Ken Scott

Ken Scott started at the top – and stayed there for over a decade. Having got himself into EMI’s studio training program, his first session as an engineer was on the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night album. But it’s as co-producer on Bowie’s first golden streak that he’s perhaps best known, stepping into the seat for the classic Hunky Dory, and remaining there through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Pin Ups, records that made Bowie a megastar but were also as musically diverse as the Beatles in their prime. In 1974, he produced Crime Of The Century, the breakthrough album for Supertramp, developing a reputation for marrying complex orchestrations to huge, successful hits. Less commercial, but hugely successful in its own right, was his work in jazz-rock, where he toughened up the sounds of pioneers like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham, and Stanley Clarke.

In his 2013 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, Scott discusses his time at Abbey Road, working with legends like Bowie and Lou Reed, living next door to Frank Zappa, and more.

Hosted by Todd L. Burns Audio Only Version Transcript:

The Beatles – “Glass Onion”

(music: The Beatles – “Glass Onion” / applause)

Todd L. Burns

Welcome, Ken Scott. Thank you very much for being here.

Ken Scott

My pleasure.

[applause]

Todd L. Burns

Right. So I don’t mean to begin by criticizing you, but there’s some mistakes on this record.

Ken Scott

Oh, are you kidding? I don’t know how many of you were here this morning with Nigel, but he was saying about recording on – I think he actually said 16-track, or no, it was 24. Well, that was recorded on 8-track. Talk about having to make decisions, and how those decisions are made, not necessarily under the right circumstances. We were recording that track, and when we did the basic track, it starts with the snare beat going “blap blap” and that occurs several times throughout the song. Ringo’s single snare drum, it wasn’t enough, so we decided that we’d overdub a whole bunch more snares every time that occured. Fine. We bounced all of those snares down onto track eight and then we continue overdubs. Then we come to what we think is the last overdub of the recording — it finished up that it wasn’t, we did some other stuff — but it was the recorders that come after the solo, and the recorders were being played by Paul McCartney and Chris Thomas, George Martin’s assistant. We didn’t have a track to put them on, so some bright spark came up with the idea that, “Well, they come after the snares, the last set of snares there, why don’t we just punch in on that track and put them on there?” Fine. There was certainly enough room to do that, but the second engineer I had working with me that day was brand new to Beatles sessions, was very new actually to Abbey Road Studios and I didn’t trust him.

[laughter]

Stupid asshole. But I wouldn’t let him do it. I said, “Don’t worry about it, guys, I’ll take care of it.” So I go over and I sit by the 8-track and after many, many attempts at them getting the recorder part and punching in after that last, “blap blap,” and them not getting it, not getting it. Finally, I lost that, that concentration, and as opposed to going into play, letting the “blap blap” go, and then hitting record, I went straight into record. So we finished up, there was only one snare drum there, and I thought, “That’s it.” Like many other occasions in my life I thought, “OK, that’s it. I’m out the door, they’re gonna can me.” But John, in his inimitable fashion was standing by the side of me said, “Let me listen to it again,” and I played it to him, and he said, “You know what? No one would ever conceive of going to the smallest part in the song after the biggest part in the song. I like it, we’ll keep it.” And that’s why when you listen you’ll hear I think there’s three fairly big, hefty “blap blaps” and then the last one after the solo was just one snare. It comes really small and it was purely an error and we couldn’t cut and paste the way you can these days, so we had to go with it. There was no way of fixing it, and that to me is what makes music human. It’s mistakes can be good if used in the right way, and I can’t tell you the number of people that have said to me, “God, The Beatles were so brilliant the way they came up with just going to that small snare after the biggest part, incredible.” It wasn’t that brilliant, it was my fuck up.

[laughter]

Todd L. Burns

But, I guess, it does speak to the idea that The Beatles and I think maybe you said this once, they’re open to that idea.

Ken Scott

Sure.

Todd L. Burns

They’re extremely experimental.

Ken Scott

Oh, for me, once again, one of the things... I was sitting at the back when Nigel was talking earlier, and it was absolutely fascinating for me. Here he was, the next generation down from me, and he was voicing so many of the things. Both of the guys were voicing so many of the things that my generation feel, and one of the things that he was saying was about the training that he went through. He started at a studio called Trident Studios, which was where I moved to after Abbey Road, but I left before he started there. But the training back then was absolutely phenomenal. I started at Abbey Road at age 16. I started off in the tape library and then moved up to become button pusher as we were called back then, because all we did was sit at the tape machine and hit play, hit record, hit rewind. So, just hit buttons. We weren’t allowed to set up sessions or anything like that. There was no way we were allowed to touch the mixing console. But I got to sit there and watch six of the most amazing recording engineers in the world at that point, there were three pop and three classical [engineers], and you could just sit there while Chris Parker would use Neumann U 47’s on the strings. Whereas, Malcolm Addy on the pop session would use Neumann U 67’s and he’d move them a lot closer. And you got to learn all of this, this kind of thing just sitting there and seeing it. That doesn’t, that’s not around these days, and then, finally moving to the point you’ve made with The Beatles. When I eventually was moved up to being an engineer, it was the most amazing learning experience, because here I was. The first session I ever did as sitting behind the board. I’d never sat behind the board before, and it was to record The Beatles. And I was petrified. I had absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing, but I had worked with them as a second engineer from side two of A Hard Day’s Night through Rubber Soul. So we built up a relationship and I think because of that relationship, they were prepared to give me a second chance, and we continued and worked together a lot more. But working with them, most engineers when they start in the studio, they would have to do recording tests or they’d do ads and things like that. When I did actually get to record a band, back then you’d quite often have to record two or three songs in one three hour session. So, you couldn’t, you had to be right on the entire time. Working with The Beatles – they would take forever, and plus they liked to experiment. So, I as a young engineer could try any mics that I wanted to and learn what they did. To show you how silly it got at times, Paul and I would go into the, the mic closet and he’d say, “Oh, I like the look of that one, let’s try that on bass drum.”

[laughter]

Todd L. Burns

Just the way it looked?

Ken Scott

Yeah, just the way it looked. So, I always had the feeling that I could experiment. They said, “Record a piano with completely the wrong mic in completely the wrong place, completely screw up the EQ, completely overcompress it.” And it would sound like shit, but there was just as much chance of them coming up and saying, “Oh, that sounds like shit,” as it was, “Yeah, it’s not very good, but we like it, we’ll use it.” So I was never afraid to experiment, which most of the engineers at Abbey Road at the point wouldn’t. They didn’t have that opportunity, so it was phenomenal working with them. They were always open to ideas

Todd L. Burns

Tell me about EMI back then. The way, in reading your book, I felt about it was that it was very buttoned-up on the engineers’side.

Ken Scott

Well, it was very staid. It was still not too long after the Second World War and there were still bomb sites around everywhere and all of that kind of thing, and the mentality was suit and tie for everyone. The engineers had to wear suit, white shirt, and a tie. The second engineers had to wear, at the very least, they had to wear nice dress pants and a shirt normally with a tie. They didn’t necessary have to wear jackets all the time. We weren’t allowed to take our jackets off during a session. We had the hierarchy, if you like, at Abbey Road. There were the “brown coats,” they were like the studio roadies. They would help musicians in with their instruments, they’d put chairs out for the orchestra, and they were called “brown coats” because they’d be wearing relatively good clothes but they’d wear these brown lab coats kind of thing, so they didn’t get dirty. Then you had the maintenance engineers, the amp room guys, they would wear white lab coats to cover up their suits. Now, I’ve heard so many people comment on, “Everyone was wearing white coats there.” They weren’t, it was only the maintenance guys and it made absolute [sense]. Everything that happened at EMI, it was very staid but there was a very, very good reason why they did things. They’d been around since 1936, I think, in that particular building. And the amp room guys, they were the ones who always set up the sessions. They put out the mics. An engineer couldn’t even put out a mic at that point. He could move it to where he wanted it, but he couldn’t take it from the mic room closet and put it out on the studio floor. They had to do it. So they were coiling up all of these dirty cables. They would have to go into the echo chambers which were often musty, damp, and not very nice. So they didn’t want to get these suits dirty, so wear white lab coats. It made absolute sense. And, of course, there was the engineers in suits and...

Todd L. Burns

Seems like you got the best of both worlds then. You got the very strict training of being at EMI but then you were working with the most experimental band there.

Ken Scott

Absolutely. It was unbelievable, the training. The whole thing with The Beatles, they started to change everything. The first thing that they changed was the hours of working. Generally speaking, at Abbey Road when I started the sessions were from ten to one in the morning, two-thirty to five-thirty in the afternoon, and seven to ten in the evening, which just happened to sort of go with the English licensing hours, the pub hours at the point. But I don’t know if it was planned that way or not. But The Beatles started to change that. They would come in late and they’d go ‘till all hours in the morning. And what happened was, the old time engineers there didn’t like to work under those sort of situations. They all had families, they were all in their forties, fifties and had families. They wanted to finish at a certain time and go home to spend time with their families. So they didn’t want to work with The Beatles. So what happens? Before me was Geoff Emerick, a young engineer that had been an engineer for six months, and he was put on the sessions, and as a young guy, he loved it. He didn’t have a family to get home to, making good money. And it’s a great chat up line, “Oh, yes I’m working with The Beatles.” “[gasp] Ohhh!”

[laughter]

Yeah, right. The trouble was we were spending too much time in the studio working with The Beatles to be able to use that chat-up line.

[laughter]

So when Geoff decided he didn’t want to work with The Beatles anymore, I was next in line, so they moved me straight up, and once again a young guy so I was eager to do it and didn’t mind the long hours or anything like that or whatever.

Todd L. Burns

I want to move along, and do a lot of different things, but one last question. Was there ever a point in which working with The Beatles where you were finally like, “OK, I don’t feel like I’m going to get fired?” [laughs]

Ken Scott

No.

Todd L. Burns

Never? [laughs]

Ken Scott

[laughs] Never. Most of my life I felt, “Oh, I’m going to get kicked out at any given time.”

[laughter]

It’s those insecurities that push me to a point it’s, “[deep inhale] I’ve gotta prove my worth.”

Todd L. Burns

Well, let’s play another song then. It’s moving along a little bit.

David Bowie – “Life On Mars”

(music: David Bowie – “Life On Mars” / applause)

Ken Scott

Boy, there was some strange compression on there. It was weird, it was kicking in at times.

Todd L. Burns

You didn’t think this guy had what it takes, first of all?

Ken Scott

No.

[laughter]

So, I first met David [Bowie] when he’d recorded “Space Oddity” as a single and it had done fairly well, so at that point the record company, Mercury, decided they wanted to do an album with him, and I had recently moved to Trident Studios and they put me on some of the sessions with Tony Visconti, he was producing, I was engineering. And we did the album and, yeah, yeah, David was a nice guy, he was very pleasant, obviously had a certain amount of talent, but superstar? Nah. No way.

Then I got to work with him on The Man Who Sold the World. Once again, that was recorded at another studio and then Tony brought it to try it and to do some overdubs and mix. Once again, David was a nice guy, obviously a certain amount of talent, but never a superstar. The album didn’t do very well at all, so David took some time off and he started with a mime artist called Lindsay Kemp. And he came in, he’d obviously been writing and he still had the music bug in him, so he came in with a friend of his to produce a single with his friend. And because I had worked with David before, I was put on the sessions with him. Now, that particular session is always going to be in my dreams, both as a nightmare and as a very pleasant experience. The nightmare comes from the fact... How many of you know what “hot pants” are?

