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Stephen Barncard: The
Old Grey Cat Interview
by Jeff Gemmill
My father tells a story of the time he heard a Benny Goodman acetate played on the radio in the early '50s. It was, according to the deejay, Benny's audition for a record company with whom he didn't sign. Many calls, letters and record stores later, my father found himself at a dead-end. Near 50 years later and he's yet to hear that song again.
Yet the music made an impact, left him with an indelible memory of one moment in time--that, in short, is the power of music.
Today, despite many attempts to quash it, the bootleg industry thrives. Why? No, it's not because of shady entrepreneurs, the Internet, independent CD stores, or CD-R and DAT technologies. It's the fans, pure and simple. Due in large part to their cost ($25/CD), bootlegs primarily sell to the converted, to the fans who already own all of the legitimate releases and imports and fill the stands when/if the artist(s) comes to town. Boots freeze-frame one show, one performance, one moment in the artist's evolution. It's what I call "snapshot history"; it's not the whole story, far from it, but--in the best of cases--it's a chapter well worth revisiting or, for fans unable to be there the first time, a chance to experience something they otherwise could not.
Bootlegs, in short, further a fan's passion for the music. Yet, boots also do a grave disservice--the artists in question do not receive their just economic due, for one, and, two, often the end result is a shoddy or shabby affair, be it because of lousy sound, incorrect liner notes or both. And because of the industry's nature, the worst offenders come and go, open and close, consistently change their identities in order to rook consumers. A good case in point is a recent Rolling Stones' release which presents "alternate" takes of the Exile on Main Street material. The songs aren't alternate takes. They're the released versions with the vocals mixed out!
That's why The Old Grey Cat is pleased to see a new era dawning within the music industry. Led by the Grateful Dead, who have opened the vaults for a series of what fans assure me are "must buy" live CDs, and now including the Dave Matthews Band (who've said they plan to release a live set every six months on CD), artists and groups are beginning to understand: You can beat the bootleggers. How? By doing it yourself!
It's a trend Stephen Barncard, a longtime engineer, producer and friend to Crosby, Stills & Nash spotted several years back. Due in large part to his efforts, we now have Crosby & Nash's , a one-CD set that is a necessity for all fans of Crosby, Nash and good, nay great music. The Old Grey Cat can safely say it is a keeper, a classic, the kind of disc that will live in your CD changer for more than a few months. It's that good.
What follows is an "e-mail interview" The Old Grey Cat conducted with the noted producer. For more information about Stephen, visit .
Old Grey Cat: You've been involved with CSN/Y since Deja Vu, right? What is it about them that has brought you back time and again to work with them?
Stephen Barncard: I was the assistant on "Deja", as well as pinch-hitter engineer for Bill Halverson on "Country Girl" and "Teach Your Children". What has brought me back? Their talent--and they're very fun people to hang out with!
TOGC: You engineered one of my favorite albums, David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name... If you can, recall one moment from those sessions which best typifies them.
Barncard: The recording of "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here" was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced. We were working basically alone down in Studio A at Heider's; Crosby, me, and my assistant-ladyfriend Ellen Burke. We were overdubbing vocals on some other song using the legendary Heider echo chamber when he started singing with himself a cappella to the echo. He said, "Put up some fresh tape" and proceeded to sing layer after layer of what you hear on the record. In 15 minutes it was done, including the mix. I have never seen a better example of a skydrop from the muse than that, EVER. No punch ins, retakes or editing. Just 100% magic. To this day, he can't explain where it came from, except some reference to "the spirit of Christine" when he was doing it.
TOGC: When you're involved in a project, do you find yourself at times in awe of what you hear? Or do you hear "mix" and "arrangement" and ways to improve the music?
