Malcolm Cecil

(music: Malcolm Cecil – “Laser Ballet”)

Malcolm Cecil

It’s really wonderful to be here in front of this very selected... I’ve been told that you guys have been highly selected out of a huge number of applicants, so congratulations and I’m very pleased that you’ve invited me to come and speak to you. I appreciate your attention.

Torsten Schmidt

Now, this wonderfully soothing recording that we just heard, which just happens to be here in a sealed copy [picks up record] - this is the David Letterman moment - it’s actually not that easy to find so that doesn’t really help, but what have we been listening to right there?

Malcolm Cecil

The last piece that you heard was called “Laser Ballet.” This was an album that I did right after I left Stevie Wonder and the Isley Brothers and Minnie Riperton and all of the heavy R&B music. I was what I call ‘boinged out.’

Torsten Schmidt

That’s not a word they teach you in German English classes.

Malcolm Cecil

OK, I don’t think they teach it in any classes. What it really means is that the main use that the synthesizer was put to in most R&B, the primary use, was as the bass. We also used it for many other instruments. We also used it to process the Clavinet for Stevie, but in general, the real essence that makes the difference, I believe, between a lot of the material we put out and the material that came before was the low end. It was the bass, the capability that the synthesizer has of producing incredibly beautiful bass sounds. As an acoustic bass player, an upright bass player, I really appreciated that and it was something that was very important in the formulation of the music, because it gave the whole flavor to the music. The concept of having the ability to change the bass sound so drastically from something very soft and gentle to something which was really powerful and, if you like, like a lead volleyball bouncing down the room, really heavy duty bass. Most of the stuff with the R&B was of the lead volleyball type, and that was what I meant when I said ‘boinged out.’ After a while you hear these sounds and you get to a point when you’re programming the synthesizer, you can’t hear any more, you don’t know what you’re doing any more, you lose complete objectivity and so you have to step back. At that point my ex-partner Bob Margouleff and I created the phrase ‘boinged out.’ I would turn to him or he would turn to me and say, “I’m boinged out,” and that meant we had to take a break. I was pretty well ‘boinged out’ with the whole lead volleyball bass thing, wonderful as it is. Anything, if you do it long enough, gets to be wearing.

So I was desperate to try and come up with something softer and gentler and show that the synthesizer could be used for something other than just powerful basslines and the occasional lead line. I felt that it was a true instrument and, in fact, that was my attraction to the instrument and why I started building TONTO, The Original New Timbral Orchestra, because I felt that an orchestra of synthesizers would be absolutely phenomenal and I had for many years wanted to experiment with sounds that I couldn’t get musicians to play. Time signatures was one of the things I couldn’t get many musicians to play, the time signatures that I wanted to play. John McLaughlin was the only guy in England who sort of saw things the way I saw them and we played together. In fact, the last gig I did on bass was at the Edinburgh Festival with Johnny McLaughlin as a trio and Pete Brown, the lyricist from Cream. He was a poet, actually, and he used to hang out and do jazz and poetry. He used to hang out with the weirdos, which was John McLaughlin, myself, and a few others of the younger jazz musicians at the time in London, who were looking for something new and different. We were trying to break away and not be just following the American lead – although that was important, because jazz is after all an American artform and that’s what we were playing – but we wanted to bring something different to it and one of the things we discussed greatly was theory of vibrations and so on. John and I were very much into vibrations and how they blended together, the harmonics and the cycle of fifths and so on and so forth. We also realized that if you slowed down vibrations enough you go below the limit of hearing and if you make the vibrations such as you can hear it - in other words, not a sine wave because that’s smooth, there’s no edge - but if you make it a pulse or something with a leading edge, you start to get tempo. It slows down below 20 cycles, your ears start to drop away, you body starts to pick it up and it becomes tempo.

So, the concept we had with time and everything was, well, why wouldn’t you be able to play harmonies in rhythm? The first obvious harmony was already staring us in the face and was the underlying underpinning of jazz, which is two against three. Well, that’s like the second and third harmonic beating together. Now, the theory of vibrations will tell you that you get the sum and the difference, that means you’ll get one and you’ll get four. Well, one is the fundamental, four is two octaves above the two, which is an octave above the fundamental, and you now have the three – is the fifth – so you have a complete one, two, three, four, the first four harmonics. Now, if you actually do that rhythmically, you get that very well-known – you want to hold this for a second? [passes the microphone and beats out a rhythm] One-two-three, one- two. Very African. It’s the basis of jazz, a lot of jazz is built on that two against three. But that’s harmonics slowed down, so we decided, what if you did the five too? What if you slowed the fifth harmonic, which is the third? We found that that worked too. To this day I still play jazz once a week on upright bass because I keep my fingers in, I go to keep my ear in, I go to keep playing and I go to keep in touch with the roots, the basic instrument. Four strings and a piece of wood, there’s nothing more basic than that. It doesn’t matter if the power goes out, I can still play. In fact, one of my fantasies was to have a live performance where right in the middle of the performance everything went out, including the exit lights, and then you just hear the bass come through. Then people realise they’ve been fooled, but it never came to be, it was just an idea. But the concept here was to create a rhythmic major chord, one-three-five, which is the first, third and fifth harmonic. That major chord then should sound good rhythmically, and as I say, when I’m playing jazz waltzes I’ll play five across it. The guys I’m playing with now know what I’m doing. At first they used to think I was trying to play six and missing. I explained to them, “No, no, you just stay where you are.” I wrote a piece called “3/4, 4/4, 5/4,” what for and why for I don’t know but that was the general idea. I have the drummer playing in 4/4, the piano playing in 3/4 and I play in 5/4 because nobody else could do it. That was the problem we had with John McLaughlin, we were playing things in 21/8. Sound complicated? Uh- uh, no. Can you count to three? Alright, you do three measures of 3/4 and a half a measure of 3/4. Yes, I did say a half a measure, i.e. 3/8, one-and-a-half beats. So it goes: one-two-three, two-two-three, three-two-three, one-and-a-one-two-three, two-two-three, three-two-three, one-and-a-one-two-three... 21/8, doesn’t sound bad, does it? Johnny and I wrote a piece in 21/8 and played it at the Edinburgh Festival but that was part of the thing. It wasn’t until I came to America some years later that I was introduced to the Moog synthesizer and realised that this was an instrument on which I could do anything I wanted to, any concept that I came up with. So I started experimenting with putting the sequences into 7/4 time and playing against them, and I got it so that I could actually feel 7/4. Until then I couldn’t get anybody to play it long enough or often enough for me to get into it, to get a feel for it. I think this was also true of people like Dave Brubeck with his “Take Five,” and later on, “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” Dave Brubeck was into experimenting with different time signatures.

But that was the motivation for me to get into synthesizers - not just that it could play different time signatures, but that it could come up with sounds that just were never anything you heard before. The opportunity to actually play with a synthesizer occurred a year after I came to the States. I’d had maybe a little brief inkling that there was a such a thing as a Moog synthesizer. I’d seen the credit on The Beatles records, The Wall; and I listened to The Wall and it didn’t sound a lot like anything I really wanted to do, but it did have some interesting things in it. I don’t know, but it didn’t have any forms in the music that was interesting stuff, I got the impression they were just recording, running the tape and playing with the knobs and seeing what came out. And that’s pretty well what I ended up doing when I ran into the first synthesizer, which was in Mediasound. I’d been in the States by then for a year. I don’t know how much history you want before that.

Torsten Schmidt

There’s a lot of that, but I think before we get into that, there’s two things that strike me about this in particular that people find probably a little difficult when they listen to non-per se dance music. A, how to rhythmically organize it, and B, you hinted that this particular piece or this particular album was also used to be the basis for poetry and spoken word as well. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Malcolm Cecil

Yeah, one of the reasons why this album is not out there, and I didn’t push it out there in a way to promote myself – this was after I broke up with Stevie and my partner Bob Margouleff at the time, and I ended up with the synthesizer, which I still have alive and well, living in upstate New York with me about ten miles from Woodstock. This particular set of pieces, as I say, was originally done as a sort of a therapy thing for me to get away from the lead volleyball-type basslines. You’ll notice that on this particular record there are no basslines like that at all. There was a doctor who was a friend of mine, we called him Dr. Jim Levin, and he was very into fine art and music and everything. He was very supportive and he would come down to the studio and just hang out there and he would lay down on the couch. Every time I would go to a bass sound and start playing, he would call out, [lofty voice] “No lead volleyballs!” In a sense he was my therapist, I suppose. He was never officially that, but that was sort of the role. During that time the record company that I was making this record for was called Unity Records, and they got a call from one Muhammad Ali, who called them up because of their name and said, “I have these spoken word pieces that I’ve been putting together.” They were to do with his training in the Muslim faith and he just wanted to record them and put them out, and he thought that he would find a record company that was an appropriate name. He found Unity Records and he just called them up because of the name. Of course, Peter Georgi, who was the president of Unity Records, called me and said, “I’ve got this thing with Muhammad Ali, would you produce it for me? Because, obviously you know how to do this stuff. Hopefully, you’ll be able to help me out with this.” So I agreed to do that and we went into the studio and recorded five lectures. They varied from 12 minutes to about 30 minutes in length - the purpose of life, the tragedy of life, heart and god and prayer, that was what they were about. I thought they were worthwhile things. It so happens that he did one version of one of the lectures called “God,” and I gave him a copy of the cassette of the lecture, which I’d edited all the “Um’s” and “Ah’s” out because he was just losing his speech at that time. He knew he had Parkinson’s, that’s why there was a little bit of urgency about it, his speech was just becoming slurred and he wanted to catch it before he couldn’t speak any more. So we had these sessions and everything and I gave him this cassette, and I put this music behind it because it seemed like it fitted to me and he flipped, he thought it was wonderful. He said, “Oh, this is great, we’ve got to put it out this way.” Well, unfortunately Unity went bankrupt and then a series of unfortunate events happened after that, which prevented this record from coming out. It was going to come out , I’d been trying to work on this for 30 years, but about 15 years ago I almost got it through and crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s and then of course, 9/11 happened. The record company got cold feet and said, “No, we can’t put anything like this out about Muslim people.” I said, “But it’s Muhammad Ali!” And they said, “Don’t care, doesn’t matter who it is. Not the climate right now.” So it went back into mothballs. I’m still trying to get that released. I wanted to hold this record, not have it out there on its own, because I didn’t want it to appear like he’d just done it over that record, so it never got released. However, the first pressing - as I say, the record company went bankrupt - I bought out the whole stock of the pressings. I brought a few with me today, probably not enough for everybody, but if you do want to get one and they’re aren’t enough to go around I will take your name and number and send one to you. But that’s the story behind the story.

[laughter]

Torsten Schmidt

That’s the bit we should keep off the video and off eBay and all of that.

[laughter]

I’m really curious because, obviously, Ali at the time, many would argue he was really instrumental in developing what was later known to be the artform of being an MC, and he has this beautiful cadence in his speech and there’s so much rhythm in there. It’s probably an issue a lot of people face in their daily production work, how do you work with or against that rhythm of what you have in a vocal track?

Malcolm Cecil

Well, the rhythm of the vocal track in terms of when it’s a spoken word, it’s very easy because really there are no really important cadences that are necessary. All you have to do is make it so that it makes sense. Without the music, what we found, was it sounded a little disjointed and you heard all the page turnings and you heard all the breathing and it was just a little awkward in the sense that like now, there’s nothing else going on. Sometimes there are pauses. I’ll pause and go “uh-uh-uh.” I try not to do that too much because I feel like a fish out of water, but when there is a gap. It can be filled with something. Usually, the gaps in conversation are filled with music, this happens in jazz. These days jazz is only played, as far as I can tell, in the concert hall where everbody comes and just sits quietly and listens and is very polite and applauds. Or it’s in very noisy environments, like bars and restaurants, where it literally is background music. When the conversation stops, the music takes over and so there’s no awkwardness. When you’re dealing with spoken word it’s relatively easy to find those places. You can stop, you can phrase the spoken word in with the music. Even though it has its own rhythm they usually don’t conflict. I didn’t find it to be conflicting at all with the particular pieces that I did with Muhammad, because you’re focusing on him anyway. The music just acts just like it would in a restaurant or a bar, carrying it through the little silences and awkwardnesses, and more importantly, it was covering over the imperfections in the original recording. Very often you can’t get him to do it again – he comes in, he sits down and he does it. He’s not the sort of person that you can say to, “That was very good, but could you say it again with a little more emphasis on the third word?” He’s not going to respond to that. If you were in the ring and you said to him, “Just hunker down a little bit and then hit him with the left,” you could expect him to comply, but I think when it comes making records or speaking in a certain way, there was no attempt made to regulate him. We just recorded him wild and then I put it together as best I could. The thing that got edited was the vocal - the thing that got moved, if anything got moved - because you can’t really move the music, the only thing you can move are the phrases.

