Ken Scott Interview

 Ken Scott will readily admit to being a man beyond luck. He began his career in the music industry working in the illustrious EMI studios later known as Abbey Road at the tender age of fifteen. His first engineering sessions were for The Beatles whom he'd work with extensively over the next few years. Later he'd go on to engineer albums with Jeff Beck and Elton John and co-produce alongside David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period. Recently Ken has gotten around to telling his full story in the new book "Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust: Off the Record with The Beatles, Bowie, Elton and So Much More. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Ken and talk extensively about his life and career including his reminisces of working on sessions with a young Jimmy Page.

 

FZ: What made you decide to write this book?

KS: The timing just seemed right I guess. For the longest time I didn’t like to look back on my past it was always the next project, then the next project. Then through doing the 5.1 surround sound of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars then working with George [Harrison] again somehow my past had sort of caught up with me. At the same time I was approached by a publisher and thought, ‘well, why the hell not?’

FZ: Do you think you can express how you felt when you first got the job to work at EMI and what that meant to you?

KS: I think I was just numb! I could have just gone through the interview, been told no, and still thought it was amazing. Just seeing a place like that, which most people didn’t know about it was phenomenal. Then of course a couple of weeks later holding a master tape of The Beatles next single and seeing them walk down the corridor…it was unbelievable. There are no words to describe it.

FZ: The way you described it in your book it seemed as though working at EMI was a form of continued education and then when you worked on The Beatles “White Album” it almost felt like grad school, is that how it felt to you?

KS: Absolutely. What I wanted to do, my passion you couldn’t learn in school. There weren’t the kind of schools for music that there are now. Being put in the position with some of the most amazing engineers around at the time, yeah, it was certainly a continuing of my education. It was my trade school. Then being able to learn hands on all the time with The Beatles who liked to experiment…I couldn’t have possibly been trained better really or had a better experience learning.

FZ: One of the revelations to me anyway that I really enjoyed reading about in your book was the importance of in-studio monitors with EMI’s somewhat shoddy Altec and the monitors in Jamaica that had a lot of low end, then the monitors used to record disco groups that carried a lot of high end. Could you describe the importance of monitors in helping to really define the sound of entire genres in some cases?

KS: If you go into any studio, or even into your home you have to know what you’re listening to. If what you’re listening to is wrong, it’s going to sound wrong everywhere and if it’s right the thing you’re listening to well then hopefully it will sound right in most places. You can work with the crappiest gear and as long as you know what you’re hearing is correct you can eventually get a really good sound. Conversely, you can have the best gear in the world and terrible monitors and much like it turned out initially with “Hey Jude” it sounded amazing in the control room but it wasn’t real. It wasn’t the way it sounded everywhere else. So even with the best gear if the monitors are wrong you don’t know what you’re getting so what’s the point?

FZ: Would you care to take me through the recording of The White Album? You have stated in your book that it wasn’t anywhere near as contentious it has been portrayed elsewhere. Did it really feel like recording four solo albums?

KS: No. I mean there were times when the writer of the song would take over and it would just be the writer of the song doing everything but there were also great periods of time when they were cutting the basic tracks and everything when they would spend days and days and days together in the studio. I think in Anthology one or two of them say that once Ringo came back into the band it felt more like it used to, it was the band [Ringo Starr quit The Beatles during the White Album sessions only to return two weeks later after receiving entreaties from the rest of the group]. I mean, Sgt. Pepper was almost like Paul McCartney’s solo album, that’s the kind of control he’d had over it. I think the others wanted their own control, which is why [The White Album] feels a little disjointed. They were playing together like mad though. It was incredible just watching them.

FZ: If you don’t mind I’d like to rattle off a few songs from The White Album and was wondering if you might provide a bit more background on what it was like to record them?

KS: As long as I can remember I’ll tell you.

FZ: “Happiness is a Warm Gun”

KS: I love that track. That to me was John’s homage to The Beach Boys with the three completely separate parts and the background vocals and everything. It was just amazing to put that all back together.

FZ: “Back in the U.S.S.R.”

