Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / [EP 379] The Sound Architect: How Robert Margouleff Shaped Stevie Wonder & DEVO

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[EP 379] The Sound Architect: How Robert Margouleff Shaped Stevie Wonder & DEVO · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  Speaker 1: This is like narrow hallway. It was very reverberant. We
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  Speaker 1: went out there at seven or eight in the morning
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  Speaker 1: when no one was around, and Howard put the condenser
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  Speaker 1: mic that out at the bottom of the hallway in
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  Speaker 1: one close and everyone was trying to crack the whip.
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  Speaker 1: I tried it, and I cracked the work and stop
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  Speaker 1: myself in the face.
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  Speaker 2: We're totally rocking roll.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, I leave you. You're reading. Little Hands says
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  Speaker 1: it's time to rock and roll up.
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  Speaker 2: I totally booked. Welcome back to book Don Rock. This
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  Speaker 2: is the podcast for those about to read and rock
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  Speaker 2: on Eric Sanach. Before we get started, listeners and viewers
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: can get fifteen percent off classic rock merchandise at old
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Glory dot com. So many great items there. The code
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  Speaker 2: is booked on Rock the link in the show notes,
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  Speaker 2: or at booked on rock dot com under my deals.
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  Speaker 3: All right.
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  Speaker 2: Our guest is Robert Margolefie. He is a Grammy Award
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  Speaker 2: winning producer, engineer, filmmaker, and electronic music pioneer whose innovations
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  Speaker 2: helped to reshape modern popular music. Alongside partner Malcolm Cecil,
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  Speaker 2: the Late Great Malcolm Cecil, he co created Tanto one
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  Speaker 2: of the most advanced analog synthesizers ever built, and together
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  Speaker 2: they helped define Stevie Wonder's classic nineteen seventies run, contributing
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  Speaker 2: to landmark albums including Music of My Mind, Talking Book,
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  Speaker 2: Inner Visions, and Fulfillingness First Finale. Beyond Stevie, Margoleff has
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  Speaker 2: worked with artists including Divo, Billy Preston, the Issley Brothers,
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  Speaker 2: and David Sanborn, while also pioneering immersive surround sound for
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  Speaker 2: major films like Lord of the Rings Seven and X Men.
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  Speaker 2: He tells his remarkable story in his memoir Shaping Sounds,
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  Speaker 2: Stevie Wonder, Divo, the Synth Revolution, and My Life behind
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  Speaker 2: the Music throughout May nineteenth, Robert, Welcome to the podcast.
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  Speaker 2: How was that for an introduction?
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  Speaker 1: Boy? You really wound up there. I'll tell you I
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  Speaker 1: loved it.
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  Speaker 2: I could have kept going. I had to edit it down.
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  Speaker 1: If She's let be known in advance, I would have
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  Speaker 1: brought my violin.
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  Speaker 2: This is so so great to be able to talk
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  Speaker 2: to you and ask you questions about all of the
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  Speaker 2: amazing projects you worked on and the things you did
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  Speaker 2: with And I said the late great Malcolm Cecil, who
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  Speaker 2: unforse he just recently passed away, right.
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  Speaker 1: About a year year and a half ago. Yeah, his
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  Speaker 1: wife's just passed on too, So they're back there together again.
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  Speaker 1: They're Stardust. Yeah, Malcolm had a good run, Nave.
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  Speaker 2: We'll talk about what the two of you did together,
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  Speaker 2: but let's start going back to your childhood. In the book,
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  Speaker 2: you read extensively about your upbringing in post war New
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  Speaker 2: York and feeling somewhat emotionally isolated despite being in a stable,
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  Speaker 2: middle class home. You also write the music created decisive
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  Speaker 2: emotional moments for you. Can you talk about the importance
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  Speaker 2: of music in your life early on?
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  Speaker 1: Well, I don't know. I think that we have what
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  Speaker 1: do they call it, epigenetic memory. Has a lot of
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  Speaker 1: music in my family that goes back on both sides.
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  Speaker 1: My older sister, God bless her, she's ninety four now,
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  Speaker 1: but master's and keyboard from Juilliard Duo pianists leaderships and
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  Speaker 1: emenoff long gone for the planet RCAA duo pianists. Music's
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  Speaker 1: always been in my family on both sides. Just recently
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  Speaker 1: I got in contact with the father's my father's side
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  Speaker 1: of the family and based in France, that part of
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  Speaker 1: my family and he Dela cour is also in music
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  Speaker 1: and recording engineer. It seems that it's a we have
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  Speaker 1: an epigenetic memory of our past. It's like a little
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  Speaker 1: book or a little Codo chrome movie running in our
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  Speaker 1: genes in some way. And music has always been in
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  Speaker 1: my family. I can remember as a little boy, like
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  Speaker 1: three four years old, we had this beautiful sun room
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  Speaker 1: off the off the living room of my family's home
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  Speaker 1: and great neck, and we had a big Steinway piano
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  Speaker 1: in there, a grand piano, and my sister used to
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  Speaker 1: play Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. She was going to Juilliard
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  Speaker 1: and I would be playing with my little tinky toys
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  Speaker 1: under the piano and listening to Bach, Broms and Beethoven.
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  Speaker 1: And I'm still doing it. I mean, I still although
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  Speaker 1: I've had a good run in pop and R and B,
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  Speaker 1: my roots, really, my roots really are classical music, mostly
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  Speaker 1: piano music. For that reason, I think I was brainwashed
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  Speaker 1: under the piano. Maybe there was maybe the piano fell
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  Speaker 1: on me. I don't know, maybe turned me into a waffle.
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  Speaker 1: But I've always lived with music in my life, and
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  Speaker 1: it's I couldn't deny it. I mean, I tried to
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  Speaker 1: be going to the motion picture business later on, and
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  Speaker 1: to be a filmmaker and a photographer and stuff. But somehow,
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  Speaker 1: no matter what I did, I've always had a pres
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  Speaker 1: predisposition to move toward music. And I grew up like that.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, I love classical music. I listened to it
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  Speaker 1: all the time. I'm now, at eighty five years old,
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  Speaker 1: I listened to more classical music than I listened to
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  Speaker 1: pop records.
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  Speaker 2: Well, okay, well, you grew up around the same time
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  Speaker 2: as my mom and dad, and my dad introduced me
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  Speaker 2: to so many of the great artists, Glenn Miller and
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  Speaker 2: all those already Shaw and I always say, if you
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  Speaker 2: love music, you will find a connection. It's all there
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  Speaker 2: from classical.
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  Speaker 1: It's amazing to think about Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller
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  Speaker 1: and Benny Goodman and the band, what a band looked like,
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  Speaker 1: and how the microphone changed reality during that time. Before then,
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  Speaker 1: it was like, oh, the band would play, and we
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  Speaker 1: had to go to a really good acoustically correct hall,
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  Speaker 1: concert hall to really hear well, or to hear great opera.
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  Speaker 1: There's some rooms that were better for certain kind of
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  Speaker 1: music and other rooms for other kinds of music. And
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  Speaker 1: then the microphone happened, and suddenly there was electronics and
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  Speaker 1: electricity inside the concert hall, and the big Crossby could
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  Speaker 1: get right on the mic right where you are on
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  Speaker 1: your mic right now, and he could do babb bah booh,
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  Speaker 1: bah bah booh, and the girls would love it because
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  Speaker 1: his voice was as loud as the entire band behind him.
