Epilogue
Woodstock ‘94—A Major Pro Audio Case History
Back in 1969, Woodstock was a modest weekend concert that unexpectedly drew 400,000 people, became a “gathering of the tribes,” and in memorable ways defined a generation, closing down the sixties. No one was prepared for what would happen, and it took the promoters 10 years to break even after paying for all the damages. Many things have changed since then, not the least of which is the professional audio industry. As the young owner of a new studio, my role in the first Woodstock was to supervise the early audio postproduction functions for the film and the record. It took almost 8 months of intensive work to correct all the tape problems and assemble the three-record set and soundtrack. In 1994, as CEO of the World Studio Group, my role was “Audio Facilities Coordinator,” and my goal was to utilize 25 years of experience to make things go a little smoother. Nothing less than perfection would do, and this time around we had only 11 weeks to get the records into the stores.
For Woodstock ‘69, it was a last-minute decision to even record the concert, then Michael Wadleigh was hired to film it, L. A. Johnson was chosen for film sound, and, among others, Eddie Kramer was brought in for recording because of his close friendship with many of the stars, such as Jimi Hendrix. The first Woodstock was recorded on dual 8-track in the back of the Hanley Sound trailer, with rudimentary cabling and equipment, and there was no preparation for the heavy rains that caused short circuits and problems in the signal flow. Amplifiers were exposed to the downpour, with the potential for great danger to the performers. During that weekend, 4,000 people were treated for illness, injury, and adverse drug reactions.
Like it or not, the Woodstock myth has pervaded the culture, and in 1994, nearly the same number of folks arrived at Saugerties, NY for the 25th Anniversary of mud and madness. There were only minimal injuries, a few unavoidable deaths, and a relatively small number of drug-related mishaps. The year of planning by Woodstock Ventures Incorporated and Polygram Diversified Ventures paid off in more ways than one.
This time around we had thousands of “WCs,” three 1-million gallon drinking water tanks, a battalion of security guards, and 740 acres of campsites. As for the recording of this event, things were quite different indeed. We had four of the best remote trucks, four scheduled stages (two stages, each of which revolved 180 degrees to provide another stage) and one surprise stage for local talent, eight 48-track digital machines, 500 rolls of 3M digital tape, a team of superstar engineers, and a 45-foot tour bus/field office with 12 bunks, 4 phone lines, and 2 large video monitors showing the pay-per-view broadcast. Eight miles away at Bearsville Recording were three studios, eleven 48-tracks (counting three that came to us after the festival closed), 40 bedrooms, a private caterer, 3 shuttle vehicles, more phones lines, and fax machines. I packed a heavy-duty rain parka and warned everyone to be prepared for torrential downpours throughout the entire weekend of August 13-14. Only by preparing for the worst could we hope to get the job done.
ADVANCE MOVES
Larry Hamby, at the time VP/A&R at A&M Records, and I had dinner on the 6th of April, and he asked me if I would be interested in working on Woodstock ‘94. When he began to describe the project, I suddenly was aware that nothing this big had ever been done before. Having been involved in major events starting with The Concert For Bangladesh, I knew Woodstock ‘94 would be a tough one, and I hoped that past experience plus a global network of audio professionals could rise to the occasion.
I accepted the job, and the World Studio Group was chosen by Hamby to provide audio facilities coordination for the festival; Hamby was designated as the executive producer of the CD set. The challenge was to coordinate 54 groups and record every second of live music. This would be a good test of the World Studio Group philosophy, calling for a massive operational plan and strategies with backups—sort of a model for future festivals of this magnitude. We like to think of the WSG as the “hub” of a recording organization, with the best people and facilities as the “spokes.” I felt confident, but with the time constraints, the number of stages operating simultaneously, and the engineers and quantity of equipment needed to record this musical event, many felt that our chances for success were slim.
Our first step was to work with a group of A&M executives to develop the budget to accomplish this feat. The prime consideration in the spending revolved around the time limitations, in order to have this album in the stores before Christmas. Hamby's directive was simple, “Make it happen—do it efficiently—save time whenever possible.”