KS: That was recorded when Ringo had left the band for a brief period. By the way he didn’t leave because he was angry or anything like that, he left because he felt unloved. The Beatles had gotten so used to each other that they weren’t passing compliments all around and that kind of thing. There was none of the ‘Hey Ringo it’s great to be playing with you tonight mate!’ They just turned up to the studio and played. He just felt unneeded and unloved so he decided they don’t need me so I’m not going to be in the band anymore. Once they realized what was going on and told him how much they loved him, how much they needed him and how talented he was he came back and suddenly it was the band. I think they were all going through that as well at the same time.

Anyway, “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, so Ringo had left at this particular point so we needed a drummer. Paul put down the first drum track and it wasn’t quite good enough, we needed a bit more, so then both John and George went down and we overdubbed them playing things as well which became the finished drum track.

FZ: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”…I know you’ve said you don’t recall Eric Clapton being there…

KS: I don’t, not at all. I have tried and tried, I even went into regression therapy for the book primarily for that one story because it is one I have been asked so often. I don’t remember it, I’ve spoken to people who were around and they don’t remember it…it just didn’t mean that much at the time. We had no idea of its historical value eventually or that we’d still be talking about it fifty bloody years later [laughs].

FZ: “Yer Blues”

KS: The recording of that came from a joke I had made to Mr. Lennon; you always had to be careful of what you said. We were doing vocals on one of George’s songs called “Not Guilty” and George just wasn’t feeling it. We were trying all these different things to get into the feeling of the song and after one of the stranger tries at the vocal I happened to turn to John and said ‘My God, the way you guys are going you’re going to want to record in there next’ and I pointed to this really tiny room by the side of the Studio Two control room which used to house one of the four-tracks. He just looked at me and didn’t say anything then a while later when it was time to record a new song he said, “I’ve got a new song, it’s called “Yer Blues” and I want to record in there,” and he pointed to the room I had joked about.

So then we had to set them up in there and for the band it was actually quite dangerous. It was so small and so cramped that if one of them suddenly swung round they would have hit one of the other members in the head with their guitar. Consequently, it’s almost entirely live even a majority of the vocal is live; it had to be live because of all the leakage onto the other tracks. It turned out though that John had made an error when he was putting down the vocal on it. He sang some wrong lyrics so then we had to go in and re-cut some of the vocal but what happened then was the sound completely changed because suddenly we didn’t have all the pickup from the other guitars and the drum and all that. Typical of John though where if he’s going to change then let’s go nuts on it which is why in the middle of the song it changes so drastically. It was because it had to and he just took it much further.

FZ: When it comes to “Helter Skelter” I’ve heard that that song was Paul’s attempt to out rock and roll John. I’m not sure if that’s true, but that sure is a hard rocking track.

KS: It is, but it had nothing to do with trying to out-do John. There was a band that had just come out and claimed that they had recorded the loudest song in the world or something like that. It may have been The Who but I can’t remember. Anyway, Paul sort of took that comment and said ‘we’re going to out-do them’. He just wanted to record the dirtiest thing he possibly could.

FZ: What are some of the tracks that stand out to you that you are especially proud of from that album?

KS: Well, it comes down to not necessarily being proud of them but rather enjoying them; you’ve already covered the ones that I really loved. Let’s see, “Mother Nature’s Son” was really nice to work on with Paul with some of the strange bits on that between him and the acoustic guitar, then the brass section, which I believe Chris Thomas did the arrangement for. Then there are some strange drums on it where we recorded Paul at the bottom of a staircase at the end of the corridor from Studio Number Two control room. It’s pieces like that that I really love hearing again because it just reminds me ‘oh yeah, we did it that way.’

FZ: What sorts of things did you learn from George Martin as a producer?

KS: The one thing these days that I’m fully aware of is to hold back and allow the talent to do what they’re supposed to do and that’s to create. George and subsequently me aren’t the kind to just sort of jump in there and are like ‘it’s gonna be our record, it’s gonna be this way or the highway’. Talent should be signed to a label to create, make art, and hopefully that art will sell. As a producer you always know that if they need help you can go down and help them. If they start to veer off too far you can always say, ‘Hey guys it’s not as good as it was, let’s move back to where it was really happening and continue from there.’ You always have that kind of control, but you have to allow them to find the road for themselves.

