Robert Margouleff

did I meet Stevie? Stevie heard an album that my friend Malcolm Cecil and I did back in nineteen seventy two, I guess, and he heard it was Tonto's expanding headband and it was all on electronica album that Malcolm and I did together at Media Sound, and it was all electronic and very off the wall, but it was at a time when the electronica was just finding its way. And I met Malcolm at the studio. He was the chief of maintenance and well technology basically more than maintenance.

And I was a synthesizer bad boy at the studio with my Bogue synthesizer doing sound for commercials and stuff for the studio and I'm working at night, and we hooked up together and we ended up developing a very large synthesizer called Tonto the Original Neo Timberol Orchestra, and it was one instrument to be played by both of us at the same time. And we did a record for Herbie Mann's label Embryo called Tonto's Expanding Headband, which

was my sort of peyote name, I guess. And Steve heard it, and he also heard a lot of music switched on Bach and a whole bunch of other stuff, and he was very curious. And on a Memorial Day weekend in nineteen seventy two, it was a weekend and there was no traffic outside and we hear him somebody calling up from the street. Because Malcolm's apartment was on the second floor, it was very quiet, and we were up there hanging out and the sky Ronnie Blanco brought

Steve by the studios. We look out the window down to the front of the building and there's Steve's standing there and Ronnie yells up, hey, we got somebody here wants to hear the synthesizer. Well, he heard it, and that was the beginning of it all. He never left after that. That one weekend when the studio was closed, we recorded maybe fifteen tunes. He just got going. Steve got it right away. He's totally He has a mind like a vice. I mean, you can't. I mean even

to this day. I was talking to him on the phone about uh. I was talking to him about Living for the City, that song that we recorded at Media and I said, Steve, what do you remember about us tracking that song? The first thing out of his mouth was this is like, I don't know. Forty years later it was raining. I mean, really, the guy has a mind that is so detailed oriented, and so the ability

to memorize stuff. I guess it's because he's onsided. But we really hit it off of those that time, and I think what we were doing was very important as well. Primarily a part of it for me was the political aspects of what Steve was talking writing about, like Living for the City or Mister Noah All or any of these songs that were political. I'm ten years older than Steve.

I'm eighty five. Steve is seventy five. Now I can't believe it, but in my high school days it was way before Steve, when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. It was Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act. It was the Norman Pettis Bridge. It was little black girls going to school in the South being escorted by white marshalls. It was sputnik. It was a very interesting time about civil rights in general, and very important time, and I

learned a lot at that time. The reason I bring it up is I learned a lot about civil rights and I was very much a progressive lefty even in nineteen fifty six. So when Steve came on the scene and he started writing songs like Living for the City and mister Noah All, I realized that we really were walking the same path, maybe different roads, to the same place. But when he started writing songs like that, I knew

that I'd found home base. And most of the songs that I've done and music and artists that I've worked with over the years, the ones that have a political aspect to them, especially about civil rights, are ones that I tend to gravitate towards. And nuts. We met him and he said, oh, let's try recording something. We went in the studio. We never left for three and a half or four years. It was like a switch was thrown. It was magical. I thought it would go on forever.

It didn't go on forever, but nothing in life goes on forever, you know. So I'm just glad I was there for the time we worked together and whatever roles we played. All I know that first album especially was just the three of us. No, he wasn't famous enough, although he'd had like ten albums, you know, R and B albums. You know, he was his own person, and we tried to reinforce the whole civil rights thing as

much as we could in every way. It was very important to me, and it is still to this day important to me, and I hope that some young musicians are taking up the cause now for because through music, I hope maybe we can find some piece of quiet and some dignity and truth. It seems were very far from that right now. And I know I tried to carry the flag with Steve, the other black artist. During that time, I was doing a lot of that kind of political writing. Was more than gay, also an interesting

man to say the least. But when we were on our own and Steve wasn't tethered to motown anymore. It was a really huge degree of freedom and the detective work between the three of us and the studio, and it was magical. I cannot tell you, you know. I think a lot of people even today are always trying to figure out the sound of our own wheels. And I don't know. I can't. Even looking back on it and spending two and a half years writing a book about it,

I still don't really understand what the hell happened. It's just a kind of an isness. It felt natural and felt good, it felt truthful. It was magical.

to use cameras and everything else. And when I got out of the service, I came back and settled in the East Village with the idea of going into the motion picture business, and in doing so, I got hooked up with Andy Warhol's crowd.

few things like that. And I was talking to Chillie Wilson, who had like a couple of soft porn houses on forty second Street, and all the young filmmakers were going there because you couldn't get a job as a filmmaker if you tried to go to a major company and say, oh, I'm a cinematographer of this, and then they say that's very nice, but are you in the union. No, I'm not in the union. Well you have to be in

the union if we hire you. So then you go all and you go over to the union to say, well, we can't get you in the union because you don't have a job. I mean, it was sort of a catch twenty two. So there was a group of people who were making movies, you know, outside the union and outside the big things. One of the was Chellie Wilson.

