Ringo Starr—Inside the Making of “Look Up,” Part 3

Don’t Pass Up Part 1 and Part 2!

Once the basics had been recorded for the nine songs, during the week of January 22 through 26, the group spent a number of days over at East Iris Studio A, fleshing out the demos—just enough to allow Ringo to track drums onto any which he chose to record.

Stankiewicz made use of his favorite tools in his overdubbing chain, including Neve 1066 or 1073 preamps. “And I really like those UndertoneAudio UnFairchild 670M compressors,” he explains. “It’s tough to find an old Fairchild, and I really like how versatile those UnFairchilds are. They sound great on bass.” And the veteran Crouch typically brought his own favs. “Dennis brings one of those classic Altec 639 birdcage ribbon mics. And he’s got a Soyuz The Launcher mic preamp, which I have as well. It’s like a Cloudlifter Mic Activator, which is an inline gain bump, prior to the preamps.”

By the way, Crouch used two quite old uprights for this album. One was a Tyrolean 7/8 bass made in 1830 (literally in Tyrol, in the high Alps), which he had found in North Carolina in 2009, and which he had fully restored over 1 ½ year period. The other was a German bass from around 1875. “I found that in a radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana,” he recalls. “So chances are, it was played on some old hillbilly records,” after making its way to the city in the 1940s. “Both of those instruments had to have come here by ship, a very long time ago.”

The last step was to fine tune the arrangements, moving sections around to create the perfect base track. “It was a pretty modern approach to what is really a great, timeless sounding record,” he adds. “T Bone is such a master of not just melody, as we know, but arrangement.”

With a country EP still in mind, and with T Bone coming to town in March, the producer recalls, “He said, ‘Well, if you’re coming out, let’s get together, and we’ll kick some stuff around.’” He arrived over at Roccabella on March 13, to play the songs for Ringo. “I had the Billy song, ‘Come Back’ and the eight others we had written, hoping that, maybe, two of them would meet his approval. He said, ‘Did you bring some more songs?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah, I did.’ And he said, ‘Let’s hear ‘em. How many do you got?’ And I told him, ‘Nine.’

“So we listened to them, one after another, and he just liked them. And he said, ‘Well, what are we gonna do?’ So I said, ‘Well, let’s record ‘em.’ And he said, ‘Well, it’ll be a whole album.’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ So he said, ‘Okay, then. Let’s do an album.’”

BECOMING A RINGO ALBUM

Once Ringo decided to record all of the tracks, the next step was to take T Bone’s demos, in whatever state they were in, and add drums to them.

The drum kit Ringo uses—and has always used for recording at Roccabella—is a 1940 WFL kit (WFL is the company Ludwig founder William F. Ludwig created in the late 30s, after selling his Ludwig company), according to his longtime drum tech, Jeff Chonis. It was purchased from Seattle-based Don Bennett, coming to Ringo back in May of 1998, according to Beats & Threads author Gary Astridge. “He had said he wanted to have a birthday kit, for his birth year,” he notes.

For those who are wondering, it’s a 14” x 22” bass drum, 16” x 16” floor tom, 9” x 13” rack tom, and a matching 1940 WFL 6.5” x 14” snare. His cymbals are actually his original Beatles cymbals, used in the 60s on sessions and tours. “And he told me he doesn’t clean them,” T Bone notes. “They haven’t been cleaned for 60 years. So, overall, it’s not a modern sound, because they’re old drums, and the cymbals are old, as well. It’s a beautiful sound. I walked in, and he started playing his hi hat the way he did in the early days, open, swishing across them with that crazy open hi hat. No other drummer ever did that.”

On occasion, when the song calls for it, Ringo will have Chonis swap out the snare for an otherwise-favored model. Also, on one song, “I Live For Your Love,” instead of his regular Zildjan sticks, he used Vic Furth Rute Bundled Sticks 606, which Bruce describes as “thin pieces of bamboo” bundled together, to give a unique slap-like sound.

Bruce keeps the miking for the kit standing, always ready to track. He mics the snare in the standard fashion, with a Shure SM57 on top and a Sennheiser 441 on the bottom. The kick is miked inside with a Shure Beta 52, while outside, he utilizes a DW The Moon Mic cardioid dynamic kick drum mic. The toms are each picked up by Sennheiser Pro Audio E-604s, with the hi hat miked with a Neumann KM84. “I also have two Neumann U87s, as room mics, across the room,” he adds. “And that’s basically it.”

As noted above, the room is untreated, with no dampeners of any kind on the walls—it’s a bedroom. “I capture the kit, the way it is in that room,” the engineer states. “It’s not the ideal room for drums, but it works in that room.” He credits Ringo’s decades of recording experience for always providing an even recording. “His internal balance is one of the best I’ve heard of anyone. Nowadays, everything’s multiple mics on everything, and you can adjust each drum. But we don’t do that. Some guys hit their snare way too hard, a lot harder than their toms, and then you have to readjust everything. But here, if I bring up those two U87 room mics, with just the kick drum, it’s a great sound, because the force he hits his snare and cymbals with is so consistent.”

“It’s a real clear sound, and it’s deep,” T Bone notes. “And the beautiful, big, deep bass drum and deep snare. The tom toms are deep, too, but they’re not limited.”

