Credits include: Queen (including “Bohemian Rhapsody”), the Cars (their first four albums), Journey, Dusty Springfield, Nazareth, Foreigner, Alice Cooper, Ian Hunter, Be Bop Deluxe, Smashing Pumpkins, and Ron Wood. See the Appendix for Roy Thomas Baker’s full bio.

My experimental years begin with Queen. There is a song on Sheer Heart Attack called “Now I’m Here.” We wanted a long delay, and an Echoplex wasn’t long enough, and there weren’t any digital delays in those days. So we got two Studer A80s, and we ran a tape loop to the second Studer two-track machine, which was about 10 feet away from the first Studer two-track machine. The distance was just far enough away for the delay to be in time with the music. To watch the tape go from one machine across a light fixture and down to a chair and over a table and then to the other machine was really funny. Because the Studers had double guides, and they wouldn’t work unless they were both physically in action [otherwise, the machines would just stop], we had to gaffer tape the rotary guides down.

So we had Freddie’s voice going into one of the tracks on the Studer multitrack, and we went out of that into the left-hand channel of the first two-track Studer machine, playing back off the left-hand channel of the second Studer 2-track machine, and that would go back to another channel of the multitrack as a delay. We would feed the left-hand output of the second machine into the right-hand input of the first Studer machine at the same time we were recording that on a separate track on the multitrack. Then we were playing back off the second Studer machine, on the right-hand side, and that would go into the third track on a multitrack.

So whatever Freddie sang, there would be a delay coming from his vocal. He would sing something like “Now I’m there,” and then it would come out “Now I’m there” again, and it was all in time with the music. It was a really long delay, and Freddie was actually singing harmonies with himself. When he heard the repeat coming out of his headphones, he automatically sang the third above, and when he heard the third above coming back, he was then singing the fifth above, so it was a three-part harmony.

I’m located on the Mojave mountain range, overlooking the Colorado River. Since we are on mountains that are half-volcanic and half-granite, there are loads and loads of volcanic rocks around. They are the rocks with the holes in them.

We’ve got these solar tubes called Burke Tubes. I’ve got one that is like 6 feet long, and I stick it in front of the bass drum and seal the bass drum and the Burke Tube, which is the same width as the bass drum, and we fill it with all of these volcanic rocks. Then we put a couple of Shure flat mics inside. I think they are called the SM91s. That sounds really good. It livens up the sound but deadens some frequencies more than others. We end up with this huge low-end thud that comes from the bass drum. It is such a big, big sound, yet it is relatively short, because the weight of the rocks alone causes a lot of dampening. The sound doesn’t go long like a normal bass drum. It actually makes a [high-impact dead sound] really loud.

Years ago, I did an album with Chris de Burgh over in Europe; he was always on tour, and he has his own fleet of airplanes. So while I was mixing in Metropolis Studio in London, we hooked up the stereo mix going from ground to airplane control via satellite, on two separate radios in his private airplane. He had one set of headphones on one radio and one set of headphones on the other radio, and he put one headphone from each set on each ear, so he could hear the mix in stereo as we were doing it, while he was flying from Ireland to Germany.

When the Cars first bought their studio in Boston and changed the name to Syncro Sound, we were doing the mixes of the fourth Cars record, and we weren’t sure if the mixes were going to sound good over the radio, so we set up a link to the main rock radio station, and we played the mix over the air at 2 o’clock in the morning, while we were still mixing. We had it on automation, so the faders were going up and down. The radio station was playing the mix live on the air, and we would drive around in cars and wave at each other, listening to the mixes as they were going down on the radio. [Laughs] That way we could hear exactly what it would sound like as it came over the radio, through their compression and through all of their EQs and stuff…. We did that on the first mixes, just to see what it would sound like over those radio things.

Credits include: Stevie Wonder, Tom Petty, John Cougar Mellencamp, Mick Jagger, Black Sabbath, Kiss, Devo, Michael Jackson. See the Appendix for Eddie Delena’s full bio.

