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Legendary recording engineer Bruce Botnick (photo © Taro Yoshida)

The Doors and The Elektra Records Sound Part I

Recording Engineer Bruce Botnick (The Tracking Angle reprint)

The Doors and The Elektra Records Sound Part One

This interview, conducted by Matthew Greenwald back in 1997, first appeared in issue 14 of The Tracking Angle. As Rhino readies the new Doors LP box set (now set for April, 2008), we figured it was a good time to present it here-ed.

and he was good friends with Herb Cohen, who managed Tim Buckley, and Herb was a friend of Jac's. When Jac was looking for a good place to record out here in California, after he had signed Arthur Lee and Love, he asked Herb where to go, and he told him about me and Sunset Sound Recorders.

MG: Can you give us some idea of what Sunset Sound was like in terms of the room and the equipment?

BB: Well, we had one room, which was Studio One, which still exists today, although the control room has been heavily modified over the years. It was a compression room...the back wall was all brick, the floor was asphalt tile, the right wall looking out to the studio was shelving with sliding doors. That's where we put the tapes, because we didn't have a tape vault. Then there was the glass window, and there were three Altec Lansing 604e loudspeakers hanging above that. The left was a block wall covered with acoustical tile, and then there was a big door, which held the famous Sunset Sound echo chamber, and then there was the entrance into the control room.

The console was a custom tube console with 14 inputs that Alan Emig built for Sunset Sound. He also built Elektra studios, and was one of the original mixers at Columbia Records when they had their studios here in Hollywood. Alan recorded Dave Brubeck's “Take Five,” the famous Stravinsky recordings at the American Legion Hall, things like that. A multi-talented man. He was also one of the design engineers who originated the design of the tube amplifiers that United Recorders used. He designed a lot of those consoles, and then brought that technology over to Sunset Sound.

The whole control room was all brick, and it had individual panels of acoustical tile to deaden it down. Basically it was a very live room. The console sat on a platform, which was about six or eight inches off the floor. The tape machine sat behind us; we had an old Ampex 200 three-track, which had separate record and playback electronics so that you could select separate record or playback curves. They had a thing back then called A.M.E., which was Ampex Master Equalization, and then they had N.A.B., so if you recorded A.M.E. and played it back N.A.B., it would come out brighter. It's like recording with Dolby and not decoding. We also had an Ampex 300, I believe, three-track, which I converted over to a four-track with sel-sync (the ability to perform overdubs).

MG: Half-inch?

BB: Yes, everything was done half-inch, especially in the case of The Doors and Love, until we got to the second Doors album, where we had eight-track.

MG: Was the room itself changed during those years?

BB: No, the room stayed the same from the day I walked in the door, which was about 1963 to 1968. When I came back to do some mixing in 1970 it was still the same, except that they changed the console to solid-state.

MG: Robby Krieger told me that when they built Elektra Studios, you got the board from Sunset Sound. Is that true?

BB: No. We built Studio 2 during the recording of Waiting For The Sun, at Sunset. It was a big room. We didn't know what we were doing, but we built the control room walls, and Tutti Camaratta, who owned Sunset Sound Recorders, had bought out a studio in Las Vegas and gotten a solid-state console that was full of Langevin components. We rolled that in—it was on wheels—into Studio 2. We had Altec 604e loudspeakers in there powered by McIntosh tube amps. Then later on, when we did "Unknown Soldier," we recorded that song in that room. The rest of that album was recorded at TTG Studios, which stood for “Two Terrible Guys” (laughs). They weren't terrible guys. It was Ami Hadani and Tom Hildley, the same guys who designed and built all the famous Record Plant studios. Anything but two terrible guys. The cool thing about Ami was that he was a General in the Israeli Air Force, and he'd be doing a session and there'd be problems and he'd have to leave the session and go fly off to Israel, fight the war, then come back and finish a session. Weeks could go by, it was kind of funny.

But anyway, back to the console. Tutti used to go to England a lot, and he purchased a solid-state console over there. For the life of me, I can't remember the name of it. We all thought it was kind of cool. It had a lot of features that the tube console didn't have. It sounded different, you know? Tubes still sounded the best. Anyway, Jac Holzman purchased one as well, and we had it customized for our needs at Elektra Studios. So, that's how the console got there.

MG: Elektra was really on a roll when they launched the 7000 series, their first rock stuff. Beginning with the first Love album, do you have any recollections from that period of time of how Jac Holzman went about exploiting that market?

BB: He saw things, basically, that other people didn't see. He understood innately what to do, because there weren't any ground rules. He was inventing as he went along. He was the first in a lot of areas, to seek out live air play, to do billboards. Just plain old guerrilla-warfare record selling! And he still is, to this day, very creative, and has been a great influence on me in his ability to take things where they haven't been before.