Chapter Three - The Eagle Has Landed

I eventually came back to Evergreen to give my marriage another go and by then, the dream had become a real, honest, living, breathing objective, and from my experiences with Wakeman and others, my fire was kindled; it really seemed possible now, not some pipe dream. Not an obsession, exactly, but I was determined. And when I get determined, watch out!
After all those rejection letters in Great Britain, I realized I needed a new plan. Duh. Before I went to Great Britain, I had taken an RIA (Recording Industry Association of America) studio engineering course in Denver, through Denver Free University, I think it was called. The course was taught at Denver Sound Studios and it was a 10 week course which I completed in May, 1975. It so happened that the course was taught by Jim Wheeler, the staff engineer, and Green Daniel, both of whom would become a huge part of my career.
One bit of trivia that I recently just found out, was that Firefall's demo which secured their record deal and that Chris Hillman produced, in 1975, was done at Denver Sound. Little did I know that this, too, would become a part of my life later. What didn't in those days in our little community?
Anyway, I completely immersed myself in the course, as I tended to do with everything, and still do. I read the textbook constantly and knew every word (where has that brain run off to?). I sat on the floor, taking in as much as my by now 22 year old mind could hold. Luckily, Jim and I were of one mind as far as sound was concerned, so I guess he was great to learn from. I just watched him and did the work and took it as far as I could. After the class, I asked him and Green about getting a job as an assistant engineer (I mean, that's why I went to school, of course!). Hard to do, they said. Lots of kids lined up, many of them were in the class, also trying to open the drawbridge. I'd probably have to work for free (ouch!).
By early 1976, after my detour to the UK and Europe, and all those rejection letters, I was even more determined. I was gonna do this, dammit! Somehow Jim, Green, and I re-connected and they let me come to work at Applewood Studios, in Golden, just west of Denver.  Golden's claim to fame is that it is the home of Coors Beer. I was to be an assistant engineer, helping the engineer with all the tasks that needed doing during a session and running the 24-track tape machine. I would gradually learn more and be given more tasks and responsibility until I was able to engineer on my own, if that was in the cards. If I made it past the first week! I was to work for free, of course, but I'd been warned previously and was able to. Even if I hadn't had a source of income, I still would have taken the job and figured out the details later!
I recently found out why the engineer hired me, out of all those hopefuls. He said that he could see that I was very serious and it was all about the music with me. That I wasn't interested in just being 'cool' or meeting 'rock stars', I knew what I wanted and where I wanted to go. And, it didn't hurt having a young girl in the studio, as it was a guy's world back then. And I found out that there was much more male chauvinism than I was aware of back then, especially by a close, close friend, which was a bit disappointing. I thought of these guys as my friends and co-workers, not that they viewed me as an object. I'll possibly speak to that in another column.  But, for the most part, I was treated well, by the musicians, as I tried to just be one of the guys, when applicable. Blessedly, I only had some 'female engineer' problems with a few people. Usually I had a good time during a session, with the guys.
Had I made history? Were there any other female studio recording engineers? In the world? I had never heard of any or saw any on any album credits, but back then I wasn't really concerned with it, I just wanted to be an engineer. I recently heard that the Grateful Dead had a female live sound engineer in the 70s, but that's all I'm aware of and would love to know of any more. Even though I did a couple of live gigs, I considered myself a studio engineer and specialized in studio recording, which is a lot different from doing live sound, especially back then; I think the two have much more in common now with all the technology we now have. So there were the live sound engineers, who were doing quite a different thing, technically, than studio engineers. Some switched back and forth, doing both, some were like me, one or the other, or it seemed like most were, and recognized that line. I felt that I would be much better if I specialized in one or the other.
So...Applewood Studios was amazing, at least to me. It was state of the state of the art, and I'll speak more about that in my next column. I will say that it was Neve/Studer based at the time I started, and you could not get much better than that. They had a great roster of equipment, the best microphones, and a Bösendorfer grand piano, which was rumored to cost around a million dollars (a quick Google put that figure at $100,000 currently; so either it was a rumor given much life or PR for the studio. Don't put your drink here, please!. So I got spoiled pretty quickly, but what a great place to get my feet wet. Some might argue it best to start off in a lesser studio and work up, but I did the middle range first and lesser later and it worked well for me. I guess I knew what was possible, with all that great equipment, and so I tried to find a way to duplicate it with the lower quality rooms and equipment I later had to work with. It was a fun challenge, actually.
So I started work at Applewood in February of 1976. I was pretty well fixed for money, as my husband was a professional, so working for free was not a problem – yet. My first session, one cold night, was with the long-lived and popular Boulder rock band Bullett (still a client!). The personnel I met, and the second lineup of the band, were David Forrest Small-vocals/writer, Richie Michalik-guitar/writer, John Butler-bass, and Andy Peake-drums. Dickie Sidman, their road manager, otherwise gofer, and sometime conga player, passed away around 1990, I think, too young, and we all lost a great guy. Rest in peace, Dickie. And of course, Robert "Wiley Coyote" Wolff as the manager, with his trusty sidekick Bosco, a Springer Spaniel, who was always faithfully by his side. He dropped the "Wiley" nickname some time ago, but I wanted to make sure people remembered him, because he was Wiley, or Wiley Coyote, or The Fox to everyone. Now how do coyotes and foxes and wolves get mixed together? Same family of Canidae, I guess.
