ARE YOU

EXPERIENCED?He was ’s childhood friend, ’s custom pedal maker/sounding board and prepped guitars for the likes of and Ernie Isley. In an exclusive interview with Australian Guitar the master designer reflects on his career highlights, politely explains the difference between an audiophiles and audio-fools, and offers his opinion on the current quality of audio recordings accepted by society. Story Craig White

Roger Mayer (far left) enjoys an afternoon of amatuer filmaking with the Jim Hendrix Experience

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roger.indd 40 1/5/08 11:25:50 AM oger Mayer is a British electrical “You had to get by me first. If you’re not engineer who has been involved hanging out with Jimi, and you haven’t in creating cutting edge effects got a personal relationship, you wouldn’t and recording equipment for know when you’re going to get the real over 40 years. In that time he performance. I mean, anybody’s going to has worked with some of the be impressed, and willing to accept any mostR important musicians of his or any performance.” other generation, artists who have cast their Hendrix is often thought of in terms of shadow long over popular music. These days, his ability to coax unusual sounds from Mayer produces a range of contemporary his instrument, a situation that Roger effects that both recreate the legendary contributed to with his effects boxes, ARE YOU units he produced in the past and maintain but first and foremost, Hendrix was an his commitment to extending the sonic exceptional blues player, albeit one with an palette available to contemporary musicians. extraordinary imagination and creative drive. His bio reads like a who’s who of ‘60s and “Oh yeah, I mean, bar none – a fantastic ‘70s popular culture, and this is one guy who blues guitar player, a fantastic R’n’B rhythm always seems to be in the right place at the guitar player. The thing was that the guy right time. played guitar, he loved to play guitar, and “Throughout out my life, I’ve always been he played guitar all the time. His music is around the right people. I was around a result of his passion, and his attention Formula One cars as a young child. Just to detail, and his complete, what shall we down the road from us, where I went to say, selfishness to get to where he’s at, EXPERIENCED? school, was the Cooper Car Company. They you know - and of course, it takes that type won the world championship for Formula of personality to attract, and get the right One in 1959-60. I knew all the drivers, you people around you, to build a team. That’s know, Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme, Bruce what Jimi had.” McClaren, all of them. I had the privilege Hendrix payed his dues as a backing of going to the Formula One garages and musician for R’n’B singers on the ‘chitlin’ knowing all the people who were hanging circuit’. During the years of racial around, the mechanics and this and that. My segregation, these venues fostered a vibrant father was involved in making some special culture among Black Americans, and the gear for car companies, and they were high expectations of the audience made involved in cutting edge engineering. them a fierce proving ground for performers. “I’ve still got a lot of friends in the industry. “You’re going out every night, you’re playing Our Vision Wah pedal uses carbon fibre. It’s to a very, shall we say, educated audience a very hi-tech piece of equipment. The actual who are used to being turned on by the best. top pedal plate is a carbon fibre composite, You are playing behind three shiny guys in and we ended up going to the same people mohair suits, right, who might give you an that make the bases of the McClaren eight-bar solo, once a night. You’re playing Mercedes. We went to the top people in rhythm, so when they play that song, you Formula One to make the bit of carbon fibre better come up with a superb riff. So that’s for us.” an opportunity for a backline musician to Of course, the musician Mayer is most often shine, say behind any of those guys; Little linked with is Jimi Hendrix, for whom he Richard, the Isley , Wilson Pickett, or created the Octavia pedal used on tracks whoever. You had to be good, didn’t you?” Axis Fuzz such as “”. Roger was intimately Roger has mentioned one of the great R’n’B involved with Hendrix in the recording acts he would later work with, the Isley studio, not only as a technician but also as Brothers. Their recording of “Twist And a sounding board whose opinion was much Shout” was the template for the Beatles’ respected. Indeed, Hendrix would often ask version, and they wrote “Shout”, which was Mayer’s opinion of a take when others were famously covered by Johnny O’Keefe. Ernie more than willing to accept what Jimi had Isley is a criminally under-rated guitar just played. player, and one who was deeply influenced SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY After his work with Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and , one won- ders what else Roger might have done to insinuate his musical DNA into the popular culture mass consciousness of the 20th century. Yet again, Mayer was in the right place at the right time… “When my friend Junior Marvin, I made a record with him back in ‘76, he got recruited into the Wailers, and a few weeks later I went down and met Bob, I said, ‘well, Bob, what do you want me to do?” He said ‘I want to sound inter- national’. I said, ‘I think I can help you.’ So I went with the Wailers, did the same thing as with the Isley Brothers, took all the guitars, made sure they all sounded perfect, perfectly intonated, perfectly set-up, you know. Let’s start with the basics, the thing that’s making the noise to start with, get that right, then just help them. You can hear the difference, from Exodus onwards, the band went from sounding like a very good Jamaican black reggae band into sounding like they’re international, you know?” There is no doubt that Marley is as imposing a musical figure as those Roger had collaborated with to that point, but what was he like as a man? “He was cut from the same thing as Jimi, a nice, quiet guy, you know, very nice. His nickname was ‘The Skipper’, and he made sure that everybody around him was taken care of, you know, being fed, everyone had money. He did that personally, he wouldn’t allow anyone else to do that, he was very much a hands-on sort of guy. He didn’t adopt a superstar attitude and all that bullshit, not at all. Nor did Jimi, of course.” Roger has an idea why it was that Marley had to take such a pro-active role in nurturing his Wailers. “You are working with Jamaicans, who are notoriously difficult to get together at one time, for various reasons, you know - they’ve got too many women, or too many children, or smoke too much bloody pot. They’ve got too many damn distractions.” MongooseClassic Fuzz Fuzz AUSTRALIAN GUITAR II 41