FZ: What was it like to work with John Lennon on a creative level? Did he ever come up to you for your thoughts about an idea or did ha have ideas that he would leave up to you to figure out how to implement?

KS: Ideas were just flowing from everyone really…more often than not from a joke like on “Yer Blues” [laughs]. I don't honestly remember him coming up and saying how do we do this, or wouldn’t it be great if we could do this. It just happened. There would be times when we wanted something different and they wanted something different so then we’d go look into the microphone closet and they’d pick out a couple of mics that they wanted to try purely by the look. They had no idea what they would sound like, but boy, these mics look cool we gotta use ‘em. There were no rules. Interestingly, the only thing that I can remember staying constant was how the mics were set up in the studio. That was the only thing that didn’t really move around that much.

FZ: One of the things that seemed especially revealing about John Lennon from your book is when you wrote that you often get asked whether John would use auto tune today and your response is that he’d maybe try it once then he’d try something else.

KS: I think to a point that’s the same with all of them. They were always pushing and would do it in different ways like Paul with “Yesterday” and using the orchestra on it. No band does that kind of thing. A lot of it sonically comes from Norman Smith the band’s original engineer. Within the guidelines of what he could do in the confines of Abbey Road he really tried to change the sound on each album and I think they’d learned very quickly how he was doing that. Once Norman wasn’t around anymore they were already experimenting with different instruments trying to push the sound even further.

FZ: Throughout the book it seems that you had a special relationship with George Harrison, what did that relationship mean to you?

KS: First and foremost to me, after seeing what surrounded The Beatles, there is no human being who could go through what they went through and come out the other side of it completely normal. George was the one who came through it the closest to normal in my opinion. He was still very down to earth even after all of that. He really didn’t want to live off of The Beatles name. The number of times I’d hear him say, ‘Look, The Beatles were six years of my life, what about the rest of it?’ All the times you ever heard about him it’d always be, George Harrison: Ex-Beatle. He had the biggest selling solo album of any of them with “All Things Must Pass”. He was so much more than The Beatles.

As a guitarist he eventually got his own unique sound when you could always tell it was him. There are very few guitarists that can say that. You can hear a blues guitarist and it could be any number of guitarists; their styles are very similar. With George, he was just completely different from anyone else.

FZ: Let’s go forward in time a bit to talk about Elton John. What was it like to work in the studio as the engineer capturing his sound?

KS: I got to work with Elton because the engineer that had started working with him, Robin Cable, got into a very bad car accident. So they had recorded Madman Across the Water and suddenly they needed someone to mix it. I had worked with the producer Gus Dudgeon before at Abbey Road and he and I knew each other very well so I was put into mix Madman and it seemed to go well. Elton really wanted a change in sound from his earlier recordings. He wanted to record with his road-band, which he’d never done before and to record in a totally different place so it kind of made sense my working on it. And, because Gus and I knew each other so well, he knew my sound, so I was just left to get the sound and go on from there.

As far as Elton goes, he didn’t like being in the studio. He was in the studio only when he had to participate and anything else, any overdubs he wasn’t there. Once he’d put down his keyboard part and his vocals that was it, we wouldn’t see him in the studio again.

FZ: The first album you were actually in the booth recording Elton was Honky Chateau named for the French residence where the music was recorded. What was it like to record in the Chateau?

KS: It was fun; it was different than driving up to London everyday to Trident so I enjoyed it for that reason. The studio worked well, the monitors were good, the desk was a little outdated and seemed a little strange, like a homemade job, or if not homemade then certainly custom made. It wasn’t really all that much time. You have to remember back then we were recording albums in two weeks. With Elton, I think I was there a bit longer because I got there for pre-production, which gave me the opportunity to see him write “Rocket Man” in ten minutes, which was astounding. It really wasn’t all that much time though, we’d spend a couple of days going back and overdubbing a couple of things, orchestra sometimes, percussion with Ray Cooper and then it would be straight into mixing. We didn’t really sort of hang out a lot and all that kind of thing. We had fun, but it was business.