Barncard: With Crosby and Nash the equations are different because of their spontaneous nature. These guys "pull off" a performance, rather than plan everything. They would rather put themselves on a high wire with no net in front of everybody to create the tension that makes them push the envelope. So yes, with them I am in awe of what happens, because it may not happen exactly that way again, so I'd better have it on tape. In the studio, I don't worry about the mix until it's time to mix. I'm only concerned about capturing the moment when it occurs. Arrangement is another factor that seems to get created in the moment with them. They always work with really good players in the studio who "grok" what they do, and again insist on a loose, serendipitous style. The arrangement gets added to with vocal and instrumental overdubs, but the overall tone is set at track creation.
TOGC: How did the idea of Another Stoney Evening come to be?
Barncard: Well, it is directly related to my connection with Graham Nash's collection of tapes, which I call the "Nash Vault" for short.
Graham has always been a collector of things; art, guitars, photos, so saving as much of his life's work on tape has been a primary goal for him. And he backed up his goals with action, almost from the start. He started the habit of grabbing ALL of the tapes of projects he was involved in, and preserving and storing them in some way. I speculate that the record company didn't really care if he took possession of the tapes because they ultimately held the rights to put them out, and they also figured that the multitracks were worthless, so it saved them space.
I, too, have also had the policy of keeping everything, and kept at least a two-track 15 ips 10 1/2" reel of everything I ever worked on, and often the multitracks. You can imagine that would build into quite a stack of mylar/acetate and it did. I must have moved that pile 20 times between 1969 and now, but I always knew that I couldn't just throw them out; they seemed valuable to me. So I kept everything for years, and from time to time would cut it down to master reels. I would dump duplicates, and later I decided to trash projects that 1) were speculative, and, 2) did not have the work of someone that later achieved some fame, or, 3) people I still hated. I had a lot of demos there but also many second-generation two tracks of all my earlier stuff, such as the Dead, New Riders, R.J. fox., Cormack and Ross, and the Doobie Brothers.
Storing these big tapes is a real drag. These things are HEAVY, cats like to pee and scratch on them, and you have to pack them in garbage bags because of dust and spiders. I couldn't afford to keep them long term in a storage space (which is not optimum, anyway), so down to the garage or attic or someone's studio they went. . .
Graham Nash, however, got a much better space to store his tape loot, the BEKINS vault in San Francisco, downtown. I had seen many of the early CSN masters during the Deja Vu sessions, and often wondered what had happened to that stuff. Then, during the 1975 "Dirty Thirty" project, I learned that Nash had the BEKINS vault with a large quantity of tapes.
The "Dirty Thirty" was nothing less than a project to build a two-track anthology of all unreleased material by Crosby & Nash. After Wind on the Water, Graham asked me to go to San Francisco, where I stayed at Graham's house for three weeks, with his DeMedio console-equipped studio in the basement.
At the time, there was a legal dance around the "need to deliver" requirements of the record companies, so David and Graham sent us on a mission to dig up any songs, even jams, that could qualify as publishable, collect them on master reels, and prepare to make an album of this stuff. This obviously was a sly ploy to comply with something contractual (we were not told any details of the dispute, and the tapes were never used).
Now this turned out to be great fun, because I discovered I really liked vault spelunking. As it turned out later, so did Nash, when he was able to be there. But for the most part, David and Graham were in Miami, Fla. on that ill-fated record (Long May You Run) that had the vocals wiped from the tape.
So Joel Bernstein and I went through everyone's collection: Graham's pile from the BEKINS vault, Joel's private collection, my collection, and even raided David's famous "under the bed" pile of tapes in his home (with his permission, of course).
The net result was the "Dirty Thirty", a collection of 10 or 12 10 1/2" reels of some great stuff, some really weird pieces, and long jams, spanning David and Graham's early home stuff, to Hollies and Byrds outtakes (both had written different songs both called "Lady Friend" before they met). A subset of that collection was the three "PERRO" reels which were rough mix tapes of the PERRO sessions leadered and documented.
This worked its way into 1976, and Whistling Down the Wire, etc., followed by C&N Live.