Torsten Schmidt

Seeing that, as you earlier said, it’s a room full of very smart people, they will by now have figured out that your accent is not exactly American. Nevertheless, the first entry in your discography is a pretty quintessential American recording, and we wondered what your role in that one was. Let me quickly play a bit of it.

(music: Miles Davis – “’Round Midnight”)

Malcolm Cecil

Well, this is, of course, the Miles Davis ’Round About Midnight record that was made in 1957. I spent probably a considerable amount of time each year working for Crescendo records, GNP Crescendo, that’s Gene Norman Presents. Gene Norman is the president of the label. It’s a family label, his son Neil Norman is now running the label. Gene is in his late eighties, he’s in so-so health, but for his age he’s doing quite well. He employed me in the capacity of an archivist, to be in charge of looking through his library of recordings. My job was to come up with tapes that had been stashed in there that had never come to light. This was easy to do because he was also a promoter, a concert promoter, and he also opened a club called the Crescendo Club, specifically for the Stan Kenton band. Crescendo is the Kenton label, Stan Kenton and Crescendo are like synonymous. He was a radio personality in the ‘40s and he had a radio program five nights a week and a television program five nights a week, when there were only four TV stations in LA. So he was very famous and very rich and he opened this club called the Crescendo on Sunset Boulevard, specifically to present Stan Kenton, because there was nowhere other than concert stages for the band to play when they went to LA, and that was the motivation for him to open the club. Being a radio guy, whenever he did concerts and promotions he would record them. Now, in the old days - this is a bit of history - in the ‘30s before tape machines - now, tape machines were invented in Germany, they were invented by Telefunken and were only discovered by the Allied forces when they broke into the bunker that Hitler and Eva Braun were supposedly staying in. They came across this weird looking thing and they didn’t know what it was. They eventually discovered it was a tape machine. And the thing about tape machines is that you can’t hear the surface noise that you can hear on a disc and it’s very audible. Prior to tape machines all recordings were done on disc and that included recordings for broadcasts. There were two ways of recording on a disc. You can record - mono, this is - you can record waggling the needle laterally, left to right, and that works quite well. You can also record waggling the needle vertically, that’s called ‘hill and dale’ recording. That also works quite good, but of course, you have problems that show up when you have large amplitudes. When it’s left-and-right, large amplitudes will tend to cut into the groove you just cut, unless you open up the grooves of the revolution before, which requires quite a bit of engineering expertise and it’s not easy to do – unless you have a tape machine, of course. But prior to tape machines, no way. We had no capability of knowing up front whether there was going to be a loud level that would cut into the previous groove that you just cut. In other words, if the needle’s going like this you have to open up one revolution ahead for it not to cause an intercut. As I say, before tape machines there was no way to do that, there was no way of time-delaying, there was no way of seeing what was going to come next. But the radio people could use that method but they’d have to use a very wide pitch to prevent that from happening on the fly, so you didn’t get much recording time, it ate space like mad. Whereas with hill and dale recording that wasn’t that problem, you could pack the grooves right up against each other and they would go up and down. They only problem is, of course, if you went too loud you’d throw the needle up out of the groove. It would jump out or it would go down into the aluminium, because lacquers, which is what they were in those days, are just paint on an aluminium disc. So the radio people, however, decided at least with this we can record a fixed amount of time, we can tell how much time we can record and if we do it at relatively low level we’ll be able to record a complete half-an-hour broadcast. This they were able to do with 33 1/3 microgroove recording, with closely packed grooves that didn’t move from side to side but just moved up and down. So this was the method, but the trouble was you heard all the clicks and pops. With tape you didn’t hear that, and the upshot of all of that was, after the Second World War, the tape machines began to be manufactured in the States. The two people who were part of the intelligence team from the US and Allied forces that discovered the machines in the bunker there, and later found out what they did and how they worked, ended up being the founders of Ampex and 3M corporation. Colonel Ranger was the 3M guy, and I’ve forgotten the name - AM somebody Pexman or something, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but the guy who did Ampex. He went with the traditional single, friction-driven puck, whereas Colonel Ranger came up with what he called Isoloop which was a serrated puck that had two different diameters and created an isolated loop to go around the tape head. Anyhow, this was all part of the situation. Radio Recorders were a company that recorded all types of broadcast. They had telephone lines, ordinary, standard telephone lines and they were 600, unterminated balanced lines. If you’ve seen 600 Ohm balanced lines, that’s where they started and you can feed 600 Ohm balanced lines thousands of miles, you can feed them across the country. They had high quality telephone lines fixed to every one of these venues. So when Gene Norman, who was an old radio man who knew about recording, he would call up radio recorders and say, “I’m putting on a concert at the Shrine Auditorium tonight, I want you to record it.” Now, you can’t take a lathe, a cutting lathe, to the Shrine Auditorium. They’re not portable. They’ve got to be on a two-ton block of concrete that’s floated so that it doesn’t get the traffic noise, doesn’t get any vibration. You can’t move those things, so you bring the sound to it with the telephone lines, and Gene Norman did exactly this with these concerts. So he has all of these tapes, many of them of have never been played since the day they came from Radio Recorders. They were just sent over and the guy at Radio Recorders didn’t know who was on the tape, unless he was listening and most of them weren’t. They probably used two or three lathes because you had to have a back-up in case there was a problem technically. So Gene Norman would record his concerts this way and all you’d find would be a disc, which would be a 15” disc you couldn’t play on a normal player anyway, and it would just say, “American Festival of Jazz 1957, Side 1” - no indication who was on it, what it was. My job was to go through these discs, and later when they went to tape, they still put the tape machine at Radio Recorders, they didn’t take the tape machine to the Shrine or the Pasadena Civic or anywhere. They still did it the same way, but they substituted tape machines for the lathes. So, Gene Norman religiously recorded all his concerts. I’m going through these tapes and I’m listening to some of the concert tapes. I didn’t do too much with the discs, although I was going through them, but it was much more difficult to retreive from disc. The tapes were pretty good. I was going through these tapes and I came across one, “American Festival of Jazz 1957.” I thought, “Oh, maybe this is Stan Kenton.” I put it on and it’s Gene Norman introducing the Miles Davis Quintet at the Pasadena Civic 1957, the only live recording that that original quintet made. That’s with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red Garland on piano, Philly Joe Jones on drums and, of course, the ubiquitous Paul Chambers on bass. There are no other live recordings of that group and so I said to Gene Norman, “I’ve found some gold here, I think we’re sitting on gold. We can release this.” He says, “No, we can’t release it.” I said, “What do you mean, we can’t release it?” He said, “We don’t own the rights.” I said, “How do you mean, you don’t own the rights? You put on the concert, you paid for the recording, you paid the band. Surely the tapes belong to you, you can release them?” He said, “No, you don’t understand. Record contracts with artists are exclusive. It doesn’t matter who records them, where, all that matters is when. If it’s during the period of the contract, guess who owns the rights? The record company who signed the artist. End of story. There’s no way we can release this.” I said, “Well, who owns the rights?” He says, “If you can find that out, maybe we’ve got a chance.” So I went through all the old books. I found that he was signed to CBS at the time. Fortunately Gene, who knows everybody in the business, was able to do a deal with CBS and they literally bought the tapes from Gene Norman for a flat fee, something like 50 grand, and some small royalty that’s still being paid. But the bottom line of it is, they rereleased the album that that group made in 1957 called ’Round About Midnight, which is what you heard at the beginning here, and they put a second disc out, which was the 30-minute concert that I found and that I restored. It’s probably because it’s most recent of the big ones, the top of the list. But Miles is probably one of the biggest artists I’ve ever had the pleasure to be remotely involved with, but I didn’t record it. [laughs]

Torsten Schmidt

Did you meet personally him?

Malcolm Cecil

Oh, yes. In fact, my second child was called Miles, because my wife was pregnant with him at the time when I toured with the Miles Davis Quintet. I was in the band that opened for him, called The Jazz Five, and we played the first set and Miles played the second set and that was a six-week tour of England. It was the first time a full American jazz group had come to England, and I’d just got out of the Air Force in time to do that gig, which was fantastic. I got very friendly with Paul Chambers and Miles turned out to be a really nice guy, actually. All this turning his back and being obtuse, that’s all a big publicity thing. He’s actually a really nice guy. The first day at rehearsal he had Fran, his wife, I had my wife Polly, and she’s pregnant, Fran’s pregnant. Miles comes over to me and he says, “Is that your wife?” “Yeah.” He grabs her hand, “Come with me.” Takes her over. “This is Fran. This is Polly. You guys stick together.” [laughs] So I never actually played with him. I’d love to have, but I played opposite him and I had a personal relationship with him, which was excellent.

Torsten Schmidt

Let me play something else from probably around the same time.

(music: Tony Crombie Quintet – “Gut Bucket”)

Malcolm Cecil

Yeah, this is very old. This is from my days back in England. I had to even ask who it was. I don’t remember this one because this was a piece I did with Tony Crombie, who was a drummer back in England in the Ronnie Scott days. I’m playing acoustic bass on this, this is one of my early albums from before my career in America.

Torsten Schmidt

What was Ronnie Scott’s?

Malcolm Cecil

Ronnie Scott’s is a jazz club that was founded in, I think it was 1959, 1958. It was the first jazz club in London to be founded by a jazz musician and it became the mecca for jazz. In fact, the British Invasion was part of the reason for its success - that’s the British Invasion of America. We had all sorts of American appetite for The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, and a number of the other popular groups from England at the time, The Who, I believe. We had a problem because of the union situation. The same union situation that prevented me from working later when I came to America, where American musicians couldn’t work in England and English musicians couldn’t work in America. So what they did, they came up with an interesting formula. Harold Davidson was the promoter and Harold was a very smart man. He owned 51% of Ronnie Scott’s, he was the money behind Ronnie Scott’s club. He made all tour arrangements for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and so on, he was a big promoter. And he got the unions to do a deal which he called ‘man concerts.’ As far as the union was concerned, it wasn’t the money that the men were paid, it was how long they played. In other words, if The Beatles played one concert, that was considered four ‘man concerts.’ And for that, you could get one American musician to come over and do four concerts. So they parlayed this into a very clever scheme, where, for all the Beatles concerts and all the Rolling Stones’, all of the pop groups that came over, we built up these ‘man concerts.’ Then Ronnie would bring over Stan Getz, JJ Johnson, Johnny Griffin, Roland Kirk, Donald Byrd, Wes Montgomery as an individual artist, and play with the local rhythm section. That was where I got to meet lots... I did that for four years as the bass player. The first person I played with was Johnny Griffin, and all the people I just mentioned, I played with all of those.They would do a two-week stint. So two weeks would be 14 ‘man concerts,’ not counting the all-nighters because they were counted separately. So 14 ‘man concerts’ is like three-and-a-half nights for The Beatles. So we had a constant stream of American, top-line jazz musicians coming to Ronnie Scott’s to play and playing with the local rhythm section. That’s why in 1961, when Miles came over with the full quintet, that was a big deal because that had never been before, but they had some ‘man concerts’ over.

Torsten Schmidt

You earlier said you just got out of the Air Force in time to play with Miles. What were you doing in the Air Force and what did you learn there that benefited you in your other ventures?

Malcolm Cecil

Good question. When I first went into the Air Force I wanted to play, of course, and I told them – I was called up, conscription, different to the draft. Conscription means everybody goes, it doesn’t matter. You have to be pretty well dead before they’ll not accept you, either that or a complete cripple. But the bottom line is, everybody went. Draft, one person in three. That’s the difference. At that time it was conscription in England and you got deferment if you were studying. I was studying at the London Polytechnic for a degree in physics at the time, but I was also playing on the TV once a week with Dill Jones and I was 19 at the time. That was what got me into the Melody Maker polls, because I was in front of everybody’s TV every Monday night. I would be on for three minutes and because I was so young I used to get featured a lot and my thermodynamics professor didn’t like this much. When we were in class he said to me – we were discussing entropy, you know what that is? Entropy is sort of the total energy of a system – he came up with this comment that in a machine, if you run the machine ‘round its complete cycle, there will be some energy lost and that is known as a loss of entropy. The next phrase is the one that got me. He said, “And so the entropy of the universe is slowly running down.” This didn’t sit with me because I had read Hoyle, the astronomer Hoyle, and I’d also read Einstein and relativity and a few other advanced tomes on Physics, because I was really interested in it. So I put up my hand and said, “Excuse me, Dr. Fewkes, there has to be a balance, but surely in the center of a star there’s fusion going on, and isn’t that positive entropy?” Well, that was all he needed from me. “Some people are in this class just to get out of their service to this nation, and their service to Her Majesty, to appear on television every week playing jazz. These sorts of people I don’t want in my class, so you can leave now and not come back.” That was basically his answer. So I got thrown out of the class, which ended up resulting in - he failed me in thermodynamics, which was an essential for the course. So, at the end of my first year, poof, that’s it, my deferment’s over, I had to go in the forces. I go in and they say, “What do you want to do?” I say, “I want to play.” “Well, sign here for nine years.” “Erm, what else can I do?” They wouldn’t let me do it for National Service, no. They said, “Well, you’re very qualified in technical stuff. We suggest you go into radio and radar, you’ll make the most money there.”

