Author: abassford

In Memory Of Philip Smart: 1953–2014

Posted on by abassford

I’m back from the funeral service and celebratory repast for Philip Smart, engineer and producer extraordinaire. What an incredible day (and evening) this was. There was no room inside the funeral home for all the people who wanted to be there. Bitter enemies and lifelong friends came together in harmony to celebrate the life of the late, indisputably great Philip Smart. Some came from Yard, some came from abroad. People drove, took the bus, took the train, walked, and did whatever they had to do, in order to pay their respects to Philip and his amazing family. It seemed as though everybody who’d ever booked time at HC&F, Philip’s studio, or played or sung on a session there, was in attendance. I saw people I haven’t seen in decades.

For those of you not familiar with reggae, as an engineer Philip Smart was a force in our field on a par with Bruce Swedien or Rudy Van Gelder. But Philip’s talent as an engineer and producer, great as it was, was dwarfed by the size of his heart. I cannot think of any figure in the music industry that was more beloved and respected by his peers. Philip treated every person he worked with exactly the same way; with dignity, respect, and humor, whether it was their first time in a recording studio or whether they were a platinum-selling artist. He had a deep and abiding love for all people, as well as great insight into character.

I worked with Philip on hundreds of sessions. I never saw him have a bad day, I never saw him give less than his best, and I never got the feeling that he wanted to be anywhere else, even though, like most engineers, he worked incredibly long hours for days at a time. He exemplified the maxim “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Philip was very plainspoken, but he had a gift for telling people exactly what they needed to hear while saying it in a way that made them listen. He could communicate with everybody, from the rawest street rapper or DJ to the haughtiest record company suit. They all listened, and the smart ones learned.

Not surprisingly for such a great engineer, Philip was a great listener in conversation as well. Whenever you spoke to Philip, you had his attention, even if he was doing two or three other things at once, as he often was. I remember complaining to him one day about how unpleasant it was to record with the guitar plugged into a direct box. He asked me why, and I explained that the instrument responded differently to your touch when the first thing the signal encountered was a tube. Philip looked at me thoughtfully for a minute and said, “Yes, that makes sense. No one ever told me that before. I don’t play guitar myself so it isn’t something I would notice as a listener.”

The next time I walked into the studio, Philip proudly pointed to a tube preamp in his rack I hadn’t seen before. “Plug into this and tell me what you think.” I plugged the guitar into the preamp, Philip got levels in less time than it takes to write this, and he brought the guitar up in the monitors. We both grinned. It sounded wonderful. Philip said, “You really showed me something the other day. I thought about what you said about tubes and I remembered how we used them at Tubby’s. So I went out and bought this. It really makes a difference. Thanks.” That was Philip: as much as he had done, and as great as he was, he was always eager to learn and expand his palette. We used that preamp to record my guitar from then on.

Philip helped countless people finish their projects, cope with demands for last-minute remixes, and deal with emergencies of every description. If there was any way he could help you, he would, whether it meant staying a bit later to burn another CD, getting another client to move a session back an hour so you could squeeze a quick mix out of him, or even advising you about a problem you were having at another studio.

Philip’s love and understanding of people helped him get the most out of them in the studio. He had a real knack for coaching the inexperienced, or less than great, into giving a performance that was well beyond what you thought their limits were on hearing them for the first time. Philip always knew what to say to a struggling performer, and when. And, of course, once he’d gotten the best out of them, he would use his masterful engineering skills to make it sound even better. He had an eye for spotting potential in people and was great at bringing that potential to fulfillment.

If you worked in his studio as a musician or a singer, Philip looked out for you. He’d call you and say, “I have a new guy here who needs a guitar part. Can you come in tonight? I’ll make sure I talk with him about the business first so you don’t waste your time.” Then he’d call back later and say, “It’s OK, I talked to him. You can come in any time after 8 tonight, just tell me when you can get here.” If you got a call from someone you didn’t know, you could call Philip and find out who they were and how legitimate they were.

