Chairman at the Board: Recording the Soundtrack of a Generation

By Bill Schnee

Chairman at the Board is an intimate, funny, and absorbing look at the music business by an insider who has recorded a host of the greatest musical artists from the 1970s to today. Bill Schnee takes the reader inside the studio—behind the curtain—and through the decades with a cavalcade of famous artists as he helped them to realize their vision.

After his high school band was dropped by Decca Records, Schnee began his quest to learn everything he could about making records. Mentored by technical guru Toby Foster, mastering guru Doug Sax, and recording legend Richie Podolor at his American Recording Studio, he immediately began recording the top acts of the day as a freelance engineer/producer in Hollywood. Clive Davis soon hired him to work for CBS where he partnered with famed music producer Richard Perry. Schnee went on to record and/or mix many of Perry's biggest albums of the '70s and '80s, including those by Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Art Garfunkel, and the Pointer Sisters.

With his deft personal touch with musicians, he continued to engineer and/or produce the likes of Marvin Gaye, Thelma Houston (the Grammy-nominated, direct-to-disc album I've Got the Music in Me), Pablo Cruise, Neil Diamond, Boz Scaggs, the Jacksons, Huey Lewis and the News, Dire Straits, and Whitney Houston.

With over 125 gold and platinum records, and two Grammys for Steely Dan's Aja and Gaucho, Schnee has been called a living legend—recognized and respected in the industry as the consummate music man with an incomparable career that he lovingly shares with his readers in humorous detail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781493056149

Bill Schnee

Bill Schnee is an internationally renowned producer, engineer, and mix master. He has engineered and produced an extremely wide variety of artists that include Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Huey Lewis, Pablo Cruise, Steely Dan, the Jacksons, Marvin Gaye, Boz Scaggs, Dire Straits, Ringo (with all the Beatles), Carly Simon, the Pointer Sisters, and Whitney Houston, including her mega-single "I Will Always Love You." Schnee has been personally nominated eleven times for the Best Engineered Recording Grammy and has won twice for Steely Dan's Aja and Gaucho. He currently resides in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife, Sallie.

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Preface

If you believe in God, you must be aware of His incredible creativity. I believe the inspiration for the creation of music is from the very heart of God. Music is shown throughout the Bible to have been designed by Him for our benefit and enjoyment. When combined with lyrics, music can touch your heart, stimulate your mind, move your very soul.

I love records—especially the process of making them. The cool thing about this process is it’s a collaborative effort by a group of creative people to make a singular vision come to life. At the start of a session, when you put a new roll of recording tape on the tape machine or plug in a hard drive, it’s like setting up a new blank canvas. It’s exciting to think that shortly a group of talented people will combine their individual skills and creativity, and a new entity will be born. Where once was nothing, soon there will be something that communicates to the minds and souls of those who hear it from that day to years to come.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is credited with saying that music is the universal language, and as different records speak their language, they become a part of the fabric of our lives. Hearing an oldie will bring back memories of that time in your past both good and bad. Just think how different Christmas would be without seasonal music (although it might be a bit better with fewer plays of Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You).

Like most people, my journey through life has had its ups and downs; but through it all, there’s been a consistent prayer of thanks for being able to work in my greatest passion, music. Do what you love, and you’ll never work day in your life! as the saying goes, and I’ve been very fortunate to have proven it true. The fact that people have paid me to do what I would be doing in my spare time just for fun continues to be an incredible blessing.

As you might imagine, being behind the scenes of making a record provides an abundance of interesting stories. When I meet people that are not in the music business, their curiosity inspires a bevy of questions about the recording process and the people I’ve worked with. Questions like, How did you get your start? What’s your favorite album? Who’s the favorite artist that you’ve worked with? What is so and so like? How do you deal with artistic egos? For years, as I answered their questions, some would suggest I write a book and tell some of the stories. I thought it was an intriguing idea, but I set it away on a back burner.