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  Speaker 1: Because we were rearranging reality with electricity, and once the
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  Speaker 1: microphone happened, we began to really rearrange the musical world
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  Speaker 1: in a very different way, not particular lily and classical
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  Speaker 1: music was really a little bit more sound reinforcement. But
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  Speaker 1: do you think even the levels of loudness a band
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  Speaker 1: like Glenn Miller, How loud do you think Glenn Miller
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  Speaker 1: wu Spann got when it was blowing in their brains out?
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  Speaker 1: I would say maybe about ad dBSPL sound pressure level
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  Speaker 1: When we were in the studio with the Stones or
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  Speaker 1: with Poison or Guns n' Roses, Where do you think
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  Speaker 1: the levels were? I will tell you about one hundred
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  Speaker 1: and twenty six ybspl, twice the level of the loudest
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  Speaker 1: the dance band would make. And we had to learn
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  Speaker 1: how to handle that kind of level in a control
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  Speaker 1: room and get something that's predictable coming out the other
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  Speaker 1: end of it. You know, the control room was more
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  Speaker 1: than a place for the engineers with the pencil protectors
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  Speaker 1: to and the short sleeve white shirts to bunky around
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  Speaker 1: with the electronics we had to deliver. We had to
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  Speaker 1: deliver sonically correct, equal in frequency music to a standard
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  Speaker 1: at pretty high levels. And you know, it's a whole
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  Speaker 1: different world now where music falls out of just vibrating electrons.
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  Speaker 1: Like with tanto, there is no acoustical instrument. It falls
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  Speaker 1: the first time you hear sound, it's coming out of
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  Speaker 1: a loud speaker. The room itself is a musical instrument.
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  Speaker 2: When did you first start to listen to music and
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  Speaker 2: start thinking about those things like how it was all
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  Speaker 2: put together and things that maybe others the normal person
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  Speaker 2: wouldn't think of.
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  Speaker 1: Well it really I really had like a rude awakening
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  Speaker 1: when I started working with Stevie and Malcolm. And the
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  Speaker 1: reason was it was during the time that we started
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  Speaker 1: developing a thing in the business calling a quadraphonic sound,
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  Speaker 1: and it had a lifespan, the short life span basically,
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  Speaker 1: but the concept was that we would be able to
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  Speaker 1: create an imbursive space with four loud speakers and that
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  Speaker 1: we could put it on vinyl, and that was a big,
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  Speaker 1: a big deal. Mostly Sam Sui developed a system called
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  Speaker 1: QS and what we moved out from New York from
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  Speaker 1: an electric lady with Stevie Malcolm and me and Steve
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  Speaker 1: went west. We were invited to go to the record plant.
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  Speaker 1: The record plant was always about the latest and the greatest,
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  Speaker 1: and we'd heard a lot about QUAD. They said they
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  Speaker 1: offered to build a control room for us, and they
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  Speaker 1: wanted to do the latest thing. Quad to do it,
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  Speaker 1: and basically it would involve mixing music in four channels
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  Speaker 1: instead of two, and creating a space where instead of
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  Speaker 1: having an objective view of music, like here's the parscenium
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  Speaker 1: march and here's Benny Goodman playing with his clarinet and everything,
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  Speaker 1: and you see a picture of the band, or you
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  Speaker 1: see a picture of a rock and roll band in
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  Speaker 1: front of you inside a parsonium march and versus that
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  Speaker 1: where the sound was objective. Or the concert classical music
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  Speaker 1: with a symphony orchestra with the conductor in the middle
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  Speaker 1: and the orchestra spread out and you would get the
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  Speaker 1: ambient sound behind you. So it was around that time
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  Speaker 1: Deco in London was fooling around a lot with an RC.
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  Speaker 1: Mostly English were doing it, but we were on the
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  Speaker 1: top of it, and we said, well, since we're building
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  Speaker 1: a new control room to have Stevens stuff in there
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  Speaker 1: and to have a space for Tonto, the original Neo
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  Speaker 1: Timber Orchestra, that we would build a QUAD control room.
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  Speaker 1: And we tried mixing some of Steve's stuff in Quad
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  Speaker 1: and it sounded terrific when it was the on tape,
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  Speaker 1: you know, four channel discrete channels, but it really the
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  Speaker 1: long run turned into a miserable failure and expensive, miserable
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  Speaker 1: failure because it really didn't hold up on final But
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  Speaker 1: the reason I tell the story is because we're really
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  Speaker 1: held up was it enabled us to start to monitor
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  Speaker 1: music while we were recording it as a production tool,
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  Speaker 1: to monitor in Quad and bring for example Stevie or
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  Speaker 1: d or any number of artists that I was working
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  Speaker 1: with or that Malcolm and I were working with the
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  Speaker 1: ability to bring them into the control room and have
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  Speaker 1: the background vocals behind them and the rhythm guitar on
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  Speaker 1: one side and the clavinetta on the other side, and
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  Speaker 1: the lead vocal in the front, and the drums and
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  Speaker 1: panning around and filling the space. Because what it did
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  Speaker 1: it enabled us to turn the music from an objective
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  Speaker 1: Perscenian space to a subjective, immersive space. So it became
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  Speaker 1: a fantastic tool for working and creating music versus we
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  Speaker 1: weren't able to We tried doing the vinyl. It was
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  Speaker 1: a miserable failure. And people didn't want to buy a
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  Speaker 1: special cartridge for the turntable, this for the quadraphonic, nor
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  Speaker 1: did they want to have a separate amplifier. And your
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  Speaker 1: wife would kill you if you want to with a
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  Speaker 1: subwa for end of the piano in the fireplace, you know.
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  Speaker 1: So it didn't work. It was a little early. Now,
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  Speaker 1: of course we have Dolby Atmos and a whole bunch
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  Speaker 1: of other things where placement of music inside a source
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  Speaker 1: point source source for music Dolby is you know, you
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  Speaker 1: can create a point where the sound exactly is you know.
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  Speaker 1: But that's wonderful for motion pictures and stuff, but for music,
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  Speaker 1: I think it's a little excessive. I don't think it's
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  Speaker 1: gonna really meet with a lot of huge success. It's
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  Speaker 1: very expensive to really reproduce it the right way. But
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  Speaker 1: there pluses and minus is about Dolbie atmos. It certainly
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  Speaker 1: sounds terrific when it's done correctly, but it became a
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  Speaker 1: tool for me over the years to be able to
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  Speaker 1: bring people into the control room, because then you would
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  Speaker 1: get all the cross talk, you would get the way
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  Speaker 1: people normally things you hear. If you like we're doing
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  Speaker 1: this now with the headphone stuff, and what's coming in
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  Speaker 1: on the right side, you hear only on the right side.
