is just gorgeous.

Jesse King; The artwork is phenomenal. It's very much at peace with that time.

Bill King: We both share a mad passion for concert photography and I have enjoyed going through your site and your gallery. First camera?

I bought a Pentax camera an Asahi Pentax in 1967 from one of the engineers and started taking pictures immediately, just experimenting. The camera sat right next to me on the board on either my left or right side, I can’t remember now. I'd be mixing and grab the camera and swing around, ‘Hey Jimi.’ Thank goodness because like I said before about managers and all the rest, there was nobody to tell you don't take pictures and the guys would say ‘yeah, just Kramer with the stupid camera. Don't worry about it.’ Nobody bothered you. I was able to get these lovely shots of Jimi in the studio or the Stones or a Keith Richards.

Bill King: There's a great Keith Richards. I mean that's the Keith Richards from the 60s we remember.

That shot of Keith sitting at the piano or the one he's ad-libbing and he's staring at me - like this is a favourite.

Greg Godovitz: It's also about the casual photograph. You took that picture of the boys Zeppelin dancing outside. That's it. That's a classic picture. You caught them having fun.

When we were in the studio, we had fun no matter what. If we weren’t having fun there was no point in doing it because we just loved to record, we loved to make music and that to me is the joy of it. Still, today, if I'm not having fun, I don't want to be there.

Bill King: The El Mocambo? Everyone wants to know what’s going on!

I so remember being there in 1977 recording The Stones.

The place was purchased, and I was asked to come up and have a look and see whether I wanted to get involved. I looked at it and I said OK, I'm going to do this, we're going to put a studio in here. I wanted to bring in John Storyk, my oldest and dearest friend. He and I did Electric Lady for Jimi, OK. And that's the reason. WSD Group, which is the architectural firm, is probably one of the largest ones in the world and one of the better ones. It’s almost there.

We've taken about two and a half years so far and basically destroyed the entire building and took it down below grade and built a brand-new building on the inside. All we kept was the facade and the side walls and we underpinned the entire interior. There are now two venues. One on top of the other.

You remember the old El Mocambo? It had about a ten-foot ceiling. It's now twenty-six and a half feet high with a balcony running around top side and it's going to be the preeminent and predominant facility in North America. They are soundproof rooms. Both are completely isolated so that I can record the two venues at the same time with live streaming.

I have a special room on the third floor looking down on the room. This is like Abbey Road. We have the same board, a beautiful Neve vintage board looking down at the stage and five 4K cameras and Go Pro's - the whole thing and live streaming 24/7.

Bill King; Lastly, you did two tracks for the Beatles.

I did, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Baby, You’re A Rich Man.’ There's a funny story.

I recorded with my boss this track, ‘Baby, You’re A Rich Man. We heard the Beatles were going to come in and I was, ‘oh geez, the Beatles, we're going to show them.’ Why did the Beatles come to Olympic Sound Studios? They couldn't get into EMI or Abbey Road. That's the reason. It was booked all the time. Particularly for the Beatles, they were royalty.

They come in and we cut the track. We start at 7 o'clock at night. We finish at 7 o'clock in the morning. It's tracked, overdubbed and mixed. Thank you, out the door. I get the phone call from the front desk. Eddie, the Beatles are coming in again. Oh boy, rock royalty. Here we go.

John sits in the producer's chair and pulls out an acoustic guitar.’ ‘C'mon lads, we got to do this song for TV - it goes like this’, and he starts strumming – “All You Need is Love”. He’s pitching and singing right there.

The band walks in and goes directly into the studio. George walks over to the harpsichord and says, ‘It's all right, bring a microphone over here quick.’ Paul McCartney walks into the studio and goes, ‘hey, what’s that? It’s a string bass. It was my boss’s; he's a jazz player. ‘I'm going to play that’. He picks up the string bass and says, ‘quick microphone on here’, and that's how the session started, I'm thinking, panic, panic, panic. I go over to the patch bay and patch the microphone off the producer's desk into all the headphones, so John could sit next to me and strum the guitar and sing to the lads out in the studio. He’d never done that before. He goes ‘1,2,3’ - we're rolling tape right from the beginning, you know half an hour of tape time,15 ips, I hit record, bang, ‘All You Need is Love’. They go through the first take, then ‘two, three’ and they just keep doing it and doing it until we get to the end of the tape. It must be about eight or nine performances, some false starts. ‘All right lads - come back in’ and could you wind back from the end, right?’ Playback. Everybody smiles, ‘Yeah, it was great. See you. Bye!

A Conversation With ... Jeff Dalziel

Your recording sessions – how are they arranged?

They are genre specific. I have a long history in a variety of genres and can honestly say depending on the artist, start times change. Obviously, the rock guys don’t really rock before three. Country artists, as a rule, like to start early. Do the Nashville thing. They have to be up and do three co-writes in a day. They seem to be a bit more responsible. Pop artists? Somewhere in the middle.

