Brian Kehew: The Beatles Archivist Preserving Rock’s Lost Recordings | The Magnificent Others

Billy Corgan sits down with Beatles gear historian and Recording the Beatles co-author Brian Kehew for a deep dive into vintage synths, mixing boards, and the hidden machinery behind rock's greatest records. Kehew explains how The Beatles pushed EMI’s engineers to invent new sounds—and why George Martin was essential to the band’s identity. The two swap stories about Van Halen’s mysterious tape vault, including why a third of Eddie’s famous wall was blank reels and how he and Tom Petty raced to buy the last remaining rolls of analog tape in Los Angeles. They also discuss the decade-long making of Recording the Beatles and why Ritchie Blackmore belongs alongside Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen. Kehew explores AI’s role in preserving classic recordings and Master Tape Rescue, his nonprofit reuniting artists with lost recordings. He also previews a Pete Townshend project devoted to his pioneering electronic music. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Don't worry what other people think.

• 0:01Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Um, what other people think is fashion or what other people think is the cool music.

• 0:06Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Uh, is very important.

• 0:09Billy Corgan?

  I feel like we should do like some sort of warning, like this may get really into nerd territory since we both love our gear.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  When you play with something older, it has character.

• 0:20Billy Corgan?

  Synthesis is the only way you can have sound without environmental affectation.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  The new things coming out didn't sound so good to me and I trusted my ears.

• 0:29Billy Corgan?

  I heard your name 500 times before I ever actually talked to you.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  It's true and it's not true.

• 0:39Billy Corgan?

  Brian Kehew, thank you for being here.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 0:41Billy Corgan?

  Uh, I feel like we should do like some sort of warning, like this may get really into nerd territory since we both love our gear.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  I try not to. It's one of those tendencies where you have to, it's like sports people. When they get together, it starts to amplify to a point where normal humans don't like it.

• 0:58Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Well, in full disclosure, I've always admired you from afar because you kind of have like the dream job I would love to do if I wasn't doing what I do.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:06Billy Corgan?

  So I'm very envious of the worlds that you go into. So hopefully that will come across in the interview. Um, I wanted to start with something funny. Oh, so, uh, 1992, uh, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, uh, with, uh, Cameron Crowe arranges us for to be in the movie Singles with a Song. We send the demo of the song Drowned. Great. We're going to record, but the band's constantly on tour. So we get booked into Lenny Kravitz's studio in New Jersey with Hank. I can't remember Hank's last name.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Henry. Yeah.

• 1:35Billy Corgan?

  Henry.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36Billy Corgan?

  Henry was there. Uh, Lenny wasn't, but I remember going to the studio somewhere in, in the haze of our touring in 1992, and I'm walking down the hall and I see the Red 37. And I'm like, is that the, it was just like laying in the hall, you know what I mean? And I thought, that was the first time I had this conscious thought of like, wow, you could own that stuff?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  So that is Red 37, R E D D is a technical name. That's the number of the Beatles, one of the Beatles mixing board.

• 2:06Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Right. From the sixties.

• 2:08Billy Corgan?

  Now that, that particular board would have been involved, like, is it, is it, it's the, uh,

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Early Beatles.

• 2:13Billy Corgan?

  Oh, it's more early. Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. First two years, let's say.

• 2:16Billy Corgan?

  Right. So I just remember thinking like, and I took a picture of it, which I still have. And I was like, how do you arrange to own this historic gear? Shouldn't this be in a museum somewhere or, um, so, and now that board's for sale. Seems no one's willing to pay the price.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  It's hard to say what those things are worth because once something like a pencil loses its intrinsic value of what it can do for you, maybe because George Washington owned this axe or whatever, Jimi Hendrix's guitar, then there is no value to it. And so.

• 2:48Billy Corgan?

  Are you not, are you not sentimental about that type of stuff?

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. I just bought some Beatles gear last week.

• 2:52Billy Corgan?

  Can you tell me?

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Uh, original tape recorder from Abbey Road.

• 2:56Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  It may not be a main Beatles thing, but it was an Abbey Road four track.

• 3:00Billy Corgan?

  It, oh, it's a four track. Yeah.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, uh, I do use tape machines all the time, so that has some function for me. So I try to stick with things like that that I like, but if you or I found a, uh, incense stick from, you know, the White Album sessions, we would want to put it on a shelf and show it off.

• 3:18Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. But is that a board you would want to own? The, what we, I call it the Lenny board, but.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I'm, I'm kind of grounded and realist about these things. For example, that board has very strange levels and can only put out a couple of channels at a time. What would you or I use it for?

• 3:34Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  That being said, uh, we've done some work at Abbey Road and they have older boards. And when you put stuff through them, it does sound better than anything else.

• 3:42Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:43Billy Corgan?

  You think it was the, it was the hand sort of manufacturing that they did? Cause back then they, there weren't, there weren't manufacturers, the way we think of them today. Like it was all done in, at EMI, right? I mean.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the, it's, it's not a secret, but one of the things people don't think about was fifties and sixties recording was still new. So you couldn't just grab a catalog from most companies and buy something. So at Abbey Road, for example, they were making their own tape machines. They made their own mixing boards. And so that's the way it worked in those days. You had to go design something for your needs. It was cool.

• 4:14Billy Corgan?

  Uh, I have the, uh, the infamous recording, the Beatles book that you and, uh, Kevin Ryan did.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:20Billy Corgan?

  Um, so my understanding is, but please correct me is, is it just started as kind of a personal passion project where you just started kind of trying to figure stuff out? Can you, can you illuminate me on that?

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Kevin and I, in fact, Kevin should be sitting here every time we talk about these things because he does so much work with me. We are true partners in that, but we started out independently, producer, engineer people making music. And he had the idea to make a book about the tech side of the Beatles. How did they make drum sounds? How did they mix tracks and things? And I had the same idea. He was in Texas. I was in California. We hadn't met for quite a few years and then finally somebody introduced us. And, uh, it's a great lesson in humility, but also better in partnership and that working with the right people makes you so much better.

• 5:08Billy Corgan?

  Hmm.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  So it's not that two of us is twice as good. It's like eight times better when we work together.

• 5:13Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Cause, um, cause I, I bought the book when it immediately came out. If people don't know, I, I recommend it because it's such an insight into the, into one of the great sort of recording periods of all time, not just the Beatles, but, but, um, as you know, because you're a studio guy like me, it's like, we would sit around and think, how did they get that sound? And there really wasn't like, there was kind of, there was always colloquial talk, like, uh, you know, the bass sound on, uh, Rain by the Beatles and how they used a speaker and, you know, but I, you would hear these things, but there was no like, there was no good go-to resource. Like this is actually how they did it.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  It, there were no recording magazines back then. We're used to these things existing now. Um, there was no, certainly no websites and things, but the making of movies, the making of recordings was a mystery. So we had to go do primary research, which I guess seems to be rare, although people, we found a lot of people make a phone call or two and then put out a story or a book, but we decided to take the long road, get to know people. We're still friends with most of them that are around and hundreds of contacts and we go deeper and deeper. And what so-and-so says, we feed it to them and they change it and adjust it and we feed it back. And it gets you closer to the truth. If there is a truth, but in the case of more technical things, there's pretty close to a truth a lot.

• 6:32Billy Corgan?

  When the book came out, I was surprised that there had never been that book. I mean, there'd been sort of similar things like, like, I guess anecdotal stories, but nothing that was comprehensive.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  This was the reason the book was made. Kevin and myself are the perfect people that wanted that book.

• 6:49Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I wanted.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:50Billy Corgan?

  I wanted it too. Yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  We're, we're the same cloth and most people that work, I realized at least once a week, we would mention the Beatles. Somebody would say, oh, how did the Beatles do this or that? And it was kind of a mystery. They also lived in that world of EMI Studios, which was the original name of Abbey Road. Uh, they had their own equipment. So when you see them with a tape machine, and we have no reference point for what that is. So it seems even more mysterious, even if it is a tape machine or a microphone.

• 7:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:20Billy Corgan?

  This, this occurred to me when I got the book. It's like, because the book is chock full of like, now this might be, seem super nerdy, but I was totally geeking out. There's like actual pictures of the sessions, but it's not of the band standing there with their gear. It's just like, here's the miking for a certain kit. Here's the way the studio looked, like all these behind the scenes photos that had never been seen by, I think by anybody that I'd ever seen.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  We have a theory that every picture of the Beatles recording, we own it. I mean, we at least have a copy of it. Thousands and thousands. And so when we found photographers, which was another way to research it, there's 36 rolls on a, on a, shots on a roll of film, if you will. And they'd have two or three good shots where their faces are bright and there's a good pose with a guitar. And we're like, no, we want to see the other shot. When you were shooting sideways in the corner and it shows the Mellotron next to the microphone and something procedural that we didn't have. So all the cool pictures of the Beatles jumping on the steps and stuff, not useful to us, but all these cool pictures that we found for the book.

• 8:17Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  You know, here's George and Paul, and there's like five instruments sitting around them. Amazing for what we wanted.

• 8:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  And there is more coming.

• 8:25Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Oh yeah.

• 8:28Billy Corgan?

  Hold that thought for a second, but it, so, cause it seems to me, it, you just go and call up, you know, Abbey Road and say, hey, by the way, let us, let us into your archives. Because, you know, the Beatles are probably the most exhaustively researched musical subject in our lifetime. I cannot think of something that's more greatly explored. So I got to imagine there's a sort of a, kind of a wariness there, a privacy wariness. How do I know you're not some crazy fan? How did you get through the layers of bureaucracy there?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  I would like to think we were at least aware of that going into it because we rarely mentioned the B word when we talked to people. Yeah, no, it's true.

