March 2025
It seemed impossible to discuss Terry Manning’s immense body of work, without assessing his credits as engineer and producer – because his resumé includes records by such different artists as Otis Redding, LED ZEPPELIN, Mariah Carey, ZZ TOP, Björk and Lenny Kravitz, to name just a few names from the creative masses whom the American veteran helped – yet that would mean shifting the focus to those famous performers, while the primary goal of our conversation was to celebrate Manning as a musician and songwriter and just touch on his studio experiences. Which we did. Six days after our second round of this interview’s sessions, in the wee small hours of on March 25th, 2025, Terry greenlighted it – and few hours later he passed away.
We planned to add some more bits and pieces to the transcript but now it turned out to be the master’s last chat for the public, so let’s remember Terry Manning as a high-spirited person everybody knew and loved.
– Terry, what’s easier for you: to bring your own ideas to life as a musician or facilitate other artists’ ideas?
That’s a tough question. They’re very similar things in a way that when I’m working with someone else, taking their music and assisting them, it gives me pleasure, but I’m the happiest when I can go in and do a song I’ve written or interpret someone’s song in my way, and do it all the way from beginning to end: recording, producing, playing… I couldn’t say which one is my absolute favorite. I just love music. I love all the parts of music. When I get a great artist – Billy Gibbons from ZZ TOP, Jimmy Page from LED ZEPPELIN, Lenny Kravitz or any of the great artists I’ve had the pleasure to work with – not only do I get to take whatever talents I have and apply them to these artist’ vision, but I also get to learn from these artists. It’s hard to learn for myself. Yes, I make mistakes and I guess I learn from those, but when I work with someone else, see them sing in a certain way or think of a certain way to put production into a song, I can go, “Aha! I’ll remember that and I can use it for myself later!” So they’re both lots of fun.
– But if it’s your music, you have to make musicians that accompany you to hear what’s in your head, to be a transmitter, and when you’re producing, you should be a receiver to try and hear what’s in other people’s heads. What’s more difficult, then?
That’s true, and it is a very hard thing to do, to produce yourself, because then you’re on both sides of the equation. You’re telling yourself what to do and you’re taking instruction from yourself. That is difficult. On my own recordings, I play most of the instruments, and there are obviously people who can play better than I can, for certain instruments especially, so I have to give them my vision and have them play it, but I’m used to that when I’m producing other people as well. So it all works out. (Laughs.)
– Which bar is higher, then? Is it simpler for you to be satisfied when you hear your music recorded by musicians who help you or to satisfy musicians who you work with?
I think the highest bar is doing it all yourself, because if it messes up it’s all your fault. If you don’t do a very good job, you have no one to blame. Not that I’d like to blame anyone, but recording and producing music is a really difficult job. What you’re doing is taking something that is inside someone’s brain, heart, soul, however you might define where their music comes out of them – you’re taking that and you want to get it recorded on some medium and put the medium out there to the public. And then, hopefully, you get to hear good things about it. People buy it, they play it, they enjoy it, whatever. And when you’re doing that all yourself, it’s even harder because it’s almost impossible to describe. You could say that if it comes out of your heart, your soul, your mind, maybe you know it better than you would know what other people are thinking or wanting to be played with, so you’ve got me at a point here.
– And to arrive at this point, you started out with a band called THE WILD ONES back in 1963, correct?
Yes, this was in El Paso, Texas. And the band was just three guys to start with, then four guys who all went to the same school growing up and lived in the same neighborhood. We were so new and young! We would get together, even though we barely had instruments to play. I got my first guitar, and that was great; then the drummer got a drum kit, that was better; and the other guitarist, the better guitarist, got a great guitar. So it was what we did. There were not many great gigs or jobs that we played – a few neighborhood parties, things like that – and then, right when I was going to leave the band, because my dad was moving out of El Paso and going to Memphis, Tennessee, we decided we would go in and record an album. A friend who was playing drums, Roy Woods, had a home tape recorder, so he brought it out to the back house behind their house, and we set it up in the bathroom so we could have echo and reverb from the tiles. We recorded our first album called “Terry Manning And THE WILD ONES” but it took years and years before it came out. After I had a real career and was actually doing some real music with real big artists, Norton Records wanted to go back and see where it all started, so they released it [as “Border Town Rock N’ Roll 1963”]. It’s not very good. It’s very naïve. It’s me singing and playing my guitar and the guys playing with me and just covering songs, as we didn’t have any originals.
– What does it say about your personality that you still talk so enthusiastically about playing?
It says that I was half crazy then, that nothing was going to stop me doing what I wanted to do, and that I still love music. My parents were very nice, they went along with it. I don’t think they loved rock ‘n’ roll music necessarily, but they were very cool about it, letting me make my way, and it worked out. As a musician, boy, did I have things to learn from THE WILD ONES! I knew very little, maybe knew four chords, something like that – I even listened back to that old first album from 1963 and heard myself hit some wrong chords. I didn’t have the songs quite right, but I loved it.
– You were born in Oklahoma. Was there any kind of cultural shock when you moved to Texas early on?
Not really. Oklahoma is a good deal like Texas. They still wear cowboy hats and they have ranches and farms, and there’s a lot of music in Oklahoma: Leon Russell’s from Tulsa, J. J. Cale from Oklahoma City, so there was some really good musicianship there. I guess the are probably good musicians everywhere, but these were especially good guys who came up out of the same culture. Once you live in Texas, especially as a very young child, it becomes everything to you, because Texans love Texas more than they love anything else. In school, as a young kid, somebody would be saying, “Well, I was born in Dallas. Where were you born?” And another person would say, “I was born in Fort Worth. Where were you born?” And I was ashamed at the time… Forgive me Oklahoma, but I was ashamed to say, “Well, I was born in Oklahoma,” because it wasn’t Texas. So I always said, “I was born on a ranch north of Dallas,” which means the state of Oklahoma. I got away with that for a while. (Laughs.)
