The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan - Jack Douglas: Lennon's Producer | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Billy Corgan sits down with legendary rock producer Jack Douglas for an intimate, no-frills conversation that runs straight through the heart of classic rock history—from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Imagine, and Double Fantasy to Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, and beyond. Jack tells the wild story of Lennon recognizing him from a Liverpool newspaper, pulling him into the studio to escape Phil Spector. He breaks down the making of Aerosmith’s first three albums, why some iconic solos on Get Your Wings weren’t Joe Perry, and how Cheap Trick at Budokan (actually Osaka) became a power-pop landmark through sheer studio ingenuity. Along the way, you get rare behind-the-glass insight into working with George Harrison, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, and what great producers really do: protect the song, the band, and the vibe.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I mean, crossing the North Atlantic in November is no fun on a little tin can of a ship. Word got out that maybe we had been smoking pot after the session was over, and then Yoko would get pissed off at us. And she'd call us, and John and I looked at each other. Before I could do it, John would, woo. In amongst all this, here comes Aerosmith. Here comes Aerosmith. You know, I never said no to them.

Yeah, what was your role in this? How was that getaway driver? Thank you so much for being here. Longtime fan. Here we are together. Talk nerd stuff recording and, of course, the Bacchanol that is rock and roll. You've been in the epicenter of it now

for a good 50, gosh, 50 plus years. 50 plus years, yeah. Yeah. So, even though it's the most obvious thing in the world, I'd like to start with the day you met John Lennon because it seems to me it's the watershed moment of your life because the moment you meet John Lennon, your life literally does change.

Right. It's not like you met him and then your life changed later. I mean, your life changed the day you met John Lennon. Yeah, it did, but... Is that fair? I don't know if it's totally fair because I was on some kind of path already. But this was unexpected.

And if you did some research, you probably know that the whole Liverpool. No, that's the second part of my question, you see. Yeah, so. No, because the reason I say that is because you were on a trajectory, you were already working as an engineer, you were working at the record plan. Yeah. And you worked your way up, literally from janitor on up. Yes. So it's not to discount what you were doing, but I'm saying is that's the day John Lennon personally walks you.

into a session and says, can we give this guy something to do? And now suddenly you're working with Phil Specter and all these musicians.

Yeah. It took a, it took a notable change. But if it's not, if you don't think it's fair to put it that way, tell me why it isn't fair to put it that way,

because that's why I asked the questions. I asked my questions for assumptions, but it did cause a huge change in my life. But I didn't think that day that it was going to be the kind of change that it turned out to be. I see. I see.

But looking back now, do you look at it that way? Yes. Okay. For both good and for both bad and tragic. Yeah. And for me, you know, like led me on a really self-destructive kind of journey after his passing. but for him to recognize me from a newspaper article in the Liverpool Echo in 1969 was very stunning. And my surprise was that he was surprised to meet me.

Like if all the rooms I walk into, here's the guy that was like, you know, We should have been just on the front pages of our local newspaper. We just released Rubber Soul. Yeah. And there's these two guys on a ship with their guitars and their band from landing. So for people don't know the story. I actually knew the story. You and friend go over to Liverpool, 1965.

It's the winter, I believe. Yeah, December. Okay. And you show up on a ship. You don't even have a immigration permit, nothing. You just show up and you decide you're going to be rock stars in Liverpool. Not even a return trip ticket. But, you know.

You had that energy once where it doesn't matter. It's a kind of a beautiful blind faith or something. Yes, and which turned out honestly to be accurate because that has everything to do with why the day you meet John Lennon, you go, by the way, I was in Liverpool once. Yeah. And he knows the story. And he's like he recognizes you from the story. Yeah. You know what he asked me?

You know, in that picture in the newspaper, I've got a 195 less ball custom with the Bigsbee. Okay, was it with the one with the Deidario pickup? I can't know. No, no, no. It's just the original 195 magnesium pickups. Okay. The second question he asked me was, you still have that? See, now there's a musician.

You still have that last fall. He wasn't much interested in my partner's guitar. He had a Mose Wright. Yeah. Which I don't even think he knew what a Mose Wright was. That was, but he wanted to know about that last poll. That's funny that he remembered it. Yeah.

Well, right there, I'll send you a picture. I'd love to see it. From the newspaper. But he just thought that it was a, like a strange moment that he would run into me there. And that I was a guy who had the, you know, the wherewithal to take a trip like that to Liverpool. Yeah. I mean, crossing the North Atlantic in November is no fun on a little. Tin Cana, but ship.

But he invited me in to work on the record. Which is the imagined record. Right. Produced by Phil Specter. Right. The reason that John was in the room that I was in was to escape from Phil. Yeah. He had kind of a love-hate relationship with Phil, right?

Yeah. Very much so. And in fact, when we were doing double fantasy and word got a, got out that maybe we had been smoking pot after the session was over, and then Yoko would get, like, pissed off at us. And she'd call us, she'd call us down into her office in Studio One. And John and I would be standing there, like, two school children.

Why, she yelled at us for, you know, what were you doing? You would go, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then she looked at me and she said, she said, you know, I can always get, Phil to do this, to do these sessions. And John, because John at this point, I hated him. I hated him. And John and I looked at each other, and before I could do it, John went, ooh. Yeah.

It was, yeah. So as the story goes, he brings you into the session. You were in editing a room or something. I was, yeah, transfers in editing. Yeah. So he brings you in the session. give this guy something to do. Yeah.

And, you know, politics being what they are, suddenly, you know, you're being elevated into a spot that anybody would die for. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there were two engineers on the date. Yeah, they probably looked at what's he doing. Yeah. I mean, my boss, Roy Secala and Shelley Acos, an amazing engineer.

Yeah. And they were just like, I mean, first of all, when I didn't walk in the room, they said, what are you doing? And all I could say was I'm with him. Yeah, my new buddy. Yeah. My new buddy, John. And he, for some reason, he took a liking to me.

It would ask me to do stuff. Yeah. Eventually, he asked me where I lived. I lived in the village. He lived in the village on Bank Street. Yeah. He gave me a ride home a few times. He asked me if I knew a restaurant, he could go in a back door in Yoko.

We did that a few nights. And then one night he called me up. He asked me for my phone number. he called me up and he said, I have to go to this party. There's all these kind of nut cases here. I just want you to keep an eye on things because I don't know them personally.

It was Abby Hoffman and that whole group. Oh, is that whole world, yeah. Their whole crew. And they were talking in this apartment, off the pig and they were talking about violence. Yeah. And he was getting drunker and drunker. Yeah.

That's also what got him investigated by the, was it the FBI? Yeah. because they was hanging out with these dissidents. Yeah. So you got yourself in all that too. They were using him. Of course.

Really. Yeah, that's pretty obvious in high school. But he made quite a scene at that party. He grabbed a knife in the kitchen and he went at this woman who had been yelling to off the pigs. And he was like, you want violence? I'll show you violence. Just gave the shit ever. Wow.

And then we left. Yeah. So, how was Phil Spector? Two questions. What did you think of Phil Spector? I mean, I'm not talking about necessarily by reputation when you're walking in. Were you a fan? But, I mean, now you're working with Will Spector, at least you're in his proximity.

And this is, you know, this is John just after the Beatles. This is, you know, and Phil Spector is still Phil Specter. Yeah, I was, I was rather disappointed because, I had a lot of respect from, I loved his records. Especially growing up in this part of the world. Right, and Ronnie was there very frequently out there. And Phil was frequently quite drunk or high. Sometimes he would be kind of half asleep at the end of the board.

And I watched Roy Sackala very subtly take over the production. of the record, Phil would lift his head every once in a while. More reverb. And I had no respect for Phil after that until I worked on the Christmas song. At that point, and John had no reason. John treated him badly and argued with him constantly. And I learned a great deal about how to work with John from watching those sessions.

But when we did the Christmas record, Phil was totally in his element. And that, to me, was like the most successful I'd seen Phil work with John. It was just a Phil Spector production. Yeah. What's that live, I don't know, magical thing that he would do or he would just be? Yeah, I mean, look, he had four acoustic guitar players in a circle with a mic and Omni in the middle, they're all strumming the same thing. I mean, that kind of thing.