That was until recently. I had finished some mixes on a Brazilian artist produced by my good friend Mike Shapiro, who was Sergio Mendes’s long-time drummer. When Mike and the artist took me to dinner, someone asked how I got my start, and the stories started. Mike said something that gave me pause. He pointed out how the modern record business really got started in the 1950s, grew up in the 1960s, and peaked through the 1970s and into the 1980s. He pointed out it was a very short time, a very iconic time in the art of popular music, and would never be repeated again. He said I was right there and watched a lot of it happen firsthand.

As I thought about what he said, several things occurred to me about that time that are no longer true. Namely, records were selling in big numbers, which meant budgets were large, traditional songwriting was still very much king, bands were still recording together in the studio, the LA session scene was in full bloom, and computers hadn’t made their indelible mark on music. Since I was fortunate to have been working in music during those golden years, I thought I’d take a walk down memory lane, and chronicle some of my favorite memories.

I’m writing this for anyone who, like me, loves music and records but hasn’t been as fortunate as I have to go behind the curtain. I’m going to include some of the highlights of my incredible journey through the five decades in which I’ve been privileged to be making music professionally. Along the way, I’ll offer insights into some of the things I’ve learned, things I’ve seen, and even some stories I just heard about during that time. I will have to include some geek talk—because, after all, I am a geek. The human memory is fallible, so let me apologize now to anyone involved in a story if I have remembered it differently than you do. After all, your memory about the situation may not be perfect either.

A few definitions for neophytes might be helpful to start. The record producer is the person a record company makes responsible for delivering a record to them from their artist. Producers run the gamut from a musician that can write and arrange the songs and then just add the artist’s voice, to producers I’ve come to call chemists. They just put all the ingredients together—the artist, songs, arranger, musicians, engineer, and so on—shake it all up, and out comes a record.

The majority of producers fall somewhere in between these two extremes. One kind of producer isn’t necessarily better than another. What matters most is that a certain producer is a good match for a particular artist. This relationship is often referred to as a marriage between the artist and the producer, and like a marriage between two people, a successful one is when they complement each other.

The engineer is the person responsible for the sound of a record. Because of this, he actually gets to sit behind the recording console in the center, right between the speakers, in order to hear the best sound. His job starts with the recording of the musicians and singers where he takes the music and the technology at hand and merges them to form the aural landscape the record will have.

As a result, this job is a combination of art and science. In a recording session, the artist and musicians look to the producer for musical help or advice, and to the engineer for sonic help or advice. I have done a good deal of both jobs and always looked at both as servant’s roles, since both are there to serve the artist and their music. The final step in making a record is the mix down. The mixing engineer takes all the various tracks of instruments and vocals and combines them to make the final record. He may or may not be the original recording engineer. He uses various tools to control the size, depth, frequencies, and power of the final record. This is my favorite aspect of engineering.

All right, let’s get started—story time with Bill!

Chapter One

You’ll Come Running Back

Every Story Has a Beginning

I suppose I should begin by telling you a little about me and how I got started. I was born on the Fourth of July, 1947 (that’s right, a firecracker baby), in Phoenix, Arizona, and spent the first thirteen years of my life sweating there—my mother told me that the hospital I was born in had no air conditioning at the time. She also said my father, who was a medical doctor, was not allowed to come into her room for the delivery, but she was allowed to smoke cigarettes between contractions. Go figure.

I grew up with an avid love of music. My father listened to classical music, and my mother loved to play the organ. I started trumpet lessons in grade school but found the embouchure too difficult and switched to saxophone. Like all kids starting out on sax, I drove my parents nutty making the sounds of a duck in heat.

At eleven years old, I started keyboard lessons on our organ. It was then that I realized I had an ear for music, although I took ill advantage of it at the start. Each week the teacher would give me sheet music with a song for me to play. I would ask him to play it for me first, and then pretend to read the notes while playing it back by ear. He finally caught on and stopped playing the pieces for me. When he passed away rather unexpectedly, my mom claimed it was because I drove him crazy.