Philip was a great guy to call if you needed a musician or a singer. You’d explain to him what you were looking for and he’d know who was available and how well they were likely to do in any given situation. Philip hooked people up with gigs that ended up lasting for years. Of course he never took a dime for any of this. If you worked with Philip, permanent access to his knowledge and wisdom came as a package deal. If he couldn’t talk to you at any given moment, you’d get a call back within a few hours with an answer.

If you were a female, you were safe at HC&F, no matter what hour of the day or night you were there, or who was in the studio with you. Philip had tremendous respect for women and didn’t allow any foolishness on his premises.

Philip didn’t have any patience with artists or producers who didn’t want to pay either. Once I got stiffed by an artist for whom I’d done a whole album at HC&F. When he found out, Philip got as angry as I’ve ever seen him get. Anger in this case meant that his face flushed and he raised his voice somewhat, but he was emphatically not pleased.

“Naah mon! What him a deal wid? That’s not happening. Not in my studio. There’s a label and a budget here. I’m calling his record company right now. How much him owe you?” I told him. Philip got the A&R man for the project on the phone almost immediately, and explained what had happened. He told the A&R man the price the artist had agreed to pay me per song and vouched for how many songs he had recorded with me playing guitar on them. Philip had the track sheets and read them right off to him over the phone. Of course, Philip’s word was all the documentation required. I had a check for the full amount by FedEx the next day. I won’t have to explain to many of you how rare it is for an engineer to intervene on behalf of a musician with the record company. But that was Philip. He lived what he believed.

So many people called Philip uncle, because if you knew him, that’s how he treated you: like a family member. Doing a session at HC&F was like visiting your favorite relative, no matter how tough or clueless the client, Philip made it fun and we always laughed. On the way to the service, I kept remembering sessions I had done; they played through my mind like a sports highlight reel, without one bad memory. No one who worked with Philip Smart will ever forget him. RIP Philip. It was an honor to have known you.

 

Why Do You Have So Many Guitars? Part III

Posted on by abassford

Instrument Make and Model: Harmony Solidbody Electric Guitar

Color/Finish: Bronze

Arrival Date: 1968

Departure Date: 1972

Price Paid: $5

This was my first guitar. I got it from Mr. Maynard Lydiard, Marc’s father, for five dollars when he and his wife were splitting up. The seventh fret had a dent under the D string, so whenever I tried to play an A, I got Bb instead. This defect forced me to learn all the other places on the instrument where that A appeared, and resulted in my learning the fretboard faster than I otherwise would have.

The guitar (probably a Stratotone, a model that would find favor among blues revivalists thirty-plus years later), was finished in a lovely bronze, with one pickup. As nice as it looked, the finish was already damaged when I acquired it. Normally I would have left it as it was, but 1968 was the era of psychedelia. Creativity, illegible lettering, and unprecedented color combinations were the order of the day. Although I understood psychedelia only in theory, I decided that the prevailing cultural winds gave me license to wave my freak flag as high as possible. (Admittedly, “as high as possible” wasn’t very high, given my strictly supervised and decidedly unfreaky adolescent existence in rural Connecticut.) I had seen pictures of the great Eric Clapton of Cream sporting an SG with a fabulous psychedelic paint job courtesy of Beatle-approved art collective The Fool. I loved Cream, so why shouldn’t I have a psychedelic guitar too?

The path from thought to ill-advised action was short and swift. It was my guitar, my five bucks had paid for it, and my parents weren’t the slightest bit interested in what I did with it as long as it was legal. My father had large quantities of sandpaper in his basement workshop. He had taught me how to sand along with many other basic woodworking skills when I was very young. Dad was also extraordinarily generous about allowing my brother and I to use his tools, except for the table saw, which he insisted he be around to supervise if we wanted to use it.

I also had a number of small glass bottles of model paint, brushes, and thinner left over from my previous interest in model-building. As strict as my parents were about most things, when it came to artistic self-expression they were quite tolerant. I knew I wouldn’t get in trouble for painting a guitar as long as I kept the operation away from rugs and furniture. On the very next Saturday, after I ate breakfast, watched my Beatles cartoons, and mowed the lawn, I set to work.