Where did the three cowrites in a day thing come from?

There’s been such a big push on cowriting in Nashville especially with songwriter/artists from Canada going down there thinking it's going to get them a hit song. There are teams of people who think they are going to be songwriters and it’s almost like a day job. It’s mostly driven by the cowriters the artists are set-up with. At times it comes across as a quantity vs. quality thing.

Every hit song I’ve been involved with, writing or cowriting, sometimes they can go quick, and others take a very long time. It’s very common for a songwriter to show up for three different songwriting sessions in a day. The first one is usually quick, in and out then go for lunch maybe. Then do another and have some dinner or as they say a’ meet and greet’. Then go back for another session, then on to the Bluebird Café, hang out or wherever they go, and that’s it.

That’s driven by publishers. It’s understandable. They are cracking the whip to get something – get going, get going. It’s kind of like placing your bets.

Is it advantageous to a young songwriter to have a set schedule?

It helps, but I have a very different view of the writing process. It may have something to do with the 360 deal in Canada. You and I both know revenue streams are down quite a bit from when we were career-oriented musicians.

I was an in-house producer at Sony for years. I’m a Sony/ATV songwriter worldwide, but I am writing fewer songs these days because there are fewer placements and because so many songwriters today are being hit with copyright problems.

A pure songwriter is not trying to be a star, and they are as passionate about writing songs as I am about producing music or playing instruments. Are your songs going to be as good as the person that is that passionate? Chances are, no. Obviously, there are great songs written by the artist and when you look back in history and pretty much every song we know, and the public knows, comes from a song-writing team. That goes for movies, etc., and I know a lot of them, and they feel kind of displaced. They are getting hit on two fronts. One, copyright issues – not getting paid from Spotify, no sales so mechanical royalties are down, and on top of it, nobody wants their songs. Few understand the validity and need for them.

At Sony we were developing artists and promoting co-writing and getting your chops together and always have been. Some artists didn’t want this and figured they needed to do this themselves. We were always mindful that it's good but let’s also find some outside songs. We presented lots of songs to artists. You would know them all and what I’m talking about.

In the wider world people don’t know that Marvin Gaye and every hit he had, he never wrote. He wrote songs, but the hit songs that made him a household name were written by songwriters. For the most part, some of the biggest artists in the world either didn’t write their songs or couldn’t write a song to save themselves.

Regarding three songs in a day, it’s more about placing bets. The more you do them, the greater the possibilities. My publisher would be happy if I delivered three songs in a day.

I’m also thinking in these team situations you are partnered with someone who has had success.

Exactly. What I’m seeing coming back from Nashville, these teams are always missing something. There are certain tiers of Nashville songwriting teams that most Canadians will never get a chance to be involved with. Then there are the ones who are trying to be songwriters and trying to get a hit. I have lots of friends that live there and have been there ten years and still haven’t had the big one, and they had big songs here before they left.

The majority of my artists and labels I work for want to know what I think. I can get a list of ten to twelve songs to listen to and pick my favourite. Honestly, the more I get, the more let down I am. As a producer I’ve done well-enough I can kind of pull rank a bit to remind them that there’s no song here, and we need to find songs, outsource and see what’s there. I can go to the bigger publishers for pitches. If the artist or label isn’t into that, I’ll pass on the project.

What were your thoughts when figuring out how you’d fit in with a band like Washboard Union? What was your approach?

The first time I heard them, they’d already completed the EP with Slaight Music and Jim Campbell. Jim sent me some files to listen to, and I heard three potential singles. When people ask me my opinion, I tend to focus on what’s wrong with it. I always follow-up with – it’s just my opinion. Here’s what I think is going to be an issue with radio play.

I think they sent out the first single unfixed and it didn’t really do much. I got the call asking if I’d retool some of it. I loved the songs. I stepped in and retooled their first two big hits, “Moonshine” and “Shot of Glory”, which don’t sound anything like the EP. Because of the way music is made these days – budget related, much like the songwriter, they keep that revenue stream in-house as long as they can.

There’s also the production side of things where everybody’s a producer. They have a laptop. Now the music is based on a team of people who make all of the music, and the singer just sings. There’s a real push towards the music sounding like what the producer thinks it should be. Somebody really has to put a face on that sonically. Knowing I was going to be charged with that duty, I went out to Halifax to meet the guys, sat down and talked. Talked about music, talked about stuff they love.

Those first two singles that came out were a culmination of what they love, not what I love. A lot of that was similar, and I became kind of like a band leader. Everything was designed and based on what they love or said, and I had to take that and make it work with radio. That’s how the sound happened.