• 9:04Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  We would say, I want to talk to you, an engineer person about your days at Abbey Road, EMI. In fact, we would say EMI because it was the more proper term. Oh yeah. And who did you work with? We worked with The Shadows and Helen Shapiro, and I did some Beatles sessions. And then we'd start connecting with them and they understood that we knew what they were talking about and the people in their world. So Kevin and I both developed a feel for. Our focus is The Beatles, of course. It's what we all care about and for good reason. They're beyond amazing. But everything else also informed us what Freddie and the Dreamers might have caused something to happen in The Beatles world. So why wouldn't you want to know about it?

• 9:43Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  So going deep into it and not mentioning the B word was a very critical thing.

• 9:49Billy Corgan?

  What ignited your passion for recording?

• 9:54Billy Corgan?

  Were you a musician who kind of fell into recording or?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  I have some early memories of like my parents having a little hi-fi system at home, a little stereo thing. And one of the speakers stopped working and I took a screwdriver and took it apart. And then there was one wire connected and one wire was loose. Connected it up and my mom said, how did you know how to do that? I didn't know, but I was fascinated by how it worked.

• 10:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And then what happens if you put your finger on the speaker? What happens if you put some paper over the speaker? Tinfoil.

• 10:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  And then one of those people that just likes to mess around with sound, as you probably do with with everything, you know, guitars and pedals and we all do. It's a it's an art form to sculpt sound into different shapes and then put them together.

• 10:36Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. So speaking of the B word, what what was your sort of point? Cause uh, back to I think our common language here is that um, as a musician, at some point you, at least in my, I mean, even Ozzy talked about it. At some point, The Beatles become this kind of touchstone of understanding. It's a sort of a kind of a Rosetta Stone. Because of the width of the recording history and because of the common knowledge, you can basically walk in any studio in the world. And if you kind of speak Beatle language from a recording point of view, you can kind of find common ground, right? So what was your, what was your first kind of like, I'm not saying which Beatles album or song did you love? What was the first time you thought, wow, I wonder how they did that as a as a recording unit or as a production unit?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  I even know where I was on the freeway when I heard Birthday from the White Album, great track. And they have this weird piano sound on there. And I thought, that is so weird. No one has a piano. It's a piano. It's an acoustic piano, but weird. Wah wah wah wah, kind of weird filter sound. And I went, what the hell is that? And I had, I had amps, I had pedals. I was working in music stores and I was like, I don't know what would do that. And it was driving me crazy and there was no one to talk to, no one knew.

• 11:52Billy Corgan?

  There was no book.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  And so years later, this man named Ken Scott, who became a close, personal and family friend of ours, who's one of the, you know, greatest recording producers.

• 12:01Billy Corgan?

  Also did Pipers at the Gates of Dawn and Floyd and.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 12:05Billy Corgan?

  All the way up through uh, missing persons even.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Exactly. I asked Ken, you worked on that session and he was really proud of saying, oh yeah, I took the piano track down into the room, put a Vox amp on the floor and I went, oh, the mid-range boost, MRB is what it's called. And it's like a, a filter that boosts low, middle and high frequencies. And he was musically playing the knob as they recorded it through the amp. And I was like, wow, there's my question answered.

• 12:33Billy Corgan?

  From the guy?

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but now there's 10,000 more questions to do. But that was the moment when

• 12:38Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  I thought, wouldn't that make a great book? I would buy it. Most people would want it and it's never been talked about.

• 12:45Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Billy Corgan?

  How, how? It's hard to, it's hard to quantify this question, even because I'm not a particularly technical person. The, the, okay, what do they call in-house at Abbey Road, what we now know as Abbey Road? What did they call the department that made stuff? Was it an engineering department?

• 13:09Speaker 00

  The nickname was the Amp Room, which is kind of different. We don't think of Fender amps or Gibson amps. They were thinking of amplifiers, meaning rack-mounted boosters of signals, that kind of thing. But they were the tech guys, which in England they call a boffin.

• 13:24Billy Corgan?

  Okay. So, so those guys are there.

• 13:29Billy Corgan?

  At what point did they start actually making their own equipment in-house?

• 13:33Speaker 00

  It was kind of an ongoing thing because you're probably aware of how echo chambers work and The Beatles had an echo chamber to use. Each of the studios there had an echo chamber. So before we have all these other possible ways to make that sound, they had taken the 1950s technology designed here in America of an empty room with a speaker in it and a mic to make sound bounce, like when you sing in the bathroom.

• 13:56Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  It's that kind of trick. And so they had echo chambers that they had built themselves. Those guys were doing it in the 50s, pre-Beatles. And even some of the pianos, like one of the pianos they wanted for a guy named Russ Conway, and he wanted the honky-tonk sound. So they were literally lacquering the hammers and detuning the strings. Let's make one of our pianos the weird out of tune piano.

• 14:16Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  So the people that worked there were also creative. But in talking to them over and over again about this strange group, The Beatles, The Beatles were pushing them to be more creative. They said, we weren't even that adventurous, but they'd be like, put the drums in the corner, put the vocal in the corner, try these weird things. Put, put a microphone under a glass of water. What does it sound like? And so things they wouldn't have thought of, the way The Beatles think was highly creative. So when Kevin and I do talks, we often say, you know, you can buy all the tape machines and microphones The Beatles had, but you won't be them because your brain is not The Beatles.

• 14:54Billy Corgan?

  Where do you think that came from, from within the group?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  You know, um, they each had it. They all had a version of it.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Maybe obviously John Lennon, who went to art school and years ago, talking to Pete Townsend, who I know, who also went to art school, he told me, they don't teach you to paint in art school in England. Sid Barrett went to art school. These people went, it's not how to paint or how to be a sculptor. It's how to be an artist in the world.

• 15:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  It's how to be different than everybody who's stuck in a box.

• 15:24Billy Corgan?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  So they learned to think differently.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Pete Townsend learned to smash instruments from there. Sid Barrett learned to do bizarre things with lights and sound there. They taught their artists to become those people and they really impacted the world. So Lennon certainly went to art school, but I think Paul was as creative in his own ways.

• 15:46Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:47Billy Corgan?

  I, when I was doing some research to, to talk to you, um, my understanding is that one of the, one of The Beatles' recording consoles was missing, but now that's apparently not true, is that, you know, I'm talking about the, was it the revolver console or something?

• 16:00Speaker 00

  I would say the main board that they used, no one has a clue about it.

• 16:04Billy Corgan?

  Right, that's what I'm saying. So, and I looked at it and I, it seemed to, so, so I knew you would know. So there's, there's one of these boards where it's just disappeared into the ethers. No one knows where it went, right?

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Doug Feiger, R I P, who was the leader of the NAC, became a good friend of mine in later years. He's also a massive Beatles nerd, one of the biggest. And he said, I bought that console. It was at Abbey Road. It was in a back room. I paid $5,000 for it, which I don't know what the exchange rate was, but it wasn't that much. And this is when the, the NAC is peaking, early 80s.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  And he said, I bought it, but the shipping was so much because it's, it's heavy steel. It's, it weighs more than a car in some cases. Shipping was so much, I just left it there. And then a year later, they said, somebody else wants it. Will you let it go? Sure, just give me my 5,000 back. So it sold to someone else and we never found it. But years ago, I was at um, a great English studio called British Grove, which Mark Knopfler owns.

• 17:00Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  And they recorded the Stones there and all kinds of great people. And I was visiting, interviewing one of their techs who is an ex-A Abbey Road guy. And he got a phone call as I was sitting there, oh, an old EMI board in Italy, send me some pictures. And he sent me pictures of the identical board to the one at Abbey Road, but with one change. And I was like, it looks just like the board we've all been looking for from Sergeant Pepper, from the revolver and the White Album. But it's not. It's from Italy. So EMI had studios all over the world, in Japan and in California with capital. And so that board turned up and I said, just buy it. It's the only one in the world at this point that is. So they have that identical brother-sister console is at British Grove.

• 17:45Billy Corgan?

  I heard about that. But they, but again, to be redundant, then no one knows where the actual, the actual one, what's called the Beatle board is.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  No, I mean, a lot of stuff is gone and

• 17:55Billy Corgan?

  That's just, it's so crazy, right? You think it's got to be somewhere, right?

• 17:59Speaker 00

  We, we probably, uh, FYI, we talked about recording The Beatles and Kevin and I have taken it out of print almost 10 years ago to rebuild it. Meanwhile, the price of the old ones went through the roof, which is unintentional. But we want to make it twice as big. We have so much information, more photos, more stories, more stuff. It will probably be hopefully twice as good as far as detail and depth and accuracy. But uh, one of our friends got us pictures of the auction they had there in the early 80s, where they were selling off all the old equipment and the Mellotron.

• 18:36Billy Corgan?

  This hurts my heart.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Time machine and a bank account is all you need, right? But in 1980, what could you have afforded?

• 18:43Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Right? Um, almost anybody. And in England, it's not even current right now to like old equipment. They tend to be a more forward-thinking recording community. America loves the old stuff. But uh, you can see in the pictures there, Beatles four-track, Beatles eight-track, Beatles four-track, the Mellotron from the White Album. The Mellotron went for a thousand pounds to Mike Oldfield. Now McCartney has it. But you know, they were selling the four-track machines used on various Beatles records, some of them uh, for like 300, 400 pounds. And yet they were not that usable.

• 19:17Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  24-track was in, they sort of like buying an old Apple computer now. Who thinks of that? Who wants to do it?

• 19:24Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Whereas other things are very cool. But when I was growing up and into guitars and amps and things, if you wanted Fender and Gibson, you didn't want Dan Electro, you didn't want Silvertone. And now those are cool, you know?

• 19:36Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Billy Corgan?

  This is kind of the cheesy, obvious question, but has, has anything really surprised you in this process of pluming the recording archives? And so something that really stuck out, like?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Well, we like to see that the Beatles are greater than we thought they were. In other words, over and over again, they proved that they were pushing ahead even at their own peril. I mean, I remember talking to one guy who said the Beatles were washed up after sixty-four. Because they had those great songs and they were tight and they were harmonic and they were beautiful and they were clean. And then they just started messing around. True, in one way of looking at it, the Beatles are bulletproof up through nineteen sixty-four and a half.