And no one ever did that better. No. Whatever that was. Yeah, yeah. Because it's, it's, it's, there's a science, I'm sure, but the, but the magic is knowing what works or something. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, playing the tracks out over the, the, uh, the monitors in the room.

Oh, feeding the tracks back into the room? Yeah. Wow. Uh, during overdubs. Okay. Yeah, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So did you, I mean, a big choir of, you know, kids and...

But back to imagine, you know, and I don't know where in the sessions you came in, the sessions when I think, I wrote it down, but it's like February to July of 71, somewhere on there. But so, but, you know, in any given time, George Harrison's on the record. Yeah. Nikki Hopkins, Claus Vorman's playing bass. Keltner's playing drums. Who's the other drummer, Alan White? How white, yeah.

Yes, fame. And that's a pretty interesting group of musicians, too. You know, you're not just working with John Lenny. You're working with, like, a pretty A-crew of talent. Yeah, yeah. I think I underappreciated it. I was so, like, nervous to actually be there doing it, that I just treated it like I was working with session guys.

Oh, okay. Like I was working with, you know, Steve Gad and Tony Levin. Sure. So in a given day, were you? you micing? I mean, were you? Yeah, I was Mikey. You know, lucky I had been mentored by Roy Secala. Okay. So that I knew. So you were already in this. I knew his

liking techniques. And that would be a big deal. So you're coming in as it's sort of a, yeah, I mean, he didn't have to tell me what he wanted on a, I mean, you and I understand studio politics. It's like an outsider just can't walk in. Yeah, I wasn't so much of an outsider. That's my point. Yeah. That's the point I'm making. If you were just some guy he found on the street, It would have been a disaster because even if you were a genius, you're suddenly, you're an invader. But you're because you're part of that family. Okay, now, okay, you're the kid.

And I was Roy's baby. I wanted to touch a little bit when you were in Liverpool in 65, going into 66, because you were there for a brief time and correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys started doing gigs when you weren't supposed to in the trouble and ship back out. Yeah. But did you see any artist play around that time? Oh, yeah, we did. We hung out at the original Caval Club. I mean, what an incredible time to be there.

It was amazing. I mean, it was like a dream come true. You know, it was better than anything I could ever have imagined. Well, you can argue it's the greatest moment in rock and roll history is that period of time. And we would hang out the cabricer. The big plus of coming back, because I was already, working musician, but small time. Yeah.

Locally. But when I came back from Liverpool, I had Cred. I was a guy that had been a beetle, yeah, I had been to Liverpool. And we both, Eddie and I, we both hooked up with the angels, my boyfriend's back. Okay. And went on the road with them and playing guitar,

playing bass. Wow. And we did a bunch of road gigs with the angels. with the angels. That sounds pretty funny. But Liverpool, I wish I could remember all of the bands that I saw down there. We were playing in the suburbs with a, you know, a pickup, a band that picked us up because we were kind of famous. But within two weeks, we were busted.

You went viral, basically, in the modern parlance. Yes. And we left in shackles. on a train to Southampton. So when you were young, somebody gives you a reel-to-reel tape recorder and this sort of begins your fascination with sound. That's right, my father did. Yeah, and you started doing almost like these music concrete,

you were recording different things. Were you editing the tapes? Yeah, I was, I also was putting my guitar, the mic into the acoustic guitar I had, and I was recording my guitar. in there as a kid and letting it feed back and getting all these sounds. It was crazy about the whole thing. It was cheap tape recorder that my dad worked in a freight yard,

so things used to fall off freight cars. As they do. The whole neighborhood, he sold TVs and radios to the whole neighborhood I lived in trunks. But he thought he was getting me a record player. because I used to drive my parents crazy wanting to use their record player as a kid in playing my, you know, Bozo under the sea, the tortoise in the hair, Uncle Remix, the Song of the South. Yeah. So, and, you know, and they just wanted to listen to their big band records,

my father's opera stuff. So my father, what he went into the freight card to get, he thought it said, record player, it said, said recorder. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it was a webcore. Yeah. You know, good brand. Yeah, bad brand.

It was something that came in from Chicago, I did. Yeah. And that's right. I think it was from Chicago. Yeah. And he pulled that out. And we didn't know until I opened the press. Yeah.

That, because he put it in a bag and he put the bag under the bed. Well, actually, real to reel at that time would have been more valuable than a record player. Yeah, but. Yeah. I wanted a record player, but this turned out to be much better. Well, it worked out. It worked out. Yeah. So at what point do you make this transition sort of psychologically, like from I want to be a musician to I want to be on the other side of the glass and recording?

The last band I was in was a group called Privilege. And, you know, and I've been in... Is this the Isley Brothers' Tienac Records? Yeah, they produced us. Yeah. And I didn't, and we recorded at A&R Studios. Okay. Phil Ramones played.

Yeah. But it was a wrong combination. What kind of music? They were. Because there's not a lot of information on that part of your life. Yeah, it's kind of psychedelic. We wanted to be Led Zeppelin, but a New York version with a Hammond organ. Okay.

So it was kind of blues-based, psychedelic. I played bass. More psychedelic. Vanilla Fudge, say? More like that, but more blues-based. Okay. More lead zeppliny. Cactus?

Yeah, cactus fair. Trying to deal like locate you. Part New Jersey, part New York. Because there was a cool, hard rock thing happening in this, we're in New York, but there was kind of, there was, it was different here in terms of heavy music than say Detroit, Chicago. Oh, yeah. Well, I had, after I quit. the one band in Florida that I was playing with, I joined a Canadian band that was called the Liverpool set.

They were already, now, not one of these guys that ever meant to Liverpool. That's why I'm laughing, because you already know where it's going. I was the only guy that had ever been there, and I'm the only American in the band. They were from Latvia, Scotland, England, and, of course, Canada. And they were based in Toronto. And the days in Toronto when the village was really something.

Sure. The checkmates and the Mandela. And so we wanted this drummer from a group called the Minor Birds. That, so were some famous people in that band. But we got him. He was English. And we got the piano player from Ronnie Hawkins. Okay.

The Hawks, his name was Scott Cushney. He wanted to leave because when they were playing La Cac d'Ore on Young Street, Ronnie would crank him up, you know, part of him and make him play really fast. So he didn't do. He wanted out. We got him. interesting enough Scott Cushney ended up in Arrowsmith

for a while because he's the piano player on Big Ten Inch. Oh. But anyway, he, interesting story. I was just working on a documentary about him. He was called Dr. Piano or something. He had a great reputation in Toronto. And

he played Thursday through Sunday at a club, When people came into town, they'd always end up jamming with him, Scott Cushney. And so I got a message just a couple of years ago. He's disappeared. He was blind also. He disappeared. And I'm like, Scott disappeared.

He could see, kind of, he had Coke bottle glasses. He knew how to get home all the time. He didn't make it home just one day. And so he disappeared. and now he was gone for months. It was all over Canadian news. Scott Cushingy, Dr. Piano, disappeared.

So they thought, you must have drowned, he must have this. So it ended up at some point he was in the hospital. He had fallen, and his face hit the curb, and it completely disfigured him. And he was in a coma, and he finally passed away. These people came in.

were looking for their uncle or somebody who had disappeared that same week, and they identified Scott as their uncle. Oh, my goodness. And they gave him a big Greek Orthodox. Sorry to laugh. Yeah, I know. And buried him. Now he's missing for like a really long time.

You know what happens? The uncle shows up. Yeah. And they're like, oh, my God, who did we bury? Scott Christian. never heard a story like that. Yeah. Scott Cushney. Anyway, so I was in this band.

We were signed to Columbia. We recorded in Nashville. Made a couple of hits. And we played the craziest places you could ever imagine. Is this privilege or this is the Liverpool? This is Liverpool. Yeah. But we did play the summer of 66 or 67 at Tony.

Tony Morts. Did you ever hear it Tony Mawins? Oh, it's a fabulous place on the Jersey Shore. Okay. You know, it's like a dream to play. I once asked Bruce, did you ever play Tony? He said, I dreamed to play Tony Marts. I was just slightly too young. Yeah.

And played there. It was great. And then I had another band after that called The Waterfront. Okay. And which became a production company for some years. And we were signed to epic records. Okay. But they changed our name to the swamp seeds.