Not a lot of people are going to take the time to do that. It could have been entirely different if someone else produced it. And that’s very common with a lot of artists these days, especially solo artists who don’t have a band. You are kind of at the mercy of your creative team.

My prediction is, we are going to see a lot more bands from a producer's stand-point. That should bring some originality to the projects. That’s what’s missing. I’m not dumping on anything out there because it’s all very well done. We used to have a saying at Sony - ‘the fish starts to stink at the head.’ Meaning, we’d see lots of bands, and if the singer just wasn’t there or didn’t have star qualities then it didn’t matter how good that band was. It was going to fail. That’s why solo artists tend to work still. Obviously, that’s the first thing to be judged over anything. You could literally loop a fart behind a great singer and it should be fine. It tends to make things a bit more homogenized. It’s the same producers or different producers using the same sound. It’s done on computers, drum machines etc. It all sounds the same. It’s something that happened in the rock world when we were making rock records. Everyone was repeating themselves.

With Nice Horse and the new River Town Saints single, these are two of the newer things I’ve done, I demanded they have to be a project, not two singers. It’s very taxing for producers to be everything. Or design everything.

The Washboard thing was a cakewalk. We had so many common interests. It was just knowing who to hire to play because it’s all real players. The bands I produce are ninety-per cent live musicians. It’s not cut and paste. It’s what it is when they play live.

Not only am I now turning down projects because I don’t think the songs are strong enough, sometimes it may be solo artists where I don’t think the voice or songs are there yet. I’d rather look at projects that are together; then I can challenge them to be better.

In the case of Washboard, Chris Duncombe plays banjo, guitar, and he sings. Aaron Crain plays guitar and sings, and David Roberts plays mandolin, guitar, banjo, washboard and sings. There’s enough there I can wrap around that. That’s why I think that project worked out so well. It’s so honest! Honest to the point some stations thought it was too honest and too folk and were hesitant to jump on.

I’m looking for projects where I can see them play a venue. It’s a band. It’s a real thing. Nice Horse is a great example of that.

When the management team asked me to work on this project, I found out all of the women play their own instruments. They are not ‘barbie dolls,’ they are the real deal. Great songwriters, great ideas and great singers.

Their management people asked me if I was going to get some Nashville people to play with them. I said I wanted to hear them first. We did some rehearsals and I thought, this is what country music is missing. The uniqueness. They are all good players. Music is not about being a virtuoso, it’s about having an identity as a musician. Good or bad, strong or weak. It doesn’t matter. The best example is the Ramones.

We all love the Ramones to some degree but individually they were horrible musicians but put it all together and it works. I’ve seen countless cover bands cover the Ramones and it’s terrible because it’s too good. It’s missing those perfect accidents. It needs to be real and I think people want that too.

I challenged the girls to be themselves and the record is one hundred percent them minus the steel player – all else is the girls. When you hear the record, it sounds real because it can’t not be.

The upside to that from a business point of view is if the band hits and does well, lots of people will try to be that, but they can’t be that. It changes the expiration date.

Two groups I was absolutely taken with that went two different directions are The Civil Wars and Little Big Town. Civil Wars falls apart because they can’t get along yet if you go back to the beginnings of Little Big Town they had songs, they had a sound a step away from what most groups sounded like in Nashville. I knew when I first heard both they were the real deal.

There are only two producers in the world that can say they were in-house producers at Sony Music in Canada. Myself and a guy named ‘Tawgs’ who has done Walk Off the Earth. Nobody in the building my first six years there as a producer including my boss ever asked me to make something sound like something. They asked me to find all of the unique things about that project and exploit that, then magnify to it’s maximum potential to how I felt as a producer.

My last two years with the company it all changed. They wanted me to fit something to what was already out there. I struggle with this constantly. I want the artist to be in both camps. It’s like a tennis court they have to sit on. It makes it a little bit tougher.

How much outside listening do you do?

My daily routine and I’ve been doing this long before my years at Sony, is mornings always consist of too much coffee, way too many cigarettes, and I listen to at least the top twenty of every main chart. Rock pop, EDM, dance, hip-hop and country. While I’m listening to that, I will quickly listen to new adds or most increased. At least the top five of the recurrent charts.

I’ll listen to each part of the song; chorus, verse etc. Then I’ll switch over to the HYPE Machine which is a beautiful aggregate that takes all of the blog charts from around the world and gives me a top ten, and it’s diverse.

I’m spending the first part of the morning enriching my brain with modern, popular content. I shut it off and only listen to outside stuff the next day. I only listen to what I’m working on.

I’m training my brain to connect the dots between genres to see what’s the common denominator among popular culture today. That sort of filters into my productions. The broader world and what’s popular this month.

