Producers & Engineers Wing celebrates the masterminds behind Atlantic Records

GRAMMY.com
Dan Daley

GRAMMY Week events explore the diversity of music that the GRAMMY Awards telecast celebrates. When The Recording Academy's Producers & Engineers Wing hosts its annual event during GRAMMY Week, it's designed to provide a glimpse into the engine room of music production. This year, the P&E Wing presented Rock My Soul, an event celebrating the collective genius of the founders and architects of Atlantic Records and their work in making one of America's most authentic music genres a true cultural music phenomenon.

Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, Arif Mardin, Jerry Wexler, and Tom Dowd reflected a disparate mix of backgrounds, talents and aspirations when they built what would become one of R&B's most iconic brands in the 1950s and 1960s. Label founder Ahmet and his brother Nesuhi were the sons of the Turkish ambassador to the United States; Wexler was a reporter for Billboard magazine and is credited with coining the term "rhythm and blues"; Mardin had a solid and scholarly background in music as a conductor and arranger; Dowd's insatiable technical curiosity gave Atlantic's records a unique spark and changed the record-making process in uncountable ways, evidenced by his insistence that recording console design incorporate faders instead of the massive rotary rheostats found on early mixers.
 
All five would have been very comfortable Thursday evening at Village Recording Studios, home to hits from Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan to Steely Dan and the Eagles. The Village was also a stop on Atlantic's itinerary — Wexler recorded and mixed a still unreleased jazz recording by Linda Ronstadt (a precursor to her pivotal "What's New" big band hit) in Studio D, and in Studio A he mixed Aretha Franklin's version of "The Weight."

When the Village doors opened at 8 p.m., the line of invited guests extended past the studio's parking lot, their spirits not dampened by a steady rain. The reception area saw the arrival of esteemed engineers and producers including Roy Thomas Baker, Phil Ramone, Eddie Kramer, Al Schmitt, Joe Chiccarelli, and Geoff Emerick, among others.

Upstairs, guests watched "Rock My Soul!," a video detailing the history of Atlantic Records and the creative and technical brilliance of the label's founders. Guests then roamed the serpentine halls of the Village where they could listen to a stream of Atlantic hits through the studio's magnificent monitoring system, which were dressed for the occasion by participating sponsors. Rooms included the Fender Rock And Pop Studio, the Universal Audio Rhythm & Blues Room, and the Shure Jazz Lounge — each reflecting the musical diversity that came to characterize Atlantic Records, the home to artists including Bette Midler, Ben E. King, Cream, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Dr. John, Roberta Flack, Buffalo Springfield, Otis Redding, Led Zeppelin, and many more.

Introducing the "Rock My Soul!" video, P&E Wing Executive Director Maureen Droney reminded the crowd that the mission for the evening was to "eat, drink and listen" — three things that no one needed a manual to figure out. Later, P&E Wing Co-chair Glenn Lorbecki introduced event co-chairs Jimmy Douglass and Nile Rodgers, who each recounted stories about their time with the Atlantic Records crew.

Douglass described the group as "five guys who acted creatively as a single unit." Rodgers recalled a never-before-told anecdote in which a visit to Wexler's South Florida home in the 1970s resulted in the inspiration for a seminal dance music record. "Jerry pulled out the recording of the theme to the TV show 'Peter Gunn,'" Rodgers said. "When I was working on David Bowie's 'Let's Dance,' the riff inspired the arrangement I was writing. When the song became a hit, Jerry called and said, 'How come you didn't give me a credit?' It was the kind of joke that you only told when you were a member of a family, and that's how I felt about Atlantic."

Academy Chair Jimmy Jam reinforced the evening's pervading theme of family when he told the crowd that in the coming year those whose talent is to "bottle the magic" of recording artists would see initiatives on the part of the Recording Academy that would help "preserve our livelihood" during the current economic crisis. "We've never needed to be as serious about that as we do now," Jam said.

(Read our GRAMMY Week event blogs.)