Sometimes you get what you want.
Hello. My name is Mike McLean, and I was the Technical Engineering Department Head at Motown Record Corporation between January, 1961 through April, 1972.
I happened along to find this thread because I was checking about a post I had made about the passing of a friend, Ann Kubal. This post is hard to resist offering a comment.
I was right there in the thick of it, fighting out the day to day problems of selecting, purchasing, installing, and maintaining the recording studio equipment that was used to make all of those classic Motown Recordings. I remember when I approved the hiring of Bob Olhsson, who was an eager young fellow at the time. There were a number of theories offered in this thread, and some were very interesting. There were also some that I find offensive.
For example: I am a purest. I feel that more modern solid state [[post vacuum tube) equipment does a better job then the old technology. I also consider the lowly CD [[44.1 kHz/16 bit) to be far better, overall, then vinyl. There is a very complex true story about how early CD's got the reputation for harsh and raspy high frequency timbre [[garbled, rashness in the string sound) that was much true in many example in the first CD releases.
However, I feel that the CD format is a very satisfactory format for popular music today. Any love for the sound of old time recordings is because the distortion introduced by the recording equipment became linked, in the music lover's mind with the sound of the actual music itself.
Take "Honky Tonk" on the original 45 release in 1956, performed by Bill Doggat [[SP?) Now here is a "song" [[a 45 RPM format length) artistic expression in the musical format that must be towering in it's power to win the heart of any music lover. It surely won mine, hook, line, and sinker.
Take "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, released in 1966. It had an entirely different sound quality, but it was, at least for me, the equal of Honky Tonk.
How about the great album "Wish You Were Hear" by Pink Floyd? I was utterly overwhelmed by this masterpiece. Yet another sound quality. But the music had it's own way to reach into your heart.
Finally, how about the Blu-Ray of the 2006 film "King-Kong"? On a proper setup, this is some very impressive sound and picture, EVEN IF EVERY BIT OF THE SOUND WAS DONE IN DIGITAL FORMAT.
I love the 1932 RKO Radio Pictures film "King Kong" even if it is loaded with distortion caused by limitations in the sound recording microphones, amplifiers, optical film recorders, film processing, optical film reproducers, more amplifiers, and motion picture theater loudspeakers.
I am content to love the old King Kong for what it is, with all of the distortion, and love the new King Kong for it's demonstration of how wonderful modern technology can present sound to a lover of music and/or cinema.
All of that stated, I will try to offer some down to earth comments about the lusty question that opened this thread, and the strange waves of fantasy and insight that danced in the mist of the threads that followed:
1964 was the year that Motown changed from a group of people dedicated to rising from nothing toward being a success, to a group who were flooded with opportunity.
When the string of smash hits by the Supremes came to pass, suddenly, instead of paupers trying with all their individual possible effort to hang on an build a record company, the same folks were flooded with vast new responsibilities.
The tax structure of the Internal Revenue Service was then, and, I would think, now, designed such as to say that if you made huge profits in a fiscal year, you had better spend them on building your company into a larger operation, or else you would be taxed on a personal income basis, which meant that you would lose almost all of the money that you had earned.
One minute we all did anything to help Berry Gordy Jr. [[one of the most handsome, charming, and delightful fellows that one could ever hope to work for) and then the next minute the word was coming down from the top that we had huge amounts of money to spend on expanding building the company.
This shock was so profound that it turned HDH the Motown production team, into HDH the "Band of Gold" folks.
Now, let me ask you to stop and think about it: Would such a vast, almost overnight, change not have a similar effect on how much effort was placed on quality in mixing the masters for releases.?
It didn't take long before the difference between starving record promotion, and lavish record promotion became clear to the folks mixing the releases. It was like the difference between trying to light a campfire in the middle of a driving rain at 40 degrees, and breaking out the propane stoves and tents for a great barbecue.
Demands for albums, to round out the profit package for the company came rolling down from the top. Now the problem was to package all of the old second rate tunes that were never released because it was felt that they were not good enough, and further, to record more tunes as fast as possible, using the money that would be taken away by the s if we didn't "invest" it.
Imagine a dedicated music oriented sound mixing engineer at Motown [[this was actually Berry, Smokey, Brian Holland, and others, reacting to this input. Suddenly, what won the customers [[wonderful mixing) became work for suckers, to be passed on to the likes of the new generation of hires such as Bob Olhsson [[one of the best hires I ever approve) etc.
This is about the way it actually went down, as I remember it.
There is a great line, spoken by Stan Laurel, in a great Laurel and Hardy 2 reel comedy from the early 1930's: Hardy was over the top about some insult to him that had received publicity. "Oh, he said, my name has been forever filtered!" Stan replies, "Well, Ollie, you should remember: He who filters one's name steals trash."
The point is that the various periods during the history of the Motown Record Corporation contain various circumstances, and it is to be expected that the quality of the product will fluctuate along with these circumstances.
My own true love is classical music. During the period from 1959 through 1965, RCA Victor "Living Stereo" classical vinyl LP stereo classical records reach an awesome high level of quality. Recording engineers like Lewis Layton and Leslie Chase were recording one fantastic excellent classical LP after another.
Then, RCA introduced DYNAGROOVE recording, and the quality fell out and all that was left was sound that made the hip music lovers sick.
If ups and downs were good enough for RCA Victor, why should Motown be different.
Trying to figure out why one year of mixes at Motown was better then another is bottom feeding. Get a life!
By the way, that hum on the outside tracks was easy to fix, you connected the two tracks [[which included totally different musical content, so it made no difference to the music) to the mix in opposite polarity [[phase) so that the hum bucked out. Any sound mixer who didn't know how to do such a thing to deal with a limitation in the recording equipment such as this was, in my opinion, not qualified to be a recording engineer.
A recording engineer makes a great recording with the best equipment he has to work with, and finds a way to eliminate problems in the recording setup.
A mixer, takes the best source material that recording engineers, and sound editors, can present for final mixing, and makes the actual final artistic product [[mixing wise.)
Sincerely,
Mike McLean
Now living in North Carolina