Bill Schnee - Chairman at the Board: Recording the Soundtrack of a Generation

Bill Schnee is a multiple Grammy-, Emmy-, and Dove-award winning musician, music producer, and audio engineer with over 125 gold and platinum records. Known in the industry as an engineers engineer, he has worked on dozens of Grammy-nominated and award-winning albums, as well as being personally nominated eleven times in the Best Engineered Grammy category.

He currently resides in Nashville with his wife Sallie. He also really likes popcorn.

Backbeat Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200
Lanham, MD 20706
www.rowman.com

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2021 by Bill Schnee

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Special thanks to Michele Reeves for contributing the title for this book.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schnee, Bill, author.

Title: Chairman at the board : recording the soundtrack of a generation / Bill Schnee.

Description: Guilford, Connecticut : Backbeat, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Chairman at the Board is an intimate, funny, and absorbing look at the music business by an insider who has recorded a host of the greatest musical artists of the twentieth century Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020037627 (print) | LCCN 2020037628 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493056132 (cloth) | ISBN 9781493056149 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sound recording executives and producersUnited StatesBiography. | Sound engineersUnited StatesBiography. | Sound recording industryUnited StatesAnecdotes. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC ML429.S339 A3 2021 (print) | LCC ML429.S339 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/778149092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037627

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037628

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to the guardian of my soul, and to my beautiful wife Sallieneither one of whom I deserve. The giver and the gift.

Every Story Has a Beginning

I suppose I should begin by telling you a little about me and how I got started. I was born on the Fourth of July, 1947 (thats right, a firecracker baby), in Phoenix, Arizona, and spent the first thirteen years of my life sweating theremy mother told me that the hospital I was born in had no air conditioning at the time. She also said my father, who was a medical doctor, was not allowed to come into her room for the delivery, but she was allowed to smoke cigarettes between contractions. Go figure.

I grew up with an avid love of music. My father listened to classical music, and my mother loved to play the organ. I started trumpet lessons in grade school but found the embouchure too difficult and switched to saxophone. Like all kids starting out on sax, I drove my parents nutty making the sounds of a duck in heat.

At eleven years old, I started keyboard lessons on our organ. It was then that I realized I had an ear for music, although I took ill advantage of it at the start. Each week the teacher would give me sheet music with a song for me to play. I would ask him to play it for me first, and then pretend to read the notes while playing it back by ear. He finally caught on and stopped playing the pieces for me. When he passed away rather unexpectedly, my mom claimed it was because I drove him crazy.

I didnt have any siblings, and as an only child, I had music to keep me company instead of an imaginary friend. I found solace in listening to records and was constantly mesmerized by them. The radio was a treasure trove of three-minute capsules of entertainment. In those days, disc jockeys made their own playlists, so in a three-hour program you could hear a wide variety of music from rockabilly and blues to pop and jazz. My taste in music became equally expansive from James Brown, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, and the doo-wop groups, to Sinatra, Dean Martin, and, of course, Elvis.

My parents moved to San Francisco when I started ninth grade. It was then that I discovered high fidelity in recorded music and became an audiophile. I remember going to a hi-fi show and being blown away by the incredible sounds that came from all the high-end amplifiers, turntables, cartridges, and speakers. I nagged my parents into buying me my first real stereo, and then spent every penny of my allowance buying records for the new system. I took note of the different sound qualities of various records. I remember how the Phase Four Series and Command Records showed off the dimension of stereo more than other recordsalmost becoming gim-micky at times.

I became a big fan of Henry Mancini, both for his music and for the sound of his records. In those days not many recording engineers got album credit, but the Mancini records did credit the engineer, Al Schmitt. I never would have dreamed back then I would become friends with Al. The Mancini soundtrack to the Howard HawksJohn Wayne movie Hatari won the Grammy for Best Engineered Album in 1963, and was Als first. As of this writing, Al is now in his nineties and has twenty-three Grammys and is still going strong, a record that certainly will never be broken.

Another early record I bought was The Lonely Bull by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Almost forty years later, while mixing an album for Herb and his wife Lani Hall, Herb kindly autographed it for me. Herb is an absolutely standout human being, and I am proud to call he and Lani friends.

The sound of these albums was a big part of the reason I got interested in electronics in high school and joined the P. A. Crew where I did the sound for assemblies and plays. I also started learning a little about electronic theory. I would take the bus down to Market Street in downtown San Francisco where there were several Army surplus stores, buy odd electronic bits, and bring them home to see if I could get them working. I also got into amateur ham and CB radio; I even learned Morse code to get a ham license. Theres no question I became a real geek. My wife Sallie actually found a picture of me from high school with a slide rule on my belt and a paperclip holding my glasses together. Yikes!

Right after I turned sixteen, my parents moved from San Francisco to Glendora, a suburb of Los Angeles, for my senior year of high school. I loved living in San Francisco, but LA had those great summer nights and fabulous Mexican food. The Beach Boys were all over the radio, and they quickly became my favorite group. They sang with those wonderful harmonies about three things I loved and dreamed of: surfing, cars, and girls. I love all styles of music, but I must confess, Im a pop music junkie. Ive always loved great vocal harmonies, especially in pop music. When the Beatles came along, I found their early records to have a great vitality, but I still remained more of a Beach Boys fanat least for a little while.