Tom Dowd & the Language of Music

Directed by Mark Moormann

Including Tom Dowd, Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ahmet Ertegun, Les Paul and Ornette Coleman and archive footage of Thelonious Monk, Tito Puente, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Ginger Baker

82 minutes runtime

Released August 2004

Unrated Documentary

Rating (out of 5 stars)--****

Although I hate to make such a recommendation, this may be one of the few movies for which the DVD is better than the real McCoy.  This excellent documentary about recording engineer, producer and innovator Tom Dowd is a genuinely fascinating look at the rock music business of the 1950s through the 1990s, both technical and artistic.  It is also a biography of a man who contributed more to the popular music industry of that period than most will ever know.  But, for better or for worse, the DVD (Palm Pictures) has more than double the interviews and just all-around fun stuff than is in the film itself.  And some of these interviews, made for Tom Dowd and this movie alone, may not be seen anywhere else.  Such was the love the subjects had for the man.

At the start of the movie, the viewer may wonder: “Why all of the scenes of atomic explosions?”  That’s because Dowd started off his professional life as a nuclear physics student at NYU and soon became one of the participants in the (what else?) Manhattan Project.  As in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Manhattan project.  Although the movie, and Dowd’s field sketches of nuclear mushroom clouds, failed to convince me that he ever was, or could have been, a nuclear scientist, there is no question he was a genius.  And that is attested to by members of the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and other bands, as well as Eric Clapton, Ray Charles and Ahmet Ertegun.  He just had to find his niche in life, which turned out to be rock and roll music.

Not playing it, recording and producing it.  This is where the incredible extra footage of the DVD comes in.  He started off working part time as a recording engineer to fund college and progressed to full time with Atlantic Records.  This was the point in the technological history of music where recording was done with one or two tracks and there was little or no “mixing” of tracks to make the final recording.  The performers played into a fixed array of microphones that that was it.  Using some of his savvy from the physics lab, Dowd was able to understand the technical side of recording and help move the industry along to eight track recording, which was a major breakthrough in the mid and early 1960s.

The man responsible for the actual “invention” of eight track recording was Les Paul, the same man who invented the electric guitar.  Dowd first heard his recording and concluded that Paul would have to be an “octopus” to play what he was playing.  Going to visit Paul, Dowd was introduced to the “octopus” in the form of a rack of eight amplifiers and tape machines. This DVD includes the actual interviews with Les Paul in which he describes both processes.  Absolutely priceless stuff starting with the first Ampex tape machine that he lugged into his basement  and which was the inspiration for eight of them put together.

The information in this film is as fascinating as it is spot-on honest, accurate and technically and artistically prescient.  You may know that Les Paul invented the electric guitar and that he did it by attaching an electronic pick-up to an acoustic guitar.  That much is obvious.  But how many people know that one of his first electric guitars was a piece of  railroad track with a pickup and guitar string attached?  And how many people know that his mother severely criticized that original effort by saying that she doubted if he would ever see a cowboy riding a horse and plucking the string on a 75 pound piece of steel rail?  If you ever doubted the truth was stranger than fiction, now is time to get religion and watch this movie.

Dowd innovated the use of the sliding volume and tone adjustments that are used universally today on mixing boards.  Prior to that the boards used three inch round dials that took two or three fingers to operate and so could only be adjusted two at a time.  With the sliding adjustments, a recording engineer can adjust up to ten volumes at the same time, or pick any of the ten to move at once.  A small thing, but typical of the innovations that have taken us from scratching grooves in a brass cylinder with a nail (Thomas Edison--yes, the DVD includes that, too) to the modern digital recording lab that takes individual vowels from one part of a song, copies them and uses them to replace less perfect vowels somewhere else (and it shows that, too).  And some remarkably candid observations from experts to the effect that most artists recording these days simply could not have recorded twenty years ago.  They are not good enough to perform without the computer messaging that breathes life into their mediocre live performances.

But even more importantly, the movie contains testimonials and interviews from rockers from Clapton to Allman to Betts who speak of the somewhat nerdy, mussed hair Dowd with a reverence usually reserved for the likes of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jimi Hendrix.  Amongst a group of people who have world-class reputations for brutal frankness, if not downright abusiveness, these people talk in terms and tones like devout Catholics talking about the pope.  I don’t think I have ever seen rockers so reverent about anything.

The amazing thing about Dowd as a producer was that he didn’t tell musicians what he wanted.  He brought out of them what they wanted.  Dowd knew that the only music worth recording was music that was the unique statement of the artist.  He also knew that the only legitimate value of the producer, and the recording engineer, is to make the recording a true reproduction of what the artist is trying to express.

Dowd’s most important genius was in being able to listen to what the band was playing, talk to them about they wanted the music to be, and then direct them on a path that would get them to that point.  The people on this movie who, as a group, had a part in performing on perhaps a hundred million records sold around the world, swear that when it came to doing that Dowd was the best there was.

The DVD also includes interviews with Dowd’s son and daughter and footage of his entire family.  This movie is a great homage to one of the unsung superstars of the rock and roll business.  Like “Shadows of Motown” (the story of the fabulous Funk Brothers) this film is an absolute must for any rock fan’s documentary library.  It includes tremendous archival performance footage of all of the above listed performers which will come across a lot better in the theatre.  See it if you can.  But if you do, put it on the list for a DVD rental as well just to see the dozens of additional interviews on the disc.  You won’t regret it.