Sound mixer spills on working with legends
Canadian sound mixer has helped shape some of the best known music in history
Listen Up!
Recording Music With Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, R.E.M., The Tragically Hip, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Waits …
Mark Howard with Chris Howard ECW Press
Talk to any music fan about who would be the most notable sound shapers in the industry and the names most often bandied about might include producers George Martin, Phil Spector, Quincy Jones, Timbaland, Robert John (Mutt) Lange and even Daniel Lanois.
Mention Mark Howard’s name in that mix and chances are you’ll be greeted with a few blank stares of “who dat?” Not a household name among the general public, true, and reason enough for the Hamilton, Ont.raised producer-engineer-sound mixer to add his clientele list as the subtitle for his memoir, Listen Up!
It’s all there: Bob Dylan, U2, R.E.M., Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tom Waits, among many others.
Put Lanois’ name in there, too. The man renowned for crafting numerous classic U2 albums gave Howard his first break at Hamilton’s Grant Avenue Studio, the Edwardian house that Lanois and his brother, Bob, turned into a recording facility. Howard’s apprenticeship at Grant Avenue had far more to offer than his high school classes. The lessons he learned ultimately gave him the skills needed to find the best sounds for artists he’d work with.
As Howard suggests in Listen Up!, the work he did in getting big-name musicians and their recordings to sound good seemed to be the easier task. The tougher part went into him finding the right locations and helping to build those locations from often empty, derelict mansions into proper recording facilities. Not to mention him handling all the negotiations for renting the houses, finding the cars or trucks needed to move the equipment from one location to the next, finding the road crews to transport all the equipment, dealing with the border hassles and, where New Orleans is concerned, having to take a few losses thanks petty thieves.
And if that weren’t character-building enough, Howard also had to deal with the eclectic side of the artists themselves.
For his sound mixing work on Young ’s 2010 album Le Noise, “a main rule was that we only record three days before the full moon, and if magic is going to happen, it is at that time.” But to Howard — who fleshes out his stories with all the technical equipment and complex setups that behind-the-scenes music nerds would appreciate — this was deemed an ordinary recording experience. A tenure with Dylan in what would become his most critically acclaimed later works — 1989’s Oh Mercy and 1996’s Time Out of Mind, both produced by Lanois — was also an exercise in unpredictability and patience-testing.
Howard also isn’t shy about noting explosive temper outbursts by Lanois: one aimed at Howard for accidentally wiping out part of a recording take, another aimed at Dylan for his indecisiveness on a sound he specifically wanted. During the sessions for Oh Mercy, “with almost everything (Lanois) tried, Dylan turned it down.
Dan once did a great mix before Dylan arrived and then played it for him. ‘Did you mix it in the daytime?’ Dylan asked. ‘Yes, do you like it?’ Dan replied. ‘No, it needs to be mixed at night,’” was Dylan’s retort, which went in tandem with his desire to record only at night.
Dylan also tested Howard with constant requests for replacing a recording of one verse of a particular track with a later verse. Or making each studio-quality recording come as close to the feel of a demo cassette he liked.
In other words, what you hear as the final recordings is often the result of painstaking efforts from the artist, producer, sound engineer and so on.
After earning Dylan’s respect, recording a project for perhaps a lot-less-demanding Tragically Hip, Sam Roberts and even Robert Plant was a piece of cake. The author’s only other difficult case was Texas musician Ian Moore, who Howard describes as a guitar snob who never seemed happy with what Howard was doing. It wasn’t until Howard brought in ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons to demonstrate how a certain amplifier worked — and maybe bring a little “I told you so” to Moore’s attention — that Moore settled down.
Howard certainly has reason to celebrate his accomplishments: A lot of his work wound up helping a number of albums earn Grammys, Junos and other major awards.
The only drawbacks to reading Howard’s memoir? He can be a bit heavy-handed in the technical aspects of his recording setups — but that’s almost to be expected, since that was his line of business. Yet sometimes his adventures tend to full of ‘I did this, then I was there and I did this’ conversations. There are also a couple of factual puzzles: he mentions session drumming great Jim Keltner working with Elvis Presley (who would have been too young); and attributes the Hammond B-3 organ appearing on work by Bryan Adams as opposed to, say, Booker T. or even Steve Winwood. And why call U2 guitarist Edge instead of the more commonly known The Edge? Either these are cases of rookie editing and research or just being misinformed — who knows?
As an overall backstage pass of sorts to the inside workings of crafting albums by the aforementioned Dylan, Young and others, Listen Up! offers rare glimpses into the great lengths Howard and the musicians he worked with would go to in order to achieve that all-important great album.