We’ve made entire drum and percussion kits out of Michael [Jackson] sort of beat boxing and stuff. Michael would sing on a wooden platform, because during his singing and sometimes without singing, he would stomp on the platform, which would basically be the kick drum, and he would do all of the percussion with his hands and mouth. He’d clap and finger-snap and slap his thighs and make all of this beat boxing from his mouth. It was a cool sound effect. All of these sounds would be incorporated. At one point we sampled every one of them and made a whole percussion kit out of that, and he even wrote a song with that as the foundation of the song. One song was called “Stranger in Moscow,” which was on HIStory. He does that on a lot of his records anyway. Sometimes you are not sure if it was a percussion instrument or him. He was really tremendous to work with, and that was a lot of fun to do.

During the mixing of HIStory, we did something that was the height of overkill. [Laughs] I don’t know if it has been done before, but for mixing the song “HIStory,” we hooked up two control rooms with four 3348 digital multitracks DASH-locked and both SSL computers running sync at the same time from different rooms at Larrabee North Studios. That was 96 tracks in each room. This was for one song. [Laughs]

Basically, in Room A, we had an 80-channel SSL, so we were using both large and small faders. That essentially had the basic tracks, like all the music tracks and lead vocals, et cetera, and Room B had an orchestra spread out, a choir, background vocals, Boyz II Men, and a bunch of other stuff. [Laughs]

The tracks in B Room, like the orchestra, were sent to the front bus, and the vocals, like the choir, were sent to the rear bus, which came up on four faders in the A Room. Then the entire stereo mix bus, from the A Room, was sent to an external monitor in the B Room, so you could actually adjust the levels in the B Room and listen to how everything sat in the entire mix. By changing which 3348 was master, you could run the mix in either room. [Laughs] Between Steve Hodge, myself, and a guy named Andrew Scheps, who kind of technically put it all together, we all worked on the ongoing song.

Credits include: Georgia Satellites, Steve Earle, Colin James, Jeff Healey, Carl Perkins, Tom Cochrane (“Life Is a Highway”), Jimmy Barnes, Merchants of Venus, the Replacements, the Hooters, ZZ Top. See the Appendix for Joe Hardy’s full bio.

I just produced this female artist from Australia named Marie Wilson. For this one song, I wanted this acoustic guitar to sound sort of like a Leslie, but the problem is that when you run an acoustic guitar through a Leslie cabinet, it sort of destroys the acoustic-ness of it, because once you amplify the guitar, then it is no longer an acoustic instrument. It is an amplified instrument at that point. It may be a cool sound, but it is a different thing.

So to get a Leslie effect on the acoustic guitar, I miked the acoustic guitar by putting two wireless SM58 microphones on a ceiling fan. That is how I miked the guitar. So instead of making the speakers spin, as in a Leslie, I was making the microphones spin. It really does the same thing, but this way it really sounds like an acoustic guitar. There is a lot of Doppler and phase shifting going on, except it is all acoustic and not electronic.

There are many of these boxes out now trying to simulate the Leslie sound, but real Leslies sound great because there are so many weird things going on at the same time, like the Doppler and phase stuff and amplitude changes. The sounds are getting louder and softer and louder and softer. It is crazy.

The stuff I did with ZZ Top is the nuttiest, on the verge of being almost unbelievable, because they had money and time and Billy Gibbons, who is just insane. For example, on the song “Rough Boy,” Gibbons had five different guitars tuned to the chords of the song, and he played them with an airbrush, so there was no impact. He was just nuts, and he could afford to have five guitars that were exactly the same.

On the song “Sleeping Bag,” I bolted an EMT driver onto one of those gray metal utility shelves that you see in like anybody’s garage, and we put that in the echo chamber at Ardent, and that is on every snare sound on that song.

On the last ZZ Top record, which is the best album they did in many years, there is a song called “Loaded.” Billy wanted a guitar effect on the end that sounds like a shortwave radio. Since he was a kid, he would listen to these crazy broadcasts from Mexico, and he has always loved the way shortwave radios sounded.