She made like she had a couple of these super soft porn you know, raincoat kind of theaters on forty second Street, and she'd give you forty seven thousand or five hundred bucks, make me, make make me a movie. She was a Greek lady. And I was getting ready to do one of those. It was going to be called Stripped and Strapped, and that fell out completely when I met Chuck Wine, who said, you know, we really want to do something. And a lot of them were

really unhappy with Andy because he didn't pay anything. Everything was for free, and it was kind of a lass, a fair way of making movies with him. And it was, you know, a clutch of beautiful models and beautiful people who were upper crustaceans in New York, and it was kind of druggy and happening, and Andy was busy being trendy and stuff, and I slowly fell in with them, and then Chuck came to me and said, I want to make a movie, and I said, well, I want

to make a movie. So we said we got in together. Let's make an above the first above ground underground movie. Let's make something that can be accessible to more people than a few people clutching around in the East village, that we can act actually do more than Empire or some of these films. And I said, yeah, let's do that. And that turned into a film called Chow Manhattan that featured the life of Edie Sedgwick. Basically what turned into

it turned into a five year opera. But in the process of doing that, I heard the mog synthesizer to answer your.

I had one table at Maxis Kansas City with my with my little troop, and Andy had the other table in the corner under the red fluorescent light in the other corner, and we used to google back and forth, and Edie would come in like a princess who was like royalty, all decked out with the with the hair and all that stuff. And it was really a scene. And we got started making showm Manhattan. I brought adult adult cameras and stuff, and I actually had enough of a budget to offer people a salary.

respected his art. But the people were working with and never got paid. Everyone was hungry. A lot of people were seeing doctor Roberts, doctor Max Jacobs.

sounds pretty good. I opened up an account.

and lighter, and smaller and smaller. And since I really understood photography and everything, I said, I really want to make a documentary about the lifestyle of what was going on at that time, and I want to put the creative tools, cameras and recording equipment stuff in the hands of the creatives themselves to see what would happen. I mean, that was a very altruistic approach, to say the least. At any rate, Doctor feel Good was in there doing

his stuff. Maxis, Kansas City was running full blast. I was moving around down in the East Village. I lived around the corner from the Fillmore East one block, actually around the corner on fifth Street. The Fillmore was between fifth and sixth on Second Avenue. Ellen Stewart was across the street with Lomma and the whole theater scene. Everything

was churning down there like crazy. It was wonderful and creative, with the smell of pot smoke in the air and people sitting on the trash cans along the street there with the chained lids and stuff sitting there playing guitars and busking, and people on the streets, and the second Avenue Delhi and the Strami Sandwiches and the Ratners, and the whole thing was like really churning the smell of

pot in the air. It was an interesting time. And I found myself one night in a dance club called Cerebrum, and I heard some bleeping and blooping happening from the sound booth and I went up there and sitting on the floor a couple of modules from a mode synthesizer, and I said to myself. The light bulb went off in my little Jewish head, and I said, this is

the way to make the music for Chow Manhattan. And at that point in time, at that point and time, you know, at that point, was it already called Chold Manhattan. Who was that after it was all done? No, it was already we were already starting to call it Chow Manhattan. And David Weisman, who we called Raka, who worked with Chuck at the factory. He was also a maker of a designer of the movie build the movie posters, Ferato

Premeger or people like that. He was swinging around doing stuff and we were already making posters that said Chol Manhattan and stuff. But I said, this is the way I could really put this in the hands of myself as a musician and as the people around me, and we could actually score the movie with the tongue, with the synthesizer, with the mog synthesizer. I called U Bob mog on the phone the next couple of days.

hand people, and Lothar was a theremin. And when Bob Mogue and Walter Seer brought my synthesizer, the one I bought off the floor to the studio, they brought a someone named Tom Fly, who later became a very major recording engineer at Record Plant, brought him along with his band called Lothar in the Hand People, which I ended up producing for Capitol Records.

introduction to doing that stuff. And if you listen to that song Machines, you'll hear a little bit of Whippet in there. It's a strange connection, I know. Okay, Just to be clear, you already had the mogue when you worked with Lothar or not yet, I had the mug. Lothar brought the mog to my studio.

he would invent stuff and it wasn't Wendy Carlos. Wendy was a precision guy. Steve heard Wendy's album, by the way, and that also kind of tweaked him to come and work with us because switched on Bach Switched On Bach a brilliant albums to this stay a brilliant album.