So, to cut a long story short I ended up doing nine months of training as a radar fitter, which is down to the last nut, bolt and screw in a radar in England. I was in charge of ground control approach, GCA radar, which is talking people down - I didn’t do the talking, I did the fixing of the equipment - but it’s talking people down who are flying, it’s being done by pilots. They talk them down in bad weather, which is all the time in England, and you’re parked in two trailers at the end of the runway. You have to be totally self-contained and you’ve got to be totally independent of power failures and everything, and you have to keep everything running. So, one trailer is a power truck with two diesel generators in it. In case one goes down, you have to bring the other one up, phase it in, flip them over – complicated stuff. Because it’s lives in your hands, people’s lives who are being talked down to land in bad weather. I was involved with that and then they sent me off after I did my training - I passed out top of my class because I was used to studying, I’d just come out of a year in the Polytechnic on the top of my study form. They posted me to a station just outside Newcastle upon Tyne, which was a plotting station with an EMI plotting table, which was, of all things, voltage-controlled. One of my jobs was to maintain that table. I did not know that it would later mean that I knew about voltage control when it came to synthesizers, I knew exactly what was going on. Remember, I’m the guy who has to fix this stuff, I’m not just the guy who’s running it. I have to know every nut, bolt and screw and when it goes wrong, it’s on me. So, I had a tremendously good training in electronics, very, very detailed, very, very thorough, for which I am eternally grateful. It really made a big difference. The fact that I got sent to this place, the only RAF station in the entire world that had an EMI voltage-controlled plotting table, and I get sent there to work on it. It’s just too serendipitous for words.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you know anything about how synthesis could be used for sounds back then?

Malcolm Cecil

No, synthesis was not even a thought, wasn’t even in my mind at that time. This was 1959. I went in 1958, I joined up, and I was in it until ‘61, I was demobbed - no idea at all that synthesizers were going to come or that voltage control would work. I did, while I was in the Air Force, design a thing which used telephone-type switching rotors and stuff, which I called my ‘music typewriter.’ You played on it and it would type it out in music. I also, inadvertently, apparently invented the nine-pin dot matrix printer, because that was how I was going to print it out and I came up with this idea of nine pins that would go out and print. I didn’t know that many, many years later, Seiko were going to do that for the Games in Toyko and come up with a dot matrix printer. Had I known, I would have patented it years before. [laughs]

Torsten Schmidt

Well, maybe that was the axis getting back for stealing the tape machine.

[laughter]

Malcolm Cecil

Probably. The whole experience in the Air Force on one level was very good and on another level was bad, because it was also in the Air Force, while I was up in Newcastle upon Tyne, that I met Michael Jeffrey, who was to come back into my life many years later as Jimi Hendrix’s manager and the owner of Electric Lady studios where I worked with Stevie. He and I started a club called The Downbeat Club. On the same day that Ronnie Scott opened Ronnie Scott’s in London, we opened the Downbeat in Newcastle upon Tyne and I believe that club is still running. It turned out that Michael Jeffrey was a high-ranking officer in the British secret service. I didn’t know it at the time. He did arrange for me to have a posting down to London because he knew I wanted to go down and play in the jazz clubs, but it was in exchange for me handing over to him my shares in the club, which I was happy to do, because I knew that there was no way that I could keep track of anything that was 300 miles north. In England, 300 miles is like you might as well be on the other coast over here. It’s like 3000 miles in America today. Then, 300 miles in England was like that.

Torsten Schmidt

Probably something else from England around the time, a little later though.

(music: T. Rex – “Get It On”)

Malcolm Cecil

Well, what can I say? I worked with a band in England called Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, which pretty much every British jazz musician of any note went through. And not just jazz musicians, but rock & roll musicians. Alexis was the person who is probably responsible for the blues still being a viable form of music. It had died in the States, he brought it back to life in England and it was reimported with the British Invasion. It was Alexis that was at the bottom of that. Alexis had everybody and anybody that was any good in his band at some point, including Mick Jagger, and I was in the band for a while. The band was a constantly moving band. But this was to come back later in 1972 when I was working with Stevie Wonder at that time and the big problem was to break Stevie to the white audience. He was big in R&B, he was big in the black music market, but...

Torsten Schmidt

Big in Italy as well.

Malcolm Cecil

That may be true. I wasn’t there, so I’ll take your word for it.

Torsten Schmidt

I wasn’t even an afterthought.

[laughter]

Malcolm Cecil

Anyhow, we came to the realisation, that in order to break him to white audiences, we had to do something that would get him in front of them. My lawyer was Johanan Vigoda at the time, who was also Stevie’s lawyer, or actually in the process of becoming Stevie’s lawyer, which didn’t bode well for me in the long run, but at that time we were all one family. He’s a very good lawyer, he’s a doctor of law from Harvard. You know what they teach in Harvard that’s different to every other law school? The art of distraction. Every Harvard lawyer that I’ve come up against has been an expert in the art of distraction. It took me a while to figure it out, but I did in the end. Anyhow, Johanan and I were talking and Jo said to me, “Do you know anybody in The Rolling Stones?” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, I see here in Variety they’re going to do an American tour and it would be great if we could get Stevie to open for them.” I said, “Well, as it happens I know Mick.” We get a call through and using me as the introduction, Jo gets through and they connect business-wise, and basically, the conversation went something along the lines of, “Hi, this is Malcolm. I want to introduce you to Johanan Vigoda, he’s my lawyer. We wanted to ask you, do you know Stevie Wonder?” “Oh yeah, we know Stevie. Little Stevie Wonder, we like him.” Next minute we’ve got a deal, Stevie’s opening for the Stones’ 1972 tour – big, huge tour. We’d just put out Talking Book, we’d just been roasted by Motown for not having a single on Music of My Mind. The single that we had on there, “Mary wants to be a Superwoman” [“Superwoman / Where Were You When I Needed You”], Motown didn’t consider worth pushing, so of course, it didn’t make a hit. So we didn’t have a hit single, but it was our fault, of course. We decided we were definitely going to have two hit singles, one opening each side on Talking Book. The first one was “Superstition,” and the second one was “Sunshine Of My Life.” And those two songs literally broke Stevie to the white audience and broke him through in 1972, it was the biggest thing that happened to him.

Torsten Schmidt

Nevertheless I’m a little bit baffled. So the main link-up was, what was your involvement in the T. Rex session there?

Malcolm Cecil

T. Rex, I did the recordings of all the vocals when they came over. Marc Bolan from T. Rex was a very strange guy. He drove cars with his eyes shut, that’s how he died, driving a car closing his eyes. He was a really strange guy, but he was an incredible singer. I did the engineering on Electric Warrior and he was the first person who I ever was able to record multiple vocals and it sounded like it was just doubling. He sang exactly the same every time. We had, I think it was a 12-track machine at the time, a 1” 12-track we were working with. I think six or seven tracks were filled up with instruments and he just went one after another. I think we did the vocals on Electric Warrior in, I think it was two afternoons. We did all the vocals on all the songs, multi-tracking them, just like that. He went straight through, never had to retake anything, an amazing vocalist.

Torsten Schmidt

What studio was that at?

Malcolm Cecil

Media Sound. Tony Visconti was the producer of that one.

Torsten Schmidt

What happened in between? How did you get to be the recording engineer on this one and out of army? I feel there’s a little gap there.

Malcolm Cecil

A little gap, yeah. When I came out of the Air Force I went to work at Ronnie’s for a number of years and that was when I played with a lot of the musicians, the American musicians I mentioned. Then I got to a point where I wanted to progress and I wanted to go into a different area of music and experiment and be a more rounded musician and be accepted more, because I was getting this thing about, “Oh, jazz musicians can’t read music,” and, “They can only play jazz.” This used to infuriate me. The BBC advertized for a principal bass player for their new radio orchestra and it’s the charter to the Queen that they’ve got to advertise in Melody Maker, they have to take auditions to everybody. So we did the audition for the BBC and I passed it and became principal bass to the BBC radio orchestra. At the same time I had my own consultancy business, because when I came out of the Air Force I needed to make money for my wife and kid. I had this electronics consultancy business and I was building equipment for musicians, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, and I built a PA system. You couldn’t buy PA systems in those days. Today, you just walk down to any of the stores on 47th Street, 48th Street.

Torsten Schmidt

They’re not there any more.

Malcolm Cecil

They’re not there any more? It’s a while since I’ve been in the city. But you can go on the net and you can buy PA systems coming out your ears. In those days they had to be custom-built, there were no such things. I was doing guitar amp repairs for Boosey & Hawkes, and they got an enquiry from somebody who wanted a PA system, and that’s how it started. Then I went on to put the sound system in Ronnie Scott’s and the Establishment Club and Prince Charles Club in England. I was doing all of that type of thing, of course, burning the candle at both ends - BBC during the day, Ronnie’s at night and my business in between - burning the candle at three ends. Of course, guess what? My health gave out. I ended up getting two collapsed lungs and they wouldn’t tell my wife that I was going to survive between the operations - two operations, while they were operating on the one side the other side went down. So, I’m very lucky to be alive, and after I came out of that operation they told me I had three years to live, and that changed my whole outlook on life remarkably. So, my wife and I decided that I was going to give up my position at the BBC and I needed to go to a warmer climate. They told me Arizona or Johannesburg, both of them 9000 feet above sea level with an average of nine hours of sunshine a day, which was what I needed, apparently, to recover. I felt not strong enough to go to the States, so I went to South Africa and this was during apartheid and that was not a very good experience. I was there for a year, and at the end of it my wife had to leave for England in a hurry, and I had to get smuggled out by a student of mine, a bass playing student, who was South African. He was Afrikaans-speaking, which made him special compared to English speaking South Africans, who were considered to be very, very low on the totem pole. Basically, they wanted to throw me in jail for putting on mixed race concerts, and whilst it worked in Cape Town it didn’t work in Jo’burg. So I left, sneaked out through Mozambique and got a ship to America. We were supposed to go through the Suez Canal, Mediterranean to New York, but there was the Six Day War and the Suez Canal was full of sunken ships. So we ended up going across the Pacific and Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and ended up on the West Coast of America in San Francisco. [laughs] So I entered through the back door, came in through San Francisco. I’m very glad I did because it gave me a very, very positive view of the States.

I was in California for a year during which time I tried to play, but I ran into the reverse problem from the other side of the Atlantic with the union and not having a green card and all this stuff, big deal problems. So I ended up having to fall back on my technical expertise and I got a job at Pat Boone’s studio at Sun West as chief engineer there and put in the first 16-track studio in LA. Later, at the end of that year, I moved to New York, because I tried three times, couldn’t get in through the immigration in LA. It was all to do with the Civil Rights Act, and the fact that there was no longer a British quota that was never filled and you just walked in if you were British. Now I was standing in line behind everybody, Mexicans, Orientals, everybody who was coming into California, which was a very popular spot, so I was like 9,000,375 in line. I ended up going to New York, basically on my way home, and did a six-week stint at the Record Plant as chief engineer, during which time I learned a great deal and met a lot of very good people, and met the gentleman who later introduced me to Stevie Wonder. A guy called Ronnie Blanco, who I mistakenly thought worked for the studio but actually turned out to be the husband of the receptionist. He was trying to keep an eye on her because she was having an affair with - what’s his name, the ‘Wall of Sound’? - Phil Spector. [laughter]

Sometimes I remember people by their other names. He was helping me out and I didn’t realize for four days that he didn’t work there, it was very funny, but we’re still friends and he’s been a big catalyst in my life. He’s a bass player, too, and he later introduced me to Stevie, because he played with Stevie, and he was the one who brought Stevie to me at Media Sound after I finished the six-week stint at the Record Plant, which was basically to get the place ready to go public for the first time. They had to have the equipment all in order and everybody had to be fired, all the staff, because they weren’t union - the union thing keeps coming up - but a different union, this was the electricians’ union, the mixing engineers’ union, whatever it was back then, it’s now defunct, I believe. I think it’s still around in the film business but not in the record business. Of course, none of the record plant employees were union. What was happening was, TVI was buying out the Record Plant for like $5 million and when the engineers heard this was happening they were breaking the equipment, because they knew that if the equipment didn’t pass muster the deal would not go through. My job was to be a scab and come and fix the equipment in the middle of the night that they were breaking and I was pretty successful at that. Chris Stone, at the end of the stint, gave me a piece of paper and said, “Go and see this man and tell him he needs you.” On the piece of paper was written, “Bob Walters, Media Sound, 315 W 57th Street.” And I did what he said. I’d never done that before in my life but I went and gave them this piece of paper and said, “I’ve got to see Bob Walters. Chris Stone says he needs me.” Bob Walters said, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m a technical engineer, I fix stuff.” “Come on up.” He got his chief engineer to interview me and half way through the interview, it switched because I had a magnetometer with me. The first thing he asked was, “How do you align a tape machine?” I said, “Well, first you clean it and then you check to see if the heads are magnetized.” He looked at me and said, “Well, how do you that?” I seized the opportunity and I picked up my magnetometer and said, “With a magnetometer, of course. You don’t have one?” The interview flipped, all of a sudden, I was interviewing him. [laughs] It turned out I got the job as chief engineer, and he didn’t get fired, we kept him on as the daytime chief engineer, he was a nine to five sort of guy. He was good, but they needed somebody who was more, shall we say, oriented towards the record industry, so that was where I came in.