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  Speaker 1: What's coming in on the left side, you're hearing only
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  Speaker 1: on the left side. But if you're in a room
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  Speaker 1: and there are big speakers there in the front and
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  Speaker 1: around you, you're hearing stuff that's coming out of the
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  Speaker 1: left speaker on the left side, but you're also hearing
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  Speaker 1: the cross talk of it it delayed slightly on the
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  Speaker 1: right side, and vice versa. And by virtue of what's
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  Speaker 1: going on, there's very complicated organs in our brain called
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  Speaker 1: the tools the inside part of our ears. All of
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  Speaker 1: that information is enabling us to decide where the sound
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  Speaker 1: is coming from, what the character of it is, how
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  Speaker 1: it's moving, and it's much more immediate and it doesn't
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  Speaker 1: leave you with a deficit in your hearing because we're
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  Speaker 1: used to hearing things with a carrier with sound behind it,
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  Speaker 1: and when you remove that and you put stuff on
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  Speaker 1: headphones only, your cognitive thinking is different. That's what I discovered,
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  Speaker 1: and the cognition is really what makes great music. What
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  Speaker 1: really made STEVEE fly, what made Devo fly, and a
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  Speaker 1: lot of people I've worked with over the years, is
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  Speaker 1: working in the control room with the speakers up in
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  Speaker 1: quad so that people could really immerse themselves and feel
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  Speaker 1: a part of it without having this kind of sensory
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  Speaker 1: desperate sensory deprivation by virtue of having the sound isolated
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  Speaker 1: and removed from the environment, what makes it great. You know,
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  Speaker 1: what makes a great live concert is the fact that
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  Speaker 1: there is cross talk, that there is people, that there
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  Speaker 1: is sound underneath that it gives us the ability to
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  Speaker 1: decode what's noise and what's real, what's important. So I
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  Speaker 1: think in a lot of ways, noise cancellation and earphones
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  Speaker 1: is something that's really beginning to affect people's education and
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  Speaker 1: the ability to pay attention to things. I think that
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  Speaker 1: we're going to see in test scores if some rehears
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: if something's done, you will hear that this noise canceling
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  Speaker 1: stuff could be detrimental to learning into cognition, so you know,
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  Speaker 1: but I didn't know about that. All I know is
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  Speaker 1: that when I brought musicians into the control room, it
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  Speaker 1: was a different story. The glass went away. It was
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  Speaker 1: the only people that really used I'd like to use
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  Speaker 1: in the studio for pop music was the drummer or
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  Speaker 1: an acoustic instrument, where I needed to have the isolation
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: so that I could mix it later on. But if
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  Speaker 1: I could have the musician in the control room where
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  Speaker 1: this liveness and fullness and subjectivity in the music, I
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  Speaker 1: always got a better performance. And I think that's part
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  Speaker 1: of the reason that those records sound like that.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, and again, just hearing you talk with such passion
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  Speaker 2: about that, it sounds like you could probably live in
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  Speaker 2: a studio and you'd be just fine.
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  Speaker 1: Probably so eighty five years old. I don't know what
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: this camera's doing, but it makes me look really young.
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  Speaker 1: You look flattering myself like crazy.
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  Speaker 2: But you do have such a sincere passion for this,
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  Speaker 2: which you could just see it. It comes through when
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  Speaker 2: you're saying it, and you obviously we can hear it
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  Speaker 2: with the final results, you know, with the Stevie Wonder
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  Speaker 2: music and all the great stuff that you did you
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  Speaker 2: know that's it's just a beautiful thing.
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  Speaker 1: Well it's let's kept me alive all these years. My
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  Speaker 1: life's been a circus. I've done so many different things
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  Speaker 1: that but it all really boils down to how do
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  Speaker 1: we know where a sound comes from? How does our
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  Speaker 1: brain decide that? And we don't even think about it,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: you know, it's what's going on on our heads. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: if you think about a sound coming behind you, you
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  Speaker 1: bring your reptilian bring considers that might be a threat.
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  Speaker 1: You know that's an uh oh right, you're right, you
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  Speaker 1: know it's a There's a lot going on upstairs that
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  Speaker 1: we just assume it's just operating. The wheels are turning,
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  Speaker 1: and we're not listening to the sound of our wheels.
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  Speaker 1: We're responding to what the stimuli bring us. And if
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  Speaker 1: we interfere with that the wrong way, or we don't
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: really understand the truths of the physiology of how we
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: how we listen and what it does, it it would
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  Speaker 1: leave you leaves us at a disadvantage. I think you
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  Speaker 1: get the best music if people can really connect to
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: the medium. A lot of modern instruments now aren't acoustic
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  Speaker 1: at all at all. They don't have anything to do
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  Speaker 1: with acoustics. They're electronic, like a synthesizer, or as I
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: call it, a sympathizer. And you play, you play it,
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  Speaker 1: and it happens in space, and it's not a sound
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  Speaker 1: ntil it falls out of the loud speaker, you know,
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  Speaker 1: so it packs. It makes the control room an instrument
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  Speaker 1: that you inhabit.
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  Speaker 2: You described the Moog synthesizer as love at first sound.
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  Speaker 2: Take us back to the exact moment you first heard
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: a Moog synthesizer.
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  Speaker 1: Ah, yes, the mode sympathizer. Well, I'll tell you. I
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: was living in the East Village. It was pot smoke
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: and peode and flower power and hippies, and I was
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: crossing the boundary between being a beatnik and a hippie.
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  Speaker 1: There's this sort of a little sort of fuzzy he
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: might say, fuzzy line between the two. Pretty fuzzy for sure.
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  Speaker 1: And I lived around the corner from the Jefferson from
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: the Fillmore East, and I remember the first concert Jefferson
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Airplane so so. But I was existing in these villas.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: I was in the process of producing a feature film,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: my first epic foray into filmmaking. Because I'd come out
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: of the service with the training as a combat photographer,
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: and I fancied myself a first class filmmaker. I love photography,
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: and I made a film, produced the film only the
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: first half of it. Actually a film called Chow Manhattan,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: and it featured all the denizens and the creeps from
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: not creeps, yeah, maybe creeps. I was a creep to
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: a creep with a creepe anyway, from Andy's factory. From
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: Andy Warhol's factory, I hooked up with a beautiful starlet
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: named Dede Sedgwick, and we were busy film and.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: I want to Andy Warhol superstar.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Andy Warhol superstar. Well he was maybe Jane Holtzer superstar.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Then Edie Cedric superstar. Andy had a whole string of superstars,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: and at that time Edie was being the superstar. She'd
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: come from Radcliffe. The guy named Chuck Wine who was
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: the seer of the the Mystic Order of Andy Warhol
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: in the factory. But they were getting tired over there
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: and they weren't getting paid. And Andy was doing stuff
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: with sixteen millimeter news gathering cameras, which at that time
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: we were probably more advanced than anything, but we're very limited.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: And I came up with the idea of creating above
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: the first above ground underground movie. And I wanted to
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: bring what was going on in that sort of psychedelic time,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: that sort of New York scene, which was very dramatic
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: and very druggy. I might add the Maxis Kansas City,
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: the art openings, Andy Warhol's paintings and Campbell soup cans
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: and stuff, and this whole clutch of beautiful models and
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: drug ye guys hanging around and what was going on
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: Joe Dellassandro and Paul America and Edie and baby Jane
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Holzer and a whole scene familiere of people at the
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: factory and stuff. And I thought that that would make
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: I had just come back. I was really sort of
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: a puppy. I was like twenty eight years old or something,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: and I thought I could make the first above ground movie,
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: above ground underground movie. Andy's movies were called underground movies,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: like Empire, you know, sixteen hours long, stuff like that
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: was pretty experimental stuff, and I respected and I was
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: interested in what was going on. And it came to
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: pass that I sort of gave the filmmaking equipment to
