I like that album a lot; it’s not perfect, it’s got a lot of the
imperfections and excesses of youth.
Q How did you have the knowledge to orchestrate guitars in
that fashion?
Musically, my background was I was taught the piano so I
learned harmony structure from there. I used to listen to my
father’s records and figure out all the harmonies that Buddy Holly
and The Crickets were doing, and The Jordanaires behind Elvis,
and that was a real passion of mine. I was always interested in
how those effects were built up and I used to sing along with
the records and sing all the parts so I knew what everyone was
doing. So I had a feel for what harmonies could do and how they
could produce tension and emotion. So I applied that to what I
was doing with the guitars. Technically it wasn’t that hard; we
had Roy [Thomas-Baker, producer] who, at that time, was a very
technical person. He’d come up as an engineer, working with the
producers of the day, and he was possibly the number one state-
of-the-art technical producer. And we were already big-headed
enough to think that we were producing it anyway. We knew what
we wanted, we had the sound in our heads, and in Roy we had
someone who always could come up with a way of doing it. He
knew about multi-track and bounces; we worked on 8-track in
the beginning and then 16-track and we quickly ran out of tracks.
Some of the first album was 8-track and then taken into 16-track,
but mainly 16-track on those first couple of records.
Q So it’s basically you in the studio with an amp, playing a
part and then playing the next part? How were you able to
match vibrato and attack and those types of elements? There
was so much delicacy and finesse in what you played.
Well, just work on it. The reason I was doing it, rather than put
an organ behind there, was because the guitar is an emotional