Torsten Schmidt

Who was recording there at the time?

Malcolm Cecil

Richie Havens, that was my first client, Jimmy Spheeris. It was not so much a recording studio for records as it was an ad studio. Madison Avenue booked it out, our strings, our horns, our harp, and this is where the synthesizer was. This is where the first part of TONTO came in, because when I first walked in there, there was this synthesizer, a big Moog 3C sitting in the iso-booth of Studio A. I thought, “Oh, this is great, I’ll get to mess around with this thing.” I spent a lot of time looking at it and it had an ignition switch on it, to turn the power on and off. I thought, “That’s very interesting,” and I made some enquiries and found out it didn’t belong to the studio. It belonged to this guy Bob Margouleff, who apparently only showed occasionally and very late at night. Well, that was my time. I would come in at five and work. I’m working on the console in Studio A one night, about five nights after I started work. This guy walks in with a fur coat on, it’s winter, and he’s got this hair down to his rear end, really long, long hair. Now I had wide hair, he had long hair. He walks in and I realized straight away this must be Bob Margouleff. So I say, “You must be Bob Margouleff.” “Yes, that’s right, and you must be the new maintenance engineer.” We had heard about each other. He says, “Tell me, do you know how to run this?” – and he points to the board, which I’ve got half open. I say, “Well, I’d better. I have to fix it.” He says, “Nobody ‘round here will show me how to run this thing. Will you show me how to run it?” I looked at him and I said, “Do you know how to run that thing?” - and I pointed to the Moog. He says, “I’d better. I own it.” I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll show you how to run this and you show me how to run that.” He sticks his hand out and he says, “Deal,” and we shook on it and that’s how we started in partnership. We started that night and started trying to record things and it was all experimental. It wasn’t until six months that later that Herbie Mann, who I’d played with at Ronnie Scott’s, walked in the door and saw me standing there. “Oh, what are you doing here? Malcolm from Ronnie Scott’s, right?” “Yeah, I’m here now.” “What are you doing?” “I’m a maintenance engineer at the studio.” “Really, I didn’t know you did that. Are you doing any music?” “I’m playing a little bit with Jim Hall.” I was playing at the Guitar Club with Jim Hall doing subs for Ron Carter, because there was this black-white thing going on in jazz at the time and Ron Carter was getting a hard time because Jim Hall was white and Ron Carter wasn’t, so there was problems going on. So Ron wouldn’t show very often at the Guitar Club, which was like four, five nights a week that Jim Hall was down there. The Guitar Club was a block and a half from Mediasound so Jim Hall would call me up because I was playing on Sunday afternoons with the New York Jazz Band, with Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Bill Berry, Billy Watrous and Jim Hall was on guitar and we had really top line players, it was a great band, and about 50 people in the audience max. So he would call me up and say, “Ron didn’t show again tonight” - he’d already done the first set - “You want to come down and play the last couple of sets with me?” So I just grabbed my bass and ran down. My time was my own, I would go back and work until four, five in the morning, as long as I got my work done nobody cared. That was pretty well what I was doing at the time. I said to him I’m doing a little bit of that, talking now to Herbie Mann. I said, “What are you doing here?” He said, “I’ve come to check on my group that’s recording downstairs in Studio B.” I said, “Oh, that’s the 16-track studio I just installed.” That was the first 16-track studio in New York. He said Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegün had advised him not to take out this huge amount of money he’d made from an album called Push Push that had made a huge hit in Japan. They said, “No, leave the money in and start a record label and then if any of the albums take off, you’re in really good shape, but if they don’t the money just gets written off. Otherwise you’re just going to pay it in taxes.”

Torsten Schmidt

There was a different tax scheme at the time, right?

Malcolm Cecil

Yes, this was when it was very common for rich people to invest in records. That’s how Unity Records was, Unity Records that put out my Radiance album. It was like a tax thing. Peter Georgi would go and speak to very rich people who needed to write off $10,000 or $10,000,000 in some cases - I don’t think he ever got that high, but $10,000 he would get. He’d get artists like myself and fund us and that was how record labels worked. The idea was if you invested, it came out of what you would have paid in taxes and it was a very good system because it kept the industry going really well. There were a lot of well-funded projects at that time, that was at the height, in the heyday of the industry. So I said to Herbie, “After you’ve finished with your group downstairs, maybe you want to come up and check out this stuff I’m doing on synthesizer.” He goes, “Synthesizer? Synthesizer, you?” Because I was a real purist when he knew me in England. I said, “Look, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve heard it.” He did come up, and I played him the first track, which was a track called “Aurora,” which was the first thing that we had ever tried to put together on synthesizer that first night, Bob and I. I sort of put dim lighting on in the studio and everything and invited him in and sat him down and played him this.

(music: T.O.N.T.O.’s Expanding Head Band – “Aurora”)

Malcolm Cecil

[comments over music] It’s like the birth of the universe. We were trying to write timeless music, music that could have been written at any time in history.

Audience Member

[inaudible] It can even get as in depth as to...

Malcolm Cecil

I hate to break you off here, but do you think you can do five words or less, or preferably one? Anybody? What does a producer do?

Audience Member

Produce.

Malcolm Cecil

Produce, yeah, that’s not the word, that’s cheating. OK, this was taught to me by Clive Davis when I failed to get Stevie Wonder to sign off on “Superstition.” He wrote it for Jeff Beck and we recorded it and spent $40,000 on the recording and getting him over and putting up the band and hotels and studios and you name it. Anyway, $40,000 later we have “Superstition” in the can and I don’t have clearance from Stevie in writing, because it’s hard to get Stevie to sign anything. The only contract I had with Stevie was to stop work, never had a contract of any description with him. So basically, I got hauled over the coals by Clive Davis, who was Jeff Beck’s label at the time. It was Epic records, which was under CBS’s heading at the time, which was before Arista when Clive was still at the top of CBS. He called me at the office and basically said - he asked me that question, “Do you have clearance for ‘Supersition’?” I said, “Well, verbally.” He says, “No, no, not verbally. I want something on a piece of paper.” And I said, “Well, no, I don’t have that.” He said, “You call yourself a producer?” I said, “Well, yes.” He said, “Well, what sort of producer are you?” I said, “I think I’m a very good one.” And I’m sort of trying to draw myself up to full height, sitting there, get the back straight, you know? So he says, “I don’t think you even know what a producer does.” So I said, “Well, yeah,” and I went off into something similar to what we heard from this very nice young lady here. And he did exactly what I did. He went, “Five words or less, preferably one,” and I had the same reaction. He says to me, “A producer gets it done. You want one word? Delivery!” That’s your job as a producer, is to deliver. He says, “You didn’t deliver, I’m not paying these bills.” Expensive lesson, but that’s what a producer does. So there you go, you got it for free, but that’s because you’re bright. I wasn’t so bright. [laughs]

Torsten Schmidt

There’s a nice little video that we could probably use for - because I feel like there might be one or two more stories we would like to hear, despite time constraints, so if we use this little video for an emergency bathroom break, it runs for about four minutes. So do you want to see this?

(video: excerpt of TONTO & Stevie Wonder documentary / applause)

Torsten Schmidt

There’s a million and one questions from that bit alone, and we also hear there’s this thing called the Internet where there’s a longer version of a similar documentary around as well, so you might know people in this building who will be able to pass some of that on, maybe. I don’t really know where to start to be honest. The one thing is, obviously, when you now go to the Motown museum and they tell you how Berry Gordy in his wisdom has detected that artists needed to go a different way and needed to take creative control and so on. Somehow, that’s one side of the story, right?

Malcolm Cecil

Yeah, that makes sense from Berry. From his point of view he would, I’m quite sure, say something like that. The reality is that Stevie became 21 and in Illinois, which is where he lived, in Detroit, that’s where Motown was started – when he turned 21, you come into your majority, which means that any contracts that you had signed when you were under 21 were now null and void. Well, Stevie had discovered when he was 17 that he didn’t own his publishing. Now, for those of you who don’t understand how big that is, let me point out to you that for an artist or for a composer, publishing is where the money is. You don’t make money on your records or on your live performances usually. Big money is in publishing. So when Stevie realized that he didn’t own any of his publishing, not any - Jobete, the publishing arm of Motown owned it - he clammed up. Because, what he used to do was, he would compose a song and then his musical director, Gene Keys, very nice guy, very beautiful man, very knowledgable, very musical, he would sit down with Stevie. Stevie would play the tune, Gene would write it out, and then Gene would take it away, arrange it for orchestra, go into the studio, record with the musicians that Motown provided him with, all without Stevie. Then Stevie would be called in and a Motown staff producer would tell him where to sing, how to sing, what to sing and just generally produce him in the Motown manner, and then send him away while they went back and did the mix. And Stevie basically hated this because it never came out as he said. This is how we got Music Of My Mind, he said, “It never comes out like the music in my mind. The music never comes out like it is in my mind.” And he wanted to go with the synthesizer for that reason.

So the reality is that Stevie became 21 and no longer was bound by those contracts. So he went to Motown and said, “OK, I’m not signing with you again, I’m not going to re-sign.” Berry Gordy hit the roof and Stevie told him, “I want you to pay me what you owe me.” His lawyer Charles King had figured out that they were owed $3.1 million. The most that Charles King could get out of Motown at that time was the point-one. Stevie got $100,000 put into his trust-fund account, as he called it, and that was what we used to make Music of My Mind and Talking Book, because he was not under contract to Motown at all during the making of Music of My Mind. And that’s one of the reasons I never had a contract with Stevie, because he didn’t have a contract with a record company, so there was nobody [to send a letter of direction]. As you may know – if you don’t know you should know and I will tell you now – if you have an artist who’s got a label deal already and you’re producing him, you have to a get a letter of direction from the artist to the record company to get paid, because they’re going to pay you out of his money, they don’t pay you separately. Now, that’s the way it was back then. Obviously, things change but that is the basic rule, is that the record company they pay the artist and now if the artist goes and gets his own producer, he has to pay him and he has to make arrangements. So, there being no contract with Motown, or with anybody else for that matter, there was nobody to send a letter of direction to anyway. Plus you have to remember, I personally had been told I only had three years to live, so what was the point in raising a huge hullaballoo about futures that I will probably not even live to see? At least that’s the way I saw it at the time. It was not on my front burner, shall we say. [laughs] More important to me was making the music, learning to use the synthesizer and answering all the unanswered questions, musical questions, in my head about things, like how many intervals are there in an octave and so on. I’ve got a whole proof about how you can make cycles, resolving cycles, of many numbers of different notes. Twelve is just one, the cycle of fifths is just one. You can use 17 tones, you can use 19, 22, 24, there are a number of different numbers that will actually come out and give you a resolving cycle of fifths. As I say, I’ve got all the mathematical proof of all this, plus, it all bears out in reality. One of the songs on the Tonto album, “Riversong,” the lead line sounds very Middle Eastern. It’s in 17-tone scale. Now, how did I get a 17-tone scale on a synthesizer, you ask? You may well ask. Well, I will tell you whether you ask or not.

Normally, you tune a synthesizer so it goes C to C as an octave. But what if you were to tune C to F as the octave? That would give you 17 tones. If you want to do 19 tones, you tune C to G as an octave. You can do it on the one upstairs. It sounds very strange but when you actually start to play it, you will find with a 17-tone there is a diatonic and two pentatonic scales you can play and with 19-tone there are two diatonic and one pentatonic scale. And, of course, both of them have a chromatic scale. So there are more than 12 tones that can be experimented with. This is something that I was struggling with, these whole concepts and this was what I was trying to figure out and trying to prove in my own way, being partially scientific, partly musical and a lot feeling and spiritual because the importance of music isn’t the technicality of it, it’s the emotion of it, it’s the message it carries. It’s, what does it do to you? How does it make you feel? It’s all about feeling, and if the music has no feeling, then it doesn’t matter how many tone scales it’s written in, it doesn’t matter how complicated it is, it’s meaningless. It has to have some sort of feeling. So, all these theoretical ideas I had were really starting points to get me to a new place - or as Berry Gordy would say, open up my head, to some extent. After playing jazz with some of the greatest jazz musicians in the world and then playing classical and what we could call ‘straight’ music, classical was only a 50-year period. Everybody thinks, classical music, “Oh yeah, that’s that long- hair stuff.” There’s only a 50-year period really that was classical. Before that was Baroque and after it came Romantic music, it’s not all one thing. The approach really is that it has to convey something. Music is about emotion and a lot of music is verbal. However, that does strike a problem sometimes because it requires, whoever is listening to it, to understand the language, and if you happen to not be of the native tongue that the song is written in, then it might as well not have any words.