I find to this day rather grotesque. I can't although I came out and helped them do the audio and stuff, I was really literally off the case after the black and white footage. That's where I really really lived with Chow and with ed and you know, I ended up living with d Where you get to tweets your two hundred and fifty k in ever see a dollar back? Nope? Okay, Let's go back to Edie. Edie became a legend in the eighties when they wrote a book about her. But

what do we know? It's the sixties is before the book. She comes from a family of some status, on the West coast drops out of Harvard, which Radycliffe rat same thing actually, but well no, not the same thing at the time. But whatever was she charismatic? What was or which is just that she came from a rich family?

or two. Extremely talented as a sculptor and as a like her father, who was also really really weird guy. And when Chuck met her, she was at Radcliffe and she came to New York with Chuck and got invited to some parties that were Truman Capodi and a whole bunch of people like that, a bunch of crustaceans and super talents and you know, high high society people in New York who were into the painting and arts scene

and stuff. And Andy's stuff, and she what happened with me in hers But she came to the studio and I was David and Raka and John Palmer brought her to the studio. Chuck brought her to the studio and it was in very low light. I had very sort of dark. It was in the evening and by studio, by office was very executive at fancy furniture and stuff. I fancied myself a film logul, although I was a puppy, and they brought her and I didn't realize how loaded

she really was. But down the road, once we started shooting shooting, she ended up living at the Chelsea Hotel and about ten weeks or twelve weeks into the movie, she set the room on fire and trying to get out of the room, shed doorknobs through her brass got heated up and she burned both her hands, and everybody forgot her phone number. After they took her off to Saint Vincent's and they got her out of the hotel and no one would talk to her, and I was

in the middle of shooting with her. I ended up living with her for about three or four months. And I can say this and I really mean it very emotionally. There were times when she was really high and there were times when she was really down, but there were the times in between when she was just Edie, and in those times I really fell in love with her. She was an incredibly sensitive, beautiful human being if she wasn't in the clutches of drugs, and it taught me

some very great life lessons. She was an amazing human being. And when after two years, after everything went south and I went bankrupted and lost everything and the negatives were at the lab and everything, David came up with the money and he said, I want to shoot it on the West Coast. I want to shoot the rest of it in color. I came out and helped him, but I didn't love what he was shooting. But Edie, he said, SD,

do you really want to finish the film? She was at the village hospital for a drug rehabilitation and stuff, and she said yes, and this was all she lived for to do that. But the minute she got on the set, she got drunk as a stunk and she stayed that way until she found Michael, her friend, and he got married, and soon after they got married, she passed away in bed next to him. One morning he woke up and she.

turned into a whole other adventure. But once we started playing with the Mogue, I ran headlong into electronica. I was more interested in the Mogue than I was interested in filmmaking. And that when the whole thing went south and everything else, the only thing I was left with my Moge synthesizer. I went to a studio called Broadway Recording and Pat Jakes who was the owner. It was in the Broadway building where there what's his name doing

his show now Saturday Night Live. Yeah right, yeah, that theater on the seventh floor was this independent studio up there. I ended up there, and I really spent hours and hours when the studio is closed, learning how to play the synthesizer, but even more than that learning at Centaur, my old studio really had. I became a synthesis long

before I became a recording engineer. Malcolm Cecil, who I met at Media, who was the chief technologist for the studio, was also a spectacular musician and he played the back line at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, and he was a really fine musician. And we met at Media in the back of studio way and I walked into the studio of the recording console at the lid of the studio, so it was like the hood out of car. They don't make studios like that anymore. It actually was saggy

in the middle. Everyone made their own consoles. Right standing here with his hands on his hips, and he said, you must be the guy with his English action. You must be the gully with the millig over there. And I said, yes, and what are you doing here? He said, Oh, I have what I said. Can you teach me how to use this? And he says, yeah, but you have to teach me how to use that, and he pointed

at the synthesizer and we made a deal. We shook hands, and he really taught me how to be a first class recording engineer, uncompromising and very together on about how people listen to things. And so we traded and we hooked up and created a band called Tonto's Expanding Heads.

Airways and Ford to Reno. I was making sounds, you know, sounds, and the guys from the agencies would come over and sit in the back of the controller and say, hey, kid, can you make that sound a little more like a tablecloth? You know, it was that sort of thing. I knew I was not destined to be there very long doing that, but Malcolm was doing some sessions at night with the

I'll think of it in a minute anyway. Jim Hall was great guitar player, by the way, and he was playing bass with Landey Cozan and doing stuff at the studio. This superb player and extremely knowledgeable guy, and we really hit it off and we started writing stuff together, which became an album that Herbie Man heard.

wires in the original cases. When Jimmy Hendrix passed on, he left the studio behind called Electric Lady, and Electric Lady was really the first home studio because it was Jimmy Hendrix's studio right, And we had gotten to a place at Media where we couldn't stay there anymore. We would go at night and plan what we had in mind to do at the Chinese, Japanese something Mexican restaurant

across the street. I used to get very loaded over there because they had bullis mono sodium glutamating the food, and I used to get feverish and have a headache from it. But we actually conceived Tonto on the tablecloth, on the paper tablecloth in that restaurant. And then there was no memory in any of these things. I mean memory. We all take memory for granted now on everything, right. We can just move one fader, one eye and everything

is remembered. No matter what you did in the days when we were making music, if you didn't take it when you had it, it was the party was over. There's no memory. We couldn't start to work with Steve. We'd already been working with Steve for about a year. We had a huge library of songs and various states of completion. We were making records. You know, an album here, Well, this is going to be music of my Mind. No, this is going to be talking book. There were no