I removed the bronze finish, which came off easily except for a few stubborn patches that I decided I would integrate into the design. I then painted the bare wood with yellow exterior house paint (the only color my father had lying around that was open) and let it dry, more or less, at least until after dinner. Then I scampered down into the basement again, opened up the model paints, and tried to channel the spirit of the Age of Aquarius.

About twenty minutes in, I realized that painting a guitar wasn’t just self-expression. Success required both a design and technical skill, neither of which I had bothered to develop before starting. It was already clear that the colors used to paint the grey and green fuselages of Army and Navy planes were not the palette of swinging London, something I had overlooked in the planning phase of my project. However, it was too late to turn back, so I dabbled on.

Several hours later I was finished, though I’d had to beg my mother for an extra half hour before bedtime to clean up. The results were hideous. I can see the bronze next to the navy blue on the headstock now. My precious new instrument, the gateway to a new life of hipness and belonging, looked like it had fallen on a Jackson Pollack painting. There was never an uglier guitar in the history of Western music. However, I did learn an important lesson from the experience: wishing for artistic success, even coupled with determined and swift action, isn’t enough to make it happen.

Not only was the guitar homely, and missing an A in the center of the fretboard, it didn’t sound great either. After I acquired a better guitar a bit later, by some miracle I was able to sell it for $15 to one of my classmates during my last year in prep school, so at least I made money on the deal.

Why Do You Have So Many Guitars? Part II

Posted on by abassford

This post originally appeared on my MySpace page, now dormant. I have slightly edited it for inclusion here.

Instrument Make and Model: Klira Bass Guitar

Color/Finish: Brown Sunburst

Arrival Date: 1968

Departure Date: 1972

Price Paid: $80

The Klira was my first electric instrument, and the first instrument I bought with my own money (not counting the harmonica I used my mother’s Green Stamps to buy a few years earlier). My best friend at the time, Marc Lydiard, had a rock band that rehearsed up the street, and their bass player was leaving because he was graduating high school. Marc offered me the job, but I needed an instrument! I worked a paper route for two months to get the money to buy a bass and an amplifier. It was the only time in my life I have voluntarily risen before 6 a.m. Of course the band broke up before I could join it, but we started another one, Synopsis, that played Doors and Vanilla Fudge songs. Depending on the song, I switched off between the Klira bass and the Harmony guitar now resplendent in its psychedelic model-paint finish. (See the next installment for more about this instrument, coming soon to this space!)

I played both instruments through a Gibson Thor bass amplifier, a justly obscure model that weighed a ton. Somewhere I also acquired a Goya fuzzbox with a treble boost, which I mostly used with the guitar. (It was the sixties, and psychedelia was very popular in West Simsbury, so occasionally I plugged the Klira into it too. Its microphonic pickups screamed like a pigeon caught in a push mower, and my bandmates quickly convinced me that it was a more appropriate effect for guitar.) I can’t remember what it sounded like but it must have been nightmarish.

Synopsis only played one gig, a benefit for the American Indians, and it was a complete disaster. Not only did I want to actually play in public and become a rock star, I desperately wanted to impress Alison Sarvis (a cool hippie girl in my class who helped organize the benefit), with the fact that I was in a band. Alison was a tall, craggily pretty brunette in jeans and turquoise jewelry who swore, made out with boys, and did drugs. She was brighter than she let on, although she did badly in school.

For some reason Alison was one of the few people my age who did not automatically write me off as a hopeless nerd. I think she liked my sincerity, as well as the fact that I was too timid to be as obnoxious as most of the males my age were. Her friendliness, as female friendliness so often does, planted the seeds of yearning for a closer affiliation, although I had no real clue as to what such an affiliation would entail, or how to go about cultivating it.