So there's almost none of this history is available where I walked. So, uh, and then the swamp. So I would have done my research. I would have gone. Yeah, the swamp seeds morphed into privilege. Okay. And we went from epic records to, uh, uh, Teenette.

teen neck. Which was their Isley's private imprint? Yeah, well, Buddha records. Right. Okay, yeah, right. You know, even earlier in my later teens, I was writing for Kennedy. Right. So I already had, you know, I already

had... This is President Kennedy, yeah, if that's just Kennedy. No, Robert Kennedy. Sorry, Robert Kennedy. He was running for Senate in New York and I was writing campaign songs and then warming the crowd up on a tour. Right, but again, sorry, because I'm glad you told me all this, because I couldn't find any of this information.

I love this type of stuff, because I love the musical journey part of it, but like, at what point you go, okay, I'm done as an artist, and now I just want to be on the recording side. I think because, that's a hard, that's a hard, that's a hard psychological thing

for a lot of musicians to get over when they go out of, you know what I mean? Like, we worked, when we were young, we worked with Butch Vig, who had done two, had been signed to a couple labels, both bands didn't kind of work.

So when we're working with him and he's working with us and Nirvana, he's kind of somewhat bitter on some level that his musical life didn't work out the way he wanted. Eventually, he formed garbage and had a lot of his own success as an artist. But most guys or girls who make that transition, there's always that kind of feeling that they didn't get out of it, what they came in to get. Oh, I never felt like that.

That's why I'm asking you. Yeah, no, for me it was all a great. great adventure from start to wherever I am now. You know, it's like I could never figure that it would, you know, each step would be more enlightening. Yeah, yeah. I started that I wanted to score film. Okay.

That's what I studied in school theory and composition. and even while I was the janitor at record plant, at night I was a client because I was scoring the ABC after school specials. Okay. I was writing the music for that show. So I wasn't sure exactly, you know, which path. And now I'm scoring film all constantly. Yeah.

So I wasn't sure where I was. It kind of explains, you tell me that, it helps because it sort of explains the cinematic aspect of some of the productions that you've done, particularly some of the most famous ones,

particularly when I think of Aerosmith. There's a cinematic quality to the way that you produce them. Also, I would... Does that ring true to you? Yeah, yeah, it does. First of all, if you're looking up at the monitors, when I look at the monitors,

I see a movie. You know, I'm seeing this abandoned a movie up there. And I'm watching, you know, each of the strings of the guitar becomes a live thing. And the drums become an image in a live thing. And so... Maybe you're just a Dadaist at heart. Yes, could be. I think so.

It's kind of a Dadaist mind the way you describe it even, you know, and even the idea of cutting tape up playing with sound. Yeah. You know, when I was working with Bob Ezrin on a billion-dollar babies. there's a song on there called I Love the Dead. And we were mixing that thing for 40 hours straight. Bob said, I'm so tired. I'm going to go get a couple of Zs back at the hotel.

You work on it for a while. I was already wiped out. It was right around Christmas, just before Christmas. And I was like, okay, maybe it just, I'll take this mix. I'll do some editing. Maybe I'd come up with something. We've got all this.

So I took a couple of mixes, and I pinned up all these different pieces that I thought were good up on the wall, chorus from here, verse, the second verse, middle eight. And I put my hand in my pocket, and there was a pill. And I'm looking at the pill,

and I said, who gave me this damn pill? Oh, this girl, she's a speed freak, gave me this pill. this will work great. You know, it was a capsule. It must be speed. Just what I need, really, to get me through the next three or four hours to put this together. It wasn't.

It was, it was some kind of psychotic. A psychotic or a psychedelic? A psychedelic. Okay. It was a psychedelic of some kind. Maybe mushroom. Yeah. So anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm.

I'm trying to edit, and I'm editing on a 440 ampax, which is a low kind of machine. But when I looked down, my arms suddenly got 10 feet long. I'm rocking the reels. And anyway, I put it back together best I could, and one piece of it's backwards. And Bob came in. I was now out, sound asleep.

Bob came in, he turned down the machine, listened to it. He goes, brilliant. Perfect. So that... Yeah. So is Bob who really... Bob Ezrin really encourage you to really become,

think like a producer, right? He did. He told me that I was a producer because of that first Dolls album. Because Todd wasn't there very often, nor did he care much about the record. It was not a good fit. because Todd's production style was so beautifully clean and the harmonies were always so perfect.

I remember we were doing personality crisis or trash or one of these things. I knew all those guys. You know, I hung out at Maxes and I knew the scene. And so I got the gig so that there would be somebody that could relate to that they knew. And of course, Lieber Krebs managed them. And so we're doing one of the songs, and Todd turns to me, says, it's really awful.

And I said, well, you know, it's not that they don't play that well, but when it's all together, it's kind of a really cool sound. It's something about. It's what we would call my band a vibe. Yeah, a vibe. So now the band comes in, and they're like, you know, half of them are. stoned and Johnny Thunder's. I don't even think he came in. You want to be like very straight to the bathroom. And David comes in last. David had been doing a live vocal just to keep the band going.

And David, who was a very close friend of him. I'm so sorry. Yeah, just passed away. David comes in and not knowing what to say, Todd said to him, you know, this is going to be really good when we put some harmony on there. And David looked at me and he said, harmony, are you accusing me of having melody? I thought that was one of the fights they ever heard. Yeah. And, you know, he was taking the piss, but it was really wonderful. Anyway, so Bob would stop by every once in a while to see how that was turning out in there.

And decombined, Todd was, you know, we have to keep the label out a lot of the time so they wouldn't know Mercury Records that there was nobody. in charge that the inmates were running the asylum at that point. But we were getting it done. But after that, he said to me, you know, you're a producer. That's what you're doing on the record. I see. You know who my assistant was on that for Jimmy Iveen.

What do you ever do? Did he ever do anything? So you have these interesting experiences with the weddings. Yoko, John, and obviously, John, Yoko. And then, you know, there's other things you get into, like, Edward Hawkins, Edwin Hawkins, LaBelle?

Well, I did LaBelle's, I did her demos. I also did, and I was just reading about it because I also did Billy Joel's demos to get his, oh, wow. For where he got his deal from, just piano and vocal, and Artie Rip had paid for the session. and already came in with Billy and... And Billy was just...

He'd been in some kind of psychedelic band too, right? Yeah, he was in the Huns or something, he wore horns. Yeah, yeah, he was also in the hassles, which was very much like the vanilla fudge. Okay. Oh, that's right, I've heard that stuff, yeah. Yeah, very much like the vagrants,

another East Coast Hammond group. Okay. Leslie West was the leader. Ah, yeah. I love Leslie Wilson. Yeah, he's great. So, you know, it, I'm sorry, what were we talking about? No, I guess what I'm trying to point you at is, you know, now you're in the hustle, like, you're in the game.

Oh, yeah, right, but with Bob. Right, I was getting there too, but I mean, with Bob Ezrin's encouragement, now you're taking these experiences. You worked with the Who on Lifehouse sessions. you know, you've got your foot in it now. And the way the business works is once your name gets around, people starts saying, you know, so did you come into it with a philosophical approach? Because there was kind of a, it seems like around that time,

and you tell me you were there, but it seems like a, not a back to basics, but kind of more of an organic vibe to the records. Is that, is that? Oh, very much so. Very much so. Is that something you were interested in, you were a proponent of or was that sort of of the time?

Well, that was a school of a recording that goes back to Al Schmidt and Phil Ramon. Yeah. And the philosophy was go out and listen to the instrument you're about to record. And then come back into the studio and recreate that sound as best you can so that you can see that instrument. in front of you. That really explains it, because the world I grew up and we didn't think like that,

but when I go back and listen on those records, I could never understand sort of philosophically where that was coming from. Yeah. Because to us, especially as kids listening to records,

my daddy was a musician, so I heard a lot of music when I was a kid, too. It always seemed kind of very, not clear, but defined. You know, it's like good sound was a big part of that logic. but, you know, in Chicago was about the blues. Everything was like over-amified, over-distort it.

