Chapter 15
How to orchestrate a six-foot Southern California salad ... Dolby delights ... Gathering wildflowers
JAC: In October of 1966, when I had a fully mixed first Doors album, I played it for Judy Collins. None of our artists had yet heard it but they were all very curious, and I wondered if Judy would get it. She surprised me with her all-out enthusiasm.
Judy understood that the Doors were a new voice for the label. Playing her the tape was my way of letting her know that Elektra was moving in new directions. She got that too, and it could not have been the easiest of acceptances. For several years she had been first in our hearts, with everything this implied in the way of support—musical, emotional, and financial. She had a great career ahead of her, with her musical best still to come, yet she could see that her record label—the company she had helped to build—was at another crossroad, and that, from then on, her direction might turn out to be the road less traveled.
ARTHUR GORSON: The game shifted. The singer-songwriters had been the royalty at Elektra, the heroes. But suddenly the attention went elsewhere, into the Doors and rock and what that meant. Rothchild came out West, Jac came out West. We had always been dealing with the "Circle Game" level, where we sold thirty thousand albums. Now suddenly Elektra is moving into a different game, which of course changed the history of Elektra. We were pissed because, as folk managers and artists, we were no longer the most important to the label, and attention, promotion, and all the rest of the things that we could always count on, even though they were small amounts of money, started drying up. It caused a philosophical problem and resentment. There was a line in a Phil Ochs song: "God help the troubadour who wants to be a star." Suddenly the whole skew changed. Elektra became a different company.
JAC: Yes and no. What I was doing with the Doors was following the music, as I had done all along from folk to singer-songwriters, to Koerner, Ray & Glover, to the Butterfield Blues Band, to Love, to the Doors. But even at the height of Elektra's rock years I never stopped recording other kinds of music. Nonesuch kept going from strength to strength. In the area of Arthur's direct concern, I happily recorded Tom Rush all the way through the Sixties, and signed serious new folk-styled voices: David Ackles, Paul Siebel and Lindisfarne. And I kept on releasing pure ethnic material, from the Bauls of Bengal to "Crow Dog's Paradise," an album of Sioux Indian music.
As for Judy Collins, her new album, "Wildflowers," was another major landmark in her artistic development, and out of it came her first big hit single.
JOHN HAENY: "Wildflowers" was a large orchestral album. We recorded in LA, in Studio One at United & Western, which was a big room. Four-track. And Jac had discovered in England this thing called a Dolby box, for something called noise reduction. Pretty adventuresome. No one here had any real idea of what it was, how it operated, what its purpose was.
SUZANNE HELMS: It was another of Jac's firsts. We used the same Dolbys on both the east and west coasts, air-freighted back and forth in special crates that Jac ordered made. In LA I would meet them at the airport, they were so precious, bring them in by truck, tell the studio they were coming. One night we couldn't find any place to park on Sunset, and John Haeny and I had to drag them across the street, get the guard to sign for them.
Original Dolby° Audio Noise Reduction System circa 1964
JOHN HAENY: I recorded Judy with two four-track machines, one with Dolby, the other not, and used the Dolby as a reference. I'll never forget the first session, live, involving thirty or forty players. We had gotten a good take, and we said, "Well, let's play back the Dolby, see what it's about." Nobody knew what to expect. The Dolby was very confusing to plug in. I came up with an odd little harness to switch over from recording to playback. I had to crawl behind the machine and switch a bunch of stuff around. I did my major connections, rewound the tape to where I thought was the top, went to the console, and opened up the gains on the monitors wide, expecting to hear the shooop of the tubes and the tape hiss. In those days lots of noise told us the equipment was working. I heard nothing. Well, I assumed, this isn't working. I pressed the Play button. It turned out that I wasn't fully wound back through the tape, I was in the middle—and out jumped the first Dolby sound anybody had ever heard. It was a very large control room, Judy and the producer and probably half the orchestra were in it, and the monitors were wide open. Everybody had a stroke. It was a spiritual awakening for everyone present.
JAC: That was a technical landmark in pop recording. Incredible clarity, no distracting noise, no veil between you and the music. And if ever an artist and a technology were made for each other, it was Judy and Dolby.
JUDY COLLINS: "Wildflowers" was the first completely orchestrated album of the genre. Not a folk guitar on it. And it had my writing. By that time I had started to write, so it has 'Since You've Asked' and 'Albatross'—and I sweated over those. Josh Rifkin did the arrangements, and he added a dimension of intelligence about orchestrations.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: In the studio Mark was very focused, but able to fool you completely; he could always seem so laid-back. John Haeny was more intense. He was a wonderful engineer with a fantastic set of ears. He could hear a run-through of my arrangements and know exactly how I wanted it to sound on the disk, and then could get that on the mikes. He got what was for those days a really beautiful, burnished, very rich sound quality that had a transparent sensuousness to it, if you will.
What I also remember John for is his hospitality. We went out a number of times to his small wooden house in Laurel Canyon, and one evening we spent there best sums up the whole style and spirit of the thing. Judy and some of the other women—I'm afraid it was still a society in which these roles were gender-determined—used to do our communal food shopping when we had meals together, hit the twenty-four-hour supermarket and come back with this absolutely mind-boggling produce. This evening they prepared this monstrous salad which I remember as being put into a bowl about six feet in diameter, and I recall that we smoked a lot of dope that night, and then the bowl was brought and laid on the floor, and we all spread out around it on our bellies, like the rays of the sun. John had this engineer's stereo system, huge beautiful speakers, and while we attacked the salad, he played us the entire Bach B-minor Mass, followed by "Sergeant Pepper." It was my quintessential California experience, and one of the most wonderful evenings I have ever spent. It was that evening that I first understood the B-minor Mass, really made the connection to it; and recording it myself later on, after that eye-opener, is in some ways a heritage of that evening. And that was all of a piece with what we were doing in the studio, and we just felt enormously happy, we felt we were doing something really worthwhile.