album titles. We just started on that Memorial Day weekend recording songs one after the other, and they were all in various states of being done and stuff. And so you moved to Electric Lad, Yeah, we moved to Electric Lady because they would leave us alone. I wouldn't have to break down our sessions with Stevie at night because the cuff links were coming in in the morning, or there was going to be a pepto bismal ad in the studio way, and they needed to do string and

horn dates and stuff. It became intolerable. We needed a place to work. And it happened just at the unfortunate time of Jimmy passing away. He hadn't used the studio for three weeks, and he went to London and he did stuff he shouldn't have done, and the studio was there with his shoes still warm under the console and Malcolm and I went down there at that time because we were looking for a place, and we walked in there and put our feet in those shoes with Steve

and we never left. And the designer of that studio was someone who I'm deep, deeply friendly with to this stage, John Stork, who built Electric Lady for Jimmy. It was his first commission, and he saw what we were doing. He got very curious and we got to meet him and we said we needed some way of being able to control this as a real time performing instrument. I wanted to take it out of the lab and take

it on the road. And he came down there and we talked and talked, and we conceived of these three arced cabinets that we could play when we were facing programming, but that we could turn around and face each other with the keyboards in the middle, so that we could perform live. And he was the one who came up

with the cases. And during that year or year and a half that were a full time at Electric Lady, we got those cases built and we started stuffing all our gear into them and creating a unified powered supply. Because what we have now is what we had then is the original version of the euro rack where all these different manufacturers make Some guys make filters, some guys make oscillators, some guys make sequencers and stuff, but they all have a common language. When we built that, there

was no common language. We had art modules or plus or minus five five vaults, a keyboard, mogue six vaults, other instruments that different, all different. We had to supply power for all of them and unify that so we could play a common thing. And Malcolm figured out a brain where we could control everything. But it was all analog and highly sensitive to temperature. I mean, we tried playing live down at the I think it was a church down at the Wall on Wall Street, Saint Thomas.

We went in there and it was raining and lightning in the afternoon. We set up our old synthesizer before the cabinets, and the temperature changed. The whole thing went

bonkers and it was turned into free playing. We couldn't play even trying to set it all up and bringing it in set up and the PA and the blah blah blah, and it was lightning and there was thunderstorm in the afternoon, and it was all kind of weird and strange with the stained glass windows and everything, and we bleeped and blooped our way through and people loved it. Malcolm was in his glory because he was a jazz player.

Me I was having one heart attack after another trying to say how am I going to get the sequencer to do this, that.

synthesizer like a saxophone or a trumpet. It makes one sound and you have to put your whole body and your whole mind into creating that one sound that has attitude. Like saxophone, it's just your mouth, you know, it's just one voice, and the synthesizer, each keyboard or whatever we're

using to change voltage, is only one voice. It could have a whole bunch of content inside the sound, with the filters and the oscillators and the envelope generators and so forth, but in the end, it was a direct connection to just that one soulful sound that was in your head. And that's really what separated tanto from the rest of the instrument. Steve really got it, and especially when we Malcolm came up with the concept of the pitch bender because you can't play blues with it. You

can't bend the notes. If you have just a keyboard, they're intervolic. One is one value, the next note is another value. But like with a guitar, if you want to play soulful guitar, you have to be able to pull the strings with your left hand so that you can get the bend to notes. They even have benders on the guitars for doing that. That's a part of

the essence of it. And Malcolm invented the joystick, and we never really got full credit for it, but he took a model airplane controller put rubber bands under the joystick so when you let go of it, it would pop to the middle and one direction it was pitched, the

other direction it was filter. When Stevie heard that the party was over, Steve got it and I don't know, under twenty seconds and you can really hear it on Bogion Reggae Woman, which was one of the first ones that we used the pitch bender on.

to him. But he was down there in the front of the media sound with Ronnie Blanco and I looked down there. Malcolm says, you know, we have a new client, and I said okay, and we went I'll show you the synthesizer Steve and he never left. I think is about three and a half. Okay, So obviously tanto is one instrument. He starts cutting.

And then he came in and we put the clavenet parts down, and that became superstition. But Steve would play most of the time offender Rhodes clavinet or keyboard piano for the basic track, and he would sing sing the song. Sometimes it would keep those vocals that he did. But when we were doing music, in my mind, it was basically a It was basically a solo effort by Steve. There are few other players. Buzzy Featen from the name

of the band escapes me, but he was there. Suddenly we had a little section of people who hung out and became their love.

had lots of materia. His brain was overflowing. He was incredible, and it was such happy times too, you know, okay, really happy times.

fading stuff. But we did it live. Steve, Me and Malcolm would sit at the console, the three of us, and we put these songs up on different machine, two different two track machines, and we cue everything up and rehearse it and record the entire album down a side at a time. It wasn't just one song. We thought in terms of albums, of how the songs related to one another, how they would cross fade together, if they

would work together musically. It was much more of an enterprise about making albums, not songs, not just gone by the wayside unfortunately.