Note: Bob Harris played keyboards for Bullett, in their first incarnation, time interval depending upon whom you talk to, but he wasn't in my first session and I only ever knew him as the frontman for Helix/Boulder and now Axe (this will be important later, as he had quite a history with some of the Bullett personnel, then on to LA and much success with the likes of Frank Zappa, then back to Boulder, but that is for another column).
I mainly remember the Jacuzzi, and Richie, the guitar player, walking around in his robe. And maybe some other guys taking advantage of the amenities. Hey, cool. I was kind of worried, though, that something untoward was going on back there! An orgy could have been going on for all I knew, and I'd heard all the nefarious stories by then. But the reality was different and this was no groupie tell-all, it was work, to me, and money out for the band, so partying had to wait.  It was very interesting that my first session ever was with Bullett and my last session in Colorado was with Bullett. I gradually became great friends with them, and assisted on a lot of their sessions, and eventually became their studio engineer and even lived in the Bullett House (well, Robert Wolff's house), on Flagstaff Mtn. They were a lot of fun and a bunch of great guys. But that is a lot of miles on down the road yet.
Besides the humans, I was blinded by the light, or lights, I should say, the soft LEDs (those tiny colored lights) and warm colors in the studio. Otherworldly, spaceship, suspension of time/endless night, cocoon. And the equipment, oh the equipment. Toys, toys, Disneyland. And that smell. The same smell as the little tape recorder I got one Christmas, which was the first influence that started me down this road. Oxide, metal, heat. Stone, cedar and carpet on the walls. Quiet/loud. I loved the fact that you could disappear for weeks at time in there and completely escape from the world. Day/night, who cared? Definitely my kind of place. How lucky was all this? To me, anyway, maybe not the atmosphere for everyone. But yes Sirs, I will work for free for you! I mean, Denver Sound was OK, and technically my first studio experience, but I remember bright overhead lights for the class and it didn't have the 'atmosphere' of most of the studios I worked in. It just didn't hit me like Applewood did. Plus, I was at Applewood in an official capacity, I had made it into a studio as an employee! So of course it was more magical at the time. Maybe Denver Sound was atmospheric as well, but it wasn't 'my first', job-wise.
During that first session, I don't remember being very nervous (and do you think I would have shown it if I had been?), I was/am a very 'can-do' person and I had been schooled very well, and studied really hard, so I knew what the engineer wanted of me most of the time; plus we already had a working relationship from the course. I spent that first night running between the control room and studio, doing Jim's bidding (running through that blasted 'interlock' – the vocal booth was surrounded on three sides by big doors, one to the hall outside, one to the studio, and then back into the control room, so it was a thick, heavy 2-door trip, through the vocal booth, no matter where you were headed). And of course I ran the 24-track tape machine, along with its 2-track children. And it wasn't as easy as record/stop/play/rewind; I had to make sure the proper tracks were in record mode, for basic tracks and overdubs, and the proper ones were not in record, for overdubs, or what we had already recorded would be ruined, because every track was its own little recording. I had to learn to 'punch-in', that is, suddenly go into record mode, on, say, a vocal track, so the vocalist could redo part of their vocals, while keeping all the other tracks. Sometimes it got pretty tense and the punch ins and outs were tight, like a breath, or a bar or two, so I had to come out of record just as quickly as I went in, because we wanted to keep what came after. We had no remote controls for the tape machines then, so I sat quietly by the 24-track, Sarah's little spot, until my services were required elsewhere.
I worked as hard as I possibly could. I will do anything to get things moving or fixed or more organized or whatever. That trait and my 'can-do' personality kept me there and proved to management that I was needed, which was part of the whole plan. I assisted on almost every session that came through the studio. Jim Wheeler, the staff engineer, was the Chief Engineer, as he only worked at Applewood while I was there. A couple of other local engineers regularly brought in the odd session and there were the Boulderites and the clients from the far reaches of Colorado or the rest of the US. Ron Valery was one of the part-time engineers and my favorite memory of him was the Kershaw brothers' session (don't remember which brother it was, actually), but if it wasn't Doug, the 'Crazy Cajun', well, he showed up, too, and I was scared half to death! He came by his nickname honestly! Then there was a nice, quiet, laid back engineer by the name of Tom Pope, who also came in every now and then with a mellow project. I think he was actually a teacher, as his day job, but don't quote me on that. So mainly, in the studio (not the front office), it was the Jim, Green (who produced as well as managed the studio), me, and Rick McAllister, the very young, precocious maintenance engineer and sometime engineer/assistant. And from time to time we were joined by the publishing demo producer, and some hopeful hangers on. Rick was a really bright, well-meaning kid, who tried to keep the studio running and in good repair, which to be fair, was not the easiest job in the world, especially with the high dollar value and sensitivity of the equipment and the pressure that put on him (like keeping a Jaguar serviced).
To be fair, Applewood deserves a column of its own, and I met a lot of Boulder people there, who would be a big part of my life in Boulder or Caribou Ranch later; so my next column will be devoted to Applewood; the technology, the sessions, the people who came through, the everyday, the magic, the boredom, my progress and, egads, being thrown out of the nest to fly on my own.

