ABSTRACT
In recent times, phonomusicological studies,1 including Mark Cunningham’s Good Vibrations (1998), Albin Zak’s Poetics of Rock (2001), and Greg Millner’s Perfecting Sound Forever (2009), have made significant progress in filling the scholarly void existing between popular-music performance and reception. Despite retrospective acknowledgment, sound recordists-and their contributions to classic rock recordings-remain concealed, both in a literal sense as they partake in the recording process and in popular-music historiography (Williams 2010, 166). Unsurprisingly then, a natural starting point for this emergent discourse has been 1950s and 1960s rock ’n’ roll and its associated recordists, recording houses, and artist output. Subsequently, a “recordist canon” of sorts has formed-consolidated by autobiographical accounts and documentary features, such as the Classic Albums series2-with George Martin, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and Joe Meek emerging at the forefront of popular-music recording innovation. Others, such as Motown’s Berry Gordy Jr., Atlantic Records’ Tom Dowd, and Sun’s Sam Phillips, are considered equal in stature to canonized popular musicians; their inductions to Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum are testament to this. There is plenty of scope, therefore, to move the discourse further on and to consider the impact of recordists on later musics. Thus, the main objective of this chapter is two-fold: first, it focuses on a key yet overlooked recordist, and second, it fills an obvious gap in glam studies by examining, as Reynolds suggested, “the rock and roll part” as opposed to the lipstick.
