This week we’re back again with a very dear friend and mentor, Mr. Jack Douglas!
Jack and I have spent countless hours working together over the years—even as much as 9 months at a time while we were doing an Aerosmith project. We even spent 3 months living in the same apartment!
This time, we’re talking about his work as an engineer on John Lennon’s 1971 album Imagine and the song “How Do You Sleep?” We even got to take a look at the original track sheets from the session!
Jack Douglas started as a folk musician and songwriter.
He then travelled to England playing in different bands before coming back to New York to attend the Institute of Audio Research. He was a member of the first graduating class!
His first professional gig was as a janitor at the Record Plant in New York. He worked his way up to the desk as an engineer and participated in projects by Miles Davis, The James Gang, and Alice Cooper, amongst others.
He then had the opportunity to engineer John Lennon’s Imagine album in 1971. Jack and Lennon got along very well, working together for the rest of Lennon’s life.
Jack would become a Record Plant staff engineer where he worked with even more incredible artists like Patti Smith, Blue Öyster Cult, the New York Dolls, Starz, and of course, Aerosmith. He even got Cheap Trick signed to their very first record deal!
The foundation of “How Do You Sleep?” was recorded at Lennon’s own Ascot Sound Studios.
By the time the song was finally released, it would’ve gone through three different generations of tape. It was taken from the original 8-track recorded at Ascot to a 16-track, from 16 back to 8, and finally from 8 down to the final 2-track.
Usually there’d be quite a bit of quality lost between all these transfers, but Record Plant staff engineer Roy Cicala, who was a mentor of sorts to both Jack and Shelly Yakus, would run a Pultec EQ on the sync head to make up for any degradation which might occur.
On the other hand, Lennon was used to doing Beatles records on only 4 tracks! There was plenty of bouncing things down and making tape transfers, so he wasn’t concerned about quality on Imagine.
A host of amazing musicians of the era played on “How Do You Sleep?”
Wurlitzer piano was handled by Nicky Hopkins, who played with some of the greatest British and American bands of the ’60s through the ’90s, including The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Beatles, Cat Stevens, and Jefferson Airplane to name a few. He credits are extensive, though he unfortunately passed in 1994 at age 50.
Klaus Voormann played bass on the song and the entire album. Voormann met them when The Beatles spent time in Hamburg and eventually moved in with Ringo Starr and George Harrison in London. He’s well known for designing the cover art on Revolver.
String overdubs were handled by Jack Douglas, Roy Cicala, and Shelly Yakus at Record Plant Studio A.
Studio A at Record Plant was a notoriously dead room. Jack and the other engineers at the studio would have to come in and put plywood on the walls to liven things up!
The string overdubs were recorded there by the phenomenal Record Plant team. “How Do You Sleep?” actually begins with recordings of the string section warming up.
SEE ALSO:
How To Mix Vocals Like A Pro
Home Studio On A Budget
Many of the instruments on Imagine were actually re-recorded at Record Plant. Amongst the tracks finished there are “It’s So Hard” and “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier,” in addition to “How Do You Sleep?”
The lyrics for “How Do You Sleep?” are noted for being aimed at Paul McCartney, whose relationship with Lennon was strained at the time.
Jack mentions that Lennon loved McCartney like a brother and could poke fun at him when he wanted without any hard feelings, despite what fans and listeners might have interpreted as genuine disdain. The suspected feud was clarified by Lennon in a later interview:
“There’s really no feud between me and Paul. It’s all good, clean fun. No doubt there will be an answer to ‘Sleep’ on his next album, but I don’t feel that way about him at all. It works as a complete song with no relation to Paul. It works as a piece of music.
I started writing it in 1969, and the line, ‘So Sergeant Pepper took you by surprise’ was written about two years before anything happened. There was always a musical difference between me and Paul – it didn’t just happen last year. But we’ve always had a lot in common, and we still do.
The thing that made The Beatles what they were was the fact that I could do my rock ‘n roll, and Paul could do the pretty stuff…But hardly a week goes by when I don’t see, and/or hear from one of them.”
Warren Huart: We’re big, we’re bad, and we’re back with Mr. Jack Douglas. How are you?
Jack Douglas: I’m good. Good to see you again.
Warren Huart: Good to see you again. This one’s a very-
Jack Douglas: It’s been minutes.
Warren Huart: It’s been minutes. Absolutely minutes. And if you’re watching it concurrently, maybe even seconds.
Jack Douglas: Yeah.
Warren Huart: This one’s a really exciting one because we have a track sheet. I mean, that’s a huge deal.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, quite.