Over the years, as computers became prevalent, I encouraged Graham many times to have a survey done of the tapes, and to collect the tapes in one place, because the years and relocation had caused the collection to be split between San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as some garages and basements. It wasn't until 1992 that we had the situation under control and the tapes in a controlled environment--the box set project.
I had about a week to get the whole project together. First, I reserved time at Sunset Sound. Tried to get A&M Studio A, but it was booked. Then I hired a crew to go to San Francisco, rent a truck, load all the tapes from SF BEKINS and bring them to the studio at Sunset. Then I hired Miguel Pous, tape archivist for A&M Records at the time, to organize the library. We also contacted a company that had a new kind of storage center that was humidity-temp controlled, and had high security. As it turned out, Graham was already storing his art there, and knew the guy. Someone took a picture of the recording room when they were done unloading. . . the entire room was filled with tapes!!
On the first day, Graham was the first to show up (as always!) and was really excited. We were going to have a good time. Nash and I organized the tapes into piles, and every five minutes it was "Hey, Barncard, come over here...look at THIS!!" Eventually, they became the bonus tracks for the box set.
During this time, we also found early demos of later-famous songs and marveled at their innocence and purity. We were encouraged by veteran collectors (such as Raymond Foye and Joel Bernstein) to look for this kind of thing, that there was an emerging market for limited editions of projects of this sort. So this box set project was more than a record. It was a rediscovery of the richness and depth of a great collection of recordings, the output of a great band. It was also, to some extent, an attempt to archive the best of what we had, transferring much of it to Sony 24 track digital (40 reels). So we were thinking about this in a "what if" sort of way, and we certainly left the hooks in for that possibility.
Miguel stayed on and maintained the vault, but didn't get into computers at all; hence, the entire survey was on cards, and the tapes were arranged neatly on the shelves, if you knew the system. In 1996, he died, and although he had helped greatly during the box project and had at least achieved a structure for the collection, we were without a clue of what exactly was in there.
Around 1995, Graham, David and I were phoning and emailing ideas about releasing the unreleased material independently. Obstacles were in the way, however. They were still signed to Atlantic, and the claims to the material were not clear. Also, there had not been one project that would be finite enough to produce the first CD. I clearly wanted it to have a story, besides it being the first new Crosby-Nash record released in 20 years.
I decided to put it out myself, somehow, basically by grabbing idle time at the studio, using credit cards for pressings, etc. Real grass roots. Also, the Internet was starting to happen. . . and I saw all of the collecting going on there. If you are a collector, you've got to be online! And I understood how there was an advantage to doing business direct with the fans. I thought it would be a cool business. . . but I hadn't really run it past Crosby. He was furious. . . stating (in e-mail) that it was HIS music and HE would decide what. . . etc. Had I known at the time how sick he really was, I would have understood better (this was just before the liver transplant). But his reaction chilled the project for a while. After the transplant, though, he was totally for it, and encouraged me to just "put it out."
I again pushed Graham for a real, Macintosh-based inventory and database for the vault, and encouraged A&M Tape Archivist Keith Woods to take on the task. He left A&M, Graham loaned him a Powerbook 520, I wrote a quick example database in Filemaker Pro 3 and he proceeded to archive every tape in the now expanded collection.
In the first days of having Keith work on it, I noticed the "Dorothy Chandler" and 10/10/71 notation on some 8-track tapes. I had been recently informed via collector friends (and contacts on the "lee-shore" mail list) of the significance of the bootleg A Very Stoney Evening; some said it was recorded on 10/10/71. On a hunch, I took the tape to A&M and made a rough mix of the entire show. Then I requested a DAT copy of the LP from list members and got one from Paul Higham, to whom I am very grateful. When I was curious about the cover, Kevin Audsley in Australia sent scans of the "yellow" version to me.