After our first projections of the equipment and personnel necessary, we went to New York at the end of June to visit the site and meet with Mitch Maketansky, the audio director for pay-perview broadcasting by PDV (Polygram Diversified Ventures), the corporate entity presenting the event. Mitch worked for Allen Newman, the PDV executive for the entire pay-per-view extravaganza. All quickly agreed that, because of the two revolving stages and the possibility of additional stages, we needed a minimum of four remote trucks. We first went to World Studio Group member Dave Hewitt and his Remote Recording Services. Next was Kooster McAllister's Record Plant Remote for the South Stage, and the Effanel and Manhattan Center trucks for the North Stage. Ann Lewis, Director of A&R Administration at A&M, had also been recruited by Hamby to handle all the myriad administrative details concerning artists’ contracts, music publishing, and legal requirements for the label. Live concert veteran Mo Morrison had been chosen to lead the production team for Woodstock Ventures, and Joe O'Hurlehey of U2 fame controlled the stage.
Hamby, who was given the project by A&M senior executives, chose the team of engineers along with the PDV group to mix the live TV sound and multitrack recording. Bob Clearmountain, John Harris, and Jay Vicari were assigned the North Stage, with Ed Cherney, Dave Thoener, and Elliot Scheiner at the South Stage.
Nearby was Bearsville Studios, another member of the WSG, which seemed to be the ideal choice for the support facility. On June 28, Hamby called a meeting in NYC with myself, Ann Lewis, Mitch, Mark McKenna, general manager at Bearsville, and Bob Clearmountain, who would become the lead audio engineer and be responsible for much of the mixing, plus editing and assembly of the project. We discussed our various roles, and the amount of cooperation needed to make the recording of the festival a success. With these roles solidified, we began to realize the incredible amount of work that had to be completed prior to the festival.
We next negotiated with the four remote trucks, made an endorsement arrangement with 3M digital tape, and hired the multitrack recorders, with two provided gratis by Sony and two by Studer. The machines were supplied by Audio Affects in L.A. and New York rental companies Toy Specialists, Audio Force, and Dreamhire. When we realized that we would have $3.2 million worth of digital machines in our possession, liability policies were quickly taken out by A&M. We emptied the East Coast and a good portion of the West Coast for available 48-track machines, causing a tremor among producers who had to scramble for the remaining machines.
In what I believe to be a first, the tape path—from blank to finished master and clones—was totally standardized before the event. For each group we allotted four rolls of 1-hour load digital multitrack tape, four cassettes, and two DATS, all prelabeled, including song order when available, which would be delivered prior to the festival. Our biggest concern was that traffic problems and crowds would prevent us from reaching the site with the raw tape for recording. You only get one shot to record live, and if this plan had failed everybody could have been looking for new employment! Individual cartons were prepared for each artist and stored in air-conditioned vaults on-site, then delivered each morning to the trucks designated to record those performances.
COUNTDOWN TO WOODSTOCK
Monday, August 1, we arrived at the site, which was already a beehive of activity with several thousand workers assembling the stages, pitching tents for food vendors, moving the porta-potties into position, and digging trenches for distribution of drinking water. A small village of office trailers was assembled on the hill above the stages to house all of the Woodstock Ventures production-related functions. Each trailer was fitted with telephones, walkie-talkies were distributed, waste removal was coordinated, power was put in, and arrangements were made for catered meals to take place continuously during the event.
We then moved into position the 45-foot Eagle touring bus that had been acquired to serve as the A&R festival site office and 12-bunk hotel for the audio engineers. The bus was put equidistant between the North and South Stages, which were about 500 yards apart. The bus was equipped with four telephone lines, fax machines, its own generator, and two “executive” porta-potties. This was the A&M site headquarters.
Eight miles away was Bearsville, which was to provide the festival site with total facilities and backup. Here we had a private caterer, and provisions for transportation of personnel and supplies to and from the site. With music to go nearly around the clock, we wisely set up residences for all the hard-working A&M personnel and engineers. We had three studios, each with three 48-track machines, set up to manufacture the double clones of each performance master, so as to provide a safety copy for A&M and another safety master for each artist. For communication between the tour bus, Bearsville, and the shuttle vehicles, we had six cellular phones, walkie-talkies, and four phones at each end.
