River Redux Part II: The Wrath of Phil

DID YOU THINK THAT WAS THE END?

Dear God, no. This is about Phil Spector, after all, and the guy's still alive. Batshit crazy and locked up, but alive.

Until he somehow ended up with scrambled eggs for brains, Spector had a certain talent (not genius - let's save that for cats like Bob Dylan who never ended up killing anyone/rotting in jail) for startling innovation. What today would be called thinking outside the sound booth. The more I listen to this stuff, the stranger it gets: what he was able to do, the way he filtered and watered and plunged, how sound waves bent and quavered. 

I am in considerable distress however, because the deeper into this topic I get, the shallower it is. This is because of the gross limitations of what I call the "YouTube mentality". There may be plenty of recordings of Da Doo Ron Ron, Then He Kissed Me and Unchained Melody on YouTube, but to a recording, they all seem to be "Best Version!", "High Quality!", "Remastered!" - in other words, STEREO, which is not what Spector was thinking about at all. Not at the beginning, certainly, and probably not ever.

He was a traditional, even Jurassic sort who liked sound to be boxed and limited. That way he could truly mix his pigments, smear them together into something that was almost jellied. The upflashing of the chorus on River Deep, Mountain High reminds me of a brush fire surging out of control on a mountaintop at midnight: but there's nothing to see, not even smoke. Just a sudden flash of heat singeing the hairs on your face.

Somehow - I don't know how because the technical aspects of this subject don't interest me - someone has taken these amazing mono puzzle-boxes of sound and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d them out, separating the auditory blur neatly into its component parts. No longer are all the musicians sitting in a 95-degree, semi-lighted box with a tiny, demonic, sweaty producer pacing back and forth and shouting abuse at them in a tinny Bronx accent.

Now, the drums are over HERE, and the string section is over HERE, and the chorus is - and you get the picture. Everyone is exactly where they'd be in a proper recording setup. None of this primitive Gold Star Studio shit, no sir. 

No more sweatbox, no more smeared pigments. It has all been pulled apart like the individual colours in white light.

So is that good?

According to YouTube, which seems to have its head back in the early '80s somewhere, why, gosh, yes! Isn't stereo always better than mono? What can you be thinking? "It's a mono record, a really old one. Ohhhh. Guess I'd better throw it away, then. Put it in the oven and make a sculpture out of it. Flea market stuff." 

This is the very same mentality that caused people to tack orange shag carpet down over glorious distressed hardwood, its gloss so deep you could see yourself. The kind of thing that still makes realtors scream when it's finally ripped up. 

Enhanced. Best version. Best sound. Stereo!! Dad showing off the New Stereo to guests, putting on some thundering Beethoven symphony with the bass turned up full because thundering bass is always a sign of a Good Stereo. And stereo, it's, you know, it's like better than that old thing, mono. Listen, the sound comes out of both sides! And you can't play your stereo records on a mono player or you'll ruin them. (Or else you can't play your mono records on a stereo player.)

It shocks me that YouTube still thinks that way. Even old Caruso records are souped up so that they "sound like" stereo. Why? They're not. The recording method in 1910 consisted of a horn, a rubber tube and a stylus making a little groove in wax. These restorations or whatever they call them often sound as if they're coming from inside a five-thousand-mile-long cigar tube or a deep well made of cheap aluminum. Weird squeaks and fragments of chopped-up feedback completely wreck the beauty of the music. It's depressing. 

It's disappointing that I'm not finding very many original versions of Spector classics on YouTube, in glorious monaural where the sound was all in the middle. This was A.M. radio stuff, after all, and it came out of a tinny little 2 x 2-inch speaker clogged with beach sand. Spector had found the trick of creating three dimensions in one: a sort of trompe l'oeil at 45 rpm. The recorded sound was concentrated because the delivery device was even more concentrated: it was a transistor radio, the life support system of every teenager from 1950 to 1975, when the boom box began to take over.

Wrecking classics by forcing them into a "Best Version" format causes a peculiar form of hurt. It's as if someone has insulted your pride. You make a joke, it sails over the other person's head because they don't understand irony, and then they "correct" you for being so ignorant. Somebody pins you to the wall at a party and begins to lecture you on a subject you learned when you were in Grade 3. You can't keep saying "I know all this. I know all this," and are expected to clasp your hands, flutter your eyelashes and say, "Oooooh! Tell me more!" The thing is, you KNOW you're in the right, and nobody else gets it. The only way to "restore" these things is maybe to find a way to play them without the skips and scratches (but please, not with sound from the inside of a pickle jar). If I could, I'd place the record on the ground, maybe in my back yard, take a giant stylus, place it on the record, and run around it frantically at 45 rpm, broadcasting the sound from reverberations inside my skull.