• 20:21Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  I mean, some of the best tight pop songs ever written, but that's not I Want You, She's So Heavy, which jams on and on at the end.

• 20:28Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Which is a piece of art in a different way.

• 20:31Billy Corgan?

  No, the chances they took, I think, because they're so successful that people don't really understand that the chances were really monumental. You know what I mean? They were risking a lot more than just whether or not people were going to like what they were doing. They were the top pop group in the world. And if you compare it to a Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, you know, imagine taking those little, those mad leaps of aesthetics and sonics.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  There's very few people, I mean, you could say Bowie, but maybe not as much even. Bowie didn't have an eight-minute noise piece on his album.

• 21:04Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  And Madonna, who has often shifted and changed styles and not left her audience behind, taking them with her.

• 21:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  That's pretty bold to do these strong moves, but not as strong as the Beatles, not as. Well, I mean, the White Album is a favorite of many people because you've got these beautiful things like Good Night that could be a Walt Disney track. Sitting next to Why Don't We Do It in the Road, which is almost a trashy resonance song.

• 21:29Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:31Billy Corgan?

  I remember one time I was at, when Howie Weinberg, the mastering engineer, was in New York at Master Disk. We'd finished a session early and Howie said, hey, I've got this dupe of the Sergeant Peppers.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  I've heard of that, yeah.

• 21:44Billy Corgan?

  And it was, it's so it basically, if you can imagine, it would have been a friend of his at Capitol had duped the Capitol copy. So basically, it's this, I guess, a second generation.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  It's a one-to-one transfer of the American masters.

• 21:58Billy Corgan?

  Yes. So, so imagine, you know, incredible mastering suite, you know, tuned for sound, big speakers, he cranks it up. And I'm listening to Sergeant Peppers and I'm hearing stuff that I've never heard before. And kind of what you said, I'm like, this band's even better than I thought they were. And this is considered one of their great albums and it's even better than I thought it was. And I've listened to it a hundred times. So I'm with you on that. They really are even better than we think they are.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  A lot of things sound too dated and I guess you could say.

• 22:30Billy Corgan?

  But let me stop you there. So what, in your eyes, what do you think sounds dated?

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Well, just saying that like drum sounds from the early days, there's hardly any kick drum. It's not a lot of bottom.

• 22:40Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see what you're saying.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Things like that. It does sound like a nineteen sixty-three recording.

• 22:44Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  But given the Beatles and you hear Twist and Shout, I, it's up there with the Stooges as far as energy.

• 22:51Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  It's up there with anything I've ever heard. And we keep saying over and over again that that was a live performance and a live mix at the same time. Their engineers, especially Norman Smith, who did half their records, Jeff Remer, Ken Scott, Phil McDonald, these various people that worked with them. They're geniuses too. And as you probably know, engineering can make or break an entire record.

• 23:12Billy Corgan?

  Yes. I've been blessed to work with some greats. You know, sometimes I find if you, if you over investigate a subject, you know, it changes something about how you feel. Sometimes I lose my enthusiasm. I don't get the feeling, feeling you've lost your enthusiasm for the band, but did it change your perspective looking from the inside out? Maybe it's the same questions voiced differently, but I mean, do you see them differently now that you've gone so deep into their world?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  It's a little less magical. That being said, it still sounds cool. But when you hear these John Lennon vocals that are all trippy, like seeing this guy with diamonds, oh, it's ADT and a speeded up vocal. And it's John Lennon. So whereas that sounds very trippy and it should sound trippy.

• 23:57Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  How they did it is a magic trick revealed when you study how things go.

• 24:03Billy Corgan?

  So you were saying the, the, the recording book is essentially out of print now and you're going to do a.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, Kevin and I decided after ten years, everybody's already bought it that wants to buy it. I mean, ten years is a long run and we did really well with it. We are just two people. We're a company, which is people think it's some office or something. It's two people.

• 24:20Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  And we put out our own books because we wanted other companies, the big companies to put it out. And they wanted to cut the arms and legs off it. And we're like, after all these years, ten plus years, there's no way. So we decided to be oddly enough, a book company and sell and make things. And luckily, our subject matter was a lot more interesting to people. And the quality of the work was hopefully good enough to last. So we decided to stop making it and we are rebuilding it now for maybe next year, twenty twenty-seven. RTB two will be out.

• 24:53Billy Corgan?

  Oh, very good. For somebody who maybe is a Beatle fan, would not think they would be into a, a highly technical kind of book. Could you at least explain to them why they, you might think they'd enjoy the book?

• 25:06Speaker 00

  I gave it to my mother to read and she understood it. So there you go. I, I said, you know, here's a section on compressors and, you know, studio people really care about that function, right? That's a specific thing, but it makes the world of difference. And she's like, I sort of don't know what the sound is, but I know what you're saying. And they're automatic volume control that shapes the sound too.

• 25:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  So we find that it is a technical book if you aren't interested in that. But there's enough about Ringo's drums, there's enough about the guys working together. And honestly, it was a process where almost eight or ten years together, Kevin and I had finished the book. We'd written all the chapters on, there's a chapter on microphones, there's a chapter on speakers. We just wanted to break it down and introduce a cast of characters. This speaker you see in the picture is this guy. And then in sixty-eight, they changed to this guy, just so you wouldn't wonder anymore. We wanted to know what every box in the room was. And then once we explained that, I stopped and we had written the book. And I said, Kevin, doesn't make sense.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  I mean, it just doesn't flow. It's too much technical. And so Kevin took it and ran with it. We came up with a third of the book, mostly his work that says production in nineteen sixty-four. Here's what they're using and how they did Hard Day's Night. And here's what they're using in sixty-eight to do the White Album with stories from people that make it more juicy about staying up all night and stuff like that. So that really tied it together, whereas that section wouldn't work if you didn't know the things we're talking about.

• 26:40Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  But, but people who are mostly recording people, they do want to know what microphones they use.

• 26:45Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. So I, I wanted to share with you because I, I've actually never told this story, so it's been indulgent on my end. But, um, so, uh, years ago, I can't remember the year, uh, The Dark Side of the Moon, sorry, the, the Abbey Road to Dark Side of the Moon transistor. EMI, uh, ETG one, two, three, four, five.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  It's a big mixing board.

• 27:03Billy Corgan?

  Was for sale.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:04Billy Corgan?

  Mike Hedges, the, uh, the famed producer, uh, the Cure, Cure fans would know.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Susan Banshees.

• 27:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Great producer. And he was selling the board and somebody goes, would you be interested in buying this board? And I, and I said, sure. So I think the original price was somewhere in the seven hundred thousand dollar range.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 27:24Billy Corgan?

  And comparing the price at the time, eight, eight, eight, the same series of board with the same similar series of channels was about a third of the price or something. So of course, one person in my life said, you're insane. If you want the board because you want the sound, you can get it for far cheaper over here. But, you know, look, it's a museum piece, kind of to your point, is it really going to be functional for you? And I just so love the idea of owning this kind of, and it goes back to seeing the board at Lenny's studio all those years ago. And I had the money and I thought, okay. So then I said, okay, I, I, and I, I think I asked like some obvious questions. Suddenly the price turned into like eight hundred thousand dollars. And then the next time I called, it was eight fifty.

• 28:08Billy Corgan?

  And the next time I called, it was a million. And the next time I called, it was one point two. So after one point two, I was like, okay, I'm out. And I think eventually the board was bought.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Two point two million.

• 28:17Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  It lives about a mile from here right now.

• 28:19Billy Corgan?

  Okay, well, let's go visit it because I at least like to see what I almost bought.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Well, whoever got it, probably a private producer who I know, um, has some crazy equipment and knows what he's doing. He is a good recording engineer producer.

• 28:32Billy Corgan?

  Is, is the person known? Can we talk about that person or?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 28:35Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  So it doesn't really matter. If they want to be known, I'm sure they will.

• 28:38Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  But, um, I'm a big fan of Kate Bush, so the Kate Bush records were made on that board too.

• 28:44Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so it was there through the seventies. And if you see a picture of Kate Bush in the studio, that's the board too. But as you said, Dark Side of the Moon, uh, all kinds of cool stuff. It's post Beatles, but it is Abbey Road and it's, it's a more usable console.

• 28:59Billy Corgan?

  Was it, was it used for Abbey Road or I, because I was told that at the time, but.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  The Abbey Road board is another, well, that's the Mike, well, there's two Mike Hedges boards. So maybe we're talking about the one that was Dark Side of the Moon has gone up and sold. The one from nineteen sixty-nine and seventy, which is used on Abbey Road and so forth, is still for sale.

• 29:19Billy Corgan?

  Ah, okay.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. At a very reasonable few million, if you want to throw away some more.

• 29:25Billy Corgan?

  So the part B of the story was, at that point, I started thinking, well, I'm sort of intrigued to own the, the series of boards. So eventually I bought, I bought a, um, I bought a board that was EMI, I think it was EMI Sweden. They would build it, they would build it at Abbey Road and then they'd ship them. And you know about those boards, they're kind of, they would float them around the world, uh, to satellite, uh, EMI or BBC stations. So, um, so I bought this board and in the, in the exchange of buying the board, um, uh, I, I said something just casually about it being a Beatle board. And I won't say the name of the company. I'm sure you know who they are. They got kind of grumpy and they were like, no, no, wait a second, you know, we're not selling this as board as a Beatle board. You know, don't call it the Beatle board.

• 30:09Billy Corgan?

  Like, by the way, I'm spending a lot of money and I'm getting lectured. Don't call it the Beatle board. We're not selling it as a Beatle board. You don't have a right to call it a Beatle board. It was like, it was a bit silly.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  I understand that, but an auction house has to protect their reputation.

• 30:23Billy Corgan?

  No, this is not an auction house.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, just a sales firm.

