FOUR DISCS, 26 YEARS: THE MAKING OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S ''TRACKS''

Jan 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Dan Daley, Mix Magazin

Bruce Springsteen's impressive career was launched with Greetings From Asbury Park in 1973. He was signed based on demos supervised by the legendary John Hammond Sr. Two years and two albums later, Born To Run made the Freehold, N.J., native a household name, and by 1984, Born in the U.S.A. had made him a mega-star. But a dozen or so albums over more than 25 years of recording barely scratch the surface of this prolific artist's career. When recording studio albums, he would often ignore all the songs he'd been working on between records, and he's famous for recording more songs than he needed for many of his albums: For example, for Born in the U.S.A. about 60 tracks were recorded in total; on Human Touch in 1992, around 40 songs went into the can.

The Springsteen canon is massive, so it's no surprise that the retrospective undertaken by Springsteen and his team in early 1998-a four-disc collection called Bruce Springsteen: Tracks, released in November-was an archival endeavor of Homeric proportions. Tracks offers many songs no one but Springsteen and his inner circle have ever heard before. Aside from those rarities are treats such as the four-song demo that John Hammond produced for Springsteen's Columbia signing and several B sides of singles, such as "Pink Cadillac," which was slated to appear on Born in the U.S.A. but which wound up being relegated to the flip side of the "Dancin' in the Dark" single instead.

"We knew that this was going to be quite an undertaking," recalls Toby Scott, who has worked as an engineer for Springsteen for the past two decades. Scott was Chuck Plotkin's engineer at the producer's studio, Clover, in Los Angles in 1978 when Plotkin was called in to finish mixes for Darkness on the Edge of Town. Over time, Springsteen came to rely more and more on Scott, both in the studio and for recording live performances, and Scott has handled nearly all of Springsteen's recording work since 1980. But one of Scott's greatest contributions is a computerized database that he began working on in 1985; Scott created it in order to help Springsteen find specific songs in his rapidly growing treasury of demos, outtakes and songs that didn't make it onto albums, so Springsteen could keep rotating them into his ever-changing live sets.

"In February [1998], Bruce had been recording material for a new album, and in the middle of it he just stopped and said, 'Let's do the boxed set,'" recalls Scott, who began the project working from his home in Whitefish, Montana. "That's what we had always referred to this project as. We knew since the 1980s that he would do it at some point." Springsteen gave Scott a list of more than a hundred songs, and Scott began researching them in the catalog. Most of the material was in rough-mix form, and for a time the creative crew of Springsteen, Plotkin and manager Jon Landau considered releasing those mixes, even doing a tentative initial mastering session to see what they would sound like. But a listening session in June among the three produced a decision-prompted mainly by Landau-to do remixes from the original masters.

Meanwhile, Sony Music had been alerted that the project was under way, and the record company's corporate machine ground into gear, creating its own timetable and setting a September deadline for master submission. "We didn't even have a final list of songs for the project in June, and here we were facing a three-month deadline in which we were going to have to find, remix and master dozens of songs," recalls Scott. "It was almost overwhelming."

Almost. But the database project Scott had started and maintained helped enormously in locating the desired multitrack reels. These were sent to Springsteen's South Jersey estate, a working farm with several additional buildings on the property, one of which-a 185-year-old farmhouse-is his personal recording studio (profiled in Mix in June '96). Scott had first put Springsteen's home recording setup together back in 1982, when the artist was working on Born in the U.S.A. and recording new songs to cassette. Springsteen had become enamored of the stark tonal quality he could achieve with an acoustic guitar and a cassette, and that experience eventually contributed to Nebraska. But as Springsteen seemed to increasingly enjoy working outside the conventional studio setting, Scott offered to put together a more sophisticated recording operation for him. Initially, it was an 8-track MCI recorder and a 16-input Trident Trimix console, which would mix down to the early digital F-1 format, which essentially was little more than a stereo A-D converter and a VHS VCR. "It was awkward, but it was digital and 16-bit, either 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz," says Scott. "He did over a dozen songs on that format, and two wound up on the boxed set. He really needed a home studio back then, if only so we didn't end up mastering cassettes for the rest of his career."

Beginning in late June of last year, Scott organized how to get the songs for the boxed set (which had grown to 128 in number) located and remixed if necessary in the increasingly short window ahead of them. The solution was to turn the farmhouse into a recording complex. By this time, the home studio had been considerably updated-after going to 24-track analog (another MCI machine, an expanded Trident; later a 62-input Amek Angela and the first of what would be two of the early Sony 3324 digital multitracks), it now features a 96-input Euphonix CS2000 console and a pair of Sony 3348 digital multitracks, with mixdown mainly to DAT. Over the years, as he updated the database of recordings, Scott's thoroughness extended to having original masters transferred to digital multitrack formats, and this helped considerably when the boxed set project began-by then most of the masters were already transferred to digital. The Euphonix room was dubbed Studio A. Next, it was arranged for Kooster McAllister's Record Plant Remote truck to come to the estate, where it would act as Studio B, parked across the driveway from the farmhouse. Finally, longtime Springsteen mixer Bob Clearmountain came onboard. Because of scheduling conflicts, he worked from his SSL-equipped home studio in Los Angeles, and Scott arranged for ISDN lines and an EDNet digital conversion system to be linked to the New Jersey site. Engineer Ed Thacker was brought in to do mixes on the Euphonix, and Thom Panunzio, who was an assistant engineer for producer/engineer Jimmy Iovine on Born To Run at the old Record Plant Studios in Manhattan, was hired to mix from the Record Plant truck.

