Teo Macero – The Music Business

Well, in the early days, you know, being there for such a long period of time at CBS, I saw the beginnings of stereo which really came in… As a music editor I was delegated to work with the engineer to do the first two hundred stereo LPs.  The first two hundred CBS ever put out was done by Stanley Tonkel and myself.

You as the producer were not allowed, you could not come into my room.  Agents, musicians, nobody was allowed in that room.  I did country ‘n’ western, I did classical.  And we did all kinds of this with what they used to call… not the clipper but… oh, it would grab the peaks, I can think of the name… limiter! I used limiters on the classical records.  With Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic and those records, today, sound better than anything they’ve been putting out the past 30 some years.  And I saw all of that evolve and then I saw the advent of stereo and then also the new system.  The, geez, I can’t even think of that…

Interviewer: Surround?

Well, not only surround sound but the CD player.  I remember them calling me into one of the studios one time and they said, “We’d like you to check it out, you know, this CD, we’ve got a new system called CD against the original.”  I said, “Well I know that you can raise the level up on the CD.”  I said, “If you raise the level up of the LP, the tape, and match the two of them.”  I said, “You’ll hear a difference immediately.”  I said, “I don’t think the CD is as good or will ever be as good as the original vinyl.”  Now, a lot of people have proven me right.  Because a lot of people say that the original vinyls of some of these remixes which are now on CD form are not nearly as good.  I mean, they don’t have the warmth.  They don’t have the dynamic range.  In the CD you go from zero to nine.  With they other system, the tape, you go to infinity.  And I saw from using an echo chamber, the steps.  In an echo chamber we had a stairwell at CBS and took boxes and everything else and it does not improve the sound.

Now they’ve got the DVD.  Now, a little story about the DVD.  Take it for what it’s worth.  I got an award from an English company about four years ago.  I can’t think of the title of the… anyway, they invited me to England to give me an award.  I never got an award.  Laughs.  I’m still waiting.  Maybe I can get Dr. Schroeder to give me an award. 

Anyway, they had all of these little cubicles and they were all different rooms with tapes playing and so forth.  And I was noticing that they were playing a lot of Miles Davis.  And I’m saying, “Jesus, what’s going on?”  So one time I dropped in on one of the room.  And I sat there and nobody knew who I was.  They thought I was just coming there to check everything out.  So I said, “Can you play that thing, that CD?”  They said, “Yeah.”  I said, “You wouldn’t happen to have the original would ya?”  The guy said, “Yeah!  I’ve got the original record.”  I says, “Can you put them both on?  I would like to hear them.”  And he put them both on.  And he says, “How do you like the new CD?”  I says, “It is not that good.”  I said, “You’ve lost it all!”  I said, “The other one, the original vinyl sounds one thousand percent better!”  The guy says, “You’re crazy.”  I says, “You’re probably right.  I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!”  Anyway, this went on and I would try other rooms and I would do the same thing.  So one night when they presented me the award, these guys that I had asked the questions earlier said, “You sonuvabitch you!  You made those records?”  I said, “Yeah, and the vinyl is still much better.”  And the English people still think that the vinyl is much better than the CD.  Now, I try to tell them, there’s a way to do it.  You’ve got a cassette, you mix it for the cassette.  There’s a way of doing it.  I said, “You want a CD?”  You mix it for the CD.  I said, “You want a vinyl?”  You mix it for the vinyl.  You should have three different mixes.  The guy says, “You’re crazy!”

And now they’ve got the DVD.  And when they put the DVD on, I said, “This is even more… you can’t do it that way.  It’s not logical!”  I said, “I’m only dealing in logic.  You can’t do it that way.  It’s gotta be logical.  The way it was originally.  The way they’re trying to manipulate it for DVD and CD and you can use the same CD player for a DVD.  I said, “Look it, oh God, you guys.”  I said, “You guys are too much.”  And downstairs they were selling vinyl records by the hundreds and I had bought a whole slew of them.  Some things that I didn’t have or I had an had given away.  I used to have twenty-five thousand regular records.  I don’t have any records except for some of the ones that I’ve made.  And only a very few copies of those.  I’ve given them all away to Universities.  And also Rutgers University came here just a few weeks ago and took out, oh, I don’t know, eight or nine huge boxes of CDs.  And I only have, maybe, I might still have a thousand left.  In the basement.  I said, take out any duplicates that I have.  And whatever you want.  I said, “I’m not going to play them.”  And once I get a new record out I never played it anyway.  And they were all in mint condition so I said, “Look it, somebody might be able to use these.”  But they’ve got now the whole systems with editing.  Sure it’s much easier and I appreciate that.  And it’s much quieter, I appreciate that too.  But the sound has not progressed.  It’s like regressing, going backwards.  Even the music is going backwards.  I mean, in the arts, we have artists that are thinking into the future.  We have people that are building buildings.

I went in for a CAT scan and I said to the girl at the end, “I’d like to meet the guy that invented this.”  Now the guy’s mind must have been, he must have been thinking about something.  I said, “How the hell did he ever invent a CAT scan?”  I mean, roll around and then come up with a picture!  I said, “The only thing that’s lacking in our society is that the music is not progressing.  I mean, it’s staying stationary.”  I mean, we’ve got the rock n’ roll which is kinda nice, some of it.  But then we’ve got the other people who are just, you know the rap and everything else.  It’s just, what does it mean?  You’ve got to be able to play these ten years from now and say, you know, the greatest hits?  Laughs.  I don’t think so.  I still miss the melody.  I mean, I miss hearing a well constructed melody like the big bands used to do.  Even though they were originals, I mean, look at all of the big hits.  You’ve got In the Mood, A Train, all those kinds of things.  I mean, you can’t find that today.

