Legendary producer and engineer Tom Dowd passed away on Sunday, October 27th, 2002, at the age of 77. When Rhino signed a distribution deal with Atlantic Records in the early 1990s, we had occasion to speak with Tom, who was one of the men most responsible for the label's rise to success. Here's what he had to say then about the good old days...
On The Early Years At Atlantic:
"In 1947 I decided to take a year off from college -- I'd been at Columbia and then went to the war and came back to Columbia, and I wanted a break. I found a job in a little music room; there weren't really recording studios then. It was a music room doing piano & voice or piano & violin demos for the students at Carnegie Hall. There was a musicians' strike pending that year so everyone started recording everything they could just in case the musicians were going to go out on strike. That was the year I met Ahmet and Herb Abramson. We did Stick McGhee's 'Drinking Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee,' which wasn't even soul then -- it was called a race record. We did Ruth Brown's 'It's Raining Teardrops In My Heart' and '(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,' and LaVern Baker and The Clovers and Joe Turner.
"About 1954, Atlantic buttons me down and wants me to work for them and nobody else. But until that time I would record a soul record with Atlantic and then the next week do the pop version of the same song with Mercury. We did it like that -- that's why they tied me down. So I signed with them and from then on it was only Atlantic. We were making 78s in those days and we were going direct to disc -- figure that out! From 1947-1959 I would say that I worked on 75% of the entire Atlantic catalog. If I didn't record it, I mastered it or I edited it or I sequenced it. We didn't really make albums in the early days. We did singles, and when we had enough singles we put them together and made an album .
"As time went on I got a real staff of 6 or 7 people. We had so much going on I don't even know all the records I worked on. I later got a great helper -- Arif Mardin. His first job with me was to work as my aide. The first thing we did together was The Rascals. I taught him how to do the down and dirty rhythm tracks and Arif would come up with additional composing and charts. It was Arif, Jerry and I, and we were a hell of a team. We were all together and it was natural to work together. When one of us came up with an idea we would go and do it. We were very casual that way. We just did it. We were inspired people. When you think of it we were a crazy mixed up bunch -- a real ethnic mix. And there were no ego problems -- we just made music.î
On Wilson Pickett:
"On Wilson I did 'Mustang Sally,' 'I'm In Love,' 'Stag-O-Lee,' 'I'm A Midnight Mover,' and 'Funky Broadway (Live In Ghana).' I did that in Ghana for the film Soul To Soul; that's where that version came from. For 'Midnight Mover' I helped Wilson write that song -- I wrote a verse of it. But we didn't take the writing credit.
"'I'm In Love' was a Bobby Womack song that nobody could figure out what to do with. When I first played it for Pickett he said it was as naked as a jaybird 'till I added in the rest of the music and mixed it. Then when I played it for him he had tears in his eyes."
On Pop Vs. Soul:
"There's a funny story I can tell you about '634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.).' This was a Jerry Wexler production done with the Stax rhythm section. Steve Cropper was talking to me one day wondering why Motown songs went pop but our records only went on the soul charts and didn't cross over. I said that our songs were more soulful. Their songs were basically nursery rhymes because every word was accounted for -- our songs left space for the singers to improvise and that is what added the soul and the feeling to our songs. When Motown put out a song every syllable was on a beat. A couple weeks later Jerry came back and said I had a hit, and Cropper laughed, 'All right cousin, how do you like it -- we got a hit!' Everything was on the beat and that's how we got our pop hit with Wilson. Steve put every syllable on the beat, and that was the difference between a pop hit and a soul hit!"
On Solomon Burke:
"I think that the original name for 'Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)' was really 'Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two EMPTY Arms).' We had a road manager named Joe Galkin from Macon, Georgia, and he managed big bands and was deep into soul. He was promoting Atlantic records in the South East. Joe got respect in the south and he called Jerry Wexler and said there is a cowboy song down here and if you get a soul artist to record it, it will be a hit. It was 'Just Out Of Reach...' We did it in New York City and it was one of the first things we did with Solomon Burke. We were recording the vocal in the studio and there was a window in the studio that Solomon could see out of when he sang. It had just started to snow. So every ten minutes Solomon kept looking at his watch while he was singing. Jerry asked me 'What's up? Why does he keep looking at his watch?' So we finally asked Solomon if anything was wrong. Well, it was 5:00 PM and Solomon was very anxious because if he could get out of the studio and catch the 5:30 train to Philadephia then he could get there by 7:00 and get on the crew to shovel snow and earn $10 that night. He had a family to feed and the $10 was a sure thing -- the singing was not guaranteed!
"Jerry signed Solomon and Wilson. Jerry and I worked on Solomon's records together at the beginning. Ahmet and Jerry signed Pickett and I was now the Southern contingent. So if anybody had to go to Muscle Shoals they would ship me in."
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