– Was there any conscious desire on your part to embrace southern sound in terms of music?
Yes, absolutely. Texas and other places I lived growing up, part of it was Tennessee, Memphis and a couple of other towns, they’re very much southern. The style of music wasn’t like the North. I worked at Stax Records in Memphis, which is very much Southern soul music, and then if you look at Motown, which is soul music also, but it was from the far north, Detroit, and it was very different. At the time, I admired some Motown songs, like “My Girl” by THE TEMPTATIONS and THE FOUR TOPS, lots of great music came out of Motown, but it didn’t speak to me the way southern music did, and the greatest soul music ever made came out of Stax. It has its own southern culture to it: a deep, bassy funkiness. Not to say that Motown, Philadelphia and other places weren’t funky – they were, it depends on how you define them – but the Stax sound was just all its own thing. Heavy snare, thumping bass, simple chords, simple music, but just with so much feeling and soul! And that is ingrained in my soul to this day. My very favorite pop music of all time is Stax.
– “Hot Buttered Soul” by Isaac Hayes would be the best description of it, right?
Yeah. I recorded that album at the Ardent Studios on National Street in Memphis. We had THE BAR-KAYS there, which is one of the two great recording bands. Booker T. & the M.G.’s were the number one session band out of Stax, and THE BAR-KAYS weren’t far behind: they were both just tremendous. So THE BAR-KAYS came over and backed Isaac. He came over about six or seven nights, about six o’clock, and recorded to one or two in the morning. It was just Isaac on the organ and singing, Al Bell, the producer, THE BAR-KAYS as the musicians, Rufus Thomas’ son Marvell on piano, and I was in the control room, recording – and it was just so much fun! It was so funky, but still different from any of the music we have recorded before.
When you think of [Sam & Dave’s] “Hold On, I’m Comin'” or [Eddie Floyd’s] “Knock On Wood” or [Wilson Pickett’s] “Midnight Hour” or some of the earlier heavy, funky soul things, that’s not what “Hot Buttered Soul” was. It still had elements of that, but we were doing a Burt Bacharach songs [“Walk On By”]! It ended up with orchestration, a whole symphony orchestra playing. It was great, and I knew I loved it. I knew that Al Bell and Isaac Hayes were doing something special, but I had no idea at the time how special it was; I had no idea it was going to get a Grammy some fifty years later, hanging on the wall there (turns camera to show the award). It’s a recording that changed soul music forever, a brand new thing. Again, “The Midnight Hour” and things like that were three, three-and-a-half minutes long, a normal song, but Isaac Hayes was doing fifteen-minute songs – long, slow, speaking over it. It was something I’d never heard before!
– How different Stax was from other labels in terms of it being an integrated one, with both black and white musicians? And how did the work there influence you?
That’s really a deep question. When I lived in El Paso, we had all colors and all kinds of kids in our junior high school. It’s a big military town, one of the biggest, with a huge army base, army air force, so we had Spanish kids, Latin from Mexico or Mexican heritage, we had black kids from all over, we had white kids, we had just everybody, and I got used to that. But when I went to my first class in high school in Memphis, I remember vividly thinking, “Wow, I’ve got a class with all white kids! That’s amazing!” I went to the next class, all white kids. Next class, all white kids. So I asked somebody about it and they said, “This is a white school. Black people can’t come to our school!” I was just stunned. “Why not? What do you mean they can’t come?” And that person explained to me: “Well, they’re segregated. They have their own schools!” So within that first year, just past fifteen, almost sixteen years old, I’ll go over the Stax to try to get in there to sing and play or just work, and there were black and white people there. And I just instantly felt at home. It was very odd to be in the South at that time and have a mindset of “anything goes”: any religion, any color, any person from anywhere is fine. It was great with me, and that was what my mindset was from being in El Paso, a very culturally diverse town, unlike Memphis which was very separated.
But Stax… It was like I had gotten to an island in the middle of Memphis that had things going correctly. It didn’t matter that we had a couple of Muslim people there. We had lots of black people, of course, lots of white people, Jewish, every kind of religion, everything you could think of. Everyone got along. Stax was just a haven. and what mattered there was that you loved music, played music, sang, performed or whatever you did. And it was really people who showed up there wanting to get in. They weren’t really going out and recruiting people from the various neighborhoods and all. The black kids that lived in that area, such as Booker T. Jones or David Porter, a great songwriter [who worked] with Isaac Hayes, came and knocked on the door. That’s what I did – I knocked on the door to get in – and the same thing was with Steve Cropper. We just wanted in there so badly. People loved the music and loved each other. Later on, after the assassination of Dr. King, it was a little different, a little harder, but not bad ever.
– You started working on Stax as engineer and then you decided to write. One of your first compositions was “Trashy Dog” which you would release on your first solo album, but before that it had been recorded by Albert King and Steve Cropper. How did it feel for you as a youngster to be hearing your music done by such masters?
Oh, that was tremendous! It just warms your heart so much to think, “I thought this up, and now these tremendous musicians are playing my song!” They heard a version I had created of it and decided to include it on the album: it had Albert King, Steve Cropper and Pop Staples all playing various songs. I know it’s silly, but I really love that. (Laughs.) To this day, if I hear somebody that’s recorded a version of a song of mine, I almost can’t believe it. There’s so many great songwriters out there, but they chose my song to record! A lot of times, I’ve had cover songs done by people in other countries or other parts of the U.S. that I didn’t even know they were doing – things I wasn’t even involved in – and then later it came out and I was like, “Oh, wow, there’s my song!”