The Pro Tools session files were sent directly from Stankiewicz in Nashville to Bruce in a couple of batches. And, while T Bone was there on March 13 and 14, Ringo decided to go ahead and track four or five songs, though it appears some were likely recut over the following few days. “I was sitting, maybe 6 or 8 feet from him, while he played,” he remembers. “It was tremendous fun, watching him drum in that little room.” Notes Bruce, “The control room is just outside the drum room, but you can keep the door open and watch him. T Bone was just in awe, when he started playing. And here’s a guy who’s seen everything.”

T Bone had the benefit of getting to watch a master do something quite extraordinary—drum to an existing track—often, actually, with the barest of minimum parts present—and sound, when listening to the finished mix, as if he was playing live in the roomful of musicians heard on the final recording. His playing is, simply, magically interactive. Ringo doesn’t play to the song—his drumming is part of the song.

“In modern recording,” Bruce says, “people are often adding a drum part—and some are better at it than others. You can always feel when a drummer is just playing along with a track, and not incorporating the feel of the song. But he feels the track, and he plays it. He doesn’t think about it. He plays with his emotions, which is why he’s such a great drummer.” Notes T Bone, “He plays to the lyric. And all great musicians play the lyric. They play the story.”

He and Daniel also took advantage of their decades of familiarity with Ringo’s playing. “Part of it, too, is that, when we were recording our base tracks, we were playing with him in our minds. That’s why there wasn’t a drummer anywhere—because we were imagining Ringo playing. I know his pocket inside out, and I know his feel inside out. It’s been 60 years of absorbing that pocket. And what we were trying to do was just create a space, where he could play his pocket.”

With only one exception, there was no direction from T Bone about what kind of groove Ringo should play. And Ringo’s not a musician who takes the demos home and studies them, trying to come up with a part. “There’s no method, man—it’s his madness,” Bruce explains. “I always try to get him to listen to the whole song. I’d put it on, whatever T Bone sent us, and he’d listen for maybe a verse and a chorus, and then says, ‘Let’s go.’ And normally, he never did more than 3 takes of a song—usually 2. His instincts are so good—he’ll just play some great stuff. That’s just 60 years of experience playing drums. He just reacts emotionally to it.”

The only song for which T Bone offered some direction was for “Time On My Hands.” “T Bone said, ‘Tell him to play like ‘Anna,’” the Beatles song, Arthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go To Him)” from their first LP, Please Please Me, with its unique rhythm. “I always loved the way he played on that, as well as ‘In My Life,’” says the producer, “where the second backbeat was anticipated. And this song had that space in it. That’s a natural beat, that I don’t think anybody besides him ever did.” On his own, Ringo decided to wait to begin playing the rhythm until the second verse.

Built into Ringo’s creativity is also delivery of unique fills, delivering accents that only occur once in a song and nowhere else. For instance, in the opening track, “Breathless,” T Bone notes, “He hits his hi hat five times at the start of the third verse, but never does that again. It’s perplexing, because he’s playing and there’s no arrangement at all,” he laughs. “I was there, listening to him do that and thinking, ‘How am I going to sort this out? What am I going to do with this? How are the drums going to be on this album? He’s not hitting the arrangement, as he had done on the previous chorus.’ But then, I relaxed. I never tell anybody what to play. I thought, ‘What difference does it make? This is how he plays. This is it.’ And, of course, it’s thrilling. This is what he’s done his whole life. His playing is part of the song.”

Crouch, too, in fact, had a sense Ringo would play something different, in that very spot. “I actually did the same thing. Again, it’s about playing the lyric. And I thought, ‘If I can give him, just lay out some crumbs, to the lyric, he’ll do the rest.’ And he did.”

After a day or so of watching Ringo and Bruce track parts together, T Bone realized they indeed knew what they were doing. “That’s one of T Bone’s strong points as a producer,” the engineer says. “He can sense, ‘These guys know what they’re doing, I don’t need to be here.’”

For those keeping track, the drum parts recorded in that first batch were: “I Live For Your Love” (March 13), “String Theory” (March 14), “Look Up” and “You Want Some” (March 18) and “Never Let Me Go” (March 20). (The remainder came the following month, upon the arrival of further demos).

Discover more great stories—get a free Mix SmartBrief subscription!

With a couple of takes available of each drum part for each song, Bruce took a first pass at editing and comping the parts, with preferred elements of each pass, after which he forwarded the sessions to Piersante, over in West L.A. at Studio Z, who created/adjusted final comps and edits, being fully familiar with T Bone’s preferences and styles in arrangement from years of work together.

During that time, various parts, such as the early passes of acoustic/rhythm guitars done in Nashville, were replaced with permanent parts, many done with Piersante at Studio Z, including some of T Bone’s electric guitars. “Acoustics, I played a 1932 Gibson L5 and a 1949 Gibson Southern Jumbo,” he notes. “And electrics, I mostly play a 1959 Gretsch Country Gentleman,” heard quite clearly on “Never Let Me Go,” T Bone delivering his most George-like rockabilly part. “When I was a kid, George was the Beatle that I related to. I wanted to be George Harrison, when I was 16. I loved his rockabilly playing. He and Ringo were both rockabilly people, as far as I was concerned.” He plays his electrics through a Fender Tweed Deluxe—and regularly makes use of an authentic Echoplex. “That’s real tape delay.”

Daniel’s electric guitar parts are played through a 1964 Fender Black Face Deluxe Reverb, as well as a new Fender Pro Junior amp. He typically mics his with a pair of Sennheiser MD 421 Kompact mics, recorded through an API 500 rack, with 512 preamps, 550B EQ and 525A compressors.

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR PART FOUR!