[laughter]

Any of you? Well, not enough of you, obviously. Hot pants, for those who don’t know, are very short tight shorts that some women wear and, I’d have to say 95% of the women that wear them shouldn’t, and the other five percent, very nice.

[laughter]

The thing was that David’s friend was wearing the shortest, tightest hot pants any of us at the studio had ever seen, and he shouldn’t have been.

[laughter]

We were awaiting a wardrobe malfunction the entire session. Luckily it never happened. So that’s the nightmare side of the story. And the very pleasant side of it was, I’d reached the point that so many engineers reach where you’re doing a session, you’re sitting next to the producer, and you suddenly have an idea and you say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to have 15 roaring elephants doing the solo here.” And the producer is, “Hey guys, why don’t we try 15 roaring elephants doing the solo here.” “OK, if you think so.” And you try it, and if it works, the producer will always take credit. If it doesn’t work, it’s, “Oh, that was only Ken’s idea anyway. I didn’t think it work, but I had to sort of calm him down a little.” That was happening a little too frequently, so I had decided I wanted to make the change to have more of the artistic say and move into production. The pleasant dream experience. I happened to voice my feelings to David about wanting to move into production and David said, “Well, I’ve just signed a new management deal. They want to put me into the studio to record an album. I don’t know that I’m capable of doing it all on my own. Will you co-produce it with me?” So here’s my mind taking over. Here’s a very nice guy who has a certain amount of talent, but I’m going to do my first production, I can make all the mistakes in the world because no one’s every going to hear this record because he’s never going to be a superstar. So, “Yeah, David, I’d love to do it. Of course.” Then a few weeks later David and his wife Angie come around to my house and we’re going through material for the album and suddenly the light bulb goes off and it’s, here I go again in at the deep end. It’s, this guy is amazingly talented and there is every possibility that a lot of people will hear every single mistake I make on the production of the album, and that finished up being Hunky Dory. So, you can now all blame me for the mistakes on that.

[laughter]

Todd L. Burns

Where are the mistakes on that in your mind?

Ken Scott

If you haven’t heard them, then I’m certainly not going to tell you. I do need to explain one thing. I held you off from fading that down for a very specific reason. I’ve been asked a lot of time about the ending on that song, which is kind of weird. You hear the piano come back in and something going on behind it. Normally, I have a computer and I can hit the button and actually play what happened. So I just have to explain it this time. We were recording analog onto tape, and as generally happened, we made decisions back then as to whether it was the take or not. If it wasn’t the take, we would go back and record over. This particular occasion, they were doing an amazing take, Rick Wakeman was on piano, there was Trevor Bolder on bass, and Woody Woodmansey playing drums. We’re getting through, and it was a really good take and, suddenly, this phone which was in the bathroom at the side of the studio, started to ring and it was picked up on the piano mics which were right by the door of this bathroom, and we had to stop the take. And Mick Ronson, who happened to be in the studio, was just cursing and swearing like mad because we had to stop it. So, we went back to the beginning of the tape, started to record another take again, and I don’t know if they just started earlier, or if they played it faster, or what, but it turned out that we didn’t erase over the complete earlier take. There was just the ending of it, came back in. We didn’t even realise it until we did the strings, and they’re just sustaining at the end, nothing else is playing, and then suddenly the piano came back in, and then the phone comes in, and then you hear Rono cursing and swearing. “We gotta use it. We gotta use it.” But, of course, we had to pull it down very fast so that we didn’t, we couldn’t have swearing. The BBC would’ve banned it instantly, and we didn’t want that. But, that’s the story of the ending and that’s why I wouldn’t let you bring it there.

Todd L. Burns

Mick Ronson, you mentioned his name. He seems like the secret weapon almost of that group, in a way.

Ken Scott

Oh, I don’t think there’s anything secret about him. Once again, very, very nice guy, very, very down to earth, great guitarist.

Todd L. Burns

Aside from when the phone’s ringing.

Ken Scott

Oh, no, he’s down to earth, he just curses like a sailor, as we all do in the studio from time to time. And in lectures from time to time as well. Not only was he a great guitarist, he was also a very imaginative arranger when it came to strings and brass. Like, some of the stuff he did for David at the end of five years. Just what he writes for strings, it’s absolutely bizarre. And some of the stuff he did on the Transformer album with Lou Reed... I don’t know anyone else who would’ve come up with stuff like that. He was amazing and a real shame that he died so young. It happens, unfortunately.

Todd L. Burns

One of the things I found really fascinating about Bowie in particular is that it seems like he would do one or two vocal takes and that was it.

Ken Scott

Not often did he do two. I co-produced four albums with David, and I would say that 95% of the vocals that we did were first takes, from beginning to end. I would get the level, take the tape back, we’d go through, and that’s the vocal you hear. They’re not perfect, they’re sometimes slightly out of tune, sometimes slightly out of time, but they’re real. They are emotional from him. I don’t know if any of you were there yesterday at the Classic Album Sunday scene, when it was myself, Tony Visconti and Nile Rodgers talking about various things. I played, there at the ending of “Five Years,” which had a whole bunch of people almost in tears, which David was in tears at the end of “Five Years.” He’s screaming, he is feeling such emotion. It wouldn’t be allowed today. It would have to be auto-tuned. It would have to be moved around. But I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re still talking about these albums after all this time is they’re real, they’re human, and they reach you here [gestures to heart] more than they do up here [gestures to head]. And I think today a lot of the music is done more for up here than it is for down here.

Todd L. Burns

Is that a philosophy that you took later on in your career with other bands? You’re just saying, “Listen, you know, one take that has feeling?” Stop.

Ken Scott

I wish. [laughs] Oh no. It’s different strokes for different folks. There is no right or wrong way. It’s you do whatever has to be done. As a producer, you’re the shrink, you’re the dictator, you’re the best friend. You’re everything, every form of a relationship you can think of, you are that at some point. I’ve been in the unique experience of seeing every side of Jeff Beck. I started with Jeff. I did the first, Jeff Beck Group album, an album called Truth, as an engineer. And it was with Ronny Wood on bass, in was Rod Stewart doing the vocals, and we had a blast. We did it very quickly. All of the albums back then were done very quickly, by the way. Something else, this was brought forth yesterday quite a lot, it’s, there is nothing quite like having a bunch of musicians in the studio playing together and they all feed off of one another. And the buzz that comes from that, it’s unlike any other drug that you can imagine. It just feels so good. So we did the Truth album very quickly, we had a lot of fun doing it. And, that was it. They toured America, where suddenly they were gods.

Todd L. Burns

So, you were his best friend in the studio.

Ken Scott

Well, we were, we were...

Todd L. Burns

In that situation, not the shrink, not the...

Ken Scott

No. No, I was just the engineer. So, it was just sit there and twiddle the knobs more than anything. But, we all got on very well. It was nice. So, they toured the States. The States make them think that they’re gods. They come back in to do the next album. Within the first day, the egos were unbelievable. And, it was obvious we couldn’t work together. I don’t like egos, particularly, unless it’s mine. So the sessions were canceled and they moved off and did the second album somewhere else. Then, I got work with Jeff a little bit later on. I did some albums with a bass player called Stanley Clarke and Jeff would come in and guest on one track on each of the albums. And Jeff was back to normal, he was a regular guy, and we got on great together. So, we’ve gone from regular, ego, regular...

Then, I get a phone call. Jeff was in the midst of doing an album called There And Back with Jan Hammer producing. And, they had a falling out over something that Jan did on stage one day, tried to upstage Jeff, and they just fell apart. And so, I got a phone call to go in and finish the album and suddenly it was the complete opposite of the ego with Jeff. He didn’t feel good enough to be playing with the musicians he was playing with. And that particular time, that was really the shrink, because at that point it was trying to pull performances out of him and I find it easier to calm someone down and pull out the performances. That was really hard, but we managed to get it together and finish the album, and it came out very well. So yeah, it’s different strokes for different folks at different times. It’s full circle with Jeff.

Todd L. Burns

Let’s play another tune you mentioned, Lou Reed and Transformer...

Ken Scott

I did.

Lou Reed – “Walk on the Wild Side”

(music: Lou Reed – “Walk On The Wild Side” / applause)

Todd L. Burns

How did you get that job with Lou Reed?

Ken Scott

David. It was David Bowie, Mick Ronson production. We’d done Ziggy and it was kind of strange because they were day sessions, which was unusual for David. But they were rehearsing for a big Rainbow show that they were doing in the evening so we would finish about six or seven and they’d dash over to the Rainbow to rehearsals. And we’d come back in the next day and then typically with David, David got very bored in the studio. He didn’t like being in there particularly. So when he finished his role, he was out the door. So that always left me the freedom. The time I came most into play with all the stuff was transferring the most basic recording and finishing doing the mixing and everything. He was at two mixes during the entire time I worked with him and it was exactly the same with this, he wasn’t around he was on the Queen Elizabeth II on his way to New York whilst I was finishing this.

Todd L. Burns

It is a very interesting production, obviously. It doesn’t sound like a lot of other Lou Reed’s work. What was the creative process like? Did he come in with the idea for this arrangement?

Ken Scott

Lou would come in and stumble through the song to Rono and then Rono would transfer what the song actually was to the session musicians that were being used and the arrangement would be worked out on the spot. The amazing bass part on that was a English session guy whose played on so many damn records called Herbie Flowers. He was amazing, the way he tells the story is really good. Basically, we laid down the basic track with, I think it was acoustic guitar, upright bass and drums. Once we got the take, Herbie comes running upstairs. He has this idea, the reason that he had the idea was back in those days when you played twice, when a session musician played twice they got double the money, they got double scale. So he suddenly thought, “OK, somehow I’ve got to put another bass on top of it,” and he came out with doing it. I think he says it’s a twelfth or something like that on electric bass doubling and that’s the incredible bass part that’s on there and it came purely from monetary desires. [laughs]

Working with Lou was very, very strange. He was there physically. I don’t think he was there mentally much of the time. A couple weeks after finishing the album... Now, Lou did come along to our mixes.

Todd L. Burns

That was a lot different than David.

Ken Scott

Oh, yes. He was there, he could have just as well not been there, he never said anything. But he sat by the side all the time, and two weeks later after we’d completed, it was my wedding anniversary or something, and I was out with my wife at a Chinese restaurant just down the road from the studios. Suddenly, all of these people from RCA, the label that Lou was on, come waltzing in. I knew most of them, they came over to the table saying, “Hi,” and suddenly one of them, “Hey Lou, come over and say hello, it’s Ken.” And he just stands there and looks at me. He has absolutely no idea who the hell I am. It was only two weeks ago that we completed his damn album. That was Lou back then.

Todd L. Burns

What about the vocals?

Ken Scott

Go ahead. You may be covering what I was just going to interject, so keep going.

Todd L. Burns

I don’t know the story exactly, about the vocalists that come in.

Ken Scott

Oh, the colored girls? Oh, the colored girls were three white Jewish girls.

[laughter]

It was obvious that we needed some background singers. David said, “Do you know any?”, and I called in this group I knew called Thunder Thighs, and they did it. It was perfect. The whole thing of them walking forward, coming from way back and coming forward, that was me and pure boredom. You could only hear “Do, do-do, do-do,” so many times before you want to change it somehow. The way I decided to change it was, “OK, let’s see if I can get it so it sounds as if they’re walking forward singing.” Had the reverb set, and the reverb was always the same, I just changed the level of them, so you hear most of the reverb just start with them back a little bit, and I gradually bring them forward. Until they’re right in your face. That was one of the amazing arrangements that Rono did for strings. Just brilliant. I wish you could hear it a little more on its own, it’s so unusual.