I did once walk several miles to her house to visit her during vacation. Alison’s mother, Mrs. Dolby, and brothers were much wilder than she was. (The idea that she had a different name from her brothers and mother was hard enough to digest. No one my parents knew had ever been divorced.) The brothers were really half-brothers, products of an earlier marriage. Neither marriage had lasted. Although I was familiar with the concept of half-brothers from my extensive study of English history, I had never actually met any. Nor had I ever met a family where people with different last names lived under the same roof.

Every time Mike Dolby, the oldest one, got out of jail he would celebrate by getting blitzed at the same club, get busted for crashing into things or cars in the parking lot, and go back to jail. He did this for years and years, at the same nightspot in Tariffville. It changed names several times, and yet every time I went back to Connecticut and read the Simsbury news in the Hartford Courant, it seemed that there was an item about Mike Dolby being arrested in the parking lot for drunken driving. It was a family tradition.

When I went to visit Alison, her mother gave me a warm, somewhat offhand welcome, despite the fact I had showed up without warning. I was invited to stay for lunch. While watching Mrs. Dolby prepare the meal, I noticed that she kept the butter in a kitchen cabinet instead of the refrigerator. Rather shocked, I asked her why and she pointed out that if the butter was left out of the refrigerator, it would stay soft and could be spread immediately on the white bread they toasted in copious quantities. The traditional New England belief in delayed gratification was not big in the Dolby household.

I wasn’t sure whether the thousands of microbes that had to be growing on the butter or the lack of nutrition in the white bread they proudly served me was more unsettling. (We ate only Pepperidge Farm Whole Wheat because it was more nutritious. My mother would have cut off her hand before opening a loaf of Wonder Bread.) It was clear that not everyone lived as we did. It didn’t stop me eating the toast, though. I rationalized that the intense heat probably killed whatever germs were waiting to leap off the bread and give me bubonic plague. Besides, I was a teenager, I was hungry, and it tasted good.

In the normal course of events, I would never have dared to speak to Alison, except that we had both worked on the junior high school’s underground newspaper together. This daring and revolutionary journalistic endeavor consisted of two to four mimeographed pages surreptitiously printed on the school machine and then stapled together by hand. Marc, being obsessed with the Zen of cool and sharing a fondness for illegal behavior and substances with Alison, already knew her and dragged me along, as he tried to do with everything, good or bad, that he did.

I knew my parents, who were politically very active, wouldn’t mind if I got busted for writing something. I could tell them I was trying to emulate Tom Paine. It also seemed like something at the cutting edge of cool that I might actually be able to do. (My brown shoes with laces, white socks, loose pants, and sober shirts, combined with my terror of alcohol, drugs, and petty mischief otherwise condemned me to terminal unhipness.)

I never got around to committing any illegal acts, but I did write articles for the paper. As I remember it, the primary topics were the Vietnam war (we were, of course, opposed), cool bands (all the usual psychedelic suspects), feminism (Karin Norton’s contribution: Karin was another beautiful brunette who became a friend later, and was way ahead of just about everyone I knew, including me, on this issue), and the right for students to smoke in school. Unfortunately (or not), I don’t have any examples of my first endeavor into journalism. I can’t even remember the name of the paper.

I do remember one of Karin’s opening sentences in one of her feminist diatribes: “One thing that really pisses me off…” I was amazed that she would say something this crude in print. Of course, we were an underground newspaper, but still, this was not the sort of reasoned philosophical argument I was used to seeing. Nobody ever swore (meaning saying “damn”) in my house, except when discussing Richard Nixon. I was appalled, but intrigued, at Karin’s courage and audacity. And her writing was direct, well reasoned, and forthright. Between Karin, Alison, and Marc, I was beginning to realize that there were other ways of doing things than those I had been brought up to believe in.

Which brings me back to the story. Prior to the gig, I had entertained triumphant fantasies of our rapturous reception, instant status among my peers, an end to the sneers and taunts of upperclassmen, and the wonder and amazement in Alison’s eyes as she witnessed my emergence as a Superman of rock from the phone booth of mundane high school existence. Maybe she would want to go steady!