FZ: You touched on the subject of the musical partnership between Elton and Bernie Taupin, would you care to expand a bit more on that partnership?

KS: Remakable! The way it would happen on the two albums I saw put together, Honky Chateau and Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player, Bernie would go up to his bedroom at the Chateau around eight o’clock in the evening, then come down the next day with a stack of papers, give them to Elton whilst we were all sitting around the table eating breakfast. Elton would then go through all these pieces of paper throwing a lot aside, keeping a small pile of others. Once he finished breakfast he’d go over to the piano and go through the small pile, and then he’d pull one out and put it up and start working on it. That’s how he’d come up with “Rocket Man” in ten minutes. He loved Bernie’s lyrics and just put it up there then boom, boom, boom, ‘yeah, that’s a song, we got it’.

FZ: One of my favorite Elton John songs is Daniel, could you provide a bit more background information about that song and how it was recorded?

KS: The general recording was just the same as any of the other songs. The arrangement was worked out, we put it down and recorded it but then when we came to mix that’s when it became slightly more interesting, especially to me. Davy Johnstone had put down some mandolin parts and the solo section on the song was going to be one of these mandolin parts but it just wasn’t strong enough. It was exactly the same as the parts he’d done underneath all the choruses of the song. It didn’t really stand out and we had none of the band around so what the hell do we do? Trident at that point had an Arp Synthesizer in the mix room, which I had spent a good deal of time messing around on, so I turned to Gus and said ‘Why don’t we beef it up with that?’ He said, ‘How do you mean?’ I said, ‘Maybe you or I could play the part?’ He said, ‘Give it a try.’ So I got a sound he liked it so he said, ‘Play it.’ It took me ages to get it together [laughs]. It was the first time I appeared as an artist on what turned out to be a number one single.

FZ: That’s a pretty amazing debut!

KS: Yeah, exactly.

FZ: Later on, you ended up working with David Bowie, your first time in the producer’s chair in fact. It was amazing to me reading about how you felt the project wouldn’t amount to all that much the Hunky Dory comes out of it. What exactly were your expectations for that album and did it shock you on how good the material actually was once it was previewed for you?

KS: When David first spoke to me about co-producing I had no expectations whatsoever. I had worked with him on two albums before as an engineer and I thought, he’s a really nice guy and he’s obviously somewhat talented as a writer, but I could never see him becoming a superstar. You have to remember that around that time I had been working with the biggest band in the world so my expectations starting off were very elevated. So he asked me to co-produce and I thought, perfect, I finally get the chance to do something that’s not going to be listened to by millions of people and I don’t have to worry about making mistakes. He came around a couple of days later to start playing me the new material and at that point I realized he’s a hell of a lot more talented than I thought. At that point I thought, oh my God this could actually do something so suddenly I was on the edge of my seat again.

On reflection, Tony Visconti, who was his previous producer, was also a member of the band. He was the bass player. Tony controlled a lot of the music; he was also the arranger, musical director, whatever you want to call him so David’s input was purely on the vocal side of things. So you really didn’t, or I didn’t really get to see David’s ideas at all. How he saw songs progressing and coming about. I think ultimately that’s why he left Tony. If he was going to fail or succeed, he wanted to do it on his own terms and the only way he could do that was to break away from the person who was controlling the music and take more control for himself. That’s why he wanted to work with me, that’s not my area of expertise. I don’t go down there and say ‘Play a C sharp minor here as opposed to…’ I let the talent create and he knew that. That gave him freedom, and once he had it, I started to hear how talented he was realized that this could become successful.

FZ: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is obviously a monster album would you mind if I rattled off a couple of songs and get your take on them?

KS: Sure.

FZ: “Rock and Roll Suicide”

KS: I co-produced four albums with David and ninety-five percent of the vocals on those four albums were first takes from beginning to end. “Rock and Roll Suicide” was one of the ones that wasn’t a complete take. It ended up being two takes. The reason for that is because it starts off with him singing not particularly loud so I had to get the level for that. We got so far then we he started to belt it a little more and we had to stop, I reset everything and we continued from there. The two sections themselves are first takes but they had to be broken up into two sections. That song is to me is one of the great examples of Mick Ronson’s arrangements. I really love the brass on it. Ronno was so necessary to the success of David at that point both as a guitarist and as an arranger. He didn’t think like most people did about orchestras and that really comes across.