Warren Huart: And it’s ‘How Do You Sleep.’
Jack Douglas: This stuff came to us as eight tracks. I transferred it from 8-track to 16-track. Then we mixed it. Then we transferred it from 2-track to 8-track again, back to 8-track.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: And did our string overdubs on the 8-track. So it went to 8-track, 16-track, 8-track, 2-track.
Warren Huart: That’s quite a few iterations.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. But you know what? No one… well, first of all, when Roy would do a transfer…
Warren Huart: This is Roy Cicala.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. Roy Cicala. When he would do a transfer, he would put a Pultec on the sync head so that he was making up for anything that was going on in the sync head as it was going over. So he would pretty much, you wouldn’t know that it had bounced around, and John was like, “Oh, only three generations. No problem. You know, we’re used to six.” So it was never a problem to do that. It just never lost anything.
Jack Douglas: Maybe it added something, I think, the loss. But two… it was 8 to 16, 16 to 8. No. Yeah, 8 to 16, 16… I think we went right to this 8-track.
Warren Huart: 8-track.
Jack Douglas: In the mix.
Warren Huart: Yeah. So this is the Record Plant.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. The Record Plant in New York. And if you look up here, which you’ll see later, you’ll see the producer was a guy named P. Spector.
Warren Huart: P. Spector.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. This is my handwriting. No one seemed to mind. Artists, John Lennon. Client, Apple Records. Master take four, and Mmaster take three. And the names are Cicala, Yakus, and there wasn’t room for me to put Douglas, so I just put J.D.
Jack Douglas: If we go back one, here’s a tape box with the final takes. And this is the 8-track. You’d see here complete takes one, two, three, and then four would be a complete take and a playback. PB means playback. And then I would put M for master, and then HTL meant Head and Tail Lead.
Jack Douglas: And this is the same thing. ‘How Do You Sleep’ only took three. Now we’re talking about the strings going on over the third take of the strings.
Warren Huart: How were the strings being monitored? Do they have the speakers in the room?
Jack Douglas: No, no. They-
Warren Huart: They aren’t on headphones?
Jack Douglas: No, no. They had, the conductor had one small speaker.
Warren Huart: Yep.
Jack Douglas: And the first chair to each section had headphones.
Warren Huart: Okay.
Jack Douglas: That’s all it took.
Warren Huart: So the first chair is the only one on headphones, and the other guys and girls are playing along?
Jack Douglas: Yes.
Warren Huart: They’re just playing-
Jack Douglas: With the conductor.
Warren Huart: The conductor. Okay.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. Who’s pretty much conducting to the first chair.
Warren Huart: Amazing.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. You want to hear some of this? It’s kind of interesting.
Warren Huart: Hell yeah.
Jack Douglas: I mean the thing is, this is Studio A at Record Plant.
Warren Huart: Did Shelly just text you?
Jack Douglas: No.
Warren Huart: That would have been funny.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. Studio A at Record Plant, and it was a dead room.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: And what we used to do is we used to put plywood on the walls, just come in and put plywood everywhere.
Warren Huart: Because it was too dead.
Jack Douglas: It was too dead, to liven the room up. No Decca Trees. You know, we’d go over each in the sections.
Warren Huart: So this, on these stems, this is called ‘Song.’
Jack Douglas: That’s how it starts. That’s them warming up.
Jack Douglas: Nicky Hopkins.
Warren Huart: Oh.
Jack Douglas: Hear the cellos and the basses? Isn’t that great?
Warren Huart: Whose arrangement?
Jack Douglas: I can’t remember. His name was like Zorro, or something. I didn’t know at all. And I never saw him again.
Warren Huart: Let’s find out.
Jack Douglas: Until ‘Happy Christmas.’
Jack Douglas: It’s funny, I don’t know how they got paid.
Jack Douglas: Interesting, though.
Jack Douglas: That’s two tape delays on his…
Warren Huart: On his vocal?
Jack Douglas: On his vocal, yeah.
Jack Douglas: We had to build a tape machine for him, for the tape delay, TC, or ATD, or whatever it was. Automatic Track Doubling.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: He asked for that, and we all looked at each other like, ‘oh shit.’ What’s that? So we asked him to explain it. He just said, it just sounds like there’s somebody else singing with me.
Warren Huart: Beautiful strings.
Jack Douglas: Biggest string section.
Warren Huart: Whoever did it, though, it’s very Beatle-y.
Jack Douglas: Yeah.
Warren Huart: They obviously knew what they were doing.
Jack Douglas: A lot of violas. Heavy on the violas in there too. It’s too bad you can’t…
Warren Huart: Solo the strings out.