I was talking to somebody yesterday.  I wanted to go get Washington DC to come up with a, I gotta project that I think is worthwhile to do; I’m having a guy check it out in the next couple of days in Washington at the Library of Congress.  Because there’s some things that I’d like to do before I die that will enhance or maybe bring back the big bands.  When you look at it, you’ve got every University, every high school, every little hamlet has a jazz band.  Well what are the jazz bands playing?  In the Mood, you know, Take the A Train, you know, Night in Tunisia or something but they’re not doing anything new!  I said, “It would be nice if somebody would come along and write some new things and get on the band wagon and really promote it and come up with the big band hits, you know, of the future!”  I said, “That’s not difficult to do.  You write a good melody.  You’ve got some good chord changes and good soloists and a couple of creative people to do the arrangements.”  I said, “It will be worth its weight in gold.”  I mean, I can’t afford to do it.  I’ve spent a half a million bucks on my own records so far.  I don’t mind doing it but it I don’t think I have the strength to do it.  I mean, if I could get somebody else to help me out to fire up these guys to play. 

I’ve got some new kind of music that I think is rather interesting.  It boarders on simplicity, yet, but with a different twist.  Whether or not it’s going to be successful or not who knows?

Like, a painting there, behind you (points behind the interviewer to a painting on the wall).  You say, “Well, what is that?  People won’t like it.”  I bought that at an auction for a hundred bucks!  I know the guy who did that.  I think that’s worth about ten thousand bucks that thing there.  Maybe even more.  Because his painting are worth up to one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand.  I mean, that just happens to be a print but the print is very valuable.  He gave me a print some twenty five years ago which I have hanging in my home in the country.  His mind is working into the future.  And I think this is what we have to do.

David is doing it with his band down there because they’re firing those kids up so that they do something spontaneous.  I was telling one of the instructors here, I don’t like to write long arrangements.  I want kids to be inspired by, maybe what they here, but to use imagination and come up with their own.  I may write 30 bars.  That’s the whole arrangement.  I want them to implant themselves into the music.  I said, “The most important thing is the notes and the emotion that you get from the notes.”  Because once you’ve given them the chance to be creative, they will come up with different sounds. 

I said, “Look it, I don’t care whether you’re playing the right notes or the wrote notes.  Behind those solos it makes no difference.”  They’re looking at me like, they probably thought I was crazy.  I don’t know whether they did or not.  But anyway, I said, “I’ll prove it to you.”  So I said, “Okay claps we’re doing the blues.”  And one guy’s going makes noise with his mouth.  And I said, “When I give you a cue, I want you to play any note.”  And I go, “Bop!”  That’s a note.  “Bop! Bop!”  And sure enough they did that and Jesus, what came out was a spontaneity and emotion on those few little things like that.  I said, “Take it.  They’re ready!”  And then, what they did, these crazy people at NYU, they played this piece in public.  Down at a big convention here and some of the people said, “Hey man, look, listen to that band.  Man, they’re fired up!”  And they were playing these kind of chords and coming up with riffs and everything else.  I said, “That’s where it’s at.”

I mean, if you write more than, if you look at some of the biggest arrangements, they may be six pages.  Maybe six pages.  I mean, everything’s repeat.  And this is what all the hits is. 

I said, you can do it.  Go in an experiment for a week.  You know, if you had a hundred thousand bucks, you’d go in an experiment and maybe blow ten or fifteen thousand bucks you know, on a different day and see what the reaction would be.  And I know that these kids are ready.  They’re ready to explode but they need a direction.  This is a way to go, you know.  I have fun doing that.  When I play, even my own charts, I use the lead sheet.  Now the lead sheet is like a piano part.  And they said, “What are you gonna do?”  I said, “You’re an e-flat, you’re a b-flat, and you’re in concert.”  I said, “Okay, everybody play the same notes.  Laughs.”  And when you do it, it sounds like an arrangement!  It sounds like harmolodic, if you want to call it that.  But, I mean, I’ve been doing that kind of stuff for a long time!

So I don’t have to transpose my songs.  If it’s in concert, I play it as it is on the sheet.  So I don’t have to transpose it.  And the trumpet player doesn’t have to do it either.  He plays what’s on the sheet.  And you get these seconds and fourths and everything else.  And I have a piece of equipment in the studio where I use this kind of a technique.  I can do that by manipulating the various tracks.  There’s one of the records here I have.  It’s strings but I took, I had two banks of strings and I took some of the first violins.  The two banks of strings of first violins.  I took one of them and put it up an augmented fourth.  And everybody said, “What are you going to do that?”  The engineer said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Yeah, we’re going to do that with that machine over there.”  And what comes out is something glorious!  I mean, you say, “How the hell do you do this?” 

And I did this with Larry Coryell’s record recently.  I took some of the tracks I recorded on four different tracks.  I had an amplifier direct and maybe two other amps, whatever it was, and I manipulated some of the tracks up a fourth, up a whatever I wanted to feel it should be.  And the end results are rather interesting.  It puts him in another harmonic texture.  People say, “Geez, you know, I dig that.  How did you do that?”  Well, it’s very simple.  If you’ve got enough tracks and you’ve got enough inputs and equipment, you can change the pitch, which is nice.  This is what I wanted to do, what, forty, fifty years ago.  And I had trouble doing it.  I mean, I couldn’t do it the way I wanted to do it.  And now, if I go back to some of the original tapes that I made at CBS and try this, you come up with a whole different sound.  You know, it might be glorious!  But you need a studio and you need a company to work with you.