I didn’t have any siblings, and as an only child, I had music to keep me company instead of an imaginary friend. I found solace in listening to records and was constantly mesmerized by them. The radio was a treasure trove of three-minute capsules of entertainment. In those days, disc jockeys made their own playlists, so in a three-hour program you could hear a wide variety of music from rockabilly and blues to pop and jazz. My taste in music became equally expansive from James Brown, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, and the doo-wop groups, to Sinatra, Dean Martin, and, of course, Elvis.

My parents moved to San Francisco when I started ninth grade. It was then that I discovered high fidelity in recorded music and became an audiophile. I remember going to a hi-fi show and being blown away by the incredible sounds that came from all the high-end amplifiers, turntables, cartridges, and speakers. I nagged my parents into buying me my first real stereo, and then spent every penny of my allowance buying records for the new system. I took note of the different sound qualities of various records. I remember how the Phase Four Series and Command Records showed off the dimension of stereo more than other records—almost becoming gim-micky at times.

I became a big fan of Henry Mancini, both for his music and for the sound of his records. In those days not many recording engineers got album credit, but the Mancini records did credit the engineer, Al Schmitt. I never would have dreamed back then I would become friends with Al. The Mancini soundtrack to the Howard Hawks–John Wayne movie Hatari won the Grammy for Best Engineered Album in 1963, and was Al’s first. As of this writing, Al is now in his nineties and has twenty-three Grammys and is still going strong, a record that certainly will never be broken.

Another early record I bought was The Lonely Bull by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Almost forty years later, while mixing an album for Herb and his wife Lani Hall, Herb kindly autographed it for me. Herb is an absolutely standout human being, and I am proud to call he and Lani friends.

The sound of these albums was a big part of the reason I got interested in electronics in high school and joined the P. A. Crew where I did the sound for assemblies and plays. I also started learning a little about electronic theory. I would take the bus down to Market Street in downtown San Francisco where there were several Army surplus stores, buy odd electronic bits, and bring them home to see if I could get them working. I also got into amateur ham and CB radio; I even learned Morse code to get a ham license. There’s no question I became a real geek. My wife Sallie actually found a picture of me from high school with a slide rule on my belt and a paperclip holding my glasses together. Yikes!

Right after I turned sixteen, my parents moved from San Francisco to Glendora, a suburb of Los Angeles, for my senior year of high school. I loved living in San Francisco, but LA had those great summer nights and fabulous Mexican food. The Beach Boys were all over the radio, and they quickly became my favorite group. They sang with those wonderful harmonies about three things I loved and dreamed of: surfing, cars, and girls. I love all styles of music, but I must confess, I’m a pop music junkie. I’ve always loved great vocal harmonies, especially in pop music. When the Beatles came along, I found their early records to have a great vitality, but I still remained more of a Beach Boys fan—at least for a little while.

During my senior year, one of my new friends told me he and some buddies were starting a band. Even though the surf craze was in full bloom and the Surfaris’ Wipeout came out of Glendora High, my friend said they didn’t want to be another surf band. I asked him if he thought an organ would fit into their sound and he said, Let’s give it a try. The first rehearsal went great and soon the LA Teens were born.

The rest of the band were into the British Invasion, and with my love of the Beach Boys, we soon became a cross between those two worlds. We wrote simple songs with typical youthful themes for the time, but we did have pretty decent musical hooks. Some of our first creations were You’ll Come Running Back, I’m Gonna Get You, and You Can’t Make Me Over.

I personally preferred the sound of a Hammond organ over the newer portable English models that had come out. My mother had a Hammond M3 in the living room. The M3 was the home version of the popular B3, including the iconic drawbars, but in a smaller package with a built-in speaker. I really wanted a B3 for the band, but its large size and separate speaker cabinet made it impossible to move without a truck or a van. So, rather than go the smarter route with perhaps a portable Vox Continental organ, I convinced my parents to let me take the M3 and cut the bottom off so I could transport it in the trunk of my dad’s Lincoln. Those massive 1960s Lincolns had appropriately huge trunks.

