"There was no other producer around, and I never got an engineering or a production credit!" he remembers. I myself always made musical suggestions when I was taking care of the technical side, but in those days that was expected of us, and Columbia didn't even give engineering credits."ĭitto certain sessions that featured Roy Halee in the producer's role. "Evidently they were hip to the idea that if you play a little softer with greater dynamics you get a bigger sound when it's recorded. "The sound in the control room was, of course, enormous," Halee recalled. The fact that Beck used a small amp at low volume settings impressed Halee, not least because this was contrary to what many of his contemporaries were doing at that time. And he also recorded the Yardbirds' version of 'I'm A Man' with Jeff Beck on lead guitar. This is where the microphones went and you couldn't change anything, and that was the way it was."Īccordingly, while still at Columbia, Halee began working with outside clients for the Kama Sutra label, including the Lovin' Spoonful on hits like 'Summer In The City'. You couldn't with classical, at least not at Columbia. "You see, although I was a classically trained musician, I had more fun doing rock because I could experiment with sound. It was foreign to them, but then, when the damned thing took off, it turned a lot of heads and he exploded. A six-minute single was unheard of at that time, and basically I don't think they really liked it at Columbia Records. Dylan, on the other hand, was their first folk-rock act, and on the strength of that job I got a bit of a reputation in the city. "They either dealt with classical or what they called 'legit pop acts' such as Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis. "That was very fortunate, because at the time Columbia didn't have any rock & roll artists, per se," Halee remarked when I first interviewed him back in 1997. Paul Simon with collaborators Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the Graceland tour 1987. Eventually growing tired of this work, he was transferred from the editing cubicle to the studio, where his first session was Dylan's 'Like A Rolling Stone'. When CBS relocated its TV production to Hollywood, Halee was the victim of a union layoff, yet a walk across the street to Columbia Records resulted in his spending the next 18 months editing pop and classical recordings, while also mixing down three-track tapes to stereo and mono in preparation for mastering. The Early YearsĪ native of Long Island, New York, who initially studied to be a classical trumpet player, Roy Halee began working for CBS Television in Manhattan during the late 1950s, positioning cameras and boom mics before handling the audio of live network shows such as The $64,000 Question. Nevertheless, it is Halee's historic body of work with S&G - recording all of their albums, co-producing a couple of them, and also co-producing and/or engineering many of Paul Simon's solo records - that has justifiably earned him his legendary status. The list is an eclectic one, and it goes on and on with regard to a Grammy-winning production/engineering career that has spanned more than 40 years. Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Barbra Streisand, Blood Sweat & Tears, Moby Grape, the Yardbirds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Neil Diamond, Edie Brickell, Boz Scaggs, Willie Nelson, the Roches, Laura Nyro, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Journey, Rufus and Chaka Khan. Roy Halee hasn't only worked with Simon & Garfunkel, you know. The man responsible for putting it all together, both sonically and physically, was Simon's long-time engineer Roy Halee. Paul Simon's Graceland album combined a huge mixture of musical styles and was recorded in studios all over the world.
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