– Later, you had a song called “Heaven” which was recorded first by THE STAPLES SINGERS and then by Joe Cocker. Would it be right to say that this song and these versions were the ultimate validation of you as a songwriter?
As I said, there are many much better songwriters, but it is definitely a validation to have. I mean, Joe Cocker, what a singer, what an artist! And then THE STAPLES SINGERS: amazing voices! And on their version it was Jimmy Page who played the lead guitar. To hear things like that and to be involved in that is just tremendous, because I think of myself as just a little guitar player who plays piano, too, and then does a demo. So when somebody who really plays great, really sings great, records it, it’s a definite validation. And it’s one of my favorite things in life, when something like that comes out. I can’t quite describe the feeling.
– Your first solo album was “Home Sweet Home”: I would describe it as fierce and funny, but what was the thinking when you decided to do it?
I hadn’t actually planned it yet. In my head I always said I would record my own album, but I wasn’t quite there yet. And then, we were working in the studio with THE BOX TOPS who just had the hit called “The Letter” – which was also done by Joe Cocker later – and were coming in to do follow-up recordings. The songwriter of the song called “Choo Choo Train” was Eddie Hinton from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a good friend of mine who was so excited in this whole “Someone’s doing my song, it’s a verification” thing. He was so caught up in it that he was almost already spending the money from a hit record: “Oh, I’m going to buy a Ferrari! I’m going to buy a big house!” It was just going on and on, so I thought, “Eddie, it might not be a hit, so don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched!” and I decided to play a joke on him. I brought in Chris Bell, who was later in BIG STAR, and Richard Rosebrough, a tremendous drummer, to record my own version of “Choo Choo Train” and make it crazy. (Laughs.)
So I recorded it, all in one night, singing in that rough, deep voice, and the next day, when they came in to continue work on THE BOX TOPS version and the producer, Dan Penn, said, “Play what we did yesterday!” I played my version instead. Eddie Hinton was just furious: “What is that? Oh, you ruined my song!” Dan also wanted to get that off. but Alex Chilton, the singer with THE BOX TOPS, was laughing – he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Later, I played it for Al Bell, the vice president of Stax at the time, and asked him, “What do you think? Isn’t that funny?” He said, “No, I like it. I want a whole album of that!” I thought, “A whole album of a joke? Wait a minute!” But I did it with as much quality and talent as I could put in it. I don’t mean that I was trying to be bad. I was just trying to be fierce and funny, which is a perfect description, I think. I did several kinds of Memphis music on it. I did a Booker T. & the M.G.’s takeoff, which I called “Sour Mash,” I did “Trashy Dog,” I did a Jerry Lee Lewis-type thing with the piano, and I sang all the background girls’ parts, the little high squeaky voices.
– The album opens with “Savoy Truffle” which is one of the weirdest BEATLES pieces, where you mixed psychedelia with blues and made it quite spectacular – it’s one of the most imaginative George Harrison covers.
Oh, well, thank you so much. Of course, I love THE BEATLES, I’m a huge BEATLES fan, and I really liked George Harrison’s version of it – he was my favorite Beatle in a way – but I thought it was kind of a hidden song. It wasn’t “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or “Lady Madonna”; it was just an album track that I really loved and I wanted to do it as crazy as I could. So I put in blues harmonica and slide guitar, and feedback, and made it ten minutes long.
– Did you take that album to the stage? There’s a reissue of it with bonus tracks, a live version of “I Can Stand The Rain” among them. Was it recorded at the same time, in the Seventies?
No, no. I worked on a George Thorogood & THE DESTROYERS album in the late Eighties. They had finished recording and were on tour. One of their shows was at the University of Memphis – then, Memphis State University – and I got a call from George’s manager, a good friend of mine, who said, “Help. We don’t have an opening act. Can you get anybody or throw a band together?” At the time, I was in the studio, doing a MEMPHIS HORNS record with people from Hi Records who had played with Al Green, so I looked around, saw these great session musicians and replied, “Yeah, I’ll bring a band. We’re on our way now!’ Then, I said, “Guys, want to make an extra hundred dollars? We’re going to go play a live show!” And they answered, “Sure, let’s go!” We didn’t have any songs ready and didn’t know what we were going to do. We just took our instruments, got in a couple of cars and drove to the university.
Already on the way, I asked, “What can we play that well?” I had worked on the original version of “I Can Stand The Rain” which was Ann Peebles’ great single – I mixed that big hit version with producer Willie Mitchell – so I knew the song well, and they knew “I Can’t Stay The Rain” because they played on it. So I said, “Well, let’s do that for one, we’ll open with it!” “Okay, who’s going to sing it?” “I’ll sing it!” I had never sung it before, but we went out in front of this huge crowd and announced ourselves as THE RAYMOND WELCH BLUES BAND, even though there was no Raymond Welch, as we just made it up, and started. (Laughs.) That was the only time we had ever played it or I had ever sung it, but somebody recorded it on a cassette, and I thought that it needed to come out, so I put it on the reissue of the “Home Sweet Home” album.
– Your next prominent appearance as a writer and a player was on “Say What You Mean” by THE HOT DOGS, which I like a lot and which still sounds quite fresh for a 1973 album. Your production has stood the test of time. How did you get involved with that band?
They were a band from Memphis who played out in clubs. They came to me one day at the studio and said, “Would you want to record us?” I liked them, so I said, “Yeah, why not?” and we started making things up. I wrote a song for them [“Feel Real Fine”], and they had another song or two they wanted to do, and then they landed on Stax to do an album, but they didn’t have a name. They called themselves COUNTRY FUNK, which wasn’t great name – although, it probably was a lot better than what we ended up with (laughs) – so I said, “Let’s think of a good one!” To come up with a name is actually one of the hardest things for a band, so one day, as a joke, I said, “How about THE HOT DOGS?” and wrote it on the tape box. And it’s stuck. But when we started doing the album, we needed more songs to add to those they were writing, so I came up with probably two songs. I don’t remember how many I wrote [Terry co-penned four tracks. – DME] but I still sing a couple of them in my head.