Jack Douglas: Solo, and solo the echo, which was known for its tuned chambers.
Jack Douglas: So let’s talk about this delay on this vocal. He said, do you have ATD, and we all scratched our heads and didn’t want to act like fools. And of course, Roy said, “We can get it.”
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: You know, there was no digital delay at that time. So Roy goes to maintenance, and says, “What do we do?” And so they built us a machine. They took a 4-track that could run at 30 IPS. And they put a cap stand doubler, a fat cap stand. So now it was running at 60 IPS. We had to get transcription reels because the thing would run so fast.
Jack Douglas: So you put a VFO on it, a variable speed, a VSO. A Variable Speed Oscillator. We called it a VFO, Variable Frequency Oscillator. You put that on the motor and then you could control how fast you wanted it so that it would be in time.
Jack Douglas: So you could take it to 60, and you could take it up then from 60. So once you took it up to 60, you were pretty much doubling it. Then Paul Prestopino who built this monstrosity said, “If I put two playback heads on this, close together, which he did, put two playback heads on it. So there’s a record head and two playback heads.
Jack Douglas: And then if he put this dial on top of it with a rod that pushed the tape between the two heads, now you had flanging instantly.
Warren Huart: Wow.
Jack Douglas: So you’re returning, you know, you could return two stereo tracks. It was a 4-track. And you could just do this incredible sound.
Warren Huart: So you had these two heads, and this rod could push the tape backwards and forwards to vary-
Jack Douglas: Between the two heads.
Warren Huart: I understand. That’s amazing.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. So it was instant flanging.
Warren Huart: You may have already said, I’m sorry. Which machine? Was it an Ampex?
Jack Douglas: It was an Ampex, either a 440 or a 300. I think it was a 300 deck, you know, with the baseball bat that you used to go back and forth between forward and rewind to slow it down.
Jack Douglas: And you would be working with John on something, and Roy might send the echo over to this thing and you would be cranking this big dial back and forth. Anyway-
Warren Huart: In real time.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, in real time. Yeah. And John just thought that it was like, “Oh, you have one.” Oh, you have one. Meanwhile, it was probably, Paul Prestopino probably worked on that thing for 20 hours straight to get that thing to work like that. But it was…
Jack Douglas: And the cap stand was so big. But you had to have these giant tapes on it. And you had to be ready to just, when that thing ran out, God help you if it ran out during a performance. So you would constantly be looking at the thing and sweating. Then you’d have to send a signal to Roy like stall for just like, you know, 10 seconds while I flip this tape over, run it through the other way. I don’t know why that vocal is… What else is on that?
Warren Huart: Well, we have separated drums, by looks of it. Let’s have a listen.
Jack Douglas: Now, I think that that’s… not Allen on this track.
Warren Huart: Pretty tight.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, I think that’s Jim.
Warren Huart: You think that’s Keltner?
Jack Douglas: Yeah. Because what happened was when we got over to New York, I mean a lot of stuff was recorded in in Tittenhurst in his house really. They converted it. And once you got to New York, and you saw the studio facility and what he could do there, a lot of stuff was redone. And Jim came in and Klaus Voormann. So they started to rerecord stuff. I mean, Imagineis a re-record. And that piano is still around.
Warren Huart: Oh it is? Who has it?
Jack Douglas: It’s in New Jersey in a beautiful big room.
Warren Huart: Oh he did?
Jack Douglas: Yeah. And he brought over a bunch of equipment. So before the auction, he just moved a few things out.
Warren Huart: Just a couple of things.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. Like the piano. And I had lunch with Jimmy Iovine a few days ago, and he said, “Jack, remember this?” And we went into his room, and there was the black Mellotron that John had stored, which was the Mellotron, the double keyboard, big monstrous thing that the Beatles used. And he got it and he brought it over.
Jack Douglas: And John had a vault at the Record Plant in the basement. It was a sealed, real vault. And in there was, which we would frequently go down and listen to some of the things in there.
Warren Huart: I’m sure.
Jack Douglas: He had all the 3-track Shea stadium tapes, and instruments like that Mellotron, which I think Jimmy got at auction. Used to be cool to go down there, put up a Shea stadium tape and listen to the actual performance. You know, it was pretty cool stuff.
Warren Huart: Unbelievable. What an incredible live band.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. So basically no monitors.
Warren Huart: Just hoping for the best.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. Yeah.
Warren Huart: So is this George?
Jack Douglas: John. That’s John. I think Jesse Ed Davis is on this one too. Yeah.
