All the Leaves Are Brown by Scott G. Shea

Author:Scott G. Shea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2023-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18:

MAMA JILL & TWIN GABLES

By the time the sessions for the Mamas & the Papas’ second album rolled around, the approach to manufacturing their unique sound was fully fleshed out. Beginning with “California Dreamin’” in late 1965, engineer Bones Howe created the blueprint, recording the male and female vocals on separate RCA DX-77 microphones into a 4-track Ampex 300 recorder. Bones set the microphones up so that John and Denny would be facing Cass and Michelle, allowing for more natural singing and greater rejection and laid them out on separate tracks in the recorder. The other two tracks would be filled with music. Afterward, a new set of vocals would be recorded, in the same key because of limited VSO capability, and laid them atop the first- pass vocals in the multitrack. Bones would then mix that session down and bounce it to a second Ampex 300 deck and double the vocals again, giving the final mix three layers of vocals, which resulted in a richer, fuller sound on record and in car speakers.

When Bones left the sessions in August, he was replaced by Henry Lewy, which made room for John Phillips to take total control, and he never relinquished it. When the group was set to record, Lou would book 12-hour sessions at Western, convening at 4:00 p.m. and ending at 4:00 a.m. but often-times going over. Always the consummate perfectionist, John ordered take after take after take until reaching the sound he’d heard in his head. His task-master efforts usually ended up with his bandmates passed out in the studio, and it was particularly hard on Michelle, who was the least experienced and weakest singer of the group.

There was a world of difference between the sessions for the second album and If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. For the latter, the band had lived communally for the better part of a year, rehearsed relentlessly, were ambitious and always came to the studio together. Harmonizing became second nature. After Denny and Michelle’s affair was exposed, getting the four of them together in the studio to lay down vocals proved much more difficult and, considering the circumstances, they weren’t as tight as they had been. When John and Lou were finally able to wrangle them for four dates in late April, five songs were completed, and three others begun. Michelle’s firing served to complicate matters by causing an indeterminate delay. It would take a few weeks to find her replacement, and an emotional John insisted that every trace of Michelle be removed from the previously completed tracks. That meant vocals had to be recut and remixed, which would take considerable time. It was a tall task, and, as John braced himself for a long audition process, Lou had a simpler solution.

In April, his close friend Jan Berry, the musically gifted half of the hit- making duo Jan & Dean, suffered severe head trauma and massive bodily injuries when he slammed his Corvette into a parked truck at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Whittier Drive at 80 mph.

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