roger.indd 41 1/5/08 11:26:40 AM Roger Mayer and Junior Marvin of The Wailers BORN AT THE RIGHT TIME “I grew up with Jimmy Page, we grew up in the same area, pretty much around where I live now. People used to play at the local pubs, and the local youth clubs and so forth, you know - this par- ticular area of England is known as like the blues’ delta, you know. A lot of bands came out of this area: , and Page, and , and the Stones. The Who were just down the road. We all emerged from this part of London, all within about five or eight miles – it’s amazing, isn’t it? That’s the way it was, you could drive down the road and you could see Eric Clapton, or Page play, or the Stones, you know.” Like many of his generation of English youth who would go on to have a huge influence on the popular music of the late ‘60s and throughout the ‘70s, Roger’s musical interest extended across the Atlantic. “That’s what we used to listen to, you know. It was a case of, like, us getting together and turning one another on to various imported American records. A lot of black records, and some of the Chicago blues stuff, Chess records, Freddy King, and Albert King to some extent, and James Spitfi re Brown, all that stuff. They were, I guess, underground records really. “My sister used to go to art school, and they were a bit more tuned onto the underground records, really, American blues, Pauljazz, Gilbert all gets sorts of stuff. For those “outparticular there” records, you had one shop in London that we used to go to. It was kind of a base- ment shop, run by a collector. Those records weren’t generally distributed, you know. What used to kind of happen in England, the English record companies used to take American records, you know, and then get some English artist to cover it.” As history has taught us, it was an incredible period in British youth culture, one that possessed an excitement and energy that Roger sees as sadly lacking for today’s youth. “Then, everything was new, you see. Like, Motown was breaking in certain clubs in Soho. The mods and the rockers thing was hap- pening with the Who. You had a real excitement that it was new - nowadays, the kids are all looking over their f**kin’ shoulder, you know. That’s the only thing that’s disappointing, most of the kids are bored all the time.” Octavia 42 II AUSTRALIAN GUITAR

