“So I had to do it - it was my first date,” Schmitt continues. “The nice thing about it was that I didn’t have a lot of time to think. Duke Ellington couldn’t play piano for the recording because he was signed to Columbia at the time, but he sat next to me and calmed me; Billy Strayhorn played piano,” he says.
Schmitt stayed at Apex for two years, then followed Dowd to Coastal Recording Studios, where they did dates for the Atlantic, Prestige, and Sittin’ In With labels. In the late-’50s Schmitt moved to Los Angeles to work at Radio Recorders, where he became friends with Bones Howe; together they engineered Henry Mancini’s Grammy-winning The Music From Peter Gunn for RCA in ‘58. Schmitt engineered numerous sessions for Mancini and others for RCA; when RCA opened its own studio at Sunset and Vine, Schmitt was the first engineer hired. He engineered many of Hugo and Luigi’s productions of Sam Cooke, and won his first engineering Grammy for Mancini’s Hatari! (featuring “Baby Elephant Walk”) in ‘62. In ‘63 Schmitt became a staff producer at RCA.
“Producers would call me to engineer dates, and these guys would come in and they would be on the phone the whole time talking to their bookies or whoever. Or they wouldn’t show up at all. Or they would come in for one song and then leave - we would do the next song and it would be the hit. So I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m doing all of this work and these guys are getting all of the money and all of the glory for it.’ So I started doing production work at RCA in ‘63,” he says.
“In those days you were given a roster of maybe eight or ten artists to produce, and you did two or three albums a year with each. I was in the studio constantly.” While at RCA, Schmitt took over production of Sam Cooke (“always a joy to work with, really special”) after Hugo and Luigi’s contract expired, and produced his last hit, the wild “Shake” in late-’64. He produced the surf band the Astronauts, and co-produced (with Lee Hazlewood) twangy guitar great Duane Eddy.
In the mid-’60s he produced Eddie Fisher’s final stabs at the charts, Hugo Montenegro’s hugely successful film and TV music albums, and in ‘67 he took over production of one of San Francisco’s most important rock exports, the Jefferson Airplane.
The Airplane are perhaps the archetypal Summer of Love band: with the motto “Jefferson Airplane loves you,” trippy “feed-your-head” lyrics, a communal Haight-Ashbury lifestyle, and a musical style cobbled together from folk-rock (singer Marty Balin, guitarist/singer Paul Kantner), blues and roots-rock (legendary guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady, who went on to form Hot Tuna), all doused liberally with psychedelics. When provocative, strident, ex-fashion model Grace Slick replaced a pregnant Signe Anderson on female lead vocals in late-’66, the group’s classic lineup was complete.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
poor Al, ignored even as he is recognized!