I compared the show from my rough mixes and the bootleg LP. Hey, it was a different show! But still GREAT. And different. So I sent DATs to David and Graham, consulted with Graham about what he liked and what songs we could cut so we could fit it onto the CDs. David basically went along with what Graham suggested.
Finally, I took the rough show and cut together a sequence, keeping the audience in mind , which is very important, and the songs and patter that would fit. I sent CD-R copies to David and Graham. Now it was like a real CD.
You must understand how picky these guys are. I mean, they invented picky! But in the spirit of the project, they apparently liked my combination edit-verite approach to the concert, and said "thumbs up" to the concept. First pass! Great.
"Now," Graham said, "when can we mix it?"
"Mix it?" I thought I was just going to mix it remotely, with them approving. . ."Oh, Graham wants to mix it with me! Great!"
Graham and I usually have a pretty fun time mixing--so this was a session to look forward to. I booked one day into Studio A--that's all we needed--and we mixed right from the 8 track master. A&M has some 8 track heads that fit onto the Studer 24 track transport and it sounds great. I mixed to simultaneous quarter inch 2 track at 15 ips and Sony Pro DAT through the A&M A-D converters. Really good, pristine, simple stuff. And of course that Neve console in there, that's audio heaven for me. We blew off the automation because we didn't want to put code on the master.
Graham and I did all the vocal mixes where there were harmonies and then he split to do a stint on Politically Incorrect that night.
Feedback from David and Graham by e-mail:
Nash: "Great. Now what?"
Crosby: "Do it. Put it out."
I started to look around for a way to put this out. I really wanted to promote the rebel spirit and prove to the world I could do it, but I started thinking, "Is this the best way to get the music out to the people?" I calculated all of the costs attributed to making a record, as well as the hassles. I had visions of staying up all night stuffing envelopes and moving boxes around; that didn't appeal to me. I realized I just wanted to produce these projects, not market them. I needed a new angle.
I had been admiring GD records for some time, the way they have a newsletter and selling independent CDs of the Dead by phone/mail order. I also considered the karmic connection between CSN and the Dead through the years. So, I made a call to Steve Silberman, who, in turn, recommended I call their fairly new Director, Peter McQuaide. He liked the idea, and when I sent him the CD, he loved it and played it for the board of directors (the band). They liked it and wanted to go ahead. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. And they made a very good and fair deal with us for the project. By now, I had contacted Steve Silberman about the notes, Joel Bernstein for the pictures, and George Gruel for the layout.
Now the rush was on. . . I had to pull the cover together, so I started bugging Steve about the notes, Joel about the pictures, and George was bugging me for stuff to put into the layout.
It was about mid-August of this year when I got Steve's final text. The next day, I got the slides from Joel. Then Gruel and I met with Graham on what direction the cover should go, given the pictures. Graham picked five and gave them to George. Then I needed to bring some final things together and meet with GD records (and CSN happened to be playing at the Fillmore for six days), so I went up to San Francisco and finished the project on the Powerbook, via e-mail and fax.
TOGC: What condition were the tapes in?
Barncard: Perfect. Almost as good as the day they were recorded, except for some high-end loss. And I must thank Bill Halverson for his fine remote recording job (back in 1971). I had really good source material to work with.
TOGC: The show itself is legendary within CSN circles due to David's "Lebanese flu"-inspired stage patter. Did you feel somewhat conflicted by what and what not to include?
Barncard: No. If any patter was cut, it had to be obvious that the fans would not miss it and D&G would not want it there. It was totally my editing choice and they approved it.
TOGC: Was there ever any consideration to expanding to two CDs? As it is, the set-list is truly them at an early peak.
Barncard: We didn't want to cut out the person with only $11 in his pocket and force a two-CD set down his throat at $20. We decided it was a better concert anyway on one CD, and left some room for more releases. It's just easier to sell one CD.
TOGC: Are there plans to release more archived material? Like, say, anything from The Mighty Jitters era?