On Monday, August 8, Larry Hamby, Ann Lewis, and the A&M A&R crew designated as “listeners” arrived at Bearsville. Since we realized that Hamby as executive producer could not listen to a projected 75 hours of recordings from 54 acts all by himself, he organized a group of A&M A&R staff members who would be the official listeners. The responsibility of the six listeners, one for each truck with an additional two for shift changes, included making sure tape supplies were adequate for each performance in their assigned truck, listening to and watching the performance of each act recorded by their assigned truck, and making sure that at the end of each performance there was immediate delivery of DATs and cassettes to the A&M site headquarters for distribution by Ann Lewis to the artists or their representatives. At the conclusion of the recording of the festival, each listener would spend 5 days studying the assigned performances and evaluating which were the best performances of each artist. The listeners’ role was to suggest to Hamby which songs they thought were the best from each performance for possible inclusion in the forthcoming CD.
On Tuesday the 9th, the A&M staff received orientation, maps, and schedules regarding Bearsville and the festival site in order to get familiar with their surroundings. That evening, Larry Hamby and A&M hosted a party at the Bear Cafe in Bearsville for all the Woodstock Ventures managers, the audio engineers, who had arrived that afternoon, and the remote truck crews who had parked and powered that morning at the site. Hamby correctly decided that this would be the last night when anyone could relax in a friendly environment before the adrenaline took over. A good time was had by all, and a sort of battlefield bonding took place, creating a team spirit among the normally fiercely independent providers and personalities.
On Wednesday the two remote trucks at each stage finished setups, the A&M personnel assembled the tape packages, and more detailed preparations took place before the impending arrival of the masses on Friday. Sound checks began, stages were revolved and checked, and all the 48-tracks were tested for integration into a complicated system that called for the signal coming from the stage to the designated truck. The requirements called for simultaneous 48-track recording, a live stereo mix “on the fly” provided for the pay-per-view broadcast and live radio, plus lines to the DAT and cassette recorders in each truck.
On Thursday the 11th, the tension began to mount. We had last-minute “tweaking” in the trucks and on stage, with Mitch Maketansky overseeing the final integration of the trucks to the stages. All the tape packages arrived from Bearsville and were stored. Then we proceeded with a complete dress rehearsal for the A&M staff on-site to get the wrinkles out of our procedures. This meant actual tapes being shuttled back and forth, testing communication and faxes, and making sure of constant phone support.
As part of our Bearsville strategy, we provided hotel facilities to A&M staff, engineers, and producers. This meant awakening them early in the morning, feeding them a healthy breakfast, shuttling them to the site, delivering a gourmet box lunch, refreshments during the day, a catered dinner, and either a shuttle back for sleep or accommodations in the A&M bus. We did our best to be a 4-star hotel on the road, taking care of all their needs from wake-up to tuck in, so that the engineers could concentrate only on their best creative efforts for the highest quality recording.
THE MUSIC BEGINS
Friday morning, everybody got up shaking because the downbeat of the festival was at 11 AM. It was like going into battle—very detailed preparations had been made, and now we had to do it. All working personnel were delivered early to the site because the first act was due to start that morning on the North Stage. Twenty acts followed, including unsigned local bands and a “rave” that began at midnight and continued until 6:30 AM the next morning.
Mitch Maketansky had made it easier for the engineers to go from recording group to group by standardizing the microphone setup on each stage as much as possible. He chose the largest group, the Neville Brothers, and with few exceptions simply contracted or expanded that mike setup for each band, so that the audio recording engineer assigned to each group knew how each instrument would be miked, which microphone would be used, and which lines would be feeding the signal to each fader in the truck consoles.
Meanwhile, back at Bearsville, our 24-hour-a-day cloning operation began at 4 PM, when the first shuttle from the site returned with the master tapes from the first group of performing artists. Security guards were in place to protect these irreplaceable tapes, which were first logged into the library, and reassigned to one of the three cloning stations for the manufacture of two simultaneous safety masters. As an additional provision, a four-camera line video shot of each performance, with SMPTE address, was furnished for the cloning engineers back at Bearsville (who had not seen the performance). They were responsible for the safety master and the artist's copy, and in this way they could check visually, making sure of editing each performance at precisely the right point during applause between tunes. Each remote truck was recording with two machines running, staggered, with the second machine starting five minutes into the performance, or at the end of the first song. In this way, we had extra insurance, with nearly double recording as a margin of safety. Our fears of dropouts were unfounded, as the 3M 275 LE 1/2 9600 digital tape performed flawlessly throughout.
The result of the cloning operation was two complete master copies of each performance from beginning to end. By 6 o'clock we had our first clones completed, and a cheer went up because our tape path system had proven successful. Hamby said from his on-site command post, “The Eagle has landed.”