• 30:25Billy Corgan?

  You know who I'm talking about.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Okay, I see. Okay.

• 30:27Billy Corgan?

  They don't have the best reputation. Let's put it that way.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  I understand who that is.

• 30:31Billy Corgan?

  Yes. So, so I buy, I buy the board and, uh, and I still have the board, I love the board and I've used the board and I think it's a.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  They sound great.

• 30:39Billy Corgan?

  It's a magical thing. Um, it's, and it's, it's, it, it has a sound that's wholly onto its own. And then, and I look forward as I get older and I make less commercial work and more artistic work, I think I'll use the board a lot more. It's a, it's a treasure that I have. But the funny thing was, and I, I wish I could remember the name of the tech and I'm sure you know the gentleman because he was one of the original techs that used to fix the board back in the day.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Brian Gibson?

• 31:04Billy Corgan?

  There's the man, there's the man's name. Thank you.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:06Billy Corgan?

  So Brian came over to Chicago to, to work on the board for me.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 31:11Billy Corgan?

  And, uh, because of course the company I bought it from, you know, had, had indicated it was in better shape than it was.

• 31:19Billy Corgan?

  So, um, so, okay, great. You know, whatever it's gonna cost, come on, make it work. And he comes and, and, and so, and, you know, he, he's at my, I had a different place at the time in Chicago and he's working on it. And I just, you know, you, you know, we're sitting around shooting this, as you do in studios. And I tell him the story I just told you about them getting grumpy about calling the Beatle board. And, you know, he kind of laughed and he, you know, he's a, he's an old school Beatles EMI guy. So he's, he's heard it all.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:45Billy Corgan?

  Sweet guy. Great. Awesome. Did a great job on the board. Okay. So about three days later, I come back just when he's about finishing up. And he goes, he goes, remember that story you told me? I go, yeah. He goes, I want to show you something. And he takes me around the back of the board.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:00Billy Corgan?

  And he goes, see how the, see how there's different coloring on the wiring? He goes, see this part here? He goes, this is actually from the Abbey Road board.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  I've seen that secret revealed, although it's not out there publicly because he wanted to protect the thing. But it is the proof from the people at work there. Brian Gibson, by the way, not a famous person, and he wasn't a recording engineer that set up the mics and moved the faders. He was a technical guy, the boffin, amp room people.

• 32:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Who I love the most, almost. They're so good. They were the tech guys. And he was there from 64, but mainly 68 onward. So when those boards came in, he installed them. When those boards were breaking, he fixed them. Perfect guy.

• 32:42Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  He's passed away now, but he was.

• 32:44Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I didn't know he passed away.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  He was the one.

• 32:46Billy Corgan?

  God bless.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Lovely, sweet guy. He was the one that introduced Kevin and myself together. He said, Brian, I was interviewing him, he goes, there's a guy I've been talking to for a while, also from America, who's doing a book. And it was such a perfect thing. Also, Brian has most of the pictures in the book that are behind the scenes came from him.

• 33:06Billy Corgan?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  They weren't supposed to take pictures during sessions and a lot of things. So he has a lot of tech photos, perfect for what we wanted. And he just let them use us. So recording the Beatles, which is our greatest hit at this point, book number one, didn't go to Kevin or myself. We gave it to Brian Gibson.

• 33:25Billy Corgan?

  Oh.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:27Billy Corgan?

  So just to finish the story, so I'm standing behind this board. And he goes, do you understand that this is actually from the Abbey Road board? And I said, how is that possible? And he said, well, when, when people would, when things would fail, they wouldn't send us back the whole board. They take out a cassette, they called them. Right? Am I being accurate?

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:45Billy Corgan?

  And he goes, they ship them back to us. And sometimes it was just easier to send them back another one that was just laying in the shop. And we just switched stuff out.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  They didn't care.

• 33:54Billy Corgan?

  It wasn't a big deal to us. So he goes, so basically, you know, to the people who sold you the board, because you actually own a part of that board.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Amazing. That is, and it's, it's proof. This person knows exactly what to do, what is there and what's real. And his authorization is good as gold.

• 34:13Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. So God bless to him. He was what a, what a sweetheart. This episode of The Magnificent Others is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. I, I was wondering, uh, uh, doing something so comprehensive, have you gotten any personal

• 34:56Billy Corgan?

  reflections from the guys in the band? Or even the States? Like, I'm friends with Sean. So like, you know, when I see Sean, sometimes obviously we'll talk about Beatles stuff too. You know, inside baseball stuff. So how, how have there been reactions? Have you gotten any personal reactions from the Estates or the, or the, the guys themselves?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  We know quite a few Beatles kids. Sean is a good friend from way back. We used to tour together. Zach I worked with for years with The Who, good guy. And then Kevin knows Julian well. Danny Harrison, we've known and been to his house and so forth. But, um, I would say the nicest compliment came from Danny Harrison, uh, who told us that he went to interview George Martin one time. And that George was talking about the Beatles. And he said, and Danny asked him what they did on something. George said, hang on. And he pulled our book off the shelf and looked it up.

• 35:47Billy Corgan?

  That's awesome.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  I do think our book, honestly, when it came out, wouldn't have interested like Paul McCartney or Ringo or George Martin that much, because the songs and the music, that is a thousand times more important than what kick drum mic they used. It really is. Our book is a niche thing and it's, it's focusing something. David Bowie, by the way, got a copy of our book and his review was Trainspotter-ish, but good. And so in England, a Trainspotter is a person that checks all the details on every little, this one has two bells and this one has one thing. So Bowie realized, it's a little goofy that these guys care about the speakers that much. But it is cool. So that was nice.

• 36:28Billy Corgan?

  I'm, I'm, I'm a fan. So I, I think it's, I think it's a treasure. I recommend if anybody can find the book and I look forward to the new edition. Um, I saw this in your, in your history, leaving the B word for a second. Uh, is it accurate that you went to school for synthesis and synthesizer? Is that, is that accurate?

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a deep dive. Um, I went to a college which is still there, Cal State Dominguez Hills. And when I was reaching college age, I wanted to train and learn more. I was into the tech side of things, like how everything works. And I grew up a guitar player. Most of my thousands of hours are playing guitar, but nobody's ever said the words, we can't find a guitar player. No one's ever said those words. But I love synthesizer technology.

• 37:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  And when I was growing up analog synths and all the records from Wendy Carlos and Keith Emerson and whoever were just blowing my mind. Those sounds were cool. And synths were unavailable. Like if I went to stores, you didn't see a synthesizer in a store when I was young. We'd have to drive to LA or something just to see one. And so it was like a weird thing. But I loved that. And I found this school, Cal State Dominguez, not only had that, but they had a Synclavier, which was definitely state of the art and the future, as far as I thought. So I went to that school, which is basically Compton in the middle to late eighties. That's where I lived. So it's a really cool school. And the nice thing I loved about it was they would give me the studio keys, stay up all night, do what you want. Amazing.

• 37:54Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  So if I went to UCLA to just study recording, you wouldn't get a chance to hold the studio for yourself.

• 37:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Now, it's my understanding you have a very good vintage synth collection.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Let's say I did, although.

• 38:06Billy Corgan?

  Oh, you got rid of it?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Well, in some ways traded up. Like, who needs a Mini Moog when you have a giant Moog modular, which is the original and the king of the hill? It still sounds better than everything made today.

• 38:18Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Things like that. I had Mellotrons, which are the great keyboards with tapes and samples in them. But I found the sixties version that has the original, like the Beatles version, King Crimson. That's a rarer one and more cool.

• 38:32Billy Corgan?

  Are you talking about the Mark, or Mark one?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Mark two, yeah.

• 38:35Billy Corgan?

  Cause, cause I have a, I have a Mark one that was converted.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  See that most of them are, uh, let's say half of them were, Mark one is just the same thing with earlier versions. So they updated the tape and made it a little cooler. But yes, you know what I'm talking about. That's an amazing machine and they're very rare.

• 38:53Billy Corgan?

  Cause yeah, it's like, I, I got very into vintage synths about 15 to 20 years ago. And I have pretty silly collection. But it was at a point where this, like now that gone through the roof in terms of prices and it's crazy.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  I'm glad, uh, there was a time period in the eighties, nineties, when a Mini Moog was $300. They're easily five grand now and up and climbing. And yet there are replicas that are quite good and different versions of that. So the time when, uh, we spoke briefly before this about, I remember the time when good gear was always in the past. In the eighties and nineties, I didn't love the mixing boards. I didn't like the microphones. The new things coming out didn't sound so good to me and I trusted my ears. Even early digital, most people wouldn't want that. Now, I didn't like it then. I stayed with.

• 39:40Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, a lot of those records unfortunately have aged very poorly because of the, the limitation of the sonics.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  If you were listening, an old analog synthesizer sounded better than a DX7. But DX7 was the new king of the hill. It did its thing. But to me, I was like, listen to the Oberheim over here. Listen to the old ARP. And so I started buying up the hundred dollar and $300. And I filled the room with keyboards for like a thousand dollars back then. There was just.

• 40:06Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  There were times when you like what you like. And I, one of my favorite sayings is you do you. It's not only a, uh, a guidance for you to choose what you want to be. Like, I want to play country with a Marshall amp. But you do you also means that don't worry what, what other people think.

• 40:25Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  What other people think is fashion or what other people think is the cool music.

• 40:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Is very important. You do you is so simple, but it's a guide as well as a restriction.

• 40:37Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Uh, it seemed in the, in the nineties, um, I mean, I had my thing too. There was a, and you were involved. And this is where I first started hearing your name. You kind of got the rep as like the synth guy?

• 40:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:50Billy Corgan?

  Or the, or the, or the guy, if you wanted like a Mellotron or something like you, like your name came up a lot. I heard your name 500 times before I, actually you talked to you. Um, and, uh,

• 41:03Billy Corgan?