The reason shortwave radios sound so oddball is because part of the signal gets there direct, but also part of the signal bounces off of the ionosphere, so it takes longer because it has to go farther. It phases with the original signal that was direct. Because the ionosphere changes so much, the frequency that it phases at changes really rapidly and in a really weird, random, fractal fashion.

We made a cassette of only the guitar part and sent it to a friend of his in Mexico, who broadcast it over his shortwave radio to Houston, where Billy had this crazy shortwave radio that was made in South Africa and doesn’t use batteries or plug in. It has some weird internal generator, and you wind up the radio with the big wheel on the side, and it works for like 30 minutes. Then you wind up the wheel again.

So we recorded it off of Billy’s wind-up radio in Houston and then flew it back into the track. So it is just a nutty guitar sound. Since Billy wanted it to sound like a shortwave radio, the easiest way to do it was to broadcast it over a shortwave radio. You see, instead of running it through a harmonizer that just happens to say “Shortwave Radio Effect” or something, we just did the real thing.

If you were across town and tried it, it wouldn’t work. You need to be far away, because if you are close, there is not enough phasing. Plus, Billy insisted that it come from Mexico. [Laughs]

Credits include: Kings of Leon, Tom Waits, Modest Mouse, MUTEMATH, Sea Wolf, Pictures and Sound. See the Appendix for Jacquire King’s full bio.

I use a boom box or a cassette recorder as a microphone. The microphones that are built into them typically have great midrange. The line outputs will often pass the input signal without having to actually record on the unit. Putting a boom box in front of a drum kit and using it as a close room element blends in very well with the close mics. Most of these recorders also have built-in compressors, so it can add a lot of explosive excitement to the recording. I really like to light those things up sometimes, and it gives you a crazy blown-up sound of the drum kit.

Some artists have a harder edge to their vocal sound, or it’s desired to just have a distorted vocal sound in the production. I’ve taken recorded vocal tracks and run them back through a microphone preamp or re-amped them through a guitar amp to achieve this. When re-amping a track, you can mike it close or far for some added ambience. Some singers perform through loud, awful PAs as part of their live show, and it ends up becoming a texture of their sound. Being able to create that in a recording is important.

When I know the final vocal will have a drier presentation, I like to record a slightly distorted amp sound with the clean vocal sound. I’ll split off the signal with a mult before the multitrack and send it to a re-amp box. I use a small tube amp for guitar, like a Watkins or a Maestro, and go through a graphic EQ pedal before it to filter off some of the bottom end. Putting the voice through an amp gives you a great texture to blend in and that adds a grainy air to the sound of the voice. It fills in for something like reverb or delay and adds a lot of excitement to the sound. Sometimes while mixing, I like to use an old Blue Stripe 1176 very aggressively on the vocal. They have a distortion quality to them that really is quite pleasing and translates well to small speakers.

A unique piece I like to use while recording drums is a Sony portable tube two-track machine that I have. It came with a pair of little microphones that I like to stick into the kick drum or lay on the floor under the snare. I get a lot of level into the tape recorder and make the tubes saturate. It adds a very interesting sound to the drum kit. It always blends in really well with the drum picture. On the Tom Waits record Mule Variations, I placed those microphones at each end of the piano, where they added an element of murky, yet high-frequency excitement to the sound of the piano and voice. While combining the sound of those mics with the piano mics, a vocal mic, and some room mics, I had a total of seven sounds to play with and find a cool balance. It’s great to have some sounds that are very near as well as farther away, but for really unique presentations, it’s helpful to have sounds that have different qualities of clarity to blend in, too.

Another thing I would occasionally do on the Waits records is re-amp tracks through an SVT in a room where we had recorded. I would re-record the sounds at loud volumes to get the rattle and shake of the room. It added an element of danger and excitement into the mix. I also played back Tom’s voice in a similar way and would capture the ambience of the room for use as a vocal reverb.