Todd L. Burns

You were working on this album at Trident.

Ken Scott

Correct.

Todd L. Burns

So you’d left EMI and you’d gone to this other place.

Ken Scott

Correct.

Todd L. Burns

Can you talk about the difference of the two studios?

Ken Scott

The major difference was just the attitude. As I’d already said, EMI was very staid. It did change a little because of The Beatles, but it was still very staid. Trident was the complete opposite. It was very laid back. You could wear jeans and a T-shirt, musicians would come by and just hang out because it was a great hangout place. As a studio, the studio was smaller than Number Two at Abbey Road. It still had the control room upstairs that looked down. Which several English studios had, Number Two Studio, Olympic was the same, Trident, we all had basically similar equipment. The desk when I first started at Trident was a Sound Techniques board. A small English company that made incredible boards. A lot of people seem to think that most of the stuff at Trident was done on a Trident A-range board. That’s a very popular board. They only ever made thirteen of them, but people will pay a fortune to get them or to get parts from them. That’s incorrect, the Trident A-range was in there only for a short period of time. Even then, up in the mix room, all of the early Elton John stuff, all of the Bowie stuff, a lot of the Queen stuff, most of [Harry] Nilsson, Carly Simon, their albums were all mixed on a Sound Techniques board, which was amazing, and I’ve been told they’re just about to start remaking them again. So, that will be interesting. It was more a mental thing than it was a difference in the studios.

Todd L. Burns

When you started working for Trident, it may have been a little bit down the road but you ended up having a management company that was separate from Trident. But obviously, you’re renting their studio time. Is that right?

Ken Scott

You’re probably thinking of a production company. No, all three engineers at Trident at the same time, we’d all got fed up with that producer thing. The Roaring Elephant syndrome. We had discussed amongst ourselves, there was myself, there was Roy Thomas Baker, that went on to produce so many hits, an engineer called Robin Jeffrey Cable. We all wanted to get into production, and so we spoke to the management and owners of Trident Studios and they said, “That’s great, we’ll set up production companies for each of you, which we’ll look after.” They basically became your managers. And each of us had our own company, it’s just I happened to break through faster than the others because of Mr. Bowie. But, we all had the same kind of thing.

Todd L. Burns

Ziggy Stardust went number one.

Ken Scott

It did very well, I think number one.

Todd L. Burns

But you didn’t see a lot of money from your work with Bowie.

Ken Scott

Well, I never have seen everything you should. I don’t think any artist or producer ever sees everything they should get, because all these damn record companies keep two sets of books, as far as I’m concerned. I have tried on numerous occasions to talk attorneys into filing a class action lawsuit against every major label out there, because once an artist becomes successful, they will go in and they’ll audit the record company’s books. I have heard of many, many occasions when they’ve gone in and done that, and every single occasion, it is turned out that the accounts were in the record company’s favor. “Oh, we’re sorry, that must have been a mistake.” A mistake doesn’t happen every single solitary time. Also, it always turns around that they would say, “Well, you’ve got to prove this. You’ll have to sue us for it.” The artist isn’t going to go into a court of law to try and get every penny, so the record company says, “Well, we’ll pay you half of what you say we owe you.” Every single time they accept that, and every single time they have to sign a non-disclosure contract that says they can’t talk about it, so it is so obvious to me. I’ve now been in the recording business for 50, oh, 49 and-a-half years.

Todd L. Burns

It only took that long.

Ken Scott

It only took that long, yeah. With David, it wasn’t so much the record company as it was his manager, a Mr. Tony DeFries, who screwed everyone. He wanted to be the English Colonel Tom Parker, the way...

Todd L. Burns

That’s Elvis’s manager.

Ken Scott

Yes, Elvis’s manager, I think he may even have passed Tom Parker, but just as an example, just to tell you what David was on, for a while, his original contract with Tony Defries took 50% of gross. David would do a tour, he would have to pay out of his own pocket all expenses for the tour, and that was after Tony Defries had taken his 50% off the top. Watch out for deals like that, guys.

Todd L. Burns

I remember one of the tours, it was an artistic decision for him to go out there with just a light.

Ken Scott

Just the neon tubes, yeah, that was after he had actually got out of his deal. He’d won his lawsuit and got out of his deal with Defries at that point so that was going to be the first tour where he would actually start to make money.

Todd L. Burns

So he knew the stage show had to be as limited as possible.

Ken Scott

Yes, of course. David is, well, he may have been stupid signing the original deal, but he learned fast.

Todd L. Burns

What other lessons from that business side of things do you feel like are really important and still very relevant to some of the participants out here today?

Ken Scott

One of the things is, you’re gonna make mistakes. You’re gonna give money away that, at some point down the line, “Oh, why the hell did I sign that?” or “Why did I do that?” That’s the way we learn, it’s by mistakes. I learned about not punching in too early on “Glass Onion,” and everything you learn by your mistakes. But make sure you do learn from them. It’s, fool me once, on me, fool me, on you, fool me twice... whatever. It’s that kind of thing. It’s make a mistake, learn from it, just don’t make the mistake again, kind of thing. There are so many strange legal things that you’re not gonna know them all. I did an album with a band called Kansas. This was way after their biggest hits. In the midst of working on the album, Kerry Livgren, who was the main guy in the band, really, he and I were talking and he told me about how they signed their recording contract and he said they’d been offered a deal by Don Kirshner’s company, which is distributed through what is now Sony. And they were playing a gig in this small club down in Atlanta and their recording contract arrived and they had to sign it there and then. Then they are there going through all these clips where they have to sign it and they sign all of these pages and then they find this extra bit at the back also had clipped somewhere they had to sign. “Well, we’ve never seen this before but I guess we have to sign it.” So they all signed. That was their publishing, they had given away all of their publishing. I said to Kerry, “You didn’t show that to an attorney?” And he said, “No.” I said, “Well, that contract is illegal then because you are, you cannot sign...” These days, there is generally a clause in every contract that states you have had it looked at by an attorney. If you haven’t, it’s more fool you-kind of thing, ‘cause you signed that you have. Back then that didn’t happen, so the contract was actually illegal because they didn’t take legal advice on it. He said to me, “Come on, your wrong. We would have been told that ages ago.” I said, “OK, I’m not going to argue with you. That’s the way I understand it, but do me a favor next time you, you go sit down with your attorney ask him for me, will you?” He said, “OK, yeah, I’ll do that.” And I didn’t think he would seriously ever do it. Couple of weeks later the band come in for the session and they’d had a meeting with their attorney and Kerry came up to me and said, “I have to apologize.” I said, “Why?” He said, “I asked our attorney and he you were absolutely correct. We could have got our millions of dollars of publishing back had we known.” But the problem was, ‘cause they’d been successful, they’d gone in and renegotiated with an attorney who didn’t know about how it had been signed in the first place. So, because they had gone in with an attorney, they could never go back on it. So they just lost the millions ‘cause they didn’t take proper advice.

Todd L. Burns

So have an attorney look over your stuff.

Ken Scott

Just take proper advice. You can’t even necessarily rely on you manager to give you, ‘cause they had a manager, a top manager for years. He was with them when they signed it. They didn’t realize, didn’t know. It takes 49 and a half years to learn all this stuff, I guess.

Todd L. Burns

Let’s play another song. I think you’ll recognize it.

Elton John – “Crocodile Rock”

(music: Elton John – “Crocodile Rock” / applause)

Ken Scott

I have to say one thing here. I’ve had absolutely amazing highs in my life from what I chose to do for a living. One of the lowest points was walking through a supermarket and hearing this playing in the background, and it’s reached a point where so many of the people that fought against the man – it’s now, you walk down a bloody supermarket and you hearing that record’s playing is just so disturbing. It really is. Sorry, you were going to ask?

Todd L. Burns

No, I guess I was going to say, another lesson from the industry is something you learned it little bit before this but use this and it’s always record in France if you can.

Ken Scott

Oh, well. I did quite of few records in Chateau d’Hérouville, just outside of the Paris and that was purely monetary things for the artist.

Todd L. Burns

Is that just tax-free?

Ken Scott

Yeah, yeah, the way English law was at that point was, if the majority of stuff was done outside of the country, as long as that money never entered England, then you didn’t have to pay tax on it. So Elton did three albums in France. David, we did Pin Ups in France, [Pink] Floyd recorded over there. Yeah, several people recorded there. Marc Bolan did. So, all for the tax reason.

Todd L. Burns

What are the challenges of the recording in this different environment?

Ken Scott

First and foremost, just getting used to it. Basically, I went two places, Abbey Road and then Trident and with any studio, it takes a while to get used to it. Knowing it. It has good points and bad points, I guess. The most important thing for me within any studios are the monitors. It does not matter what any other gear is. As long as the monitors are good, you know how it’s going to turn out in the end. I’m not going to go into one story to demonstrate that, ‘cause it’s jumping back too far, but first and foremost, working in a new place to getting to know the monitors. We also had problem at Trident, where Elton had always worked before, there was a drum booth. So with the piano, which he always played on the tracks, there wasn’t much leakage from the drums. Chatéau, it didn’t have any drum booths. So there’s Nigel Olsson set up on the drums and right in front of him is the piano. So, we’ve got one hell of a lot of leakage, which we couldn’t use. And so, Gus Dutch, the producer, sent out for some French carpenters and had them come in, and they traced around top of the piano, and made this huge thing that just came over the entire piano which was two holes in it from each for the mics and it completely blocked off from the piano from anything else. Things like that, you learn going into other studios, things you have to do. And that’s one of the things we had to do there.

Todd L. Burns

What was the most striking thing about working with Elton John for you?

Ken Scott

Well, he was a nice guy and he was quite talented, but superstar? No, never. I had the most amazing experience seeing him write “Rocket Man.” We were in pre-production, and the way it always worked was Bernie Taupin, lyricist, is he’d go up to his room at the about eight o’clock in the evening and he’d come down at breakfast next day and it was communal living. We all sat around this big table and had the breakfast and dinner together. And so Bernie would come down and he‘d hand Elton these — Reg as he was back then, he hadn’t formally changed his name. He brought him down to Reg, and he’d be going through them and he pulled out couple, then after he finished breakfast and then he go up to the piano and we put up the lyrics up and he’d just start to play. And I guess on this one particular occasion, ten minutes he had “Rocket Man” complete singing it there. The band were already set up, as we pre-production set-up by side by the piano and after we all finished, it would just be sorting out the arrangement. And then, when everything had been completed like that it was over to the studio to record. Just ten minutes to write that song, incredible.

Todd L. Burns

I heard he is also quite good at foosball.

[laughter]

Ken Scott

Boy, you did read the book, didn’t you?

[laughter]

Yeah, one of the ways we passed time was playing foosball. And someone decided to start a championship. Now, I was absolutely bloody atrocious at this game, I couldn’t do it for love or money. But they set up this championship and everyone had to be a part of it and I was teamed up with with one of the roadies, who was also equally bad.

[laughter]

We actually started winning. And we’re beating people and we come to the finals. Something clicked with us and we get to the finals and we’re playing Elton and Gus, neither of whom like to lose.

[laughter]

So it was determined it was going to be the best of three. We won the first one. Of course, Elton and Gus, they really get on top of it and they win the second one and it’s, “OK, its the third one. This is win or walk out.” Everyone was crowded around the table and me and the roadie got it. Suddenly Elton, “It’s best of five.”

[laughter]

We played on two more and they won the next one and we won the fifth one.

Todd L. Burns

Just the idea of Elton John playing foosball, completely blew my mind as I was reading the book.

