Olivia at Little Mountain Studio
by Richard J. Skelly
Bob Brooks may not think it essential that Little Mountain Studios be the site of a hit record. Nevertheless, that may well occur.
Olivia Newton-John recently visited the studio and recorded her next single, Don’t Cry For Me Argentina. The song, taken from a new musical created by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, deals with the life of Eva Peron (legendary wife of the late Argentine dictator Juan Peron).
‘Argentina’ is ambitious and is the biggest gamble in Miss Newton-John’s career. She’s thrown her country and pop roots aside and has taken the plunge with a song that knocks one out with its emotional impact. She should have a contender for a fistful of Grammy nominations in 1978. It’s that good!
However, there’s always the risk of failure. Because it is so different from anything she’s done before, Argentina could be rejected for not fitting into her past formats. My feeling is that win, lose or draw Olivia Newton-John is going to be regarded with a lot more industry respect.
Miss Newton-John was only Vancouver for a weekend, with the session coming in at a little under 48 hours. Onlookers remarked that she involved herself with all aspects of the recording and pronounced satisfaction with the final results.
A vast assemblage of over 70 symphony and session players were hired for the recording. Outside of producer John Farrar, everyone involved with the session was local. This greatly pleased studio publicist Rich Simmons. He feels that interest in Canadian facilities has never been higher and points to the recent ‘sniffing around’ of Toronto studios by Mick Jagger and the Bay City Rollers as evidence.
Little Mountain Studios
Over the past few years, Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver have developed the reputation of being one of the better recording outlets in the Pacific Northwest. It’s been a gradual process with bugs being ironed out of the equipment, quality engineering staff being found, and internal management being altered. But these struggles are over and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
Olivia Newton-John was recently a visitor to Little Mountain (see insert story) and the producers of the Wolfman Jack Show have almost exclusively used the studio for recording show material. Along with a cluster of local clients like Terry Jacks, Valdy and The Hometown Band, Sweeney Todd and Joani Taylor, this has started to get little Mountain’s name across to the industry.
The studio has a corporate background.
It is co-owned by Griffiths Gibson Productions (one of North America’s hottest creators of jingles) and Western Broadcasting (the radio empire which owns both CKNW and the Vancouver Canucks). There must be a belief that money can be made by operating this lavish studio. It’s hard to know exactly what goes on in these corporate minds, but by listening to general manager Bob Brooks one can get a pretty good idea of the potential stakes.
Books is a veteran of broadcasting, publishing and producing with a total of some 14 years in the business. His eye is very clearly on the bottom line and he wants the studio, like his personal situation, to be a paying proposition.
“I’m in the music business but I’m not living in the sub-culture. What do you call me, an average business man? I came into this business through the door of management in the broadcast field, I’ve had to hire and fire people and balance budgets for quite a few years. My hype goes only as far as the dollars go. I’m very realistic in that area and that’s the one thing lacking in this industry. People knock on the door all the time trying to get something together, but you’ve got to have bucks to operate these days.”
Brooks believes that in the past too many ‘deals’ were worked out with clients of Little Mountain and that this, in the end, created bad PR. Therefore he’s gone out and had rate cards developed which have their own deals worked in.
“It’s legitimate, up front and published.”
Little Mountain’s monitoring system was rumoured to have cost them business in the past. Publicity was generated over a year ago when Randy Bachman backed out of recording a BTO album there. Brooks concedes that the monitoring was suspect but that steps have been taken to rectify that situation.
“I’m the first to agree as a producer, a client and now general manager of this place that the monitors were not quite right. We’ve just hired John Vrtacic out of Toronto who should make them right. He does not come from the record studio business but comes from industrial electronics.
He’s a design engineer and a specialist in acoustics. We’re being a little unusual. It would seem normal to hire a studio maintenance engineer or to steal one away from some other studio. But we decided we wanted someone higher qualified than that because we want to design additional equipment for this place equipment that you can’t really buy because it doesn’t exist. We have a book of things to do and John’s the man who can do it.”
Summing up the situation with Bachman and others like it which might arise, Brooks adds, “As a non-engineer I sit in an interesting position because I have no axes to grind when it comes to how things should sound or operate. I go to the experts and they tell me. I want to please the clients although I’m not prepared to tear down the studio every time one comes in.”
Brooks believes that equipment-wise, the studio can compete with any outfit in the world. He doesn’t make a big thing specifications because he doesn’t think that’s always the reason why people come into a studio. He thinks that one of the human touches of Little Mountain, which endears it to many clients, is the presence of a cook called Isa. Valdy was so taken by her warmth and motherly concern that he ended up washing dishes during some of his sessions at Little Mountain.
There’s a school of thought that a studio has to be the site of a massive hit single in order for it to attract a large clientele. Brooks is a little sceptical of that approach and has a few thoughts on the subject.
“I’m a cynic about hype. I’ve heard some huge hits come out of some rotten studios and I’ve heard some great product come out of great studios that went no-where. I think clients happen by word of mouth. You can buy all the fancy ads in the world, but when you get right down to it, somebody has to walk out of the studio and say ‘I was really treated well there.”