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: the stars and to the actors themselves because I wanted
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: to see if we could self make a movie instead
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: of like getting a whole bunch of establishment guys with
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: the pencil protectors and white coats and stuff, and people
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: in the Union, you know, you know, making movies. We
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: want to do something on our own. And I thought
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: I could bring the underground culture to the water, to
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: a water audience. It really was the impetus for that.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: But what happened was I was in the East Village
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: and just a long story off a short period, you
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: might say, But I was at a nightclub and I
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: went to a nightclub. It was a place called Cerebrum,
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: and they had a couple of modules from a destroyed
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Moge synthesizer there and they were playing electronic and music
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: in the club in between the dance acts, in between
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: the dance music, and I heard the synthesizer and I said, man,
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: I really like what the thing is doing. And it
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: dawned on me that I could use the synthesizer to
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: make the score for Chaw Manhattan. And the very next
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: week I called Bob mog and we made friends, and
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: I bought a Mogue three C and it was one
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: of the first he made one of the first two
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: or three. Wendy Carlos had one, Peter Niro had one.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: I had one, and I was going to use it
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: the score Chaw Manhattan, which we started doing. Unfortunately we
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: never finished the film, and so there are fragments of it.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: But I just finished the book. You know, you can
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: hear the book and the shaping sounds, but it's also
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: an audio book, and there are fragments of the original
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: mode soundtrack from Scham Manhattan in the audio version.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: It wasn't user friendly at first. I think you're right
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: about that.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: No, it was very basically unfriendly, right. It was very
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: very dicey, It was very temperature sensitive, and if you
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: got to sound, you better take it while you got
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: it because it wouldn't be there in a few hours.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: And Bob Mo came down a couple of times because
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: the keyboards were drifting and stuff, and he'd come down
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: with a soldering gun and a handful of transistors and
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: sit on the floor in my studio and solder transistors
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: into the keyboards and stuff. But it was a wonderful
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: experience for me. I really loved it. As a matter
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: of fact, the way it turned out is I left
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: the movie behind me and walked with my arms wide
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: into the arms of Electronica and ended up with the
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: synthesizer and of course the rest history. I mean, it's
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: a well known adventure, you know. But uh, I left them.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: I left the movie behind. The god we got finished
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: with under someone else's austices. Basically I helped him and everything,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: but I ran out of money and everything else. I
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: ran through over one hundred grand and couldn't get it finished. Mainly,
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: there was a lot of issues with doctor doctor Roberts
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: as we called him in the movie and his famous
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: vitamin shots. The real doctor Roberts was busy poking at
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: Kennedy in Washington, went to uh went to Vienna with Khrushev,
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: where Kennedy met Khrushchev, and he was giving shots to
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: Kennedy for his issues. What a story sharing all that stuff.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: He was poking up the whole cast of Hair and
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: the whole cast of Chow Manhattan. So it really sort
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: of turned into a lot of chaos down there toward
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: the end of it, And then it was reconstituted later
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: in la with David Weissman, who we called Raka, who
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: is a very determined and driven guy, very talented, and
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: he shot the color footage part of it, which I'm
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: not really overly in love with, but the black and
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: white footage was really for me what Chulman hat was.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: But it introduced me to the synthesizer.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, look what it led to.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And what it led to was because I hear
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: that stuff in my head and my musical my musical epigenetics,
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: my unvoiced memories of my ancestors who are banging around
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: in my head somewhere, and my genome has had driven
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: me toward music, and it wasn't the choice after a while.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, here, I am eighty five years old. I
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: just made a record last year. But you know, right
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: now we're some big changes with AI, which I'm I'm
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: really loving.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: I think I was wondering what you thought about AI.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you cannot deny it. And it's here.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: It's not going away. I don't care if the WGA
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: says you can't use something in my in our book,
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: if it's written with AI, you can't use it. Union rules,
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: you have to keep the writers writing, and blah blah blah.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: I think that in the end, the whole bottom line
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: is this, and this is what I've learned, the big
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: the big learn for the last sixty years. Technology drives
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: the art. It's that simple. Okay. If the technology is there,
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: it's art is going to change and adapt to it.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Just think of one microphone and bing crossby being able
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: to do blah blah blah and the microphone with the
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: microphone like this, like you are with your R twenty right,
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: and all the girls are hearing being seen right to them, right,
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: confessional right, and and you know, and he's as loud
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: as the entire orchestra, and he's just babbabooei and he's
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: as loud as the whole of thirty musicians. When you
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: start to be able to rearrange reality like that with electronica,
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: you will begin to change the nature of music. And
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: look where it's gone.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because I use AI
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: to help with the podcast for various things, using using
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: the creative thoughts that I have and then using and
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: then AI will help.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all, it's all there, it's all to be used.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: I do not fear the future, embrace the future and
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: live with it and understand it. It's not a dirty word,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: but it's we're going to learn how to use it.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: We're going to step on our own wing knees a
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: couple of times down going down the process of learning it.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: But it is there for us to use, and if
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: artists involved, artists will find the way of using it
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: in an artistic way for storytelling and for research and
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: for a million other things. It has its good points
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: and its bad points, like everything else, Like everything else,
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: you know, but this is it, you know, it's just
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: it's just another instrument. It's like your guitar. It depends
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: on who's playing it.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think people will get caught up too much.
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: And yes, of course you can go too far. There's
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: literally music that's being created and we're being sold as
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: it's being created by human beings and it's not. And
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: we're hearing this on Spotify and places like that. And
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: also with books, I mean there I've heard a story
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: about somebody having a publisher pull a book because it's
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: being accused of the entire book is just created by AI. Well,
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: that's going too far. Of course, that's the extra so
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: you know that's not using it as a tool, that's just.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: I've run that into that with my own book. They
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: informed me that I didn't use AI. I used a
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: little bit here and there for research, but they said,
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: we are under contract to the WGA Writers' Guild of
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: America and we are signatories to their deal, and we're
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: forbidden from using AI. I think that that is a
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: huge mistake. I think that we have to learn to
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: embrace the technology. You can't walk around with your head
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: buried in the sand because you want to keep you know,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: opteen people working or doing stuff. People are going to
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: use the tools at hand in some kind of creative way.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: It's just another instrument, like a guitar or anything else.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: It's well educated, but it's always looking backwards. You know.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Think about trying to get something like AI to play,
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: like Suno to play, you know, some free form jazz.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: I think you find it would be very, very below
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: average results from that. I think it has this place
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: like anything else. Artists are here to embrace change. That's
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: what separates the week from the chaff.
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: For the listeners and viewers who may not know what
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: exactly was Tonto and why was it revolutionary for its time?