The Roots of Racism, Family & Healing

By Bill King

With the horror of Charlottesville fresh in mind - white nationalists/supremacists on the ground, a resurgence of the KKK, communities under siege –  an open dialogue is beginning to take shape. Words are still hate-filled and coded, but for the most part, there’s push-back – folks coming forth and confronting evil. Statues to Confederate war lords are falling, as are those of slave owners and plantation barons. Those are positive signs we may be replacing bandages with healing surgery.

With that in mind, I thought I’d offer a look at our family to better understand the roots of modern day bigotry and how my brother Wayne and I dealt with it.

All you should do is turn back the clocks and gather around a kitchen table during the late fifties and early sixties down south and listen in on adult conversations. It was the blame game – it was always about the outsider – a face, a name that either prospered or endured hardship more than you. I’m talking about family. Family history.

There was always a family member, aunt or uncle who ripped on those less fortunate and those who acquired a comfortable amount of wealth. Ours was no different - the key factor still in play – southern history – one rooted in class, prejudice, and racism.

Dad’s side of the family were dirt-poor tobacco farmers who lost everything from gambling, drinking and the Great Depression. Pops' father was a hard man who put the farm and family in jeopardy. Pops never spoke kind words about him other than to remind us he was frequently beaten with a razor strop. I know from those who knew dad as a boy and maturing man, he was wild as hell. Dad ran the Kentucky foothills without a care in the world until the Great Depression. He made it as far as grade ten schooling and then, out of necessity, was sentenced to picking tobacco – back-breaking work for a child or adult. Once old enough to drive, dad ran moonshine through the Kentucky/Tennessee back country in an amped-up Ford.

 Family vacations, dad would point out roadside hideaways. Places where ‘copper stills’ were once hidden from the sight of revenuers. 

Pops railed against big government; blacks, unions, alcoholics, Catholics, fat people, liberals, communists; whoever challenged his sense of what America was meant to be.

Dad loved history. He’d cram us into his prized Ford Fairlane station wagon and travel to historic Mt. Vernon N.Y, - George Washington’s home; Hopkinsville, KY to observe Lincoln’s log cabin, Washington D.C. – colonial Williamsburg, VA. If there was a statue or symbol of America – the family arrived to witness and remember.

Across the river in Louisville, Olympic heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay was quickly dispensing with opponents and rising in the pro ranks. Pops was there for every fight pleading for an opponent to smash Clay’s mouth shut. ‘No negro should ever talk to a white man this way’, he’d say. Pops was a Rocky Marciano guy. He’d huddle front of his bedside radio - draw curtains and battle Cassius and fight personal demons.

Dad was wounded on four different occasions during World War 11, and it wasn’t until he was well into his ‘70s that he began treatment for PTSD. Recalling the amphibious landing and assault on Utah Beach, D-Day June 6, 1944 – Normandy, he suffered sleepless nightmares. Pops would interrogate himself – ask why he survived and close friends drowned or perished from enemy fire. It haunted him till death at age 89. War rarely took a day off in our home. Twelve operations, hundreds of trips to the VA hospital, long bouts of anger, pain and frustration followed him most hours of the day.

What gave Pops relief was music. He played rhythm guitar through his late teens and twenties and travelled the south in minstrel shows with singer Jackie DeShannon’s(Sharon Meyers) dad, ‘Tink’ Meyers. As told to us – they sang poor-house songs scripted during the depression. He also worked with magician Harry Blackstone setting up and packing props. All before war changed him.

As kids, we tiptoed through the house and sidestepped as if avoiding minefields. Occasionally, the guitar would come out, and pops would place his trembling hands on the fret board and shape a chord then strum. This was when he came to life - loosened up, revealing what he yearned to do with his life. Play like Oscar Peterson’s guitarist – Herb Ellis!

The Elvis ‘three-chord wonder’ recitations, those idiot rock n’ rollers declarations – only jazz musicians had it together in his head. Buddy Rich, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman – even country man Roy Clark, honky-tonk pianist Jo Ann Castle of the Lawrence Welk Show, fared better.

Dad worked a good thirty years as a security guard at Colgate Palmolive Company until retirement. The next twenty-five were invested in his passion – fishing. That fishing habit brought him to the Everglades where he spent nearly every waking hour trolling for bass. When not in Florida, he could be found at his campsite on Cumberland Lake, in Kentucky – fishing.

At Colgate, he battled with the black community which bordered the plant. Poverty was a ‘fact of life’, and the grounds of the plant were fair game and a small income for those most in need. There were tubes of discarded toothpaste, bars of soap, detergent – products tossed aside for one small infraction or another. At night, folks would jump the fence and dad would give chase. The game played out until the old man was ambushed and whacked with a shovel, fracturing a leg. This did little to dissipate the hostility he bore for the opposite race.