Chapter Two - "Launch"

First of all, I want to thank everyone who read and supported my first column.  This endeavor has been more successful than I ever dreamed it would be and it is my readers who have made it so.  Keep it up, by all means!  I'm having fun and I hope you are, too.   I want to thank Andy Peake, Bob and Suzannah "Thana" Harris, John Manikoff (RIP), and Craig Roush for their help filling in the missing pieces, for this column as well as ones to come.  All of them have been more than patient and generous, especially with their hectic schedules and my deadlines.

Launch
- I remember the day I came up with the dream of engineering as vividly
as one might remember a significant news or family event.  Where I was, what I was doing, the whole thing.  My
first husband and I and some friends were sitting around on a clear
weekend afternoon, looking out of the window of our aerie near the top
of Bear Mountain in Evergreen, Colorado.  All 14,000 feet of glorious Mt. Evans was framed by our picture window, which we watched like a TV.  You had to be there.  I
was sprawled out across the couch and partially on a foot rest and
partially on our huge cable spool coffee table (didn't everyone have
one?).  We had a pretty good stereo, music being our lifeblood.  It wasn't, I know now, an audiophile system, but we had those huge, washing machine JBL studio monitors.  I know a lot of you know of what I speak!  We
hanged our Thorens turntable from the ceiling so there would be no
skipping as we tromped across the floor in our hiking boots, and we had
some brand of good receiver, or an amp and separate receiver, and some
graphic equalization (EQ-like adjusting bass and treble), which drove me
crazy and still does (the graphic type) unless it is used to tune a
studio control room, then locked up in a plastic cover (the EQ, not the
room!).  So I think I kept turning it off, much to the exasperation of my then husband.  Anyway, I had the sound system to hear exactly what was happening with the sound on albums in those days.  And to think about how I would make them sound.  I had no idea how hard it would be.  Not just getting a lowly job at a studio, but how hard good engineering really was and all that went into it.