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: Well, right now you would say Tonto could be emulated
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: with the euro rack. What TANTO was was first of all,
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: we had Malcolm and I had you know, modules and
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: racks and stuff all over the place. It was getting
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: to a place where the thing was like fourteen feet long.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: How do you play go from one end of the
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: instrument to another. You needed a belly board or something
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: to scoot from one side to the other. We needed
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: a way to Actually what we wanted to do was
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: TONTO stands for the original Neo Timbrel Orchestra. We were
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: looking to do with an analog world because there's no
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: digital anything when we were doing this stuff. Was to
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: have an instrument that was playful for lot, for real
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: time performance. And John Stork, who was the designer of
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: Electric Lady Lane, that was his first Electric Lady not
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: Electric Electric Ladyland was Jimmy's record. Electric Lady was the
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: studio and John Stork built Electric Lady the most friendly first,
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: you know, really, Jimmy Hendrick's first studio was the first
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: home studio. Electric Lady was the home studio. Jimmy built
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: it for his own work. And when he passed, Stevie
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: and me and Malcolm went down there and we found
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: a new home. We were able to put our feet in
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: his shoes. But John, we tried to conceive of a
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: way of making that shell, that round shell, so when
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: we turned away from each other we could do all
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: our programming right, but then we could turn toward each
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: other and play the keyboards facing each other. So it
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: was a way of with large. Because it was all analog,
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: it was highly unstable, but Malcolm figured out bussing and
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: doing some technology to we were able to make it
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: and execute where we could play simultaneous three, four, five,
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: and six voices at one time, each voice on his
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: own controller, not polyphonic this way with four nuns like
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: when Steve first came in, we were first doing the
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: We first met Steve on that weekend, Memorial Day weekend
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, and we brought him into the studio.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: It was a Sunday and it was very quiet, and
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: we brought Steve into studio be a media and he
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: put his hands over, We guided him around, We kind
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: of explained what it was and what it could do.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: And he'd already heard our record, our Electronica record, Zero Time,
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: and he knew had some expectation, and we cranked it
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: up and he was there and he said he said Malcolm. Malcolm,
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: we're all with the synthesizer. Malcolm says, well, it's the problem.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: He says, well, I'm trying to play chords and all
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: I'm getting is one note. And Malcolm really was very succinct.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: He said, Steve, it only plays one note at a time.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: It's like a saxophone or a trumpet, or you know,
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: a wind instrument. You play, you put your whole soul
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: into your umbishor and here, and that one note comes out.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: But it's filled with intent and attitude and energy and
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: the blues that you can bend notes and do things
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: that but it's only one note at a time. And
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: the synthesizer is like that. We could play three and
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: four notes because we had three and four key boards
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: where we could do two voices here and two voices
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: over there and do stuff together and some of that
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: stuff that we do with Stev. See, it's very like music.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: In my mind's a very small record in the sense
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: of the number of instruments. There's no big waterfalls on
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: those records. It's all intimate, like a string quartet very close,
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: very intimate, or twenty microphone on the voice, very close,
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: just like you're doing right now.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: Before we started recording, Robert noticed the microphone right away.
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: He says, I like that microphone.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: I got one on my desk right, yeah, yeah.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: I love it. I was telling you I looked at
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: radio for so many years, so if I was going
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: to do a podcast, I wanted to get the right
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: kind of mica.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: You did the right thing. The other thing was the
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: other thing that was really good about that microphone is
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: especially with Steve being on site it he was able
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: to touch the microphone on the side without creating any sounds,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: so he could know where is where the microphone was.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: He couldn't see it right right, But you put your
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: hand on the side of that microphone. Now, we'll make it.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: We'll make any noise, yeah, I mean you can. If
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: you just lightly turn it, you won't get any mic
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: noise from it because it's so rejected. You know, you're
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: really working about three or four inches from the microphone. Right.
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: You also said you were there when Wicked Lester was recording,
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: so for kiss fans, I want to get that out
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: there too. You threw that little nugget out there. He said.
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: You were there when Paul and Jean were recording under
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: the wicked lester name before Kiss.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Bill o' cooin was managing those. That was a
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: scene too, I'll tell you. But look at the huge
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: success those guys.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: Had they did Okay, Yeah, I had Aernan Rojas I
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: believe his name is so he was one of the
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: engineers on Fleetwood Max Rumors and I think also the
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: next album, and he was there at the time when
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: in the early days. I don't know if that name
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: sounds familiar, but in those early days of Electric Lady,
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: I'm sure you have stories to tell.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: Its stories are endless. Shaping sounds, I was shaping sounds
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: for a long time, but I was also shaping myself
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: on the jacuzzi next door to my studio.
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: Nice Nice beer.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: Was twenty five cents in the soda machine and the
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: coke machine was all beer, Heineken and stuff. You get
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: twenty five cents and pinball and guys running around in
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: their record company executives running around in their letter letter jackets.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: You know, everyone looking everyone huffing and puffing and hanging
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: and everything. People running around for one studio another. It
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: was the most wonderful, marvelous, totally psychedelic, but very high technology.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: At the same time, it was the biggest playpen in
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: the world. And I think I mean the Hotel California
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: written by the Eagles. Where did they write it? The
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: record plan that's where the name Hotel California came from. See,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: it was a scene and a half. You have no idea.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: I can't even begin to explain it.
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: Well, sex, drugs and rock and roll, right, that was
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: the it was. Indeed, when did you meet Stevie Wonder?
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: How did that? You write about that book too? It's
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: a great story. I think he went to your place
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: and said, hey, I've heard about you. I want you
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: on my next record. Because he was ready to make
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: the move to a different stage of his career. Right.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: Well, his contract finally his pre majority contract that we
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: signed to Motown as a child, and he had already
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: had like twelve or thirteen albums which were made under
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: the strict auspices Barry Gordy and the style school that
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Motown maintained to get acceptance for black artists and for audiences.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: And it was called a style school and it was
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: a very you know, it was a it was a
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: routine four guys in well dressed in the same suits
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: doing synchronized dancing behind a gal or a guy sitting
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: standing in the front, the same band, the same rhythm
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: section for every every group. It was. It was a formula.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: But the bands that during that time. Black music was
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: called race music back in the early late early in
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: the sixties, and somebody at Atlantic, I'll think of his
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: name in a second, anyway, he came up with the
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: concept of calling race music rhythm and blues, and that
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: changed everything. It made possible for the big labels to
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: start looking at because most of the black music was
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: coming out on a little independent labels managed by various
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: managers and entrepreneurs who had little junior labels of all kinds,
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: and the big big boys were not doing it. And
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: they needed the vinyl and all that stuff for the
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: military and stuff, and they were. There was a lot
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: of There was a lot of racism and music at
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: that time. And I think that both the Jewish people
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: in the business and the Black people in the business
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: both had their disasters. The Jews had the Holocaust, the
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: Black people had slavery and in their past, and I
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: think somehow they kind of unconsciously kind of identified with
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: each other. And also the Jewish music in the Eastern
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: Europe was melismatic, just like the black music was melismatic.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: There was a lot of sort of common energy going on,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: and it was this sort of rumbling underground, and Barry
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Gordy came through, a few other black artists came through
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: with the first true black labels that really sort of
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: ecided to say, we can do this too, we don't
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: have to be under the thumbs of the white record companies.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: There was that kind of energy going on too during
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: that time. And there was also the real building where
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: all the publishers were hanging out and they would do
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: their songs tin pan alley stuff, and the song pluggers
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: would be running around with their briefcase and the piano
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: players and stuff, and there was a real kind of
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: melding of a lot of white soul singers, white songwriters,
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: and black songwriters working together. It was a kind of
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: just in the late sixties early seventies, there was a
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: lot of cooperation beginning to happen. There was kind of
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: really an interesting time, and but we out of that
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: came a whole bunch of stuff. And Steve came out
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: of that time, but he came out of it with
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: a very socially aware time, and it was something that
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: was very important to me as well. I think possibly
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: the most important song that I committed to tape was
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: the record our Recordings of Living for the City.
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: Yes see, I wanted to ask you about that. By
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: the way. Was that Jerry Wexler.