ENCORE. The commentary below sounds like a Masters thesis or PhD dissertation or something, in which the writer effuses about this ethereal thing Spector does by turning off the guitar track on "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" by Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans (which I have posted above for your consideration). When I listen to it - a particularly raucous and ugly piece of pop music - it's hard for me to make out just what everyone is talking about. I sort of hear a guitar, or a not-very-resonant thunking sound, but the magic eludes me. Somehow or other, through being famous or influential for a long time, every little thing Spector did has become hallowed. It's even worse with Bob Dylan, who is at least still walking around. 

During the mixing for Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans' version of "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah", Spector turned off the track designated for electric guitar (played on this occasion by Billy Strange). However, the sound of the guitar could still be heard spilling onto other microphones in the room, creating a ghostly ambiance that obscured the instrument. In reference to this nuance of the song's recording, music professor Albin Zak has written:

It was at this moment that the complex of relationships among all the layers and aspects of the sonic texture came together to bring the desired image into focus. As long as Strange’s unmiked guitar plugs away as one of the layered timbral characters that make up the track’s rhythmic groove, it is simply one strand among many in a texture whose timbres sound more like impressionistic allusions to instruments than representations. But the guitar has a latency about it, a potential. Because it has no microphone of its own, it effectively inhabits a different ambient space from the rest of the track. As it chugs along in its accompanying role, it forms a connection with a parallel sound world of which we are, for the moment, unaware. Indeed, we would never know of the secondary ambient layer were it not for the fact that this guitar is the one that takes the solo. As it steps out of the groove texture and asserts its individuality, a doorway opens to an entirely other place in the track. It becomes quite clear that this guitar inhabits a world all its own, which has been before us from the beginning yet has somehow gone unnoticed.

Thank you, Professor Zak. You may go home now.

(Not Phil Spector. It's Al Pacino. But at least he's still walking around.)

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River Redux: Phil Spector revisited

I am sure, sure-tee-sure I have posted this song before, but is this the kind of song you only listen to once? You listen to it until you fall right into the middle of it and drown.

Much is made of the famous or infamous Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound, a weird aural trick that no one had thought of before. Back in the early '60s, recordings were made in the most primitive circumstances, with one or two microphones and a couple of tracks. Bob Dylan just sang into the sucker on his first album, and that was that. I've seen video of all Four Seasons clustered around the same mike.

Spector was dealing with the supposed limitations of mono sound recording when he began to innovate and percolate and come up with something eerily new. I say eerie because that's how I feel about Spector recordings. I get the chills, even the willies, when I listen to them, particularly late at night.

There are tons of them on YouTube, fortunately - God, how did I LIVE without YouTube? - so I can listen, at a click, to Be My Baby by the Ronettes, And Then He Kissed Me and Da Doo Ron Ron by The Crystals, and the two big Righteous Brothers classics, Unchained Melody and You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling. But Tina's classic is still my favorite, and it gives me the shivers no matter how many times I hear it.

Why is that? Spector uses some pretty complex arrangements in these things, strings, brasses, lots of funky percussion (and for some reason he used a lot of castanets), and keyboards: piano and even harpsichord, as well as (usually) a female chorus. But all these things were not separate entities. They were layered on top of each other, even smeared and bleared together like pigment in an impressionist painting.

In another video, which I won't post here, a couple of session musicians of the era give away some of the secrets of the Wall. The two guys are sitting right there in the recording room at Gold Star Studios, a seedy-looking little place that looks like it turned out records that amateur singers would give their grandmas for birthday presents. But no. Miracles happened here. The musicians were cramped together so cruelly that going to the bathroom would necessitate clambering over the trombonist. This was done on purpose, so the individual sounds would meld and fuse together.

Another trick was the use of the echo chamber. I didn't know what one of those looked like - I assumed a glass tube like in a Star Trek movie or something, but no. It was just a room, an ugly little room in the basement made out of cement, and microphones were aimed at the walls. Yes. The walls. A cheap little speaker blasted the music into the echo chamber, and the sound waves from all those densely-clustered instruments bounced and zinged weirdly off the walls and into the mikes, which took the sound back to the control room where Spector did God knows what sort of Satanic thing to it.