Ken Scott

Monopoly was the good one because if he started to lose, it would suddenly go flying.

Todd L. Burns

Let’s play one more track. This is from a solo album of one of The Beatles that you worked on.

George Harrison – “My Sweet Lord”

(music: George Harrison – “My Sweet Lord” / applause)

Todd L. Burns

That was George Harrison, “My Sweet Lord.”

Ken Scott

I learned very early on not to get star-struck. He was the exception until the last day I saw him.

Todd L. Burns

Why him more than the other Beatles? It seems like he was the one you had the strongest relationship with.

Ken Scott

Yeah, I was the strongest with him. He was just an amazing person. There’s been so much written about him being dour and down the entire time and the quiet one. Eric Idle once said of George, that he was always quoted as being the quiet Beatle, but anyone that knew him knew that once he started there was no shutting him up. As far as being dour, he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Just as an example, they were mixing “Yellow Submarine” surround sound at Abbey Road, and George and Ringo were invited to go and hear what they were doing. They’re upstairs listening, and it just so happened down in number one, the very big studio at Abbey Road, Mel Gibson was doing music for one of his movies, I think it was The Patriot at the time. And typically, with any of the Beatles, the top film stars, if it’s a Beatle they’ve got to meet them. It’s, they’re above everyone. So, Mel Gibson heard that Ringo and George were upstairs and he passed word up, could he go up and meet them. Word came back down, “Yeah, sure, send him up.” So, he went upstairs and he meets Ringo first, he shakes hands and all of that, then it’s George’s turn, and George just turns and looks and he said, “I thought you said it was Mel Brooks.”

[laughter]

Mel Gibson’s jaw just hit the ground and George said, “Don’t worry, I know who you are.”

[laughter]

But that’s the way he was, he was an amazing individual. He could give two hoots about the business, really. He always used to get pissed off because it was always, “George Harrison, ex-Beatle.” And, he, “That was six years of my life. What about the rest of the stuff?” He hated being that ex-Beatle being after his name all the time.

Todd L. Burns

And his solo album did better than any of the other solo Beatle albums.

Ken Scott

Yes, it did.

Todd L. Burns

You were not the producer.

Ken Scott

No, no.

Todd L. Burns

You were engineering.

Ken Scott

Yeah, it was he and Phil. I had moved into the production area at this point.

Todd L. Burns

Phil being?

Ken Scott

”The” Phil. Is there anyone else that?

Todd L. Burns

Phil Spector. Yeah, he has a very different production style than you.

Ken Scott

Well, as it turns out, yeah. My first dealing with Phil, he tried to come in and do a track for his wife, Ronnie Spector and she wasn’t there. He was there on teaching the song to the musicians, the session musicians. I was upstairs getting the sound, and I got what I thought was typically my sound. He then came up, musicians started to play and he had me change maybe three minor things and it completely changed from what it would be my normal sound to his. I’ve racked my brains, what were those three things, but I’ve never quite remembered them, but they were very simple. It was nothing much, but with All Things Must Pass, the album, the basic tracks were all cut at Abbey Road by Phil MacDonald, and Phil Spector was there for all of the basic tracks. Then, it was only 8-track at Abbey Road at that point. At Trident we’d moved to 16-track, and so George came and I did all of the overdubs and then mixed. During the overdubs, Phil was back in LA He wasn’t there for any of the months we spent on the overdubs. He just came back when it was time for mixing and the way it would go is, George and I would turn up about two, three o’clock in the afternoon. We’d get a mix together as close as we thought it should be. Phil would then come in, he’d listen and make suggestions. Some of which we’d do, some of which we wouldn’t. Phil would go, we’d complete the mix, George would go, we’d set up for the next day and so it went. Phil wasn’t there that much for that.

I did have an interesting education with him a bit later. As it turns out – this made so much more sense after the trial. George, Phil and Ronnie Spector came back to Trident later for a song that George had written specifically for Ronnie, called, “Try Some, Buy Some,” and we’re upstairs in the mix room, which had a small overdub booth behind us, and we’re putting the vocal on and after we’ve sat along, all of that, Ronnie went in there alone, got her to sing, got a sound. Phil said, “OK, let’s do a take.” As soon as it’s finished and I stop the tape machine Phil starts to tell us a story which probably lasted around 20 minutes and the entire time Ronnie Spector is just standing in front of the mic, not saying a word. Then Phil press the talk button. “OK Ronnie, that was good, can we have a little more feeling in the second chorus maybe.” “OK, Phil.” I’d record, we’d go through again. When it finished Phil would regale us with another 20 minute story and Ronnie was just standing there in front of the mic, not saying a word. She was petrified. She was absolutely terrified to even move from the mic or say anything, as has become clear. At the time it was so strange but then everything that came out about Phil after that with the trial and everything. It just made so much sense. It’s horrible, horrible.

Todd L. Burns

Let’s move on to a completely different style of music.

Ken Scott

[laughs] Please! And Person!

Todd L. Burns

Yes, and person.

Ken Scott

Sorry, just one other thing with regards to All Things Must Pass, especially that particular track, it comes out so much. All of the backing vocals, the George O’Hara-Smith singers that you see is on the album, they’re all George. We spent hours and days and weeks doing the backing vocals, and the way we’d do it is, George would go down, he’d put down the first part, we’d put down like four of him doing it, then we’d be bouncing his four vocals onto another track at the same point he’s singing live. Then he’d start the next harmony and, after we put four down, we’d mix the, the first track with the five initial tracks down to that other one with him singing and just gradually kept on going back and we’d get - something that Nigel brought up during the earlier talk - something that used to happen a lot that doesn’t happen now is, we would slow the tape machine down so that he could reach the high points and he would just sing it slower we’d put it up to normal speed and he’d be up that much higher and that’s how all of the backing vocals are done that entire [album]. Well, I say the double album ‘cause I don’t think there are any backing vocals on the last, the third thing.

One other quick thing about All Things Must Pass, I was blessed to spend a fair amount of time with George before his passing. He contacted me completely out of the blue and I got to spend quite a bit of time over at Friar Park, his place in England. What was the point I was getting to? Hell! I completely lost it with that.

Todd L. Burns

One of the things that I found interesting about you listening back to it is you guys saying you probably wouldn’t have put so much reverb.

Ken Scott

Oh, no. When we were back there we would, we sat in his studio in front of the board. There we are playing the mixes and finally some of the multi-tracks of All Things Must Pass, working on the reissue of it, the 40th anniversary or whatever it was. We just looked at each other and we burst out laughing. For two reasons, one, it was here we are 40 years on, sitting in exactly the same positions listening to exactly same tape, something that we thought would last for six months or maybe a year, but here we are 40 years on doing the same thing, and the other thing was how much reverb there was on it. It was ridiculous. We would had loved to just have gone back and remixed it, “despectorize it” it is probably the best phrase. We actually mentioned it to EMI, but they wouldn’t allow us to do it. They said we had to put it out as the original, and I really hope that it doesn’t happen without George being around. There is always that possibility if there is more bucks involved but...

I suddenly remembered what point I was getting to. George, whilst we were doing all of this had the idea of, “Why don’t we put another CD as part of the package? What we will do is interview everyone that played a part in recording of All Things Must Pass.” “Yeah, great idea, George. OK.” And it just sort of happened that I was flying back to LA the following week, and he said Ringo is there at that point. “Why don’t you go over and sit down with Ringo and do the first interview and find out what he remembered about it and record it?” I said, “OK, great , fine.” I flew back to LA contacted Ringo’s home, set up an appointment over there, set up a recorder in the garden. Ringo came out and after some small talk, “OK Ringo, so what do you remember about recording All Things Must Pass?” “Did I play on that?” No one remembers anything about the recording. Maybe with some of them it was too much drugs or whatever, but the majority of it was we never ever thought we would be talking about those recordings this far on. Artists recording deals back then were, they had to do an album every six months. Now obviously, The Beatles were slightly different, but it was still we made records that we thought people would be interested in. If people were interested in it for six months until the next album came out, then we’d done our job. We never ever thought, 40 years on, 50 years on, we’d be talking about this. So it was just another day at the office kind of thing. There’s a lot of stories that have just completely disappeared from our psyche. I actually, as has been commented, I did a book last year I think it was it came out, and there was one story I really, really wanted to try to get into the book because I had been asked about it so many times. I was the engineer when Eric Clapton came in to play the guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I have been asked about that so many times because it became part of Beatles history. It was the first time an outside musician had actually come in and played with the band, and I don’t remember a damn thing about it nor does – I’ve spoken to my second engineer, I’ve spoken to the maintenance engineer, I spoke to Chris Thomas about it, none of us remember it. It wasn’t that important. But for the book I wanted to try to get the story in there so I actually went into regression therapy, hypnosis, to try and bring back some of those memories that I forgotten. It didn’t work this time around, but I am going to do it again and it will be volume two.

[laughter]

Todd L. Burns

Volume two. Let’s go in a slightly different direction for the next tune. Only play a little bit of this.

Billy Cobham – “Stratus”

(music: Billy Cobham – “Stratus”)

Todd L. Burns

If you want to hear the best bit, you’ll have to go out and buy it, I guess. This is Billy Cobham off of Spectrum.

Ken Scott

Correct, with Tommy Bolin on guitar.

Todd L. Burns

Jazz fusion is pretty far from Elton John, David Bowie, The Beatles. What drew you to this music?

Ken Scott

Tell me about it. Well, the way I got into it, we go back to Chatéau recording Elton, and at dinner, either Elton or Gus would always put on some music in the background. And they had this favorite album that both of them kept putting on. It was called Inner Mounting Flame, and it was by a band called Mahavishnu Orchestra, a band that I had never heard of. And I would catch snippets of this album while everyone was talking at dinner and it made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. It sounded like five junkies all in different rooms just going nuts and I didn’t understand it at all.

[laughter]

So then we come back to Trident to mix and one day I get a phone call from an A&R guy at CBS and he said, “John McLaughlin and Mahavishnu Orchestra are coming over to England to do a TV show and they would like to meet with you with in regards to doing the next album.” “Mahavishnu Orchestra, that’s the band that Elton and Gus kept talking about. Can you send me a copy of the last album for me to listen to them and we will take it from there?” They sent over Inner Mounting Flame, and when I put it on and sat down and actually listened I was floored. They were fucking amazing! “Yes, please let me meet them.” It was a quite remarkable TV show, because they came out to do a run through and Mahavishu were one of the loudest bands I’ve ever heard. And they come out and they play. Instantly, the guys, this was the BBC the guys came out with their volume meters , “Oh turn down, you got to turn down, you can’t be over 99 decibels,” or over something like that and they were over 120. And just, “You can’t play that loud.” And John McLaughlin did the sound check with everything down. They went, changed, time for the show, they came out and up to eleven. For anyone who has seen Spinal Tap, and this cameraman – it was so loud, he just fell off this camera up there. [laughs] It was strange, but anyway, we got on like a house on fire.

Todd L. Burns

What did you think you could bring to that?

Ken Scott

I had absolutely no idea whatsoever. One of the things for the book that I tried to do, my big question was, “Why me?” Because there I was, I come off The Beatles and Bowie and Elton, which was so far away from what they were doing. I have no idea why I was ever thought of and no one else can quite remember. The closest I think we got was the fact that their manager was a New York attorney called Nat Weiss, who had been connected with The Beatles. I think he was their Americian attorney and all of that, so there may have been a connection there, but I don’t know. John wanted me, I don’t know if I actually worked. John used to be a session guy in England and we spoke about it, and I don’t know if we ever worked together then, but I guess it worked because I got my first lesson on American slang from a Polish keyboard player, because we did the first take and they came up to listen. Now, I have to say one thing, I mentioned earlier about the bars, the buzz, high of great musicians playing together, well, the Birds of Fire album that we finished up doing, it was all live in the studio. Five unbelievable musicians playing live in the studio, no overdubs, oh, what a rush that was. And so, anyway, we do the first take, they came up to listen, and as they’re all leaving, Jan Hammer - I said Polish, he’s Czech, I think – the keyboard player, came up to me, said, “You’re a bad motherfucker.” “What did I do wrong?”