And as far as music being a universal language is concerned, I’ve got big issues with that. It’s not a universal language, OK, clearly not. A universal language means everybody will understand the same meaning. OK, what does this mean? [sings/scats: Julius Fučík - “Entry of The Gladiators”] Clowns, circus, right? But who knows the title of that piece? What did the composer intend? It’s called “The Entry of The Gladiators” - people going to their death! Now, I don’t know what that’s got to do with clowns. It’s usage, it’s the fact that it’s always been associated and used as clown music in circuses, so that’s the association. If you go on the net and you look up Javanese or Balinese gamelan, there’s some really good stuff on there. There’s some rubbish on there too, but there’s some really good stuff, a real Javanese gamelan. They obviously know what they’re doing, there’s like 30 of them and they’re working in groups and they’re all going... [sings several extremely fast rhythms] And they all know what they’re doing, clearly they’re all doing it together. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know whether it’s a dance of war, I don’t know whether it’s a marriage, I don’t know whether it’s celebrating the season, I don’t know what the music is about. I have no idea, but clearly they do. The thing about music that’s universal is music itself. Every culture has music, there isn’t a culture on earth that does not have music. I teach music up at Columbia Green community college, and I always start off – I teach music appreciation and jazz history and history of rock & roll roll, but the jazz history people, the rock & roll history people, just the history of music, period - they’re not all musicians, and they’re not getting qualifications in the arts, they’re not in there to get a fine arts degree. They’re in there to get three hours of credit in the humanities for their GDE. That’s what they’re there for and guess what we do? I get a deal with them on the first day, I tell them just what I told you, music, basically it’s a completely universal thing that every culture has. The class is a little tribe, we’re a little group of people - there’s some music in here, we have our own music. We don’t know it yet, but there’s music in this room. Well, this room obviously, but I’m talking about my community college class. Every semester we put on a concert with these kids. Many of them never, ever played or been on stage - and some of them for good reason. But the bottom line is, they get an opportunity to stand up and do that and those of them who can’t or are too embarrassed to do it, just can’t get over it, they’ve got to do something to contribute towards the event. One lady usually cooks food for everybody between the rehearsal and the performance and for the outside people. Somebody does the posters, somebody else does the invitations to the bigwigs. We spread it around and they do it, I don’t do it. I make them do it, because this is the music of that little tribe, and it’s really to make this point that there is music everywhere. Music itself is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere on this earth and in my opinion it’s the underpinning of the entire human race. It’s the one thing that distinguishes us as a race from the animals. Now, I can’t say that with true definition because I don’t speak bird, I don’t speak whale, I don’t speak dog. I speak a little cat, that’s because I live with three of them, it rubs off after a time. You get “me-out” means open the door, “me-in” means open the door the other way.

[laughter]

But in general, music, I believe, is what distinguishes us. When Bob and I first started putting this T.O.N.T.O.’s Expanding Head Band stuff together, particularly “Jetsex,” which doesn’t have any pitched sounds until the very end, it’s only got like three notes in the whole piece - and we asked the question, “Is this music?” I went to the dictionary of music, the Penguin Library Dictionary of Music, it’s a typical British thing, this paperback I had. I looked up “definition of music”: “Sounds that are grouped together by people for other people to hear,” or words to that effect. In other words, music is sounds that are intended to be played or put together for other people to hear. They’re not just put together in a vacuum. So, that’s music. As soon as I saw that definition I turned around to Bob and said, “Yep, it’s music. We put this together for other people to hear, it’s music.” It doesn’t have to have any other attribute, and then it all becomes a matter of taste.

There are four points of view when you’re making a record or when you’re producing any piece of music that’s going to go out there, that is seriously intended to be distributed. The four points of view are really like geometrical points, you can draw them - the parallel between geometry. The four points of view are, first of all, the artistic point of view, which is the creator, whoever created it. Without the creator, there’s nothing. I’m not talking about the creator, I’m talking about the piece of music. Without somebody composing or writing the piece of music there’s nothing for any of the other people to do. So that’s the primary thing, is the writing. The second function is the producer. The producer gets it done, the producer gets the artist’s idea from an idea in the artist’s head, to something tangible that other people can actually hear. That’s the producer’s job and it’s a little different a point of view to the artist. The artist is trying to get his or her vision out, whereas the producer is trying to extract that vision and perfect it and improve upon it and clarify it. The third person or the third point of view that is absolutely necessary in the creation process, where you’re actually creating this product, is of course the technical person, the engineer. They come from a very different point of view. Their job is to make sure that there’s no technical imperfections, that there’s no things that are going to come up and bite you later and give you big problems down the line. Their job is to make sure that every nuance possible is picked up and there’s absolutely no point in having somebody do the most beautiful, beautiful, delicate passage if the mic is three feet away and you can’t hear what he’s doing. If you’ve got to crank it up and all you hear is like ‘sss’ through the whole thing, that’s not going to work. So engineering has to also come from a musical point of view. But those are the only three points of view necessary to create the product itself, the actual sounds. OK? And the points have to have lines connecting them, just like in a geometrical figure, and the lines are lines of communication and they have to be two-way to be strong. In other words, the engineer has to have a strong line of communication with the producer and the artist, because when the producer says, “I want you to go back to the bridge,” the engineer has to be able to interpret it, so that’s 1 minute 22, and knows where to take the machine - whether it be tape or solid state - back to the point that you want to go in. He has to be able to translate musical and technical terms backwards and forwards, talk to the artist in artistic terms not technical terms. He doesn’t want to say, “Oh, when you sing that 320 frequency it really bothers the equipment.” He’s not going to talk to him like that. He’s just going to say, “Hey man, you know when you get up to the second in your middle register, the upper part there, can you back off the mic a bit?” That’s artist speak rather than tech-speak, but he may turn round to the producer and say, “Look, shall I put him on track 22 or track 24, which one are we going over?” That’s different speak, it’s a different line of communication.These lines of communication have to be two- way. The producer has to talk to the artist, “Hey man, you know when you get to that line, give me a little more oomph there, it’s the key, that’s the hook, we need the oomph in there, give me some oomph.” Or, “Give me a little more green on the snare drum, guy. That snare drum’s not sounding green enough.” Whatever is necessary to communicate, whatever language you use. So you have these three points of view and you have therefore six lines of communication - three two-way lines - which forms a very strong triangle and that triangle creates an area. That area is the area of operation in the studio, that’s the area that you work in. But that’s only three parts of the story.

How many records have ended up not going anywhere? How many people in this room have worked on a record that didn’t go anywhere? Yeah, well, it’ll be all the hands when you’re another ten years older, because it happens. The bottom line here is that the fourth point of view that’s needed cannot be in the same area, it has to be outside that area. So, if you have the area of operations, say, on the floor here, you have to have another point of view up here that is responsible for distributing and marketing and putting that thing out. That is your record company, that is your sales arm if you wish. That’s another point of view, and if that is going to be strong, that will create now a figure which has a volume, it’s a tetrahedron. Obviously, the bigger the volume, that’s the volume of business, that’s how many records you sell. So the further away from the area of operation you can keep Mr. Moneybags, the bigger hit you’re liable to have. And the more you can keep him at the tip of a point, the more penetration you’re going to have, because that’s the whole idea. So if you follow that model in your head, you’ll have a model of how the product works. That’s the model I’ve always used and it’s worked for me. Now, they can be the same person. You can be the producer, you can be the engineer, you can be the artist, but to be all three at once - not possible because they’re different points of view. So when you’re an artist, focus on creating. When you’re in front of that microphone, forget about the tape machine, forget about the technical things, forget about telling the engineer what frequency to turn up. Let him do his job, just focus on getting your job done, get that emotion out there. If you are the producer, focus on getting it done, focus on delivery, your job is to deliver a product that is salable. That’s what your job is. And if you are the engineer, focus on getting everything to perfection that you can, do your job as best you can. Whoever you are, set up lines of communication with the other people. If you’re functioning in two functions, you can’t do it at the same point in time. If you’re in the studio and you’re singing and now there isn’t a producer, it’s just somebody on the other side pressing buttons for you - maybe your old lady, your old man, whatever. There’s no production happening there, so you’ve got to go through the door to the other side of the glass, whether it be real or figurative. As you go through the door take your real or figurative hat - take off your artist hat, put on your producer’s hat. Now you walk in, now listen to it like it’s somebody else singing or somebody else performing and say, “What would I tell that person, how would I improve that, how would I produce that?” Same thing is true if you are the engineer. Your job is to absolutely make sure that there are no technical problems, no technical hitches, and that you do not destroy a work of artistic brilliance because of a technical flaw - very common mistake. “Oh, we got to do that again.” Why? “Oh, there was a pop.” Well, deal with it. Deal with it. The rest of the tape was like, huh? We’re not going to get that again. I know that down here. Listen with your soul, listen with your heart, don’t listen just with your ears and don’t let everything come from cerebral land either. It’s got to move you. If it doesn’t make the hackles on the back of your neck stand up, if it doesn’t make the hairs on your back stand up, it ain’t a hit. When you hear a hit you’ll know it because the hairs on the back of your back [will stand up]. That’s what happens to me. This is a hit – it ain’t a hit yet but this is going to be a smash. That’s probably, out of the last five ten minutes of what I’ve told you, is probably more useful than anything else I’ve told you today. How are we doing?

Torsten Schmidt

Well, we could go on for a minute. Speaking of hands-on things, the one thing that strikes one, once they see pictures of the TONTO – [shows images on screen] and that’s one example of it, or let me pull up another one - its ergonomics and you saw it a little bit when we saw Stevie perform earlier, and the mic positioning as well. You seem to care a great deal about the ergonomics of what people are doing there. Can you explain that a little bit using this as an example here?

Malcolm Cecil

Yeah, the way TONTO got to be the shape it is - that’s not a fisheye lensm photograph, that’s exactly how TONTO is. It actually curves around, those cabinets appear to be curved. They’re in fact 17” racks, that’s 19” rack equipment with the ears taken off, makes it 17” wide to keep it a bit more elegant. TONTO originally came in cases much like the Moog 2C that’s upstairs, that you’ve I’m sure seen in what is it, studio 1 upstairs? Wulf’s new acquisition. I was just trying to think about the best way to put this. The time when we first got TONTO it was in a cabinet much like that one. And then as time went by we acquired a second Moog 3C, which came out of a place called Electric Circus, which was a nightclub that had a fire and the cases had been somewhat scorched on the outside. The modules were fine, everything worked, but the cases had been singed so we picked it up for real cheap.

Torsten Schmidt

Real cheap at the time is what exactly?

Malcolm Cecil

Real cheap at the time was about four, five thousand.

Torsten Schmidt

That was real, real cheap then.

Malcolm Cecil

Yes, they were about $15,000 new.

Torsten Schmidt

So it still was the price of a car.

Malcolm Cecil

Oh yeah, but cheap for what it was. What we did was, we put the two side by side and in order to try and play it we had the keyboard on a tea trolley, on wheels. We would pull the keyboard from one end of the instrument to the other and we got to be very tired very quickly. This was not the way to work. So we got together with John Storyk when we went to Electric Ladyland. He was the architect who designed Electric Lady studios. When we got together with John, he was a Buckminster Fuller student. Now, I’ve never studied with Buckminster Fuller, but I’m very into geodesic domes and triangulation and his whole philosophy and so when I found that John Storyk had actually studied with the man I was like -[ makes a grabbing gesture] - sort of glommed right onto him. Basically, we discussed how we could rehouse the TONTO modules into a case that was more suitable and more playable, more ergonomic. We wanted it playable from the front, serviceable from the rear. Now, if you go upstairs and you look at that Moog 3C - I haven’t looked behind it but I know what’s there. Unless it’s a very new model, after TONTO, they did not have, what we call service loops, on the back of the modules and some of the modules, the oscillators particularly the oscillator controllers, have to be adjusted by pulling out the module and adjusting actual trimmers on the board. You have to pull it out, it’s still connected. In the original case you can’t do that because there isn’t a service loop. The wire’s immediately attached with a tie wrap to the whole loom of the other wires so you have to put in an extender card.