JOHN HAENY: Judy's particularly unique gift was song sense. Her whole purpose was to deliver the melody as straight as possible, with the lyrics as clean and understandable with as much emotional meaning behind it as she could impart, but without any vocal or dramatic tricks.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: Some things in the arrangements came from Judy. For example, although it's not literally so, the sort of harp figure that opens 'Michael from Mountains' was suggested by something she played on the guitar when she first sang the song for me. That put a certain image of sound in my mind which I took and reshaped. The keyboard figure that keeps going through 'Both Sides Now' may not be literally, but it's something like when she sat at the piano and played the tune for me. She's a very good pianist. When she'd sit and play something, I would pick up on it not simply because it was hers and because she may have wanted it, but because it sounded right.
Judy Collins "Wildflowers" EKS-74012
Because the arrangements were being done at the last minute, Judy was in the unenviable position of having to do her studio work cold. And I threw a lot of complicated things at her. I took advantage of her musicianship, because she really knows what she's doing. I would have constantly changing meters—not starting in 4/4 and just keeping going, they keep shifting. Even with tunes you know, if you're faced with this at the last second, it's not the easiest thing. She did it, and did it terrifically and with great skill. I still have and cherish a couple of photographs taken at these sessions of our recording of 'Albatross,' this tune of Judy's, which is the most complex arrangement on the album. The meter is changing, every bar, from 4/4 to 3/4, 7/4, 5/4, et cetera. I'm conducting, and there is this lovely shot of Judy looking up at me very intently, very deeply involved, really focusing on what's coming next.
JOHN HAENY: Frequently there were large conflicts, not violent, but large creative conflicts between the importance of the vocal performance and the orchestral accompaniment, which was a push-pull between Josh and Judy that went on all the time.
MARK ABRAMSON: Judy always thought that Josh's arrangements would overwhelm her, or was fearful of them, and Josh always felt that everything had to be heard, and the voice was just part of that. Judy saw herself as the focus, and Josh saw the music as a whole as the focus. Very different.
JUDY COLLINS: I think Josh would have run off with it if he could have. But he couldn't.
JOHN HAENY: Mark sat in the middle and helped mediate. He was Judy's confidante.
MARK ABRAMSON: I was definitely caught in the middle, and I may not have been as strong as I should have been.
JOHN HAENY: We recorded everything live. You would look for the best orchestra performances and the best vocal performances and splice them together, bar by bar. Judy and Josh would sit there, and Mark would sit in the middle and try to figure out how I could physically edit the tapes to get Josh the best orchestral performance and Judy the best vocal performance. And sometimes I had to do almost impossible edits to accomplish that. I would just try to stay out of the conflict between Judy and Josh, waiting for them to decide who was going to win the battle over that particular few bars of music. That album had something like four hundred-fifty edits.
MARK ABRAMSON: We didn't have automated mixing then, digital processors. It was all manual. Some of these mixes were very complicated—three of us on the board at the same time, pushing buttons, mixing, changing equalization, because it took six hands to do.
JUDY COLLINS: One thing you don't want to do is walk away from a mix session. Ever, ever. You can't. One of the great struggles that I've had throughout my career is maintaining voice level to track level. They will drown you in their arrangement whenever they can. It's a natural thing, I think they come by it quite honestly, but every singer I've ever known in my life has to fight it. This is serious, serious stuff.
JAC: Josh and Judy were both right. Getting the balance between individual interests without wounding either is like performing the most delicate brain surgery, which it is. You don't want to lose the words, but those settings of Josh's were particularly exquisite and deserved equal weight. Judy's voice could sit comfortably in the arrangements—put some light but characteristically different reverb on her voice and balance it into the strings.
MARK ABRAMSON: Judy and I worked extremely well, I think, when the chips were down and things had to be done. She would be temperamental when we were mixing, or privately, but when everybody was there and there was work to be done, there was never any temperament that would get in the way. Josh you put up with because of what he would contribute. Of course he was very young. I'm not sure he was fully aware that people were relying on him for more than just musical things. He could be a problem because of his own ego—his own sloppiness, frankly, where arrangements wouldn't be ready on the day. With 'Both Sides Now,' which we recorded in New York, we sat in the studio with the whole orchestra for an hour waiting for Josh because he hadn't shown up with the final copies of the score, and we were paying umpteen dollars an hour, going crazy.
JUDY COLLINS: "Wildflowers" was released in 1968. That music was never an easy sell. But everybody was talking about 'Both Sides Now'—"By God, that's a single. But it needs remixing, or it needs something or other."
JAC: From the beginning I thought 'Both Sides Now' was a potential single but I wasn't sure about the timing. The world needed to settle down a bit for these wise and gentle words to be heard. Almost a year later there were rumors of an English group coming out with the song so I moved quickly.
JUDY COLLINS: He sent us back to the studio, and we remixed it and he re-released it—
JAC:—With great energy—
JUDY COLLINS: Because he believed in it so strongly. And it hit. Top 10, Number 8, nine weeks on the charts.
JAC: And because it was so widely played on radio formats other than Top 40, it earned Judy the cover of Life magazine.
JUDY COLLINS: There was a lot of commitment on Jac's part to a project, whatever it was, but I never really felt that he was pushing me: "Quick, hurry up, get a record out." Because he respected the process, the time it took. There were times when it might have been a good idea for me to hurry and push and get a record out. But Jac never forced me to do anything I didn't want to.