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: Yes, I knew him. He was a good man, yea.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: But these were record guys. These were the real deal.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: D The crooks had the jukeboxes. It was Las Vegas
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: was really a den of iniquity. It wasn't sort of
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: sort of sanitized thing with lots of fountains and overpriced everything,
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: and it was a bunch of gangsters running that and
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: running the thing. It was. It was a whole other
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: kind of life and a whole other kind of existence,
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: and it was goodness and badness like everything else. But
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: music really flowered from that, and a lot of people
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: got taken advantage of two It wasn't you know. There
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: were a lot of people running around getting ripped off
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: of their publishing and all kinds of things like that.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: But at the end of it, the music was absolutely
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: spectacular and simple, and I'm just glad I was there
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: for you know. But it was an interesting time. I
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: call it Blues and the Jews. It's a really a
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: time when two sort of downtrodden social in the social
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: world got together and made something happen together, and not
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: totally voluntarily, but that's just the way it happened. But
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: it was amazing. It was an amazing time, and film
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: was filled with wonderful, wonderful music, and I'm just glad
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: I was there to capture it and to be a
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: part of it.
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: Robert Margo f his memoir Shaping Sounds, Stevie wonderdvo the
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: synth revolution in my life behind the music, So walk
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: us through how songs like Living for the City and
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: Superstition come together from a production standpoint.
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: Living for the City I called Steve on the phone,
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: not that he's been really available to me. He hasn't
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: really been very much available because he's a busy person himself.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: I love him to death, by the way, Steve is
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: the remarkable person. But uh, I called him on the
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: phone and I asked him, I said, Steve, what do
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: you remember about when we were cutting Living for the City.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: It was one of the first things we recorded, and
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: he said it was raining. I mean, who we repers
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: had from fifty years ago, right, But it was at
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: a time when the kids from the South, the black
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: kids from the South, were beginning to try to figure
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: out to find a way to make a living, and
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: some of them were coming to New York and others
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: were going to Detroit to work in the car factories.
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: And it was the time of civil rights. It was
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: the time of Norman Pettis Bridge and the Civil Rights ACKed.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: In the sixty and fifty eight or fifty nine, Linda
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: Johnson signed the Civil.
• 46:35
  Speaker 3: Rights Sack, and there was a quality and there were
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: US Marshalls, you know, bringing little girls to school, black
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: girls to school in the South with guns, and there
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: was a lot of roiling around. And a few years
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: later with Devo, for example, it was Kent State where
• 46:55
  Speaker 3: the National Guard killed a whole bunch of students in
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: the campus and Jerry and Gerald and Mark were there
• 47:03
  Speaker 3: as art students when that happened. They too were very
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: politically oriented. The other one artist from Motown who really
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: sort of was doing it was a guy named Marvin
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: Gay was also during that time was sort of instrumental
• 47:22
  Speaker 3: in making music that was political more political, and Steve
• 47:28
  Speaker 3: really wanted to be a political person, and he was
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: twenty one years old. He was filled with idealism and
• 47:35
  Speaker 3: talent at the head, top of his head.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: Was exploding, basically, and he finally got out from underneath
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: his contract which expired out his twenty first birthday. And
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: he didn't want to do the motown formula where the
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: band would come in through the kitchen and the clients
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: and the audience would come in through the front door,
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: you know, and play this formulae kind of motown sort
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: of music hall kind of stuff, you know, with the
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: same core band and the same discipline and sort of
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: told how to behave in front of a wide audience.
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: And it was kind of very you know, it was
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: kind of very uptight in a certain way, but it
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: got the music in front of, you know, a white audience,
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: which is critical for selling records. I mean, what really
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: changed for Steve, for example, was going out with the Stones.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: That was really brought his music in front of a
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: huge white audience. But it was a time when we,
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: you know, we wanted to be He wants to be
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: his own person, his own individual person, and Malcolm and
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: I aided and betted him. He always calls us his
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: associate producers, which you're fine. You can call me whatever
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: he wants. But I think that those four records really
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: speak for themselves. And whatever we were, whatever we did together,
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: the formulaic thing behind it was magical. I can't explain it.
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I can't understand. Even for me to
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: listen to the sound of my own wheels is I'm
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: still sort of puzzled by it all in a lot
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: of way.
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like capturing lightning in a bottle, but it lasted.
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: It lasted for a good few years there.
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, that's the purpose of music is to
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: tell our stories. I mean, the music of like the
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: Baroque music or music of Bach Promise and Beethoven told
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: the stories of their time. Our time is different because
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: if we have electricity, they didn't have that. So you know,
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: we were able to do something else, and now we're
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: getting ready to do something else again, and not something
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: else is going to be and is now changing the
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: way we think and the way we create music. My
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: real concern with well, I guess it's going to just
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: have to shake itself out. But you know, Suno could
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: be making music with a vending machine. You know what
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: I'm saying. It's like making music for vending. She just
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: do you tell it and it spits out the song
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: on one hand, On the other hand, maybe there's a
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: way of using that's more creative, that there's a way
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: of integrating the imperfection of live performance, which is absolutely essential.
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: If you go to a Taylor Swift concert. What makes
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: its things so compelling, it's the cross talk. It's the
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: left going into the right, the right going into the left,
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: people standing there, and you know that she's not gonna
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: sing it the same twice no matter where she goes.
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: It's going to be different every time. But it's that
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: imperfection in the music that makes it so beautiful. It's
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: what makes the analog synthesizers so much more beautiful than
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: the digital ones, because they're imperfect, and when we see
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: something that is not perfect, we notice it first. I mean,
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: I remember, like sitting in a parking lot in the
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: late August afternoon hot It's like one hundred and ten
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: degrees and I was sitting in my car in this
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: parking lot waiting to go into a rehearsal studio, and
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: there's this big wall of green plants in front of
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: my windshield about thirty feet or forty feet away, and
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: after a while you look at it, it becomes invisible
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: until the bird flew across the thing, and all of
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: a sudden, I'm watching the bird. You know. That bird
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: is sort of like the end of the baton of
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: a conductor in an orchestra. It's also the bird is
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: also the imperfection, the irregularity of something in the regular space.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: That irregularity is what draws our attention, and that's what
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: a great vocal does. It's that thing that's different every
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: single time, and that randomness is what makes the music beautiful.
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: If you want to think about the click track, if
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: you think about it's Stevie's song like Superstition, you bought
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: you time the first state bars of that song, or
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: you time the first aid bars of Whip It right.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: Then you go down and you go to the third
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: verse and you take the time in time the eight
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: bars of that. You'll see that the times are totally different.
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: Because there's a thing called roboto where music speeds up
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: and slows down, and in live performances, that's what makes
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: it wonderful. Whether it's a Brahms symphony or SCARLETTI keyboard thing,
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: or it's kiss or it's Stevie or it's Billy Preston
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: or it's Steve O. What makes the song as wonderful
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: is the beautiful imperfection of it, that it's different everyday time,
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: and that's what we live for and that's what's specific
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: a lot of our pop music. It's like track.
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: The Book Down Rock podcast is part of the Boneless
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: podcasting network. If you're a fan of classic rock and
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: classic film like I am, go to Boneless dot lovable
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: dot app to find over twenty great shows there. That's
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: Boneless dot lovable dot app, or just go to book
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: down Rock dot com the Boneless podcasting network. It is
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: what you want to be listen with confidence. There are
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: artists now who are being criticized because people are saying
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: that they are lip syncing to a track. Is there
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: too much pressure because of the YouTube videos where everybody's
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: seeing it and criticizing it and most people have negative comments.
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: Are they pressured into now thinking I have to sound perfect?