And I think I'm not entirely sure, but I think I introduced Johanna to Stevie, which in some ways I regret, because Johanna never took care of me and Malcolm properly. And that's the part of the reason that we parted company in the end. Had nothing to do with the music or a friendship or anything else. Really had to do with business. But that's neither here nor there. And that's okay. History.

i'd remember it. But he came up with the concept of R and B to make it more vanilla and everything.

is across the street on Sunset. It's another place now, but it's the same deal across the street from the Pancake House there. And we took him up to Motown because he didn't drive, and he was out negotiating the deal with Stevie for Stevie, right, And we took him there because we thought we would go and filter around

Motown and make friends and stuff. Since where we were out here and we're sitting out in the office and out in the outside office, and he's in there with Ewart Abner and a whole bunch of those guys, right, and Malcolm and I are sitting there were here smack smack. Where did you go to law school? You know? And we knew the Goda had done his job well and he made Stevie a fabulous steal. He did, and he was an interesting guy. We remained friends over the years.

He's gone now, but he was early a piece of work. His father was a cantor. Yes, he was very Jewish. We used to go to Canter's out here the other kind of cantors, right, and have a nice pastromola sandwich together in a bowl of Coleslaw. And Malcolm and I really you know, got to know him. But in the end there was kind of a little resentment from us because he really didn't take care of us. We felt we were like a hippie family and he didn't see

it quite like that. And you know, I think that's the reason that in the long run, boy Steve and me and Malcolm won are separate ways.

engine from the flow. And then I said, well, Stevie's going to get lock up. We need a judge or some Stevie said, And if a Goda was around, we said go to ten years Agdas said that and uh, we pieced it all together and spun it all in. There was no digital memory or anything like that. We had to do. Everything had to be done physically, you know, spun at the right thing, and we cooked that stuff up.

five years old. Now I can't believe that, but I think that that probably singularly was one of the most important songs I think I've ever recorded in my career.

We'd work on one song for three hours, another song for four hours, and we'd go away and whatever, and we'd do other things and come back to them, but the song. We had an archive of songs, and there are many more songs that are still in Spee's archives. I don't even remember. It was one Malcolm recorded upright based on one of the first songs recorded, called Crazy Letters,

which was wonderful. But these string bass took it to a kind of a jazz place, and when we started working with the synthesizer, one note per keyboard, so everything. If you listen to those records, you will see how few instruments there really are on them. They're all very very simple, and there's not a lot of waterfalls and big string parts and orchestrations, any of that kind of R and B stuff that was coming out of Motown and all the other black labels during that time, big

string dates and stuff. Everything was elemental and close. And the important thing is that we're just talking. When I came on board before you got here. We're talking about microphones. I said, you know, I recorded most of these records, Malcolm, and I recorded with an R twenty dynamic microphone that had proximity to it. And I said, that's really very important because for two reasons. One reason is Stevie could touch the mic and know where he was without having

to see it, without creating microphone noise. And the second reason was even more that the microphone felt very close and very intimate because of the proximity effect. Like this right then, Steve would sing down the mic with this kind of closeness. It was the same kind of thing that Bing Crosby was doing when he had the microphone in front of the whole big band, and the whole big band was as laud Bing Crosby's voice was as loud as the entire big band behind him, because the

microphone allowed us to rearrange reality. And that's what turned Big Crosby into a into a crooner. Von Monroe, Bing Crosby, you know, all of those great singers you know, came out because they could sing close to the mic and create this kind of intimate, close feeling. There's not a lot of reverber echo. It was very close feeling, and

we're doing it now. We're most of these artists sing close for that reason, because it makes the voice sound very personal and intimate and close, and you can rearrange reality inside the audio stream by virtue of the mike proximity.

tracked it but hadn't mixed it. And then Steve whent it was just coming in off the road from the Stones, and Malcolm and I were working with Jeff Beck and his band. I don't remember the guy's names.

don't know. Steve was such a prince in those days, I can't tell you. And then he had a radiant smile that was just incredible, really beautiful human being. And Jeff said, Steve said, well, would you play on would you play on Looking for a Pure Love? And Jeff said, yeah, but I want to get a song in exchange, and Steve said, well, what about Superstition? We had the track already on multi track, it wasn't mixed, and then went in and uh, Jeff played the drums and we cut

a track of it with Jeff playing the drums. Really yeah, and that went down, and I don't know, I think Steve thought better of it. I know that the people of Motown. When they heard about that, they were pretty adamant about it. I tried to really stay away from the motowners. It's all intensely political and stuff going down there with black superiority and the new black labels, and we're doing stuff for ourselves. And you know, here are two little white Jewish boys, one from London and one

from New York working with Steve. And I think in some ways I was a certain amount of resistance to us at Motown. I'm not entirely sure. I can't put my finger on it, but you know, you do get those feelings, especially after my youth and my sort of attention to human rights and stuff, and I was a little sensitive to it, I guess.

or anything. The only time I knew those guys is when we were working in the studio, and that's where we were, and that's where we belonged, and that's where I was at one with myself in my art. And what I tried to do is to bring the best of my brain to bear and to get the artists to perform to the limits of their potential. That really is my job.