I
won't say what LP I was listening to, but it just hit me that there was
some not great engineering going around, and it was ruining some great
bands, or at least ruining my listening experience, and I thought I could do better and I thought the music deserved it.  I
had no idea how to go about achieving this or that females weren't
engineering, but I knew I wanted to do this thing, get good at it, learn
everything I could, and at the end of the rainbow would be a gold or
platinum record or a hit or maybe even nothing but studio magic and
creative satisfaction.

But at that moment, I just wanted to lie there, look at Mt. Evans, and have it sound good, because the music was too wonderful for mediocrity.  So my dream was selfish, at first.  And not being terrifically musically gifted, like my parents, it was a way to be involved with the thing I loved the most.  My life had a soundtrack, and I wanted to control it.

Over the next year, I separated from my husband, crossed the Atlantic, received thirty, count 'em, thirty, rejection letters in Great Britain (I bought an APRS directory (The Association of Professional Recording Services) and wrote every studio that was listed).  Then it was back to the States to stay with a dear friend for a while and get my head together.  There, I got a very unexpected initiation into the music business (a friend's embryonic lighting company, a DJ's connections).  So I got backstage sometimes.  I
rode in that damn 18-wheeler lighting truck, bobbing up and down one
hundred miles to and one hundred miles home from the concerts.  If I was lucky, I got to ride in my friend's old clunker.  But I had some pretty amazing experiences during this time, which set me up for what was to come much later.

I
 wasn't very interested in most of the bands we went to see, although
the rest of the world was, and I won't list them in the interest of 'to
each his or her own'.  The most memorable concert, to me, though, was the Rick Wakeman gig.  He'd left Yes and was doing his solo thing and was very, very hot at the time.  And being a young progressive-rocker, I was in heaven.  Some friends knew him really well, so I got more access to him than I would have normally.  I got to chat with him before he went on stage.  He was terrified and talking about his stage fright, which, with his experience, kind of threw me.  Being the mother savior that I was, I tried to help, but I doubt I did.  However, he had someone to babble to who would babble back, which is half the game when you are afraid.  So at least I was there for that.  I
noticed that it was very quiet back there and low key; he wasn't one
for a huge entourage or all kinds of people hanging about, which was
interesting for me to see, that concerts and the music business were (sometimes!) just business as usual.  Work.  By
the time he went on, I felt comfortable enough with him to go plop my
elbows down on the top of one of his keyboards and watch this genius at
work, not but a couple of feet away.  I kept thinking he would wave me off, but maybe my presence further comforted him, I don't know.  Or maybe he was so into his performance that he didn't notice me.  He was in kind of a wizard tent thing off to stage left from the rest of the band, so was a bit isolated.  It
was probably hard being the focus of the whole show after his stints as
a sideman, albeit a famous one, with The Strawbs and Yes.  The audience must have seen me and wondered "who the heck is she?"  Oh, nobody, just a cheeky little girl with big dreams.  (BTW, I'm 5'6", I'm not really 'little'.)

After performing, he joined his band and his friends and I in the hotel bar and we were about the only ones there, I think.  We had the lighted disco floor to ourselves.  Wow, cool!  Gosh, forget Wakeman, how lucky can you get?  I didn't really have another chance to talk to him that night.  I think I tried one time when having a rest from my wondrous disco floor dancing, but he was done for.  He did give me his office address in case I should want a reference, as I told him of my goal.  How nice was that, even though he probably wasn't a believer, along with all the studios in the UK!  But, his name does appear as a reference on my very old engineering resume!  Like he would have remembered me!

