The Doors Unruly Boxed Set (from 1997) Scroll down, Doors article begins following Hallelujah...Leonard Cohen Comes Down From the Mountain, Below
HALLELUJAH...LEONARD COHEN COMES HOME FROM THE MOUNTAIN The making of Ten New Songs
SCROLL DOWN - LEONARD COHEN ARTICLE BEGINS BELOW, JUST UNDER THE DOORS PHOTO
The Doors
Above, 1967 fan photo, sent out by the Doors’ office. (My very own contemporaneous copy). The autographs look like they’re real, written by hand, but they are cleverly done as part of the repro’d photo. SCROLL DOWN FOR DOORS ARTICLE
HALLELUJAH...LEONARD COHEN COMES DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN
The making of Ten New Songs
Posted on 3/1/08; originally published in Mix in early 2002
by Eric Rudolph
Mention Leonard Cohen to the average knowledgeable pop fan of a certain age and you’ll likely evoke a croaking, mocking line or two from Suzanne or So Long Marianne, both from his 33-year-old first record, Songs of Leonard Cohen.
That the 67-year old native Canadian, who first became something of a pop star as an iconoclastic, precocious young Montreal poet and novelist, should be so strongly identified with his earliest songs is testament to the stealth-like quality of his highly unusual but successful musical career.
Although Cohen has sold more than 12 million records worldwide (in the CD era alone, according to his record company), starting in the late seventies in America he became mired in a cult artist’s career path. Large and extremely enthusiastic followings remained primarily in Europe and Scandinavia.
That all changed in 1988 when the savvy, sophisticated pop polish, wry, wicked humor and soulful songs of the (self-produced) I’m Your Man put Cohen solidly back on the American musical map, eventually selling nearly two million copies worldwide (again, according to Columbia Records).
Five years later The Future rewarded patient fans with more impossible-to-ignore tracks in a similar vein, several of which found their way onto the soundtracks of the films Pump Up the Volume, Natural Born Killers and others. (In the title song of The Future, which Cohen has said was inspired by the end of the Cold War and the chaos he felt would certainly ensue, he wrote and sang the now-more-than-ever chilling words “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder”)
It has been a long nine years for Cohen fans since The Future, with the only releases consisting of two live recordings. The long wait does come with something of an explanation, however. Cohen, who has had a lengthy association with Zen Buddhism, spent more than five of those intervening years at a Southern California Zen Buddhist monastery atop Mt. Baldy. “I was nearly 60 when my last tour ended and my teacher Roshi was nearly 90, so it seemed like an appropriate moment to spend more time with him” Cohen told Mix from his Los Angeles home.
“When I came down from Mt. Baldy about two years ago I met with Sharon Robinson,” Cohen explains (Robinson had sung on Cohen’s records and tours, and they had written two of his best recent songs together; the depressive’s national anthem Everybody Knows and Waiting for the Miracle).
Cohen and Robinson talked about ideas for songs, and when Cohen came to one of her son’s piano recitals, he asked Robinson if she would partner with him on the next record, she explains. Eventually her role was expanded to that of producer, co-writer on all the songs and musician, playing all the instruments via samplers (aside from Bob Metzger’s electric guitar, on one track). Robinson is even featured prominently on the CD cover.
The result of that partnership is an unusual and spare recording. Ten New Songs features only Cohen’s lead vocals, Robinson’s densely overdubbed backing vocals and the aforementioned one actual musical instrument, on one track. Robinson used MIDI gear and sampling software to create the rest of the music.
The project began when Cohen gave Robinson poems and lyrics he’d written, mostly while at the Zen center, along with some rudimentary demo tracks he’d made there using what he calls a “recording box” (assembled by Steve Lindsay, who produced some tracks on The Future). The unit consisted of a Mackie 12x2 board, a Neve 1272 mic preamp and Tascam DA-88 (which was upgraded for Ten New Songs to a DA-78) and one of his stage mics, either a Beta 57 or an AKG 535.
From the material Cohen proffered, Robinson selected pieces she thought would work as songs, conferred some more with Cohen and then began writing the melodies to the pieces they selected.