Throughout high school, brother Wayne and I endured his lectures on race and equality. It was all about class and where you stood on the economic ground. He was sure blacks would always reside a few steps below whites; that’s just the way it was. Then along came Martin Luther King and all hell busts loose.

For old southerner’s, these were racial issues sorted out long ago by whites, and everyone knew their place. Integration was on the doorstep; sit-ins, civil rights marches, laws guaranteeing equality were on the books or on the legislative horizon and dad, like those of his heritage, had no control or say in these matters.

The coming years were unpleasant. Us boys saw the future and didn’t buy into the bigotry and hatred. Music demanded humility, compromise, associations, and friendships. At nineteen, I left home and never returned as a resident. Dad and I fought and argued for years – going three to five years without a conversation between us until we met on common ground at my Italian grandmother’s farm in Pennsylvania. It was there, after a year’s absent during a conversation I asked him to take a walk in the woods.

Pops stood 6’6” – a lanky, at times fierce man, but on this occasion, he was with his first son. I finally had a chance to speak openly without fear, and ask why he carried so much animosity for the poor and blacks he’d grown up alongside. He responded, “it’s all about survival. There are those that have, and the have nots. It’s the laws of survival. I have, and that’s that – the planet’s overcrowded and the weak die”. Astounding! I prod him further – he then explains this is the way he was raised and he can’t change.

I didn’t buy that.

Through the next decade, until death, I make an effort to change him; not hate him. Each month or two, I’d send him a book to read. He was a voracious reader. P.J. O’Rourke, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson – music biographies, history, war, travel - anyone I thought who could expand his horizons and move him away from those John Birch Society and Jerry Falwell pamphlets.

Visits, he’d be locked and loaded in his recliner with FOX News blasting on eleven – wound tight and ready for a fight! We knew to keep him far away from his prized gun rack. Brother Wayne and I would teas, toy and keep him laughing. Pops did learn from our long-distance relationship, never speak to me in racist terms or language. Never demean those less fortunate, - at best, be civil.

During his last decade, we grew close, speaking every week or so on the phone. It was always about music and photography and what was in those books. Throughout our lives, I never asked him for a penny, then in the last three years of life, $1,000 arrived consecutive Christmases; a check each, addressed to my wife Kris and I, with instructions scribbled in trembling ink, ‘put this towards the best digital cameras you can buy’.

Pops and I looked at the same photo books; Henri Cartier-Bresson, his favourite, war photographer Robert Capra – my favourite – Eugene Smith. He understood what made a great image. Dad listened to music and could recognize a finely crafted solo. Pops savoured the landscape and beauty and time spent hiking and fishing – he was no ordinary man – far better than the class battles poor southerners carried as open wounds.

Leading to my fiftieth high school class reunion, my dear classmate, Jan Stratton Cooksey, prods me a good year before to attend – saying something special was occurring. Kris and I make the trip, and I find myself accepting an award for the work I’d done in music outside our community of Jeffersonville, Indiana – Commodore of the Port. We are a shipbuilding community.

The person driving this – Jimmy Gales, a black man who I shared many a day and friendship in classes throughout my school years. We hadn’t seen or spoken through the years, but Jimmy took this upon himself to make happen. I had no idea how this would play out in that Indiana has a checkered past and connection to the Klan. It’s a diehard right-wing Republican state, and me – a well-known war resister who fled to Canada. The night was exceptional and the past, for most, was the past.

Late evening, Jimmy and I speak, and he reveals to me something I’d never imagined; how much he loved my dad. Their fishing adventures and friendship. I was bowled over. It was like rumours of someone having two families or at least relationships with a muse.

I walked away with a smile in my heart. Truthfully, I always suspected dad wasn’t the shallow man yodeling epitaphs from the recliner. A far better man than the hurtful words that crippled our relationship. Jimmy spoke the words I needed to hear.

I always suspected Pops would have given up all his possessions if he could have sat five minutes on a coveted bandstand alongside Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cannonball Adderley, Lionel Hampton and his super hero, Wes Montgomery - the giants of jazz, whose artistry and intellect demolished all delusions of superiority. Pops heard the music, and the music touched him. It was Jimmy, the family angel, who righted his soul.

The Uprising - Isle of Saints

Paradise imagined isn’t necessarily paradise realized. From a distance, the oceanic embrace of a small plot of volcanic inspired land awakens the senses and instructs the mind to contemplate the beginnings; first people, the history, their culture and what can be gained from the experience.

It was 1989, and my first invitation as a photo-journalist to travel farther south to the island of Aruba to cover the Aruba Jazz Festival; featuring Wynton Marsalis and Dianne Reeves, amongst a roster of star- drenched talent.

