Saying Goodbye to Hugh McCracken and Phil Ramone
We lost a pair of legends this week. Hugh McCracken was one of the least pretentious people I’ve ever interviewed. His style-a combination of elegance and sting-left its mark on the last quarter of the 20th century. If you need proof, listen to his exquisite solo on Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen.”
And what can you say about Phil Ramone, other than that he was an icon-one of the few true giants in the industry-and that no one realized he was nearly 80. Many of you had personal relationships with Phil; the pages of Mix will soon be filled with stories about him.
Perhaps one of you can share whether Phil ever talked about how the producer’s role has changed over the decades, and which forces drove that evolution. The shift from analog to digital certainly reshaped the job-engineers no longer needed to wield razor blades with the Zorro-like precision Phil and his peers possessed. As for the analog/digital debate, that ended for me the moment the long-lamented PARIS hard-disk recording system hit the market.
The more I think about it, apart from the creeping cultural hopelessness that pushes young songwriters to endlessly mine their own limited experiences-with a near-fatal drop in lyrical quality (does anyone still read Rimbaud?)-the factor most responsible for reducing sonic variety in pop recordings may simply be better tuning.
Listen to the first two bars of “If This World Were Mine” (written by Marvin Gaye), recorded in 1967 with Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Do you think that upright piano was freshly tuned and voiced before the session? Probably not. Electric guitars were notoriously tricky to tune in those days, and pre-Marshall amplifiers-and the settings players favored-tended to exaggerate upper harmonics. Bells, piano, guitar: everything is clashing in the upper range on that track, yet the result is a spare orchestration that only enhances its beauty. Notice the minimal use of cymbals, which would have tipped the whole thing into outright cacophony.
Look, I’m just riffing here-and if I’m off base I invite you golden-eared engineers to set me straight-but let me offer two more examples. Carlos Santana’s classic solos on “Black Magic Woman” (1970) and “Smooth” (1999) are, to my ear, equally soulful and melodic. But on the earlier recording, he’s working that Gibson SG, adjusting his intonation with his fingers as he goes-a level of hands-on expression not required on the later track. I think that gives him room to impart an even more personal signature.
Most importantly, peace, love, and best wishes to the families of Hugh McCracken and Phil Ramone. They gave pleasure to so many..
Appeared in Mix, May 2013