Robinson then created simple instrumental tracks in the MIDI format and added her own scratch lead vocals, cutting to a hard drive at her ProTools-based home studio (named Small Mercies Studio). The songs were transferred to a Tascam modular multitrack tape for use at Cohen’s home studio (named Still Life Studios). “A rough mix was put onto two tracks of the eight-track Tascam tape; the other six tracks were left open for Leonard’s vocals,” explains Ten New Songs’ engineer and mixer Leanne Ungar, another long-time Cohen associate.
Then Cohen began adding his lead vocals at his home studio. Ungar, who had put together Cohen’s studio, also served as engineer on Cohen’s vocal recordings for the first few songs, but soon left the recording to the vocalist. “Leonard is very computer savvy; he could learn ProTools,” Ungar explains, noting that Cohen eschewed cutting his vocals to a hard drive via ProTools because he was more comfortable with the operation of the Tascam. Another reason for using the Tascam was that a hard drive would’ve made too much noise in Cohen’s one-room facility. Cohen’s vocals were recorded on his new Tascam DA-78, in 24-bit mode.
However, noise from a hard drive wasn’t the only ambient concern. Tracking final vocals in Cohen’s home studio (which despite its reasonably high tech trappings, is not “acoustically isolated” Ungar explains) was an environmental challenge. “There were dogs barking, birds singing, garbage trucks. Also, occasionally Leonard would forget to turn off the Jacuzzi… which is adjacent to the studio (the studio resides in a second story Cohen added above his garage, next to his Los Angeles home).
“When you’re involved in doing vocals and your ears are full of track, it is easy to not notice these noises,” Ungar says. She removed most of these ambient sounds but claims she can still hear their remnants on the finished CD.
As for the studio’s lack of acoustical treatment affecting the quality of the vocals, Ungar notes that Cohen was singing so softly and so close to the Neumann U-87 microphone she’d selected for him that the room’s acoustic nature had no noticeable effect on the vocal recordings.
Ungar, who has worked with Cohen since 1973 (when she was an assistant engineer on New Skin for the Old Ceremony) is more than familiar with the unusual Cohen vocal style. To find the right instrument to capture his gravelly voice for Ten New Songs she considered several microphones and ultimately decided on the U-87. “The Future (Cohen’s previous record) was all U-67,” for lead vocals “but it is not easy finding a good 67. The U-87 married well with Leonard’s voice; I got it, listened to it and liked it.” Ungar matched the U-87 with the Neve 1272 mic pre-amplifier from Cohen’s portable recording box.
Asked about Cohen’s somewhat startlingly gritty voice, Ungar laughs and says, “Leonard says it’s cigarettes, but I hear a constant deepening. If you compare his first and second records, he’s already down by about one-fifth” of an octave by the second outing, and she adds that the deepening has simply progressed. She explains that her equalization treatment of his vocals on the new record varied according to the mood of the song, pointing out that Cohen’s voice is rendered with a lot of low end on some tracks and much less so on others.
Cohen approached the vocal sessions strategically, due to the limits of the studio and the inward-looking nature of the material. To facilitate relatively noise-free recording and complement the mellow nature of the piece, he found that the quietest times of day were very early morning, around four or five am, or sometimes even earlier.
“I had to start singing before the birds, and the traffic on Olympic, and before my daughter’s dogs started barking (Cohen share his home with his adult daughter). It was very relaxed at those times, four or five am, to come in and find the right place to stand or sit, and have the right drink or smoke in your hand, lean back, go back, erase, go forward. It was a very luxurious way to do the vocals,” Cohen recalls with evident pleasure.
However, this approach wasn’t simply comfortable; it also allowed him to craft his vocals meticulously. “I was able to take the time to find exactly the right mood for the narrator,” working “until the vocals married with the track and the song’s content, so the voice represented the song rather than simply unfolded it,” Cohen explains. Cutting vocals at home was also much less expensive, he does not hesitate to add.
It soon became clear to the team that the home studio approach was a workable process, but not just from a convenience, comfort and cost point of view. “We could write at leisure,” Cohen adds. “We could write lyrics, dissect them and discard them.” He terms the approach “experimental and hospitable to choice. “
Cohen describes Ten New Songs as “deceptively spare, like a Sade record, with an agreeable groove from beginning to end. You can lean on it, relax into it. There are doors and windows you can enter if you have the time, and I don’t think there’ll be disappointment with the furniture and appointments. It may seem to be a spare outer surface but with investigation much filigree and ornament can be discerned. It may not be apparent but it is there.” he adds.