  But what do you, what do you think that was? Cause I looked at some of the artists that you work with. And again, I don't know. I know, I know you worked a lot on that one Fiona record, Fiona Apple record. But I'm saying is, uh, you know, John Bryan was a name that got thrown around back in the nineties as well in town here in LA. Cause there weren't a lot of guys who really understood the gear, but I guess less about, what do you think it was about those times that suddenly people sort of turned back to some of those sounds?

• 41:29Speaker 00

  I think at the time, the current offerings were not that great. And you could put that into the recording systems or the type of effects. I mean, there are crazy things like these Tell Ray echoes. John Bryan was my roommate for a while, but I was like, John, you've got to hear this Tell Ray echo. And he made that the sound of his movies and his records for years. It was just this weird looping drum oil can echo that sounds like you're underwater. Nothing modern would do that. No digital rack mount thing. So the deficiencies, which are also features, uh, we're good. Right now you almost can't buy a guitar amp that isn't like a tube amp. That's what people have accepted as a good sound. Unless it's a digital modeling thing, but

• 42:13Speaker 00

  we've come back to those ideas that many people rejected. And I do think when you play with something older, it has character, which may not be flexible. Some of these great reverbs of the past, like an EMT plate or even a spring reverb, doesn't do much, but really what it does is so strong in one direction. You're like, I love it for that.

• 42:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Jimmy Chamberlain from the Pumpkins always calls it musical. That's his way of explaining. He, he loves things that are musical. It's like, it's like there's a sort of call and response that goes on with the gear.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  We could detour because I always use that when I talk about musicians. My favorite musician is Michael Schenker and

• 42:53Billy Corgan?

  So funny. I was talking to his son the other day.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. He's, he's a cool guy. I know him as well. And, um,

• 43:00Speaker 00

  is he better in a speedway or an inventive way? Or no, he just has a perfect voice for what he wants to do. And I love the melody aspect.

• 43:08Billy Corgan?

  Oh my God. So one of the greatest guitar players all time.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  First band I ever saw was UFO and I've been working on their old tracks recently.

• 43:14Billy Corgan?

  Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a new thing for me, but, but a dream come true. But as I was saying, the word musical, it doesn't really matter how fast you play or, but if the, as one of my friends calls it note choice, it's a funny word, but it works.

• 43:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. He's a supreme note choice guy.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:33Billy Corgan?

  He just picks the greatest coolest notes.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Brian May, Ritchie Blackmore, I know you've mentioned him, but one of my biggest influences, when I hear him, he sounds like himself. He sounds confident. The notes are primary. It's not shredding really, but there's something about it that is so bold. And he's very confident. There's no question about that. And yet I think that there is a distinctive voice there. But it's always musical.

• 44:00Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. I, I was in communication with Richie's wife, Candace. Just begging to have Richie on the podcast.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  He is the best interview in the world because he's so wacky. And if you go look up Ritchie Blackmore interviews, which I do every six weeks, I can't wait to see what he says because he's always out there and funny. He's so funny.

• 44:20Billy Corgan?

  And his memory is insane and he has such an incredible recording history even before Deep Purple with Joe Meek and all that stuff. And it's just like, ah, Richie would be a dream guest.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  I, I wouldn't say that he's underrated because most people have a certain time period.

• 44:34Billy Corgan?

  I think he is underrated.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, but I was going to say that, that when you talk about the pantheon of people, Jimmy Page, Pete Townsend, Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, of course, you know, those people are up there and do it. But Ritchie Blackmore should sort of be there in my opinion. And, but we always talk about these kinds of things. I don't care how well you play. It's the songs you write that is what makes me listen to your music. So there would be no Eddie Van Halen if he didn't write some of the greatest songs ever written.

• 45:05Billy Corgan?

  Well, those things, for, for that level of artist, those two things seem to go hand in hand.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, true. Maybe it's a taste sense or a musical discernment, but I can also

• 45:15Billy Corgan?

  It has, it has to be, it has to be.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Feel their influences, but it's how they re-channel it to become original. Yeah.

• 45:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Because even if you like, in my mind, in a weird way, and I know not every musician would make these, this parallel. Van Halen, Eddie and, and Blackmore running kind of almost parallel tracks. They, they are singular guitar players. You can hear the influence, but somehow it doesn't show up in their playing in the way that it seems to show up in everybody else's playing. And then through the majesty of their innovation and ability to play the guitar, they literally create genres that do not exist before they start playing.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  I'd say that's true. Yeah.

• 45:55Billy Corgan?

  Like, cause I was listening, I love Rainbow, which is Blackmore's band after Deep Purple with Ronnie James Dio singing. And then ultimately Joe Lynn Turner and, uh, Graham Bonnet. I mean, Richie's basically inventing hair metal in like 76, but no one calls it hair metal. It's just called hard rock. But if you listen to some of the Rainbow in 76, it's literally Sunset Strip hair metal seven years in advance.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. When Ronnie left Rainbow to join Black Sabbath, which became a very big thing. I mean, Sabbath was my favorite group growing up, although, uh, when he joined, it became a different thing. But it sounded like Rainbow to me because they had keyboards at Martin Birch recording. It didn't sound new to me. It sounded like, but everybody else went, wow, this is amazing.

• 46:35Billy Corgan?

  I never made that, that parallel.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Well, I just said to people, you should go buy some Rainbow albums. If you love this version of Black Sabbath, you will love Rainbow.

• 46:44Billy Corgan?

  Well, we have to go back to Elf, of course. They're the

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:47Billy Corgan?

  The root source of it all.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  You mentioned Richie. If you listen to the very famous live Deep Purple record, 72 in Japan, he's doing these muted gin, gin, gin, gin, gin, gin, gin. I don't think anyone had done that before. It's the sound of heavy metal.

• 47:01Billy Corgan?

  Interesting.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  That muted power chord, gin, gin, gin, through a Marshall thing. Yeah.

• 47:06Billy Corgan?

  I was curious because you know, you're living in this world and you're, you're still so actively involved with everything that's going on. How do you feel about sort of the plugin? It's become such a big business now for, in recording. Before I, before I ask you, and you pick it how you want. Cause over here we have like, in, you know, a thousand plugins for, for gear, uh, meaning like, uh, you know, the teletronics and, you know, including like Abbey Road, uh, reverb chambers. You can get the Capitol reverb chamber. There's all that. And then even on the other side, now you have the synthesizers, the software version of synthesizers. So.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Most of them are as accurate as could be, whatever that means. And usually when it's not accurate, it means the original has some flaw or weirdness in the way it works. I mean, no, if you buy an old mixing board like you did, not every channel is going to sound the same. But in software they will, which is a feature as well as a problem.

• 48:01Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I get that. I never thought of that.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  10 EQs on every channel to sound the same. If you do that on your board, the same boost, it will slightly be different. Although is that a flaw or a feature?

• 48:11Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  So I think they've done a great job of figuring it out, how to replicate a synthesizer, a channel on a board, a compressor. I use that all the time. That being said, I used to record the traditional ways and I was one of the last people. I didn't have a computer till 2009.

• 48:30Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  I had a rule, no phone, no computer in my studio. That was like for a long time. But I kept tape machines around and that's currently still what we're doing at the studio is all my old tape machines are there just so we can transfer tapes for people, old stuff. But when I got into plugins, I was like, well, I can save this. It'll be here tomorrow. That's a huge feature.

• 48:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  I can try different versions and then come back to this one. And if I only have one Fairchild, which I never owned that expensive thing, I can have six of them on the mix. So the benefits do outweigh any possible limitations right now. That being said, I have an old mixing board. And when the pandemic hit, I actually took for the first time a computer home with speakers and did some mixing at home. It was a replacements project for Warner Brothers. And I did some mixes and they said, oh, it sounds great. And I went, it sounds good. No, it's great. I said, no, that's a good sound. But a week or two later, we could move again and get out of our homes. I went back to my studio, working solo and I just put it through the board. And then it became 3D and powerful and alive.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  I didn't do anything. And then I sent it to them. They're like, oh, wow, that sounds really good. And I was like, it's a secret weapon to have hardware.

• 49:42Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I certainly believe in moving electricity still.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:47Billy Corgan?

  How did you get into the, into this archivist is it, is the sort of the benign word, but like, I'm fascinated that you're sort of involved in this like, you know, digging through catalogs and finding unreleased stuff. How did you get that gig to begin with?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  A good producer friend of mine named Bill Inglot was producing a record for me, with me. And the artist was there doing a very sixties type sound. And he said, wow, you work really fast. And I was like, drum sounds 15 minutes. You know, you shouldn't, you can only move the mic so many times before you're done. And he liked that. And then he said at one point, could you make something sound old? And I was like, I cannot make a modern record. I can't do, I can't tune a vocal like Katy Perry.

• 50:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  I can't do drum samples. I can do anything Led Zeppelin did. I can do The Doors.

• 50:33Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  And he goes, great, come with me to Capitol Records. And we started working on a Doobie Brothers box set. So Rhino is the wing of Warner Brothers that does their catalog projects. So any band that's not currently actively working with them, which is Fleetwood Mac, Aretha, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper. All those tapes, they're like, it's time to go into Alice Cooper's 50th anniversary of School's Out. Let's pull the tapes out. I have a tape machine. I still have all my old machines. And originally, pre-computer, we were just going through like, again, Fleetwood Mac, one of my favorites, going through the tapes of Rumors, et cetera, my studio, just listening to the versions and trying to make something that is respectful and releasable as a bonus track.

• 51:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. How do you feel about the rise of that? I mean, it's, you know, when the, when the CD box set kicked in, sort of, you know, in our generation, sort of somewhere in the 90s.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 51:27Billy Corgan?

