Susan Rogers - This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You

THIS IS
WHAT IT
SOUNDS
LIKE

What the Music You Love
Says About You

Susan Rogers

and Ogi Ogas

For Art, whom music saved

That sense of absolute freedom, that sense of no direction but the greatest direction in the world, of being able to feel, Im a part of this somehow.

Sam Phillips, producer, on pursuing a life in record making

CONTENTS

LINER NOTES

Listening to This Book

This book invites you to listen to many specific records. For the best experience, we recommend that you search for and listen to these records on a popular music streaming service such as Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, or Amazon Music. You can find a list of This Is What It Sounds Like records on the website weve created, ThisIsWhatItSoundsLike.com.

THIS IS
WHAT IT
SOUNDS
LIKE

I CAN IDENTIFY THE EXACT MOMENT WHEN MY JOURNEY to becoming a professional music listener began. It was at a Led Zeppelin concert at the Forum arena in Los Angeles when I was twenty years old. Hundreds of concerts later, Id still rank it as one of the best Ive ever seen. Robert Plant was at the height of his fame as a rock god, mesmerizing the crowd with his vocals, while guitarist Jimmy Page, clad in a black silk suit embroidered with , struck incendiary power chords. But as the concert approached the halfway pointthe band still hadnt performed classics like Kashmir and Stairway to HeavenI realized that it was time for me to leave.

It broke my heart to go. Music was the truest source of passion and meaning in my life and the concert had lifted me to a state of pure rapture. But if I wasnt home by ten-thirty p.m., there would be hell to pay. Not from my parents. My mother had died when I was fourteen years old, and I no longer lived with my father. I had dropped out of high school at age seventeen and married an older boyfriend, thinking that matrimony would be a quick ticket to security and independence. Instead, my marriage had become a trap of desperation and loneliness. My husband resented my attraction to music, and if I didnt return home by his curfew, I would be met at the door with jealous wrathor worse. So as Page launched into the acoustic arpeggios that open Bron-Y-Aur Stomp, I apologized to my bewildered friends and solemnly made my way to the exit.

I felt so powerless and low. All my life I had enjoyed an intense, irresistible, and what seemed like a necessary relationship with musicwhen I listened to music, every note felt important and every lyric felt trueyet Id been intimidated into abandoning one of the most exhilarating musical experiences of my life to return to a place of isolation. Unexpectedly, defiance overtook me. I stopped in my tracks and, in dramatic Scarlett OHara style, leaned back, raised my eyes toward the rafters, and vowed, One day I will return to the Forum and mix live sound for an amazing band!

It was an utterly implausible vow. For starters, I wasnt entirely sure what a sound mixer actually did, let alone how to become one. I couldnt play an instrument. I didnt sing. I didnt know any musicians or anyone in the music industry. I stitched heart valves on a biomedical assembly line for a living. Yet this improbable musical fantasy had been germinating in the back of my mind ever since Id seen a photograph on the back of a Sonny & Cher album when I was very young. It showed a man sitting in front of an elaborate console of knobs, buttons, and sliders. The label below him read, Sound engineer. When I saw this photo, I felt more than thought, Hes making records but not playing an instrumentmaybe I could do that!

Not long after that Led Zeppelin concert, I decided to act on my vow. I divorced my husband and moved to Hollywood with less than a hundred dollars in my bank account. I persuaded a professional audio company to take a chance and hire me as an audio technician trainee. They taught me to install and repair the sophisticated electronic equipment in recording studios, the magical workshops where musical wizards made albums. Working as an audio tech wasnt nearly as glamorous as making musicor mixing it, for that matterbut in a few years time it provided me with an intimate view of record making by talented artists such as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt.

I admired all the artists whose music I was fortunate enough to serve, but my favorite kind of music was soul: performers like James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, and Sly Stone. And there was no question which artist was my favorite. The newcomer mowing down all the conventions of rock, pop, and soul: Prince. But Prince recorded his music elsewhere, and I knew that he wasnt ever going to walk through the door of the Los Angeles studio where I worked.

Then one life-changing day in the early summer of 1983, I got a call from a former boyfriend who worked as chief tech for Westlake Audio, Michael Jacksons chosen studio. In his thick Boston accent John said, Yah dream job is waitin fah yaPrince is lookin fah a technician! Instantly I knew that the job would be mine. I had been a Prince fan from the moment Id heard his first single, Soft and Wet, coming out of a boom box held on the lap of a young Black teen on the back of an east-bound bus crawling along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. I had seen Prince a couple of times on tour and had all his albums. I also knew through the professional grapevine that he liked working with women.

His genre-bending sound and avant-garde profile made him a rare bird, an eclectic outsider to the folk-rock musicians surrounding me in Southern California. But the fact that I was one of a tiny handful of female audio technicians in the industry made me a rare bird, too. None of the more experienced technicians in Los Angeles were interested in taking the gig, because it required relocating to the Midwest, thousands of miles from the epicenter of the entertainment industry. I, on the other hand, was willing to leave everyone and everything behind, move to Minneapolis, and become the personal tech for the artist who meant the most to me.

Prince had just finished touring for his groundbreaking double album 1999. He was at an early point in his next record, and the first thing he needed me to do was install a new recording console in his home. That task took me about a week to finish, after which we began to have short exchanges. (Prince was famously taciturn, especially while working.) What little conversation we did have was about equipment and practical matters, but one day as I drove up to the gate outside his house I had Sly & the Family Stones Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) cranked up on my car stereo. I lowered the car window and pressed the button for the intercom. Prince answered... by singing along.

That might have been the first time he realized that he and I shared the same musical tastethat we lived on the same street, as he liked to put it. Perhaps thats why after I finished installing the equipment, he unexpectedly invited me to sit in the recording engineers chair.