Don Puluse:
Recording With The Legendary Sly Stone

Don Puluse contributed enormously to the sound of Sly & the Family Stone as he was recording engineer for many of the songs that appeared on their earlier recordings. Don is now the Dean of the Music Technology Division at Berklee College of Music and receives e-mail at [email protected]. In this interview, originally published in Musician's Information (May 1994), Don discusses some of the work he did with this legendary group. MI: Did you work with Sly Stone on a number of albums? DP: Other than the very first one, I did all of Sly's early recordings. I did Dance to the Music, his third album Life, part of Fresh, most of Stand! as well as the singles he released shortly after Stand. MI: What was it like working with him? DP: The thing that impressed me most about the band was when they listened, they danced. They would come into the control room and they'd all be dancing and you would think they weren't hearing a thing. And then Sly would say: "Stop the tape! Stop the tape!" Then he'd say something like "Cynthia, you do this, Jerry do this." He would just shout out these instructions. They would run back into the studio ... and I mean literally run ... they'd be sitting down before the assistant engineer had time to rewind the tape to the beginning! It was incredibly dynamic. Sly produced and I engineered and made all of the control room decisions until playback time. It worked very, very well. Those were dynamic sessions and there was never any letup. I will also say this: there were no drugs. There were really no signs of drugs in any of those recording sessions. MI: Do any sessions stand out in your mind? DP: Sly did Everyday People and then decided to re-record the song. I heard the first four bars and knew it was a hit. I mean, the groove was just unbelievable. So he said to me: "You know that song ...," we didn't have titles, by the way, everything was 1, 2, 16, 23, etc., so I'd say "Is that the one that goes Da Da, Da-Da-Da?" And he'd say: "No no no. The one that goes Da Da Da Da-Da Da." And that's how we identified songs. Anyway, that one song was "Everyday People" and he said: "I want to cut that again." He re-recorded it and I was really bummed because the original track was great. When it came time to do overdubs I asked him which one to use and he said: "Oh, I don't care, you pick it." Of course I went back to the original. He loved Dance to the Music so much that one day he came into the studio while I was in Europe and asked the engineer to erase everything but the drums and bass. And the engineer tried to talk him out of it, saying: "Well, Sly, we can make a copy," but he said: "No, no. I don't want to make a copy. That's the best bass and drum sounds I've ever got and I want to make another song on that drums and bass." So the engineer came to me when I got back and said: "I have to tell you this. I'm really sorry but I had no choice. I had to erase "Dance to the Music." It doesn't exist." MI: Did he bring his material into the studio pretty much complete? DP: They would know where they were going but it all evolved in the studio. Once I went to see Sly play a club gig -- MI: Was this in San Francisco? DP: New York. All of this was done in New York. I went to see their show after we did the second album. The one with all the numbers, no names. Anyway, when I went to see his show they didn't know how to end anything. Nothing had an ending. Every song on the album was faded! So I went to see the show and they didn't know how to end. Finally Sly would jump up and they'd land on a chord and that was the end. You could see it was really studio stuff they were working on. But Sly was a very dynamic guy, a very bright guy. I mean, look at what he started! MI: When he was recording drums did you ever see Sly use rhythm machines? DP: I've heard him use them but not with me. It was all just straight out drumming with me, no click track. MI: Did he do a lot of overdubbing? DP: No. Generally everything was done together and occasionally they would do the horns over. That was a band that could do it. They played together a lot so they could just go in and cut the tracks. MI: Did you ever record them in performance? DP: I recorded them at the Fillmore East once ... and what a band to record live! I was down below the stage without a video monitor ... and the lead vocal would come up on the organ mic or the guitar mic! You never knew what was going to happen next. They would start playing and then take a piece of their equipment and just start marching around the stage. And then they marched through the audience and actually marched out to Second Avenue and marched around with the audience following them. So there was this one huge line and they'd come back up on stage and continue the concert. It was wild. We did one concert at the Fillmore East with Jimi Hendrix. Eddie Kramer recorded Jimi and I was recording Sly on the same funky equipment down below the stage. You could hardly hear the monitors but somehow you did it. MI: What were you recording on then? DP: I was told quite clearly that there was no way the CBS crew was going to carry a 16-track recorder downstairs. They gave me a 4-track tape recorder -- that was a concession. The guys were pretty upset about the new style of doing things. They were used to doing the Tony Bennetts, the big shows where you set up and run your 4-track and it's nice and straight ahead. You couldn't do that with rock & roll. Before, you would use a CBS-made console which was well-made but relatively simple. Consoles grew increasingly more complicated in the 60's, and before you knew it you were using consoloes with features that couldn't be duplicated easily. I was there when CBS bought their first MCI console. I hate to say that -- that was 25 years ago! And you know, the way things are going, people are not going to recognize a recording studio in 10 years. We're not going to recognize the processes we use today. It's going to go way beyond just doing things in a home studio. That's minor. I don't think you will see a single computer anymore ... computers will be built into everything and there will be computer brains all over the place. I don't think there's any question that we're going to look back at this period as "the good old days" and wonder if people were more creative in "those days." MI: Getting back to Sly Stone for a moment, did he have any way he approached his music? DP: I didn't see a lot of writing. He was a big idea man, feeding the horns ideas: "Great, now do this. Larry do this." Larry Graham was the bass player. Sly's brother Freddie was on guitar. There was one tune, Sing a Simple Song, where he has a scream that gets panned. Anyway, I was recording Sly and he was just doing the vocals. In order to get the effect he wanted he ran from the left side of the mic to the right side while he was screaming. We ended up panning it anyway because it was only going down mono. But there was Sly, going for an effect. He was a very funny, dynamic guy. MI: What was the first thing you did with Sly Stone? DP: "Dance to the Music." I had been a remix engineer at CBS Records. "Remix" was the stage after the original recording was made. A record was not usually mixed by the engineer who did the recording and overdubbing. So, I was a remix engineer at that point and Roy Halee, who produced Simon and Garfunkel, Blood Sweat and Tears and others, was one of the big engineers there. Roy left and the management came to me and said: "Okay, you have two weeks to prepare for the studio." And I had never done studio sessions before. "Dance to the Music" was cut in my third actual week in the studio by myself! So that song was a good one for me. I didn't even know the song was a hit until about nine months later. An A&R man was playing me a record which had new Epic product and I recognized "Dance to the Music." I said: "Hey, I recorded this!" He looked at me with a stunned expression and said: "Really? It's a hit! It's starting to break in Detroit and Miami." That was the first time I had heard it since the session. MI: Did Sly get involved with mic placements and things like that? DP: Oh no, not at all. He never sat there and listened to a drummer doing snare hits or anything like that. I would get the sounds while they were rehearsing. And then he'd come in and say: "You know, that sounds a little dull" or "that sounds a little bright." The best producers seem to work that way. They judge the overall, the product. They don't judge the individual things. MI: What kind of mics did you use on the drums? DP: Neumann U-67's overhead, generally. I think on "Dance to the Music" I used a U-67 on the snare, also. And then dynamic mics on the toms. I think they were Electro-Voices. I liked to experiment a lot until I came up with something that really knocked me out and then I would lock into it. So it's kind of hard to say exactly what I was using on any one session, but usually I used condenser microphones. MI: What would you use for the horns? DP: For horns, either Neumann U-49's or U-67's (again condensers) almost always. MI: On the vocals too? DP: Yes. The U-67 was sort of the overall microphone in those days. Occasionally we also used a U-47 which has a 5 kHz peak. Sometimes that would work on vocals. That would also work as an overhead. If you were using one overhead, as we often did, the U-87 would work on that. But it was really not in what you used, but in what you heard. MI: Did you take Larry Graham's bass direct? DP: Larry usually used effects so we would come right off his effects, like the fuzz stuff that he did. For guitar we always used an amp; we never went direct. I think Larry used a Bassman and Freddie used a Fender Super Reverb or a Twin for his guitar. I don't think they started bringing Marshalls into the studio until later on. The guitar amp would just get about any dynamic mic I had laying around like an Electro-Voice RE-15 or RE-20, sometimes a Shure SM-57. MI: What kind of keyboard was Sly playing on in those sessions? DP: A Hammond B-3 organ and Leslie cabinet. That was it. Rose played a Fender Rhodes but pretty much it was straight-ahead stuff they could use on the road. MI: Do you think it's enough for a musician to just play an instrument these days or must they become aware of the new technologies for their own self-protection? DP: I don't think anybody can be ignorant of the technology or it's going to be like the early artists who were ignorant of the business and were often taken advantage of. The musician does now have a lot more to learn and a lot more to control and there are diminishing returns. You know the great musician who lived with his instrument was great because of that. If he can no longer live with his instrument because there are so many distractions, I can see a danger in that. Awareness is the key word. You may not be able to control everything but you can be aware of it. MI: Did Sly use a lot of processing on his records? DP: EMT plates, Pultec EQ's, light compression on individual instruments. Bass would be compressed, as would vocals, depending upon the song. We used pretty much straight effects, those effects you'd automatically use to make it sound like a record. MI: Reverb, compression, and EQ in other words? DP: Yes. MI: How did you use the EMT reverb? DP: I had it on the snare and on the vocals and the horns, probably a little on the organ although it already had the Leslie. We had about 50 of them at CBS Studios and you used to have to go through and pick them. I liked the sound when they were right but they were too much trouble to deal with. MI: Sly Stone is so talented and he seemed so far ahead of his time back then. What do you think happened to him? DP: I think the lifestyle just got too big for him. It became too easy. He had a phone in a suitcase way back then; it was the first mobile phone that I had ever seen. He'd be walking down the street, his phone would ring, and he he'd get a big kick out of setting it up on a fire hydrant so he could answer it. He had $500 boots made and the whole thing. And drugs came with it and it bashed him. I last saw him many years ago. He came back in to the studio and I was booked on a mixing session with him. He came in and he just wanted to go two-to-two which means to do basically what you would do today in mastering. We didn't trust the mastering engineers as much in those days. So we would make the tape sound as good as we could and would send it up to them hoping that they would make it sound like the tape. He came in and said to me: "I want to go two-to-two on this album I just did." I said: "Sly, I haven't worked with you in several years. I'm not really sure what you're looking for. What do you want it to sound like?" He looked up at me and said: "I want it to sound like my old albums." And that was the only indication I had that he wasn't necessarily happy with the changes he had made in his lifestyle. I think Sly was saying he'd like to go back -- and I bet he could do that at any time. Wouldn't we all love that!