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From The Desk Of Cotton Mather: Paul, Ham Sandwich And Brad

Cotton Mather’s Robert Harrison gets brownie points for ambition. Death Of The Cool (The Star Apple Kingdom) comprises 11 of the 64 songs he’s been writing in an extended fit of creativity inspired by the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text—one tune per hexagram (or reading). Seriously. Harrison will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.

HamSandwich

Harrison: Brad Jones is an exquisitely talented producer, musician, songwriter,and true Renaissance man who lives in Nashville. We became good pals when he mixed the Cotton Mather record, Kontiki, in 1997. I worked with him again in 1999 when he produced and tracked our follow-up, The Big Picture. Now here’s a rock ‘n’ roll trivia quiz for you.

Q: What do the following statements have in common?
Paul McCartney played drums on all the Beatles records.
Mama Cass died from choking on a ham sandwich.
Brad Jones recorded and produced the record Kontiki.

A: They’re all false.
Paul played on “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Birthday” and “The Ballad Of John and Yoko,” and Alan White was hired to play on their first single, “Love Me Do,” before George Martin was aware of Ringo’s drumming abilities.
Cass Elliot died in her sleep of a heart attack at the age of 32 with no food in her windpipe.
And I recorded and produced Kontiki.

In April 1997, I flew to Nashville with a bag of ADAT tapes that contained almost all the audio that would comprise Kontiki. Some songs existed across multiple tapes having been sub-mixed as I went in order to open up the possibility of more tracks. And some of the songs had been recorded on cassette and bounced to the ADAT format. I needed someone who could lash three ADAT machines together to sync all the audio for each song and allow us to mix. Brad was someone I’d met through the label owner, who had a great reputation and said he could do the job. We spent the first three days just finding everything, syncing it up and prepping it for mix. My ramshackle approach to recording meant that as fresh and raw as it was, it was also untidy.

Once we had everything in place, Brad asked me if I’d be open to adding any more overdubs if he thought we needed them. I told him yes, as long as I like the ideas. So as we mixed each track, we’d listen and then brainstorm as to how we might improve it. On six of the 14 tracks, we did additional production, mainly percussion and keyboards. The songs most affected were “Homefront Cameo” and “Spin My Wheels,” on which we actually tweaked the arrangements. The first had a guitar solo removed, and on the latter we moved the E-bow solo to the end of the song followed by a mellotron Brad had recently scored from Roger Manning’s sample library. I also put mellotron on “She’s Only Cool,” and he suggested strings at the end of “Password,” while I found that cool vocal sample that runs through the outro. Some percussion was added here and there, and that was it. In the scope of the record, it was a relatively small amount of tracking, but I thought it was impactful enough, particularly on the first two songs I mentioned, to warrant some sort of production acknowledgement. When I asked Brad about it, he advised against giving him any sort of production credit because he told me people would just assume he’d recorded and produced it and that I’d played a typical artist support role, because at the time I was unknown. But I thought it would be incorrect not to acknowledge his contribution, especially since collating and lining up the tracks had required his wizardry. The credits say Kontiki was produced by me “with Brad Jones and Whit Williams.” The last song we mixed was “Camp Hill Rail Operator,” and when Brad pulled the master fader down, he turned to me and said, “Congratulations, you’ve just finished your first production. Too bad you’re not going to get credit for it.” Every time I see Brad, he thanks me for “giving me credit for a record I didn’t make.”

Why am I telling you this? Because a few days ago, a fan wrote me asking for Brad’s contact information because he was looking for “that Kontiki sound.” I told him he should try looking around my house for it, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

So I told him how reach Brad, suggested he get Paul McCartney to play drums and advised him to avoid ham sandwiches.