Does this spare, simple soundscape reflect the experience of his nearly continuous five-year stay at the Zen center? “I guess there is a relationship to the life I was leading. I wasn’t anywhere else. It is hard to see, from the inside, the influence of the ordinary life one is leading,” he adds. Both Ungar and Robinson agree that the record’s spare sound and relaxed feel come from the artist’s current state of mind.
When Cohen was satisfied with a vocal track the Tascam tape was transferred to his Macintosh 450 MHz G4 computer via the ProTools Mix Plus software, which was set for 24 bit, 48K recording. The removable hard drive, a Cheetah 10,000 RPM Seagate, was then taken to Robinson’s studio where she completed the arrangements, adding sampled instruments and her luscious, often-complex background vocals.
In keeping with the long-held Cohen schema of contrasting his gritty voice against the lush backing of several female vocalists, some of the songs feature as many as 20 backing vocal tracks, all performed by Robinson; many songs have at least six-to-twelve such tracks, she notes. This took “many hours in my studio, with lots of early and late hour sessions,” Robinson adds, making what appears to be quite an understatement. She often found herself singing double three-part harmony. “I don’t like to double the same voice on the same side,” she explains, noting that this often meant doing three different parts for both the right and left sides of the stereo image.
“I stacked my vocals differently for each song, depending on the arrangement and the mood I was trying to create,” Robinson elucidates. “Some songs were more intimate and called for only two or three tracks of background vocals, others were less so, or the arrangements were more complex, and so I used as many as 20 vocal tracks. But there's a very close-up feeling to this record, so I tried not to do too much doubling. I wanted to keep it real, and provide just enough to enhance and highlight Leonard's vocals.” Her microphone was a Neumann TLM 103, “a copy of the great U-87, minus some of the costlier features,” Robinson notes.
“For recording, I used Pro Tools Mix Plus with one 888 interface, running all of the samplers and synths through a 1622,” explains Robinson. “I did all the sequencing in ProTools 5.0, and printed all of the parts so they could be moved back and forth on hard drives between my studio and Leonard's. The third-party plug-ins we used included TC Mega reverb, a Wave Renaissance package, Focusrite compressor and EQ, and a Lexicon reverb.”
However, by then the path of Ten New Songs had veered mightily from the original plan. When they started, Cohen, Robinson and Ungar planned to hire musicians and background singers and complete the project in a conventional manner in a regular recording studio. Initially “My vocals were supposed to be just sketched out ideas…to be sung in sessions by others” for the final recording, Robinson says.
But then a curious thing happened; by all accounts Cohen fell in love with the sound of the sampled instruments and Robinson’s layered vocal parts. “We decided… that bringing in musicians and singers would actually be a compromise,” Robinson explains. “When Leonard heard the first completed track, A Thousand Kisses Deep, he was enthralled” by the sound, adds Ungar.
In keeping with the home-brewed nature of the project, the rough mixes ended up being pretty close to the finals. “Mixing took about three weeks” at Cohen’s studio, using ProTools Mix Plus and Yamaha MS 60 speakers, Ungar explains. (This followed an attempt at mixing in analog at a regular studio, but the team found that the sound changed too much, and the idea was abandoned.) The mix was about “working carefully, laying in sounds with delicacy. That took time but there wasn’t a lot of reworking” from the roughs, says Ungar. “Most of Leonard’s vocals are contiguous performances with some comping of words or phrases. Compression was hardly used at all; “with ProTools you can ride each word so carefully you don’t need to squash the signal.”
Reverb plug-ins, used for most vocals, instruments and percussion, were initially D-Verb but that was replaced with Lexiverb. “D-Verb had a dark, unspacious sound,” says Ungar. “Lexiverb opened it up, although sometimes we did go back to D-Verb.”
Convinced, from their attempt at mixing in analog, that they should stay in digital all the way through, the team went to Portland, Maine to master at Bob Ludwig’s Gateway Mastering Studios, one of the few mastering facilities comfortable working directly from a ProTools-based source, Ungar says.