– And then you didn’t record again until 2013. It’s interesting that the same thing happened to other great producer, Mike Vernon. You were busy, I get it, but didn’t you feel the itch to be recording your own music all this time?
I did. But during those whole years of not putting out an album or writing, I still had songs recorded by someone else. It’s interesting, though, because there was one song, which is on Spotify now, “Feel Real Fine” – I recorded it with a couple of friends for an album we were going to call “Mud Bluff” but we never did anything with the rest of it – the song I was so excited about that I sent it to Mike Vernon in England and asked, “Don’t you want to put this out on your label?” And he sent a nice letter back and said, “Not quite my style, so I won’t release this, but good on you!” I really admired what he did.
– You returned with the “West Texas Skyline” where you paid a tribute to your friend Bobby Fuller. Was that a deliberate reconnection with the past?
Absolutely. He was my very first music mentor. He was from El Paso, where I was from, and I actually sat in on a live gig where he played once or twice, went over to his house where he had a home studio, and asked him questions. “Why are you pushing that button? How do you write a song? How do you produce? What does producing mean?”: you know, just very naïve, very young teenager asking a guy who was older and so smart with what he was doing, asking him questions. But of course, about the time I left El Paso, he also left, went to Hollywood and got famous, had a huge Top Five hit all over the world, “I Fought The Law,” and a couple of other good hit records before he was sadly murdered out there. As long as Bobby was alive, we would write letters back and forth to each other, and all through my years of recording, working almost every day in the studio, he was always on my mind.
He was always the guy who helped me get started. Before I even got into Stax, I wouldn’t have been able to do things without his guidance. And I love his songs. So I decided that when I finally had time I would work on my own albums, really work on them after so many years of doing everyone else’s music, and it was in 2013 that I got started with and finished two albums at the same time: “West Texas Skyline” and “Heaven Knows” that I released later. I wanted to do the best I can for Bobby, to go back to the Sixties style of early rock ‘n’ roll like he was doing and add modern production values. Obviously, when he was recording, the band all played at once, and when I was recording a tribute to him I played each instrument separately and used multiple tracks that he didn’t have back in those days.
– And you added a couple of your own tracks to that album.
Yes, I wanted to write two songs that were part of that era, or sounded like they were from that era, and talked about it. One song is called “West Texas Skyline” – which is the name of Bobby’s album as well: that’s a song where the first verse is about Buddy Holly, second about Bobby Fuller, and the third verse a sort of a tribute to all of El Paso. The other song is “Cold Night In Heaven”: it’s a kind of a tribute to Robert Johnson that just speaks about being at the crossroads and other things pertaining to music in the South, but also about people like such as Chris Bell and Stevie Ray Vaughan, dying, and me hoping their spirits go to heaven.
– While we’re on the subject of heaven… Your next project was very unlike Terry Manning. I’m talking about “Planets” here.
Oh, yes. I wanted to do an instrumental album – in fact, I have another instrumental album fully recorded, mastered and ready to be released later this year – with a couple of friends. One is my son, Lucas Manning, who did some of the beats and sounds that were on it, and another, a flutist named Christine Gangelhoff, was a member of a classical trio called C FORCE that I had recorded in my studio, so I had really gotten to like her flute sound and the way she played. I wrote all the compositions and played most of the things, and I wanted something that was a tribute to planets and space. I love rockets and space! Just five minutes ago, I was watching the space capsule return from out there and land in the ocean. I wrote a song for each of the planets and the asteroids in the middle, and deep space, and small things like Pluto that used to be planets, and I tried to do something which, in my mind, related to that. For instance, Mercury is the fastest because it’s the closest to the sun and has a much smaller orbit to speed along, so I wanted something uptempo there; by the time you got to Earth it was a little slower; you’ll pass Venus, of course, too; and then, as you got farther out, things got more majestic and slower, and larger. It was a little interpretation of mine that I enjoyed doing.
– What surprised me about “Planets” was its a mix of new-age, which is ethereal, with soul and jazz, which are quite visceral…
Well, I was sure to put some horns in there and a little bit of soul feel: I can’t do anything without some of that!
– …and I was half-expecting the first time when I was listening to it to hear a quote from Gustav Holst, because everybody who’s doing something about planets, like Manfred Mann, tends to quote him. But there’s nothing like that.
And it’s so much better than Gustav’s music! (Laughs.) I did try to lean towards the classical genre just a little bit on the “Jupiter” track, because I love classical music – Bach is one of my all time heroes – and that is what I actually do for myself: I’ve got three symphonies – rather short, fifteen to twenty-five minutes – two of those written and fully charted and the third written, but not fully charted with a score yet. I hope at some point to be able to record those, and it would have to be with a symphony orchestra because they’re up to eighty parts, and it’s very complex: bassoons, French horns, you name it, it’s all in there. So yes, I was thinking classical on the “Planets” album, just a little, plus a little bit of soul and a tiny bit of funk and some beats in it, but I did want to keep in the kind of jazz and kind of new-age vein. It’s really unstylable. I love many, many styles of music, and big band music is one of my other huge favorites, but it’s hard for me to do that.
– That’s the problem with today’s music: it’s compartmentalized for marketing purposes, and while the most interesting things happen in, so to say, hybrid areas, they’re hard to sell, even if it’s Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” recorded by Bela Fleck.