So to us, the East Coast thing was always kind of, you know, the Phil Ramon, like almost too clear, too defined, where we were growing up with everything over-hand. Well, then, all right, so this was passed on to Royce Cala, Chelleyacchus. Then their philosophy, in particular, Shelley, was now you've, got all of these instruments that sound like the instruments they're out in the room, now make it sound like a record. Okay. What does that mean to you?

Add the magic to it. Okay. So the magic is... The compression, the EQ, the reverb, the delays, all those things that make it have that magic. Don't go completely crazy. Yeah. Be subtle with it and it'll work out crazy.

Okay. That helps me understand because particularly your work with Aerosmith, it's got a particular feeling to it, you know, where a lot of guys would have gone maybe the other way into aggression. Yeah. Your work has a lot of beautiful definition that holds up really, really well over time. It's quite dry, actually. Yeah, that too, which for the punter in the room means you're not adding reverbs and

undo ambience. Back then, you would have used plates. Right. Also leakage was important to me. Sure. Like if I put the base in a booth, I always opened the door. to the booth. Okay.

And let that big wave. Do you like that? That big wave. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So, um, in amongst all this, here comes Aerosmith. Mm-hmm. What was your first impression of them?

Well, being such a yard birds fan. Okay. I immediately. So you got it. I got it right away. And, and when I went up to Boston to see them, by the way, they wanted Bob to produce that record. Right.

Was because he was more of a name? Yeah, he was a big name. But Bob. But he's Canadian. See, that's how we said. Yeah. But I'm also, I'm a landed immigrant. That's a joke for all our Canadian.

I'm a Canadian land of immigrant. From working up there, they just, I got landed immigrant status. Become Canadian by. But Bob didn't think they were ready after hearing the first record. And Lieber and Krebs also managed them and the Dolls. And they were looking to give me the prize that I deserved for making sure that the Dolls album got through. So you got that gig.

That was my prize. Who did you first connect with an Aerosmith sort of emotionally, like of the, of the, of the I think Stephen, because he's basically Bronx yonkers. Right. So we recognized each other right away. Yeah. But, you know, it's basically it's Stephen and Joe. Yeah.

Those are the guys. Joe is very standoffish or very shy, either one of those. Yeah. I mean, he's the reluctant rock star. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, he's a very bookish. He wanted to be some kind of scientist.

He was interested in saving fish in the ocean. The reason he started playing guitar was so that girls would notice him. Yeah. So that worked. Yeah. But I love it because. But I, please. But in a room at a high school gig they were doing,

where they were playing where it was. So the acoustics are so terrible You could hardly hear anything Yeah But charisma was there The charisma and the aggression Yeah And they put a drink

Drink kept a rolling Yeah And you know From blow up That was always a big thing for me Yeah When we The last day of school

In sixth grade Which for me would have been Gosh what age would I have been 11 years old So that would have been 1978. We had a kind of like a little commons area. And so they said for the last day of school, you can play whatever you want.

We have a record player. Bring in your records. You can play whatever you want. Kind of like the last day of school party. So I played Trankt up to Roland. And the teacher made me turn it off. And I said, but you said I can play whatever I want. Anything but that.

And you can't play that. Yeah. Oh, boy. shut it off and did it did that in the middle of it, right in the middle of train cup to rule. Wow. So the reason I love this type of stuff is, you know, the legend of Aerosmith, particularly at this point, it's a long train. There's a lot of history there, you know, good and bad, mostly good. But the records and the breakups and Joe going solo and you did that stuff and all of it, right?

But you were at the beginning of that particular train. You know, you saw them in that infancy, but you saw them before they became this legendary, now the number one selling hard rock bandit in American history, mostly borne up by records that you did. Yeah, the first three. Yeah. So it's hard from an interview point of view, it's like, what's a point of entry? You know what I mean? And because it's, you know, there's the war stories and the thing.

I'm more interested. Right. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I'm not that interest in that because that's already all out there. Yeah. So did you feel right away or did it take you a hot second to think, okay, this band's got something that's really, really unique and special? Not just this is another good. Oh, absolutely.

What was that for you? First of all, it was Stephen's voice and his very being. You know, he's a force. He's a force of nature. Yeah, he really is. and I knew that he was going to drive that band to make it no matter what. Well, there's that song, Make It, you know what I mean? He literally sings it in the song.

Right, and he was dedicated and loyal to the band. He loved them. He loved Joe, like the kind of love he could never get back from Joe. That would cause problems quite often. Interesting. Yeah. He could never get that kind of love back from Joe. you know, it was sometimes heartbreaking.

Yeah. I don't mean in a sexual or a home. No, I get it. I get it. Every band has its weird chemistry. Yeah. And the thing that makes it work is almost the thing that doesn't make it work. It's like a cutting edge in there somewhere. Like an unrequited love.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like in my case, I was talking about recently, like I would write some of these songs that now are big, songs and my band would just shrug. Yeah. Like they didn't give it at all. It was like it didn't matter what magic trick I did.

They were like, but I think that's part of what drove me in the band. Oh, I could see that. Yeah. Like trying to impress. I was trying to impress them more than I was trying to impress the world or something. It's interesting. They become the most important people to impress. Well, there are the people that are in the room every day.

Yeah. They're your brothers? Everybody else comes and goes. And in the case of Aerosmith, I mean, the fact that that's still a moving train, you know, 50-something years later and just release these new songs with Joe and Joe and Stephen. Yeah. It's not bad either.

It's not something I would be producing, but that's fine. So alluding to my previous thing, you know, there's so much there. I mean, you and I could just literally talk about Aerosmiths for three hours, so we'll keep it simple. but so I just picked like one spot right so I was looking at the records and what was on the records and you were obviously in the room but I thought okay I can't remember which it was get your wings right it's 1974 and there one side of the record is no more no more and then I think the the last track on that side is you see me crying yeah and it's like so just take those two songs you know I mean because there's so much to talk about like so no more no more it's like it's basically guns and roses 15 years before guns are roses. And you see me crying. And I remember hearing that song when it came out. It was like, what band is this? Yeah. You found this. And basically it presages the ballad version of Aerosmith that was so big in the 90s. Like, you were doing that with them in 1974. Like,

you saw that in Stevens' voice. Yeah. And I knew I wanted to orchestrate it. Yeah, it's beautiful. That way. Did you do the string? No, Mike Minary. Okay. Beautiful, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I had, you know, I already knew who I was going to, who the orchestra was going to be, was primarily in your filmonic. Yeah. See, that's the cinematic thing in you that. You know, I sat with Michael and talked through the arrangement with it. Yeah.

But, you know, that scoring for 90 pieces is out of my lean. Sure, but I mean, if you were just like a common, you know, growing up in Airsmith was huge in Chicago. So, you know, you couldn't escape them in Chicago, whether you want to. to or not. But that was one of those songs where as a fan you would listen to the record and all this rock stuff and obviously a lot of swagger from Stephen and Joe's guitar playing and this and this and that. And then all of a sudden it's like, wait, what is this band?

Well, you know, that's inspiration from the Beatles. Okay. Who finish off an album with Ringo singing. Oh, good night. Good night. Yeah. So that was the inspiration. I didn't know that.

And the other thing was, you know, we're working primarily with vinyl, right? Sure. So you can't put a loud song on the inside of the record. Because it starts a grade, right? Right. You can't have a heavy bottom or... So we also... 18 minutes or 20 minutes is where it starts to go, right?

Yeah, that's why there were only nine songs on those Aerosmiths. Ah, I see. And you could start out with a bang. You know, we always started out. you know, like toys, back in the saddle or something that was really bottom-heavy and introduced the record. Now, what about all those weird rumors we always heard that Joe wasn't really playing guitar? Like, what is the... On Get Your Wings, on a couple of tunes, he's not.

It's Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, which was a hard sell. Was it because of musicianship, or was it because of... Yeah, there weren't... They weren't the players they wanted to be... Excuse me, yet. They had in their minds what they want to do. It must have been hard for Joe. Brad was a trained guitarist.