FZ: How about “Suffragette City”?

KS: The most boring song in the bloody world! [laughs] I’ve heard it so many times, that and “Changes”. I wouldn't mind if I never heard either one of them again. The big misconception about “Suffragette City” is the sax section. David has actually stated during at least one radio interview that I know of but I think there have been several others that he played the sax’s on that track. I don’t know if it’s failed memory or if he just likes to take credit for it where it’s not necessarily due [laughs]. There aren’t actually any saxophones on that one, it’s the Arp synthesizer. We came to the end of recording “Suffragette City” and it needed something so once again my suggestion was lets bring down the Arp and see what we can do. I programmed the sound and Ronno played it. That’s the ‘sax section’.

FZ: And “Starman”?

KS: That was the strange track because so many people picked on that one as being the mainstay if you like of the ‘concept album’.  “Starman” was really added on at the last minute as a single. We had recorded the album and there was a track on it called “Round and Round” a cover of an old Chuck Berry song and when RCA heard it, they didn’t hear a single. We had to go back into the studio and David came up with “Starman” so we dumped “Round and Round” and replaced it with that track. The whole idea of a concept album, especially based around that song is so rubbish, it’s ridiculous.

FZ: You wound up working with David for almost the entirety of his Ziggy Stardust period and I’m curious to know how much of David became the persona? Was he still a normal guy to you?

KS: Absolutely. I don’t know that he necessarily became Ziggy because Ziggy was always a part of him. I would say that the Ziggy part of him took over more and more. He was always flamboyant which certainly increased as the Ziggy persona took over but he was still the same guy all the way through. He was still in the studio, totally professional and there were never any drugs in the studio. The worst it got was that Ronno might have brought in a couple of beers. Everything we did was completely straight and David was totally bored throughout his time in the studio. He couldn’t wait to get out. That ended up being great for me because when it came time for the mixing process he was never around. It was just me and a second engineer hoping that he would like it. The funny thing is I never got any comment from him whether he liked it or not. I guess by allowing me to do the next album he did like what I did [laughs].

FZ: You worked with Jeff Beck on a number of occasions throughout the years and have witnessed his evolution personally, professionally and as a guitar player. Could you describe that evolution? It almost defies reason how he just keeps getting better and better as the years wear on.

KS: Why, it’s just more and more practice. They say practice makes perfect right? [Laughs]. The evolution as a person that I saw began with the first Jeff Beck Group album Truth. Just a bunch of guys, none of them were particularly known all that well, I mean they were known on the club scene because of The Yardbirds and all that but they weren’t major stars. They came in we recorded the entire album; had a great time it was a lot of fun. The whole thing was over and done with rather quickly. Then the album came out and they went over and toured the States and they came back to record the next album this time because of what occurred with the tour they all had egos like you wouldn’t believe! Within the first session it became apparent that it just wasn’t going to work so they cancelled the rest of the time they had we ended up not working together on that.

I did bits of work with him after that like he’d recorded at Motown and for whatever reason he came to Trident and I started to mix some of that with him but it never saw the light of day unfortunately. The next real time I can recall working with him was when I was working with Stanley Clarke. He’d come in and he’d guest on one track on each of the albums I did with Stanley and now he was back to that normal guy that I knew when we had done the Truth album. He was a sweetheart; he was really nice and just wanted to get what was best for the track.

Then he had a lot of success with his solo career and I got called in to finish an album he’d started called There and Back. We were doing it in England at Abbey Road and it was a completely different situation. Now he’s playing with Simon Phillips on drums, and Mo Foster on bass and it was the complete opposite; he didn’t feel good enough. He had lost all confidence and I discovered at that point that it’s easier to try and tone down a musician like, ‘Oh yeah you’re great, but don’t play as much.’ That’s easier than having to be like, ‘Come on Jeff you can do it, you’re really good.’ I had to try and pull performance out of him because he didn’t feel up to it. It was strange.