Honestly, everything that I make, be it recording myself or producing other people, I want it to sell as well, but it’s not about money. It’s not about success, being on TV at the Grammys or anything like that. That’s all great, but I think most people that make music probably do it because they love it. They just want to speak that language to whoever might listen. So I want it to be successful, but I don’t expect “Planets” to sell a lot. Who’s going to buy it? There are people that I’ve gotten great comments from, people who enjoy it, like it, but it’s not going to be on top radio, it’s not going to be on television unless it ends up in a soundtrack as background music or something. To make it and then to like it myself is all I really care about, and if other people like it, that’s icing on the cake. And then, at the very end, if people buy it, that’s even better – but it’s not about that. That’s why I will do other styles on the other instrumental album I have coming out.
– Once the celestial bodies of “Planets” were out of the way, you finally released “Heaven Knows” which you had recorded earlier. Why did you let it stew?
You don’t want to release too much at one time because it competes with itself. And because now the way you find out about things, and especially promote them, is quite a bit on social media, you can only do so much there. Also all those albums are quite different: a lot of artists do kind of the same thing, but I didn’t want to do that – I want to explore new roads every time. I want to go down. Where does that road go? Okay, let’s turn on and see. So I waited to release “Heaven Knows” – or, rather, the record company did – waited over a year until “West Texas Skyline” had done everything it was going to do. Well, I hope it does lots more, but there’s an early period of release where it gets the most views and listens and everything, and then it turns into part of the catalog.
– On “Heaven Knows” you paid homage to your favorite artists: George Harrison and Brian Wilson, Al Green and Otis Redding. You had obviously worked with Al and you mixed Otis’ “Dock Of The Bay” – but did you actually ever meet Redding?
I have met Otis several times. I never recorded him directly or worked in the studio with him, but I was around while when he was recording things – and he was such a lovely man! Very, very intelligent, very kind and gentle and sweet. And then, when it came to singing, he revved it up, turned on that engine he had. But yes, I did work on “The Dock Of The Bay”: worked on final overdubs and the mixing. Sadly, we did that just a couple of days after he died. I remember the night that it happened. I was at [producer] John Fry’s house where we listened to something, when Jim Stewart, the president of Stax, called and said, “Otis has died!” And within two or three days, Atlantic Records, which was distributing Stax at the time, phoned up, because when an artist dies, they get lots of publicity: “We want a single out now!” That was not a very nice thing to do anyways, because we were all friends of Otis’, and working with him, and to tell Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Al Jackson, Booker T., Isaac Hayes, all those people, “Quick, he’s dead, we want a single!” was like, “Whoa, hold on a minute! We’re in a period of mourning, please!” But they insisted. So Cropper came in Ardent Studio and brought in THE MEMPHIS HORNS to overdub – because the horns weren’t tracked and he recorded them live, speaking to the band – and then we overdubbed a few more little things, and then Steve and I mixed it, and it was the only song of Otis’ that I ever worked on.
And I remember that session differently from any other session I worked on – and I’ve done literally thousands and thousands of recording sessions, perhaps more than any other engineer/producer that’s worked in studios, only because I started so young. Before I was eighteen I had worked on records that became big hits, and I’ve done real things pretty close to every single day since then, and I remember most sessions very clearly: I could almost walk back in the room, if I had a time machine, and pick up right where we left off with the board, and wouldn’t have to remember things because they were in my head. But looking back in my mind on that Otis session, it’s like there’s a heavy fog in there, it’s dripping teary rain into the room: everyone was so sad, so upset. The horn players, Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love, and a couple of the other guys, have worked on all Otis’ songs, except the very first one, Wayne and Steve were his best friends, so it wasn’t the loss of an artist – it was the loss of a close friend, a beloved friend.
– I assume you don’t like this fad of bringing dead people to life on records and adding instruments to their voices. I’m not sure how I feel about THE BEATLES stuff, but I really don’t like it when I hear classic Aretha and other artists’ tracks drenched in modern symphony orchestras. What about you?
In almost all cases, it’s a terrible idea. One thing I did like was “Free As A Bird” by THE BEATLES. It was very Beatley, and there was obviously the John Lennon genesis of the song. And George Martin was there, everyone but John was in the same studio. I really enjoy that song.
– Me too, but it was strange listening to Harrison’s trademark slide guitar and knowing that he never played slide on THE BEATLES records – it was Lennon on George’s “For You Blue” who played it Elmore James-style.
I agree. But still, George was great, and that song worked well. And Jeff Lynne came in to co-produce and work with them. In fact, Jeff told me that he was sitting there during the first overdub, and Paul and George were out on the mic singing harmony to John, and when they sang the first take they said, “Hey, Jeff, how was that?” And Jeff said, “I was stunned. THE BEATLES are asking me how was that? They should know it was great!” But yeah, in most cases I hate when they do something to previously recorded music, because when it’s first recorded and released it has the full approval of the band or the artist: the artist, the producer, the record company, the management, the engineers, the studio, everyone agrees. This is finished. Let’s put it out. This can never happen again. And when they do whatever to it and then it comes out, it’s lost that original intent to some degree and very often to a huge degree.
– It’s interesting that you’ve brought up Lynne… You followed “Heaven Knows” with “Playin’ In Elvis’ House” where you added ELO’s “Showdown” to classic material. How come?
First of all, I love the song and I love Jeff – he is a great artist and friend. But I wanted to take a song that I felt could very much lend itself to Memphis soul style. It’s kind of a Beatle-ish, but I thought, “Wow, it would have been a great song for Al Green and have the background singers and everything!” – so I added the horns in and gave it a funky beat instead of the way Jeff did it. Later, I played it live in Stax Studio with the Stax Music Academy [songwriting workshop], and we had six or seven girls singing some of the background parts. That’s why that’s there – recorded in Memphis, with almost all players from Memphis, in a Memphis style.
– The original sounded quite English, and you’ve worked with both American and British musicians. Is there any difference between them – in attitude, in approach?
When musicians play at a professional level, there’s always a language that’s common to all of them, but there are obvious differences. Even within the United States, there are differences between Motown players and Stax players, and between Philadelphia players and Memphis players, or New York versus Los Angeles. There’s a little difference in style, once you get past the common language. But with the British… I worked with an assistant engineer at one of the big studios – and the assistant engineer is always there to help and show you where things are, to give you the lay of the land of their studio – and he said to me at a break, “The British try to work it out technically, either with a technical thing with the equipment or musically technical, the way they put things together, but you seem to solve any problem that comes up musically first!” That’s what he gleaned from the way I was working.
I don’t know what it means, but I know that when I worked with British musicians, recording things like horns, they played a little more classically, a little more orchestrally, whereas some of the Memphis horn players didn’t read music and it was all by ear. I found that almost all musicians that I worked with in Britain came from some sort of classical background, whereas in America, not nearly so much, especially with rock bands. Every person is different, of course, and that makes every band somewhat different, but once they get amalgamated, it starts becoming band-like rather than individual-like. And sometimes, there are problems, and you might get a band where they’re arguing and you go, “Oh, my God, what am I going to do now? I’ve got to bring them back together, got to get an album done!”
– What is your character more aligned with: the guidance of performance or designing the concept of sound?
I’m gonna have to dig deep here. I love sounds and sights so much, and I love to immerse myself in those things – they are both definitely part of my character. There is a very rare word that means everything that you see and hear, and that’s kind of me. I constantly want to revisit everything that I’ve done before and places I’ve been.
– How different is it for you to capture an artist’s performance from capturing a moment on a photo?
As you know, photographer is my other career, and I’ve had many gallery shows and museum showings. It’s a little nice that people will actually pay for what you like. The disciplines for the two art forms, as I call them, are somewhat similar, because in both cases you want to either see or hear something and you want to capture it, and then you want to transfer it to that medium I talked about and hope other people also like it. If they hate it, that’s fine too: at least it engendered a reaction. I don’t mind a bad review. But it’s obviously very different as well because one is visual.
When I’m out shooting photographs, I don’t hum music, I don’t even think of music. I don’t write a song in my head or listen to the radio, because it interferes with what I’m doing, with that one job I have at that moment, and I always want to concentrate on that one job. Likewise, in the recording studio, working on music, it’s what you’re hearing rather than seeing. When I was there with Otis Redding or Jimmy Page, with Shakira or Mariah Carey, even though they’re beautiful, I didn’t take any photos of them. People say, you’re a photographer and you didn’t take a picture of Al Green? What’s wrong with you?” And every time I answer: “That wasn’t my job!” I didn’t get up in the morning and drive to wherever we were working to do two different things. Maybe I’m kind of dumb but I can’t mix them. (Laughs.) Well, I took a few photos in a studio on occasion where somebody would ask me to do something, but it’s very rare. There are those differences I can’t reconcile.
– The image of Tom Dowd with Dusty Springfield is your best, how to put it, musical non-musical work.
Thank you. That makes very good sense because I went to a studio that day but not to do music – I went with the purpose of taking photographs because I worked at that time for a newspaper called “New Musical Express” out of London, and they sent me on assignment as a journalist, even though I was already working with my other job. They told me to go where Dusty was recording in Memphis, as I lived there, and please interview her if I could, so I did that, and that picture turned out to be a monstrous photo, historically, because, I will say myself, it is the best picture ever taken of her. And it has the famous and great man Tom Dowd as the engineer who worked with her. But later, after I had interviewed Dusty and already formulated an article in my head, I was hanging around, watching Tom work there, and he asked, “Would you mind doing something for me?” “Sure. What?” He needed some headphones put over here and a microphone over there, and as he knew me from Stax, he said, “Would you mind doing another job and be an assistant to me on this session?” “Sure!” So that day I did both things.
– Let’s move to your latest album. The first thing I thought about when I saw the title “Red And Black” was the classic French writer, Stendhal.
Someone has told me about it, but only after my album was out. I didn’t know about it before! (Laughs.)
– But you sure know a lot about modern international culture that the countrified “I’m Awesome” ridicules.
Yes, that song is written by Mutt Lange, who is a very close friend. We’ve worked together many times in the studio where I engineering for him. Once he was at my private studio and wanted me to hear some songs he had written. He said, “I’ve got one that might be good for you!” I asked, “Really? For me? You think about me?” And he played me “I’m Awesome” which I thought was hilarious. First of all, it was written with a country thing in mind, and then, it was written possibly for a female, because it’s about influencers and being so enamored with themselves. I loved it! And I said, “Would you mind me recording it?” He replied, “No, no, please. It’s for you. Let’s say I wrote it for you!” Well, he didn’t, quite, but I took most of the elements he had in the demo – he makes fantastic demos! – and produced it from his executive production of it, with a different type of instrumentation. It was like “Home Sweet Home” again that I started as a joke. I like humor and I like humor in music. Not in every song, of course, there are many serious ones, but with ZZ TOP, for instance, we had a lot of very humorous songs, and I just liked that. So on this album, I made sure we had two or three pieces that had a funny side to them, were very musical and had a great sound, and “I’m Awesome” was certainly one of those.
– As a joke, when working with ZZ TOP, were you ever tempted to grow a beard?
I couldn’t grow one, if I tried. I get a little bit of stubble, but it would look absolutely ridiculous as a beard. Maybe a mustache… That’s about it. (Laughs.)