Now, here comes a little bit of technical. One volt per octave is the standard for voltage controlled musical instruments. That means 1/12 of a volt is a semitone. A 1/12 of a volt, if you divide into 1000 millivolts, turns out to be 83.333 recurring millivolts per semitone. Why is this relevant? Well, that means that if you’re going to tune to the nearest cent, you’re going to be down to millivolts - one or two millivolts is enough to put you out of tune by one or two cents. Now, electronic resistance being such as it is, you plug the card in, you plug the extension card in, now you’ve got a different resistance path going directly into the oscillator you’re trying to calibrate. You tune it all up, you take the extender card out, you plug it in. It’s out of tune again. Why? Because that card introduced a change. Even though it’s a few milliohms, it put a small difference in there and people like Stevie can hear that, which brings me to this. [holds up box] This is the little magic box that I used to make sure that our synthesizer was always in tune. This is a joystick controller that I built myself from a remote control for a model aircraft. You could probably control a drone from it these days but what it is, is it’s a joystick. Now, it’s not the first time that a joystick has been used for a synthesizer. Putney used a joystick on theirs, but their joystick was very hokey and didn’t have any springing on it, you couldn’t do anything calibrated on it. So what I did was I got this model aircraft controller and I set it up with my brilliant technical ability - if you look in there you’ll see I’m joking. It’s a very simple circuit, which simply provides voltages, two separate voltages out. The horizontal one I use to control pitch and notice that it springs to the center. [demonstrates] And the vertical one I use to control the filter. Now, the two things wrong with the Moog 3 and the Moog 2C upstairs - well, three things. One, it’s monophonic. Two, it is not touch sensitive. There is no way to get any dynamics out of that. That’s why Walter Carlos had such a huge success with Switched-On Bach and not so much with Clockwork Orange, because Bach was written for instruments that were not touch sensitive, it was written for the harpsichord and the organ, so Baroque music sounds great on a synthesizer. But you try to play Beethoven, which is from the Romantic period, it came a little later, you try to play that type of music, now you’ve got to have dynamics. The synthesizer, the Moog doesn’t do that readily. So how did I get around that? Also, the fact that it only plays one note and not a chord is only half the story with the keyboard. The other half of the story is it’s only in tune over two octaves. You try getting that full keyboard upstairs into tune, all the way up, and then you try changing the range, it’s difficult. Tricky, tricky, tricky, you’re constantly adjusting. So I came up with this simple solution and the advantage of this is that there are two little white things at the side here, which you can see. If you look at the back here, you’ll see what they actually do is they change the physical positions of the pots that this is controlling. Therefore they’re like sort of zeroes, they’re alignment things to align the centre. This is, when you’re flying a model you want to get it so that it’s flying straight - you adjust these little things. Well, the horizontal I used for pitch and the vertical I used on the filter. Because if you shut the filter down on an analogue synthesizer, it will mute the sound. It will take the high frequencies out and it’ll make the sound more muted, which is sort of touch control, it’s sort of sensitivity and it certainly substitutes well for it. So between correcting the pitch with my little finger, which as a bass player I’m very used to doing, between doing that and changing the filtration with this little knob, the vertical - and now notice the vertical stays where it is. Once I get a filter sound that I like or that I want to keep, I can just leave it there. I can also do pitch bends and these knobs here set the distance of the pitch bends and the amount of up and down that the filter gets, so there’s three little knobs on there. Very, very simple and the switches change the polarity so it goes up or down. Very simple but this is what enabled me to keep TONTO in tune, even if someone else was playing the keyboard. I’d be playing this little guy. I could sit with it on my lap, I could sit there at the console with it and still control it and keep Stevie in tune. I’m a musician first and foremost. This is all about music and the idea was to help and aid Stevie in getting - or whoever was playing if it wasn’t me - in getting the sound. So I would work with them. I’m used to working with a piano player, a saxophone player, I’m used to playing jazz where I’ll turn on a dime. They’ll change to a different key, I’m there. They change to a different tempo, I’m there. They change to a different mood, I’m there. I’m used to that, so it’s not a hard deal for me to play this little box. So that’s the secret of how TONTO was probably the only synthesizer in the early ‘70s that seemed to be in tune.

Torsten Schmidt

We’re not only talking about something that’s 40 years ago, I mean, now when we’re thinking about welcoming the Moog upstairs to the family we talked to the kind person who fixes stuff for a certain German band that’s been pretty popular with electronics in the ‘70s, and...

Malcolm Cecil

Well, that’d be Kraftwerk, wouldn’t it?

Torsten Schmidt

...and he is like, “Oh, it sounds beautiful but it’s nearly impossible to tune, so really think hard about it, whether you want that or whether you can live with that.” You start to wonder, especially at that time, how the industry as such did not really exist at the time. As an illustration, this is the total sales - this is not thousands or millions or whatever - that’s the total sales of Moog units sold in the years between 1967 and 71 per quarter [shows graph on the screen]. So that’s in quarter one four units sold, that’s not exactly much. So we’re talking about a really small number of people that are actually working in this environment. Now, here you are talking about the different hats that you’re wearing, tinkering with your own piece of technology, and at the same time you’ve got all the Buchla’s, Moog’s, Dave Smith’s and so on, the Oberheim’s and stuff. How did they react to you, because there’s not only Moog stuff in the TONTO, there’s all different kinds of things that talk to each other?

Malcolm Cecil

I tried to talk to the manufacturers in the early days. Bob Moog used to come down, sit cross-legged on the floor. When I was trying to do the 17-tone thing, he had a unit that would plug into the back of the keyboard, you’ll see there’s two big, blue ribbon connectors on the back there. I think they’re two 30-pin connectors each or bigger. They are supposed to go to a box that he designed where you can make your own tuning and we were going to buy this box so he brought it down to demonstrate it. Well, he came down three or four times, sat there cross-legged on the floor, soldering irons, resistors, this whole thing. I’m standing there trying to do what I can to help and it’s not happening. It never did, we never did get that thing working. That’s why I ended up tuning the thing from C to F to get my 17 tones, I just couldn’t get it the other way. The problem with the Moog and the Arp, for example – the next thing to come to our attention was the Arp – well, they both use, as does Oberheim, one volt per octave for the pitch. But there’s another thing you need on an analogue synthesizer, which is called the trigger, or in some parlances, gate – they don’t mean the same thing, Arp made the distinction. A trigger is a single pulse that goes up, comes back down. A gate is where it turns on and stays on until you lift the key, that’s the difference between a trigger and a gate. Arp noticed that difference. That’s the other peculiar thing with the Moog keyboard, if you press down on a key and now if you don’t release that key and press another key, it will only play one of the two notes, and the note that it plays is usually the highest of the two. So it depends, he changed the circuitry. On some of them it’s the lowest, but it only plays one of the two notes. It selects the higher or the lower note. Furthermore with the Moog, in order to get the envelope generator to work - now the envelope, as its name implies, is the package in which the sound is delivered. In other words, it’s the on/off pattern. The envelope is the attack, the initial decay, the sustain and the final decay or release, that’s the standard four-parameter envelope. Inside that we turn a voltage controlled amplifier, it’s like a fader, you turn it up, down, it’s like an automatic fader and that controls the gain of the output of the instrument.

With synthesis, there’s three stages. The first stage is you take a rich waveform, that means you take a waveform that’s got a lot of harmonics in it, the more oscillators the better. One of the secrets of the bass sound on TONTO is minimum three oscillators. Minimum. Sometimes there were as many as 12, depending on what we were doing. They’re not all tuned to the same note and there’s also other tricks that we used to get what we call a rich waveform. You need lots and lots of harmonics because the only way you’re going to get your sound is by filtering it, which means subtracting - it’s called subtractive synthesis. You take a rich waveform, you filter it and then you pinch it on and off with the voltage controlled amplifier. Now, those three processes - if you go from one note to another, in order to turn the note on you have to have that envelope start, so you have to tell the envelope generator, start now. In addition to the pitch that we send to the oscillator we have to send a trigger or a gate, some signal, through to the envelope generator to say, turn on the VCA now. The envelope generator, you set the parameters on it and it goes up and repeats those parameters on a VCA. If you change the note after you have started your envelope generator – the envelope’s started, it’s going along and now you change the note. If you change the note without lifting on a Moog, what happens is you don’t get the envelope restarting again. The note just changes, so it can go... [sings a tune legato] You keep on playing and eventually it gets down to the decay and you’ve got nothing. Whereas if you play individual notes - if your gate’s continuous, you’re not going to get it retriggered. But if you lift the note, then you push down again it’ll start again. So now you go... [sings the same tune with shorter articulation] ...as distinct from... [sings] ...either retriggering or not. That is the big the difference in the way you play it. So there’s a new thing when you’re playing a synthesizer keyboard, a Moog keyboard. Not only is it one note, not only is it not touch sensitive, not only is it out of tune for more than two octaves, but in addition to that, if you don’t play it right it won’t sound right. It’ll sound awful because you’ve got to know when to lift and when not to lift, when you want to retrigger and when you don’t, so you’ve got to think a whole different way about it. So Arp decided they were going to come out with a better idea, which is that every time a new note was struck, even if the gate didn’t start, a trigger would go and retrigger the envelope generator. So they had a different type of envelope generator. The only difference was now it required +10V, whereas in order to trigger a Moog it required ground, zero volts. Moog’s trigger when you put ground on them. Very dangerous, because if you have something plugged into an envelope generator and it accidentally touches ground, it will trigger it and out comes your sound. Certainly very dangerous for live performance, but it wasn’t a good idea so they went to positive triggering. Arp went to +10V and in addition - that was the gate - then they had a trigger for every time you redid it, so you didn’t have to worry about whether or not you were lifting. The only trouble is, it made everything sound samey again, because every note was... [sings a staccato rhythm] ...the same note again, the same envelope. So it was a sort of fix but it wasn’t the perfect fix. But my job now was, how do I get an Arp keyboard to play a Moog module? Or a Moog keyboard to play an Arp module? Well, the voltage thing was not a problem. They were transposable, you could just put the voltage in for the pitch, that worked. But we had to do a lot of things so we finally decided we would settle on a +10V triggering, which was a good thing because when Oberheim came out with the Synthesizer Expander Modules they trigger on +5V. Everybody’s got a different thing, EMS triggers on +5V as well. So you’ve got all these different standards and we had to standardize within TONTO, we had to come up with a standard that would make all the instruments, so they could all play nicely with each other. We’re the only instrument that did that.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you have a estimate on how much cable you used for that?

Malcolm Cecil

That’s a new question. There’s miles of cable in TONTO. The power cable alone is 127 feet long. It’s 10/9, that means it’s ten strands of number nine wire. Number nine wire is pretty fat. It’s not easy to solder. That particular piece of cable is a control cable that was left over from some Apollo mission. I hope it wasn’t 13, but it was from one of those missions. It was 127 feet when we got it and I refused to cut it. What we did was, we put both ends to the same terminal. This may sound like it would short but if you take a red wire, you take it all the way ‘round the instrument, 127 feet, and then join it back to the red terminal, electrically you’ve only got half of the distance because you’ve got two routes for the electricity to get to the source. It reduces the resistance so it’s like using number 18 wire – or not an 18, excuse me, number four-and-a-half wire. It’ll be twice the size of wire, twice the fatness, because we’ve got two routes. In other words, two pieces of parallel wire even though it’s only one wire. How we achieved that, we didn’t want to cut the wire, we just stripped back the insulation, wrapped another piece of 18-gauge wire around it, then took that to each instrument, so there are seven spurs off of that. So it’s a very complex wiring system. Then there’s another 127 feet of control cable. The control cables are 60 internal conductors - there’s 20 grounds, 20 pluses and 20 minuses because it’s all balanced wiring. We have controls, we have audio, we have what we call trunk mounts, which is a way of connecting different parts of the instrument together without having to have a patch cord go from side A to side B, it goes round the wiring into a patchbay. The patchbay on TONTO is horizontal, most patchbays are vertical but TONTO has a horizontal patchbay. So there are a lot of different things about it, but the amount of wire, literally it’s got to be a good few miles of wire in there.

Torsten Schmidt

I’m almost dizzy just listening to the numbers of it. One thing that always struck me as well, as a reference how much did you pay for a car back then?

Malcolm Cecil

I think, wasn’t a Mustang $2400? I think a Mustang was $2400 back in those days.

Torsten Schmidt

At the same time there’s ads when you see Stevie on the Mu-Tron and it’s like, “The same sound just for under $100,000.” That’s like what, 40-something cars? And that’s just one instrument, and at the same time you’re telling us that even Stevie, who was one of the most prolific artists of the time, only had $100,000 in his trust fund. Something doesn’t add up, how did you cope?