Credits include: The Breeders, Ride, Dillon Fence, Madder Rose, Marilyn Manson, Del Amitri. See the Appendix for Mark Freegard’s full bio.

People are always a little surprised or concerned with the way I am using the equipment. There is a track on the Breeders’ Last Splash called “Mad Lucas.” There were times when Kim Deal would say, “How small can you make this sound?” She would keep saying, “That is still not small enough, Mark.” Well, there is a guitar and a violin on that track that I managed to get pretty small.

At first, I would be winding out all of the bottom end, but finally, I ran it through a little Tandy speaker that I carry with me. It’s a little mini-amplifier and speaker that is pretty hideous. It’s not a personal computer speaker; it is worse than that. It is a tiny little plastic box that cost a couple of pounds in England and runs off a 9-volt battery. It works well for distortion or resizing a sound and sending it somewhere else. I put the guitar through that speaker, back through the board, and out through an Auratone, which I miked up in a toilet, recorded that, and filtered that over again.

The ambient properties of the toilet at Coast Recorders were useful for other aspects of Last Splash. We actually recorded quite a lot of the vocals in this toilet at Coast Recorders in San Francisco. Kim Deal really loved it in there. Anyway, it had a really good sound. I started recording more of the little speaker things in there, too.

I also use an Eventide 3500, which has a lot really cool distortion or Doppler effects that the 3000 doesn’t have. Sometimes I find myself putting a signal through that and monitoring the return and not using very much source. I did that with a string section on an English band called Goya Dress. We had this one song where we put on strings, but we didn’t think they were working very well. I just looked for a program on the 3500 that did something to the strings on the middle eight that took them to another place. The program made them become another instrument, certainly not strings.

I used the Roland Space Echo on the Goya Dress session. I changed the pitch of the tape loop by pushing my finger up against the pinch roller. I controlled the pitch of the sustain spin like that.

For a more unique ambient touch on the vocals, I found Coast’s grand piano a useful tool for vocals. On the Breeders album, on a track called “Do You Love Me Now?” the vocal reverb on the intro is a piano. I had Kim sing into a grand piano. It is really quite useful, because there are all these resonances from the piano that make up the reverb. I just put a couple of mics on the soundboard. She was leaning over the front of the piano, singing into the soundboard. She got quite annoyed because I had to set the gain really high, and if she moved, we couldn’t use it. It ended up being quite a special moment.

Credits include: Roger McGuinn, Little River Band, Rick Nelson, REO Speedwagon, Sammy Hagar, Quarterflash, Charlie Daniels, Pure Prairie League, Michael Murphy. See the Appendix for Paul Grupp’s full bio.

There are hundreds of things that I have done, but most of them are not worth mentioning. They are stupid things, like back in the old days, we used to dissect the old analog synthesizers and patch them into everywhere they weren’t supposed to go. Everyone did it, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Lowell George taught me the trick for getting his slide guitar sound, when I was working with him on a project. He told me to align this old 3M 79 tape machine at +20 dB. So I did, and it sounded really wonderful. There was tons of incredible tape saturation and compression, distortion, and all of that stuff.

The next time I did a slide guitar, I did the same thing, and I burned up a head stack. As it turned out, when I did it the second time, I did it in stereo and used two adjacent tracks. I later found out that you had to put many tracks in between because it heated the heads up so much.

I should have used Track 1 and Track 24 or Track 1 and Track 16. What I did was put the information on Tracks 9 and 10. Since the two were right next to each other, there was nothing in between to dissipate heat.

I just basically melted down a $5,000 head stack, which the owner of the studio wasn’t too thrilled about. It was at Westlake Audio. When he came to me, I said, “Well, it should take it.” I went on about AGFA tape: “If you align it at +10, it should work out fine.” Then I went on about the design of the machine and this and that, and he looked up at me and said, “I designed that machine when I was working at 3M, before I started this company. It is not designed to take that!” That was Glenn Phoenix.