– You never really asked stars to contribute to your albums because that would draw attention to them, rather than you, but now you had Billy Gibbons play on this record. What changed?
“Red And Black” is basically a tribute to many of the styles I’ve worked with over long, long years. For example, the very first song, “Do Something Good,” is stylistically based on what TALKING HEADS, ROXY MUSIC and some other artists did at Compass Point, which was my studio for over twenty years. Then, there are two or three ZZ TOP-style songs on the album, as I wanted to do tribute to the many things I did with them over eighteen years that we worked together, and it was the chance to have Billy there.
He came to Compass Point at one point just to visit, said, “We ought to do something together again!” and gave me some words, on a piece of paper, written by him and another friend, Micki Free. I replied, “I’ll spend all night getting it ready. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll do it!” I had recorded a basic track, rewritten the words, rearranged some things so that it fit, and when he came back in the morning we recorded in just a few hours a song that was a tribute to the “Eliminator” album. I had the same instruments, drum machines, synthesizers, things which I had used in places on “Eliminator”: when we finished that, I put them in a box, taped it up and stored it, but once Billy was there, I got it out for the first time in many years, and we did a follow-up to “Eliminator” as one single for my album. It was a great honor. Then I recorded other songs, in other styles. One was my version of “EMI Song (Smile For Me)” that Alex Chilton and I wrote in 1969 and that I originally produced for him, and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was a tribute to Brian and Carl Wilson, who was a good friend too.
– How important is it for you to be working in your own studio rather than to relocate to somebody else’s?
It’s my favorite thing, and there it is. I’m in Texas again, and I love it. It’s my home, and now I have a studio, Sonic Ranch, nearby. If I need to track drums or do full-band things, there’s a studio in another building, because this one is much too small for that sonically – it’s best for overdubs and, of course, mixing and mastering. I’ve set it the way I like it, and that’s where I am right now. The chair sits in a place that I like it, I have instruments that I like (shows to the wall where guitars hang) and outboard gear that I like, and software that I like here – let me bring Pro Tools to life a little bit (turns around and wakes up a computer) – all set and ready to go, whether I bring a project of an artist that I’m producing. It just works great for me, so I’d much rather be in my own place all by myself because that’s what I like. That’s me. I don’t have to dress up or even get in jeans and a T-shirt, because I can come out of my house into my studio wearing pajamas if I want to.
– So you didn’t feel as comfortable when you had to share the ownership of Compass Point with Chris Blackwell?
I made it mine as well, to a degree, because Chris was just coming there to produce this and that, and he ended up feeding the whole thing, the equipment and everything, to me, which was nice. But there we had two big studios and one small studio, and I had to go from one to the other all the time. And it wasn’t only my place as I had to rent it out to many, many, many artists who came over, so I had it set up close to what I like and still relate to other producers and musicians. It was more like a venture, a professional public studio rather than a private one.
– And how was it to be working at Abbey Road?
Just wonderful – and not only because I’m such a BEATLES fan. I love the place! I know every inch of it, because many times I would be the last person to leave Abbey Road while I did my sessions there. I did there three hundred sessions over a year period and, as people left the other studio, where I wasn’t working, one by one, and the office staff left too, I would keep working late into the night, and then I would realize, “Oh, I’m the only one here!” I would also leave my sessions and wander around the building, looking at things like the file cabinets out in the hallways that had document of sessions from the Thirties, Winston Churchill recordings – crazy things! I just wanted to be part of it so much that I learned literally – I hate this word, because everybody uses it all the time – literally every inch of that studio. So that was fantastic to work over a year there as a mentor and as a client.
– You’ve worked with a lot of artists and you’re adept in a lot of genres, and you love every kind of music, but still, what’s your favorite thing to be working with?
Yes, I’ve worked in many styles and genres, from country music to heavy metal to pop, almost everything, but if somebody asked me, “You can only do one more thing in the studio and it could be anything, what would it be?” I would say – and it’s not possible, of course – “Give me TOMMY DORSEY ORCHESTRA or Frank Sinatra as the vocalist. That’s what I want!” But I’m not going to ever get to do that, because they’re all gone. However, my favorite, if I had to pick one, would be big band music: Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, all the great artists from the Thirties and Forties. I remember doing an interview on a panel with a lot of producers and engineers at the New Music Seminar in New York a few years ago, and when asked “What’s the very favorite thing you’ve worked on?” everybody was saying, “Oh, David Bowie!” They were expecting, I think, that I would name ZZ TOP, LED ZEPPELIN, Lenny Kravitz, someone like that, but I said – and shocked them – that it was Billy Eckstine.
He was a deep voice baritone singer of classic big band tunes and one of the biggest artists in the world back in the day – many people called him Black Frank Sinatra. Billy had a lot of big hit records, and he got signed by Stax at the end of his career, in the early Seventies, and let him do whatever he wanted, because Al Bell was a huge fan of Billy Eckstine. So he recorded the orchestra at T.T.G. Studios in Hollywood, with the same players that worked with Sinatra, and then Al brought him over to Ardent Studio in Memphis, where we recorded Billy’s vocals and I mixed [for 1972’s LP “Senior Soul”]. He was one of my favorite big band singers. and to get to work with him… I just loved him! He did classic tunes like “If She Walked Into My Life” [on 1974’s album of the same title], and hearing that amazing voice of his come out of the microphone while I’m working it, I was just in heaven. My very favorite things are a little off the beaten path of what people think I would like, but that’s not what I do and known for.
– Being a big bands fan, would you go for working with, say, a bebop or free jazz artist, somebody like Miles [Davis]?
Miles would be awesome! That would be out of this world! Bebop, not quite as much, but still, yes, bring it on! (Laughs.)
– So you’re not a purist in this aspect?
