Are We Still Rolling? by Phill Brown
(Tape Op Books)
As both a book nerd and a music nerd, I find myself squarely in the middle of the target demographic for this book, which is a memoir by a recording engineer with over 30 years experience in the music business. Phill Brown started his career as a teenager, working at London's Olympic Studios in London, and over the next four decades, managed to work with some of the most important musicians of multiple eras, from Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones to Bob Marley and Pink Floyd to Roxy Music and Steve Winwood to Talk Talk and Throwing Muses. Are We Still Rolling? is his first attempt at writing a book, and while it's obvious that he's not a trained writer with an English major's grasp of literary techniques and references, that hardly matters in the face of his obvious talent as a storyteller. The chapters in this book are titled after the musicians Brown discusses within each of them, and he does a great job of making the tone of each chapter reflect the mood of the experience he's detailing within.
The book begins with Brown's early experiences at Olympic, and one of the first stories he tells is of working as a lowly tape operator on the sessions for the landmark 1968 Rolling Stones album, Beggars Banquet. During this chapter, Brown captures his youthful, wide-eyed awe at merely being present for such an event. He details the complex events that led to the creation of the classic track "Sympathy For The Devil," and gets deep into the nuts and bolts of the sessions. For someone as fascinated by the creative process as myself, these details are gripping, and really bring the entire event to life, allowing me to go back to well-worn albums with fresh ears and catch details I'd never heard before (I spent the entire week in which I read this book listening to various albums that Phill Brown had worked on). And while the minute details of a recording session might not seem as interesting on their own merits to the average reader as they do to me, it is again Brown's prowess as a storyteller that will keep any reader engrossed in the tale as he tells it.
In fact, there are points within this book in which Brown tells of the most stressful studio moments of his career. At these points, the atmosphere changes very quickly to that of a gripping thriller. One such moment occurred during sessions for Bob Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff," when a stray spark from the joint Brown was smoking melted several seconds of tape from right in the middle of the classic tune. As he details his frantic efforts to splice the tape and prevent the musicians and producers who waited in the green room only feet away from ever finding out about his mistake, I found myself on the edge of my seat, reading as quickly as I could to learn of the resolution to this incident. Later on, during an all-star session led by Japanese percussion virtuoso Stomu Yamashta and featuring Steve Winwood, jazz guitar virtuoso Al DiMeola, synth pioneer Klaus Schulze, and Wailers guitarist Junior Murvin, among others, Brown was confronted with a dilemma when the band unexpectedly led straight from one song into another as the engineers in the control room realized they were nearly out of tape. Again, Brown's excellent storytelling puts you right into the room, and you sweat along with he and his crew as they work quickly to find a solution before the tape runs out and they lose the entire take.
My favorite section of the book came towards the end, when Brown described in detail the lengthy, painstaking sessions for the classic final two albums by 80s British group Talk Talk. Not only does he discuss Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock in the sort of detail that is enough to thrill a longtime fan such as myself, he clearly portrays the claustrophobic, all-encompassing atmosphere that both of these months-long periods of work created. One thing I must give Brown credit for, during this section and throughout the book, is that he never pulls any punches when discussing his own behavior, or that of others. If he did way too much cocaine during a session, he tells us so. If he neglected his wife and family to a completely unreasonable extent for months or years at a time, he admits to that too. And if he has a bad experience with a certain person, band, or record label, he explains why in clear, precise detail. Some of my personal favorite musicians, notably Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses, are taken to task over the course of Brown's narrative. And while this can be upsetting, he never fails to detail his experiences and explain his viewpoint to the extent that, even if you don't agree with him about a certain person, you can't help but understand exactly why he feels the way he does about them.
By the time Brown reaches the end of his narrative, he's derived several conclusions from his own experiences about the music industry and its future, and he spends the last few pages sharing them with us. The most important of these, I found, was the observation that record company meddling has hurt the industry as a whole. It's Brown's opinion that the industry created better music in his early years involved with it, because the bands, producers, and engineers were left alone to play their music and work their magic to their own satisfaction. In Brown's experience, record company meddling has never led to a more positive result than would have occurred had the bands been left to their own devices. He also draws an interesting and counterintuitive conclusion about how the industry got to this point. It's Brown's opinion that the punk rock movement of the late 70s and early 80s led indirectly to a more meddlesome role for record companies, who initially got into the habit of micromanaging their investments into bands after a succession of punk bands abused the trust of the labels, either through lacking basic competence at their instruments or by attempting to avoid doing the work necessary to satisfy their agreements with labels. Though I understand why he draws those conclusions, I'm not sure I agree with Brown about punk's negative influence on the state of today's music business. Another of his strongest conclusions, though, is one I completely agree with. He believes that recording sessions, and music as a whole, benefitted from the relative limitations placed upon it by the more primitive technologies available in the 60s and 70s, and that as the possibility to record with more and more tracks, studio effects, and computer programs led to an irresistible temptation to overproduce, and to move away from capturing the way music sounds when a group of musicians play together in a room.
It is the many stories Brown tells over the course of this book, though, that ultimately provide the weight of authority behind the conclusions he draws. His detailed memories of sessions, and his skill as a storyteller, allow him to reconstruct for his readers a clear picture of what his long life in the music business was like. By giving insight into the role of the recording engineer, an integral but often unsung player in the process of creating the music we listen to every day, Phill Brown offers a whole new perspective on the industry, and on music as a whole. That perspective is sometimes unorthodox, but always fascinating. Anyone who likes music should read this book.