Saturday morning, August 13, with most everything running smoothly at Bearsville, I went to the site to check their operations. Upon arrival at the bus, I was greeted by a very excited Larry Hamby, who said, “Chris, they built a third stage during the night for a lot of the acts that play the local clubs, and they are about to begin performing. I'm calling it the ‘Renegade Stage,’ and my promise was that we would record every note at Woodstock—please make it happen.” In the next 20 minutes I had borrowed Kooster's personal DAT machine, plus a makeshift set of adapters assembled by Paul Prestopino, the maintenance tech in the Record Plant truck. This would connect us with the PA system on the new stage, and Paul Wolff (president of API consoles at his day job, who also worked the stage for Kooster) ran over with me to install. Hamby chose his assistant Jill Carrigan to operate the tape machine, and told her to “write everything down” because she was now producing her first album.
By Saturday afternoon the rains had begun. At 8:30 PM, Nine Inch Nails arrived, climbed out of their bus, rolled in the mud, and jumped on stage to the cheers of the muddy masses. Shortly after midnight, as Aerosmith appeared, the heavens opened up on the downbeat, providing some divine staging. Because of the preplanning and fears of the worst, there were no power shortages, no performers got wet unless they wanted to, and the festival recording continued without a hitch.
In a quiet moment, Ed Cherney remarked, “The best part of this is being together with my fellow engineers and seeing everybody subordinating their egos. When you do this for a living, making records is dog-eat-dog. But pulling together like this is a rush of adrenaline.”
By Sunday morning, after a night of rain, dawn revealed the world's largest mud bath. Performances continued throughout the rainy day until the level of discomfort reached the point where people started heading back to their cars in droves. By about 3 PM, the New York state troopers shut down all roads in the area and suspended all vehicle access permits. The roads were filled with departing festival goers, shoulder to shoulder—one solid mass of flowing humanity. All of our shuttle vehicles were stranded. It took us almost 2 hours to arrange for the head of security at the festival to contact the individual troopers at checkpoints to arrange for our vehicles to drive along the shoulder of the road, in order to deliver our tapes. Back at Bearsville, the clone factory had slowed down, which gave us some anxiety, but luckily the tapes soon started flowing again from the festival site.
The festival ended on the North Stage with Peter Gabriel in the early morning hours of Monday, at which point the final rave commenced on the South Stage and continued through the night.
AFTER THE STORM
Monday morning dawned with the cloning operation in full swing. By approximately 7 AM we had all the tapes from the site and were able to project that we would complete our cloning operation by the end of the day on Wednesday. After recovering from the three days of almost constant recording, the A&M listeners appeared in the late afternoon for a meeting with Hamby and Lewis to begin their postproduction performance evaluation. By Friday, all evaluations had been submitted to Hamby, the team headed home, and the performance clones had been shipped to locations all over the world, as designated by each artist. The original masters and safeties were on their way to A&M in Hollywood (in two separate shipments sent at two separate times, with two separate air express companies, to increase the odds that at least one shipment would be delivered safely to A&M), to be cataloged under the guidance of Dave Abramson, A&M Records tape librarian.
After final creative agreements by Hamby and all of the performing artists, mixing was begun in the studios with the engineers chosen by each performer. Hamby chose the six on-site engineers because they represented expertise in all the genres of music planned for the festival. One reason he did this was in the hope that the majority of the artists who performed at the festival would feel comfortable with these engineers and stay with our team for the mixing phase of the project. The majority of artists agreed and chose the Woodstock engineers who had seen and recorded their performances to mix their potential contribution to this historic CD set. This greatly expedited the return of the final mixes to A&M and provided the crucial time for the sequencing, editing, and assembly by Bob Clearmountain and Mitch Maketansky.
“This was the largest live-recording event in history,” Hamby said. “There was more music happening over a wider area of time and genre, that was being recorded in the most precise manner, than at any other time.” By the following Monday, a week after the music stopped, all of us involved in this historic and overwhelming event were back to our normal everyday lives, somewhat missing the Woodstock rush of frenzied activity.
In early November, 1994, the double CD of Woodstock ‘94 was released on schedule, in time for high-volume Christmas sales. It was a big hit and quickly became a multimillion Platinum seller. Great record. Best experience and most fun ever. That's what I love about this business. Lots of fun and calling it work. If they only knew.