[laughter]

“Why am I bad?” I thought it sounded good. One of the others came up and said, “That’s good over in America. Don’t worry yourself, it’s fine.”

Todd L. Burns

We listened to the Cobham track, because it seems like, with him especially, you really won him over with the techniques that you were using. He wasn’t experiencing someone like yourself micing drums in the way that you were.

Ken Scott

They came from a jazz background and the first album, Inner Mounting Flame, the engineer on that, it was the typical jazz thing of just one or two mics over, and not that much definition on the drums. And I think that’s one of the things that I certainly brought with because I did it the way that I was accustomed to, just with a hell of a lot more mics. Every tom had its own mic. Each bass drum had its own mic, couple of overheads, hi-hat, snare, just, the typical way I recorded rock and roll and suddenly the definition that he was getting on the drums, he’d never heard before on this style of music. So yeah, I finished up doing four solo albums with Bill. Through him, I got to do three albums with Stanley Clarke. That led to Happy The Man, Dixie Dregs.

Todd L. Burns

You said in the book that Spectrum, that’s the one that this came off of, to your mind was the first jazz fusion record in a way. Why did you say that?

Ken Scott

I can’t say it’s the first. To me, it’s the most real fusion record. McLaughlin is a great technician, he’s a great guitarist, but he still comes from a jazz background. A lot of John’s playing was jazz turned up loud, jazz through a Marshall, whereas on Spectrum you’ve got the drummer and the keyboard player come from a jazz background, the bass player, Lee Sklar, comes from a general session background. He’s played with so many: James Taylor, Carly Simon, Phil Collins, all of these type of people. He was the bass player. And then the guitarist, complete rock, he was playing with the James Gang at that time, I believe. Tommy Bolan and he then went on to Deep Purple, but he came completely from the rock background so it was so much the intermingling of all the different styles in the studio. So that, to me, is why it’s fusion, more than Mahavishnu was.

Todd L. Burns

Let’s play another track. This is by Supertramp.

Supertramp – “Dreamer”

(music: Supertramp – “Dreamer” / applause)

Todd L. Burns

So you mentioned recording The Beatles, Bowie, all these groups, one week for an album or so.

Ken Scott

Two weeks.

Todd L. Burns

OK. Supertramp, Crime Of The Century.

Ken Scott

Six months.

Todd L. Burns

Why did it take so long?

Ken Scott

We were after something very specific.

Todd L. Burns

You were also given license by the record company.

Ken Scott

We were, it was absolutely astounding. Where the thing had come from, looking for something special, I don’t know, but it was there, at least in my mind, right from day one. I would get a drum sound very quickly, which is to say mics, same positioning, relatively the same EQ. So I can generally do it quickly. On this occasion, for Bob’s kit, one-and-a-half days just to get the drum sound, and it continued that way all along. And what transpired, because we were taking so long to get things going, come to the two weeks where everyone expected the album to be finished recording. We’d got basic tracks and a couple of overdubs, but not many, and we suddenly get this phone call from A&M that Jerry Moss, who was the “M” of A&M was in town and wanted to come by and hear what we’ve done. And, “Oh crap, we haven’t got anything to play him. We’re nowhere close.” And they said, “Well, he’s coming down, so come up with something.” So we just did rough mixes of what we had and he came in. He sat down in front of the board at Trident, and we played him what we had, and at the end of it he got up, “Well, thank you. It was very nice. It was good meeting you all,” and he left, and we thought, “That’s it. We’re out the door, he’s going to kill the whole project, we should have done it faster.” We almost didn’t even turn up the next day, but it’s a good job we did, because we immediately got a phone call as soon as we set foot in there that he loved everything that he heard, and he thought it was going to be an amazing album, and that we had as much time and as much money as we needed to complete it the way we had started it. So, we just spend six months of it, and even then, it was a 24 hour session to finish it off.

Todd L. Burns

It seems like you, as you said, you knew from the beginning that it was special and you tried to fit every single thing you could into this album.

Ken Scott

We experimented a lot on this. We didn’t want to use standard things. We used sound effects a couple of times during this. And the usual way that one chose sound effects was, there were lots of records out that were just sound effects, so you’d get one of these records, you’d find the effect that you wanted and use that. And everyone used the same ones, and you’d hear the crackles and all of that kind of thing come from it. And I just said, “We’re not doing it that way. Any sound effects we want, we have to record them ourselves.” So, on the opening track, “School,” there are school kids. And we rented an Nagra and I went to the garden of a friend of ours, that was just down the road from a school that my kids were attending. And I went down there at lunch hour, when I knew all the kids would be in the playground playing, and I set the mics up and recorded the kids and went to the studio later on. And Roger would go through and listen and find bits that would work, and then we’d try it within the track. And much the same as another track called “Rudy,” where there are train sound effects, and that was Roger Hodgson and John Helliwell. They took the Nagra that time and went down to Paddington Station, I think it was, in London, and recorded train things. And the weird thing, the way these things happen, whilst they were recording the sounds, there was this announcement for a train that was coming in, it named all the stations it was going to, and it just so happened, and we didn’t realise it until after the event and after we’d used this particular part, we suddenly realized it was announcing where Roger was born, where Rick was born, where various names of the band, that’s where the train was stopping.

Todd L. Burns

You certainly wouldn’t have gotten that off of a sound effect, right?

Ken Scott

No, certainly not. And there’s another part, at the end of the main song of “Rudy,” it goes into this much lower, quieter section, just the strings and Rick singing, maybe piano, I can’t remember. But there’s a link into it which is a violin, and most people think that that part was specifically written. It wasn’t. As Roger and John were leaving the station, there was this busker outside playing and they thought, “Oh, we’ve got to record this,” so they pulled out the Nagra again and set it up and recorded this guy playing, and that’s what we finished up using. It just worked perfectly between the two parts of the song. Just all kinds of things. I remember walking into a studio and I immediately got down on hands and knees with a block of wood and I’m going all over the floor knocking this piece of wood to find the best place, because there was a song that we knew we wanted a specific wood-hitting-wood sound. And so I was going around trying to find the best place on the floor for it. Any box that would be lying around, we’d start hitting it in all its places. [makes knocking sounds] “That would be good for ‘Dreamer.’“ All of that kind of thing, because we didn’t have all of the things that you can get in the computer these days, we had to do everything ourselves. I persuaded them that I didn’t want to use regular percussion instruments. On “Dreamer,” there’s a part where normally have used a tambourine and I didn’t want to do that. It’s just too normal. So we finished up having Rick with a drum brush and he’s just doing that in front of the mic and when you hear it all of these things work out much better when you hear just them. You hear the “Shh-shh- shh, shh-shh-shh,” but you also get this whistle from it, which is amazing, but you don’t hear it with everything else going on. We used on the actual track “Crime Of The Century,” something I’d been taught by an incredible English percussionist called Ray Cooper, something that used to be used in horror movies, apparently. It’s called a water gong and its either a very large gong or a sheet of metal, that you hit and lower it into, generally, it’s a fish tank full of water. As you lower it, it changes pitch and it’s the most amazing sound. Especially once again, you hear it on its own. You hear the water bubbling once it goes down. But all of these strange things and we just knew we had to do it that way and it worked.

Now, I mentioned earlier on about the most important things are the monitors in the control room. We mixed the album at a studio called Scorpio in London, and they had these speakers that were built by an English company called Cadac and they were seven foot tall, they weighed half a ton each. They had something like 25 different speakers in them. How they ever set them up, I have no idea but they were the most amazing speakers I’ve ever heard. You could get them so loud and I liked to monitor loudly. I’ve only ever found one person that monitors louder than me and that was John Taylor, the bass player of Duran Duran, and I swear he was deaf but he would come in and instantly turn up the monitor full-bore. Even I had to leave when he was listening to something. These speakers, you could turn them up so loud and they were so clean and so accurate, amazing.

Todd L. Burns

Why did you monitor so loud? Was that just a force of habit at a certain point?

Ken Scott

I’ve found that when you start off, if you’ve taken a break for a while from recording, I always start off monitoring low and as you work through the days it creeps up and creeps up until the end it’s loud, and you’re obviously mixing at the end, so it’s really loud for the mixing. These days, it’s more because I like to feel it than anything else. If it’s not hitting me here [gestures to chest], it’s not loud enough, or I’ve done something wrong, I don’t have the mix right. I have to feel it.

Todd L. Burns

Let’s play one last tune and talk about this stage of your career before opening it up to questions.

Missing Persons – “Mental Hopscotch”

(music: Missing Persons – “Mental Hopscotch”)

Todd L. Burns

That’s Missing Persons, “Mental Hopscotch.”

Ken Scott

Interesting choice of track, it’s not one many people know so.

Todd L. Burns

I chose it for a reason, because I found it really interesting that, after being a producer for a long time, making a name for yourself, becoming a bigwig, you decided to get into management with this band specifically. And this track was the one track that I feel like, broke it to the labels because it was the most requested on...

Ken Scott

Yeah. The way it went, in typical Hollywood fashion, when I moved over to LA, I happened to rent a house that was opposite Frank Zappa’s house. I had no idea, I found out the first day. I dropped my family off, I was working during the day at A&M Studios. Had to finish off a project and we were mixing, so just doing during the day, I dropped my family off at the house that we were renting to have all the power turned on and the phone and all of that kind of thing. Dropped them off, I went to work. When I finished I went back, expecting all the power and everything to be on, and the whole house is dark and it’s locked and I don’t know where my family are. And I’m sitting in the car – this was before cell phones – and I’m getting madder and madder and madder. I was fuming. And suddenly, there’s a knock on the car window. It’s one of my daughters, and she said, “Hi, Daddy.” “Hi.” “Do you know someone called Frank Zappa?” “Yes.” “Oh, well, this is his daughter, Moon. We’re at his house. It’s just over there.” “Oh!” Only I could have such luck.

[laughter]

And so, I became friendly with the Zappa’s and went to one of their shows in LA, one of Frank’s shows, and I became completely enamored of the drummer that he had at that point, a drummer by the name of Terry Bozzio. And after the show I was telling Frank and Gail, his wife, just, “He’s fucking amazing. Where did you find him?” I’m just talking about him and raving about him. So they knew my love of Terry’s playing. One Saturday afternoon I get a phone call from Gail and she says, “Terry, his wife and another of Frank’s musicians” - a guitarist by the name of Warren Cuccurullo - “are up here and they’ve just formed this band and Frank thinks that you might like it. Can I send them down?” And I said, “Sure.” By this time I’d moved five minutes away from Frank at this point, and they came down and they pulled out this boombox and they played me this cassette, it was absolutely atrocious. It was awful. But there was something that, “I’ve gotta see this through. I’ve gotta see it further.” And so I said, “OK, now, let me come and see you play live,” and they weren’t playing live, they were only rehearsing. So I went down to the rehearsal place and heard them play, and once again, it was still so amateurish, it was ridiculous. But once again, whether it was just because I knew what Terry was capable of, and I wasn’t seeing that, maybe that’s what pushed me on, but whatever it was, I kept going and kept going. We worked together, we went into Frank’s studio, and cut some demos, which finished up being masters.

