Roger Mayer Interview Australian Guitar Volume 66
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ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?He was Jimmy Page’s childhood friend, Jimi Hendrix’s custom pedal maker/sounding board and prepped guitars for the likes of Bob Marley 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 40 II AUSTRALIAN GUITAR xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 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 Rmost 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 Brothers, Wilson Pickett, or created the Octavia pedal used on tracks whoever. You had to be good, didn’t you?” Axis Fuzz such as “Purple Haze”. 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 the Isley Brothers, 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: the Yardbirds, and Page, and Eric Clapton, 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.