James A. Michener’s historical novel Caribbean had just surfaced in airport kiosks. Somehow, this seemed a fitting read for a first-time traveller to the region. Caribbean is a fictionalized account of the pre-Columbian period of the native Arawak tribes and island life through the centuries up until 1990. Each country comes with a richly-textured story depicting a period of it’s history in conflict; colonization, the slave trade, religion, ceremony - even the trials of Columbus for genocide. To this day, I’m grateful I read this before landing on my first tropical island. It has served me well decades thereafter.

Isle of Saints is an aural composite of all my travels throughout the region as heard inside my head and felt in the heart. From Aruba to Barbados, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbados, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Virgin Islands, Tortola, Grand Cayman, Antiqua, San Blas, Panama, Jamaica, Santa Domingo, - Cuba. In fact, the cover art was purchased in 1998 in Santa Domingo from a street vendor and proudly hangs from one of my music room walls. It’s credited to Haitian artist; Laurent Casimir, who passed in 1990.

I rode the scribes bus for a quarter century photographing and writing - rarely mixing professional worlds between musician and journalist. I was there to listen, to feel, sense and absorb – then relay those experiences in thoughts and words. It’s the number of unforgettable people I encountered and the shared experiences, I will forever savor.

The Uprising is a name I chose to address this project. It’s about our times – a world in crisis, yet it’s us, the world’s people, who can derail the rampaging “greed” train. We can do this thorough our music – the marriage of cultures, ideas, and relationships. 

I’ve been fortunate to have a twenty-five-year relationship with Cuba and its people. The three musicians who grace Isle of Saints come from Havana and Santiago de Cuba. They all entered my life at various time periods. Bassist Roberto Riveron and I played in Jane Bunnett’s, Afro/Cuban Blues Project some years back. Percussionist/vocalist Magdelys Savigne and violinist/vocalist Elizabeth Rodriguez are currently members of Maqueque, Bunnett’s award-winning back-up band.

This project evolved from producing Mags and Elizabeth’s project, OKAN. I played them a new original composition and expressed a concept I had in mind and they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the project. Through the generosity of Slaight Music; funding arrived as quick as the project was approved. This happens when Gary and Ali Slaight and Derrick Ross hear something and green light.

Everton Paul has been a music soulmate of mine for a good forty-five years and his home studio Side Door Records is the most inviting living room for making music anywhere. Along with two great engineers; Shane ‘Shakey J’ Forrest, who presided over the recording and my long-time recording engineer friend, Michael Haas from Inception Sound, - did the mixes.

When things feel right –they are usually right. I’ll be forever indebted to all who contributed to this – the many pauses to perfect lines, the joy of laughter between Elizabeth and Mags – the serious intentions that rumbled through the main room and the final out come. The ingenious contributions of bassist Roberto Riveron and my desire not to recreate or impersonate indigenous music, but to bring artists together and encourage them express themselves in their own musical vocabulary, and breathe life into the notes I scripted on manuscript paper. We are the best of friends on this musical journey – the long conversation. Welcome to our journey to the – Isle of Saints!

Bill King – Producer/arranger/composer/keyboards

Elizabeth Rodriguez vocals/violin

Magdelys Savigne – drums/vocals/percussion

Roberto Riveron – bass

Engineer – Shane “Shakey J” Forrest

Mixing Engineer – Michael Haas

Recorded at Side Door Records, Toronto – 2017

Slaight Music

1.       Havana Odyssey

2.       Isle of Saints

3.       Carmen’s Veranda

4.       Ivory Town

5.       Clear Mountain Moon

6.       That’s the Way of The World

Contact: billkingpiano@gmail.com

647 883-2919

A Conversation with CD Baby’s Kevin Breuner

It took a musician to tackle the issue of selling independent music online – direct to the consumer. CD Baby founder Derek Sivers did this by creating a website to sell his own music in 1998 and saw the potential of doing so for others. Most everything about digital commerce was a scary proposition back then. Once a member, you shipped five CDs and waited until they were sold and then reordered. A check would arrive in the mail, along with your cut. Keep in mind, folks were petrified of online banking.

From day one my experiences with CD Baby were always straight forward, clean of mistrust and never once did I have to chase after a payment. To this day, musicians applaud the upgrades, stability, and easy access.

I caught up with VP of marketing Kevin Breuner at Canadian Music Week and asked him about the current business model and what to expect in the future.

What brings you to Toronto?

Canada has been our second largest market for many years and we’ve been doing things like expanding our publishing and administration services, which have been available in Canada quite a while. We are starting to take more care of other markets outside the U.S. This is my first time at Canadian Music Week, even though we’ve had others attend in the past. We are trying to get better connected with the music scene in Canada – stronger relationships and continuing to grow our presence in this market.

You must be under pressure from publishers and rights collectors to properly account for every recording that finds its way through CD Baby and the many streaming platforms you access?

