Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?

“It’s meaningless drivel, basically,” Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott told me, after we discussed the effectiveness of cabbage-soup diets. The drivel in question—which Elliott spells Gunter gleben glousen globen —was uttered by the producer of their Pyromania record, Mutt Lange (who would later marry Shania Twain). The band was going stir-crazy in the studio (not realizing that future albums with Lange would take years instead of months to complete) and badly needed some comic relief. So on a skeletal version of the “Rock of Ages” track, when Lange was counting off mid-song to indicate where guitar fills should come in, he started off with the traditional “1, 2, 3, 4,” progressed to rhythmically listing Indian foods such as papadum, and ended up making up his own quasi-Teutonic language. “We thought it was so funny, we lifted it from the middle of the song,” Elliott said. (The Offspring agreed in 1998, borrowing it for the intro of “Pretty Fly [For a White Guy].”) “We were actually accosted by a German once who said it meant ‘running through the forest, silently’,” Elliott reported. “It doesn’t— but auf wiedersehen, mate!”

“Love to Love You Baby,” Summer’s 1975 American breakthrough, boasts moans of pleasure that would not be equaled until Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Time magazine calculated that twenty-two different orgasms were audible in the seventeen-minute mix, produced by Giorgio Moroder, but Summer insisted that although she was writhing on the studio floor while she recorded her vocal, she was faking it. In addition, she clarified when I got her on the phone, she wasn’t prone on the studio floor. “I was on my back, ” she said. “I couldn’t do the song with four guys staring at me, so I lay down on the floor; we put up curtains and shut the lights off.”

Madonna’s 1989 album Like a Prayer, arguably her finest full-length record, ends with “Act of Contrition,” which is, well, a novelty track. The Andrae Crouch Choir from the title track returns, only now the tape is run backward, and there’s a skronking guitar solo. It’s chaotic, and even a little scary, in an Old Testament-meets-Danceteria way. Madonna fumbles through a half-forgotten prayer from her Catholic childhood. “I reserve … I resolve,” she says. “I have a reservation. What do you mean it’s not in the computer?”

That apocalyptic guitar certainly sounds like Prince showing off. He and Madonna collaborated on another track on the same album—the grinding, not really successful “Love Song,” which was largely done by the two of them mailing tapes back and forth to each other. But the credits for “Act of Contrition” just say, “Produced by the Powers That Be.” Asked about the song’s creation, Madonna said she improvised the lyrics: “Whatever was in my head. It’s totally unedited.” And Prince? “He played guitar on it. He also played guitar on ‘Keep It Together,’ ” which hit number eight in 1990—one more gold single for the Paisley Park walls. “We didn’t have to prove anything to each other,” Madonna analyzed. “And I don’t think he’s had that same opportunity with other people that he’s worked with. Because generally he tends to dominate everything.”

No, but they tried. After Dark Side of the Moon hit number one in 1973, making Pink Floyd international superstars, the band returned to Abbey Road studios that fall, not sure what to do next. “What do we do after this?” asked keyboardist Rick Wright. Although their record company would probably have preferred Dark Side II: The Lunatic Returns, the band set off on a more experimental route.

They decided to record an album without musical instruments, using only common household objects. “If you tap a wine bottle across the top of the neck,” guitarist David Gilmour said, “you get a tabla-like sound close up.” Pink Floyd explored other sounds: They stretched rubber bands between two tables (for a bass sound), they unrolled adhesive tape at various lengths, they sawed wood, they pounded hammers, they chopped tree trunks with axes, they broke lightbulbs. The band’s road manager was sent out to hardware stores to find brooms with a wide variety of bristle strengths.

As the weeks went by, it became apparent that while the band was enjoying their mad-scientist recording experiments, not much progress was being made, and the sounds were not an improvement on using traditional instruments such as guitars and drums. Engineer Alan Parsons remembered, “We spent something like four weeks in the studio and came away with no more than one and a half minutes of music.”

Only one fragment of the work would ever appear on a Pink Floyd record. Their next album, 1975’s Wish You Were Here, features one of the sounds on the introduction to the first epic track, “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” Drummer Nick Mason said, “We had used an old party trick of filling wineglasses with varying levels of water and then running a finger round the rim to create a singing tone. These tones were then put onto sixteen-track tape and mixed down in chord clusters so that each fader controlled an individual chord.” As it turns out, the band had created a high-tech reinvention of an old musical instrument, one that Benjamin Franklin had also designed a version of: the glass harmonica.

One of the pleasures of listening to old Chic records is the virtuosity of each of the three musicians in the band; you can focus on any one part all the way through a song and marvel at the playing. Tony Thompson was a top-notch drummer, and although Nile Rodgers was a master of funky chicken-scratch guitar, he was also a nimble player who could make just about anything sound graceful. But the anchor was bassist Bernard Edwards, who is arguably the most influential bassist ever in pop music, even more so than greats like Paul McCartney of the Beatles or James Jamerson of the Motown house band.