Todd L. Burns

Frank let you use that studio for a very specific purpose.

Ken Scott

Oh, yes. [laughs] I don’t think I’m as bad now, but I had a reputation for finding every single damn fault there is in a studio. And Frank had just had the studio built. He was on the road, and he knew he wanted to start recording as soon as he got back off the road. So if he were going into a new studio, there would be lots of faults, and he didn’t want to have to deal with those. So he let us use it, knowing I’d find every damn fault in that studio and have it fixed before he came back off the road. That’s how we got to use the studio.

So we recorded this, I then did the rounds. I think we hit every label in LA three times, labels in England twice. We even hit a couple of labels in Australia. And just rejection after rejection after rejection. We finished up deciding to put the record out on our own. And we put out a four-song EP, which is a 45 with four songs on it, and it just cut a little quieter. So, this comes out, we start pushing. The band are playing out live by this time. Every time they play, we’re getting a bigger audience. We’re moving up like mad in the live scene in LA and we also happened to be played on the biggest radio station in LA for breaking new acts. It was, K-Rock, KROQ. We started to do really well, but we’re still not really seeing anything from record companies or anything, and we’re selling quite well with our self-promoted EP. And then finally, we get to play the Santa Monica Civic, which is a 2000-seater, I think it’s something like that, and we sell out. And it just so happened this was round about the end of the year, and KROQ has their countdown of the most requested songs of the year, and we’re going down and we go through two of the songs off of the EP and we thought, “Oh, this is great.” We get to the top three and we think, “Oh, that’s it, we’re not going to hear any more of our songs on it.” And it just so happens that track that just played finished up being the most requested record of the year. Guess what? We suddenly get a record deal. It was terrible. It wasn’t a good record deal in any way, shape or form but it was the only one in town and it was with Capitol Records. So, of course, we signed it, we finish up. They want to reissue the EP with the change of one song. They want another song on it, which we went in and did, and they put it out on 12” and it became the biggest selling 12” record ever, from what I was told, at that point anyway. So we were shopping around for management. We were finding exactly the same thing as we found when we’re trying to find a record deal. We had one manager who was interested and he was Tina Turner’s manager and he wanted Dale, the lead singer. He didn’t want the band. God, what an idiot, ‘cause all of the talent was the band and Dale was a unique front person, but nothing more. They needed someone to manage them and so finally, for me, it was put up or shut up. I had virtually been doing that anyway. So I just turned to him and said, “Look, I’ll manage you,” and they said, fine and so I finished up managing them for a year and a half. We completed the album, we sold 800,000 units, I think it was.

Todd L. Burns

What was the most important thing you learned as a manager?

Ken Scott

That management can be as artistic as playing, as an engineer and a musician and and a producer. I loved management.

Todd L. Burns

In what way?

Ken Scott

The way I handled it anyway, the way I looked at it, it’s not just about the money and setting up tours and all that. You can get creative with it. We got very creative. It was very much hands-on. We were all sort of hands-on and it was, the merchandising, we were coming out with dresses and things like that, which at that point had never been done. Just all of these kinds of things. It was an artistic savor but in a totally different way. There were other things that were in my keeping. I feel you always have to keep the audience and the fans in mind. They’re the ones that propel you to where you are. You shouldn’t rip them off or anything like that. They’re vitally important and there was a situation. We played Long Beach Arena, which was 18,000, I think, on a New Year’s Eve, and by this time we’d farmed out our merchandising to a company. And the guy that ran it, Burt Ward, who used to play Robin in Batman and Robin TV series, he called me and he said, “Well, we’ve got the offer from Long Beach, they want...” I think it was, they wanted 60% of everything that was sold. I said, “You’ve got to be fucking joking, we’re not going to give them. We’re paying for everything to be made, we’re getting it down there, we’re not going to give them 60% for selling it. They’ll come down.” He said, “OK, fine.” This was maybe two months before the gig. Cut to a month. “Well, they dropped to 50%.” I said, “No way. 20%. I’ll let them have that.” “OK, OK.” Three weeks, “They’ve come down to 40%.” “I told you 20 per cent.” “Look, I think you should go for the 40%.” “20%, Burt.” “OK.” We’re getting up closer and closer and closer, and we’re a few days away, and he calls me up and he says, “Well, they’re not going to budge from 40, they say you are going to do what every other band does, and that you’ll back down at the last minute and just jack up the price, so that you’ll still come out with the same amount of money.” And I said, “I don’t work that way. We’re going to stick to the same price and they get 20% or we’ll bring our own people in and sell outside.” He said, “OK.” The day of the show they back down to 20%.

[laughter]

I felt so fucking good!

[laughter]

It was amazing, but no, unfortunately too often, once someone becomes popular, “Yeah, OK. The fans can afford it.” I’m sorry, it’s bull crap there’s enough money to go around and the people you shouldn’t rip off are those ones that are paying the money for you to you through merchandising, through record sales, through all of this. They’re the important ones, the fans. You always have to bear them in mind.

Todd L. Burns

One last story, before we open up for questions. The after-party.

Ken Scott

Oh, I knew this was coming. How graphic can I get in my language?

Todd L. Burns

Feel free to get as graphic as you want.

Ken Scott

I said about Santa Monica Civic when we sold out. But before the the gig we’d actually got the record deal, we’d sold out the full house, and the record company saw that, and we got the deal very quickly after that. So it comes time for the show. I thought, “Hell, we got a record deal, we’ve sold out the Santa Monica Civic. We should celebrate! Let’s do it after the show!” So I organized this party at my house for after the show, and we knew that it wasn’t going to start until one o’clock in the morning, because the time the band got out of the gig and all of that. So I send letters around to all of the neighbors telling them we’re going to have a party, it’s going to start at one o’clock, so if if you want to go to a hotel for the night or something, you’ve got fair warning. Fine. And a lot of people did that. So it comes time for the party and [sighs] our estimate was that, at varying times through the party, we probably had about 200 people in the house at a given time. We had DJs, we had press, we had the band, we had other quote / unquote celebrities. We had the record company people. It was packed. So I set it up so that there was a disco kind of thing outside so that people could dance. And then there was the pool. [laughs] So we’re about an hour and a half into the party and there’s a knock on the door. I go and there is a couple of police there. Up to this point, I had a strict no drugs in the house thing. I knew for this party with people coming there was no way I could control the drug situation. So I knew there was a lot going on. So when I see police at the front it’s panic, and everyone behind me panicked as well that saw us, and suddenly there’s everyone dashing to the bathroom pouring stuff down and flushing the toilet.

[laughter]

And I’m holding the police there as long as possible and they say, “Excuse me, are you the owner of this property?” “Well, yes, officer. I am.” “Well, we’ve had complaints about the noise.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding! I sent out letters telling everyone. Everyone knew!” They said, “Well, I’m sorry, sir, but we’ve had reports of noise.” “Oh, no.” “Can we come in?” And by this time I think everyone sort of cleared everything up. I said, “Sure.” Come out, I take them out the back, they hear the music and they say, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to turn it down.” “Ah, come on officer.” “You’re going to have to turn it down.” I go over, I turn it down, they leave. ‘Course, as soon as they leave, I go and turn it back up again... Half an hour later, three quarters of an hour later, [knock, knock, knock] it’s same two police officers. I said, “Oh, come on, guys. You saw me turn it down.” They say, “No, we’ve had more complaints.” “You saw me turn it down!” “Sir, I’m sorry. Can we come out and check again?” I say, “OK, come in.” As we’re walking through, they say, “What’s this party for?” I said, “Well, I manage a band called Missing Persons,” and one of them says, “Missing Persons? That has the girl that wears the fishbowls on her tits right?” I say, “Yes, that’s the band.”

[laughter]

He said, “Oh, wow! Can we get her autograph?” And I say, “Sure, yeah. Of course, we can arrange that, but let’s go out and sort out the sound first.” So we go out there and they said, “Sorry, Mr.Scott, it’s not good enough.” “But you saw me turn it down, guys!” He says, “No, it’s too quiet can you turn it up?”

[laughter]

OK, that can work, so I turn it up. I take them in and I take them over and introduce them to Dale Bozzio, the singer with the band, the girl that wears the fish bowls on her tits, and leave them talking to her, and I go into the office which is at the front of the house, and I get posters, I get t-shirts, I get the whole thing, and I go out and give them to the cops. They get Dale’s autographs on it and they leave happy as clams. So now we’re at about dawn, I think. Five thirty in the morning, and most people have left, there’s just a few friends, close friends, and we decide, “OK, there’s nothing better than having a good stiff drink in your hand in the jacuzzi and watch the sun come up.” So that’s what we do. We all go out and put our swimming costumes on and we go out. Oh well, first off I go out and turn the jacuzzi on. I go out there and there’s this guy in the pool and he’s sitting at the side, he got his head on his hands, this huge grin on his face. And I just sort of look at him and I continue and I go turn the jacuzzi on and I’m looking at him strangely as I go in. We all get changed, we get in the jacuzzi, and he’s still there with his huge grin on his face. We couldn’t puzzle out what the hell was going on, we just left him alone. We finish, we go in and we get dressed, and I go out to turn everything off, and he’s still there, but by now he doesn’t have a grin on his face, and I go up to him and I go, “What the hell is going on?” “My balls are stuck in the suction.”

[laughter]

“I beg your pardon?” “My nuts are in the suction.” I just ran into the house, and just told everybody, “He says he’s got his nuts stuck in the suction.” No one believed. We all went running out and one guy hadn’t changed yet he was still in his swimming trunks so he jumps in. He said, “I’ll prove if he’s stuck or not.” He puts his arms around the guys’ shoulders, puts his feet up at the side of the pool and kicks back, I have never heard such a loud scream of agony in my life. The friend just stands up and says, “He’s stuck.”

[laughter]

What the hell do you do in a situation like that? 911. 911? Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? Yeah. I’m suddenly thinking English 999 for a minute there. So, I go in and I call, “I need the fire department, paramedics.” They put me through, “Excuse me. Yes, I have this gentleman, he’s in my pool and he tells me his testicles are... BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP”. Dial it again, “I need the fire department, paramedics. Hi, I just called, I think we got cut off. I have this gentleman in the pool and his testicles are stuck in the...” ‘BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEE.’ Oh, Christ! So I go out, “They won’t listen, they keep hanging up on me.” My wife at the time could be very loud-mouthed, let me put it that way, and she goes in and she gets on the phone, “You assholes don’t fucking hang up on me. I’ve got this guy with his nuts stuck in the pool, and you’ve gotta fucking get over here immediately.” Of course, they don’t hang up. Five minutes later there’s a knock on the door and I go and there are three of the biggest guys I’ve ever seen in my life in full fire-fighting regalia with the hats up to here. I’m just looking out and they say, “We’ve heard something about someone stuck in the pool.” I say, “Yes, he’s out here. Come out.” I lead them out, they look, they go over to the corner, and there talking, and one of them comes back and he says, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to break the concrete.” My wife in her typical manner, “You can break his fucking balls off before you break my concrete.”

[laughter]

So I, always being the gentlemen, “There has to be another way, sir.” They look at each other and they say, “Do you have any Vaseline?”

[laughter]

Yes, in the kids’ bathroom. I go running in. I come out with this tub of Vaseline. I have never seen such a funny sight in my life as this one seven foot guy in full fire-fighting regalia on his knee, rubbing Vaseline on this guy’s nuts.