Fortunately for us, we were going way beyond the norm collecting data from artists; even back when I started working there in 2006. At one point, we even debated stopping that practice because it wasn’t being used by anybody at that time and was causing a lot of extra headaches in the sign-up process. I’m glad we kept it. With digital service providers like iTunes and Spotify, and because they got pressured to better account for publishing royalties and songwriter credits – increasing the requirements in those areas; we were prepared for them.

As the world was becoming digital, all of these publishing royalties due independent artists weren’t being collected or accounted for. The publishing world was still old school in their thinking. We know who the big players are and they get paid, then they kind of swept the rest under the rug. There’s no reason there shouldn’t be a one for one deal. Same should be true with publishing and songwriter royalties. That’s what that service is about. Going around the world and collecting that information – making sure the data is out there – songs properly registered around the world, so we can collect that money.

I guess one of the gratifying CD Baby practices all musicians appreciate is the monthly payments. Historically, other than the superstars, getting paid was one sad tale. Volumes have been written about music industry rip-offs.

We actually pay weekly, if you are generating that kind of revenue. We have big artists who do really well and payments are consistent and they can count on them.

Does this break down by genre?

I wouldn’t say so. I see everything. Musicians playing instruments I never knew existed are making lots of money because they could connect with a certain audience. The one thing all those who are selling well have in common is, they have connected with an audience or tapped into a market that hadn’t been reached. They are good at cultivating fans. They also write great music.

 We see a lot of singer/songwriters do extremely well. That’s really based on outside circumstances. There was a period we had these singer/songwriters getting massive placement in film and television because that was popular at the time. It’s that kind of situation that will drive a genre or groups. It’s more cyclical. It’s about being able to capitalize on the opportunities when they happen and owning that relationship with fans. Keep cultivating, so they can take it to the next level and keep engaged so they keep coming back.

What have you added to CD Baby that gives an artist a better understanding of how their music is being received and what can be done to improve outreach?

Two things very recently. We added these trending and analytic reports which are amazing. They become addictive because you start looking at them every day. We have these great trending reports for Apple Music, iTunes, and Spotify and you can look day by day and see where your streams are happening, down to obscure cities anywhere in the world. You can get into a Spotify artist and get stats – you can get the top fifties cities, but with ours, you can zoom in the map and see, for example, who in the Toronto area is streaming. Could be fifty miles outside the city in some little town and someone is streaming you like crazy - why not play a show there? It also gives demographic information.

A lot of artists go about trying to communicate with their fans in the wrong way. For example, a lot times an artist will try to imitate what the pop icons are doing. Pop icons are in a different class of their own and part of a marketing machine geared at youth. That may not be your audience. You may be wondering why that girls’ shirt you have at your merch table geared towards teenage girls isn’t selling. That’s because your audience is fifty-year-old men. There’s data that covers that, that will help you make better decisions. The coolest thing about Spotify, it shows who is streaming your music on the playlist. That’s incredibly helpful – there’s no other way to find that information.

We had kind of a hidden success for my band last year. We released a Christmas album a few years ago and this year somebody had put our album in their playlist. He was just a random guy and a Spotify user. In think he just kind of lucked into twelve thousand followers to his playlist, using some very generic key words that just happened to work. We got 80,000 plays just off that playlist. We would have never known had we not had these trending notes. It helped us to move and figure how to build on that and drive more traffic now – not wait. It made us more proactive. For us, it also happened with Pandora. A lot of these platforms are driving their own eco-system and doing things in different ways.

With Pandora, we had a cover song that was off that same Christmas album. For whatever reason, between November and Christmas, it got a half million plays and we would have never known if we hadn’t looked at the data. We could watch all of this go down in real time. We sold a lot of albums and streams.

How many platforms does CD Baby reach?

We are distributing to a hundred outlets.

Do you pay more to reach more outlets?

The only thing the higher distribution fee adds is publishing administration. It includes all of the stores.

What are some of the new extras?

We just acquired this new marketing platform called, Show.co, it’s an amazing platform. Someone came to us with this and said they were transitioning their business and would you guys be interested in this platform? It was a platform pretty much all the major labels had been using. The client list using this platform every day is impressive – Universal, The Orchard, Nettwerk Music, Sony – they are all in there every day in their accounts launching these campaigns. Absolutely, we said, we want this.

We got it and are making it free to all CD Baby artists. It features campaign pages that are designed to get a specific action from your fans. The major labels have been using it for contests, email exchange and for downloads. You can do different things with it like featuring a new official music video. It cuts all of the garbage out that YouTube puts on it. It shows the video and tries to get everybody to subscribe to your channel.

The one page the major labels have been using that is really cool is called Social Unlock. Basically, if you follow someone on Spotify, it unlocks content or gets you into a contest and when your fans follow you on Spotify, you also get their email address. It helps you build a list. The people who manage the Oasis catalogue use this constantly to do contests because the band doesn’t play or do anything together anymore because they can’t stand to be together.