came out of the studio. It was a chilly morning, and they said, we got to find a place to do it, and I already I had heard that we were going to do it. I brought my camera. We went up on the Hollywood Hills under the Hollywood sign and took that photograph and Abner sent me three hundred bucks for it.

getting any royalty or was it? Okay, you were not getting a royalty, right, although we assumed we would. Right then that kind of came to a head, Okay, that at the end of at the end of fulfilling this. But if it came to a head at the end of fulfilling this, when did it start to boil? When did you bring it up?

definitely going in different directions. And what happened the final the final straw was that we always had an open mic in the studio with Steve because Malcolm or I would recite the lyrics of uh a few bars ahead of where he was. You know you were you know you said you are the Malcolm saying you all the china of my life, and then Steve.

so we can hear Stevie. And Stevie heard it in his zerophones and he said to Malcolm, don't you talk to my friends like that. And I remember it. I remembered it. And that's when the angels left the room. Malcolm stood up and walked out and never turned around. I tried to put the thing back together, but it didn't happen. And I still feel badly about it to this day. But I know that, you know, our times come and go, and nothing is forever. We did what

we were supposed to do. We delivered, he delivered. We made some great, great music together and it speaks for itself.

have two questions. One to what degree was the material on the albums after you left? Had you already worked on it, or was totally new?

up after that, and Songs in the Kia Life. I had nothing to do with the people he took on after me, and Malcolm was my assistant, Garyo who was started as my tape operator, and John Fishback, who was the owner of Crystal Studios, which was the first studio we came to before we got to the record plant on the West Coast, and they're both very first class engineers, but I don't think that they had the love and the passion that we had for Steve, nor did they

have the sort of the political sensitivities that I had about human rights and the passion for what Stevie was singing about. They were just you know, pushing buttons and pulling the up and down, and very frankly, if you look at the output that we had with Steve in the three years or whatever number of years that we were together, we were doing one album every year and

a half. In some cases there was two albums in a year, and we also did a mini Ripperton album, and we also did a Serrita Wright album and a whole bunch of other stuff with Steve. We were busy in pushing things forward at all times. And then when Steve went back on his own, it was, you know, one album every year and a half or two years to get around to doing something, okay, and that's fine. He already did he already is they say, he already shot his watch. He made a place, he did something

that changed the culture, materially changed the culture. Malcolm and I could have never done that on our own. It was Steve in that vehicle that he had, that bit of magic that he had that I hope that we enabled, and I think the results speak for themselves. I have nothing but love and respect for Steve. Okay, but slicing and dicing a little bit more. You mentioned Steve's car accident, since you were there before and after. Yes, did he

make a full recovery or was he different? Well, I can't say that was He made a full recovery, but he was different. I think his near brush with death changed his way he perceived the world. He was much more spiritual when he came back, and he was he was different, a little different, but he wasn't disabled or anything. But I think his view of life changed. He had the near death experience and that was really pretty savage. He almost didn't make it, you know, and you know,

to this day, I love Steve. I care about him. I know that we'll never repeat the same thing over you know, but he's a good man, and he's long, he's lived long, and he has a beautiful family, and I only wish him well and I'm glad we had the time the gods put us together. For the time we were together. We can't change that either, right.

I said, you know, you might want to have a little of my vibe on one of your songs, said come down and play moge on one of my songs, which I did about three or four years ago. And we talked to each other on the phone rarely, but not a lot, you know.

in between stuff with them in this coming week. And they really had an idea of who they were. They looked us up, looked me up because I would work with Steve. They knew I understood Electronica and R and B,

and I knew when I heard Devo. I heard them at the star Wood back in the day, standing up there, lurking around in the balcony with all the greats, the near grates and the end grades, and all the guys in their letter jackets from all the record companies would hang up there, hover around up there and need or dervs and stuff. And I saw them perform and I said, you know, this really interesting band. I really liked them,

and I went and met with them. They came to the record They came to the studio and they were all dressed up with hard hats. They came out of a car, all wearing hard hats and coveralls and hip boots and stuff with a canister stripped to the hard hat with a with a hose that was running up their no And when they got out of the parking lot at the record plant, the whole place went completely bonkers.

They were doing this film about radioactivity or something down down the street, and they came over at their lunch hour, but they scandalized the entire studio. But I understood what they were looking for and to keep it simple again, not a lot of voices, and not to try to make them what they weren't to have some high end producer and imprint their own the producer sound on their music. I really realized that the best thing I could do with Devo is to get them to sound like who

they were. My job is to get them to perform. It's not there my job to sound like oh, Margolev produced this record. I wanted them to be the earthy sound that they were. The important thing was to understand the bottom end, which is really R and B, which I really got from Steve.

And also I used three or four different guitar amps at the same time, all with different sounds, so that we could mix and get the sound so I would have to overdub stuff and to keep it as simple and as rudimentary as possible, and to keep it earthy and together again, I go all the way back to Lothar and the hand people.

coming from. And if you look at their lyrics today and you look at their music today, you see how how they were looking into the crystal ball because that's where we.

