"The Phil Ramone Interview" by Paul Verna.
Featured in the BILLBOARD Tribute to Phil Ramone - May 1996

PHIL RAMONE: The artist has to feel that, when the producer walks in the room, he's totally concentrated. I don't want my doctor reading and answering phone calls and having the nurse come in and babble, and say, "Oh, he'll be back in 10 minutes." If he has an emergency, fine, but if I walk there I want those 15 to 20 minutes to be mine.

Rudeness is something I just can't tolerate.  The engineers and the people who bring you the coffee are as sacred to me as the people who are at the door. So you have to deal with your own psyche and be humble. When you get to know an artist, you find out the things that have peeved them over the year and it’s generally the stuff that has to do with somebody not wanting to do things their way in the studio.

BILLBOARD: Your discography lists you as music producer for President Kennedy's famous birthday party where Marilyn Monroe sang "Happy Birthday" to him. How did you get involved with the White House?

RAMONE: Richard Adler, who was a songwriter who was producing commercials, came to the studio where I was working and said, "Can you come to Washington with me to this event with the President to honor the Arts Council?" So we went and the event was in an armory where you couldn't hear or see anything. lt was a mess. Danny Kaye was conducting the orchestra, and they had a television hookup to another symphony, but the transmission was horrible. Well, who got blasted in the papers but the President?

Afterward, Richard got a call from the head of the Democratic Party, asking him to resolve the situation for the first anniversary of Kennedy's Inauguration. So Richard hired four of us and gave us carte blanche. Now, you have to understand, I was young and I was not known for architectural interiors. But I drew out an idea that I thought would work, which was to build risers with carpeting and stuff everything that could rattle with fiberglass. Then I asked Altec to design a speaker system that could be hung in tiers going straight up towards the audience, so that for every 10 people there'd be a pair of speakers. At that time, this was overkill no one had ever done before. Then I went to Richard and said, "I really want to do something to the ceiling [to improve the acoustics of the room]. I know there's an experimental balloon that NASA uses for weather." We took these 12-foot balloons, stuffed them with Styrofoam and put netting over them. And they hung 10,000 balloons underneath it, so when you looked up it was a celebration of red, white and blue. We had a goal that was Olympian in its design. Nothing could be any more unattractive than what was handed to us... and it worked. With many thanks to Tom Dowd, we did it.

BILLBOARD: Did you get to meet the President?

RAMONE: Well, here's the funny part of it. At 7 in the morning, my phone rang, and the voice at the other end said, "This is Jack," and I said, "Yeah, right. Lemme sleep!" And I hung up...on the President! [laughs]. I didn't know it was him. But the next ring of the phone came within minutes. "Mr. Ramone," and I heard the Boston accent, "this is Jack Kennedy." And I said, "Mr. President, I can't believe I hung up. I can't believe anything! I'm really sorry. I really feel bad." And he said, "Mrs. Kennedy and I would like to have you come over."

So I went to the White House, and he said, "Well what about the music, how does this work?" I said, "Mr. President, I've heard you don't have recordings of these wonderful evenings." And he said, "Well, can it be remedied?"  I said, "Yeah!" Then we went into this plan of how the East Room could be converted into this theatrical event and then go back to being the East Room.

The next event we did at the White House was an evening of great Broadway favorites and Agnes de Mille had directed a piece for it. Because we couldn't fit the orchestra and the actors onstage, we had to pre-record the orchestra. The show was very precise and it started very well. We did two or three numbers, and, all of a sudden, a guy plugged in a spotlight and the lights went out. Just gone. The tape machines just drew to a halt and all the actors were frozen in position. Now, you talk about being frightened and worrying about what was going on! The Secret Service was up with their flashlights and we were yelling for the maintenance guy. After what seemed like hours, he managed to put back the power and we went through another 12 to 15 minutes and then the same thing.

Now, I figured, not only was my career over, but the embarrassment!  I was just despondent; I couldn't figure out what to do. At that moment, I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard a voice, in that Boston accent again, saying, "Stop worrying, Phil. This is not something you could have controlled. It's something we have to evaluate tomorrow.  " And then he said, "Would you consider doing these events for us?" I said, "Mr. President, I'd be honored." So I went on to do special events for the Kennedy, Johnson and Carter administrations.