Edwards’s masterpiece was the slinky, muscular bassline in “Good Times,” which was sampled wholesale for “Rapper’s Delight” and a host of other hip-hop jams. It was also adapted by Queen a year later for their hit “Another One Bites the Dust.” Maybe Queen bassist John Deacon recognized the bassline’s power because he was present at its conception. He had been hanging out with Rodgers and making a tour of New York’s finest nightclubs, which ended at Chic’s recording studio, the Power Station. When they arrived, Edwards was late for the planned session. Rodgers didn’t want to look feckless in front of Deacon, so he started showing a song to drummer Tony Thompson, “acting like we planned it that way,” Rodgers told me. When Edwards walked in, he didn’t apologize; he just plugged in. “He started playing a bassline that was probably really good,” Rodgers said—but Rodgers thought it would sound even better if it was a walking bassline. “I was screaming, ‘Walk! Walk, motherfucker!’ ” Edwards began the famous da-da-dum-dum-dum line, and Rodgers started shouting again, at engineer Bob Clearmountain this time: “Make it red.” Clear-mountain dutifully pushed the record button. “We got it on the first take,” Rodgers proudly reported.

The guests singing in the chorus and adding sound effects did not include any Pythons, but did feature Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, and Pattie Boyd Harrison (of “Layla” fame); to produce water noises, John Lennon blew bubbles through a straw in a bucket of water. In 1966, when “Yellow Submarine” was recorded, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was still three years away. The Beatles were big fans of the show, though; Paul McCartney would stop recording sessions so he could watch, and George Harrison ended up producing several Python films, including Life of Brian. (Also a Python watcher: Elvis Presley, who apparently got into the habit of calling people “squire” from Eric Idle’s “nudge-nudge” sketch.)

Bum-ba-bum-BOOM. That bass-drum pattern is possibly the most famous drum opening on any song, and it’s constantly used in movies, although never better than in Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets. The Ronettes’ first single was also their biggest, hitting number two in 1963 (kept from the top by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs’ “Sugar Shack”). Today, it stands as the most indelible example of Spector’s “Wall of Sound” production, which was state of the art from 1961 through 1966.

After “River Deep, Mountain High” flopped, the genius became a recluse; Spector married Ronettes lead singer Ronnie Bennett in 1966 (they divorced in 1974), but otherwise rarely emerged from his Los Angeles mansion, apparently spending his energy over the intervening decades on growing a huge, unkempt mop of gray hair. In 2003, he was charged with murder for shooting actress Lana Clarkson, so when I contacted his representative in 2004 asking about the details of the recording of “Be My Baby,” I didn’t expect a reply. But a week later, I got an eight-page email from Spector, offering a truck-load of previously unrevealed details on studio drummer Hal Blaine and Gold Star Studios, where the song was recorded over a six-month period. Some relevant excerpts from that email (lightly edited, mostly for punctuation):

I always had ideas for the drum sounds that were different each time. There were times when Hal Blaine would sit for hours, and never play a lick, and/or wait outside the studio while I would get everyone else sounding the way I wanted; I would build instrument by instrument, adding them slowly, on top of each other, with the drums being last. And many times, if I couldn’t get the right drum sound, at the end of the session, after hours and hours of work, I would cancel the session, even though we had worked four or five or more hours.

The drum sound I had in mind came about fairly quickly this time, albeit many hours after getting a “sound” on all the other musicians. I had the echo in place on everything else, and Gold Star’s echo was a nightmare to handle, as it changed from minute to minute. If someone moved, the echo would change, like the wind. So everyone had to remain as stationary as possible (much to their dismay), or the echo would change the sound I was trying to get. So when Hal Blaine would walk back into the room (because he wouldn’t be sitting there the entire four hours), nobody could move a microphone, and he couldn’t brush up against anyone, or anyone’s microphone. Unlike Motown’s studio echo, which was consistent, Gold Star’s was not.

But on the day of “Be My Baby,” the echo sounded real good, and more important, consistent. You can hear how consistent it is, on the ending of the recording, when I told Hal to solo on all the breaks and fills, which I thought would be very sexual to add to the sound of the recording. The echo was excellent that day: in particular, the echo from the overhead mike, which picked up the bass drum beautifully and filled the room up, which is why I decided to use it (the bass drum) as the intro. Normally, the bass drum beginning the recording would not have been loud enough, or big enough, and I worried if it would be loud enough to sustain the band coming in after it until the day the record was released.

The fact that everyone caught crabs in the bathroom, from the toilet seat! A “social disease” nobody could talk about in those days. Since I owned my own label, Philles Records, for a laugh I would bring my record distributors down to Gold Star Studios and tell them to use the bathroom, just because I knew they would catch crabs from the toilet seat. Every musician caught it, and their wives and girlfriends from them, and nobody knew where they were getting them from? Boy, I bet those crabs broke up some very sweet—and what could have been long-term—relationships! Imagine coming home with crabs in your pubic area, and the next day your wife asks you where did she get them from, in her pubic area? When she knows she got them from you! And you swear you were working at a Phil Spector session! And you were! And you have been “true blue.” That’s very fucking funny! And every gynecologist and urologist in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills was telling everyone that the only way you could catch crabs was from sexual intercourse ! But that was bullshit. Gold Star had a crab-infested toilet seat ! I tell you, it was one of the funniest scenarios in the world, watching this crab scene go down over the weeks. Of course, getting rid of those son-of-a-bitch crabs was no picnic! And pissing in the parking lot wasn’t too “cool” either! The studio had mice and roaches as well. It never would have passed any health-code test. But who the fuck cared? It had a great echo chamber. Inconsistent, and a nightmare to use, but fucking great. So, all in all, I think everyone would agree that Gold Star’s erratic but sensational echo chamber, and the wonderful memories of that studio, were well worth the price of the doctor’s visits and the Quell lotion it took to cure all the crabs we caught there!