We are talking at an awkward age in the history of tape recording and audio engineering. Um, stereo had not been perfected on records yet. Although some studios were employing three track or two track recording, um, Phil Spector, if he had the opportunity to go into a studio that involved three or four track, he really didn't care. He wanted it in mono. The bah humbug, back to mono, whatever the Phil Spector slogans are, that, he still comes from there. It was, in those days, embarrassing to copy a tape to a tape more than two or three times because the degeneration made the tape sound poorer than a record. And we were beginning to want to abandon records because they were pretty poor and here we were making tapes that sounded worse than records, so that's embarrassing as far as an engineer is concerned. It has nothing to do with an artist or the aesthetics that an artist aspires to. Phil Spector might record something in mono, and because it was in mono, he could not affect the EQ on the strings, or this is too sharp, or make this fatter, or this or that, because if he tried to affect one thing he was affecting the entire track. So that, he was like, yeah, all right, take it the way it is, I'm going to add another part and he would then add another guitar part or overdub another acoustic bass part, or put a piano on. Well, every time he did this, the last thing he did went down about this much, and the thing that was done before, went down that much more, and so forth, so all of a sudden his records were out of focus, they were blurred vision. Because they were blurred vision, usually in, in small studios you have to add echo to make things sound live. Well, as they were degenerating from layer to layer and copy to copy, even the echo would disappear, everything was becoming obscure and everything was becoming more inarticulate. And the more inarticulate it became the bigger it sounded and the woolier it sounded, the wall-to-wall sound. Now, when Phil was all done, he'd take the whole tape, finally it sounds something like what he wants, now he'd run the whole thing through, and they'd add echo, a little bit or a lot to everything -- and God knows what you'd have. I mean, you couldn't tell whether there was six or 60 guitars on it, four or 40 strings -- I mean, listen to a Righteous Brothers record, listen to any Phil Spector production that was the wall of sound, and then tell me, you couldn't tell how many people played on it or how many parts there were, overdubbed or -- no matter how they were re-, you couldn't tell me how many parts there were on it. It was just a wall of wool, a wall-to-wall sound. That was an inherent trademark of Phil Spector. And people, people liked the overall feeling that the aura created, but you couldn't write it and you couldn't do it in one pass, if you tried for the rest of your life, it was impossible to do.

Strange as it might seem, Atlantic Records was conceived of, and the first recording date was done about two months before the musician strike in 1948. Atlantic's first recording dates were done in 1947. The initial active partners in Atlantic Records were Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abrahamson, who had met in Washington, D.C., while Herb was a student and Ahmet, who was attending St. John's University in Boston, uh, I mean, in Baltimore, excuse me, in Baltimore, Maryland, uh, and living in the Turkish embassy because his father was the ambassador to the United States during World War II. Uh, Atlantic Records, I did their first recording dates in 1947 because of the record ban coming, they were using any studio they could get, and I was one of the studios they used. In 1948 the continued. But 1951 or '52, Herb Abrahamson had to go back into the military service because he was, unknown to most people, he was a graduate dentist, a dental surgeon, and he had acquired this training auspices of the GI Bill, because of military time, so now with the Korean War, he had to go back into service. When he went back into service, Atlantic Records then took on Jerry Wexler as a working partner who would, like a law firm, after a center number of years accrual, he would become an equal partner with Ahmet and Herb and so forth in this company. Herb's wife, Miriam, was working for the company and an intricate part of the company, and took care of Herb's end of the business while Herb was gone. So that by 1952, '53, we now had Ahmet, Jerry, Herb, Miriam protecting Herb's interests -- I was still not full time Atlantic -- I was fleeting around New York doing all other kinds of record dates, but I was Atlantic's consultant and whatever they wanted to record, I'm first one they called, can you be at this studio or we're going to record in our own studio, I had modified their equipment to make it functional, etc. By 1954 the company got so big, and Herb was coming back from overseas service, we also then took in Ahmet's brother, Nesui Ertegun. Nesui Ertegun was the first instructor in the history of American music in the United States. He taught a course at UCLA on American humanities. In addition to that he was producing records for Good Time Jazz. Nesui was one of the foremost hister-, historians in American jazz in a class with Marshall Stearns or any of those people. He joined the company and Atlantic then had somebody in charge of jazz, somebody in charge of albums, somebody in charge of the gospel and the spiritual records, somebody in charge of that. And I was the end of the chain for all of them. I could be doing the Coasters at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and John Coltrane at 2 o'clock in the morning, or Charlie Mingus one day and Joe Turner the next day or the same day. You wanted culture shock, Atlantic was the place to go.

Atlantic Records was created in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abrahamson. They endeavored to record gospel, blues and jazz music. By 1952 they added Jerry Wexler to the complex. By 1955, Nesui Ertegun became a member of the company, and now Atlantic had a division for taking care of LPs, taking care of R and B, taking care of jazz, taking care of blues. And I was a member then, by 1954, permanent member, exclusively of Atlantic. Before then I was working around, but thereafter, I was exclusive Atlantic, and that was the nucleus of the company that went on to raise hell for a couple of years.