Cohen acknowledges that there are pitfalls to making records at home. “I could see where the sense of relaxation could induce a stupor… However Sharon and Leanne and I share an obsessive interest in detail, and (working at home studios) gave us the time and space to concentrate on details and produce the kind of fully-completed record that we wanted.”
-ends-
The Doors’ Unruly Boxed Set
by Eric Rudolph
(Posted 11/12/07; article originally published in Mix, December 1997)
"You're all a buncha slaves! Lettin' everybody push you around! What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do?!!!," screams a drunken Jim Morrison, ad infinitum, just prior to finally finding out precisely how far he could go.
It is March 1, 1969 at the Dinner Key auditorium in Miami, Florida, the song is Five to One. Taped on a cassette from the audience, the sound is telephone-call thin and the noise floor is up to the ceiling. Despite the howling, chaotic, nearly out of control singer, the Doors gamely hold the fort. Drummer John Densmore lays down a solid, lively beat as keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger valiantly try to inject some musicality and maintain coherence amidst the madness.*
A hell of a way to open a premium-priced boxed set in the sober age of crystal clear perfectly sterile and safe digital recordings. But then the Doors, whatever fans or detractors might say about them, were always, thank God, different.
The smokin', drinkin', swaggerin' and swearin' Dirty Doors have put together four CD's filled with demos, outtakes, alternate versions and unreleased live recordings as well as an offbeat selection of band members' favorites. Having kept somewhat of a low profile officially since Oliver Stone's botched biopic, one might expect a slick, commercial set designed to help ensure a steady stream of residuals into the next century.
However, the Doors were one of the only bands from the sixties that actually had a solid business setup, and are by all reports doing quite well from their legacy, which may be one reason why they were comfortable making this set such a raw and in may ways uncomfortable experience. Or perhaps in the sober politically correct nineties we've just forgotten that beneath all the catchy top ten singles the Doors were a pretty unruly bunch. Here, we’re reminded of that fact.
In many ways what we're actually offered is a rather complete picture of Morrison, as far as recorded history will allow. We get the drunken, dissolute tortured soul on the opening track and on some loose jams, but we're also treated to Jim the Elvis fan (the swinging, fun Black Train Song), the jazzy balladeer (a lounge-lizard king alternate take of Queen of the Highway), the counter-culture's worst nightmare (Someday Soon, "you're all gonna die") and the fading, overweight hit maker who can still deliver the goods (a sizzling live Break on Through, recorded at the Isle of Whight Festival shortly before Jim's death). And lots of Jim the clown, reportedly one of his favorite roles.
With both Morrison and longtime producer Paul Rothchild dead, the task of compiling the set fell to the band and Bruce Botnick, who engineered every single Doors album from the very beginning and co-produced their last studio album L.A. Woman with the band.
"Working in this set with the band was really like an extension of the L.A. Woman sessions, where we were rebelling against some of the things we'd done before and not trying to make award-winning sound but to put the material across with energy and tell the story," Botnick explains.
Thus the shockingly low-fi Miami tape was a natural opening track. "Initially you say 'this sounds really awful,' but as you listen to the performance and what he's saying all of the sudden the sound doesn't mean anything. I thought the performance was so extraordinary, such a piece of history that it didn't matter. All I did was use some No-noise to get rid of tape hiss and clean it up and EQ it so it wasn't overly harsh, and let it speak for itself."
Other tracks had sonic imperfections that didn't add anything to their ultimate effect and so received some significant re-working, Botnick notes.
"I had a tape of Break on Through from the Isle of Whight festival that is a very hot performance but which was badly recorded and lacking life. And Who Scared You, from Soft Parade sessions for some reason I didn't record it as well as I would like to I don't recall why but I figured that in the remix I should be able to tune it up a bit and give it more life.
"In both cases I re-recorded, playing the tracks into Oceanway Studios Studio B over loudspeakers and into to acoustical echo chambers, picking up on Neuman M-50 mics and using different digital reverberation and delay tools to create depth and a more three-dimensional soundscape, not so much to trick people but to provide a sense of immediacy and three dimensionality to the sound. The original tracks were flat and had no life. When we were done they had new life. I mixed these tracks on a vintage Neve analog console from a 20 bit Sony digital 24 track with Nvision 24 bit D/A's. The recording format was a Genex optical disc recorder fed by DB Technologies DB 122 24 bit high resolution A/D's.