I’ve seen him since and he’s back to the normal guy [laughs].

FZ: Truth really is an incredible album especially when you begin to consider the time period around which it was released. The fact that it was only recorded in a week and a half is astounding to me personally. What were those sessions like?

KS: They were fun. There were some madcap times like when Keith Moon the drummer of The Who came in to play timpani on “Ol’ Man River. Nicky Hopkins was on piano and the regular band was there of course and that turned out to be a little madcap. I think the first time I ever recorded bagpipes was on that album…actually first and only time luckily! [Laughs]. One of the interesting things to me was that Mickie Most who was credited as the producer was only there for the mixes. He wasn’t there for any of the recording. His partner Peter Grant was the one who was there for all of the recording sessions who of course is well known for later becoming the manager of Led Zeppelin.

FZ: I was actually going to ask you about Peter Grant. What was he like personally and how much input did he impart during the recording of Truth?

KS: I think he was just there to make sure that the band didn’t get out of hand. They were working as hard as they could and I don’t remember him trying to act as the producer or anything like that. His role was mainly to make sure that they had everything that they needed and to make sure we were all working.

FZ: With Mickie Most being absent, how much of the guidance role in the studio fell on to your shoulders?

KS: I mean, they knew what they were doing. A lot of it was just what they had rehearsed and then done live. I remember that Rod Stewart liked to sing live with the band and the best mic that he liked to sing into had to be covered in all of this foam and everything so that he could hold it. So much of it was cut live and they instinctively knew what they were doing.

FZ: In the book you described working on a session with songstress Jackie DeShannon featuring Jimmy Page on guitar. What was that session like and what was Jimmy like in those famous session days?

KS: He was a session musician and that was it. I found out subsequently that he was going to art school at the time so many of the sessions had to be worked around when he was available if you wanted to use him. He did so many sessions along with John Paul Jones who I did a lot of sessions with. I knew John from lots of sessions; I knew him better than I did Jimmy. Anyway, that whole Jackie DeShannon thing happened, I was the second engineer and it just stuck in my mind for whatever reason because I had never seen a session have to be broken for a tea break whilst the artist taught the guitarist how to play the part. Subsequently with Jimmy’s success with Led Zeppelin I thought to myself, hang on, this guy had to be taught by Jackie DeShannon!

The great thing about doing the book for me was taking other people’s points of view about situations and finally finding out what the true story was. So for me being sixteen years old…maybe seventeen and completely new to recording it stood out that the artist had to teach a session musician how to play a part. Many years later I was invited to go see a movie and I saw on this list that Jackie was going to be there so I said to Bob Owsinski my co-writer, we have to go there, we have to corner her and find out if she remembers that. She actually remembered it very well if not slightly differently than me. After that it was like, okay we’ll put both sides of it in the book. It just so happened that a few months later that I was in England at an event and Jimmy was there so I had the opportunity to go up and say okay, ‘I’m writing this book, I got this story, do you remember the situation?’ He remembered it perfectly and he sort of brought together my side of it and Jackie’s side of it.

Essentially what happened was that he wasn’t a very good reader of music. Of course as a session music you’re given a sheet of music and are expected to play it. Well he was playing it as written but just wasn’t really feeling it. Turns out it wasn’t the notes she was teaching him, but rather the feel because it was a very rhythmic part. Quite often it’s very difficult to draw feeling from a piece of paper.

Jimmy Page and Jackie DeShannon

FZ: While reading your book, one of the themes that I picked up on is your immense appreciation for the opportunities you’ve been given. Looking back on your extensive career, how do you feel about all of the things you’ve done?

KS: My life has been absolutely, one hundred percent blessed. I have to put it that way because I don’t believe in luck. If I believed in luck that much I’d be a billionaire living in Vegas at the moment! Firstly, number one, I get a job at what turns out to be the most famous recording studio. I got fed up with school and nine days later I’m working there; that in itself is astounding. Then the first session I’m ever second engineer on is The Beatles; that’s astounding. The first session I ever engineer is the Beatles; that’s astounding. It’s unbelievable all these firsts, I mean there just isn’t that amount of luck.

Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust