Interviews

Matson: The Beatles in Mono LP box set?

Berkowitz: I grew up in Boston, and I knew a guy in Boston, Jeff Jones. Jeff and I worked together at Columbia Records as marketing directors; Jeff was the first head of Legacy. Jeff and I had 10 years of making records together. After a number of years, he left and became the head of Apple Records. In 2009, he sent me the stereo Beatles LP box. When I received them, I wanted to hear the second side of Abbey Road. First, I took out my original 1969 UK copy. It has ticks and pops, and I'm thinking, God this sounds great! Then I put on the new copy. The hair on my arm stood up. They had cut from digital! Oh my God; it's The Beatles, why would they do that?!

A few weeks later, Jeff Jones calls me up. He says, "So what do you think?" And I say, "Jeff, you did a beautiful job, there are pictures I haven't seen. The covers look great. Other than the fact that the stereo LPs were cut from digital." Jones says, "How do you know that?" And I said, "Because I hear it immediately. The sound goes into a box; it's not as vivid as the analog." He says, "Do other people know that?" I said, "No, not many. They think it's quiet and clean. But it's not as good as the original."

A couple of months later, Jeff calls and says, "If I asked you to do a Beatles Complete Mono vinyl box, what would you do?" I paused, swallowed, and said, "What would I do to the records that changed the world? I would do whatever I could possibly do to make them sound like what the producer and the artists did originally. I don't have a better idea than that, and nobody else does either." And Jones said,

"Why don't you get involved, come over and do this." When I first arrived, the people at EMI and Abbey Road Studios thought I was bat-shit crazy. Remember, they won a Grammy for those first box sets.

Matson: I love hearing the earlier part of The Beatles catalog in this newer mono—like Rubber Soul.

Berkowitz: When I got to Apple, the first thing I told them was, "We have to find original copies of everything. We have to find the original "IT." I want to explain what "IT" means. When I started at Columbia Records, with the tapes and catalogs of Bob Dylan, George Benson, Leonard Cohen—music that John Hammond had produced—there were cards from the studio sessions where John Hammond would write "IT" next to notes for certain takes. I'm thinking, what does that mean Michael Brooks was one of John Hammond's final assistants, and I asked Michael what IT meant. And he said, "Oh, that means the final take, that's 'IT': the selected, final, releasable version." When I first got to Abbey Road, I needed to find the IT records; the ones approved by the producer, approved by the band, approved for manufacturing. The approved release. When you hear the mono version of "Please Please Me," which first came out in 1962—that is the work of art. That is the Mona Lisa. That is IT. There is only one IT.

Matson: Tell me more about the process.

Berkowitz: So I could compare and get my EQ set together, we transferred everything we could find to digital. We experimented with the track levels and EQ without wearing out the master tapes. Then when we made the final analog lacquer LP cuts. We only ran the master tapes themselves three or four times. I arranged for everyone to listen with the same phono cartridge, the one I always use, an Ortofon Black 2M. I also changed the power cables on the tape machines. They thought I was crazy; they brought me 14 different cords.

Matson: How about the Legacy Miles sets?

Berkowitz: Miles and Duke were the great bandleaders of all time. Here's Jan Lohmann's book, The Sound of Miles: The Discography. I marked it all up according to who was in the bands. How do you take the entire Miles catalog and divvy it up? What's the order? When the musicians change: okay, that's now a different box. See here: When Bennie Maupin joins, and McLaughlin and Holland, that's the beginning of Bitches Brew. We divided it into eight box sets based around the changes of musicians, plus certain live shows. I didn't decide to do anything. The music tells you what to do.

Matson: The box sets accomplish certain things.

Berkowitz: The moment of creation: We can relay that. That's the depth of some of these box sets as a musician and a listener. That is fascinating to me, and I think fascinating to others. I can't make the records, the music that was made and released, any better. But we can make them sound better, and we can illuminate the circumstances around them in a more detailed, factual, musical-historical way.

Matson: Let's go to the Basement. I picked The Bootleg Series Volume 11 because I love it, and I think others do too. First, you have the release in 1975 of The Basement Tapes, done by Dylan and Robbie Robertson. Now on this 2014 box set, you have certain tracks labeled "Without Overdubs," referring to the earlier release. When I first heard the Columbia two-LP release of The Basement Tapes, it never occurred to me at the time to worry about the process. Was Garth Hudson involved, or did he just turn over tapes?

