The term producer was not used in the early years of recording, but the job of man-aging the intersection of technology, art, people, and commerce dates back to the invention of recording technology. A couple of terms used were: “director of record-ing” and “recorder”; today these pioneers are sometimes referred to as “record-ists.” The boundaries separating the creative, musical, business, entrepreneurial,
FIGURE 1.7 Group listening to an Edison phonograph in Salina, Kansas, in the 1890s.
Credit: US Dept of the Interior, National Park Service, Thomas Edison National Historical Park.
technical, and talent discovery aspects of the job were as blurred and pliable as they are with today’s producers and engineers. The Recording Academy, for the purposes of Grammy qualification, defines the producer as:
The person who has overall creative and technical control of the entire record-ing project, and the individual recordrecord-ing sessions that are a part of that proj-ect. He or she is present in the recording studio or at the location recording and works directly with the artist and engineer. The producer makes creative and aesthetic decisions that realize both the artist’s and label’s goals in the creation of musical content. Other duties include, but are not limited to: keep-ing budgets and schedules, adherto: keep-ing to deadlines, hirto: keep-ing musicians, sto: keep-ingers, studios and engineers, overseeing other staffing needs, and editing (Classical projects).48
Much of what Scott and Edison did coincides with the Academy’s definition and so we can think of them as not only the inventors of sound recording but also its first producers.
Music producers by function—using that title or others—are core to the opera-tion of the recorded music industry. Without intermediaopera-tion of the technical, musi-cal, and financial aspects, combined with an understanding of the end purpose for the recording, there would be no useful product to sell. Frederick (Fred) William Gaisberg (1873–1951) was one of the earliest music producers, although he did not use the term. As a boy in Washington, DC, he met John Phillip Sousa, sang in his choir, and on windy days held and turned Sousa’s music at his Saturday after-noon concerts on the White House lawn. At the age of sixteen, while still in school, and just six months after the start-up of The Columbia Phonograph Company, Gaisberg began accompanying whistler John York Atlee on recordings for the com-pany. He recounts: “In the parlor stood an old upright piano and a row of three phonographs lent to him by the Columbia Phonograph Company. Together we would turn out, in threes, countless records of performances.”49
In this instance, Gaisberg acted as accompanist, recorder, and manufacturer, load-ing and operatload-ing the machines, and creatload-ing the final product for sale. When he recorded Sousa’s band, the volume was such that he could record to ten cylinder machines simultaneously.
The Columbia Phonograph Company was a licensed franchise of American Graphophone, the company that owned the Bell-Tainter patents. American Graphophone entered into a national sales and distribution relationship with the North American Phonograph Company that, in 1888, bought Edison’s patents and exclusive sales rights. Edison continued to make the machines. American retained its Bell-Tainter patents and manufacturing rights, and Columbia kept its rights to sell in the District of Columbia, Delaware, and Virginia. This relationship with North American “also gave Columbia sales rights to the Edison Phonograph in its territory.”50 North American’s founder, Jesse H. Lippincott (1842–94) had decided to lease the machines using the Bell Telephone business model. It is rumored that
14 The History of Music Production
the stenographers, feeling threatened, may have been sabotaging the machines.51 In any event, within three years, by 1891, “Lippincott fell ill and lost control of North American to Edison who was its principal creditor.”52 Edison reverted from renting machines to selling them and added more entertainment offerings on cylinder. 53
Gaisberg thought that “Columbia seemed headed for liquidation”54 but “almost without its knowledge . . . it was saved by a new field of activity.”55 He commented:
Showmen and fairs demanded records of songs and instrumental music.
Phonographs, each equipped with ten sets of ear tubes through which the sound passed, had been rented to these exhibitors. It was ludicrous in the extreme to see ten people grouped around a phonograph, each with a tube leading from his ears, grinning and laughing at what he heard. It was a fine advertisement for the onlookers waiting their turn. Five cents was collected from each listener, so the showman could afford to pay $2 or $3 for a cylinder to exhibit.56
These were the glimmerings of a record business and commercial music produc-tion as we would come to know them. Despite Gaisberg’s explicit musical contri-butions to his early recordings, musical ability was not considered necessary to be a recorder. It was viewed as a technical position. When Gaisberg graduated high school in June 1891, he approached Columbia for a full-time job but they were not sure that they needed a musician on staff. They offered him a job on the con-dition that it involved the technical aspects as well as performing. He trained in their factory at Bridgeport, Connecticut, and after a year was back accompany-ing performers. All but by title, Gaisberg had been an independent producer for Columbia and was now a staff producer. One of the performers, Dan Donovan, introduced him to the man responsible for many of the recent improvements to Edison’s phonograph: Charles Sumner Tainter of the Volta Laboratory. Tainter had recently developed a more sensitive machine that could record twenty cylin-ders from one performance. Gaisberg left Columbia and went to work for Tainter.
Gaisberg explained his production process and other duties there: “To earn my $10 a week I had to find the artists, load up each of the twenty units with the paper cyl-inders, set the recording horns, and play the accompaniments. Our entire repertoire consisted of “Daisy Bell” and “After the Ball was Over,” and sometimes we would perform the latter as many as seventy times a day.”57
Gaisberg was now performing what would become known as A&R (Artist and Reportoire—some say Repertory), then referred to as talent scout duties. He was also required to collect money from the slot-controlled phonographs in saloons and beer gardens, which he disliked doing, so he went back to Columbia as a pianist and talent scout.58 However, in 1894 Edison plunged the North American Phonograph Company into bankruptcy gaining him back his rights to the phonograph.59 During this time of uncertainty, Gaisberg met Emile Berliner, was impressed by the sound of his flat discs and, when the gramophone was ready for its commercial introduc-tion around 1894, Gaisberg went to work for him. His new job involved scouting for talent, playing accompaniments, and washing up the acid tanks. Berliner did
the recording.60 Although the tank cleaning would be categorized as manufactur-ing duties, this is an interestmanufactur-ing early example of the division of what we now think of as production and engineering roles. At that time, artists and performers were paid a fee of two or three dollars per side recorded, with no royalties. The songs were recorded on five- or seven-inch discs and typically ran one-and-a-half to two minutes long.61
16