roger.indd 42 1/5/08 11:27:07 AM by Hendrix, who had briefly played with his Wonder at the time, as well as being the brothers long before Ernie joined the band in raison d’être for Cecil and Margouleff’s the late ‘60s. electronic duo Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES “As a child, he remembers Jimi coming by “Malcolm Cecil had this synthesizer TONTO the house and staying with them, you know. and it was the first polyphonic synthesizer. There is a lot of talk these days about various re-issues using particular vintage com- Anyway, I was working with Stevie Wonder, That was used on those three albums, Music ponents to achieve just the right tone. As one who for over forty years has continued and the Isley Brothers called up and they Of My Mind, Talking Book and Innervisions. to push for new sounds and new ways to go about achieving them, Roger is sceptical. said, ‘would you come over and help our It was fun. I mean, I’d go down the studio, “I personally get so frustrated, because I’m a designer, I want to move forward, all out?’ I went and saw him, I said, and of course, at , they had the time. I mean, basically, if you think about it, the future, by definition, isn’t the ‘damn, this guy’s good’. some of my studio equipment anyway, so it past, is it? This industry, it can’t sustain growth unless it invests something in the “I worked on every album with the Isley was like going back to the office.” future. Many amplifier manufacturers, you can take the case of say, I don’t know, any Brothers after Live It Up. I took all the By the early ‘80s, after more than a decade of them, like some of the amplifiers were used by Hendrix, the reality is the amplifiers guitars and went over them, gave them a outfitting some of the top recording studios didn’t last very long then, three or four weeks maybe, before we blew them up. Put it few preparations, did the bass guitar, did in the States and working alongside some of this way, back then, we were concerned with having a reliable amplifier. They were this and that, and gave Ernie a few different the greatest musicians in the world, Roger a nightmare to keep going. We were using the amplifier to the absolute maximum pedals, you know, and generally put my two started to realise that there was a great potential of it, driving the hell out of it, but you don’t expect transformers to keep cents in. demand for the effects that he had produced melting and shit like this, it’s just bad design. Especially if you come along say 30 or “His later stuff is technically better. Some back in the ‘60s. The pedals that he had 40 years later, why would you issue a design that’s going to have the same faults, it of the stuff he did with Isley-Jasper-Isley is built for Hendrix were custom-made devices, doesn’t make any sense. very good. Not a lot of people realise that on and only a handful of professional guitarists “Let’s take it stage by stage. First of all, basically, a resistor’s a resistor, right? most of the Isley Brothers records Ernie Isley in the intervening period were lucky enough There’s nothing magical about it. Today they’re a little bit more stable. They’re prob- played the drums as well, he started off as to attract his attention, so he set about ably a little bit quieter. There’s no performance advantage to be gained from them. being a drummer.” designing a production model Octavia to Capacitors have got slightly better, and once again, slightly more reliable, but there is no noise advantage from them, you know. There’s been a few claims by what we call the audio-fools, you know – not audiophiles, audio-fools – and that’s like talking about the magical properties of a piece of wire, it’s fucking nonsense, you know. It’s “You could have the same tools, shall insane. One of the most important things with a signal from a guitar is that the leads are clean. In other words, if you don’t regularly clean the ends of the cables, as with we say, or the basic capability and the the connectors, if you get dirt in them – which could be nicotine smoke, pollution smoke, Christ-knows-what – any little stuff like that can create problems and noise, same tools, but the secret is to listen to because the actual signal from the pick-ups is infinitesimal, there’s virtually no current at all. But people forget that, they go like ‘it’s a wonderful guitar cable’, I say the music and be inspired by it.” ‘well, like, I don’t know mate’. If you clean the fucking things now and again, they’d be alright, you know.” So after coming to America with Hendrix, make his effects available to the general and deciding to settle there (“I lived for over public. This was the origin of the unique 20 years in New York, from about 1968 to rocket casing, which is the chassis utilised 1988.”), and before hooking up with the Isley for a number of his pedals to this day. Brothers, Roger established himself building “When I designed the pedal, to start with, I gear for recording studios. said, ‘I’m not going to make a pedal that’s “I was most well-known for making recording in a bloody square box’, because when it’s on studio equipment – you know, recording the floor, and someone takes a picture of it, studio consoles, equalisers, limiters, I’m want an iconic shape, you know, so they compressors, noisegates, all kinds of stuff look at that and say, ‘that’s a Roger Mayer’, – and my professional recording equipment, you know. It’s like the auto industry, you look at that time, was in all the major studios in at a car and you go, ‘that’s a Ford Falcon’, or the States. In New York, Atlantic records, I whatever, from the actual shape of the thing. made everything from mastering and cutting “I started looking into the shape, and it equalisers, and compressors for them, you started with the actual actuation of the know, all kinds of stuff.” footswitch – I wanted you to be able to It was during this period that he worked hit the footswitch from the back, front, with Stevie Wonder. Wonder was at the time sideways, and this and that. Also, I wanted recording almost non-stop with Malcolm to give some protection to the knobs. That Cecil and Robert Margouleff at Electric was the basic architectural specifications Ladyland, and as fate would have it, Mayer that I wanted for it.” knew Cecil from his childhood in England, While the Octavia pedal that Roger produced which is how he came to collaborate on was very true to the design that he had constructing TONTO (The Original New originally built for Hendrix, he does not see it constructing TONTO (The Original New originally built for Hendrix, he does not see it Concorde + Treble Timbral Orchestra). This enormous analogue as a shortcut for people who wish to emulate Booster synthesizer was the primary tool used by Jimi’s tone, nor does he see any reason that Concorder + Treble Booster