[laughter]

They managed to get him out and because of that event... sometimes there’s publicity that you lap up. You get it, it’s just amazing and you could never plan it. And for this, we actually made all of the American newspapers. We made three English newspapers and it just so happened that one of the girls that was at the party, she was the cousin of my assistant, she happened to be the weather girl for the number one DJ in LA at that time, Rick Dees. She did a show every morning and she took this kid home with her. He was a gatecrasher from up the street. She took this kid home with her, and she was every morning on the Rick Dees show, at some point during it, she would say how his bruises were healing, or getting worse, so we got that.

The final thing to this story is that, just as I’m seeing the firefighters off in their fire truck down the road, a police car comes up, and it’s the same two cops that had come up twice before. I go over to them and they wind the window. I say, “Come on guys, we stopped the music hours ago, what the fuck?” “Well, we were just down the road having breakfast and we heard this call, that someone had got stuck in the pool and it was the same place we’d been to all night so we just had to come and see if it was true.” And I just said, “Yes, it’s true.” “Ah, we can’t wait to get to the station to tell this story.”

[laughter]

That’s the after-party story.

Todd L. Burns

Thank you very much.

[applause]

Shall we open it up to questions?

Ken Scott

Oh, yeah. We got that part. Jeez. The part I love, I have to say. So, fire at me if you can.

Audience Member

Big pleasure, sir. It’s an honor to meet you.

Ken Scott

Well, thank you.

Audience Member

I was just talking with my friend here.

Ken Scott

Oh, it was you that I heard while I was telling the story that was interrupting me. OK. [laughs]

Audience Member

You probably heard this before, but I read in someplace, I don’t know how accurate it is, this study, but it’s about brainwaves and professions and this group of neuro-scientists are analyzing every field of actuation. And the brain activity that more resembles that of a monk in meditation or the meditative, it is that of a mixing engineer, and I can really relate with this, in some ways. I would like to hear your thoughts about it. I don’t know.

Ken Scott

I have absolutely no idea whatsoever. I really can’t... I become totally immersed in it, so I can only assume that just, as they’re concentrating on whatever, it is they’re concentrating on whilst they’re doing that, it could be similar, but with the volume I monitor at it just somehow doesn’t seem to ring true. But yeah, I’m sorry.

Todd L. Burns

The one thing you mentioned in the book, though, that reminds me of this is when you’re doing early mixes on songs and you’re concentrating so hard on one thing, people would come in and be like, “Oh, can you fix the guitar?” And you’re like, “Hold on, I’m doing the drums right now.”

Ken Scott

Oh, yeah.

Todd L. Burns

And I guess that it does take that sort of focus, meditation, concentration.

Ken Scott

I guess, it’s that type of thing that for a period of time I refused to have the artist there when I mixed. And that came from when working with David, he didn’t like the studio so he didn’t come to mixes, so I got to do it all on my own. And I got used to doing it on my own so I like to continue doing it all that way. Then finally, I let people come in on the mix. But if you let the musician in too early, it’s always the drummer wants to hear more drums. The guitarist wants to hear more guitar, the bass player always wants to hear more bass. So they would tend to come in, as you would say, I’d be setting up the drums, and the bass player would come in and say, “I think you need more bass.” “But I’m only listening to the drums.” “Oh, oh. OK, I’ll keep quiet.” You keep going a bit longer, then the guitarist says, “I can’t hear the guitar.” “No, I’m working on the drums.” So I tend to keep the musicians out. I like to get it the way with George and I with Spector. Take it to that point where it’s pretty damn close, and at that point, you can allow people to come in and make suggestions, and either accept the suggestions or not, so there might be a certain amount of concentration that’s involved. But also, within mixing I like to take lots of breaks. Go through it three or four times. Then I’ll go and take a break for five minutes, go and have a cup of tea or something like that. I’m not putting that out there as long as people will meditate.

There’s a George story. He did soundtrack for a movie called Wonderwall, and we were working on that, and he would disappear for an hour everyday. Myself and the second, we had no idea where he went. It turns out he went into this small closet almost everyday for an hour and he would meditate in there. We finally found out where he was going, so I understand that meditation thing but I never concentrate that long. I wish I could, I can’t.

Audience Member

By the way, “Savoy Truffle” is my favorite one from every Beatles.

Ken Scott

The story of that with George. Once again, George Martin went on vacation for a good few weeks whilst we were working on The White Album. He went to the Greek islands and he came back into the studio when George and I were mixing “Savoy Truffle.” And The Beatles, they went through fads and while doing The White Album, they went through this whole thing where they’d just come in when are we gonna mix it and say, “OK, we want full bass and full treble on every track.” OK, they’re The Beatles. You don’t argue, you turn full bass and full treble up every track and that’s how we mixed it. That was the standard EQ for some of their mixing. It was that way and George Martin came in and he said to George, “I think it sounds rather toppy, don’t you George?” “That’s the way I like it, and it’s gonna stay that way.” George Martin just turned around and walked out.

Audience Member

Thank you, sir.

Todd L. Burns

OK.

Audience Member

Hello.

Ken Scott

Hi.

Audience Member

I was wondering, some of the work that you’ve done has a certain soothing quality in it, and as the producer or recording engineer, what did you do to achieve that and how to re-engineer that? When like, let’s say in the America situation, you had to go and redo a track after the whole thing was finished.

Ken Scott

I didn’t do that. I didn’t do “Horse With No Name.” Just to explain briefly, I did the first America album. And when it was handed into Warner Brothers, I think it may have been Warner Brothers US, I think it was put out without “Horse With No Name” to start with and one of the Warner Brothers, either England or US, said, “We need another song, we need a single.” So they went back into another studio and recorded “Horse With No Name” and that was put on the album and then that one became very successful. Soothing. There are very few tracks that I’ve done that I care to think of as soothing, especially with the monitoring level I listen to most of the stuff. I work from the gut, completely. I don’t know what I do most of the time. It all comes down to here and here, as far as I’m concerned. You could take six engineers, put them in exactly the same situation, with the same musicians the same mic positions, everything’s identical, and the six engineers will each come out with a totally different sound, because we all hear things differently, we all do things differently. And, a lot of it is something that you can’t teach. It’s something that, I guess you can train yourself to do, just with experience. It’s my experience working with The Beatles that I learnt what works for me, and that’s what I do. But a lot of it, I can’t even explain what it is. It’s just what feels right. And sometimes it can be very silly, like, knowing that I had to work with Missing Persons. It was something in here that kept me going with them, and finally other people around me that had said, “You’ve got to be nuts, why are you giving up a good production career to manage this band, and they’re shit?” There was just something within me that knew it would work. And it’s been that way all along. With Supertramp, why the hell, why with them did I suddenly decide, “OK, I’m gonna spend more time, and get it right”? I’ve got no idea why I do half of what I do, and it just comes naturally, and I just go with the flow.

Todd L. Burns

When Nigel was saying earlier that he found his sweet spot for EQs and all these things, is that something that you related to as well?

Ken Scott

Absolutely. Whenever possible, I use the same mics all the time, and normally the EQ is basically the same. I’m a firm believer that the sound starts in the studio, in the recording room, not in the control room. Everything happens in the studio, from the sound, to the performance, and we in the control room are there just to put the icing on the cake. Just give that little bit of sparkle to it. I don’t believe that you can take an OK sound in the studio, and through the use of plug-ins, or whatever, make a great sound. Some of the stuff that Nigel does, that does happen. The type of music that I do, I have done, it happens in the studio so much more. I’m not dealing with the electronic side of stuff as much as he does. No, everything for me is in the studio. So, if the sound is there in the first place in the studio, I don’t have to do much. So, the EQs that I use is minimal. I did some sessions with my co-writer of the book, Bobby Owsinski, he was producing a band, and he’s worked with virtually all of the big names in LA, he couldn’t believe how little I did to get the sound. So many of the big names in LA will come in with these huge racks of outboard gear. And they have to use everything that’s in them. And me, I’ll use a Universal Audio compressor. I will use one echo, one reverb, and just a little EQ. I don’t need lots of effects, not too much EQ, because it’s readily there in the studio. I’ve got the musician to the point of the sound there that I don’t have to affect it.

Todd L. Burns

Are there any other questions?

Audience Member

You partly answered the question that I had in mind, like getting the best performance out of the artist in order to maybe save time then with mixing or be quicker with a good result.

Ken Scott

To me, that part of it all comes down to decision-making. I started off on 4-track, which Nigel said earlier about, we would have to record sort of everything onto one track. You had to determine right up front what the record was going to sound like.

Patrick Pulsinger

Are you a fan of limitation then?

Ken Scott

No, it doesn’t have to be limitations, just make up your mind. A hundred and ninety one tracks of the guitar solo that eventually going to have to be sorted out some time down the line, do it when you’re recording. If it takes 191 times, that’s fine. I won’t argue with that, but you must’ve seen how every time there is new technology, the record companies will reissue the record in a new format, especially with surround sound. Records that have been mixed in stereo, suddenly another engineer will get ahold of the masters and mix for surround. Imagine what it’s going to be like 20 years down the line when suddenly someone gets all of these ProTools files, and there’s 191 guitar solos. What the hell’s he going to do? That’s always assuming the hard drives still work in 20 years down the line, that we can still get that out of them. But there is no reason for it, you can keep a couple of things. But the amount I’ve seen that people have saved every single time, it’s ludicrous. You know when it’s the one or not. Or you should know when it’s the one or not.

Patrick Pulsinger

But, I mean a lot of things must’ve changed since, let’s say, from The Beatles to Duran Duran or something like this. Like, would that be something you’d embrace? Like, you can do more afterwards. Would you embrace technology or would you think back of the time when decisions were made at the spot?

Ken Scott

For me, it’s both. I like both analog and digital. In my ideal world, I would use both. I will start off recording on analog and then transfer it to ProTools so that I can use what I need to use, what is really good about ProTools. So, I’d certainly embrace modern technology, but all too often, we as humans, it’s all or nothing. If it’s new, we’ve got have it, and we’ve got to totally embrace it and forget what’s back there. One of the reasons that I enjoy talks like this, and I go around to universities and talk to students, is that thing of, we don’t have to lose everything from back then. There is no reason for it. The whole thing of recordings back then worked because there were lots of good points about it. And why don’t we just use modern technology to improve on that same principle and just keep going? And making decisions is one of them. And it’s not just the music industry, it’s in life in general. We’ve reached the point no one likes to make a decision. I use the thing of going into a supermarket and you walk past and there’s a guy on the cell phone, “Honey, but there are hundreds different kinds of baked beans. Now, which baked beans is it you want me to get?” It’s absurd. They’re baked beans. You’re not going to die if you take the wrong ones. Well, she might kill you or she might injure you, but it’s not that bad, unless you’re doing brain surgery or maybe flying a plane. Decisions aren’t going to hurt. The minutiae that we have now gotten into, and I’ve been guilty of it myself in the past absolutely, but I’ve never known a record become successful because the hi-hat’s two db higher or two db lower. It works or it doesn’t. It’s just get the feeling out there, get a great song, get a great performance, and everything else falls into place.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

You probably already answered this but you mentioned a little bit that current music or modern music is made through a mental process, and not like a feeling or like a heart process. I was thinking, is there a specific reason that current musicians are not doing that previous?

