Posts Tagged ‘david briggs’

Elyse Weinberg LP features Neil Young, Nils Lofgren

Exclaim.ca is reporting that the Chicago-based  Numero Group was poking around  Laurel Canyon and discovered an old, unreleased album from folk singer Elyse Weinberg. Its Numerophon imprint will be issuing the sessions, which featured Neil Young, as Greasepaint Smile on September 18.

Young  sings “Houses.”

Numerophon is The Numero Group’s vinyl-only legacy imprint. Aimed at releases featuring plaintive and old-timey folk and gospel, blues, ethnic, field recordings, the musical outpourings of Appalachia, and so on, Numerophon is a label’s evolution run backward, into what Numero might have looked like circa 1948.

Greasepaint Smile was to be the follow-up to Weinberg’s 1969 debut, Elyse. Her first album was issued by Tetragrammaton, but the label went out of business before Greasepaint Smile could be released. That said, a CD repress of Elyse in 2001 via Orange Twin had delivered two tracks from the sessions (“What You Call It” and “Houses”).

“Houses” is especially notable, as it features lead guitar from Young. Of Shakey’s “signature fuzz-tone,” Numero says that it can be heard “casting chaos over the beautiful ballad.” The song has since been covered by the likes of Dinosaur Jr. and Vetiver, among others.
In addition to Young’s guest appearance, the record also includes backup performances from the E. Street Band’s Nils Lofgren, J.D. Souther and Kenny Edwards. It was produced by longtime Crazy Horse cohort David Briggs.

Read more at: http://exclaim look at more info.ca/Music/article/numero_unearth_elyse_weinberg_lp_featuring_neil_young_nils_lofgren

Tags: crazy horse, david briggs, Elyse Weinberg, Nils Lofgren, Numero Group
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Neil’s studio prowess- more than meets the ear

“Over the course of 50 years as a recording artist, Young has quietly proven himself one of rock’s most underrated studio masters.”

Neil Young, Dave Howard and Daniel Lanois recording LeNoise at Silverlake Studio, LA (picture Sound on Sound)

Variety’s senior features writer Andrew Barker examines Neil Young’s forays into the recording studio through the years.

Neil Young, the gearhead audiophile or studio perfectionist….

Barker writes: “The media worship of Neil Young doesn’t really give enough kudos to the technical facilities and engineers that have aided him,” says longtime L.A rock journalist Harvey Kubernik, whose book ‘Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and Music of Laurel Canyon’ explored the scene that informed Young’s early career. “Reprise Records let him make the kind of records he wanted to make. He had management that enforced that. And he got to use the best studios in town. It’s a huge component of his durability.”

Young’s memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace,” is filled with his appreciation for machines and engineering, be it cars, guitars, model trains or recording studios. Young speaks of such haunts as Los Angeles’ Gold Star Studios and Sunset Studios; producers Jack Nitzsche, David Briggs and Elliot Mazer; and Wally Heider Studios’ prized “Green Board” console — used to record Cream’s “Disraeli Gears” and the Monterey Pop Festival — with an awe that borders on the spiritual.

Other great quotes about Neil  in this story from David Briggs, Ryan Bingham, Los Angeles New York Times music critic Robert Hilburn.

Read more at:  http://variety.com/2013/music/features/neil-young-audiophile-1200586875/

Tags: david briggs, Harvey Kubernik, Jack Nitzsche, Variety, Waging Heavy Peace
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Neil Young – The Moonlit Sessions

Neil Young’s Moonlit Sessions
Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Barbara Schultz
REUNION WITH CRAZY HORSE YIELDS TWO POWERFUL ALBUMS

Working with Neil Young can be a wild card, for sure, but it’s probably one of the most exciting gigs a studio engineer can have. John Hanlon has been producing, recording and mixing Young for about 17 years, and to say it never gets boring would be a gross understatement. It’s a thrill. It’s musical genius live on the floor. It’s awesome power on the fly, by the light of the full moon…

Hanlon’s relationship with Young started in 1983, when he and David Briggs, Young’s longtime producer, were working on Trans remixes. Hanlon joined Briggs again in 1990, engineering and mixing Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s magnificent Ragged Glory, and Young has been calling upon Hanlon’s talents ever since.

“When Neil calls me, it’s always out of the blue,” Hanlon says. “His manager, Elliot Roberts, and Neil will call together and say, ‘We need you yesterday.’ Then I just drop everything to go, because I’m working with a real artistic visionary.”

In August 2011, Hanlon got the call to head up from his home in Malibu to Young’s ranch in Northern California. “They told me we’d be working with Crazy Horse and Mark Humphreys,” Hanlon explains. “Mark is Neil’s monitor engineer onstage; he runs the P.A. in the studio. We record everything live, with no headphones. There’s some overdubbing later, but he always goes for the live performance feel. It’s always about the performance with him.”

Hanlon didn’t know in August that the sessions would result in two albums: a heavy, hard-rocking batch of folk songs called Americana, and Psychedelic Pill, a collection of new originals. Hanlon was simply told that the first order of business would be to install a studio that could serve as a working clubhouse for the musicians and a small crew.

“I was to build a studio in one of the houses on the ranch where David Briggs and Tim Mulligan had done American Stars ’n Bars with Neil back in the ’80s,” Hanlon says. “And he wanted to do it 8-track analog, which meant we’d also snapshot to Pro Tools, but he wanted an 8-track setup, in the building they call the ‘white house.’

“First I went up for some preliminary meetings with my assistant engineer, John Hausmann, to lay out the space and check out the acoustics. I purposely didn’t ask how they had set up the room for American Stars ’n Bars. I wanted to feel the vibe in the room without any preconceived notions of copying what they did. That was the 1980s; sounds and amplifiers, and where people’s heads were, would have affected the sound coming off of the instruments and from their souls at that time, anyway. Everything changes.

Read more:
mixonline.com/recording/artists_engineers_producers/neil_youngs_moonlit_sessions/

Tags: david briggs, moon, tim mulligan
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