BOOK: ‘Sound Man’ by Glyn Johns
The duties of a sound engineer — setting up equipment, recording audio, mixing tracks — aren’t the most glamorous aspect of the music business. Nevertheless, such seemingly technical details are directly responsible for crafting the sonic identity of an artist, album, or song. While the names of most of these sound men are unfamiliar to all but the most devoted scourers of liner notes, Glyn Johns is one of the exceptions. His lengthy list of accomplishments includes engineering the Rolling Stones, starting with the band’s first session in 1962 through 1976’s Black and Blue and inventing a much-imitated microphone setup for recording John Bonham’s drums on 1969’s Led Zeppelin.
In an era when studios employed engineers exclusively, Johns broke away to become the first to work freelance. This arrangement allowed him to record artists regardless of their label, putting him at the controls for the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” the Who’s “My Generation,” and the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park,” among many others. He was also among the first wave of engineers to make the leap into producing, helping create the studio sound of the Eagles and the Steve Miller Band, and working extensively with the Who, Eric Clapton, and Joan Armatrading.
Johns’ new memoir Sound Man (Blue Rider Press) takes a fleet, episodic trip through his decades in the studio, from his beginnings as a teenage assistant engineer at IBC Studios in London, through the heights of his commercial success in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, to his recent comeback recording albums for Ryan Adams and Band of Horses. As befits a book by someone so trained on technical detail, Sound Man centers largely on process: how Johns entered the profession (largely by accident) and worked his way up; how he designed the drum-mic method that bears his name; and how he wrangled rock stars away from their excesses and got them to focus in the studio.
Johns is a clear-eyed narrator, having abstaining from drugs and alcohol his whole life, and a consummate professional, bypassing scandalous stories in favor of straightforward accounts of what happened. Johns maintains a diplomatic tone throughout: having sat in with the Beatles during the sessions for Abbey Road and Get Back/Let It Be, he hints at discord within the band before ultimately declaring, “It is not my place to discuss any detail of what happened.” Nearly everyone discussed in the book is praised as “the nicest man you could want to meet” and “entirely without ego” — and, remarkably, it sounds entirely genuine coming from the fair-minded, matter-of-fact Johns. Conversely, when he hurls invective at a fellow ‘60s IBC engineer (“an unpleasant little shit of a man”) or Phil Spector’s handling of the Get Back/Let It Be tapes (“[he] puked all over them”), it’s all the more striking.
Sound Man seems less interested in sharing gossip or correcting past slights than in drawing attention to overlooked people and music close to the author’s heart. Johns spends much of the book recounting his close friendship with Ian Stewart, an original member of the Rolling Stones whom manager Andrew Loog Oldham demoted to sideman because he didn’t fit the band’s image. Likewise, Johns elides over or omits many of the notable albums he worked on (check out the discography section in the back for a fuller picture), but spends several pages discussing two little-known, historically-themed concept albums he produced for songwriter Paul Kennerley (1978’s White Mansions and 1980’s The Legend of Jesse James), just because they never got the audience he felt they deserved. Johns also writes extensively about the 1983 ARMS Charity Concerts he helped organize, raising funds for the Action into Research for Multiple Sclerosis on behalf of his friend Ronnie Lane, the former guitarist for the Small Faces and the Faces who suffered from the disease.
Even if Sound Man is short on drama, Johns makes for an enjoyable, believable narrator. He approaches his past with stoic British distance, indulging in little self-aggrandizing or self-pity. (Even his lowest points, such as his fear in the ‘90s that his sound had become dated, are treated matter-of-factly and without hysteria.) Johns is content to let his achievements speak for themselves, from creating rich sonic space on Who’s Next to rescuing the Clash’s Combat Rock from double-album bloat. Perhaps the most revealing part of Sound Man isn’t the stories that Johns tells, but how he tells them. His writing style is no-nonsense, even-handed, professional, and focused on the music — in short, qualities that make for a great engineer.