  Now it's kind of turned into like, now we're kind of past that line and we're into like, things that were never finished, incomplete takes. And I'm the guy buying that stuff. So I, there's no judgment from my end. But how do you feel from your perspective? Because you work in the, in this, let's call it that side of the business.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  We have a weird overabundance of options in this world and that's ubiquitous, whether, whether you're into cars or sports, you can know about the girlfriend of your favorite catcher this weekend. You know, it, it happens. So in the case of music, I do love hearing, there are some tracks by some of these groups that are far better than the version on the record. Maybe they were dabbling in some substances, or maybe they were just thinking it needed more backing vocals. But going through things like Fleetwood Mac and taking it off all the overdubs to put five people back in the room. Wow, that's Fleetwood Mac that we love. And it shows how good they are without assistance.

• 52:26Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  I still love their production when they go into Tango in the Night and Mirage and stuff. There's, there's amazing layers of vocals and guitars. But when you strip it back, they're a phenomenal group. I mean, not just good, but something magical.

• 52:38Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  So I love to hear that stuff and reveal it without not tuning vocals, not really fixing things much, just trying to show a, a better version of something that hasn't been heard yet. But back to your question, you know, Pat Smear, he's a good friend of mine. Funniest guy in the world. And he said, oh, box sets, those things you listened to once. Right?

• 52:59Billy Corgan?

  It sounds like that.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  And so I have bought a few, like Rainbow Rising, where the bonus disc, I listened to it a bunch. It's really good. But even some Beatles stuff, I'll listen to two or three tracks over and over again. But the outtake of this one song where I would have died for that in this 80s as a bootleg.

• 53:19Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  I listened to all my bootlegs in the 80s to death, especially the Beatles. And now I have better quality versions, but so much is coming out and so much is competing for our attention.

• 53:29Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Including this show, that it is very hard to give it the kind of focus we used to have. So I will ask you, does music feel like it sits in a different place in today's world?

• 53:43Billy Corgan?

  It does, but it feels like something's coming back. And I don't mean it's coming back like how it used to be. I think it's coming back like the new version of the old version. And I don't know what that is yet.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  When you were a young teenager, how many records did you have?

• 53:57Billy Corgan?

  Well, my father was a musician, so we would have had maybe like 20 albums in the house.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  A lot, in some ways.

• 54:02Billy Corgan?

  Probably, yeah, compared to most people, yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  You'd listen to it front and back, over and over and over again, right?

• 54:07Billy Corgan?

  I listened to stuff I didn't even like.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  What kind of stuff would that be that's inside your brain?

• 54:12Billy Corgan?

  Uh, you talking about back then?

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:13Billy Corgan?

  I mean, we're, we're talking about like Return to Forever, Romantic Warrior was the, was the record.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 54:20Billy Corgan?

  We're talking about Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Great.

• 54:24Billy Corgan?

  I had my own Black Sabbath albums.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Lemmy said something very prescient, and I, I think Lemmy is sort of a genius in ways beyond music. But one of his things he said was, we all had that music we heard before our filters went up. And he said, for me, that's Buddy Holly, The Beatles. He goes, not Elvis, but Buddy Holly and The Beatles, you can never do wrong. Everything they did was gold. And that is pretty strong music, of course. But, you know, he saw The Beatles before they were famous, Extra Impact with him. But he said, it could be a boy band, or it could be Metallica, that you listen to before your filters went up. Nothing can ever touch that for you.

• 55:01Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  So I grew up with like, my parents' show tunes, like Sound of Music and Jesus Christ Superstar, burned into my brain and I can't ever not like them. Nobody can even knock them down because they're just pure.

• 55:12Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 55:16Billy Corgan?

  I, I know every estate or every band's difference, but generally speaking, there's got to be that moment where you're in a room by yourself and you're here, you've got the master tapes. You know, these, like in our world, kind of our, our audio version of gold. You know, whether it's Fleetwood Mac or whatever, or it's Black Sabbath. You've got the tapes, you're in the room, you're by yourself. There's a certain responsibility that comes with being a kind of a preservationist, archivist. I mean, you're given a great responsibility and I, you're a sensitive person. So it strikes me that you would take, you would take that responsibility seriously.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Very much, but it's interesting too, the perspective where transferring things and almost everyone comes in and says, this recording is very important. It's the only recording of my dad's group. This recording is my grandmother sending a message to us. It's very important. I said, almost every tape at this point is one of a kind. Almost every tape, even outside the world of big labels, is actually more precious because it could not be replaced. But if you gave me the Hotel California tape and I threw it off the Santa Monica Pier, Hotel California would still exist.

• 56:21Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  So in some ways, that tape, which I've had, Hotel California is here, 24 tracks. Amazing sounding, incredible production.

• 56:30Billy Corgan?

  Who produced that?

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Bill Simzik.

• 56:32Billy Corgan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  There's like two or three producers who I think no one could touch, but that's one of them. And the recording is phenomenal. You put up the faders, that's the record. It's unbelievable how good it is. But if that tape disappeared tomorrow.

• 56:46Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, we have, we have it, yeah.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  But we have it. And, and does it need a surround mix? Does it need a commercial mix with no vocal on? Probably not for the Eagles, but.

• 56:55Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  More and more, we have found what's out there. I don't know if you know about this side project, but one day I was at Sunset Sound and the owner, good friend of mine, Paul Camerata, said, we have like 2,500 tapes in the attic and we've got some Who tapes up there. What? And it was the Who by Numbers multitracks from 75. They never recorded there. So I talked to Pete Townsend and he's like, what? Oh, great. We'll send them back. There are so many tapes in this world in studios or in producers closets that no one knows, that I started a nonprofit, it's just a website called Master Tape Rescue. And anybody, including me, that has tapes on their shelf, put them up and list it like Craigslist. And it's anonymous. No one knows like Craigslist where you live or where you are.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  But studios have given us 500, a thousand tapes to list. And then Steve Miller writes in and says, hey, you've got a live show of mine. R E M wrote in and said, you found a live gig with multitracks. Can we have it? Yeah, I stay out of it. There's no money exchanged. Let me connect you to those people and they can get the tapes back to you. So it's a really interesting idea because I realized, let's say there's a studio here in Santa Monica that's been in business for years. They don't want to go through the closet and make an inventory and put something on the web. But it's too much work, but giving us a listing, Bowie Live 76, what does that mean? Doesn't matter. Just put it up there. And then if somebody needs that for a documentary or a project, then we can ask those people directly and they'll pull it out and take pictures or whatever.

• 58:25Billy Corgan?

  Oh, wow.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:27Billy Corgan?

  You've been linked here to the, to the never ending saga of the Van Halen tapes. One personal story is I interviewed Eddie for Guitar World in 98.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Ah, yes.

• 58:38Billy Corgan?

  And once he realized I could actually play guitar, he really warmed up to me.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 58:42Billy Corgan?

  And towards the end of the four hours that I was with him, he took me in this room and sort of pointed at this wall of tapes.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  I know that wall well.

• 58:51Billy Corgan?

  And I said, what's that? And he goes, well, there it is, you know what I mean? And I go, are you ever going to do anything with it? Very Eddie, you know?

• 58:59Speaker 00

  True.

• 59:01Billy Corgan?

  Now, the story I heard years ago was when Eddie was still alive, God bless him. He basically said, I don't want any of this stuff to come out. Is, is there truth to that or do you know about that or?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say that's true, although I can't speak for another person. Alex is a good friend of mine. We met late in life and he's a good guy and I like what he's doing. But their world is a bit like a soap opera.

• 59:29Billy Corgan?

  I've heard.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  The, the, the Kiss is a soap opera.

• 59:32Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  But Van Halen has a bit of comings and goings. It depends on what year you talk to so and so or what's needed. It's been pretty dysfunctional as to who can work with whom. It's very tough right now for them to get things done. So I don't have high hopes for it, but many years ago, just the basic assignment Warner Brothers always gives, let's go through the Van Halen tapes. And to clarify, when you work for a label, you're supposed to give them your tapes when you're done with the record. That's the rules. Doesn't always happen. Sometimes they get left at a studio. Usually they go there. And we went through the Van Halen tapes. There aren't a lot of outtakes. In other words, there's one recording of Jamie's crying. If they did three takes, they threw them out at some point. But we did have some alternate versions.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  And then there were these amazing demos they did with Ted Templeman before the first record where they just knocked out like 30 songs in a day or two. Here's our whole catalog. And they had a lot of later songs like DOA and stuff that became Mean Streets later on. So they had a lot of good material to pick from, A, to get signed and B, to make the first record. So we went through this stuff. I'm a massive Van Halen fan. And regarding guitar players, I actually think Eddie is in a different category than everyone else in the world. I mean, maybe Les Paul is in his own category too. And how much they changed the universe?

• 1:00:52Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  But those two people. Where seismic shift and also the quality of the musicianship is way up there. It's hard to even fathom, but also Eddie would be nobody without great songs. I wouldn't care if he went to G I T and played better than that. It's not important. The songs is what counts. So I do love Van Halen as a performing group. They're one of the last groups to grow up like the Beatles did, playing covers in bars. So they knew Pretty Woman, they knew ZZ Top songs, they knew Superstition. They were doing these cool covers, so they knew how to do modulations, they knew how to do

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  syncopations, they knew how to do basslines that went opposite the, they learned from all those songs. When you grow up in that world of cover tunes, I was in a band that did covers. You had to learn funny ninth chords and things you don't know about. So they learned their lessons the way the Beatles did. At that period, it just about changed. I would say around the eighties, most people stopped playing covers and started doing original music. So whatever chords you choose or your fingers choose tends to be your style rather than even learning, oh, we will put some jazzy funky things in this rock music. So Van Halen and the harmonies as well, there's so much, and they found Ted Templeman who found them.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  It just works so well that Van Halen is sort of a different animal. However, there is a great amount of disagreement between the people and how they want things to be. So you talked about this wall of tapes. I've seen the picture, Al showed me the picture and I said, one third of those are blank. And he went, what? And I said, the whole right side, I can tell there's blank tape. How do you know that? I said, there's nothing written on them. But Eddie, at one point, and Tom Petty went around L A buying up every roll of tape because they stopped making analog tape.