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Untitled-1 1 19/11/07 11:40:44 AM roger.indd 43 1/5/08 11:27:43 AM someone should want to do that. “The frame of reference that all guitar players have, their only frame of reference is BUSINESSMEN, the CD. A CD is at least seven generations away from the master tape, and in reality, the actual sound that you have to make in THEY DRINK the studio is not going to be the same as you’re going to hear on a CD with a set of domestic loudspeakers. It’s all got to do with various things. The ears have got different MY WINE frequency response to different sound pressure levels, the Fletcher-Munsen Curves, As both a technologist and one who has they’ve all been documented. Then you’ve got been intimately involved in the creation the obvious fact that a domestic loudspeaker of some of the greatest popular music of does not sound like a guitar amplifier. I the last 50 years, Mayer is uniquely posi- mean, someone who sits and listens to a tioned to comment on the problems that CD, and says ‘oh, I want to sound like Jimi face the music industry in the digital Hendrix in my bedroom, what can I plug in?’ age. Roger places the blame firmly at There’s no simple answer for that. the feet of an industry that has come to “My specialty, basically, with Jimi, was favour marketing and re-packaging over getting the sound onto the record, you know, artistic innovation, though he is adamant to make a hit record that would stand the that, due to the reduced audio quality test of time, that would go around the world, consumers have come to accept, there and you could play it on AM radio, FM radio, have been no winners in this skirmish. vinyl, whatever, and it was going to sound “They’ve had a very long period of finan- ok. The sound that you actually have to cial success by basically re-formatting produce in the studio - before you mic it up, their old catalogue - and now that’s and before it goes into the recording console, kind of run dry, or they’ve rather over- and then it’s got to be equalised, mixed, charged for CDs and whatever, they are compressed, whatever - is not going to be faced now with a new generation that is the same, by any stretch of the imagination, basically nicking extremely lo-fi record- as you’re going to have to produce at low ings, aren’t they? I mean, MP3 at 128k, level in your bedroom. It’s a ridiculous downloaded – that’s not good, is it? The concept. Trying to sell that dream, or the Holy actual quality that a youngster might Grail, to basically amateur musicians, I don’t listen to today, really, it doesn’t sound as know - is it dishonest? I don’t know which good as a cassette through headphones. words you would use to describe it, but it’s Vision Wah One of the interesting things is, of certainly not realistic. course, that many of the old recordings, “I think that point should be made, it’s even after they have been completely, a pointless task, isn’t it? I mean, it’s the like, shall we say, downgraded in qual- same thing as you go up to, say, Fangio, ity, still sound better than a lot of the and say ‘alright, Fangio, I’ve bought your modern ones.” 1957 Maserati 250F that you won the French Roger is obviously no great fan of the Grand Prix in. What tyre pressure did you sort of sample-based music that many use? What were the gear ratios? What was of those kids are choosing to download, the oil in the engine? What was this? What though his reasoning may be more was that?’ - and of course, now that they sound than many of us old fogeys. It is think that they own exactly the same piece his supposition that the human brain of gear that Fangio had, they forget one very is historically attuned to recognise important thing - they can’t drive.” unique sounds as they occur, to filter out Which is not to say that Mayer thinks we regular patterns of background noise should all give it away, just because we and stay alert for the unexpected sound can’t all be Jimi. In fact, whether it is which may indicate an imminent threat. designing effects or recording, he has very “Repetitive rhythms, especially if they little time for looking backward, and rather are recognised as a pattern, become expects that every musician is obliged to very boring very quickly. They probably create his own new sound. real only become, to be honest with you, “You could have the same tools, shall we very acceptable under the influence say, or the basic capability and the same of certain drugs, you know, the Es and tools, but the secret is to listen to the music whatever else they have been doing.” and be inspired by it.”

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