But Joe, Joe is a guy who played from the gut, all feel, and at that time very little technique, but the greatest feel ever. What a feel. And dangerous. Really, because he didn't care what he went into, Sometimes that was great. So, but there were, there were, it needed, a couple of those songs needed to discipline

that they didn't have at that point. When I approached Stephen about it first, he was like, absolutely, I totally get it. You know, I totally get it. You sell it, but I get it. I'll support it. Yeah, I'll support it. And Joe took it really badly. Brad didn't at all.

and said I always wanted to watch those guys work. Okay. Yeah, but I imagine it would be hard for Joe. It was hard for Joe, but it was only a couple of tunes. Same old song and dance, Trinkett to Roland. Somebody once told me they thought it was Rick Dairanger playing some of that stuff. No, no, just, you know, and I knew Dick and Steve from the Alice albums. What a great band that was.

Yeah. What a great band. Yeah. But in the end, it worked out because they learned those solos and went out on the road for a year. You came back when we did toys. They were like a different... I see. Completely different musicians.

You could definitely hear the jump in their musicians. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And what was... Just say one thing about the magic of that band was that they really acted like a band. They really respected the contributions that each member of the band made. They were totally open to everything, including Stephen, except for lyrics. Okay.

Including Stephen, somebody made a suggestion. We played it out before. You know, I never said no to them. I just said, let's see what works best. And that's why the pre-production stages were sometimes months long. Yeah. Because they came off the road with no music, no, nothing at all. Yeah, probably just a riff.

That's a riff, yeah. I want to circle back because we're sort of in your arc 1974, 1975. Were you still in orbit of John and Yoko at this point? Because I read something that you were sort of around for the lost weekend time in L.A.

I was because I did muscle of love out there, which John talked me in doing. Oh, really? Yeah. I said to John, well... Did you like Alice Cooper? He did. He said, I'm producing Alice Cooper.

And he said, to be really, where are you doing it? And I said, wherever they tell me. Yeah. Being a novice. Yeah. And he said, you're the producer. You tell them where you're going to do it. Of course, Richardson was also producing

to keep an eye on me, really. And so he said, why don't you bring it out to L.A.? Warner's will love it. You'll be close to them. Yeah. So we did it at Sunset Sound. And this gave me a chance then to become one of the original Hollywood vampires, along with Alice. Were you in the, in Sunset One, the original room, the original Sunset Room?

Yes, the big room. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, loved it. Yeah. I did one song in there once. It was interesting. Yeah.

The big knees. Yeah. I think they finally sold that, and he. Oh. Well, you know, that's the thing with us old studio guys, you know. Yeah. It all goes eventually. Yeah.

I have a studio as well. Okay. In LA, so I have a nice... Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, an SSL and all the bells and whistles and five or six hundred thousand dollars worth of mics. Wow. Like everything.

What's the name of your studio there? No name. Oh, no name? No. It's not a commercial studio. Oh, it's just a... We let friends use it. Okay.

And it's a big room. Okay. I can score in it. Oh, wow. It's big enough for a small orchestra. got everything you could ever match except for the Fairchild we just sold for $150,000.

You're talking about the Fairchild compressor? Yes. What made it so expensive other than the normal $34,000? It was 50 when we bought it. Yeah. Was it a special one? It sounded great, but we had it tuned as well. Okay.

And a guy from Dubai was buying. He went around in L.A. made us an offer. And my partner and I... The plug-in's looking really good. The plug-in, you know what? The plug-in sounds great.

Yeah, the plug-ins are pretty good. It depends on what you sample, what instrument you sample. So, yeah. So we were like, yeah, I think we bought a rack of 1073s. Wow. So back to the last weekend for a second. you know i was a drive the getaway driver i was going to say yeah what was your role in this

how is that getaway driver in this catalogue so the vampires were it was alice led in nilsson uh sometimes wringo sometimes wringo anybody else yeah mickey dolens that's right um what a crew yeah really and and there was some pretty hairy times uh yeah you're john getting john out of places where he was getting into trouble when he was drunk. Yeah. He once kicked the rear windshield out of the car I was driving. He could get pretty violent.

That was some bad times for him. What was your relationship like with Yoko? I mean, I get the sense that you wouldn't have been in that orbit if she didn't want you around. Well, I'd made all those Yoko records. Yeah, that's why I'm asking. Yeah, that was John early in our relationship, said, I'd like you to work with Yoko on her music.

Yeah. And I guess, and I'm asking because it's a sense I have just from reading through what I could find about your life is she must have felt seen and respected by you because your presence in their life personally and professionally indicates that. Yeah. I think when I first started working with her, she tested me. and I'm because I also interviewed Elliot Mintz

so I've heard Elliot Mintz's version especially he wrote a book too about how she would sort of test him oh yeah she'd test all the time but the first thing I said to her

about something we were doing was I said Yoko I don't care if you play the piano from the bench or inside it it's going to be unique so whatever you want to do I mean, we did some strange things. Yeah.

But it was all cool. Right. I mean, I was a big John Cage fan. I was a big, I was a jazzer. Yeah. You know, I loved all of that stuff. Yeah. So, looking back now, I mean, we know how this story goes, and you were there for different parts of it.

But how do you view their relationship? Because I think there's more respect now with time for their partnership, maybe as a, Best way to put it. You know, because back then it was a very contentious thing, her being, you know, she was blamed for breaking up. Yeah, well, this isn't pretty much nonsense. Sure, but I'm saying is, you know, there's the, there's what the public thinks and the lazy journalism and all that stuff.

But then when you're actually in the room, you're in the room with these two people who are both, you know, incredible artists. Yeah. Hugely influential. He relied on her a great deal. Sure, that's what I'm saying is you got it inside track where most people didn't on how they actually worked together. But I would, at some point, I would stop them from working together so that they didn't

become too critical of each other, particularly this I learned from working with Yoko early was that if John was producing those sessions and he came in, it became more difficult for her because if she was singing a little bit flat, he would say something about it. And she would sing flatter. Yeah. How can you not be? Yeah. So when it came time for her to do her vocals, I would, we would have breakfast in the morning at La Fortuna, make a plan. Then I would have her come in at 11 o'clock.

We worked from 11 to 4, sometimes 5. and he would come in at five and we would work to whatever time, that just during vocals. Sure. Which meant that she was free most of the time to do whatever she wanted to do on the vocals. Just taking some direction from me. Yeah.

And John was very easy to work with. The one thing I had learned about working with John, and I had asked him this one time when we were sitting there, and I said to him, you know, what is it? You know, of all the producers you could have worked with. Yeah. And I knew half the reason was that they trusted me. But if all the producers you could have worked with to do your comeback record here, why me, you know?

And he just put his head like, I said, good antenna. Good antenna. And that I understood because I knew that when you work with John, you're staying two or three steps ahead of him at all time. He has no patience for anything that's slowing down. If a song isn't going right after two or three takes, we'll move on. And he just have a problem with that. John, let's move on to the next song.

Not a problem. Okay. We'll get back to it tomorrow. Yeah. Jeff Emerick tells us amazing story in his book here, there, and everywhere about John coming in, had a cold, was grumpy, and he did four takes of a day in the life,

and they just banged off. And Jeff Remick's like, he didn't necessarily like working with Lenin because Lenin had no patience. Yeah. And where McCarvney was willing to do all the meticulous stuff. Yeah. And he was more interested in that than the Lenin vibe, which was like, let's just get it done. Yeah. But then he turns around, he says, but he had such immense talent, he could actually pull this off.

Oh, yeah. In four takes. So there's always this dichotomy of like, well, why would you do more than four takes when you don't have to? Absolutely. Absolutely. If take two is good. Yeah. Is there a moment that stands out in your mind where you're, like, you see that level of talent?

Because obviously that's a rare level of talent. Well, because we did live vocals for everything. Okay, so give me one where you were like, holy shit, this is why it's John Lennon. Nobody told me. Okay. I mean, that vocal is perfect. It's just, he's in there singing and playing at the same time. Yeah.

It's perfect. Yeah. He's playing. He's singing. It's what he does. Yeah. Perfectly. Yeah.

I mean, that's just his talent was enormous. His mic technique was incredible. I mean, and also, he drew a line, which was very nice, between me, producer, and he's the performer, so that he'd do four vocals. Sure. Maybe five, if I needed a little patching up here and there, and then he'd leave.

And it's you, you figure. Yeah, you figure. figured out when you get to call me and I'll come out of the room and do and do and double it. And that, that's, that's all it was. He didn't, you know, Stephen will be leaning over you. That S could be better. Do we have another S? How about that T? Do you know what I mean? You'd be like, micromanaging every inch of, especially when it got to Pro Tools. But he was, John was like, he knew that they were all good, that they were all relatively good.

Yeah. And he didn't he didn't know that we had a record until he heard the vocal back on watching the wheels. Okay. He was still, he was like not sure. Right.

But when he heard that back, he was like, Mother, tell him we have a record. Right. So now that you're a successful music producer in the fantastic music business, I imagine your phone, did your phone start ringing a lot? I mean, were you in demand suddenly?

Yeah. You're making money. or yeah i mean money was never a thing part of it for me was like uh you know the apartments kept getting better in new york you know nicer neighborhoods and and and um but it was like did you feel though you had your pick though i mean you know are you were you getting offered enough stuff that that you thought okay i want to do that and i don't want to do that and yeah because you made some interesting choices montrose yeah it's interesting right Yeah, I liked it. Ronnie was great, and he was a really interesting man, an astronomer, astronomer.

Astronomer. Astronomer. It sounds weird when we say it. Yeah, I know. It was an astronomer. I didn't know that. Yeah. You could tell you anything about this.

Great guitar player. Amazing guitar. Cool sound. Yeah. Is this bantros with Hagar singing or is it? No, with, I can't remember his second guy. Yeah. Patty Smith, right?

That I loved doing that record. Yeah. Cool. Rick Derringer, also a really good guitar for. Yeah. Recently passed away. God bless him. Also, I don't know how many four or five, eight songs with Alan Ginsberg. Okay. That I co-produced with Bob Dylan.

Yeah, that's right. That was a trip. We want to talk about somebody with no patience. Yeah. Oh, Bob, you know, he was truly shy. I, you know, he used to slip notes to me about what we should do next. What do you think we should do next? Did you save the notes?

No. Then one day he told me a terrible joke out of nowhere. I mean, just really bad. And so I wrote him a note back as you can stick to the notes. And I couldn't have broke the wall. Yeah. But yeah, we did. And we had all the beat guys and David Amram and all that.

I actually knew David. I ran a little bit. Yeah. Still round. So that was an interesting record. I mean, I did Shanaana. The NAC. Did you do the first NAC?

Round trip, I guess, third. Okay. He's considered a classic now. I need to go listen to that because I miss that. We did what they always wanted to do. Of course, capital records was. Yeah. Where's my Sharona?

Yeah. How about this instead? The Rockets? She was my real estate agent at one point. Yeah, in L.A. Yeah. Yeah. Not what you would expect. No, not at all. You expect this blonde and this, you know, she was great. She was great girl. Bit of philosophical bent. Did you find yourself when you were successful sort of, I guess the query is something along the lines of like, did you, did you attribute your, your success to anything particularly particular in philosophy.

Because as somebody who's produced records, like at some point, you've got to kind of pick a lane. You know what I mean? Because there's the intuitive faculty of producing, which is, I feel this is the right thing. But then you're also under constant pressure about what other people are doing. I never, no, I never felt that at all. Okay. So if you had a, if you had a recording or an aesthetic philosophy, how would you define it? because the reason I'm asking is because I know so many of your records

and I know them really, really well. And there is a common sort of feeling to your records, but it's almost hard to put my finger on what it is. So that's why I feel I should ask you. You know, when I would make a record, the thing that was important to me is that I'm making the record that I want make with the band. First, the band. And second, not what other people are producing or what the

sound is today. Because I want, I would really like 20 years from what I'm producing this record, that this record is still listenable. Yeah. And that was the kind of feeling. Does that go back to that Al Schmidt, Phil Ramon, like, if it sounds good and it has heart to it, it's going to work and it'll endure. And yeah. So that's, is that for you, like, the common thread with your work. Yeah. That it's still, you can still play the record and not go,

listen to the gated reverb. Okay, so you have to indulge me here because, you know, 1977, 76, 77, I'm in my backyard listening to Cheap Trick Live at BudaCon being from Chicago at, which is I am. I mean, Chief Trick was a,

they were the local legend. Yeah, of course. But that was their breakthrough moment. you know, they had their first record come out. But like, Buda Khan was where they suddenly, they were on pop radio. They, on the radio station I grew up listening to, they would play, I want you to want me at 10 minutes after the hour, every hour. Wow. So I knew if I sat in the backyard at 1-10, 2, 10, 3, 10, 4-10, I'd hear why I want you to want me.

Eventually, I figured out if I could record it. I didn't have to sit and listen. But that was a watershed moment for me because by having a lot, my father was a musician, like I told you, but he, never had success. But the fact that there was a band from Chicago that had success that I actually could identify with that. That actually told me it was possible to get out of Chicago as a musician. Because with my father, all you ever heard was you can't be successful out of Chicago. I know it's not information, but there's not really a question. I'm trying to think, and all I can think of is, you know, Bloomfeld and, you know, the blues

bands. Yeah, and my dad liked those guys and saw those guys too. But, Trick was the moment where like it was actually about a younger band making a very Midwestern statement, what we now would call Power Pop. And Cheap Trick was the ultimate purveyor of Power Pop. Yeah. And Nielsen's crazy genius, whatever goes on in that brain. Yeah. You know, because you know being in a room with Rick is like it's an endurance test because he's so ADD. Yeah.

You know, and you're never quite sure if he's in self-promotion or self-deprecate. and Cheap Trick being one of the meanest bands I've ever met in terms of not only dissing each other, but dissing whoever's in the room. You know, and I know you went through that, too. No, sure. Sure. So give me some cheap trick, just to indulge me because I just love them.

Oh, well. And actually, I want to tell you a funny story at the end of it, but please go ahead. The first record that we made was for me what cheap trick was. the first the cheap trick album yeah that's snoddy yeah what's that song where you wrote about the serial killer it was the it was the ballot of

Richard Speck before they changed yeah they changed the name because Richard Speck was the guy in Chicago killed all these nurses the nurses right he horrible grizzly thing he was going to sue from his jail cell so CBS they didn't want to fight it so it was the

ballot of TV violence yes but you know, it was snotty and dirty and funky and fat and dry. Yeah. But also had Mandocello in the middle of it. Yeah. So that it showed, you know, they could do this too. But I got stuck and I'm really stuck on Draw the Line.

Okay. For almost a year. Oh. And I was supposed to do the next cheap trick album. Ah, that's why you didn't do it. Yeah. I was stuck there. Yeah.

I wanted, um, I went to Tom Wormann and I said, Tom, listen, I can executive produce it, even while I'm doing this up here, an Armunk. Um, but I want Rick Derringer to produce it. Oh. And he said, I'll take that under advisement. but he loved the band so much. He did it. Yeah.

God bless him. He did a great job, but I thought he turned the band into different direction that I would have turned them. The only thing I, the first record I knew was going to land at college because of the statements that were on, it was, you know, a social, it was a social protest record. You know, everything on it, Daddy should have stayed in high school. Yeah.

I mean, it was about, you know, taking heroin. It was about a serial killer. It was, you know, all these issues. Yes. And I thought, well, it'd be great there. It's not going to, it's a good start. Yeah. And then all those other songs, like I want you to want me, which we recorded.

I love go-go girls, dream police. We recorded all those. And I said, next record for these guys. I see. Put them on the back burner. We're going to go slowly. I never knew that. Yeah, we're going to go slowly.

over there. Ah. But we're going to make this statement first. Yes. College will love you. Your rest of the world won't yet. And then, and that's how we'll move. And then, and then when I heard I want you to want me with that piano, I was like, no.

Yeah. No. And then when it was a hit from Buda-com, which I had mixed, I was like, yeah, see, that's it. You know, that's it. Yeah, that's, I, because, because, because, you know, Because, you know, there's been a lot of contention through the years about the way those other records were produced, you know. The word that we would throw around back in today was they sounded a little bit wimpy.

Yeah. Where they don't, they, the band that you see live still to this day, and the band that's on Boudicom, that band doesn't sound wimpy at all. No. No. It's a funny story about Boudiccone. Please, yeah. So Boudicons not Boudicant.

You know that. It's Osaka. It's Osaka. But they sent me the tapes. And Jay and I, we listened to all, you know, we listened to everything. Buttecon sounded terrible. It was just so poorly recorded. I don't know, like, the mics were off or they were pointed to wrong direction.

There was a little bit of drums, very little, not much, no bass drum. We went to Osaka, it was better. It was the best. performance. I mean, the best recorded, the performance was good. Yeah. As good as Budacom. They play good every night. Yeah. They're one of those crazy. And the screams and everything. It was all great.

So, uh, in order to reproduce the drum sound, what I did was I put a, uh, I put a speaker in a bass drum. And I filtered the, whatever I had from the tape down. So only 60 below and below, cycles were getting through. And then I miced that bass drum. So now I had to thumb. Oh, you basically did like a virtual sample. Yeah. And I did the same thing with the snare drum. Okay. There was a one overhead on it. So it was getting a little bit of snare and some toms and some symbols. Wow, I never knew that. So I put a speaker on top of a snare drum and miced underneath it. And I think from 5K to 8K or from 3K to 8K. And that was a speaker. And that was a speaker. And that was,

It does have a cool. Yeah, now I got a snare drum. So that's how we did that. And it was tough. But here's the funny story. Rick calls me up to my house 20 years ago, something like that. He goes, we have the film from BudaCon. We're going to do a 5-1.

I want you guys to mix a 5-1 version of it. And I said, do you have the film from Buda-Con? I said, but he goes, he just used like kind of the same mix, maybe. I said, but that mix is Osaka, remember? Did he not know that? No, he forgot. Oh, he forgot.

He thought you were so excited. Yeah. So now Jay and I go to work on this thing and thank God for Pro Tools. There was a cut and paste job. You would not believe because when there was a close-up on Rick or his hands or Robin singing, that was Buda-Con.

you know, when I was a wide shot, it was Osaka. And it was just, it was a laborer. Love it. They loved doing it. Yeah. What great songs, though. Oh, yeah. Great time. They're in Japan now, I think.

They're doing their final, because I was just there. All the advertisement is final, I just played Buda Khan the other day. So whenever we're in that building, it's always like a, you know, I go back to sitting in the backyard, listening to the mix that you've done from Osaka. Is that, that, just that sound of that record still to this day. I just, being from Chicago, it's that record has so much to us in Chicago. You can go back to Chicago at all? I still live there.

Oh, you do? Yeah, it's, it's, I always say it's the, it's the most, most indicative side of my insanity that I live in Chicago still. That I've never, they've never gotten out. We don't get political here. Okay. Okay, just a couple more things. Thanks for indulging me. I also worked during that period of like John and the Who and I also worked with George Harrison.

Right. On Bangladesh. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I have to say, your public record is very incomplete. Yeah. I worked with David Bowie on a. some live record that you wanted.

I had no idea on any of this. Yeah. You know, I was working with, I was worked with Stevie Wonder. I mean, I was working with it. You need to get some minion to gockering, fix your public record. Yeah.

Let's cycle back and, and, I know I wanted to tell you a story. Now I can't remember the story. I want to tell you it was a good story. Anyway, it doesn't matter. So at some point, John or Yoko,

one of them calls and says, John's going to come out of retirement. I want you hear these demos. Yeah. What was your opinion when John was in his retirement, his house husband and sort of retirement? I saw him about a year before we did this record. I was at a health food restaurant over on the east side.

He had been in the Y with Sean teaching him to swim. And he came in and he put his hands over my eyes. I said, guess who? I guessed, of course, all the wrong people. I knew it was there. And he said to me, what are you up to? He goes, I said, you know, I asked him, what are you up to? And he said, you know, I'm a house husband.

I'm not doing anything. I found that hard to believe. And he said, look, why don't you? He says, I miss the whole scene. Here's my private number. And I only live like four blocks from on the west side, on Central Park West. Yeah. Here's my phone number.

Call me up and come up and hang out. And I didn't. Really? I didn't. Because I thought, you know, all this stuff I'm reading about him and he just wants to be a dad. I'm the last thing he needs me to come up there. Wow. Now, maybe that was a good thing.

I see. It might have been a good thing. Because now a year later, when the mystic phone call came in to, come out to their mansion out there in Glen Cove or wherever there was. It flew me out in a seatplane. Okay. And Yoko gave me an envelope that said, for Jack's ears only, it was from John. And John then called from Bermuda.

And he said, I want you to listen to this. And tomorrow tell me if you think it's just shit or I have a record there. And there were two cassettes in it. They were wonderful, wonderful. They were all narrated. Were these just, like, him playing into a tape recorder? Well, yeah, he's either playing guitar or some shitty keyboard.

I think... He had some kind of keyboard that he used to do, right? Yeah, yeah, just kind of organ-y piano sounds. Somebody's banging on pots and stuff. fans in the background. Yeah. Then he recorded that directly into the mics on a blaster.

Then he took that blaster and played it, not wired, it just played it into another blaster. And while he did that, he doubled the vocal. Because he had to double his vocals. So it was a generation

away, you know, but you heard the songs run away. I heard them and they were all narrated, Most of them said, here's another piece. One or two of them were, this is definitely for Richard Starkey, which I finally gave to Richard Starkey, and we recorded it with Paul playing vase a couple of years ago. But I thought, when I spoke to him the next day,

and he said, what do you think? And I thought it was incredible, beautiful, great. great songs. There were just a ton of them. And I said, to wonder, just release these cassettes. Interesting. I don't think I could get the magic of what you've captured here. It's incredible. You know, it's just beautiful. And he said, I suppose that means that you like the record, you like the music. And I said, I love it. He goes, okay, well, we're going to make a record. Wow. It has to be secret.

Yeah. So no one knew, kind of. Yeah. Andy Newmark says he knew from the get-go. Because I rehearsed the band without John. Yeah. I charted all the song. Yeah.

How did you feel, though, about this kind of, you know, again, this idea of them sharing the record, you know, because that sort of feeds in how it, when it comes out. At first, I thought it was just a John record for a minute. until Yoko handed me this much to these pretty tapes. And she said, and here's my stuff. Ah. Okay.

It's going to be both of you. She said, yes, there'll be both of us. So that's when I knew that day. I was shocked in doing the research that the record was, at least what I read, it was poorly received. It didn't. They were like, where's the edge? That's so strange.

Where's the angry John? I'm like, this is him approaching 40 years old. He wants to know how the rest of you are doing. This is how he's doing. He's never sung anything to you, but his truth. Always, yeah.

And there he is singing his truth. And where's the edge? Where's, I'm the walrus. In the world that we live in now, you would think automatically a number one record, He's back after five years and the whole thing, and it was the complete opposite. I don't remember that at the time. It was, well, because it was mostly ill-received in the UK, less so here.

Starting over was a big hit right out of the box. So it wasn't a... Yeah. Was part of the criticism of Yoko still, or was it more about China? Oh, that was a tremendous. You know, why do we have to hear Yoko in order to hear John? Well, it's a hard play. Yeah.

It's a dialogue. Yeah, I see. And, you know, I didn't understand at all why it would feel that way about it. Deffen understood it. This is a maybe a strange question asked. Because obviously when someone passes away, it puts everything that's happened before into a different relief. Did you feel, did you love the record as it was when it came out? regardless of the...

Oh, yeah, I absolutely loved it. Yeah, because it's gone on to be a classic now. Yeah. But it's also imbued with the tragedy that follows the coming out. Yeah, try to dust that off a little bit. Yeah, you kind of can. Yeah. That's why you ask how you felt when it actually went out.

Also, I think that walking out thin ice is quite brilliant. Yeah, it is cool. So, because we talked about a little bit before we rolled cameras, you alluded to the fact that John being assassinated and I use that word because Sean uses that word. Yeah. And I remember the first time I heard Sean say that, I kind of, we were talking in private and he said,

when my father was assassinated. Not when John Lennon was killed or John Lennon was assassinated. When my father was assassinated, you know, it's one of those things where you kind of, it hits you like a fish upside to face because you're like, wow, I never thought about it that way. Yeah. I think that's accurate, which is why I would say it that way, right?

So when John was assassinated, you alluded to the fact that it kind of sent you off in a different path. Can you talk about that? Yeah, because suddenly everyone wanted a magazine article, everyone wanted a book, everyone wanted this, everyone wanted that. I wanted, you know, absolutely nothing to do with it. And so I started hiding out and then taking pills so that I could just stay in the house, send somebody else. Did you feel, was it a sense of personal trauma or did you, you didn't like that you were in this different circumstance or was it all of the above?

All of the above, yeah. I didn't want to go out of the house. It was terrible. It, and I felt this terrible guilt because very often I went home with him. And I didn't because I had another session after. And so I played it over and over and over. I would have been in the car. I would have seen the guy.

I would have tackled him. John would be alive. So that played over and over. over and over it, so I could put it away with medicating it. Yeah. And that turned to different drugs. And then I was out of control. And I had to just lay low.

After 82 or 80-something, I just stopped altogether. Yeah. Until I was sober. I'm sober of 31 or 32 years. But I remember them telling me in the program, we'd stay sober for two years before you even think about going back to work. And I had really good sobriety because my dad had a big old house upstate. And it was a chance to, my mom had already passed.

It was a chance of me to check in with him, stay with him, kind of take care of him for a while, take care of this big house at the big old 17-room farmhouse, contributed to that, my wife and I, our son, and there were, it turned out that there was a lot of sobriety in the area. And so it was good. I mean, I went to rehab and then after rehab, it's right. They said, okay, stay sober for two years.

and then think about almost two years to the day, I got a call to produce Super Tramp. It was like, hello? Because, you know, I don't know, if you do anything about the AA and their old mottoes, of course, wait for the miracle is one other things, you know. And it was like, hello, miracle. And then after that, I was back to work.

And it was good. Yeah. And I felt good, and I'd put, put it behind me. Yeah. But never completely. Yeah. Never completely. So it comes to me often in a dream.

Okay. John does. Is it a recurring situation or is always different? It's different. It's different. It could be in different places. It could be the studio. Is it a comfort to you that he comes?

It is, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He talks to me. He liked to talk to me. He liked to tell me that I didn't know anything. You say, for a bright guy, Jack, you don't know anything. So two last things, and because I saw where at some point you had to sue because of unpaid royalties.

And I'm not as interest in that as the fact that at some point there's this piece and you you still work with the estate and how did how did that come about that you end up making peace? Because usually once there's a little thing, that's kind of the end of the relationship. Yeah, well, she was being advised by a really bad guy. She was having a relationship with who told her that you should trust no. And especially me who to this guy, I look like I knew everything because I've been around for so long. I see. This is the one guy you don't want to trust.

And it's like, you know, the number one guy you can trust, you know, no matter what was going on. Yeah. Matter what I saw. Yeah. So she went into this. At one point during a free trial hearing, I slid over next to her. Security went from me.

She said to her security, and I said, don't do this. Okay, don't do it. It doesn't make any sense at all. It's a signed contract. Just pay me and let's move on. Yeah, let's just get over it. And still, we went to trial, which lasted a week. The jury was out for 10 minutes.

They said they got a sandwich and came back. But there were some funny moments during the trial that I could think of. apparently she promised what's his name from Rolling Stone, the owner? Yon Winner. Yon. She promised Yon that he could have the journal. Okay.

If he came in and testified on her behalf. Of course, she didn't have the journal. Nobody had the journal. Because somebody had stolen it. Sam Havitoy was a guy, by the way. He was behind all of this. Yeah. Who actually wrote a weird book.

Have you ever seen that book? No, oh my God. He wrote a book where he admits that he stole the journal and he can't put what was in the journal out publicly, but he can put what he remembers about reading in the journal. Oh, Jesus. I think he stole the watch, too. It's such a scummy, weird, bottom of the dumpster.

Yeah. So, Jan gets up there and... So her attorney is saying, so who was this Jack Douglas anyway? And Jan is saying, he was really a nobody. He only produced. Yeah, he was like nobody, kind of an engineer, that's all. I mean, John liked him and he gave him a job. So now my attorney, Peter Parcher, gets up and he's got a book in his hand, and it's

Yon's book. and he said, Young, would you read this? And it's a chapter in this book where he talks about me and being this producer. He makes John read it to the jury. Yeah. And, of course, that was terrible.

Yeah. That was a... And then Phil Specter comes in to testify. Oh, my goodness. Because she promised Phil, I'll give you more stuff to work on. Yeah. So now Phil, and Phil is totally...

Sorry to laugh. He's totally fucked up. And he gets on the stand and they're asking him questions. and he can't make any sense that, even what they're asking him. So now no more questions, he gets up and he stumbles. And as he stumbles out of the witness box, his wig goes sideways. So now his sideburns are over his nose.

And it was just a pathetic sight now. Everybody was like, oh, my God. The funniest one and strangest one of all was I would come in, I guess this lasted maybe two weeks. I would come in, and this is the Supreme Court in New York City. Goodness. The room was divided by an aisle in the middle. I was sitting up front.

She wouldn't sit up front because of assassination attempts. So she was sitting crowded by her people. Okay. Everyone that was supporting her was on that side, and everyone supporting me was on my side behind me. And so I would come in, and it would be the same people every day, same people. And I would come in and I always, thanks, thank you for, thanks for coming by. Thank you. Your support is really welcome. Thank you so much. And there was one guy,

he was sitting almost directly behind me and I'd say, thank you so much for coming in. And he would just look at me. He wouldn't even say anything. Just look at me. And then as I'm sitting up at the bench, everyone saw I turn around. I could feel the guy's, his eyes, He's boring it to the back of me. I turned around and he'd be like, staring at me. And then one day he was gone about a week later. He was gone. So now Bob Gruen, because he worked with Yoko,

had to sit on Yoko side. And Bob and I are very good friends. So Bob and I would meet in the men's room. So we could talk. And Bob said to me, boy, you fuck that guy up. So I said, what guy? He's going, that witch that Yoko hired to put a spell on you. He was sitting

directly behind you. He went up to Yoko and he said, I can't get no, I can't get anywhere with this guy. Every day he comes in and thanks me, smiles, he pats me on the back. He quit. And I was like, whoa. It's a good story. Yeah. But you made peace. That's the nice... We did

at a show, at one of Sean's shows, at Bally Ballroom. Okay. I went to see it. She was upstairs. I was sitting downstairs. And somebody came downstairs and said Yoko would like you to come up to the table. And I came up and I went upstairs and she gave me a big hug and she said, really, a lot of water has run onto the bridge.

And then we started working on little things together. I saw that. That's why I was surprised. Yeah. And, you know, I'd get a Christmas card from her. She opened that MoMA. She sent me an invitation to the open. and yeah, we stay in touch.

That's good. I love her. Yeah. Well, you shared a lot of stuff together. Yeah. Important stuff, too. Yeah. Okay, last thing.

Yeah. Tell me if I'm wrong. I saw you teach a class on studio etiquette. I did. That school closed. Okay. Okay. That doesn't seem much for your teaching, but...

For all those schools. Let's give me one or two parables of studio etiquette. I got to hear this. The artist is always right. I want to... Listen before you touch anything. I know this feeling. Yeah.

Treat everyone that you work with well. No matter who it is. Whoever's on the toe and a pole. Yeah. Yeah. And stay ahead of everything that's going on. And I tell you quick Frank Sinatra's story because I love this story. Sure.

Are you Frank Sinatra fan? I am. Okay. So I worked with a guy in New York at a place called Chun King, if you remember. Oh, I know it downtown. Yeah. And this was the 90s. And he had recently, you know, within recent times, had worked with Sinatra towards the end of

Sinatra's light. Uh-huh. And I said, what was it like working with Sinatra? And he said, every day, all the boys would come in with, you know, bins of Mostecholi. Yeah. And set up the table full everything. and then Frank at five or whatever would sit down for dinner and everybody working would sit at the table with Frank.

It didn't matter if you were the tape up, the guy's sweeping the floor. Everybody sat at the table with Frank. And Frank sat there and ate the same food Frank was eaten and then Frank sat there for a while and told stories. So that boils up what you're saying. If Frank can do it, so can you. So I love that.

Thank you. Yeah, very welcome. I'll be having a good time. Yeah, great time. Thanks.