• 1:02:43Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  And Petty and Ed always liked analog tape. So the two of them were fighting each other to buy up all the tape in town. So one whole side of it is blank. The other two walls are mostly two inch tapes, some mixed tapes and so forth. Everything done before fifty one fifty Studios was built is in the Warner Brothers vault.

• 1:03:04Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Warner Brothers keeps that. When fifty one fifty was built, they were supposed to turn in the tapes legally, contractually, but they never did. So at this point, the Van Halen family archive holds those tapes. Warner Brothers isn't contesting or fighting it. Would love to know what's on there, but they have talked about it. We've never, we've talked about archiving it for the Van Halen family, but it's never happened. And I know that they can go through and hear stuff and probably are working on something with that stuff. What, what that becomes or how it goes? Yeah.

• 1:03:37Billy Corgan?

  Okay. So yeah, so I get that. That's complicated. I'd be remiss not to mention your new project, which is the George Martin Scores. I watched a little promotional video that you and your partner did.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Billy Corgan?

  And very interesting, but really a passion project?

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say it was the hardest thing we've ever done. Kevin and I have done several books together, recording the Beatles was the first one. And then two very beautiful photo books with a photographer, friend of the Beatles who we met. And then as we were about to rebuild the new recording, the Beatles, Valz Martin approached us and said, we've got all these orchestral scores. To be fair, that's not the world I live in. I can read some music, but I'm not, I love symphony music. I grew up with classical music too. But there are people that live in that world every day, writing for oboes, transposing instruments, all these things. But we felt that it was a good job for us to take something that might appear lofty and intimidating and make it friendly and cool

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  for rock and rollers and people that just love the Beatles to learn what George Martin was doing.

• 1:04:44Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  So more than 10 years of our lives went into it. I don't know that, I mean, it's thousands of hours, working with all these people around the world who are orchestrators and conductors and so forth. They advise us on what they're seeing here. So besides you get yesterday, but then you get a few pages telling you what's happening.

• 1:05:01Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  So it's fascinating because we got to go into it and then go back to Abbey Road and re-record some of the orchestras and then we give people the thumb drive that gives you the multitrack. You can play and mix your own stuff.

• 1:05:14Billy Corgan?

  So it's, it's four volume set book?

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Well, there's three, and then there's a bonus version, which has like a conductor's baton and DVD Blu-ray extra stuff. Yeah, but three giant books and it's about 22 pounds. It's huge.

• 1:05:31Billy Corgan?

  Is it, is it surreal to stand in Abbey Road and sort of hear this music, you know?

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a strange thing. We had one day booked years ago when we were doing the project originally. George was still alive at one point and Giles was going to be the producer. And then George had passed away before the session. Giles couldn't be there, so we ended up producing a George Martin session in Abbey Road with some of the original pages there as people are playing the string quartet or doing I'm the Walrus. So it was weird. We do have a, we've been there enough times now to,

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  we appreciate every time I walk in, the smell, the view, it looks like the sixties in there. They keep it that way for a good reason. And it sounds amazing in that room. It's very different than you'd expect because it's basketball court size, but there's almost no echo. It's a big, warm resonance, which is great for drums and piano and vocals. Have you ever gotten to record there or worked there?

• 1:06:30Billy Corgan?

  I've never even been in the building.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Time to make a trip over.

• 1:06:33Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I've thought about it.

• 1:06:38Billy Corgan?

  This is a little bit of a punter question, but so how long did you know George before he passed, George Martin?

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Not much. I mean, we spent days at his house. We'd go there and then we came back on another trip to come go through stuff. The first trip was just to see what they had. They only really knew that they had yesterday, Eleanor Rigby and Strawberry Fields, but they didn't know what else they had. And we wanted to know not just the Beatles, but George is a multi-dimensional person. And we asked them, could we expand it to show more than the six years where he did orchestration for the Beatles?

• 1:07:12Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  But there's Jeff Beck, there's some film stuff he did, James Bond and stuff. So we asked about that and yeah, they, they thought it was a good idea to broaden it, just not Beatles, Beatles, the B word all the time. And we loved doing it, meeting with George, he's the man you expect. Kind and gentlemanly and older English guy who's really, really cool. And he was funny and he was charming and we got to work with him and it was a pretty serious level though, because we're Beatles fans, but we're not fanboys. So driving out there, Kevin and I were like, if you told us when we were 13 years old or 22, we'd have a heart attack, but today we're here to work. And then sometimes it's like, hey, we got work to do, you know? We can't talk, we've got to keep working.

• 1:07:58Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Billy Corgan?

  Having been inside the sort of the Beatle machine, I don't know a better phrase for it. How do you, how do you view George now, especially since you went so deep into the recording side of the equation?

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  Kevin and I were among the biggest fans of George Martin you could have because we really paid attention to the details. Given that he was doing comedy records and sound effects and things, the Beatles are the group that plays on stage. George Martin is the echoes, the backwards parts, the flanging, the cellos, upside down things, orchestrations that we consider the Beatles. That's George Martin in their sandwich, if you will, right? We can't separate them now, but it's one of the things that made the Beatles greater. And had they had a different producer, I don't know that would have happened. So it's one of the reasons we still reference them. If you think about trumpet arpeggios, ba ba ba, ba ba ba, you say it's the Beatles.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Well, the Beatles don't play trumpets, but George Martin made it fit with what they do.

• 1:09:01Billy Corgan?

  It's, it's a theory I kind of came to, came at later in life.

• 1:09:06Billy Corgan?

  It's a Beatles wonk and part of it was in, at least informed by Jeff Emmerich's book where he talks at greater, great length about recording the band, being in the, in the room during those sessions. And it was more of a greater appreciation from McCartney's vision of the, of the band and his, his influence as a producer.

• 1:09:26Billy Corgan?

  How do you, how do you rate McCartney as a producer, both then and then posthumously? Because it's, it's, it's not a story that gets talked about a lot, but I think there's probably more there than even a Beatle fan would think.

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  I'm a big McCartney fan and in some ways, it's like Beatles and Stones, McCartney and Lennon, some people have their sides they choose. I'm glad I don't have to choose a side, but John Lennon had a distinctive voice and a distinctive approach. He was more throw a hand grenade in the room and see what happens. And Paul was more about controlling things, it seems. And so if you have a McCartney song, they can play it with five horns at Disneyland. But a Lennon song doesn't even translate with a rock band on stage. I don't want to hear Lennon covered by most people.

• 1:10:11Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  It's so distinctively him that hearing somebody else do Me and My Monkey, I don't really like those covers very much.

• 1:10:20Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  It doesn't really work, although his singularity is a strength. But Paul's music is a little bit more musical and a little more melodic and timeless.

• 1:10:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  Although they overlap, you could do In My Life on a harpsichord at a wedding.

• 1:10:35Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  And Paul has these raucous rock and roll songs, but the ones we know them best for, Paul lands into arranging, careful orchestration. So to what you say, at one point, the Beatles are producing themselves in the White Album era. George is off looking for a new studio that would eventually become Air Studios. But he's leaving the Beatles to do what they needed to do and they made the White Album, a lot of it.

• 1:10:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. There was a lot of talk in the last couple of years about them using A I and Giles. I have a father-in-law who's Gilles, so

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Billy Corgan?

  Giles Martin.

• 1:11:13Billy Corgan?

  He talked about, you know, being able to rescue things that they'd never been able to use. Like, you know, there was a live recording where they used A I to do the separation and stuff like that. Do you have any, any particular opinion on them? Cause I, I have a theory and, and I always use the Beatles as an example because obviously the number one topic, at least what I found in the music business in the last couple of years is A I. What's going to happen? What's A I going to do, good and bad, particularly with songwriting and all that?

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  You could spend six hours in that, given the Beatles situation, I think sometimes the word A I is misapplied to anything that's large learning models and sort of trickery, but it may not be an intelligence type thing. If you're training software to do certain things.

• 1:11:57Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  It's not necessarily AI. It parallels or works with it. But those of my friends of mine who are coders say, oh, that's definitely not AI. It's a misapplication.

• 1:12:06Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  And in some ways, that's a buzzword, like we used to say, interactive or HD or something. A buzzword that makes things sound cool. In a lot of cases, the Beatles were doing stem separation. Uh, and that was new technology at the time. I first heard it at Abbey Road where they said, we've got a Beatles song here in mono and we'll play it for you in stereo. How could you? It's on one track of tape. How could you? We figured out how to separate the guitars, but as an engineer, those frequencies, no, it's not frequencies. It's the shape of the note, the length of the note makes it a bass in certain frequencies with a shape. And then a piano has a different attack. So it knows that even though it's the same note, that's a piano. It's really cool how it figures it out.

• 1:12:46Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Billy Corgan?

  So what I've been saying, just sitting around tables when these subjects come up is, uh, and it's an interesting litmus test question, uh, which is, uh, if you could hear Meet the Beatles as if it was recorded yesterday, would you be interested in that?

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  Um, yes, as long as the original's there. You can always give me a black.

• 1:13:08Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see what you're saying.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:13:10Billy Corgan?

  You don't mind the upscale if, if, if this doesn't destroy the original.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't wait to see the Wizard of Oz at the Sphere with all the extended screen and all the things flying around. Just leave the original piece of art where it is. Um, some artists have taken, I won't mention names, but some artists have taken the original off the market and left a new version with new drummers or new mixes. And I think that's kind of, it's okay, but it's not fair to say this is superior.

• 1:13:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, yeah. Cause I, I just, I know how the music business operates. So once they figure out they can make a whole nother round of money off of 50s and 60s and 70s catalogs by doing stem separation.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Billy Corgan?

  They're gonna.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Um, I've been playing with recently, uh, one of my new projects right now is a famous group on a famous tour and all they can find is a mono tape. And all we can figure it was a broadcast on the radio, but it sounds really good. It's in mono. So I am now splitting the guitars, drums, vocals out.

