- Place – De Lane Lea
- Time – Mid 70s
- Artist – Tommy Boyce
- Mix Engineer – Kenny Denton
Splicing Success
Tommy Boyce, born in the USA, was probably most famous for his involvement with the Monkees and his partnership with Bobby Hart.
I was tasked with mixing a track with Tommy and this would prove to be very different from any other mixing session I had been involved in before.
We would examine each line of the song one at a time, playing it over and over again until Tommy was happy it sounded just as he wanted it.
We would then edit each line together, on average to mix a three to four minute song would take eighteen hours.
When the mix was finished, usually around five or six in the morning, I would proceed to top and tail the stereo quarter inch tape.
This involved putting red leader tape at the end after the fade and green leader at the front, cutting out any extraneous noise, including the drummers count in.
This was a simplistic task for me, having already cut and edited the quarter inch so many times already.
Subsequently when the tape was running through the machine there was so much splicing tape passing through, it looked like it had come from a hospital emergency room.
The first time I did this for Tommy he asked “What are you doing?”
I told him I was cleaning up the front of the tape and he replied,
”Kenny, please don’t fuck with success!”
Start Again
About three weeks went by before Tommy phoned me to tell me he had reservations about the mix.
He told me, “I don’t like the third line in the last verse, and I wanna redo it.”
This was long before the days of mixing desks having any form of total recall, a digital memory of the mix enabling you load a previous session.
Although nobody had ever asked me to do this before, it seemed like a reasonable request, until we got back into the studio.
For hours and hours I tried to regain the previous mix but eventually I had to explain to Tommy it just wasn’t going to work.
To get exactly the same balance, echoes, compression on this one line and insert it back into the song, making it a perfect match without it being noticed, was virtually impossible.
“Kenny, what are you telling me? Same tape, same desk, same studio, same engineer.”
He seemed to have a point so I persevered working on through the night.
During the early hours Tommy had fallen asleep.
I woke him up to have a listen to the line I had just inserted. As his eyes opened he looked at me with an expression that would have made the Devil pray,
“Kenny,” he said.
“Don’t ever do that again, Jane Fonda was just going for my zipper.”
You couldn’t help but love this guy.
Remixing the one line took almost as long as it took to do the original mix.
Chased Down in a Taxi
One Friday afternoon we had finished recording and were waiting for a taxi to take Tommy back to London. We sat discussing the re-mix we were to start on the Monday morning.
Tommy’s cab arrived so we both left the studio.
As I was slowly edging my way through the almost stationary Friday evening traffic.
I looked in my wing mirror to see Tommy had got out of his cab and was running down the middle of the road towards me.
Thinking a catastrophe had taken place I hastily opened the car window.
As Tommy approached the car, somewhat out of breath he said to me,
“Kenny, on Monday when we get to the end of the song, just before the fade, I want to drop the acoustic guitars down and bring up the percussion, have a good weekend see you Monday.”
Then casually walked back through the traffic to his taxi.
Of course by Monday Tommy had changed his mind again.
Late one Saturday evening Tommy phoned me at home, in a panic about a track we had finished some weeks before.
He was going to cut the Master on Monday morning at De Lane Lea and was adamant that we had to redo one line in the second verse.
I tried vigorously to talk him out of it, but with his usual charm he managed to talk me into meeting him on the Sunday afternoon at the studio to redo the line.
Dancing Around
We started at 2pm. I attempted to match and insert the new ten-second piece of music for the next thirteen hours, before he was finally satisfied.
We then played the track from start to finish for about an hour, whilst he danced around the room.
Finally he said, “Kenny I don’t like it, put it back as it was.”
Well, looking down, the small piece of tape from the original mix had fallen from the side of the tape machine onto the floor.
It was concealed amongst a mishmash of other bits of tape that had been discarded from all the previous attempts throughout the night, but worst of all the tape had been stepped on, which rendered it unusable.
Breaking the news to Tommy wasn’t a great moment; I tried to explain that only one of us had been dancing around the control room that night and it sure as hell wasn’t me.
After he calmed down, I found the original piece of tape, but only one half of it was usable. I asked him if he still had the copy tape I gave him when we first mixed the track some weeks before, he said,
“Yeah, its in my flat in London.”
We decided that he would get a taxi back home, pick up the tape and bring it back to the studio. I would then copy the one line and insert it back into the original Master tape.
Once Tommy had left in the cab, I reset the desk and cleared up the control room, so once we had done the edit I could make a hasty getaway and the room would be tidy and prepared for the next day’s Ten o’clock session.
The Wee Small Hours
Tommy returned to the studio around 6am with the copy and by 7am I’d replaced the original line and the task was completed.
For the next hour we played the track over and over again.
I was stunned when Tommy said,
”No, I don’t like it and I’ve changed my mind put the new line back.”
To my horror the new line we had spent fourteen hours re-mixing was crumpled on the floor, but his time it was me that had trampled on it.
Having reset the desk whilst Tommy was gone, there was no way of redoing the line without spending another fourteen hours.
To say Tommy went ballistic would be an understatement.
People were now starting to arrive for the next session, so we would have to vacate the studio soon.
We agreed the only thing to do was to use half of the line on the tape that he had danced on and the other half of the line I stood on.
It was now 9.30am and the track was back together with the compromised edits.
Tommy took the master tape down the corridor to the disc cutting room.
Exhausted I went home to bed, saying to myself, never, never again.
Rude Awakening
I had been asleep for about two hours when my wife came in to wake me, telling me Tommy was on the phone and needed to speak to me urgently.
Putting the phone to my ear, I was ready for anything.
Tommy was shouting down the phone but to my surprise he was raving about the track, telling me it was a masterpiece and how he couldn’t wait to get back in the studio with me to finish the album.
We did go on to do many more sessions; they were always extraordinary, which was the nature of working with Tommy Boyce.
The last time I saw Tommy was in a busy part of Mayfair.
We were walking towards each other.
As we got close he said, “Kenny how are you man, wanna try my jacket on?”
It was a black windcheater with “White Rock” printed on the back, this was the title of a documentary that Rick Wakeman had written the music for.
I put it on and asked Tommy how he was, “Fine, fine! The jacket looks great man.”
And without another word he just walked away. I never saw or spoke to him again.
Sometime later I was told he had left the UK and gone to live in Memphis, then onto Nashville.
I had many wonderful times with Tommy.
Socially he was the same as he was in the studio, always hiding behind the mask of Tommy Boyce, making sure he was always the centre of attention, forever performing. No one, as far as I am aware, was offended by this trait.
Tommy was one of a kind, a wonderful fascinating character and a great talent. Although at times he could drive me to the edge of insanity, I miss him to this day; I loved him dearly.
Tommy’s book dedication
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