Doo-Wop Acappella by Pitilli Lawrence;

Author:Pitilli, Lawrence;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

So, How Do You Make a Living Singing and Producing Doo-Wop Acappella?

As the Brill Building was the epicenter of the pop and rock-and-roll world of the late 1950s and early 1960s, providing original songs that reached the top of the charts, doo-wop acappella had its own music capital. The central location for most acappella recordings lay on both sides of the Hudson River with Jersey City on one side and the New York metropolitan area on the other. Santiago and Dunham cite 117 different labels and recording studios that competed with one another during the 1960s. The principal sites for these labels and studios were Harrison, New Jersey, and New Rochelle, New York. However, other locations provided establishments where numerous songs were recorded and pressed into demonstration records. Some of these sites included Kay Records in Little Ferry, New Jersey; Silver Park in Ridgefield, New Jersey; and the very popular Sanders and Variety Sound Studios in New York City.

These studios and offices hardly met professional standards. The most powerful person in the enterprise was the owner, who also served as the record producer. In the vast majority of cases, this individual was no older than twenty-five years of age and had a minimum amount of business experience. In addition, the owner-producer was honing his engineering and record-production skills on a day-to-day, trial-by-error basis. To further augment difficulties, the studios were small. Primitive recording equipment, in the form of a single microphone and reel-to-reel tape recorder, was used in many instances. Sometimes, recordings were made in the basement of record shops or, for that matter, anywhere where a portable tape recorder could be used.

In order to give the reader a bird’s eye view of the challenges that studio life presented, Santiago and Dunham provide a “day in the studio” segment with acappella record owner and producer Wayne Stierle as he relates the following:

When you’re in the middle of something that may be important, or crazy, or both, you don’t always know it, because you’re doing it. That’s how many acappella recordings were created. I’ll tell you about one night, and maybe you’ll get the feeling of what it was like. It was a long time ago, so they tell me, but sometimes it feels like it was last year. Acappella was, by nature, a hot Jersey kind of thing. True, it was recorded in all seasons, but it had a hot night aura that permeated the life it seemed to have. It was a hot night in Jersey kind of a music. It was twilight time in Harrison, New Jersey, and I arrived at the studio for yet another marathon series of sessions, where several groups would be recorded in one night. The pressure was always on to make the sessions inexpensive and get the most material possible. It was a group harmony assembly line, built on a frail thread that could come apart or break at any time. It was hard to do, it was scary, it was fun, it was crazy, it was next to impossible, and sometimes it was what it should have been.

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