They have millions and millions of plays on Spotify and are using this tool to capitalize. Britney Spears, Maroon Five have used it. We are just rolling out to artists and it’s available now, for free. The link will be on artist dashboards in just days. Instead of going out there and saying “buy my music, buy my music” and irritating fans – here’s a tool that will help you get creative and get things done and improve your efforts, whether building subscribers, getting plays, getting followers, building email lists – you are unlocking more opportunities. 

Bill Covers CMW Seminars

Last week in many ways shed a bit more light on the future of podcasting and streaming. The fact is, the tech world never stands still and the tools keep getting more user-friendly and with that comes change and confusion. Here is a synopsis of five events I found most enlightening.

Reinventing Radio & Storytelling in the Multi-Connected Life

Panelists contend that the narrative podcast is more potent than television, as the imagination is more active when listening than watching. And the next wave - contextual radio streaming, with the internet broadcasting real-time music, news, stories and local information - is here. Listeners will tune into radio longer hours as it returns to great storytelling and individual topics of importance and interest. The automobile will be a paramount location for "driveway moments" - staying in your car until the story fades. Listeners will self-design their own apps, and a new language, consisting of terms like EFFT, RDJD, GEO Soundscaping, Assisted Intelligence, Voice Triggers, Spatial Storytelling will be absorbed and practiced. - Bill King

Growing the Pie: Will Streaming Do?

Loading up on apps is outdated; at least that’s what the esteemed panelists addressing trends and innovation had to say. We are about 5-to-10 years away from sorting out the pie to a fairer pay system that will eventually serve artists, labels, creators and product managers. Since 1999, the ground that has been given to services like Napster and tech companies is only now beginning to be made up. For every dollar SOCAN collects, another remains uncollected, emphasizing the importance of registering with collective management organizations around the world. Rates from streaming services like Spotify - which pay top dollar to the most popular artists and pennies to everyone else - need to be renegotiated. One bright spot: indie artists have the tools, blueprint, and more platforms and avenues to positively determine their own future. Your horizon is closer - Bill King

From the Pod - Casting the Net to The Future

Podcasting To Millions: Podcasting is no longer the unrefined cousin of terrestrial radio. In the U.S., 42M people tune in weekly to podcasts, and that number shoots up to 67M listeners on a monthly basis.The key attraction is good storytelling from an amiable, well-spoken host, schooled in their chosen field, with Amplifi Media's Stephen Goldstein stating: "People don’t watch crap on TV anymore. Personal control is the big change - the same on radio as it is on television.” It's determined that podcasts draw 15% of a U.S. audience that listens weekly, wherein Canada it's 15% of those 18+. In Canada, The Humble and Fred Show gets downloaded 12K-15K daily, running sponsored promotions ranging "product in hand" fan endorsements through social media platforms Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Sponsorship and licensing fees supply the main revenue. “We live in an on-demand – customizable world. People want to listen on their own schedule,” says H&F's Howard Glassman. Globally, 10B podcasts were downloaded in 2016. - Bill King
  

Streaming Sharing, Stealing

Why Steal When You Can Stream? Carnegie Mellon University professor Rahul Telang singles out data as the key to becoming a dominant player, confirming that with such series as Netflix's House Of Cards and the movie star appeal of Kevin Spacey, the linear way of watching TV is over.Telang also claims that streaming services have had a negative impact on piracy because free content discourages stealing. Defining the "4 P's" as product, price, placement, and promotion, Telang says Netflix understands the public tolerance level for streaming service pricing. Studios have caught onto data value and are now limiting sharing of info on such streaming hubs as Spotify. The challenge for all is identifying your audience. - Bill King

Standing on the Platform

Platforms are unifying public and private radio stations: With the launch of Radioplayer Canada and iHeartRadio Canada, radio needs to be where people are and integrated on all platforms. Rogers' Julie Adams says, “it’s about agreeing on technology and competing on content." The UK-developed Radioplayer app brought public and private broadcasters together at the dawn of streaming's popularity, offering a standard web player to make the listener experience easier.iHeartRadio Canada boasts 100M+ listeners and 120 platform integrations, division head Rob Farina said, adding that the brand wants to reach the consumer on the platform of their choice. Cars are the next frontier and the medium is still advertiser-driven.When it comes to teenagers, Zack Sang & The Gang, heard on 75 stations across the U.S, is one of the most successful in grabbing their attention.

“It’s a big thing for everyone, making sure your brand lives 24/7," Sang says. "Digital opens this up. Not all content put out there is solely audio. Content will always be a priority. People want somebody they can follow. They want a pulse, something real on the other end.” - Bill King