For mono or stereo, if you do it carefully, you can definitely see how Lowell got this unique sound. You do everything else normally, like mike the amp and so forth. You just overdrive the machine well before you start hearing something. Normally, about +6 is where you start noticing pretty good distortion. At +12, it is history.

A lot of the desired noise and impact gets lost in the normal signal path. This method got it straight to tape. See, you would distort the console, and nothing in the whole recording chain would ever deliver it. It would clip the signal and prevent that level from ever getting to tape. You might get +10, but you would have this distortion from all of the electronics, rather than the tape. This way, it was a matter of sending a normal signal to the tape machine and then cutting it onto the tape +20 dB hotter.

I can tell you of one thing that I witnessed, but I didn’t do myself. Lee Kiefer was a producer and engineer of the first Tubes records. He had this brilliant idea that he wanted to take a tinny 2- or 3-inch transistor radio speaker, connect wires to it, and hook it up to a microphone input. He took a couple of pieces of string, put a couple of holes in the speaker, and hung it from the tuning lugs of the kick drum. This speaker was hanging dead center in the back of the kick drum, where the head had been removed.

They used it as a microphone for the kick drum, and it recorded only the sounds that caused that speaker to really move. Where the speaker was efficient and moved, the sound would propagate down the line, and the ones that it couldn’t reproduce or couldn’t handle, it just didn’t. When you did a final mix and played it back on one of those small radios, that kick drum really stood out. It practically ripped the speaker out that you were playing back on. On a big system, you didn’t really notice any big deal. His whole idea was that on small radios, the kick drum was always lost. He wanted to figure out a way to get around that. It worked great.

Credits include: Redd Kross, Dinosaur Jr., Aerosmith, Earth, Wind & Fire, Alice Cooper, Son Volt, the Smithereens, Screaming Trees, Dish, Chainsaw Kittens. See the Appendix for John Agnello’s full bio.

A microphone and a speaker are the same thing. They are transducers. One sucks and the other blows, as I like to say. When you wire the subwoofer as a microphone, it sucks. What it does is reproduce these signals out of the bass drum, which are sub-low frequencies. You can barely hear it, but you can feel it a ton.

My only real speaker of choice is a 15-inch subwoofer, as opposed to just a 15-inch speaker, which I’ve tried. It seems like the subwoofer, for some odd reason, catches the frequencies in different ways. At least that is true with some of the ones I have had. Of course, I might just be insane, and I am just convincing myself of this. However, at the times I’ve not had actual subwoofers and just had speakers, it seemed to me to be different.

If you have a guy with a small bass drum, it really helps to make it sound thicker or deeper. If you’ve got a guy with a big bass drum, you can hopefully make it sound even bigger. It is a matter of taste, but in optimum situations, it really works great. I use it all the time. People think I am crazy, but I do it.

Credits include: Jerry Lee Lewis, G. Love & Special Sauce, Mojo Nixon, The Radiators, Live Aid, Hall & Oates, the Neville Brothers. See the Appendix for Bob Kruzen’s full bio.

While recording the Panama album, which was produced by Dony Wynn, we were looking for ideas to make a couple of songs a little more extreme. I had this Shure mic that was really old, and it had this strange hollow sound to it that we liked. I mentioned to them that for a lot of the old-time sessions, people would sing into a bucket for an effect. Dony found a big old steaming pot for crawfish, and we put mics in the bucket and had the singer sing into it. It was a really nice vocal effect with a tone we couldn’t have gotten any other way.

I’ve got a couple of compressors that are great for weird things. One of them is an old Altec 438A compressor. I’ve got it to where I have complete control over the attack, decay, and compression. I can almost make it work backward to where it is expanding instead of compressing. It has also got a nice distortion element to it.

The great compressor for doing really strange stuff is an Eventide Omnipressor, and a lot of people don’t know about it. It has a knob on it that will do anything from extreme compression to reverse expansion with a gate, so it will actually make the transients louder and then cut off the low parts. It’ll put dynamics into something instead of taking things out.