I'm not looking at that. If the gods had wanted me to do the next record, I would have done the next record.

called QS. I don't know if you remember.

come to the record plant. We were looking. We were working at Crystal when we first came out here, and we couldn't stay there because Crystal was all the hippies from Laurel Canyon were making their records there and Steve sucked up all the oxygen. No one could go there because he was there. At twenty four to seven with us, we had a move and meet Gary and Chris said, well, come come over to the record plant. We'll build a room for you if you booked the room for a year.

We liked that whole concept. We went up to Gary's house. It was on Camino pal Merrow. I think it was the old Canadian Embassy. Looked like some haunt. That house empty, no furniture, but the exception of the dining room had a big long table and as you could seat like twelve people for dinner, a big chandelier, and the whole

deal in the kitchen at the end. You could look there right and we start there and we negotiated, and the hummed and drummed and stuff, and Gary brings out the cavasier bottle and we poured the sniffers and we're all standing up holding our glasses. We've made the deal, and we clinked the glasses and there's an earthquake right

right at the moment. The whole house going like this and that, and I could look through the kitchen and see the water coming down from the swimming pool down toward the kitchen, and I knew that the gods had something good to say. And John came out and we built this wonderful studio B and we had quad monitors in it because we were doing quad a lot in England. Deco was doing a lot of classical music, and PolyGram and people like that were doing Quad. And there's some

rock and roll records. I think one of the Beatles records, the White One, was in the stereo quadraphonic Quadrophenia was in but it didn't go over with the public because no one wanted to spend the money for a new, different kind of wacky cartridge for their turntable and add another amplifier and more speakers. All the wives would go crazy, don't put that speaker under the piano, or and take that subwolfer out of the fireplace. And it was a

lot of that stuff going on. So it really didn't happen. But what happened was we built a QUAD control room with an API board that had a QUAD monitor section and we mixed try to make Superstition in Quad and it sounded great when it was on tape, but when we tried to get it into the vinyl, it was not there. You couldn't get the separation. But what that did for us is I was able to monitor in

Quad with Stevie's. One of the things that really made those records different, and what made DEVO different was they were monitored while we were recording in Quad and they had them in the control room and they could hear the clavinet over here and the guitar over there, and the synthesizer over here, and the background vocals behind me and stuff, and you know, at like one hundred dB or a ninety dBSPL sound pressure level, and it was loud and it was full, and it filled us with music.

It wasn't a perscenim march with the music in front of us, and we're looking at these three guys sawing away on their instruments inside of a perscenium march. We were occupying the same space as the music. And that is really what's happening, finally coming now that we can handle it technically to do things like that. But back in the day, that was the only place you could really deliver like that was in the control room. And I often used that device in my work, and it

was very evident on Stevie's stuff. Most of that stuff was done that way, with the exception that we had to use the studio for vocals and stuff like that. But when we were tracking instruments, Stevie Stack was in the control room. Devo's instruments were performing in the control Mono or Hermano no earphones, right, and it's a different thing.

You know. I have a big thing right now about the noise canceling headphones, which I think are very dangerous because they deprive you of auditory information that you need to have with the background noise and cross talk. When you listen without headphones on sound that comes from your left, you also hear a delayed signal to the right and

so forth your head. You're shapier ears. All those things give you visual cues that enable you to decide where sound is coming from, where you're gonna and it really affects your cognition about how you understand words. When all these kids are listening on these noise canceling earphones, they're depriving themselves of the ability to get those auditory cues, and I think people suffer from it and stuffer about

really being able to really achieve the correct cognition. It's a kind of a phasia, and I think it's very very dangerous what's going on with noise canceling.

when I was in high school. The teacher how to ski a little bit, fall over the place and everything. But so I had a degree of sensitivity towards Stevie's predicament. We always used to make sure that all the instruments are always in the same place, that Steve got a verbal picture for me and Malcolm exactly where the bathroom was, where the coffee was, There's stairs here, the door handles

over here. We'd always try to create a picture an image that he could sound like, for example, recording the drums. I'd hate to go circle around on Steve. But the thing is, how does Steve know where the tom toms are or where the symbols are if he can't see them. So we would make sure to make sure that what he heard in the headphones was an exact stereo mix

of his drum kit. So if he was hitting the drum over here to the left or to the right, and the other drums to the left or the high hat, they would all come up in his headphones in stereo, so that he could have a spatial relationship with the instrument he was playing. And if you listen to the Stevie Wonder records, you'll see that all the high hats are on the left because that's where Stevie had them, So it's okay. There was that kind of sensitivity going on in terms of how Stevie listened.

the studio to make that happen. And my job is not to be a personality and say, oh, this is a Robert Margolette record or this is a heimiancle record or whatever. It's the artists performing at their best.