We played the usual places for a band in SoCal in the sixties: high school dances, teen clubs, fairs, and bowling alleys. Like a lot of young bands, we had loads of fun—and chicks dug us! At least they dug our guitarist and drummer, showing me early on that girls go for guitarists and drummers more than organists. It couldn’t have been that those guys were better looking than me, could it? Our youthful confidence grew quickly, especially in our song-writing. At one point we drove into Hollywood to enter a battle-of-the-bands contest and were totally shocked when we didn’t win. But we soon recovered and decided we should make a demo and try to get a record deal.

The drummer’s house had a cool barn in the back where we rehearsed. I had a tape recorder with sound-on-sound so we could record the instruments and then add the vocals. However, the barn was a bit echo-y, so the music was never very present. It was there that I started fooling around on our drummer’s kit, and I found that I was a decent drummer. After making a slew of barn tapes, we decided it best to save our pennies and go to a real studio to make a proper demo. After graduation, we went to a little studio in a nearby town and recorded what we thought were our three best songs. It must have cost us all of $30 for the recording session and a few acetate discs for us to take home.

Someone’s mom knew someone who knew someone who knew Gary Usher, a music guy in Hollywood. We later learned Gary’s uncle was a neighbor of the Wilson family, and Brian Wilson and Gary were friends. When the Beach Boys were being formed, Gary wanted to be in the band, but was turned down in favor of another friend of Brian’s, Al Jardine. Gary did cowrite several songs with Brian, including 409 and In My Room. We sent an acetate of our demos to Gary and were thrilled beyond belief when he called and asked us to come and have a meeting with him.

His office was in the Capitol Records Tower, and I remember how nervous, yet excited, we all were as we entered the building. I was especially thrilled because Capitol was the home of the Beach Boys. After the introductions and small talk, Gary offered us a tour of the studios. We walked down the long ramp into the basement and were blown away with what real studios looked like. Studio A was absolutely massive, and I recall how great the sound of our voices were just speaking in it. Gary then took us to Studio B, which was where he liked to record. It was a much smaller room, which he said was better suited for a five-piece band, but it still felt magical to be in there

Back up in his office, Gary told us he liked our songs and thought our sound was very commercial. He offered to sign us to a record contract at Decca Records, where he had just made a production deal. This was the singles era in the record business, where typically an act was signed to record four songs. If one of them became a hit, you ran in and recorded six more to complete an album. Gary told us he thought one of our songs in particular, You’ll Come Running Back, was a hit. He said the business folks at Decca would be preparing contracts, and since we were all minors, our parents would have to sign them as well. We drove home that night knowing we were headed for stardom.

When I told my parents what had happened, my mom got very excited, but my dad wasn’t impressed at all. He was an Austrian immigrant, quite austere and very intelligent. He had come to Ellis Island as a baby and was adopted and raised by a poor family. He worked his way through NYU and medical school to become a physician. He really wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor, even though I knew I didn’t have the stomach to be one. He kept saying that music wasn’t a stable occupation and never considered me following my passions. In fact, down the road when my career was well established and I had about ten gold records and a couple of Grammy nominations, he was still asking me, Billy, when are you going to get a real job?

Usher was convinced we were headed for stardom and said we would need a manager. He had just signed the Surfaris to Decca as well and had us meet with their manager, Dick Martinek. Dick made us all dress in the same shirts and get our hair styled very similar to the Beach Boys. We were really looking the part. If you’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do! you’ll have some idea of what this roller coaster looked and felt like for us.

