Company - Original Broadway Cast Q4 transfer.
You ever watch Penne's Making Of.. documentary of
Company entitled
Original Cast Album?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVf78joLfSg Reel 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5nSemIyWs4 Reel 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH7thd6keOQ Reel 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnlvAexfErI Reel 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5skZCQjOhk Reel 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqnzCwRZ6dk Reel 6
Elaine's difficulties begin halfway through Reel 5 and continue on through Reel 6. Finally at five o clock in the morning, returns on effort are diminishing rapidly.
Her comments on that same section of the documentary 40
years later.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf52APstI0A
Filmed as a pilot for a never-realized CBS-TV series to begin airing in September of 1970, it chronicled the fourteen-hour marathon recording session that took place from 2
M Sunday afternoon into 5:AM Monday morning on a cold March night at Columbia Records' famous 30th Street Studios in Chelsea in the Spring of 1970.
The series was to have featured the recording sessions for a different cast album every week, but ten days after filming the pilot, all the series producers were in Hollywood running MGM, so there was nobody left to take the reins. This pilot is all that remains of a great idea.
Normal recording sessions in those days required everybody to sing and play live together, were four hours long and you were expected to get usable takes of at least four songs during that period of time. So this fourteen-hour session was the equivalent of three normal sessions plus some extra.
But that wasn't all that unusual. Classical and cast albums of the period often did that because it was easier to pay people union scale for three or four sessions in a row plus overtime if any than it was to do one session a night for three nights in a row, strike down the setup for the next group that would be using the room since there was no such thing then as ``locking up a studio'' for a single group for weeks or months on end as you do now.
But one of the drawbacks of that as you can see in the end of the piece where Elaine Stritch is trying and trying and trying unsuccessfully to get a usable take of
The Ladies Who Lunch is the fact that people get tired and voices or fingers get overworked.
It's even worse for the orchestra, because often, producers will start the evening off at 2
M with pieces that require the entire cast as well as the entire orchestra while everybody is fresh. If all goes well, by ten or eleven o'clock at night, out of a cast of dozens and an orchestra of sixty or a hundred members, you're left with a six-or-eight-piece band and a handful of singers waiting to record their solo numbers and you're all out of there by one or two in the morning.
But, as in the documentary, if all does NOT go well, you're there Til The Sun Comes Up Over Avenue of the Americas struggling and struggling until you just fall over from exhaustion.
As such, after a fashion, the returns on effort often become more and more diminished until such a time arrives that producers basically have to call it a night, have the expensive orchestra - who is already set up and in a groove - lay down their live tracks of the number by themnselves and then lay in the soloist on top of it in a couple of days once their voice or fingers have had a chance to recover.
Of course back in those days when overdubbing was a sign of weakness, no kind of professional vocal or instrumental soloist wanted to have anything to do with the idea, considering it effronterous to their abilities. But, as you saw in the documentary and dozens of others like it, sooner or later there comes a point where you simply cannot go on any further and it becomes necessary.
In my day, if you weren't a classical or cast album - you had ONE WEEK to make your record. SEVEN DAYS. THAT'S IT. AND you had to coordinate YOUR schedule with whoever was in your orchestra or backup singers, because they were doing three and four sessions a DAY.
Which is why classical and cast albums did their WHOLE RECORD in under 24 hours INCLUDING REHEARSALS. This was possible because - whether you were in a show, classical orchestra or pop group - your ``rehearsals'' consisted of either performing with the show or classical music piece, eight shows a week in New York or Hollywood, or else if you were a pop or rock act, going out on the road on tour with your new material BEFORE you cut it.
In any of those cases, your chops were all set and you didn't NEED much relearsal at the session itself. As you saw in the film - the little bit of hammering out certain parts that needed to be done usually took place behind baffles and within curtained enclosures while the orchestra and technical staff was setting up, accompanied by the arranger or composer.
This make-a-record in-under-24-hours schedule allowed for a couple days of pickups if you needed it (most people didn't) and then apart from mixing into the wee hours all weekend, everybody else was free to go about their business.
Of course in those days ALL singers and musicians could sight-read a chart and often get a perfectly usable take the first time out since most of the time you didn't NEED extensive rehearsals for weeks on end like you do now.
So if you didn't want to change orchestras or backup singers, if somebody was available between two and six in the morning on a Saturday night/Sunday morning - you had your session between two and six in the morning on a Saturday night/Sunday morning and were glad you were able to get that.
By Monday of the following week, you better be mixed, mastered and have your audition/test pressings ready for your record label brass to listen to and approve and/or make suggestions - then your art was chosen, photographs were taken and by the middle of the second week you were already on the Paar (or Carson) show plugging your new record.
Whereupon three days later you ran down to the other end of Sunset or Ave of the Americas - walked in off the boulevard to a week-old playback on a film stage lip-synching your way through Christmas music in the hundred-degree July heat - or the reverse - going in off the freezing December wind outside to lip sync your way through a bunch of beach music.
Nowadays as we said, of course acts will book up a single studio and production team for weeks if not months on end - playing to a click track and assembling the whole performance a few tracks at a time - and the same with the music videos that replaced the Scopitones. With those, you were expected to get enough usable film in three hours to cut two songs together, print the film and release it by the weekend.
Certainly technical perfection with a production can be achieved with those `bit-by-bit' processes, but often what is lost is that electric live spontaneity that is often captured when the entire event is captured all at the same time.
It is often said that if you never meet the guys with whom you are playing on a given record or appearing in a music video, there can't be any give-and-take or ideas passed back and forth during tracking - some of which may prove fruitful - and guys are left with simply ``blowing the ink'' (from their instrument regarding what's on the arrangement chart) - and as a result - the entire production has a fairly dry and mechanical feel to it.
For another great QR from the same period, check out
No No Nanette the 1971 revival with Ruby Keeler and Jack Gilford - especially Helen Gallagher's rendition of
Where Has My Hubby Gone Blues. Talk about something that's so theatrical it needs the Big Screen treatment, but sadly just like
Company but unlike other great musicals like
Chicago,
A Chorus Line,
Burlesque and
Les Miserables, nobody has yet undertaken the monumental task of bringing either
Company or
No, No Nanette to the screen in a modern incarnation.