Ken Scott

To a certain extent, I think it’s been forced upon them by major labels. The use of Autotune these days, it’s almost like you have to do it if you want release by a major record label. It ludicrous. It’s people that know nothing about music. They’re only interested in three months down the line, the quarterly reports are in the black and not in the red. That’s the extent of their knowledge. It’s money, money, money. I was just down in Nashville with my wife, and we were sitting down talking to a guitarist and vocalist, and he’d recorded an album, and he had done all of the vocals, and refused to use Autotune, refused to use it. And then finally, he backed down. And it was, “I’m gonna have to.” He took the two most commercial tracks and used Autotune on it because he feels that people now expect it, and that’s all from major labels. And there is so much that I find that is taught in these recording scores. That it’s all computer. All computer. I put out a product called EpiK DrumS EDU, a drum sample library called EpiK DrumS. That I got together with five drummers that I had worked with in the past. Billy Cobham, Terry Bozzio, Woody Woodmansey of Bowie’s Spiders From Mars, Bob Seidenberg from Supertramp, and Rob Morganstein from Dixie Dregs. And we recreated drum sounds and loops from records that we had done in the past. I realized in doing that, that there was an educational side to doing that, where there is a lot of engineers these days that have never actually recorded live drums. Most of the samples these days are real drums, but [they] have never actually worked with a kit in the studio. So many haven’t, it’s all samples. I got together with the publisher of my book and we put out a thing called EpiK DrumS EDU, which one part of it is a DVD of me showing how I record drums, but the other part of it, which is what I initially went in to put out, it’s three and a half to four minute multi-track recordings of these drummers, them playing grooves for three and a half or four minutes, which are all multi-track. So, for someone who has never recorded with real drums, live drums, I keep doing that, live drums, can learn the problems. Like, the leakage of cymbals into tom mics, and how you deal with that and all that. You can practice without studio time. You can do it on your laptop, you can do it wherever you want to, but it’s a way of teaching more of the old style kind of thing and it’s with some of the greatest drummers in the world. But, I have seen these people coming out of schools. I did a project, it was a couple of years ago now up in Seattle, and my assistants, there were two, they both went to recording school. We recorded drums, and their immediate reaction was they started to move everything around onto the grid. I said “No! It has to be human, every drummer is different.” It’s only a couple of milliseconds between where the drummer hits the snare, is what makes the difference between one feel of a drummer and the feel of another. I learned so much on watching one show. Ziggy, the first track, “Five Years,” starts off with drums fading up, same drum pattern all the way through the song, and then finishes it, fading down, played by Woody Woodmansey. I had moved over to LA, and I was totally used to Woody playing the way he does. Moved to LA, went to see Bowie live and it was the first time I had seen him play with other musicians, and it was an American drummer. And he played exactly the same as Woody played, but the feel was totally different. It was just the milliseconds difference between where he hits the bass drum and where he hits the snare drum made all the difference in the world between them. That’s something, if you just move things onto the grid, suddenly everyone is the same. It loses its humanity. It becomes robotic because everything sounds the same. You take something like “Honky Tonk Women,” the Rolling Stones, if you check the tempo at the beginning of it, and check the tempo at the end of it, it goes like that during the whole song, but it feels amazing. These days that wouldn’t be allowed, it would all be put to the grid. There’s nothing wrong with being human. We all start off in the womb, hearing a heartbeat, and a heartbeat doesn’t go the same rate all the time. That’s where we start and we just go from there. We need humanity back in music.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Ken Scott

You’re welcome.

[applause]

Audience Member

Thank you. Pleasure to meet you. And thank you for the overtime back then and all this great music. I was wondering, you mentioned the six month time frame that it usually took records to be released back then. Now it’s a slightly different time frame, ranging between a year and a half to maybe...

Ken Scott

Because people don’t want to make decisions.

Audience Member

OK, so I wanted to ask you about that, the decisions of a debut album. Beginning with a sound or letting it go and then beginning with making decisions and taking it from there to the next record and the next.

Ken Scott

I believe in team work. I think everything comes from a great team. I think the teamwork of The Beatles and George Martin, they knew what they had to do. Now eventually, The Beatles pulled away from George. They grew. They wanted to do different things than George necessarily wanted to do, but there are very few artists, as far as I’m concerned, who can produce themselves. Most people need that outside ear. I went through something, there was a BBC interview that Bowie did once where he was asked about working with me. And he said I was his George Martin, which, at the time, I took exception to. Because I hadn’t realized exactly how much I had learned from George Martin. And I started to think about it and finally I realized that what I as a producer do is allow the talent in the studio to what talent has to do, and that’s create. Always knowing that if they try and go too far afield, I can always sort of, “Guys, you know it was better, what you were doing before,” and nudge them back. And that’s the way George worked with The Beatles. With so much of the stuff he did, and I picked that up. And finally I realized what a compliment David was paying me by calling me a George Martin. Right. Now to try to get to that. A band, an act, normally knows what it’s trying to put across. Too many bands these days are forming to get a record deal and to become famous. They’re not forming to make good music. The bands that are there to make good music know what direction they want to go. They know what they want to put across. Then it’s up to putting the team together. The right producer that feels the same way as them. Then the decisions are easy. They know the road they want to travel. And it might sell, it might not sell, but if you’re doing it to make good music, not to sell records, it doesn’t matter. You’ve gotten something out of it in the end. Unfortunately, these days, you might not get the second chance for the second album if it doesn’t sell. At least that used to happen in the good ol’ days. With things like this, Red Bull Academy, I think the chance of getting a second chance is much stronger. What I have got out of being here today is how much into the music they are and the creativity of artist, it’s the way it used to be back in the Renaissance period. Everybody had to have someone who would give them the money so they could exist so they could create their art. And I almost get that feeling that it’s not giving the money but it’s giving the opportunity here, and at all the Red Bull Academies throughout the world. If you’re there for making good music, the decisions are easy. And if you’ve got the right team with you, you’re all heading in the same direction. And so, instinctively you will know the best take. There are some musicians... [This is something] that Nigel hit on earlier. There was a sax player, an incredible sax player that I worked with, Michael Brecker. I worked with him on a Bill Cobham album and Bill told me, “Get him first take.” OK. Made sure we recorded him properly on the first take and he said, “OK, now I got the feel for it, let’s do another one.” And, Bill said to me, “OK, do it on another track.” OK, did it on another track. Mike, after doing it, said, “Oh no, no that wasn’t the one. OK, I know I can do better.” I think we probably did another eight takes. None were as good as that first take and Cobham knew. He’d worked with Michael Brecker enough, he knew. It would be the first take, that’s the best one always with him. It was that outside voice that kind of knew that, which was great ‘cause I would’ve put him on the same track and we’d just gone down hill really fast. So, if a band has played together for a while, someone in that band will know how good someone is and what they can attain. The producer after spending time with them will know how much they can attain and how to get the best of them. And you just go through it. The Beatles and Duran thing, there was really no difference. My time with Duran, be it strange, it was exactly the same. Until management and record company became involved, we all knew what we were heading towards and aiming for. And it was easy, “Now, c’mon, you can do better than that.” “Yeah, it wasn’t good enough.” You feel it. It’s what it’s down to.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Todd L. Burns

Any other questions?

Ken Scott

Are we there?

Audience Member

Hi.

Ken Scott

Hi.

Audience Member

You’ve been a major influence in my career over the years.

Ken Scott

I’m sorry.

[laughter]

Audience Member

[laughs] I just wanted to know, how different you feel the mixes were after the mastering. ‘Cause right now everyone’s mastering really loud and I know for your time, mastering, if you went to Bob Ludwig or if you went to George Marino, they actually had a sound ‘cause they knew how to compress it a certain way so the needle wouldn’t actually jump off the record.

Ken Scott

OK, OK, so part of the EMI training, before you could sit behind a mixer, behind a console, you had to master. Because in all their wisdom, it was harder to get something onto vinyl than it was onto tape. You had to be careful of phase because it would make the stylus jump. You had to be careful of bass because it would make it jump. And so, everyone started off exactly the same way when the started to cut at Abbey Road. You’d get the first tape in, you put it on, this is the first time you’re on your own. You put the tape on, “You know what? That needs a little more top.” So you immediately crank up the high end, full bore. “Mmm, it’s a bit better. Now it’s lacking a bit of low end.” So you crank the low end, full bore. “Yes, much better. Now it’s lacking mids.” And you crank the mids full bore. That lasts for about two days. After the two days, you put the tape on, “Oh that needs a bit more high end.” And one notch of turn. Perfect. You learn very quickly that the artist and the producer and the engineer knew what they were doing in the first place, and what they put on to tape is what they wanted it to sound like. Reggae records, all of the low end that was on them, it was intentional, they wanted that. They didn’t want the mastering engineer to go, “Oh, there’s way too much low end on that, I’m going to roll it off.” A mastering engineer, as far as I’m concerned, as far as my training goes, should take what he’s given and do as little as possible because the artist, the producer and the engineer had the concept in the beginning and that’s what it should be. I understand that these days there are more problems because people are doing things at home and mastering engineers aren’t getting as good a recording as they used to get from a top studio. So that they might have to do a bit more. But it’s reached a point where mastering engineers are now considered gods. They are more important than the artist and it shouldn’t be that way. So many of the mastering engineers today have never got out of the full top, full bass and full mid concept. The other thing I have seen with mastering engineers is they’ll have this thing on the computer, “Oh, we’re down in like 2.5k. I have got to boost that.” They do it by watching a line, as opposed to listening what it sounds like. I think it should go back to the way it used to be. [laughs] And may be for no other reason than to stop a lot of people recording in their bathrooms or their bedrooms because if they started to hear what they were really coming out with, maybe we wouldn’t have this many really good studios folding as there are.

Audience Member

Yes, absolutely, I was wondering if there was a big difference because of different pressing from, like, say Germany or Holland, they were known good pressings versus like some pressings they have heard it like in the US have compared different pressings. Were you a bit disappointed sometimes when you would hear a certain pressing over different pressing?

Ken Scott

You know, most of the time I haven’t got into that too much. As far as the recordings go, whichever country I was in if it was England or America, I would get the test pressings for that particular country, listen to them, OK them or not OK them and then go from there. Other countries would get copy tapes they are making from. I have to admit, I couldn’t go through all of them and do it.

What does fascinate me, yesterday at Classic Album Sundays, the Bowie thing, of course it had to be on Ziggy, it was brand new pressing from EMI and a track and a half through side two and it started to jump so I had to go to another pressing. And it was nowhere near as good. But there are so many different pressing out these days, I certainly can’t keep track of them. And most of them I am not even involved in. The latest Ziggy and Aladdin Sane I was involved in because EMI finally came to me and said, “Look, we want to put it out again. Any thoughts?” And I steered them towards a gentleman in England called Ray Staff, who was the original mastering engineer and he’s still going. He’s the head of AIR Mastering in London these days and he thinks about mastering the same way as I just described. He and I worked together, he would send me versions he’d done of Ziggy, and the way I used to do, I was, “Oh, it’s good on track two, just slightly less high end.”And we worked together and did it that way, and to me, it’s the best pressing of Ziggy that I’ve heard a long long time. The best pressing I have ever heard was the original pressing of Crime Of The Century in England, because at the time A&M was distributed by CBS and we managed to persuade them to put it through the classical department, who had the best vinyl. It was always that way. The classical music division of any record company had better vinyl because of the dynamics. They didn’t think you needed good vinyl for pop records, “This crap pop music. Who needs good vinyl for that?” They never had dynamics for anything so it was kept for classical. We managed to persuade them for Crime and it was astounding. It was so good.

Todd L. Burns

If you can get your hands on a copy.

Ken Scott

Yes, good luck.

Todd L. Burns

Well, thank you very much.

Ken Scott

My pleasure.

Todd L. Burns

Ken Scott.

Ken Scott

My pleasure.

[applause]

Keep reading

On a different note