It was the first time that the music business would disappoint me, but far from the last. To be polite about it, we were awful. The other guys in the band, who were supposedly more experienced than I was, froze with nervousness when confronted by a jury of their peers. Guitarist Greg Allen, Marc’s good friend who had moved away the year before, came all the way back from Newtown just to sit in on our big psychedelic version of “Shotgun,” the climax of our set. Marc had assured me that Greg was the best guitarist he had ever seen, and that with him aboard, this song could not fail, no matter what happened before it.

Greg tried his best. He riffed madly and at length, to absolutely no response. Then I took a bass solo. I summoned every ounce of my feelings for Alison—my muse, my bad, but not too bad, dream girl—and attempted to channel them, to turn them into glowing lightning bolts of devotion aimed directly at her heart and soul. This, after all,w as what music was for: the declaration of undying love to the object of your devotion, for the world to hear. Wasn’t it? Few are more romantic than those who know nothing of romance.

Unfortunately, I played an F when I meant to play an E, and panicked. My fingers wandered aimlessly around the fretboard. I felt nauseous, like the stage of the Eno Memorial Hall had opened into an elevator shaft gaping at my feet. I couldn’t figure out how to stop, but I couldn’t think of anything coherent to play either. The song fell as flat as if it had been… shotgunned. Almost everybody, including  Alison, went outside while we were playing and smoked cigarettes. Nobody clapped. Nobody.

About the only way the gig could have gone worse was if we had closed the show. The other band, Burnt Suite, came on after us and absolutely killed. Everybody came running back in as soon as they started playing their awesome Creedence Clearwater Revival covers. Even as competitive as I was, I had to admit that they sounded great and I thoroughly enjoyed their set. As a result of the gig, Alison ended up dating Billy Florian, their lead guitarist. The resulting trauma nearly ended my musical career before it started.

Synopsis rehearsed for a while longer and played once more, at a private party at Marc’s house that his older brother gave while his mom was away. We had gotten better. And this time we actually got eight bucks each, my first professional gig. But since our audience consisted of ten or fifteen couples under blankets and cushions making out with each other under the glow of a couple of black lights, our performance was met with the same indifference that we had endured at the Eno. It was shortly after this that we gave up.

After Synopsis broke up, I decided I was more interested in the guitar than the bass, and stopped playing it. My junior year in prep school, I auditioned for a group in town named Granite that was already up and running. Despite initially forgetting to plug my amp in, and enduring five minutes of terror until somebody else figured out what the problem was, I played well and got the gig. Soon we were playing church functions, school dances, and battles of the bands, and getting paid for it. I was a working musician at the age of sixteen.

Granite’s bass player, Kim Goldich, was unlike anyone I had ever met. One of the few Jews in an overwhelmingly WASPy world and from a family that was even more left wing than mine. Kim was ballsy, outspoken, passionate, fiercely dedicated to music, and brilliant with tools of all kinds. (He built an entire PA system from scratch for one of our later bands.)

He and I really hit it off at the first rehearsal, and I invited him over to visit the next weekend. He brought with him “Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade,” a two-album set of nonstop classics, most of which I had never heard. By the end of the day, we were friends for life.

Since I really wasn’t interested in the bass any more, I ended up giving the Klira to Kim,who was unhappy with his current instrument, a Vox teardrop bass with a built-in fuzztone and a tuning oscillator. Unable to afford a new bass, in typical Kim fashion he decided he would build his own in spite of the fact that he knew nothing about how to do it. The Klira died a noble death as he disassembled it for parts, many of which resurfaced on his new instrument, which was more functional than it had any right to be. Although he did play his creation for a while, eventually he bought a Fender bass like everyone else did and life went on.

Alison eventually went out to the Southwest to work with Native American tribes on reservations. Kim and I went to college and continued to play in bands together. Shortly thereafter I lost touch with everybody else I’d grown up with in West Simsbury, including Marc Lydiard, except my cousins. (Karin Norton would reappear briefly in my life at a later date.)