"We realized that there was no way to meet the deadline of September 10 if we just used one studio to remix all of this," Scott says. "The math just didn't work. And there were scheduling issues to deal with when you have more than one mixer. Ed was available from July through September; Bob was booked almost through August; Thom had time in the end of July and all of August. So we had to have multiple studios working and multiple mixers mixing at the same time, if necessary."

Through early August, Scott was coordinating virtually all of this by phone, awaiting the birth of his first child in Whitefish. He hired engineer Greg Goldman, whom he had worked with before, to act as his eyes and ears on the ground in New Jersey. All the mixers shared Yamaha NS-10 monitoring in common-Springsteen's own favorite studio speaker-coupled with dB Technologies A-D converters (Clearmountain used Apogee converters). This gave an element of consistency to the project, which would cover 26 years' worth of Springsteen recordings and encompass a broad array of recording formats and technology.

Artistically, Plotkin assigned songs from various eras of Springsteen's career among the three engineers chronologically. "The earlier stuff went to Thom, because he was actually around for some of it," Scott explains. Thacker was also given some of that material, as well as a lot of the middle period Springsteen. Clearmountain remixed later pieces, from the Human Touch era forward. "As a result, there was enough material so that most of the time the mixers weren't crossing over between eras," Scott says. "For instance, CD three is all Thacker and CD four is all Clearmountain. And the material itself has so much internal variation between periods that there really isn't a consistency issue in most of it. It stands alone. Besides, we've all heard a few Bruce Springsteen mixes before."

Thacker's connection to Springsteen was peripheral until he was called for this project. He had been friends with Plotkin for years and had been working in recent years on music projects with E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan. However, that, combined with a highly evolved working knowledge of the Euphonix console, made him a good choice for Studio A, says Scott. From Thacker's point of view, the experience was much more than simply a gig. "Bruce's records had been a big influence on me as an engineer in terms of their power and content," he observes. "The interesting thing about them is that they're not as guitar-driven as you might remember them. Once I opened up the tapes I realized that the guitars are more like the foundation of the rhythm and the keyboards have these little interlocking melodies that really give you the hook." After mixing 38 of the 66 songs in the boxed set, Thacker found, too, that Springsteen had changed his attitude toward reverb. "We all recall his vocals as being very big and sitting in the track surrounded by reverb," he says. "But in several instances he asked me to make the vocals drier than they might have been 20 years ago; make them a little more personal. We weren't trying to re-create the past with this project; the songs and the music do that themselves."

A typical day in August, when all three engineers were working simultaneously on mixes, was both complex and cacophonous. Panunzio and Thacker would generally set up a mix during the evenings, returning the next morning to complete it. Springsteen would call in during the afternoons and show up between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. to listen to mixes and make any suggested changes. Plotkin was also present, adding his input.

Meanwhile, Clearmountain was doing the same, but with a three-hour time difference, with his mixes being played back in real time over NS-10s in the living room at Springsteen's recording compound. By then, Scott's wife had delivered and he was back on-site and, along with assistant engineer Ross Petersen (who was also assisting Thacker in Studio A), using the mornings to handle any maintenance tasks that had cropped up overnight. "It got so you could hear music coming from all over the place," Scott recalls of those bustling dog days of summer. "It was an old building, and you could hear everyone's mixes coming through the walls around you." It was a beehive-like production line that was creating what would eventually become 66 songs for Tracks in less than 90 days.

Thom Panunzio had specified the Record Plant Remote truck, which ran on an external generator for the first few weeks until Kooster McAllister found a 240-volt source in the greenhouse attached to the farmhouse. But inside, it could have been the Record Plant in Manhattan, circa 1975, with McAllister's discrete API console and the classic outboard complement that included Pultec EQP-1As, Fairchild 670s and LA-2As. "Some of this stuff had originally been recorded 20 years ago, and they wanted to re-create that effect for this mix," McAllister says. There was an occasional overdub, as well. "In a lot of cases, Bruce had started a song and then moved on to the next one, so some of them needed a guitar part or a tambourine or a harmony," he recalls. "Bruce just stood in the back of the truck and did it. Usually in one take."

For Panunzio, who had assisted engineer/producer Jimmy Iovine on Darkness on the Edge of Town at the original Record Plant, it was a time trip. "It was a flashback to open up the tapes and hear me and Jimmy talking over the talkback. When you think about it, there's no other artist who could have had so many great songs not make it onto their records in the first place."

At the same time, Scott had rented (and learned to operate) a Sonic Solutions workstation, chosen because it was the same platform that mastering engineer Bob Ludwig would use for the finished productions. Scott loaded the final remixes into the Sonic's hard drives. He assembled them in sequence and according to which disc they would reside on for the final boxed set, setting spacings and doing crossfades and other editing tasks. "That would make the mastering stage go that much faster," he says. "And once we had material to fill one of the CDs, that would give us all a chance to reevaluate it artistically in sequence."

Mastering was completed in a week, from hard drives sent to Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine. Scott, Plotkin and Springsteen capped that process off with three days of listening there, making final tweaks to the four-disc set before sending it off for replication.On schedule.

Scott credits everyone who worked on the complex project as contributing to its on-time completion, from the technical aspects to the artistic wrestling that went into choosing which songs would appear on this career-defining showcase. But the project also had one other tangential accomplishment that seemed to particularly gratify Scott's orderly proclivities: Sony Music has recently created its own archive database, and in doing so has made extensive use of Scott's cataloging efforts over the last decade. "Now I can just call up Sony and get whatever Bruce Springsteen song I need," he says. Which will be very helpful for Tracks II, if it ever happens.