I have used it to de-compress over-compressed things. It is also a great device for drums, because you can stick a point on a drum that isn’t there. You can make it inside out, so when you hit a drum, it’ll go away and then suck up in reverse.

I’ve got a Telefunken V72, which I basically use to be a fuzz box. I know a lot of people use them for mic pres because they are usually looking for the Beatles’ “sound.” I think it is a good mic pre, but when I overload it and use it as a distortion box, it really adds a special quality. I like it especially on the bass guitar or drums. If I want something clean and quiet, I’ve got some Universal Audio things that I use for actual preamps. I just use the Telefunken V72 as an effect.

Another thing we have done is take a Rockman and patch it into the effects send of a console, like an SSL, and use it as a fuzz box. It isn’t really made to run through a console, but when you patch it in, it really sounds pretty cool. The input/out works best, as opposed to using the cue send, because it has a really hot signal, and it overdrives everything. I’ve run vocals, guitars, and drums through it. In fact, a snare drum through a Rockman is quite a sound.

Credits include: the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, the Cramps, Robert Cray, the Replacements, Gin Blossoms, Travis Tritt, Marty Stuart. See the Appendix for John Hampton’s full bio.

If you are looking for a total out-of-control effect, a lot of times you can go to the SSL Listen Mic compressor to achieve that. It is a total, 100-percent ass-bashing, trash-compacting compressor. It takes any dynamic range and reduces it to one level. If you hit a drum and then stop, the compression lets go, and the room tone gets as loud as the drum hit does.

Let’s say we are doing this on mixdown. Generally, you use a regular echo send from a channel and send that to the Listen Mic input of the console. You kind of play with the echo send level and the listen mic input level to achieve the desired effect. This is done while in Listen Mic mode. Once you’ve done that, the only way you can get that to tape is to hit the Listen Mic To Tape button and put a track into Record. Be warned that you cannot control the level to your monitors, because the monitor volume pot is out of the loop now, as is the Cut button. In other words, you can’t turn it off. The only thing you can do is unplug the speakers or turn the monitor amps off. The end result is messed up and great. You record it onto another track and add it into the mix when you need it. A lot of the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me album was run through the Listen Mic compressor. I’ve used it a bunch.

Many things have been said about where the paths of excess lead, and I’m more than happy to relate one such experience.

Joe Hardy [ZZ Top, Tom Cochrane, Jeff Healey] and I used to do lots of stupid things. We once had an old Les Paul, and we were looking for an odd sound for a band called Photons on Line Records in Germany. The song was called “Idle Jets.” For the hell of it, we ran the guitar through every piece of equipment in the room that we could get our hands on. The guitar ended up sounding exactly like an elephant charging. It was totally, completely messed up.

I know for a fact that we started off going through an Orban two-channel parametric equalizer. We went in one channel, maxed it out, and took the output of that channel into the input of the other channel of the equalizer. We maxed that out, too, took that through an EMT 140 plate, and took the output of the plate to a Langevin Passive Graphic. We took the output of that to a Lexicon Prime Time digital delay, went from that to a Pultec MEQ5, took the output of that through another Pultec MEQ5 and went into a rack-mounted MXR flanger, and then into an MXR phaser. We took the output of that into a Dolby unit on encode and took that into Pandora’s Time line. We recorded that onto tape at +17 over 185 nW.

On the same song, we took the mix and ran the left and right channels through separate Fender Twins, out of the board onto a separate piece of tape. The Fender sound was very distorted.

As the song was ending, we would cut to the Fender amp recordings every four bars of the mix, and then to the normal signal straight out of the board, and we went back and forth every four bars. The desired effect was hi-fi/lo-fi. The end result was indeed very sick. Too bad I did all that stuff when I was younger, because nobody will let me mess up their records like that anymore.

Credits include: Afghan Whigs, Primal Scream, Alex Chilton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, 16 Horsepower. See the Appendix for Jeff Powell’s full bio.