Barncard: There is a lot of concert audio footage from various eras, though there isn't really much releasable from the Jitters sessions. For the most part, with the exception of a couple of blues jams, the music is variations on the Jitters' records (otherwise known as the Section) on Capitol. Also the fact is that it is a band, so musician fees will be higher, etc. You see where this is going. . . the acoustic stuff--simple, clean, fast, magical, two writers & players makes this kind of project doable. Electric music is another matter. PERRO, for instance, is a can of worms of incredible proportions and all of the tapes have not been found.
I do, however, have the Whales and Fieldworkers benefit show from November 1974 at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium that I recorded that's under consideration, as well as various "Crosby in San Francisco" material, which might just include some Perro stuff, and there's also a small chance we have a multitrack tape of the show that became the bootleg A Very Stoney Evening.
TOGC: You've worked with many artists aside from C&N--the overlooked Valerie Carter comes to mind. You worked with her early on, didn't you? She's someone who should really put out more than one album a decade...
Barncard: Actually, she put out two solos: One produced by George Massenberg, and the other produced by someone else, both for CBS. She was also the girl in a 1971 band called "Howdy Moon" with Richard Hovey (also from RJ Fox) and John Lind. That record was produced by Michael James Jackson and Lowell George, but I did a lot of pre-production in my home studio in Sausalito. She's a wonderful singer, who deserves much more praise for her work, and a really nice person. She currently sings backup for Jackson Browne.
TOGC: Now that C&N's Another Stoney Evening is complete, what projects do you have lined up?
Barncard: We're looking at many concerts from the "golden era," since we have the edge, rights-wise, for stuff before 1975 anyway. There's the aforementioned Whales and Fieldworkers benefit; it features a number of songs that showed up on Crosby and Nash's ABC releases, but these are the earliest known versions of these songs--and the concert is a stunner. Also, I haven't given up on finding the night that A Very Stoney Evening (the bootleg) was recorded. I have a night in Berkeley that still hasn't been auditioned, and that might be it! I would like to "bootleg the bootleg" on that one--and it should be a two-CD set, given the historical significance. There might be other gems in the Atlantic records vault; Nash and I are going to check that near the first of the year. There's really a lot of music in his collection, all of which was really well recorded.
TOGC: As you're involved in "scouting new technologies" for A&M's studios, what's your take on digital technology? Do you long for the days of analog and LPs or do you think digital has the edge?
Barncard: Well, we're stuck with 16-bit digital for a long time. I think consumers are very happy with the way things are, and DVD and other formats may not make it with consumers, so we are stuck with it and might as well enjoy and work with it.
As far as "longing for analog," I love analog, and will continue to use big-format analog for all new music projects whenever the budget allows it. I like to track analog, and mix analog to 1/2" two track at 30 ips, then let the best mastering guys in the business take it to digital (Dave Collins and Joe Gastwirt) but all of that tape cost, extra processes, and mastering fees can boost a budget to the point where it's not feasible or profitable to put something out. So, I have to cut things to the bone and find other, honorable ways to make the CD. For instance, I do all of the processes myself; the new technology enables me to do that. And I really like the flexibility of digital--it's a producer's dream. But I do know its limitations.
I don't like the small format digital systems like ADAT or DA-88 because that forces you to go through conversions on less-than-the-best converters (they can't be the best because of the price), so I try to avoid them at all costs. But I see it coming someday. . . CSN records all of their concerts on ADAT.
The bottom line: if you compare a modern analog recording on modern tape to a CD, the difference is very audible, but most people don't have half-inch two tracks, and you couldn't get master tapes of your favorite music if you wanted to.... so I think the modern CD is a a great value to consumers, far better sound than most people would get from their turntables.
Also DVD is going to have far more copy-protection, country-codes, and alternate formats, and cost more. Maybe it will fly, maybe not. Maybe people just won't care, they might be happy with the CD the way it is. . . I do know that the standards haven't even been set for audio yet on DVD!!
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