BILLBOARD: That would have been a thrill for anyone, especially a young man in his early 20s.

RAMONE: Yes.  That training for me was the backbone of respect, continuity, artistic integrity and everything that I hold to be holy to the making of records. And one of the great things about my involvement with the Kennedy administration was getting to know the Social Secretary, whose job it was to keep up with everything that was happening everywhere. One day she said to me, "There's a group that's very exciting; have you heard this single from the Beatles?" And the Beatles hadn't happened here yet, but the Kennedy administration was going to ask them to perform at the White House. Well obviously, it didn't work out that way, but it's interesting that it could have happened very easily had Kennedy lived.

BILLBOARD: Before you became a recording engineer, you were a musician. Tell me about those early days.

RAMONE: I started playing the violin at age 3 and I was very fortunate because there were people who heard me who were influential in getting me auditions. By the time I turned 7, I was playing concerts.   Believe it or not, there's a camp for these kinds of kids and I was part of it. My parents, particularly my mother, never allowed me to think I was different from any other kid. Later on, I was put in the hands of a great teacher, and then I became a scholarship student at Julliard. So it was those prodigy years that are really the essence of where my musicality comes from.

BILLBOARD: I heard you played a command performance for Queen Elizabeth. How did that come about?

RAMONE: It was great. I was 10 years old. I played the Lalo "Symphonic Espagnole." As you can imagine, it was a major event in my life to do a symphonic performance in front of the English Royal Family.

BILLBOARD: How did you make the transition from violin virtuoso to recording engineer?

RAMONE: Well, there was a side of me that rebelled against the rules of classical music. I started playing jazz and amplifying my violin to make it sound different. In a classical world, you're not allowed to do that. I was picked up by many variety shows and I developed a style that was inspired by Jack Benny, George Burns, Fred Allen, Victor Borge—that kind of humor. It was a great conflict at Julliard. I mean, they didn't like any of this.  They really put their foot down because, at the time, I was concert master of the orchestra.  They thought I was really off-the-wall. So I started doing club dates as a strolling fiddle player and got a job as an assistant at a studio called JAC, run by a guy named Charlie Layton. And I got totally into it. The engineering side of me was there without my knowing what it was.

BILLBOARD: Have you ever gone back to your classical roots?

RAMONE: Yes. I did this record last year with the Curtis Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra in Philadelphia, with Andre Previn conducting. Andre comes from that same classical training, yet he can turn on a dime and play blues and jazz. He's the role model who doesn't stop his classical growth. He's the essence of what I think a musician should be.

BILLBOARD: How do you define the role of the record producer?

RAMONE: I get asked quite often. People say, "What did you do to make something better?" Well, the role of the director of a picture is similar.  If it's the script for them, it's the music for us.

BILLBOARD: Do you believe a producer should leave his or her stamp on a project?

RAMONE: Don Was talks about his lack of interference as a producer and I agree. I don't get caught up in the stamp of approval, because we, as producers, are way in the back. If our names were on the front cover, it would be different.  I don't think the record buying public go to the Phil Ramone section in Tower Records. They just don't. So you have to put your ego where it belongs: with the artist,  the song and the crew that you put together. If you think you have a style and you perpetrate that onto people, you're hurting the very essence of their creativity. The reward of producing comes when someone inside the record company who has a lot to do with what's going on actually calls you and says, "Boy, this record really came out great." Or when other artists call you and want to work with you.

BILLBOARD: Who are the producers who have had the most profound influence on you?

RAMONE: Well, Quincy Jones is not only a good friend but a unique producer who has expansive vision. Arif Mardin is another great producers. Don Was, Babyface, L.A. Reid, Trevor Horn and Glen Ballard are just incredible. I think David Foster has a versatile career. He's a hell of a musician and he's got great taste. George Massenburg is a great musical guy and a technology genius and I don't use that word loosely. Of course, Peter Asher is a guy I have looked up to for years. I listen to people like Prince.  I'm a huge fan of his music and his productions. He has a minimalist approach to a lot of things, which I love. Then there's George Martin. A lot of people didn't give George enough credit, but he was able to receive all that information from the Beatles and put it to use. You have to be less than egotistical in order to do that.