One time, when I was working with a band on the Ardent label called Neighborhood Texture Jam, we basically needed a big disastrous noise on a track called “The Brucification Before Pilate.” It was on an album called Don’t Bury Me In Haiti. The song was in the key of E, and we borrowed a cheap old Fender Strat copy from a friend who didn’t care what we did with it and strung it up with nothing but big low E strings. The band was so broke that it took all of the band’s money to afford all of the E strings.

We put the guitar on a stand and ran it through a Marshall head with all the knobs turned up as far as they would go, and at the point in the song where we wanted this big noise, we cranked up a weed eater and ran it over the guitar strings above the pickup. The weed eater played the guitar for a few seconds before we really dug into it and blew it up. It took about eight seconds before the strings totally snapped and went everywhere. It was a really wonderful noise that was perfect for what we needed.

It took about 30 minutes to buy all those big E strings and string the guitar up, and it took about eight seconds to record it. It was definitely a one-take kind of thing. We added a little reverb to the sound, and I added a bit of EQ. It all came across on tape really well.

Credits include: Black Eyed Peas, will.i.am, Pink, Michael Jackson, Wu-Tang Clan, TLC. See the Appendix for Dylan Dresdow’s full bio.

Once when I was at Record Plant, I saw analog tape machines gathering dust in the back of the room, and I freaked out and asked the assistant to get some shop tape for the 1/2-inch machines because I wanted to do an analog tape flange in the bridge of a song. Whenever I did it, he freaked out. He had never seen anything like that before. These are techniques and things that are really being lost.

Whenever I’m doing an analog tape flange, I’m really loose about it. I don’t have to have my 1/2-inch machine aligned at +6 over 185 or +9 or, you know…Dolby SR or anything like that. Shop tape is fine for the majority of it, and sometimes even better because it is a little bit off.

There are a couple ways to do this, but I like to record a section of a song with some pre-roll and then play the two-track simultaneously with the DAW in record. I’d slow the two-track down by putting my thumb on the flange or using the deck’s varispeed function, which gives it this deep sound like it’s being sucked into a vortex. Then I’ll VSO it up so it comes out exactly when I want it to. Whenever you do this, it’s like you’re playing gear like a musical instrument.

Nowadays, somebody would just put a flanger plug-in on the elements and automate the bypass and automate it. And while it’s great and it’s neat, there is a lost art form to a lot of the stuff with recordings we’re doing, because major studios are failing. These techniques won’t be passed on to the next generation of assistants if the major sound motels keep dying off. And I mean, you may only do an analog tape flange effect two or three times a year. Whenever you do those with a client in the room who has never seen or witnessed it before, they will be your client for life because they will really understand that you know what you’re doing. If you know how to do that, you truly know how to EQ a kick drum, and you know all this stuff.

While it is a quite technical thing, you need to technically know how to do it—you need to do it and practice it and be proficient at it so that it actually sounds artful. Just doing it on a tape flange is one thing, but being able to pull it off so it sounds exactly like what you had envisioned before you could hear it…the room is high-fiving all around and experiencing each other because you pulled it off. You’ve added something to the song with that one production technique. If it sets up a section better than before, then you’ve done your job tastefully. But that’s just one production technique.

Credits include: the Klitz, Big Star, Ry Cooder, the Replacements, Toots Hibbert, Sleepy John Estes, Jason & the Scorchers, Mudhoney, Billy Lee Riley, Mojo Nixon and True Believers, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Flamin’ Groovies, John Hiatt, Aretha Franklin, Primal Scream, Dan Penn. See the Appendix for Jim Dickinson’s full bio.

I quit Ry Cooder in 1972 or early ’73 to produce Dan Penn. Dan and I were going back and forth to Muscle Shoals a lot at the time. I was helping him get his first record, Nobody’s Fool, mastered. I didn’t have anything to do with that album, but on one of those trips to Muscle Shoals, he said, “Jimmy, why don’t you produce me? I need to make another record. I think you ought to produce me.” I said, “Dan! Right on!” So I started producing Dan’s second record, which was called Emmett the Singing Ranger Live in the Woods. It’s my greatest unreleased record!