The contracts finally got signed in October of 1964, and we were ready to record. We drove into Hollywood to Capitol and set our instruments up in Studio B. They had a real Hammond B3 there, so I didn’t have to bring my sawed-off M3. The engineer set us up in a circle and off we went. We worked for two nights recording the backing tracks for the four songs. On the third night, Gary brought in a studio guitarist named Richie Podolor to overdub on our tracks, which wasn’t an uncommon practice at that time. Richie was a real professional musician, and we were all blown away with his playing and musicality.

Gary then had us take a week off to practice the vocals before returning to Capitol. After doing the lead and background vocals, we ran out of time at Capitol with one overdub left to do—an organ solo on what was to be the B-side of our first single, I’m Gonna Get You. So, the next night Gary booked Studio 3 at Western Recorders to finish up. This was the famous room that Brian Wilson did so much of the Beach Boys’ work in.

As I sat down at their B3, I got intimidated thinking about all the awesome music the Beach Boys had made right there. I’m Gonna Get You opened with my organ playing the verse riff with an almost sinister feel against the kick drum before the rest of the band leaned into it, raising the tempo. Jim Weiser starts singing the lyrics with the same ascending melody with occasional harmonic help from us before our drummer announces the minor key bridge and walking bassline—a classic Beatles move.

After I did the solo, Gary played the A-side of our single for the engineer. When the engineer heard that, he exclaimed, That is such a smash. You guys are going to be stars! That was the first time the record business lied to me. However, it wouldn’t be the last.

My aptitude in high school was in math and science, so in September, I had started college at Cal Poly in Pomona, majoring in aerospace engineering. But the first day, when they put me in a specialized machine shop class to learn about milling and the structure of different metals, I freaked out because I was afraid I might lose a finger in one of the big metal machines. I came home and told my parents I wanted to change my major.

Since I wouldn’t go into pre-med, my dad suggested I pursue business, saying, You can always use a business degree. That first semester, I barely cracked a book. I was so high on our band’s future that Introduction to Marketing couldn’t hold my interest. After all, we were going to be stars—the engineer at Western Recorders said so. My parents were really upset when I quit school after the first semester, but I was sure we were going to make it.

In the sixties, the DJs held all the power at radio stations, and a few of them flipped our single over and played the B-side, I’m Gonna Get You. You’ll Come Running Back never got any traction, but I’m Gonna Get You actually took off and charted in a few markets. Decca turned their attention toward it and sent us weekly radio station charts, including a few where our record was listed above the Beatles. I’m guessing ours was peaking as theirs was on its way to the top. But who could complain? My only beef was them listing my name as cowriter, William S. Schneed.

Soon after the single lost its brief spark, Gary called and asked me to pick up the new album by Bob Dylan. He said to work up an arrangement of a song on it called All I Really Want to Do, which he thought could be a hit. We did what he asked and later went back into Capitol and recorded it. He once again brought Richie Podolor in for a jangly twelve-string guitar hook and solo. Jim Weiser, our lead singer, also added a folky harmonica. I loved the way the record came out and now thought it would be a hit for sure.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones who had our eyes on Dylan’s song. Cher had heard the Byrd’s perform it at Ciro’s and decided to make it her debut single and title track from her Dylan-heavy album. Both she and the Byrds’ released a version the same week in May of 1965. Our newbie band didn’t stand a chance against them at radio. The flip side of ours was an innovative song called Saturday’s Child, which was an adaptation of Countee Cullen’s poem of the same name. Not many garage bands of the time were looking to the Harlem Renaissance for inspiration, and I thought Jim’s full-voiced vocal and my organ work gave it an electrified reading reminiscent of the Animals’ The House of the Rising Sun.

After the LA Teens’ second single failed, we were hoping to do more recording, but Decca and our manager both dropped us. Richie Podolor had built a studio just outside of Hollywood in Studio City. I called him and he invited me to come over for a visit. I met his assistant engineer, Bill Cooper, and we all spent about an hour just chatting. When I told Richie we had been dropped, he said he thought our band was great and he was sure he could get us another record deal and produce us. He said he had a working relationship with Mike Curb, and I’ll never forget his next sentence, Go see Mike—he’s going to go places. You think? Fifteen years later, Mike had served as president of MGM and Verve Records before becoming lieutenant governor of California.