BILLBOARD: How do you feel about being called "the Pope of Pop"?

RAMONE: Oh, I can't take that too seriously, can I? The King of Rock 'n' Roll, all those terms, they're funny to me. Obviously, it was done by somebody who said it in an article somewhere and people picked up on it. Maybe it's the combination of the words "pope" and "pop." It gives people the opportunity to do what they want with it, but I don't take it seriously at all. It could even be offensive to a lot of people. And I can't personally say that that drives me to work every day. I don't wake up and look in a mirror and go, "Hey, you're the Pope of Pop." And I certainly don't even think of it in the holy sense. It's kind of like somebody calling you Duke or Earl—I think of it in those terms. But I love nicknames. Quincy calls me Garbage, so Pope of Pop and Garbage go right together [laughs]..

BILLBOARD: Why does Quincy call you Garbage?

RAMONE: He's named everybody, but over the years, I've had this great ability; when I'm dressed up, to end up with ketchup on my tie or my shirt, so he would call me Garbage. And in front of certain people he calls me Phillipo. It balances me very well, from Garbage to Phillipo to Pope.

BILLBOARD: You had quite a juggling act on the Hot 100 chart once, with one of your productions knocking out another one of yours at No. I. Do you recall that?

RAMONE: Yes, I think it was "Maniac" by Michael Sembello, from the "Flashdance" soundtrack, and "Tell Her About It" by Billy Joel. "Maniac" was at No. 1 and "Tell Her About It" at No. 2 one week, and the following week "Tell Her About It" jumped to No. 1. When I look back on it, nothing could be as successfully planned. It was wonderful. [The period in question was the weeks ending Sept. 17 and Sept. 24, 1983.]

BILLBOARD: Although you've been independent your entire career, would you consider working with a record label in a Production/A&R capacity?

RAMONE: I think the trend now is possibly to think about it.  It would be nice to be musical director of a label. Your knowledge and experience could be useful in a lofty atmosphere, with the writers and artists [interacting] in a creative environment.

BILLBOARD: Do you see any down side to a producer-label situation?

RAMONE: Sure, if your function is to go to 12 meetings a day, I don't think it would be pleasant.

BILLBOARD: You mentioned your interest in developing artists. Can you tell me about some of the young acts you've been working with lately?

RAMONE: There's a group called The Tories who I'm really interested in. I think they're going to be a big, wonderful recording group. Their demos are sensational. You wonder what could be done to make them better. There's also a band called Swamp Boogie Queen, who I'm developing, and Fran Lucci, a singer/songwriter who I think is extremely talented. And then there's Kyle Davis, another talented singer/songwriter.

BILLBOARD: Have any of these artists been intimidated by the prospect of working with you?

RAMONE: I don't think so. Take a young actor. If they're going to work with a Scorcese or any of the fine directors, they're going to have the same intimidation as if they're working with an unknown. It's not fear; it's anticipation. Also, there's a lot of pre-discussion. There's no showing up on Monday and "There's the artist." That's over. And I'm not age-conscious at all. I don't know the Tories' age, and I don't think they're intimidated by me. If you are honest enough in your production to say, "Listen, I screw up, just like a dad screws up with his kids," you gain a different kind of attitude between you and the artist. It's not school. I'm not there to punish or admonish anybody.

It's interesting. I walked up to Benny Carter the other night, and he said, "Gee, I'd love to do an album with you," and it stunned me. I turned to Quincy and said, "Hey, Carter wants to make an album with me," and he said, "Great idea. None of us said, 'He's 89'."

You want to be as enthused and as young as you ever were. I can stand next to a rock 'n' roll band and get just as excited as anyone else in that room. The music is what rules for me. I don't think you can class yourself. The age-level thing is all about your personal energy.

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