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: A lot of these songs that are done to uh
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: to pre recorded tracks, you got to understand that they're driving,
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: you know, a half a million dollars worth of state props,
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: lighting and cues and things, and they have to make
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: sure that the whole thing happens with a degree of synchronicity,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: and that's why they do it. It's also some people
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: don't want to travel with thirty five or forty people
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: that can't afford it, their degrees for it, but there's
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: no substitute. I understand it. When you have a show
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: that has, like, you know, a crew of thirty five
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: people and four big vans full of trailer truck trailers
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: full of stage gear and lighting and sound and cues
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: and recording consoles and orchestra's sound effects off stage and
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: dancers and everything else, that there has to be a
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: degree of predictability. But that's a different kind of music
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: than if it's you know, just a single voice singing
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: out there just with the piano, like a Joni Mitchell
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: for example, the going worship the ground shoe walks on, okay,
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: But where there's that kind of intimacy where the music
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: has for bottle, it speeds up, it slows down. What
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: does an orchestra conductor do in front of us? If
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: the orchestra with a stick he comes out, it looks
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: like a damn penguin with the tails on and all
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: that stuff, and he stands up and he puts us
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: back to the audience. But you know something when you
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: look from the other side and you see the conductor working,
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: and you realize that there are eighty people on that
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: stage following the end of his stick of his baton right,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: or you look at someone like this. I had the
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: privilege as a music student. I sang in the winters
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: with a group called the Skola Cantorum. I was the
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: chorus or singing the choir. I used to singing the
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: choir of the New York Philharmonic, and I got a
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: chance to really sing under the baton of Leonard Bernstein,
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: among others, And he conduct the offer that orchestra with
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: his face. Just by his facial instructions, the facial gestures.
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: The orchestra was so in tune to him. But you
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: really understand that what is the conductor doing. He's speeding
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: it up, he's slowing it down, he's making a choir,
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: he's making it louder. But everybody's playing. And if he
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: does the same molar symphony two weeks later, it's going
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: to be different. And the same thing is true of
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: great art. It's never the same twice, and what we
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: look for, as you and I do. We look for
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: those differences, that intimacy, that closeness. That's what really makes
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: great performances. It's not the militancy with Stevie.
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: Do those songs come together quickly? You are looking for
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: that element, that special human element there? Did it come
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: together quickly? Organically?
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: The thing is this, We never went in there with
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: the idea, oh, we're gonna do music of my mind.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: We got to get twelve songs for this album or
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: that album or whatever. Steve and me and Malcolm we
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: just started recording. We just started the tape rolling right,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: and we do it. I don't know, five or six songs.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: We put them in the library and an archive basically.
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: Then we do a whole bunch more songs than maybe
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: the twenty songs, and we go back and we pick
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: ones up and say, let's put background vocals on this one,
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: or what do you want to do with this one, Steve,
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: you want to add a new bassline? What do you
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: have in mind? He would walk into the time of superstition.
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: He walked into the studio. You know, superstition. This or
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: that wasn't Jeff becktime or anything. That was before. He'd
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: just come in off the road from the Stone Store
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: and he said, walked into the studio, said let's record
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: the drums. Oh, what's the song, Steve, Well, you'll hear it.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: He walked into the studio and twenty minutes later he
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: walked out of the city. He played the drum track
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: for Superstition with no other music. Okay, it was all upstairs.
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: It was all up here, right, And he played the
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: drum track and then we went back and then suddenly
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: Superstition emerged because we started putting Clavenet tracks on it.
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: But if you listen to those Clavinet tracks, we used
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: a lot of tape delay to get them to repeat.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: You'll hear where they collide, where they're not perfect, because
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: the thing is moving. Okay, but that movement is what
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: created the funk. You see, and you ten eight bars
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: of that. You do do it, and you'll see those
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: tracks are in motion. But it's that motion that creates
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: the funk.
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: Wow. So yeah, I think that story was he just
• 58:49
  Speaker 2: sat behind the kit, the drum kit. No nobody knew
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: he was going to do that.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: It was all up here. Yeah, he has a remarkable mind.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, maybe it's because it's unsided. But he has
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: a memory, like there's a steel trap up there. Like
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: I said, when we were doing Living the City, first
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: thing out of his mouth is it was raining. It
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: says it all to me.
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: And essentially he's writing songs in his head.
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he is a remarkable He is a remarkable, magical person.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: And God came down and put his thumb on his forehead.
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: That's all I can tell you. There's no answer, there's
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: no logical reason or anything else. It's just that's the
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: way he was born. And he is an incredible human being.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: He's not perfect. None of us are perfect in every way,
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: you know. He has his own issues, just like everybody else.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: But the thing is he did change the culture, and
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: we helped him do that. But we were in many ways,
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: we were creative and everything, but we were his handmaidens. Basically,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: he was the one who came up with the songs.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: We didn't come up with a song. We came up
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: with the orchestrations and the sounds and engineering and storing
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: the information and encouraging him and whatever we did to
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: blow on the coals and everything else. But at the
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: bottom line is Stevie and his God.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and he was at that It seemed like you
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: were both at that period where you converge at just
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 2: the right time where you had all these creative thing
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: to explode.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a three year period of an incredible blight,
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: bright flash of light when me and Steve and Malcolm
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: all sort of got together for that moment in time.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: Have I ever been to Steve's house for dinner? No?
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: Have I ever gone to the movies with Steve or
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: other than going to hear him saying it one of
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: his toy things concerts in the audience. That's the only
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: time have I ever been to his house in fifty
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: years or sixty years that I've known him. No, Because
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: the place we lived together was the studio. That's where
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: we lived, and that's where we worked and where we
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: created that magic.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for checking out the Booked on Rock podcast.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 2: If you've just found the podcast, welcome. If you've been listening,
• 1:01:14
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• 1:01:16
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• 1:01:19
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• 1:01:22
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• 1:01:25
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• 1:01:27
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• 1:01:32
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• 1:01:35
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• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: episodes on the Booked on Rock YouTube channel. Find it
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: at Booked on Rock. Thanks again for listening. Now back
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: to the show with Stevie. There was a fractured there
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: and then you guys, everything's cool now, right, there was
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: something that happened that was and that's the business side
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: of music, right. It was a publishing thing.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: Or it's not the first time, it's not the last time.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: When business issues come into the studio, that's when things
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: go south. That's what happened with us. If we had
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: a different, little different understanding of it, a little bit
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: different than this, or Stevie's lawyer had a different attitude
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: toward us or whatever, things might have been different, but
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: they weren't. It's what it was. When business came into
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: the studio, that's when we went our separate ways. Malcolm
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: stood up from the thing, he said, he turned around
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: some people at the back in the studio, he said,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: would you mind it being quiet, because we're trying to
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: communicate with Stevie, and it was the time when Stevie
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: was on edge. He turned and he said, Malcolm, don't
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: you speak to my friends like that. And that was
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: the time Malcolm stood up and walked out of the studio.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: And that's when the Angels left the building. I tried
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: to put it back together again. I always I've always
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: had a civil relationship with Steve. I love him to death,
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: and Malcolm too. It really hurt us.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: He was under pressure, wasn't he though from the label.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 2: They wanted everybody to think that he was the only
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 2: guy that created this. Yeah, he was under that pressure.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: So you saw him on TV and he didn't thank you.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: And yeah it was. There was a whole bunch of things,
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: a lot of slides and stuff that we fell and everything.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: I kind of learned a lot of that stuff slide.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: But in the end, you know, nothing's forever, and I'm
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: just glad we lasted for the three and a half
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: years we lasted together. I have a really decent friendship
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: with Steve. Now. It's fine. We love each other. You know.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: If he called me and asked me to do some
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: couple two year year or two ago, I went down
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: and played a synthesizer for the first time in twenty
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: years on one of his tracks, created some PAS sounds,
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: not that they were terrific bass sounds or anything, because
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: it was really kind of rusty. But you know, I
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: care about him, Yeah, I love him. I care about him,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: and I know what we did together that the good
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: certainly outweighs the bad in every way.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 2: He's now publicly acknowledged your contributions.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: Now it's numerous times. I have nothing but admiration and
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: love for him, and I care about where he's going
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: and his health issues to just like everyone else. He's
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: ten years younger than I am. I'm eighty five, he's
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: seventy five. You know it's but I was ten years
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: ahead of him in civil rights. So when Steve came
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: on the scene with Living for the City, I already
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: been there once with what was going on when nineteen
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: fifty eight, when I was in high school. So you know,
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: what comes around and goes around. He's a remarkable human being.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: He's as imperfect as everyone else on the planet. Sure,
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: he's what is known as a human being, and that
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: doesn't mean color or any race or any of that stuff.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: What's inside of him doesn't have a color, it's just
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: a humanity.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: He seems like a beautiful soul.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: He is a beautiful soul. And like I say, you know,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: I still go to the ends of the earth for him.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: I love him, I care about him. You changed the world?