Yes, I know he is not from Colorado.  Besides a good 'rock star' story (how I hate that term when speaking of musicians!  There has
to be another.), I'm trying to give a little background on my
progression and how he showed me, more than the rest of the 'rock stars'
I met back then, that they were just people and above all else, to be
treated as people.  No cameras, autographs, or fawning.  I never would have had conversation one (or it would not have lasted long) if I had whipped out any of that with Wakeman.  Or he might have loved it, but I got the feeling that it wouldn't have gone over, right before a gig.  It was just understood.  Professionalism at all times, even though I wasn't working, I was sometimes with people who were.  I can't tell you how much that probably helped me later on when I had to work with some of my favorite musicians.  'Had to', gosh, what a tough job!  It could have been a workman's comp issue and you had to be prepared for these things or you wouldn't be able to work.  I almost cut my finger off in the tape machine when working for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer at Caribou Ranch, much later; imagine if I hadn't been somewhat prepared!  I might have fallen down the elevator shaft trying to keep from fawning while stuffing my autograph book into my pocket!  But
seriously, I also learned a lot when I tried to comfort Wakeman. You
have to be able to talk to artists and coax them and encourage them,
famous or not, to get something special out of them and onto tape/disk.  And respect them. So I started off learning to do that even before seeing the inside of a studio.  So
even if the client was, say, Tom Smith's Bad Bar Band, I tried to
encourage them and have the same respect for them as I had for Wakeman
(sorry, Tom, whoever you are!).  I have to say that I learned a lot of this from my future mentor, too.  If a vocalist had throat problems, out came the tea and lemon.  It was just done.  And it was as important as any piece of equipment in the studio.  In
those days, if the performance wasn't there, there was only a limited
amount of things that could be done to fix it, unlike our current
digital world.

Chapter One - Studio Life At and Beyond the Controls

It's great to be able to also codify the history of the Colorado music scene in the '70's and early '80's (well, that's the first part of this journey, and the start of my time frame, from my point of view, of course). And much has been written already. But it was one of those spaces in time that erupts for a little while, then burns out, like a spent volcano.

A lot has been said about the enormous concentration of talent in Colorado during that time and the artists that should have 'made it', who didn't. In between keeping the studio doors open and food in my mouth, in between doing the boring, endless, or ridiculous sessions, there was always a point of light that reminded me why I put myself through what I did. Some sessions were pure magic and I knew it and I will never forget the times I realized I witnessed something wonderful, whether it was the early Catseye struggling to find itself, or Woody and the Too High band filling a club on the strength of their original songs, as could Bullett, and many others. You could hear incredible live, original music at many Boulder venues any night of the week.

Of course every session was a chance to enhance the artist's work, to capture it as it was meant to be, or to add some color and creativity. Even the use of obscure technical equipment is art, depending upon the way it is used, calibrated, or manufactured.

If you don't know me or can't tell, I was a female recording engineer in the Denver/Boulder/Nederland area from 1976 to around 1982 and in Houston studios between 1980 and 1982, then at home from the mid-'90s onward). I worked at Applewood, Mtn. Ears, Northstar, Caribou Ranch, Todd Wheeler's Remote Truck, the Helix/Boulder garage studio, and two studios in Houston, but not the one that was a combination recording studio and a bordello for passing truckers. True story. And it wasn't a bad studio, either. A little Texas color for you. Most people knew me either as Sarah Dudzik, early on, at Applewood, then Sarah Bullington in Boulder. Now Berner again.

When I began to do research for this column, I was consumed with time frames and correctness. But I lost half of my mementos and all of my journals in a move, years ago. So after driving myself crazy, tearing up my apartment, writing countless emails to friends who were there, too, and re-connecting with old friends, I decided that it was the music, and the story, that counted more than a perfectly contiguous story. So if the dates are bad, I forget or misspell some names, I don't remember recording sessions or stories as others do, please forgive me, and either blow it off or let me know. I would like to know and as a hobbyist historian, I think this project should be as correct as possible. Instead of my journals, which I wrote almost every day back then, I will rely on studios, tape labels, friends' memories, and letters to and from my family during that time.