We recorded quite a few songs for this project at Sam Phillips Recording [in Memphis] with Knox Phillips as the engineer. This is where we cut the session for this album with the two live Harleys. It was a song called “Tiny Hinys and Hogs.” Yeah. “Tiny hinys and hogs, funky ladies love outlaws.” It contains one of the greatest Dan Penn lines that I know of: “This chrome hog is a rollin’ rocket. A two-wheeled Caddie with a highway sprocket.” [Laughs] No one yet has written a motorcycle song at the level of a hot rod song, like “Little GTO.” There is no motorcycle song that comes to that level. This song did, had we been able to finish the project.

Dan is the master of cutting a screwed-up demo, and he had this demo of “Tiny Hinys and Hogs,” where he was slapping on his leg like this [imitates rhythm] and making the sound of a Harley-Davidson. Japanese motorcycles scream, but there is a rhythm to a Harley-Davidson engine. It goes ba-da-bump, ba-da-bump, ba-da-bump, and that was the rhythm of his hands. Not to be outdone, because Dan can come up with some crazy stuff, Dan had Gene Christman, a brilliant drummer, go in on the drum set and play this screwed-up hambone rhythm that Dan was doing.

I thought, “What we need now is some Harleys to play the percussion part, like bongos.” So I got Campbell Kensinger and one of his other cronies from the family Nomads to bring their bikes into the studio. Campbell was an artist anyway. Campbell was in the center of the studio playing lead Harley. He had his buddy, who didn’t really “get it,” off in the corner playing rhythm Harley. Well the rhythm Harley was just playing. He just started the motor and let it run. Campbell was actually trying to get the motor on the beat. He was retarding the spark with his screwdriver to slow the engine down and giving it gas with the throttle to keep it from dying, so it was sort of choking out. Every time it would choke out, he would rev it up, and he was shooting like three feet of blue fire out of the exhaust. The whole studio was filling up with carbon monoxide. It was great! Eventually, Campbell got to the point where he was really playing the bike. Not only was he keeping this beat going, but when we got to this solo part, he was doing this saxophone thing. Dan was playing acoustic 12-string and playing on the floor, where he insisted on singing with the Harleys live in the vocal microphones.

Knox Phillips was engineering these sessions, and he was crazy as a rat at that point and willing to let me do anything. Knox is tight buddies with Mike Post, the Hollywood guy who does all the TV music, like Hill Street Blues and all that stuff. I had met Mike a couple of times, but we weren’t what you would call “friends.” Post had a session that was starting the next day at Phillips. There was another person from L.A. that was also with Mike who was a “somebody,” too.

Anyway, they came in during the session, just as we were starting the bikes and all that garbage. Post was horrified by the whole thing, and he had to leave. The guy who was with him said, “No way in the world am I leaving. You go on. Just come back and get me later. I am going to stay here and watch this.” [Laughs] Post was basically saying, “This is crazy. I know who these people are, and they should know better than this.”

So Post returns a few hours later, and we are playing it back, and he says, “That’s incredible. The motorcycle is playing the beat. It sounds like a saxophone.” He just went crazy. I’m going, “Yeah, sure.” I sort of had the attitude like the time to appreciate my genius is before I do it. You better believe I can do it. Of course the motorcycle is playing with the beat. Where did you think I was going to put it? Did you think I was going to bring them in here and have them play off the beat? I’m not going to bring some amateur to come in here and play the motorcycle! [Laughs] These men are professionals!

Everybody, when they hear the tape, thinks the bike is playing along with the instruments. Well, of course, what is happening is the instruments are playing with the bike. The bike is so hypnotic, and Gene Christman is such a brilliant drummer, that you hear Dan say on the tape, “Start your bikes, Campbell!” [Makes motorcycle sound] Then you hear the rhythm of the engine. Christman just played with the bike. It is so obvious, but nobody ever sees it.