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: How many people you can say did that?
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: You mentioned Divo a few times. You describe Devo as
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: wanting to put an alien head on an R and
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 2: B body. What did that phrase mean to you in
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: musical terms?
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: Well, just as a quick aside, The thing is that
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: the DeVos love R and B. They grew up listening
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: to R and B. So when I came on board,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: I made really sure that the bottom end of their
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: records was really R and B. There was. The band
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: was a small band that was not meant to have
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: lots of overdubs it which should be. It was a
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: simple band. Everyone played their part, one part each right.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: When they played together. There was an ensemble, but it's
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: more like a string quartet. It was tight and it
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: was together, but it had an R and B bottom end,
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: and I made very sure that that's stuck. That the
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: bottom end, the kick in the base where the R
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: and B had the R and B feel and then
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: they put the monster on the top, but it was
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: an R and B body with an alien head. That's
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: what devol is.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when you first heard it, do do Do Do doo?
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 2: Bring What were you thinking?
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: Five up, two down, five notes, two notes down, Very simple,
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: very easy to remember, very impulsive. Feel. Those guys are marvelous.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: Mark is a marvelous songwriter. Jerry knows how to really
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: write the lyrics. Jerry is a real politician, and you know,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: he just had a baby last year or the year
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: before him, was pushing seventy.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: But they also had that genius and the idea of
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: the image, you know, the look.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, when you look at their lives, when you look
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: at their lives show you really realize how really tight
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: and highly organized they are. They're absolute geniuses of this stuff.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: All we had to do is just not drip stuff
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: all over them, sugar coating and syrup and bullshit, and
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: just let them play their instruments and play out and
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: maintain their impulse of energy. And by bringing them into
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: the control room, I was able to do that and
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: allow the cross talk and the energy and everything else
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: to really fulfill itself super loud and quad in the
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: control room. That's what made them happen.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: All right, what's the story of the whipcrack?
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: Oh Man, Howard Siegel, who's was my engineering partner for
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: the project, who's actually Jack Black's half brother. Really yeah,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: he wouldn't brought Jack into the studio when we were
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: doing Devo. Jack was like ten years old, right, yeah. Wow,
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: the little nose was over the console like this, right,
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: and we played the Devo album for him, and I
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: think it changes. Well, those guys are still together, they're
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: still friends to this day. But yeah, Howard and I
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: were complete mad been together. And uh, there's this law
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: of hallway down going down from Studio A to Studio B.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: It on one side and then the other side was
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: the canteen and the chacuzzie and stuff and offices. It
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: was just like narrow hallway. It was very reverberant. We
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: went out there at seven or eight in the morning
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: when no one was around, and Howard put a condenser
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: mic down at the U eighty seven down at the
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: bottom of the hallway in one close and everyone was
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: trying to crack the whip. I tried it, and I
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: cracked the whip and stap myself in the face, but
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: whole suit was like that. And I think in the end,
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: I think it was Jerry that finally got the whipcrack.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: We recorded it and then of course there was no
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: digital anything, so we had to fly it in at
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: the right place, spin it in with another machine, and
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: then we put stuff on top of it and stuff.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: But it was tricky, but it was fun and the
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: story remains is a wonderful story. And those records are
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: very earthy and very hands on. There was no digital anything,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: and the variation and it is again what makes that
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: stuff magical and compelling is the fact that the irregularity.
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: It's the bird flying across the hedges. You watch the bird,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: you know, look at everything else. You just look at
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: that one little six ounce little thing flapping for one
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: end of the parking lot to the other. That's the
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: way music is. Want that. You want the magic, you
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: want the unpredictability, you want the irregularity. That's what makes
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: great records happen, is that the magic of that.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Devo stood out musically and visually, and it's great
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: to see them get the respect musically because I think
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: in the beginning people were so caught up in that
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 2: look which was iconic and and but there was a
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: there's a real artistry behind that music.
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: Well the thing is this. It used to get the
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: thing too. Oh, there's the records about jerking off. That's right, yes,
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: but no, it was uh it was Horatio. It was
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: it was about Horatio Alger. No, it's about chunking off.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: You know. It was everything to everybody. Everyone was like
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: trying to figure out what it was about, right, and
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: it had that kind of a crossover. You couldn't really
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: tell whether it was about sexual issues or was it
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: the American dream about you can improve, you can do better,
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: Horatio Alger, the whole concept of do good and be
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: moral and be upstanding and stuff. You know, Yeah, you
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: can whip it. You can whip it good. You were
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: whipping and I whipped it last night. You know.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: I always looked at it kind of get your ass
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: in gear and make things happen. But like I say,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: you can read it as you wish. Find the bookd
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: onn Rock website at booked on rock dot com. There
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: you can find all the back episodes of the show,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: the latest episode in video and audio links to all
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: of the platforms where you can listen to the podcast,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: plus all the social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: and x. Also check out the Booked on Rock blog,
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: find your local independent bookstore, find out all the latest
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: hot rock book releases. And before you go, check out
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: the booked on Rock online store. Pick up some booked
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: on Rock merch. It's all at booked on Rock dot com.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 2: There's so much more in this book, and it comes
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: out May nineteenth, right, so there's still some time where
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 2: people can they can pre order.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm gonna read it. I'm going to read portions
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: of It's book Soup, which is a book bookstore out
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: here on Sunset Bulevard. I'm gonna pontificate with my book cool,
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: so it's sold. Life in the fast lane, my friend,
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: live your life. Be honest, be truthful always. The first
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: thing I learned when I got sober and put it down,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: all that stuff behind me. Tell the truth. That's what
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: it's about. Tell the truth.
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 2: That's another part of the book. That's that's inspirational to you. Yeah,
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: you had some setbacks, you reinvented yourself. You've learned some
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: lessons in a remarkable life. Robert Margle, thank you sir,
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: is there a website people can go to? Where can people.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: Robert dot margolf at gmail dot com.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: They can send you an email.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: They can, and I'm happy to answer to Thank you, Robert,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: God bless you. That's it. It's in the books.