Zweig - Invisibles: celebrating the unsung heroes of the workplace

Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. The Beatles. Eric Clapton. Van Halen.

Lets start off with a little quiz. Which one of the above doesnt belong?

Maybe youre thinking Eric Clapton because hes the only single artist, not a band, on the list. Or maybe Van Halen because their heyday was in the 1980s, and the others were a decade or two before. But youd be wrong on both counts. The outlier in this list is actually the Beatles. All the rest of the artists are linked by one person: a man named Andy Johns.

Cavernous, thunderous, terrifying even, the opening bars of Led Zeppelins When the Levee Breaks constitute possibly the most beloved drum intro of all time. The track, and especially that intro, is seminal, a sonic benchmark thousands of bands, including some of the most successful acts in rock history, aimed for or were inspired by. As the music recording magazine Sound on Sound noted in a piece on drum recording, its one of the most sought-after sounds in rock. The drum loop has also been widely sampled all over the musical map, from the Beastie Boys to Bjrk, Eminem to Enigma. Even if you dont know When the Levee Breaks, youve heard these drums or their imitations.

Ubiquitous now, we take for granted how radical the sonics of (Zeppelin drummer) John Bonhams drums were in 1971, when the bands fourth album was released. As studio technologies were advancing at the time, the trend was toward more mics and more gear in general. On many recordings of the era bands were using multiple mics on the drum kit, usually with one near the bass drum. Also, for some time a more deadened and close drum sound, popularized by the Beatles later recordings, had been gaining popularity. Yet Johns, as the albums recording engineer, the person responsible for getting the bands sounds on tape, tried something counterintuitive, and revolutionary in a way, to achieve such an exceptionally massive soundhe took just two microphones and hung them over a banister high above a staircase that was in the room where Bonham was pounding away. (The band recorded in an eighteenth-century country house rather than a traditional studio, enabling them to incorporate its varied acoustics, such as the stairwell, in the recordings.) He also compressed the signal and ran it through an echo unit, effects which, utilized together, made the overall performance sound simultaneously louder yet more distant, key to its mesmerizing quality.

When we think of our favorite songs, we think of the artists performing them. Perhaps if youre a serious music fan, youll know who produced the tracks. But we never think of the engineer, which truly is an oversight. The unusual production on When the Levee Breaks is factors in its popularity and longevity, wrote Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum, now a professor of Music Technology at Laval University in Quebec, in the Journal on the Art of Record Production.

Johns didnt achieve this sound alone. Of course, Bonhams performance is what this all rests on, and Jimmy Page, the bands guitar player and producer, is widely credited, and rightfully so, as the mastermind behind much of Zeppelins oeuvre. But it takes nothing away from Page and Bonham to acknowledge Johnss critical role. He was a highly skilled craftsman, who married a deep technical knowledge with an artistic gift for knowing how to get that sound on so many recordings. Beyond Led Zeppelin IV, Johns engineered nearly all of that bands most successful records, plus the Rolling Stones classics Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, and numerous other acclaimed albums. This mans stamp is on some of the most widely shared cultural touchstones of a generation. Yet, other than a blip of recognition following his death in April 2013, he, and his work, have remained invisible.

7:30 p.m. Peter Canby shuffles a stack of marked-up article proofs, flicks off his desk lamp, and finally shuts down his iMac for the day. He has pored over a journalists notes for a particularly sensitive piece, double-checked quotes from a blind source formerly in the CIA, held a meeting with a writer and his magazines attorney over concerns of libel, and instructed a new employee that she needed to be versed in the vocabulary of genetic coding before attending a screening of the sci-fi flick Prometheus, because its review, which she later had to check, had a line about a disintegrating humanoids DNA-laden chromosomes sinking into water. No minutia is too minute for the fact-checkers Canby oversees at The New Yorker. The requirements to work in his department, beyond possessing a savant level of meticulousness, are stiff. More than half of the sixteen fact-checkers are fluent in a second language, among them Mandarin, Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and Russian, along with the usual French and Spanish; the majority have advanced degrees, including the expected Journalism and Comp. Lit. masters, plus an LSE grad, and the errant Oxford PhD program dropout; and many stay only a few years before leaving because the pace is brutal, says Canby.