Richie called Mike Curb and set the stage for us. I went to the 9000 block of Sunset Boulevard where Curb’s office was, aptly named Sidewalk Productions. At that time, his tiny office consisted of only him and his sister Carole. Based on nothing more than Richie’s recommendation, Mike offered us a record deal with Richie onboard to produce us.

As soon as the new contracts were signed, the LA Teens headed into Rich-ie’s studio to give stardom another try. American Recording was a bit funkier than those big-time Hollywood studios where we had previously recorded. Richie had just bought an electric harpsichord and asked me to play it on the first track we recorded. Richie was much more involved in the production than Gary had been, extensively coaching us on the song’s arrangement. I also noticed he and Bill took more time getting sounds on the various instruments than the Capitol engineer had done. Bill came out and adjusted the mics a few times to get the exact sound they were looking for.

When the music and sound got to Richie’s liking, we made a few takes, and then he called us into the control room for a playback. He said, See what you guys think, as Cooper hit play on the tape machine. What happened next was a real Aha! moment that is etched in my mind as if it happened yesterday. The sound that came out of his speakers was unlike anything I had heard at Capitol or Western. It was more immediate, had much more punch and character, and somehow was just more musical. It made me feel something from our band that I had never felt before. For the first time I saw how the sound could add an emotional dimension to the music. It was a real eye opener for me and would ultimately determine the direction of my life. I really wanted to know how to do that myself.

As soon as the track ended, I turned to Richie, pointed at his console and all the equipment and asked, Can you teach me how to do this? He retorted, No, I’m teaching Cooper. Now go out and do another take! Of course I was disappointed, but having that sound evoke so much emotion made a very deep impression on me.

We only recorded one track that night and as we left, Richie said he would call us in a few days when we could come back in and do some more recording. But a few days turned into a week, which turned into a few weeks, and we still weren’t back in the studio. I kept calling and leaving messages until he finally called me back and said he had some serious business issues with Curb and didn’t think he was going to be able to continue working with us. I was very upset because it had been so fun working with Richie; and more importantly, I really wanted to hear that incredible sound again.

I called Mike Curb who confirmed he and Richie were on the outs. We started discussing what the next step would be when with cheeky audacity I asked, Why don’t you let me produce the band? For some ridiculous reason Mike said, Okay, we can try that. He told me he had a studio in Hollywood, and we could record there. When we lost Richie, we also lost our drummer who had also been getting pressure from his parents to get a real job. When I told this to Mike, he said the engineer at his studio, Larry Brown, was a very good drummer and could record with us.

I called Larry and scheduled a time in the studio for us to record. Curb’s studio was called Continental Sound, and its entrance was in the back parking lot of a building where Doug Sax would soon build the Mastering Lab. Also in a few years, Continental would change hands and become Producer’s Workshop where I later recorded many albums, including Aja.

But back then, I was going in to produce my band, and I was scared spitless—scared because both of the producers we’d worked with sat behind the console and turned the knobs, and I had no idea what all those knobs did. In fact, when I arrived at Curb’s studio and introduced myself to Larry, I proceeded to insert my size-thirteen-foot right into my mouth. As he was setting up the console, I noticed the equalizers (tone controls) were the same ones Richie had in his studio. I only knew they were equalizers because I watched Richie adjusting them on our one-day session and could clearly hear what they did.

Pointing to the equalizers, I timidly asked Larry, Who makes those? Langevin, he replied. Having no knowledge of professional audio equipment, I asked, "Oh, the watch

Reviews for Chairman at the Board

[Dave Ihde · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great fun. As a musician and audio engineer I was very interested in the stories behind much of my favorite music, music makers and the soundtrack of my life. An insightful and gracious look back on an amazing career and a life well lived.