Berkowitz: Garth was in the room with us most of the time during the production of this box. Bless beautiful Garth, who recently left us: He had the good sense to put a tape recorder up on top of his organ while they were jammin' away down there in the basement, and he knew what to do. People have asked us, since the earlier release came out and won a Grammy, why did you change it? Let me be clear: The album that Bob and Robbie made is how records have always been made. Garth had the tapes over the years, and then basically he sold them to a guy in Canada named Jan Haust, with the understanding that Haust would do nothing without the direct involvement of Garth Hudson. They made a deal with the Dylan camp that they were going to make and produce this thing, with Dylan having approval. I went up to Toronto to listen to the tapes, with engineer Peter C. Moore, answering back to Jeff Rosen at the Dylan office. Sometimes Mr. Dylan is forthcoming and present, and other times I don't hear from him at all, though I get the feeling direction is coming from him.

At the time, people were asking Garth to make a film about The Band and to go back to Big Pink. So I go up to the studio in Toronto, and I'm there already for a week, and I'm going, "I thought Garth was going to be here." And they said, "He is here. He's in the next room." So after about five days, I suddenly see Garth with a big black hat on dash from one room to the other, like a vision. He didn't want to talk to me. It was worked out that we would have a dinner. At that time, Garth was focused on '50s jump R&B tenor sax players. This is something I know quite a lot about. It's a favorite of mine.

Matson: Was Garth a shy guy?

Berkowitz: He was quiet. He had been a big star for a long time, and who said he wanted to be a big star? He wanted to be a piano player. He wanted to be a musician. He wanted to travel the world and play beautiful church organs. On my iPad, I had all sorts of jump tenor stuff: Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, Clifford Scott, a lot of great classic R&B jump blues. So at dinner, Garth is listening. He leans over and says [low growly voice]: "You're not from the record company, are ya?" And I say, "No, I'm independently working for the Dylan office." He growls, "Ah that's good." Then Garth says: "You're not from Rolling Stone, are ya?" I tell him no. Garth: "Ah that's good. You're not trying to make a film about Big Pink, are ya?" I say no. Garth: "Ah that's good."

So after that, we're in the studio together every day for the next two weeks. Garth would tell us things: the instruments used, how songs came together, whose ideas they were. We'd be listening to a beautiful track, and Dylan's singing about God and stuff, and Garth would growl, "You know, he's making this up right here, just as you hear it go down." Some of the tapes were in really rough shape. They were moldy and unevenly wound. And they'd been in some barn, getting baked and then frozen for several decades. Some of them got sent to the Bell Laboratories in Canada. And we also did some more work on them in New York.

I do feel incredibly blessed to have been involved with both Miles and Bob from the beginning, all the way through the reissue process to now. And I still am involved, now for 38 years. I'm the guy next to the guy.

Matson: Steve, when you're going through the vaults, it must be exciting to hear things that haven't been heard much, if at all, since they went down?

Berkowitz: Totally, completely, absolutely! I can't believe it's my job. And then they pay me.

Anybody who's in the music business for a long time doesn't do it just for the money; that would be really crazy! You do it because you love the music, the process, the communication. You're asking the questions, on the one hand how it happened, the technical, the music, the machinery, and the replication. That's really important: People want to know about that. But then on the other hand, it doesn't make any damn difference how it was made; it either sounds good or it doesn't. It either communicates across to you or it does not. How it was done is the same magic about how records have always been made.

Matson: Sometimes, even with current digital streaming and so forth, there must be times when a decision has to be made to set something aside? You can't include everything.

Berkowitz: I don't have a flat answer to that question because the circumstances are different each time. The music tells you what to do, the artist tells you, the contract tells you, the quality of what there is on tape tells you, and the appetite from the company's standpoint as to how big it can get—all these things tell you what to do. I want there to be more music in the world, that is my credo: more music, more communication, a better world. And to try to do that within the confines of a corporation whose job it is to make money. I have always wanted to archive the music so that I knew we were saving it. If I was to have a tombstone, it might say: "This guy straightened out the music files of Miles Davis and Bob Dylan."