in praise of Lewis Hahn

Fuck yeah, Lewis Hahn.

Lewis Hahn, everybody.

Loved him in the Sam Kinison Wild Thing video.

Hell of a resume indeed -- the Mardin connection makes it clear, thinking of those early Hall and Oates records.

huh i didn't even know who this guy was but dang what a track record.

i've actually been thinking about dudes like him lately....one of the worst things about the sort of decimation of the music industry to me is the loss of a class of professional recording engineers that were highly skilled at making records and making records sound good....

like today the idea of "producing" is sort of giving a record a certain type of style or sound, but look at this guy it's crazy -- everything from doug sahm to bette midler to rashaan roland kirk to the modern jazz quartet to the bee gees....

the problem i think today being is that making truly good sounding records isn't really valued much by the industry due to mp3 and crazy mastering and a whole bunch of things, also guys like this were an example about what was right about a more factory/pro system of recording....they got really good paying jobs at studios or could freelance and they just knew their shit, from a technical aspect of how to record an artist, not in the producing sense of putting a "stamp" on a record.....

like, say ted templeman worked with van halen and beefheart and van morrisson and made great sounding records for all of them, as different as they all are....

(my point being is that there won't be the infrastructure in the future to support dudes like this)

right on M@tt this is exactly what was striking me about this guy today - like, he had a working relationship with Arif Marden, who usually got the "producer" credit, but the 70s is (I think) when that word started to get slippery, and could mean anything from "guy who described what he wanted to hear and then left it to the engineers to figure out what he meant" to "guy who's doing everything from tape op down to final edit." That the same guy who engineered "Be Real Black For Me" also can claim responsibility for engineering "You Belong to Me" is some major WHOA territory for me - this is a guy who was audibly engaging with the stuff he recorded, really listening and asking himself how he could best serve the material but also probably asking "how can I stay out of the way of the good stuff that's going on" - striking a great balance between doing things in his own style & doing the audio-verite "recording" thing that Albini considers the job of an engineer.

xpost and yeah, the loss of this style of engineer is something that the good producers and engineers I know are always lamenting - not whining you know but saying that the seventies especially were the halcyon days for guys who were about their business on this stuff & could get paid for it, whereas now, you can be as passionate as you want about it but the money just isn't there, everybody's convinced they can do it themselves just as well & since the market doesn't disagree, it's hard to argue their point

engineers and session men/women...truly the un/sung/derappreciated and out/dated/moded heroes of rock...(I'll stop with the slashes now)...like, all those Bob Ezrin productions of the 70's still sound amazing, but few people talk about Jack Richardson's input...Billion Dollar Baby, by Bob Greene, has an excellent section about how engineers do that voodoo...(Muscle Of Love, in this case)...

hell, engineers were the ones that would "sweeten" tracks back then...I miss sweetening!

i mean, i can't hardly think of a major label record from the 70s that *sounds* bad...not that they are all good record, but overall the sound of most stuff back then is really really solid across the board.

it's funny to recall how the slick sound of your average 70's recording came to be seen as a negative, something that punk had to "liberate" us from...

it's even funnier that a lot of the big punk records were actually produced pretty "pro" anyway...never mind the bollocks sound big and bold and real hi-fi, sounds amazing by today's standards, like compare it to a foo fighters record and it just sounds massive when you turn it up.

I remember that being the thing that surprised me about the Sex Pistols & the Clash & A Tonic for the Troops when I first heard them - the word on all these bands was "raw" and so on and then I heard "Holidays in the Sun," I was ready for it to sound abrasive and hard and ugly and I was like fuck, dude, this is big loud rock and roll, exactly what I want!

i watched a vh1 classic "classic albums" on never mind the bollocks and they were in with the engineer going through the individual tracks on a studio board and he showed how jones would play the bass part identically to the guitar part and then also do other octaves on guitar making this big "moving panzer division" sound