Over the next several installments, I plan to write about Colorado as I knew it. The studios, the artists, the bands, the technical people (besides me) without whom any of this would have been possible, the ambiance, the funny and not-so-funny stories, what it was like to be a female engineer in the '70s, and how I achieved my dream of being an engineer. I have stories about the famous, the infamous, and the believers in their own press.

Working in many studios allowed me (and other engineers) to become involved with those that came to Colorado, from another part of Colorado, or the U.S., to work for a short time there. They might not have been a part of the community, per se, but definitely put their mark on it, and me. There are certainly people who know more than I, and saw more than I, and stayed longer than I. But I have the time and am willing to write it all down, from my point of view. I hope the people that I forget to mention will come forward and fill in the blanks. I had to leave my career (temporarily), and Boulder, too early, as did many, thanks to the revival of disco and the arrival of punk, and hey, I liked punk, so let's just say that another wave came by to ride and many of us had to change our carefully laid plans and comfortable, beautiful surroundings. So I have no doubt that I missed a lot, but I think I was there for the bulk of it, not the first, not the last, just the middle and some beginnings and endings.

So before I wrap this intro, I'd like to leave you with some thoughts I had when I first starting writing this:

Universality - there is a documentary, "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music", which I highly recommend. Google or Allmusic the late, great engineer/producer. Does the name Clapton, or stereo records, or faders ring a bell? Thank Tom. I noticed that our early backgrounds were very much the same – musical parents involved with performing, and constant exposure to music at an early age. Music lessons, a desire to add creativity to recorded music, to lift it above simply capturing it onto a medium, and an openness to learn from the artists. The push/pull between both sides of the brain, the ability to be theoretical and artistic at the same time. I would never, ever compare myself to Tom Dowd, and am certainly not the musician, physicist, engineer, or producer that he was (he worked on the early Manhattan Project-amazing). But, I think it shows that even someone like Tom and someone like me and many others, came from the same nest.

Sure, some fell into the business by other means or necessity, but not me. I had a major plan. And I followed it until I achieved the first few parts, anyway. Maybe that's the difference between being male and female in this business. My male peers seemed to fall into it with the ease of a diver and I had to build the pool first. I'll write more about that later, but all in all, I was treated pretty well by the guys, even better than today, in many cases.

Anyway, Ray Charles said, in this Tom Dowd documentary, that the first thing you have to have, to engineer, is to be able to hear, to really hear. Of course that is horribly obvious, but he meant hearing like a blind person, like he was. I've always been able to hear to about 23kHz (23,000Hz), which is pretty high for human hearing – most decent equipment specifications go from 20Hz (subwoofer-like bass) to 20kHz (20,000Hz). Dogs hear a lot higher than we do, although there is no data on what sort of engineers they would make, if they had the capability. But ears aren't enough on their own and my personal frequency range has nothing to do with really hearing or blind people, but bear with me...

When I was a young kid, we had a blind neighbor, and one of our relatives was blind, too. I loved hanging out with them, and I learned what it was like to miss part of the world most of us have access to and how they compensated; how their hands gave them so much information, and how their sense of hearing became more acute. I used to put a blindfold on and pretend that I was blind. The first thing I noticed was fear, and the fear led me to strain my ears; they were all I had on which to rely, besides flailing about with my hands. So even though I didn't hang out with the musicians like Tom Dowd did, and learn how to listen from them, I had the physical ability and the curiosity to be able to learn to listen, as a starting point, and my attention was drawn to sounds naturally, from an early age. I didn't get my parent's vocal or musicianship genes, but I had the ears and the exposure. Some people are born to be great musicians or great tennis players or Renaissance men and women who do it all, but I really think I was born to just engineer (and a few other unrelated things).

And so it begins...read on.

© Copyright Sarah Bullington Berner 2007