Warren Huart: Yeah. So Beatle-y.
Jack Douglas: What a great rhythm player.
Warren Huart: Unbelievable.
Jack Douglas: Jesse Ed Davis.
Warren Huart: My hairs are standing on end.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. What a deep groove, huh?
Warren Huart: Is this Voormann? Klaus Voormann on bass?
Jack Douglas: Yeah. Yeah, Klaus was the only bass player on Imagine.
Warren Huart: I always thought George had played on this song.
Jack Douglas: I think he did, but I think he played on it in England and not…
Warren Huart: Not the final version. It’s so good.
Jack Douglas: I was so shocked when I was doing the transfer that this song, when I did the first transfer of it, I was like, “Is he singing about Paul?”
Warren Huart: I was going to wonder whether we were going to touch on that. I was, I didn’t want to start that conversation.
Jack Douglas: Wow. And so that was always a mystery that I never went to with John about that relationship until that video, which I think I showed you once where he starts talking about Paul, where he confesses to the fact that he loved him as a brother, and that he could take the piss out of him any time he wanted to, whether we got it or not is something else. So it sounded like there was just this angry thing. But you know, apparently he enjoyed that. That’s more English than it is American, that kind of piss taking.
Jack Douglas: But yeah, that video is wonderful, where he’s just… That’s the Playboy interview. I did show it to you.
Warren Huart: You did. You showed it to me a couple of years ago. Somebody had found the video cassettes.
Jack Douglas: Yes, they had been discarded and were marked-
Warren Huart: Like 1980.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, were marked TBE, to be erased.
Jack Douglas: And the reason they were to be erased is because in the video, Yoko is sleeping on a couch.
Warren Huart: I remember.
Jack Douglas: So she didn’t want anybody to see her sleeping on a couch while we were working, you know? And so that was the… Shift or whatever his name was, came in to do the Playboy interview. And he was so petrified at sitting with John.
Warren Huart: At the console.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, at the console that John actually had to pry, he had to prime him to get the interview started, you know, because the guy was shaking and he was terribly frightened.
Warren Huart: It was a big deal. I mean, he’s back in the studio after not recording for three or four years, which probably felt like an eternity.
Jack Douglas: To him, it did.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: Certainly and to us too.
Warren Huart: And who was filming it again?
Jack Douglas: Bob Gruen.
Warren Huart: Bob Gruen. Very famous photographer.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, that was Bob’s… it was his birthday. John’s birthday. The birthday cards are on the console and…
Warren Huart: There’s a reflection in that video of Bob Gruen holding the largest video camera from 1980.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. I know.
Warren Huart: Like this. And he’s holding it like this.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, and it’s got a monitor that pops out. It was the first one that a monitor on it. And he gave that to John for his birthday. So he came in, I took it away from him and I took video of Bob Gruen, and then John was doing this interview. So Bob Parks…
Warren Huart: Wait, this is John’s birthday?
Jack Douglas: It’s John’s birthday.
Warren Huart: In 1980.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. He was 40.
Warren Huart: Oh, so it’s only a few days before he died.
Jack Douglas: Well, it was sometime. It was October and it’s a month.
Warren Huart: Like a month or so.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, two. Two months. So it’s, yeah, his birthday card is on the console. My gift to him was about 40 cassettes of the hidden microphone tapes that he didn’t know about, but had asked for.
Jack Douglas: It was kind of a nudge, nudge, wink, wink situation. After the second day of recordingDouble Fantasy, he said to me, “You know, not always the best things are said out in the studio. Sometimes they’re said in the control room, or anywhere else. You’d never know where someone’s gonna say something that’s really interesting.”
Jack Douglas: And he was so interested in documenting everything about that went on in the sessions, including the journal that was kept. But to him, the idea of having this audio of everything. So I mean that’s what he said. And so I hid microphones. I hid microphones everywhere. I mean, they were in the control room, they were in the vocal booth, they were out in the room, they were in the bathroom, they were in maintenance, they were in his little private room that he liked to go in. While I was comping vocals, he would go into this other room and just hang out.
Jack Douglas: I put a piano in it, and it was very comfortable. It had a couch, and he could just hang out. And so there were again, two mono transcription tape machines in a room that was being fed with all of these. Just everything went into this thing, these machines. And every once in a while the guy would have to go down just to make sure it flipped over. But they ran so slow that basically you got 10 hours out of one reel.
Jack Douglas: And so for his birthday, his 40th birthday, I can’t remember how long it takes to transfer all those things, but I had somebody working around the clock to transfer all those tapes to cassettes up to that point since, you know, end of July. And they wheeled them in. And I said, “Well, you remember what you said about everything being said?”