• 1:14:03Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  To just pan it out, not really to change the mix, but just be able to give you some stereo.

• 1:14:07Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  And the guitar is over here, although that software is always a bit flawed. How could it know that a weep on the guitar is not a backing vocal or a horn going up? Or a mini mode bending a note? It's really tricky to know those things, even if you're a human, what all those notes are. So it's great what it does. It's one of my favorite tools. Right now, if I'm mixing a live record, like we just did a Fleetwood Mac live thing. Lindsay's vocal, he's got a loud guitar booming behind.

• 1:14:33Billy Corgan?

  You can get rid of it.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  I can take that out and I get a good, clean vocal to work with. So it was an an actual spill from the stage sound. Very hard to work or Christine McVie has a lower voice and she's got a loud monitor so she can hear the band rocking. And oftentimes it gets in the way of a low note. Now I can turn that down.

• 1:14:50Billy Corgan?

  Ah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Billy Corgan?

  I feel like this is a good way to, to end, cause, cause the synth, back to synths.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:02Billy Corgan?

  I'm sure probably mangling it, but I, I saw this thing where Bob Moog was saying once about that he believes in the electricity in the wires, that there's almost a spiritual capacity to what goes on with synthesis. Do you feel that way?

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  Years ago, I was doing a lot of deep, uh, therapy.

• 1:15:20Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  And I came to realization that the therapist said was very Buddhist is that it's true and it's not true.

• 1:15:31Billy Corgan?

  I'll leave it, I'll leave it there.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Billy Corgan?

  As fellow synthesis enthusiasts, I'll, I'll give you this softball. How do you, cause, cause usually when I try to explain my interest in synthesis, particularly since I'm identified as a guitar player, and let's not forget Eddie Van Halen had probably as big a set by playing the synthesizer.

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Billy Corgan?

  Which gets lost on a lot of people. But from your end, explain to the layperson what the, what the, what the, what the particular attraction is.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  Well, sculpting sound.

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  I'm very particular what the term synthesizer is, and this is more academic than not, but I would even say a mini moog may not be a pure synthesizer. Why is that? Cause it has a certain fixed routing. It has a certain set of options. They're pretty wide ranging, but it always sounds like a mini moog. I can't put the amplifier before the filter. I can't put the oscillators between. And so the older synths, you have a big modular synth, I understand, right? The kind where you patch the panels together.

• 1:16:37Billy Corgan?

  I have plenty of.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  I know. And so when you understand that, it's like a cook.

• 1:16:41Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  With a kitchen full of nutmeg and flour and sea salt and a great cook.

• 1:16:49Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Knows how to use that better, but most people want to go fast. They want to go easy.

• 1:16:54Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  They don't want to learn all the differences between the kinds of salt. So what I find is that synthesis who know what they're doing, prefer to not have someone limit you with, this is the way it goes. Like a Prophet five to me is a boring synthesizer. It's one of the top rated, most valuable ones. And I love the records that were made with it, but to me it's a little box that you can't get much beyond.

• 1:17:15Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  The kind you have and then I have where you patch it in together. Incredible sound options. You can do the worst and weirdest and the best things with it. There are still sounds, my synthesizer from 1969 to 74 is when those modules were made. It makes sounds every day that I've never heard before.

• 1:17:33Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  No one's heard before.

• 1:17:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, it's the closest, working with modular synthesis is the closest I've ever felt to, if you want to be spiritual about it, would be God's choices on the universe, right? It's all the building block components are in front of you. And I think that's what gets lost with most people. And so when I've done, I've done live performance synthesizer shows, right? Literally just set up a modular.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 1:17:54Billy Corgan?

  I just, and I've released the records and my fans don't care about them, but I still put them out.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:18:00Billy Corgan?

  One time I did like an eight hour performance and recorded it and but, but, but, what people, what people don't understand is, is and you, and you hit on exactly what I would say. It's, it's hard to imagine that if you give a musician a guitar or some pedals and an amp or even a keyboard like a, like a Prophet five, you are on some level, you're dealing with limitations. Somebody else has pre-made the choices for you. So a guitar player, what are your choices? Well, I can tune the guitar differently. I can run it through this wacky thing, but at the end of the day, I'm really not in control of what this thing actually does. I haven't even, I, I'm not even in control of the, how hot the pickups are or something. Synthesis allows you to go to the actual foundational thing.

• 1:18:42Billy Corgan?

  So like you said, you can choose 800 different versions of soul. You're not just given this one soul. And when you get to that, as such, you from a composition mind, it's sort of mind blowing because it takes you back more to the primitive state of music making. It bypasses the intellectual overlay, which is like, what would the Beatles do? Or what did Jimmy Page do in the studio? And now you're just down to primitive synthesis. And I saw this quote once from Stockhausen, where he was explaining, um, what his attraction to synthesis was as a composer. And he said, synthesis is the only way you can have sound without environmental affectation.

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:19:15Billy Corgan?

  Because if you play any sound in a room, and even as we're talking, we can hear my voice bouncing off the wall. He's like synthesis, you can actually have pure sound without environmental effect, reverb, the airplane going overhead.

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  Or you can create that environment too.

• 1:19:29Billy Corgan?

  Exactly. So, um, so.

• 1:19:32Speaker 00

  What was your first synthesizer and how did you learn how to use it?

• 1:19:35Billy Corgan?

  Um, well, funny, uh, like a lot of people in, in the nineties, you know, uh, there was a situation on a record where I, I needed a synthesizer for something. And I had a buddy who had vintage synths. He even had one of the early PPGs where it had the, the

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  Screen.

• 1:19:53Billy Corgan?

  The screen and, and, uh, and you know, to me it's like, give me the synthesizer, press the button till you find the sound you like. Maybe you alter it a little bit, you filter a bit. And the buddy was like, no, let me bring in my vintage synths and I'm going to show you, these are supreme instruments. And I made it actually, the first time I ever really worked with any real synthesizers, I had a hit record with it was a song called I, which was for a David Lynch film. David Lynch had rejected my first offering and so on a whim, I sent this other song and he liked that. So I, I was scrambling in one day in between tour dates to make this record. So I'm, I'm using real synthesizers for the first time. And it was sort of illuminating. It was like, wow, there's this whole other world here.

• 1:20:37Billy Corgan?

  The lazy take of the one button and you hit the sound. You know, the guitar center thing where you're like, you know, and drive you crazy, you know, you get, you get, you get a new synthesizer and it's like the wacky patches to sell the synth, but none of them are functional. So it was the idea of like, wow, I could really get under the hood here. And, and I have a different level of control and it opened me up as a composer to other tonal things, probably more akin to what an orchestral or symphonic a person feels with the tonal palette of a full orchestra. And having just done a, an opera version of my album, Melancholy in, in in Chicago, uh, last year, you know, standing in front of an orchestra with 60 people playing in the orchestra in a 40 piece choir, the tonal palette.

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Billy Corgan?

  As composed of like a normal rock band where it's like, is the Marshall working today? Cause there's not enough power coming in, in Malaysia. It, it really opens you up and understands that compositionally, you're, you're, you're so used to in rock and roll, dealing with limitation.

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  I, I think that when you had your first experience with synthesizers, you didn't know what the capabilities were. When I had my first ARP synthesizer, I didn't even know what all the sliders did, but eventually, okay, this one makes it higher. This will make it brighter. You start to figure it out. It's a new language, but the theory of synthesis, going back to the 60s original patchable synthesizers is you design the sound. Let's say it's four minutes long. My, my note will be evolving over four minutes. There are conceptual things as well as what works, like a fat bass sound. But I really still like the inspiration of saying, whether it be sampling, let's do it's not sample trumpets and drums. Let's make garden gates into Jimi Hendrix feedback, right?

• 1:22:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  Sample the kitchen sounds and make music. People aren't doing that much, but the potential is there. And just this year, I met these inventors from New Zealand. They have this thing called the field guitar, which is not out yet. My mind exploded like when I first had a synthesizer. This guitar, it's not a guitar synth, but you can process it. Like first thing I asked him, can you put a slow attack on every string? It's not a synth. It's still the guitar, the E string twanging, but with a slow attack. So I can play Blackbird.

• 1:22:46Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  On polyphonically or have vibrato on the top three strings, but not on the bottom strings. Uh, I put a tremolo on each string at different speeds or you move the guitar and it senses your positions to change the speed of your Leslie and your filter. It's doing all these things and my mind is going, wow, I'm a guitar guy like you.

• 1:23:08Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  We spent our lives learning to do this stuff. And then I don't have to change that language that I speak, but now I can have some of those sounds that I always wished a guitar could reach the next level, you know?

• 1:23:22Billy Corgan?

  Okay. Well, thank you. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to find something that feels, I like a good ending, you know?

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Billy Corgan?

  So, um, give me, give me, give me something that you're, that you're excited about.

• 1:23:33Speaker 00

  Well, I would say, uh, we didn't even talk about the Who, but I've worked with them for years and what I'm excited, we just talked about synthesizers. I pitched out album to Pete Townsend that I'm finishing last night, which is a record of his electronic work. No guitars, no singing.

• 1:23:49Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  Probably called electronics, tentatively, double album of just the Bob O'Reilly, the Won't Get Fooled Again, the electronics and other pieces you might not have heard. But it's all the synthesizer side of Pete Townsend, cause I love that part of him. But you never see it on stage. You've never been in the studio with him. So we get to focus on that part and he loved the idea. And he said, go make this record for me. So

• 1:24:10Billy Corgan?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  It's coming soon.

• 1:24:11Billy Corgan?

  I love Pete. So that's cool to hear. Um, but is it true that, that the Bob O'Reilly sound is really like a ham in Oregon?

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  Lowry.

• 1:24:17Billy Corgan?

  Lowry.

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Billy Corgan?

  At least I know that much.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  It's a great tidbit. Thank you. Take.

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