Malcolm Cecil

Well, the way we coped was, we didn’t make any money. Everything thing we made - as my good lady will bear me out - everything we made went into the instrument. We lived, breathed and slept TONTO, that was our livelihood. There was a group of us, there was Bob and I, who were the out-front guys. I was the designer really, Bob wasn’t technical. Bob was really good when it came to the business side of things. You need somebody to do that, for sure. And he was very good with sonorities, we used to call it sonorities. That is, hearing tonal qualities and he was very good at getting down into those things and he had infinite patience. That was the other thing, he had infinite patience with me - and my lady will also attest you need it. The whole group of us were supported by a background group of people. Polly, my wife, was the librarian. She kept track of every tape that went in and out, because we were a production company, we weren’t just a synthesizer and engineering firm. We didn’t just do engineering, we booked the musicians, we booked the studios, we dealt with the record companies, we did everything that a producer would do because Stevie couldn’t do it. He was just on his own. Stevie was the artist, we treated him as the artist, let him have total artistic reign. Whatever he wanted he got, whenever he wanted it. As you heard Margouleff say, any time he wanted to work. And because Stevie is unsighted, he’d call up at two in the morning and say, “We’re going in the studio.” OK, we’d be there. Holidays, Christmas, birthdays, it didn’t matter to him, it was Stevie time. We worked like that for like four straight years and in order to do that you have to have a back-up team. Stevie didn’t have one, so we were his back-up team. Polly did all the library work. We had Dennis Palattia who was the fellow who did all the office work, he was the one who took the work orders. What am I talking about? I’ve got some work orders here. [pulls out work order] Here’s an example of a work order, attached to it is another work order from the studio.

Torsten Schmidt

So this just happens to be Minnie Riperton.

Malcolm Cecil

This starts up here. The session would be booked, Dennis would fill in this top corner here. This part here was all to do with special requirements. Then we turn to here when we go to the studio: the time we started, time we finished, what we did. All the things that we could possibly do were laid out at the top there. And the time it started, time it finished, W4s where the tape was, titles of the tunes. And we had two other forms, one was the equivalent of what you would call a track sheet, and the other one was the equivalent of what you would call a legend on a tape. We had all of that information all coordinated, and everything was done with numbered tapes so nobody knew what was on the tapes except us, that was our security system. We could have tapes lying around and people would have to play them to find out what they were. And that was a pretty good security system. And we also kept lots of useless tapes around with the good ones, all part of the security system. We very paranoid in those days. Anyway, when that finished Dennis would go in and turn it back this way and start putting the prices down and there were prices for us and also charges for the studio and any other musicians costs. We did all the musicians contracts, we did everything, we did the production, period. We had a whole production company.

There were two other people involved. One of them was Uly, Ulysses Grant, Ulysses S Grant - the whole number - and no, he wasn’t the famous general but he was very important. He was my technician, my wiring technician. I would draw up diagrams and he would build them and he was a very, very good guy and worked for us for a long time and the last person – well, actually there were two more. There was Charles, who was a carpenter who did all the woodwork that we needed. That was after the main cases were built, they were built by a guy called Harry Sanger in New York. He built all the cases for IBM prototypes back in the day and he built the original cases. And then there was Jan. Jan was - we’re an equal opportunity employer so she was a lady solderer. She did all the solder work on all those huge cables, every solder joint on those cables was done by her, and she worked for three years on the instrument. That was all she did, was solder cables from morning ‘til night.

Torsten Schmidt

I’m a little bit in between two minds here because just looking at the discography as such, there’s people on there like the Isley Brothers, Van Dyke Parks, Joan Baez, Minnie Riperton, as we just saw. The TONTO albums as such, which are a topic of delight amongst collectors and synthesizer aficionados. Also, a lot of the Stevie stuff, obviously, we could talk about for days and some of that is pretty well documented. What we don’t get to hear too much about is your work with another gentleman. Let’s play a bit of music to give you a bit of a breather for a second, and how about this one?

(music: Gil Scott-Heron – “The Bottle”)

Malcolm Cecil

This was a big hit of Gil’s. Gil and I met under very interesting circumstances. I had a studio in Santa Monica that I had moved TONTO into after the break-up with Bob and Stevie Wonder. I moved out of the studio we had in Point Dume in Malibu, where we recorded with Stevie, Weather Report, Billy Preston, lots of people, and I moved into a shopfront in Santa Monica, a 1000 square foot shopfront, and turned it into a recording studio. I eventually took the shop next door and that was 2000 square feet, which wasn’t really enough but we managed. One day I was there, the front door of the shop was open. We didn’t have any air- conditioning so we had the door open, it was a hot day. This very tall, black gentleman poked his head into the studio. “Oh, it’s a recording studio here.” I said, “Yes, it is.” “Can I come in and have a look?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” He says, “I live just round the corner. I didn’t know there was a recording studio here.” I said, “We’ve just moved here.” He says, “It looks great, you’ve got this big synthesizer.” It turned out the name of the man was Tom Wilson, not the Tom Wilson from the Beach Boys, the Tom Wilson who was the CBS producer who produced Bob Dylan. He was a very interesting, very intellectual guy and he says, “I have this musical called Gondwana that I need to record and it’s a spec project, but I can cut you in...” To cut a long story short, I went for it and we started to cut these tunes. He turned ‘round me to after we’d done 40 songs and he said, “You know what? I need to bring you some paying work in here. I’ve got an album coming up for Arista Records.” Clive Davis had just started up Arista. What happened was, Clive Davis had got caught - or at least the whole company, CBS, got caught - have you heard about the coke-ola scam, you know about that, the coke-ola scandal? What was happening was that CBS were putting little packages of coke into the records they were sending to DJs, to get them to play the records. It’s true, it all came out and Clive Davis stepped up to the plate and said, “I’m guilty, it’s my fault, I’ll take the responsibility, I’ll take the blame.” For doing that he got fired from CBS, but they gave him $20 million to start Arista. So what can I tell you? Money talks, nobody walks. Anyway, he decided - he being, of course, Clive Davis - that he needed a black act on the label and so he signed Gil Scott-Heron. Who would he get to produce but his old producer who had produced Dylan very successfully for CBS for him – Tom Wilson.

So Tom brought Gil in to do the session and came in on the first day and was sitting down there. Tom had a very interesting style of production, very interesting. He would sit there, put his feet up on the console, open up the Financial Times and that was it, that was all you’d see. The first day we’re recording, we start recording this thing called “Hello Sunday, Hello Road” and it gets to about take five. I think it’s a pretty good one so I turn around to Tom and said, “What do you think, Tom?” “I’ll let you know if there’s anything wrong.” That was his style of production, let everybody do it. His idea was, nothing makes the farm grow like the eye of the farmer. You just have to be in the room, you don’t have to do anything. If everything is going well, leave it alone, let it happen. So, that was how I met Gil but the story didn’t quite finish there. Halfway through the album, one day Dion, my assistant - our habit was, we would do a song. As soon as we got a take and everything was fine, Tom would leave the studio and say, “OK, do a mix and send it around to me. Do a rough and send it around to me.” So Dion would go ‘round with a cassette with the rough mix on it, to Tom’s house which was a block and a half away. Well, this particular morning Tom didn’t show, very unusual. Tom was always there first. So we go through and we get halfway through the session and still no Tom. Both, Gil and I are getting a little uneasy. So I say to Dion, “Run round to Tom’s house, make sure everything’s alright, make sure he’s OK.” So Dion goes ‘round. Dion came to me because he walked in when I was building the studio and I was building the ceiling, which was a gullwing ceiling, and I needed somebody to hold up the thing while I fixed it. Dion is like 6’4”, very long limbs, and he just happened to walk in the door. He was this Dutch guy, I don’t know where he came from. He just walked in the door and I turned around and said, “Excuse me, could you just hold this.” That’s how he started and he never left, he became my assistant, very nice guy. So he went around and the reason I told you that is because he goes to the room and gets no reply, so being tall he climbs up. Tom’s apartment was like, there was a basement and then his apartment up a few steps, but you had to be fairly tall to look through the window. He climbs up onto the railing and looks through the window, sees Tom lying on the floor. So he comes backs to the studio, tells us, so Gil and I go around. Gil is about the same size as Dion, 6’10” sort of, in that region, Gil was a basketball player. Between the two of them they managed to get into the window. I think Gil hoisted Dion up and Dion climbed in. We got in and we got Tom to the hospital. It turned out that he had had a heart problem and he had to go in and have an operation. So, the whole album came to a grinding halt at that point. Tom got out of hospital a couple of months later, we went back to work. Three weeks later, same thing happens only this time with not such a good result. This time, unfortunately, Tom was dead, his aorta had burst and that was it. Here we are with a half-finished album and Gil turns to me and says, “Hey man, will you help me produce and finish this album?” So I said, “Of course,” and that’s how I came to produce Gil.

We stayed together, we did, I think, 15 albums together and we were together for about 22 years. We went through all sorts of changes. We did the Stevie Wonder Hotter Than July tour, 1980. Gil was booked on that because Bob Marley couldn’t make it. Bob Marley was supposed to open for Stevie and he couldn’t make it, so Gil got called to do the opening, but it was supposed to be only for the first few shows until Bob Marley was better. He never did get better and we ended up doing the whole tour. On the first night when we were in Austin, Texas, we went up into Stevie’s dressing room and Gil and Stevie and myself and a couple of others - the producer of the show and so on - were talking about how we were going to do the last number, what we were going to do. Gil came up with this idea, he said, “Do you know what? It’s going to be Martin Luther King’s birthday, we should do ‘Happy Birthday To You’.” Stevie had already written “Happy Birthday” for Martin Luther King. And he said, “You know what? We should exhort everybody to write to their congressman and see if we can’t get Martin Luther King Day accepted as a national holiday. That would be something really worthwhile.” Stevie cottoned on to this idea right away, “Yeah man, yeah, let’s do that.” So that became what we were going to do at the end of the show. That was the song that Gil got called back up to work with Stevie at the end of the performance every show. Gil would get up there and he would exhort everybody to go write their congressman to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday. That continued, we ended up doing the whole 1980 tour, which did take most of 1980. It wasn’t continuous, but it was like fits and starts – six weeks here, four weeks there, different areas of the country. We would fly there and then go by coach, then get back on the plane and fly back from whence we came. It was a very powerful experience for everybody because Gil then went on to organize, with Stevie, all of the black artists, musicans and entertainers. It started with the Motown team through Stevie and Gil and we ended up getting all sorts of people involved, and four years later the law was passed and it became a national holiday, even though ten years in a row it had been brought up in congress and failed. This was an amazing accomplishment that was done through music and through the dedication of musicians who thought music was more valuable than just love songs. So much of music is love songs, so much of music is about interpersonal relationships, but I’ve always been a proponent of social consciousness and I believe that social consciousness can be promoted through music and great achievements can be done. Music isn’t all about making a million dollars or billions of dollars or selling lots of records or being famous, it’s about changing the world. It’s about making the world a better place to live in not just for you and those around you but for everybody, everybody who comes within the sound. I’ve been amazed at the number of people who’ve come up to me, because you never know your effect upon other people or very rarely. How often does one get to know one’s effect on other people? My wife Polly had a yoga teacher – she does Iyengar yoga – and she had a yoga teacher who was from France, and from a very well to do family in France. Gil had a write-up in a French magazine, very esoteric French magazine. Now I know schoolboy French, I mean, I have ordinary level French GCE - my matriculation to get into the polytechnic - but I couldn’t understand one in ten words of this article, I didn’t even start. So I said to Polly, “Why don’t get Fenech to come down to the studio one day after yoga? Finagle her to come down and just read the article, translate it on the fly, and I’ll set up a mic and a cassette and Gil can hear the article.” So Polly brings Fenech down one day out of the blue, she just appears at the studio. I’m getting ready, I’m getting the mic set up and everything, and Fenech’s looking at the gold records on the wall. She gets to Talking Book and she goes, “Oh, my god! You did Talking Book? That record changed my life!” She then tells me the story. She’d been in the West Indies. She had fallen in love with and had two children with a West Indian man who she was deeply in love with. Everything was fine because she was from a well-heeled French family, a French aristocratic family, and so there was no problems until her father found out that the children were not 100% white and cut her off, cut off all her payments, everything. “That’s it, you’re on your own.” The only thing she could do to make money was teaching yoga in the hotels in Jamaica and trying to make ends meet. Well, the husband didn’t stay around very long when there was no money around so she was left with these two children to support. She said that the only thing that got her up and through the day every day was putting on Talking Book first thing in the morning, every time she got up. She said, “I put that record on and it got me through the day.” So, you never know your effect on other people, and it’s very rare to ever find it out, but when you realize things like that are going on – how many other people’s lives have been touched by the products that I’ve been involved with? I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you, but I know that there are people out there who have been touched by it and have been touched by some of the social consciousness things that we did. I mean, “Living for the City” was no joke. “Living for the City” was the break-up of Stevie and I because it was the first time that Stevie really realized he was actually being produced, which is what he hated, that’s what he left Motown because of. As soon as he found out and realized that we had actually been producing him all this time – he was under the impression that he was doing it all, which was the whole idea. That’s really what you want to do, but it works against you if you use that technique. It’s a production technique that I used with Stevie, I’ve used with a lot of artists. It worked with Gil because Gil understood it, and Gil appreciated it, and Gil listened, and did everything I asked him to do, but with Stevie, as soon as he realized that I was actually, quote, ‘producing’ him... When I started and stopped that tape machine - never done it before, but when I started actually taking charge in the control room and saying, “No, do this, do that” - strands of the old Motown came right back into his head and he’s like, “Uh-uh, nope, I’m not having this.” And that was the beginning of the end for Stevie and I, that’s what really broke it up. You can look at money, you can look at business, you can look at all other aspects, that was what it was. He did not want to be produced even though it made better product. I only say that, not out of ego, I’m saying that because so many people have told me and I’ve read in so many different articles - people I don’t know and writers who I’ve never met, I’ve got no axe to grind with them - all seem to concur that the albums we did together, Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, those are the albums which are the seminal albums everybody talks about of Stevie’s. It also took him three years to produce an album after we left. We produced four albums in as many years, two albums with Syreeta, three albums with the Isley Brothers. I mean, it goes on and on and on, the number of albums we produced. The “getting it done”-part of it, the production part, was being done but when we left there was nobody to fill in that gap, nobody to book the studio, nobody to ride herd on Stevie and say, “Hey man, it’s going over the top. I liked the other take.” There was one case in point. We filled up the whole tape with vocal overdubs and it was time to go back because Stevie had done a vocal - and this is probably another important point you should remember - I always do first takes. No matter what, I push the button on first takes whether they’re ready or not because so many first takes have turned out to be the magical take. You can keep trying and keep trying, it just gets worse. You go back to the first take, there’s something magical about it. “OK, there’s problems” - fix them, cover them up, do what you got to do, but if the vibe is there that’s the important thing. You’ve got to recognize it and say, “That’s it.”

So I recognized on the first take of this vocal that we’d done - I forget which song it was now. As I say, we put 50 songs out and I left him with 250 in the cans, so 300 songs - you don’t remember this stuff. In fact, I don’t remember a fraction of the stuff I’ve recorded. You can’t keep it up there if you’re dealing in the now. I prefer to deal in the now, I’m more interested in what’s going on in the project I’m working on right now than anything I did in the past. And I don’t listen to the old albums, I’m not familiar with them that much, only while I was in the studio. So this basic idea that you’re trying to produce and get the best possible results out of people at the time, you do these first takes. I had saved Stevie’s first take and we’d done these 16, 17 more takes on top. Basically, Stevie had said, “No, go over it,” but I didn’t. I just chose another track and just pulled the fader down, because my decision was, that’s too good to go over and I’ve got spare tracks, so why would I do that? He thinks we’ve gone over. At the end of the day I said, “That’s it, that’s the last track. We’ve got to decide whether we’re going to go over anything if you want to do more.” “Yeah man, we don’t got it, we don’t got it.” “Oh, come in, I’ve got something I want you to listen to.” I brought him into the control room, and I put the first track up. He looks back and he says, “You kept it.” He knew what it was right away, that’s the sort of memory he had. He knew what he had done, and he listened to it and he turns round and says, “Hey man, you’re right, that’s the one.” He recognized that he couldn’t do it any better than he’d done it there.

Now, as a musician there are many times - on “Innervisions,” on the actual title track I’m playing bass, it’s the only track on the whole of Stevie’s albums, those four albums, that I play bass on, upright bass because it was an acoustic track. And I played this line... [sings] Between the first and second verses there’s a little break, where it’s just the bass doing that line, and so, of course, Mr. Clever has to go... [sings syncopated variation] I had to put my little twiddly bit in, right? And as soon as I did it I go, “Oh, no, why did I do that? Now we’re going to have to take it again.” But I kept that inner thought. We get to the end of the take and I turn around to Stevie and say, “Yeah, we’ve got to do it again.” “Why, man, why? It was perfect.” I said, “Well, you know, I screwed up in the bass break.” “No, man, you played that twiddly thing, I really liked that.” I go, “Huh? Well, if you really like it...” I had wanted to do it again because I had this idea that it should be like the way it was written and I had twiddled it up. But it turned out it worked, it was something that actually did work and there was no reason to take again. And that’s the take that’s on the record. Technical reasons are not good enough reasons to retake a take that’s already got feel and vibe to it. It’s more important to have the feel and vibe than it is to be technically perfect or to be musically perfect, for that matter. How it comes across, what it does, how it makes you feel. That’s what’s important, nothing else.

[applause]

Thank you, thank you very much.

Torsten Schmidt

Would there be some questions?

Audience Member

Thank you for coming.

Malcolm Cecil

You’re very welcome. Thank you for coming. I’m here because of you. If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t be here.

Audience Member

Tell me about it. You spoke on vibrations and a little bit on frequency, and also on feeling and the emotion of songs and stuff like that. In the past maybe two months some of my friends have been getting me into - yoga deals with it, but meditation. I forget what it’s called, I can’t recall for the life of me - it’s in the shape of a bowl and there’s a little wooden piece that’s similar to this in terms of shape and you tap it.

Malcolm Cecil

Yeah, it’s a singing bowl. Tibetan.

Audience Member

Tibetan. It emits a vibration and also a frequency that work intertwined and they affect your emotion, you mood so that you can focus and meditate. My question deals with frequency and how frequency can affect someone’s mood, in terms of sound or whatever, and if you studied that and incorporated that into any of your songs, like certain frequencies to evoke a certain feeling in someone that was listening to a song.

Malcolm Cecil

I don’t think it’s quite a simple as just a frequency because frequency is essentially pitch. Sounds are three-dimensional objects in time, OK? You can tell this from the language. We talk about three-dimensional objects in space and a three-dimensional object in space, it has a length, it has a height and it has as thickness, those are the three dimensions. They’re each independent, but for it to be a real object all three have to be present, at least in some form. Even a mono-molecular film of oil on the top of water that makes that dullish, yellowy, bluey rainbow, after the rain you see on the road - that is a mono-molecular film of oil but it’s one molecule thick, it’s still got a thickness. If it didn’t have a thickness, it wouldn’t exist in the real world. If it didn’t have a length, it didn’t have a width. Now, the same is true of sounds. Sounds are three-dimensional objects in time. They have a length, a duration. They go from... [sings ‘ah’] That’s a duration, length in time. We call it length, how long is the note? We use the same term. Then they have height, pitch: low pitch, high pitch, medium pitch. Pitch is the vertical, it’s whether you’re low, you’re medium or you’re high, that’s the note. And the third thing they have is thickness. We talk about fat, brassy sounds, thin, reedy sounds, OK? It’s the tonal quality. So these three things together create just one sound, just one single sound. A sound can have many pitches. For example, we were talking about envelopes before, maybe we change the voltage but we don’t change the envelope. That sound has like... [sings a series of pitches] It’s got numerous pitches but it’s still one envelope. It has a thickness, it has height. So, you can look at music as being like very complex sculptures of individual notes and sounds. You can play a note in many, many different ways and you can sing a note in many different ways. You can sing it with different tonal qualities, you can sing it with different intensities. There’s many ways that you can vary it but you’re always varying one of the three dimensions. You’re either varying the timbral quality, you’re varying the pitch, you’re varying the duration or all three in some manner of fashion. So I don’t think it would be true to say there’s a frequency, which is just a pitch, that will do that. But there are things that will evoke certain feelings in certain ways. For example, if you want to create the feeling of tension, one of the ways of doing it is to play notes that don’t sit well together. You play notes that are close together. Because of the nature of harmonics and the nature of frequencies and the way that they work and the way that harmonics work, as you go higher up the scale there’s a lot more notes that are produced that will blend with the original. The all hold multiples of the original frequency, so if you look at it mathematically - let’s say 100 cycles, it’s a low note, it’s a bass note. 200 cycles is an octave above. 400 cycles is an octave above that, so it doubles. 800 cycles is an octave above that, so every octave you’ve got twice as much space, so there’s a lot of frequencies in there. But the way we hear them, they divide up proportionally, and the way that we usually hear them is, we hear harmonics very easily. Although we don’t really think about them, they’re intrinsic to every note. Everything has harmonic structure to it and whether or not you have notes that are in that harmonic structure or not is what determines whether those two notes are going to play together. If it’s in the harmonic structure, they’re going to be what we call consonant, or they’re going to sound sweet. If it’s not within the harmonic structure, they’re going to sound dissonant, or sound not sweet. There are times when you want it to be ‘ungh’. If you were doing a movie score and the killer’s going to come in and he’s going to shove this knife through the shower curtain and kill this lady in the shower, as happens in the Alfred Hitchcock movie... You listen to the soundtrack there. What it is, it’s a semitone apart, it’s violins going a semitone apart, rubbing against each other, a really uncomfortable feeling. So yes, feelings are conveyed not by usually a single frequency, but by the way you combine frequencies and that’s what chords are about, that’s what voicings are about. If you take a piano and you look at the harmonic series, the harmonic series goes - if you actually take the notes - one times the frequency, two, three, four, five. We just looked at the octaves but in between, from one hundred to two hundred there’s nothing in between because it’s one and two, so 200 is the next harmonic. The next one would be 300. Now, 300 is halfway between two and four. It’s not quite in the middle, but what is it? It turns out to be the dominant note. In other words, if your original note is C, the second harmonic will be C the octave above and then you’ll have G in that octave and then you’ll have C again. The fifth harmonic next is E. Now look at that: C, G, E but they’re in different octaves. Now if you play C, E, G at the bottom of the piano, all together, it sounds like mud. But if you play C, skip an octave and a half, play G, skip up over the next C, play E, you’re now playing the harmonics of that bottom note and those harmonics will blend and sound smooth. It will feel very consonant, it will feel sweet. So the strongest voicing of a major chord is C, miss an octave and a half, G and then E in the next octave. That’s the most strong, powerful three notes that you can put out to make a major chord and it sounds great. Much better than C, E, G anywhere on a piano played close. People tend to forget this, but that’s they key to understanding the relationship of harmonics and everything else. Harmonics are really important in that they dominate all of music, and if you obey the rules of harmonics, and understand the rules of harmonics, you can use them. It doesn’t mean everything has to be harmonically perfect but if everything is conforming with the harmonic series it will sound sweet. The more you don’t conform, the more tensive it’s going to sound. If you’re writing film scores, it’s very helpful because you now have a tool to be able to tell you, how am I going to make this scene more tense? How am I going to come to a point where it gets even more tense than this further on? What am I going to do? Harmonic theory will guide you in that, that’s an important aspect.

I’m going to be publishing a book on this whole topic, but it’s not going to be ready for a little while. I did a lot of research over my life with this. It’s the one thing, if anything, I want to leave behind, other than TONTO, of course. But it’s the one thing I think will be universally useful that wasn’t around when I was born and hopefully will be when I kick up the daisies at the end of my time here. Who knows how long it’ll be? I’m 76 now. I’ve enjoyed a very good life up to now, and I plan to live to 120. My three years stretched, by the way. However, my philosophy didn’t change. I still live as if I only have three years to live, which may very well be true. You’ll find that if you do that, you’ll have a much fuller life. That’s probably why I’ve done all the things I’ve done, it’s because I never set out to do a career path, I never had a future in mind - only the present. Build the present on the past if it’s worth doing, otherwise break from it, make a whole new start. I’ve done it many times in my life now, and it’s never failed me. The only thing I haven’t made a new start with is my good lady. We’ve been together for 55 years.

[applause]

Torsten Schmidt

Unfortunately, I’m getting a lot of cutthroat signs from in between the curtains.

Malcolm Cecil

They’ve all run out of media. I’ve run you out of your media! [laughs]

Torsten Schmidt

I don’t know how much we can harrass you later, because we know that maybe if Erik has a little time in the studio when you’re around for a little moment, we do have the multi-tracks for a certain track that maybe people would be interested in having a go with. And it may be kind of explanatory if you could be still be around for that, but I don’t know whether that’s possible.

Malcolm Cecil

Sure, I’d be happy to do that, I know the track.

Torsten Schmidt

We should probably do that in the main studio after everyone has had a bit of rest and how does it work with you guys, maybe at seven or so? Would seven work? If that works time-wise for you - but we will let you know and we’ll have one of these ringing noises, but technicalities aside I want to go out with a song in a second. But not before we give a very, very warm hand and welcome - not welcome, goodbye, but probably a welcome again at some stage.

Malcolm Cecil

Does that mean I’m welcome here?

Torsten Schmidt

Please, everybody, join me in thanking Mr. Malcolm Cecil.

[applause]