Jack Douglas: And he just couldn’t believe it. He started listening to them right away. As soon as he got home, he was like, ‘this is incredible.’ You know, all the things that are said out there. Because every night, after the session, he sat for an hour or sometimes two in the control room when the actual date was over. And just put his feet up and talked to us about everything. About politics, about the Beatles, about Hamburg, Germany. About being a father now. About everything. He just sat there and talked and passed a pipe with some good grass in it.
Jack Douglas: And it was, you know, all that stuff was there. And every once in awhile, bits and pieces show up online. They have a name for it. The hidden, the hidden recordings or something. But someday I hope you’ll be able to get all whatever thousand hours. I mean they talk about content.
Jack Douglas: When we went to Record Plant to do Walking on Thin Ice, I again bugged the control room, the live room, and recorded right up to the very last day. And the last day tape I destroyed because I just couldn’t bear it.
Jack Douglas: I just, you know, when you take a reel of tape, and you take it by the hub and you pick it up and knock it like this and it just all falls off like that. That’s what I did with that reel of tape.
Jack Douglas: I also gave him a pair of… Lee DeCarlo and I went to Harvey music, which was the big hi-fi dealer, and gave him the first pair of wireless headphones. It wasn’t Bluetooth. It was just a transceiver. And he could plug this thing into the head, into his stereo at the headphone jack. And it would transmit to the headphones. They were Sennheisers. They sounded pretty good. He thought it was like magic. Oh, I can walk around the house and listen to music?
Warren Huart: Wireless headsets, I remember those.
Jack Douglas: Yeah.
Warren Huart: With the aerial.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, that’s right.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: Pre Bluetooth.
Warren Huart: Wow. That was pretty hardcore.
Jack Douglas: That was good.
Warren Huart: I learned a huge amount.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. You know, what Roy used, and he used one of two mics in a bass drum. I could never get them to work. He had, he would take a surgical hose.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: And wrap surgical hose around the tuners of a bass drum.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: Okay. And then he would attach the surgical hose to a hub. A steel hub.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: A tape hub. And then he had drilled holes in the tape hub, very much like how you stand at Christmas tree up.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: Screwed with like three screws. And he would put either a 57 or an EV 666 into that, screw it down. And that’s how he got his bass drums.
Warren Huart: I have no idea how that would work. Sounds like magic.
Jack Douglas: The mic was suspended.
Warren Huart: Oh, I see now.
Jack Douglas: Yeah. The rubber hose would come down.
Warren Huart: Oh, I get it now.
Jack Douglas: He connected it all, and this mic was suspended.
Warren Huart: I see.
Jack Douglas: For some reason he had this theory that you didn’t put a bass drum mic on a mic stand, because the vibrations of the mic stand had nothing to do with the vibrations of the bass drum.
Warren Huart: I understand.
Jack Douglas: So the bass…
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: You can’t knock it.
Warren Huart: It sounds like an amazing crackpot idea. Yeah. I love it.
Jack Douglas: Just the look of it.
Warren Huart: The look of it sounds incredible.
Jack Douglas: I mean, I remember having to put these… you didn’t use a front head. He covered the front head. You know, he covered the bass drum in a tunnel, like we do very much now, but he had to suspend that mic and his mic choices.
Warren Huart: Yeah.
Jack Douglas: They’re great mics, you see, but they don’t have a whole lot of real bottom, but they have all that 80 and 100 cycle stuff that’s, which is what you hear.
Warren Huart: Yeah. Especially right at the top.
Jack Douglas: Yeah.
Warren Huart: Groove is so good. You think that’s Keltner?
Jack Douglas: There’s no real low, low bottom there, but you can’t kill that bass drum. It’s there, you know.
Warren Huart: What’s on the toms?
Jack Douglas: 87s.
Warren Huart: 87s?
Jack Douglas: If he had a drummer with two rack toms and a floor, he would just put the 87 in a figure eight, and put it like this over the two toms.
Warren Huart: The two racks.
Jack Douglas: Yeah.
Warren Huart: Oh, that’s amazing.
Jack Douglas: Yeah.
Warren Huart: That’s amazing.
Jack Douglas: It’s good stuff and it still works.
Warren Huart: Ah, well, thanks ever so much.
Jack Douglas: Yeah, you’re welcome.
Warren Huart: It’s phenomenal.
Jack Douglas: See you again soon.
Warren Huart: Let’s do another one soon. Thanks for watching. Please leave a bunch of comments and questions below.