I don’t know what a purist is or what the jazz police would say, but I love a large collection of instruments – lots of horns, good winds – very much what Glenn Miller had or Woody Herman with THUNDERING HERDS.
– I wouldn’t want to discuss your work with LED ZEPPELIN or MOLLY HATCHET, so let’s touch on three other musicians. The first is Tony Joe White.
Tony Joe White was a friend and a fantastic artist. A very funny guy. Fun to work with. I engineered his [1971’s self-titled] album with him that Peter Asher produced in Ardent Studio. I loved Tony. Of course, everybody knows him from “Polk Salad Annie” which was his big hit and lots of people have done it, even Elvis covered it, but he was a very prolific writer and singer and played a lot of shows for years. He was just a really genuine, honest Southern guy to the core, with that accent and everything. Sadly, he passed away recently.
– Next is Johnny Winter. You wrote a song called “Look Away” on his “The Winter of ’88” album that you produced and played on.
Yeah, I did an album with Johnny for MCA when his management and the label wanted to get him a little bit away from the blues. Not totally – but they heard what I had done with ZZ TOP and MOLLY HATCHET and wanted to go in that direction and get him into the pop world to have a radio hit. And I wanted to do more of the blues that he did because he’s such a great blues artist. and that’s what he loved. So we had to compromise a little. We got a couple of good songs that Jerry [Lynn] Williams had written, and then I played to Johnny “Look Away” that I’d written while living in Swiss Cottage in London. He liked it and played great, fantastic stuff on it. I’m going to redo that song myself sometime; I’ve been singing it in my head for a few months now, so I’m going to get back to that. But Johnny was a tough one. He had a breakdown at the time, a recession, and he became a lovely crazy guy, if that makes sense. He was a very different human to most people, but that’s a good thing, because he wouldn’t be such a great artist otherwise. Many artists are kind of different.
One day we’re right in the middle of a song, and he’s wanting to eat. I ask, “How about a pizza?” He says, “Yeah, order a pizza!” So I call up “Domino’s Pizza” who tell me they’ll deliver in half an hour, and we start the song again, and then he stops again: “I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat! I say, “Johnny, I just ordered a pizza. It’ll be here in twenty-four minutes. So start the song again!” We start and he stops: “I’m hungry. I want to get something to eat!” I repeat, “Johnny, I ordered a pizza. It’ll be here in twenty minutes. It’s on the way!” And he just jumped up. He got really mad, started throwing things around the studio, knocked the microphone over. I said, “Hold on, that won’t get it. You’re not going to break my stuff. The pizza’s on the way!” Only he just didn’t get it in his head. He was just screaming, “I’m hungry! I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” He stormed out, and we had to stop the session and take a break for about a day and a half before he called up and asked me to come over to his hotel? “I apologize,” he said. “I don’t know what I was doing…” It was very kind. So we came back and finished the album. Still, it’s one of those things that don’t happen very often.
– “Planets” being an exception, you write proper songs, with a topline. However, there’s an instrumental piece that you wrote with Joe Walsh, the title track of his “Got Any Gum?” album. How did that happen?
I was working with Joe on that album, and we were just messing around. He’s another beautifully crazy guy who has so much life to him – even the titles of his albums hint at that! (Laughs.) Remember “The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get”? He loves titles that have a humorous vein to them. So Joe was sitting around in the studio, thinking of another one. He proposed “I Opened The Door And Influenza” and discarded it, and then he said, “I’ve got it! It’s ‘Got Any Gum?’!” And we made up this little piece called “Got Any Gum?” to put on the album, just to have fun. If you’re in the studio and you’re not having fun, why are you there anyway? Not every song has to be a joke, but every song should have life to it, whether it’s sad or happy. I like songs that are fun and upbeat. One of the best sessions I’ve had was when THE STAPLE SINGERS threw a party in the studio, laughing and telling jokes, ordering in fried chicken and having fun.
– I have to ask you, then, about “Rattlesnake Shake”: when I originally saw this title, I thought you had produced a cover of a FLEETWOOD MAC classic, and then it turned out you had wrote your own song with the same title, and it has nothing to do with masturbation.
No, it doesn’t. That one I wrote and then presented to OMAR & THE HOWLERS, and Omar put a couple of things in it as well. But I knew FLEETWOOD MAC well – I was friends with the very first FLEETWOOD MAC group, with Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer – and I think it was the greatest FLEETWOOD MAC. I love all the incarnations of the band, but I love what they did with the Elmore James-type songs and blues things like that. I even got to play Peter Green’s Les Paul guitar, which was really exciting. So I knew of “Rattlesnake Shake” that they had, but I had forgotten about it. And then, one day I was out mowing the lawn in the house and said, “I got the shakes, I got the rattlesnake shake!” Oh, I almost came up with this song, totally forgetting they had one with the same name. Only mine is better. (Laughs.)
– How many artists covered that song of yours?
A couple. And I’m hoping Chris Stapleton will sing it, it’s perfect for him. So if you see Chris, tell him to do it.
– If there’s any single song or an album, doesn’t matter if it’s your production or it’s your music, that defines you?
What defines me musically is one of my own albums, where I’m the artist – writing it, singing it, playing it – because it’s the most “me” that could be on it, and it would be the “Red And Black” album, because it’s the most recent one and the one that I put a lot of time into it over a long, long period to cover many bases. As for the albums that define me where I’m not the artist, I could say it’s “Eliminator” or “Tres Hombres” by ZZ TOP, or “Led Zeppelin III”: there’s something about the third albums there! (Laughs.) But then there’s Lenny Kravitz’s “5” which we put a lot of work into. I can’t pick a favorite to define me, because so much of my work there is defined by the artists themselves and what they’re bringing to the table that I’m merely facilitating.