Wikipedia explains it more clearly than I can:

"Microphones in the recording studio captured the musicians' performance, which was then transmitted to an echo chamber—a basement room fitted with speakers and microphones. The signal from the studio was played through the speakers and reverberated throughout the room before being picked up by the microphones. The echo-laden sound was then channeled back to the control room, where it was recorded on tape. The natural reverberation and echo from the hard walls of the echo chamber gave Spector's productions their distinctive quality and resulted in a rich, complex sound that, when played on AM radio, had a texture rarely heard in musical recordings."

One of those session musicians recalls:

"There was a lot of weight on each part.…The three pianos were different, one electric, one not, one harpsichord, and they would all play the same thing and it would all be swimming around like it was all down a well. Musically, it was terribly simple, but the way he recorded and miked it, they’d diffuse it so that you couldn't pick any one instrument out. Techniques like distortion and echo were not new, but Phil came along and took these to make sounds that had not been used in the past. I thought it was ingenious."

Not content with this kind of reverbatory sorcery, Spector was known to turn off a guitar track on a tape, relying on the "bleed"/spillage of the guitar's overtone-y sound into one of the other mikes to create the sense of a ghost guitar. It's there, except that it's not. And you can still hear it even when it isn't.

Whether all this supernatural stuff was folded in right then and there, or later, I don't know, but that smeary, bleary, echo-y, ghostly shade of the music was liberally used to give the song a sense of throbbing unreality. A chorus had the sound of fourteen glass globes vibrating to the point of near-explosion. A brass section was cooked down and down, reduced like a sauce that boiled away into a vapour of brassiness that almost had no individual flavour at all. Strings were sometimes doubled, then doubled again, and again, so that two string players could end up sounding like an entire string section, bizarrely cloned - not to save money or space, but to give the whole thing an unnatural, uniform, mutant quality.

So the lead singer would be laying down tracks on top of a vibrating prism of sound,  a rotating jellyfish at a depth of several thousand feet that would explode if it ever found its way up to the surface.

If you listen to this, and listen to it, it gets scary, because this is not real sound. Mind you, what you hear now isn't either, it has all been mucked with, but all this was done manually, no electronics, because there weren't any (and Spector despised the innovations that came later - he did not change with the times). When I listen to his productions, I get the same feeling as when I listen to those Tibetan monks chanting in overtones: yes, we ARE hearing the actual components of sound, but pulled apart, like white light being shattered by a prism into a rainbow. In this case it's almost the opposite. The sound waves are all pushed together, creating something we've never heard before and can't even quite comprehend.

There was another aspect of this twenty-thousand-leagues-under-reality effect: Spector made the musicians rehearse for at least three hours before rolling tape. At the end of this, everyone would be so sweaty and exhausted and beaten-down that they would lose their individuality and "meld", almost melt, the way he wanted them to. It was no doubt a form of brainwashing or torture, acceptable torture because he paid them. Spector is not a nice man, and is in fact batshit crazy and a sociopath, but damn! he came up with an interesting recording effect that people are still trying to duplicate today.

You can try it, you can record and re-record and re-re-RErecord musical reverberations and play them back and then record them again, but it's not the same. No one has quite the right demonic quality to put it all together. And singers are different, and music is different, it just has to be. And I am sure I am not using any of the right technical terms in writing about all this, but I'm writing what I hear, and I have a pretty darn-tootin' good ear, thank you very much; I came in with it, I inherited it from all the crazy musicians in my genetic pool.

Some are so crazy they aren't even here any more. But at least none of them are in jail for murder.

P. S. Listen at your own risk! I guarantee you, this is the weirdest thing you've ever heard: just the sound of one man chanting. 

. . . OK, there is always a P. S. to the P. S. Since I posted all this, including Tina Turner singing River Deep Mountain High, I found a version of this same song which sounds SOOOOO much better that I had to post it again. It sounds so much better because it's in glorious, clean-cut, diamond-hard MONO with no soup-ups or enhancements. (See follow-up post, where I get into a serious rant about this.) It may be the playback equipment that makes a difference, but I can hear so much more of the recording here, the deep well (not wall) of sound. In fact, Well of Sound might be a more accurate description of what the Mad Phillster was after.

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