(MENAFN- The Conversation) Maybe he's someone only musicians know about. Which is criminal. Or maybe this excellent memoir by engineer and producer Tony Cohen, who died in 2017, will fling him into the spotlight. Which is appropriate.
Cohen, who was mostly Melbourne-based, made an astonishing contribution to Australian recorded music in the 70s and 80s.
It seems glib to reduce a busy creative life to a list, but these highlights are the main roads on the map of our culture through those years: Lobby Loyde, The Ferrets, The Boys Next Door, Laughing Clowns, Models, The Reels, The Birthday Party, The Go-Betweens, Hunters and Collectors, Cold Chisel, The Beasts of Bourbon, The Saints, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Tex, Don and Charlie, The Cruel Sea, Tiddas ...
Review: Half Deaf, Completely Mad: The Chaotic Genius of Australia's Most Legendary Producer - Tony Cohen, John Olson (Black Inc)
Half Deaf, Completely Mad is co-written with John Olson. Olson, as Cohen did, works in studios as an engineer (they worked together on Augie March's bootikins ), but also as an archivist and oral historian.
Olson's role in this book is essential to its success. Cohen had started the beginnings of a book in 2012, tapping out tales on his laptop. And then Olson started interviewing Cohen and many of the people who had worked with him.
But Olson made the wise decision to just let Cohen's voice tell the story in this book, and it is clear and conversational off the page; he is both funny and irreverent. Cohen's are stories of glorious inventiveness and dire indulgence from someone with a (mostly) keen memory. The gist of the stories was pure, even if the dates might have needed a bit of research on Olson's part.
Ken Gormley, Cruel Sea bass player, commented after Tony's death:
Cohen's life unfolds through the book as a long, chronological series of vignettes, separated by his handwritten initials TC and punctuated with exhortations to listen to songs that illustrate the tales – making it clear that the context of this life is music, and you'd better go and listen closely to these songs! Hear all the stuff he's talking about: the sound and the songs; the people and the times.
Read more: 'a gentleman with the mad soul of an irish convict poet': remembering chris bailey, and the blazing comet that was the saints
'Turn it up a bit more!'
Young Tony mixing in the studio. Photographer unknown/Black Inc Cohen grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Mentone in the 1960s, playing covers in garage bands, but the stories really start when, in 1973, he was introduced to Bill Armstrong, owner of Armstrong Studios, Melbourne's centre of music recording.
Working as an assistant, cleaning toilets and getting coffees, he was 15 and he had a job! In the first week he was paid $17 –“I was so young I spent it on lollies. And hash.” These were learning years, as he slowly brought bands into the studio in the quiet hours, getting better at this obscure craft, and developing an ego:
This time at Armstrong's was informative, not just in learning what to do, but what not to do. Olson has allowed this part of the story to breathe deeply.
“He was really keen to talk about Armstrong's and early recording,” Olson told me in a recent interview,“because they had taught him so much. And he talks a bit about Molly [Meldrum], which people will probably be surprised to read.”
Cohen's regard for molly meldrum is clear. Molly was a ground-breaking music producer in those magic years from the late 60s into the 70s, as youth culture swung into revolutionary mode. As Cohen says in the book:
Tex Perkins, Tony Cohen and Molly Meldrum at the ARIA Awards. Photograph by TV Week / Are Media. But the core of Cohen's reputation is anchored in the work he did with The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds. He met Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and the boys in 1979, and engineered and mixed their first cluster of albums, peaking with junkyard in 1981.
This idea – helping the musicians to get what they want – is at the heart of Cohen's success as an engineer and producer. Studio engineers know the gear and the rooms they work in intimately, while keeping sessions running smoothly; producers are all about getting the band's ideas to the right audience, often keeping record companies happy. Cohen didn't have a“sound” like some producers do, he saw his job as capturing the sound of the band, as transforming ideas into reality.
A strange, scrambled method
According to Olson,
I also spoke with Laughing Clowns drummer Jeffrey Wegener about recording with Cohen at Richmond Recorders in 1979 and he echoed this sentiment:
The training and workplace practices of studio engineers up to this point created that“no” mentality, and their way of working was quite removed from Cohen's methods. Blixa Bargeld called him“The Anti-Producer”. Cohen wrote:
He talks about rooms and equipment in the book, and how he records things – inevitably. Why Yamaha NS10 speakers work; the usefulness of Neumann U87, U89 or TLM170 microphones if you are recording Tex Perkins; the Lexicon 480L reverb unit. It feels natural. This is, after all, a book about a working life.
By the mid-70s, Cohen had become comfortable with drug-taking of all types and as the decades passed he developed addiction problems, and eventually chronic health issues. In 1984 he asked Roger Grierson, independent label head and band manager, to manage him. (“It didn't last long and I tortured the poor man.”)
Grierson remembers, in his recently published memoir:
Cohen doesn't shy away from this part of his story.
In 1987, after recording and mixing a swathe of Australian music including Models, The Go-Betweens, The Reels, Pel Mel, The Johnnys, and X, and some time in London, Cohen moved to West Berlin. Recordings with These Immortal Souls and Crime and the City Solution followed, as well as a re-invigoration of the working relationship with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. West Berlin was, he writes, a turning point.“It wasn't a business, everything was done purely on an artistic level.”
Back in Australia in 1988, and on methadone, over the next few years Cohen produced albums for The Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon, Dave Graney, Mixed Relations, Tiddas and The Blackeyed Susans, and most importantly, met his partner till the end, Astrid Munday.
Cohen won Producer of the Year at the 1993 ARIA awards, saying,“this is an award I think I richly deserve”. But by 1995, with two ARIA wins, he was too ill with complications from diabetes to get up on stage.
Nick Cave posted on Facebook after hearing of Tony's death:
Nick Cave: everything Cohen did was 'so unique and bold and startling'. Jose Coelho/AAP At the end of the book is a list of Cohen's compadrés who have passed on, maybe 60 names, most of whom you will be familiar with. Tony was a sweet man, well-loved, and those relationships meant a lot to him.
“I get very upset when I lose another but I dream a lot,” he says.“It's always a jumble of those who are with us and those who are gone, and I wake up happy because I feel like I've been in touch with them again.”
Hopefully he visits his loved ones in their dreams. And he will always be in touch with us through the music he helped create, and through the words in this wonderful, lively, funny book about a working life in music.