Tom Holman was very much into specialization. I was into the spatialized audio because of the way I was working in the studio, and there's something I wanted to see happen, and it so happened that it was during a time when the motion picture business, especially New Line Cinema, which was a new and very revolutionary independent bunch of people were taking the New Line Cinema theatrical library and transposing them onto DVDs, and the soundtracks were all miserable and

sounded terrible, and I said, I think I know how to really make that happen, and we made a deal with I made a deal out of my living room, my house on just below Runyon Canyon. I was living on hillside. In my apartment, I put a kind of a home studio together, but it was more than a

home studio. But I started mixing with my friend Brandt at that time, and Malcolm and I had long gone our separate ways, and I was done with traveling to Japan and going to down to Rio to do rock and Rio and do all these different kinds of things.

But I lacked the kind of an identity. And when I discovered what was going on with the motion picture business, I knew that I could take a motion picture soundtrack which was really designed for an auditorium with two or three hundred people in it on a next curve which they called it was a theatrical curve for auditoriums and optical audio that it left a lot to be desired. And I found that it was just when pro tools started happening, and I found that I could re engineer

those soundtracks and really make them come to life. And we did a lot of very major pictures like that, including Lord of the Rings. In the Sound of Music which was on six track mag and I was able to sort of turn that all that stuff around and to really make all those soundtracks become award winning soundtracks, and a lot of directors actually came to work with

us and they were all amazed by it. I ended up renting a house and outpost the States and turned it into three recording studios, and we had a brilliant run of about ten years of doing that of actually how defining how home theater audio worked, what worked, and what didn't work, and there's a lot of science going on. And we had went from five dot one to six dot one to seven dot one and then twelve dot one, and I was sort of at the bottom of that.

I worked closely with doctor Floyd Toole at JBL and we did a lot of listening and a lot of critical listening, and fortunately we were working with a company like Newline. We all worked with others as well, but the New Line really gave us our head and we developed it. We had a very very very brilliant twelve year run.

jockey guy. And somehow I always managed to come up standing, come out of it standing up one way or another. And I'll tell you this, I wouldn't have it any different at age eighty five. I look back at my adventures, the good times in the bad times, and I look at all of it, and I know that I've I've done what I was supposed to do on the planet. And you know, my God exists in my head, and sooner or later I'll become startists like everybody else. But I'll tell you this, I've had a fantastic run.

I'm not sure we have all the answers to it, but I think that it's also unavoidable. And I urge your listeners to embrace the change and not put your head in the sand and deny the existence of the new thinking, and understand it and embrace it and make some new music with it, because I want to hear something new. I'm tired of eight bars of this and eight bars of that. It feels like basket weaving After a while. How many times can you do the two on the floor and backbeat and stuff tap tap tap.

We have to take music somewhere else. Look how far we've come from Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Perry Como and Bing Crosby, No, all the blues from the South and all of that stuff that's come along. Where are we stepping next? What's can it take us to a place that means something that's just not in the you know, I just went to the get a haircut, and I was sitting in the barber cherry yesterday. I love the barber Chairy. You don't have it now. It's a stylist, but I and I was listening to it.

I couldn't understand one word of what they were saying on the music, it was coming over the thing, and I don't know what it's doing socially, you know, I don't know if we're moving, if we're moving the dials the right way. Yet that to find our to find our huge shot.

I went I went to public high school. I know, you ended up going to a school in Stockbridge. But they're always kids. They might be nice, they might be beautiful, whatever, but they were the art kids. They were different, and those kids made the music. As a result of the hard economics of today's society, there's not as much of a middle class, and the people who were brought up in the middle class, they don't want to fall below. So they go to work for the bank, they work

and tech. Those people used to be artists and they could say no. So for me, what's going on with the music now is it's sort of like pre beetles. There's a business. You can hear a good ditty whatever, but it doesn't drive the culture. And as I say, you put it very eloquently before I started to talk just now about the future and pushing the edge of the envelope. The other thing, of course, being that every three or four years it was always a new sound.

There hasn't been a new sound in like fifteen eighteen years. It's I'm waiting for the revolution too. Well.

listening to. I mean we have, you know, all the big concert dates and people playing out live, and I think that's where the music is going in a lot of ways, because there is a kind of a beauty and imperfection. Yeah, definitely, And in live playing there is a lot of imperfection, and I think that that's what we're looking at. We're looking at the randomness of real musicianship. It's not so much the formulated kind of computer music

is one thing. A lot of this computer stuff is all very clever and very good and very sequenced and everything. But in the end, it doesn't have any soul. It doesn't relate to anything meaningful than a bunch of bubbling noises from a computer. We need to have something that's going to address our faci physical issues. We have to talk about what Donnie is doing in Iran as they say Iran and stuff, and all these people hunking and blowing off steam in every direction and threatening old men,

threatening each other with bombs and stuff. But somewhere inside of us there's still a thing called a soul and a sensitivity and a childlike beauty that is the innocence of art and the discovery of beauty and truth. And I think that we need to look for that again more than anything. Ah Man, We're gonna leave it at that, Bob Now, by Cracky, I can wave my cane at you right head on down the hill once I get my parking validated.