One entire CD consists of previously unreleased live material from a January 1970 New York City show. "Those were all 8 track masters; the entire time the Doors worked in the studio and made lie recordings we never got to record with more than 8 tracks. These were cut with no Dolby on BASF tape recorded at plus-10, very hot levels, the way we did it then, and there's no tape hiss. However, time makes the oxide fall off and I had to bake certain of the reels and were transferred them 20 bit to 24 track digital. So I could them mix them kept all in digital right to the master to a gen x optical disk recorder at 20 bit.”
The band favorites CD, culled from original album cuts, took very little work. "I used the 1630's that Paul Rothchild and I made about six years ago and did a little EQ work. We could've gone back to the multitracks and redone them all in 20 bit but these versions were really quite wonderful. We used pure 16 bit A/D's, some of which were hand made. The original two track album masters are in good shape for the next time we approach them, for the next format. We can very easily take them to 20 or 24 bit at 96K topology and they'll sound even better!"
"I'm not a believer in remixing something unless you have to; I want to maintain the moment in time. Some of the songs were mixed in 1967 and 1968. I'm not drinking the same wine, water or eating the same food, I'm not thinking the same. Whatever was influencing me then it is hard to replicate that now. My tendency is to stick with the sound; you can always make something sound better sonically better but why? It is a moment in time. The Beatles felt the need to remix; in some of their early tracks the voices were all on one side that was the way things were done then, and some things you want to leave alone.”
Selections from the group's first recording dates, their World Pacific demos, were taken from the only known existing copy, Ray Manzarek's acetate disc. "We transfered the disk to a Sonic Solutions System for de clicking and noise reduction at Audio Mechanics. I ended up using only one side or another of the mono disk because one side of the stylus would be picking up different things than the other," Botnick explains.
Another oddball tape that presented challenges was "the only live performance of The Soft Parade anywhere anytime, done for a PBS television special taped in a New York television studio in 1969 shortly after the Miami fiasco, and long before television’s approach to audio was revolutionized.
The original master video tape, the subject of a long, exhaustive search by the Doors organization and outside consultants (including this reporter), had long since disappeared. Eventually a decent three-quarter-inch copy of the 1" master tape was located. "Using Sonic Solutions NoNoise the sound came out clearly after we got the garbage out. We heard stuff we hadn't ever heard before. You can really hear the compressor pumping away, with the band surging up when Jim stops singing and dropping away when he puts out some sound pressure. Not only is it the only live version, the only live performance ever, but it is also an excellent performance," says Botnick.
"A good example of leaving a song alone is Rock is Dead. We were doing something else and I was in a mix mode so the inputs are all wrong for tracking. Jim's vocal is locked with the drums then halfway through drums move to a different track. There were, obviously not too many options to go fix it. So I left the mix as it was, just making it a little more left center right center. Again it was a matter of being there something really funky about it the way it is. Then we go back to the sophistication of the adagio. The same way that the first track from Miami segues into the smooth slick sound of Queen of the Highway. I'm a big believer in contrast.”
The only new recording was for the Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor and Orange County Suite. "For Orange County Suite we only had a two track of Jim singing and playing piano himself. We overdubbed the Doors at Oceanway a week before we delivered the record.
“The Adagio, which was recorded in 1968, had never been finished; Ray had done his parts but John hadn't added his drums and Robby hadn't done his solos.”
The box set was assembled with a combination of digital and analog processing. “The live material from New York was transferred to 24-track digital and mixed digitally on a 192 input AMS Logic 2 at Pacific Ocean Post. Monitoring was through Quested monitors powered by McIntosh tube amplifiers. The rest of the material was mixed analog on an old Neve at Oceanway because we needed the acoustical environment to make this material work.”
"The culmination, this period of retrospection, was a wonderful experience for myself, Robby, Ray and John, and Jim. Yes, Jim was there! Play it loud, but not too loud that you damage your precious hearing!" Botnick concludes.
ends
* (Morrison was, quite famously, found guilty in Miami of public indecency charges related to this performance. The controversy, trial and verdict nearly destroyed the band’s live concert business, according to many accounts. Had the conviction stood, Morrison would have likely gone to prison, doing hard [state prison] time. The case was on appeal when Morrison died in July 1971.)