MALCOLM CHISHOLM
Any musician or producer, who has ever recorded an album or CD, knows that a great engineer can make the difference between a Hit and a flop track. This is the reason why Malcolm Chisholm will be known as one of the great unsung heroes who helped shape the sound of blues and rock ‘n’ roll during his career. This is also why Malcolm was chosen as the 3rd inductee of the Blues’ Who of the Blues series.
(Information for this article was obtained from Living Blues Magazine, Issue #191 – Vol. 38. #4)
Longtime Chess recording engineer, Malcolm Chisholm, who died on June 3, 2003, was in the booth when some of the 20th century’s most important popular music was created. His engineering credits for Chess, accumulated between the mid-50’s and 1973, include landmark sides by the likes of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis, and the Dells – and that’s only a fraction of the front line. For this story his widow, Ramune, who has embarked on a campaign to nominate him for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the category of “Non-Performer”, shared with David Whiteis of Living Blues Magazine, written documentation of Malcolm’s life and times, as well as an audio transcript of a radio interview he did with Steve King on Chicago’s WGN in 1991. These sources, along with Willie Dixon’s autobiography I Am The Blues and an in-depth interview conducted with Ramune on January 19, 2007, provide most of the background for this article.
Malcolm Chisholm was born in Chicago on March 19, 1929. After spending his early childhood in upper Michigan, he moved with his mother to Toledo, Ohio – a place he remembered less than fondly. According to Ramune, “He didn’t do very well in school, so he dropped out and joined the Coast Guard. He was already building radios by hand – just learned on his own.” Ramune has a letter he wrote to his mother while he was in the service. In it he requested a list of classical records ranging from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto to Wagner’s Lohengrin, dutifully listed in alphabetical order by composer and including information on preferred conductors, record labels, and even catalog numbers – a scope and depth of enthusiasm that does, indeed, seem greater than one might expect from the typical Toledo youth.
After serving his four-year hitch in the Coast Guard, Chisholm drifted from Honolulu to Japan and then back to Toledo before finally moving to Chicago. There he secured a job as a radio man for United Airlines. From there he went to engineering, a career he said he decided to try after hearing a poorly mixed recording of a Beethoven sonata. The job he landed, though, took him far from the rarified aesthetic environment that unfortunate record represented.
Universal Recording, the Chicago studio that Chisholm signed on with in 1955, handled major-label sessions by the likes of Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, and Count Basie: they also cut blues sides for Chess and Vee-Jay. Chisholm began his tenure there as a tape editor and maintenance man, but pretty soon he began to engineer recording dates as well. As the new kid on the block, he found himself assigned the Chess blues sessions which, he remembered, “no one at Universal took with the slightest degree of seriousness.” But according to everything Ramune remembers, as well as Chisholm’s own statements in the Dixon book and on his 1991 interview with radio host Steve King on Chicago’s WGN, he not only took the blues and the bluesmen seriously, but he found it an enjoyable challenge to parlay his classical training into recording them.
“The mixer is a conductor,” Chisholm told King. “In blues you’ll sometimes hear three or four solos going at the same time, and because of my legit background – ‘Oh, gee, that’s polyphony! The old madrigal stuff from the 17th, 16th century, several tunes that work together!’ So I was less troubled by that than some other people who encounter this sort of thing in blues.”
He described his methods further to Dixon’s co-author, Don Snowdon: “I got into the habit of picking one lead, featuring it and subordinating two others, do that for eight bars and then change over….That requires a certain amount of interpretive talent and it requires working to some sort of standard. Mine are Will’s [Dixon's] because what I know I learned from him.”
Ramune Chisholm chuckled when she recalled her husband telling her about Dixon’s teaching methods. “Willie Dixon liked to train his engineer,” she affirmed, “Malcolm was fresh, he was new, he was eager. He would set the dials to whatever it was, and – now Willie was a big man. A couple of slaps on the back, eh was like, ‘No, no.’ So after nine or ten slaps on the back, Malcolm got the hang of it.”
“Will told me what the fixed balance of blues should be.” Chisholm explained to Snowdon. “You carry far too much guitar and far too much voice because they need to be heard and the fill instruments are carried a little lower…Will and I never had a failed session.”
There were times, though, when as much creative improvisation was called for on the technical end as on the musical end. On at least one Howlin’ Wolf session, when Wolf didn’t know the lyrics of a song, Chisholm set up a microphone in the control booth and attached it to headphones Wolf was wearing, the producer (probably Dixon) simply narrated the lyrics to Wolf as he sang. Wolf “sang it wonderfully,” Chisholm told author Nadine Cohodas. “He was an enormous musical talent.”
The session at Universal that Chisholm recalled most fondly in his later years, though, occurred on May 21, 1955. That was the day when a dapper young hipster from St. Louis named Chuck Berry came into the studio with a county-style rocker dubbed Ida Red. There was already a song out by that name; Leonard Chess, after spotting a Maybelline cosmetic bottle sitting on a windowsill, suggested a name change (and, apparently, a slight modification in spelling). The result was one of the seminal recordings in rock ‘n’ roll history.
“[Berry] was an absolute original,” Chisholm told Steve King in 1991. “Only man I ever ran across who used the English language as a rhythm instrument. We had three hours, we had to do four tunes, we had a well-rehearsed band, and by golly we sold some records! That session probably cost Leonard Chess all of a thousand dollars, and I think we got four good sides on it [Maybelline, Wee Wee Hours, Thirty Days (To Come Back Home), and You Can't Catch Me]. I was Chuck Berry’s engineer from then on, except for once or twice when I was out of town. I always felt kind of good that Chuck was successful.”
In 1958, about a year after the Chess brothers moved their offices to 2120 South Michigan Avenue, they hired Malcolm Chisholm to engineer sessions there as a full-time Chess employee. His first impression of the facilities was unfavorable. As Ramune remembered it, “When you walked in the studio, the control room was four feet off the ground. It was small, it was narrow, it was like ‘What the hell is this?’ So his famous saying was ‘Jesus H. Christ! What happened here?’ Then he clapped his hands and he said, “Oooh, I can work here! I can make things here!’ It [was] alive, very alive.”
But Chisholm didn’t confine his activities to the studio itself. On January 16, 1958, be brought what amounted to a portable engineering booth in a leather carrying case to the Pershing Hotel on South Cottage Grove and recorded pianist Ahmad Jamal and his trio. Things were so cramped at the Pershing that Chisholm had to set up his tape recorder on a table in the liquor room. “That was a terrible hotel,” he remembered when he told the story to Steve King. “I had to leave there about 4:30 in the morning with several thousand dollars worth of equipment, and I just very quietly stuffed a pistol into the tool case. I don’t know why I did that; everybody was very gracious. And we were just amazed when the thing hit, especially Poinciana, which was the longest 45, I think, anybody ever tried to put on record. And it became a big hit in the dance clubs.”
The success of Ahmad Jamal Trio At The Pershing: But Not For Me, the LP that resulted from that session, spurred Chess to attempt further projects of that nature. Chisholm eventually engineered live dates on artists such as Marian McPartland and Ramsey Lewis; he also engineered some of the most important studio jazz sessions that took place under the aegis of Chess (and were usuallyreleased on the subsidiary Argo label). According to Cohodas, Ramsey Lewis remembered that Chisholm “got good balance on the trio then just sat back when we played. Occasionally he’d leave the control booth and let the tape run…we were free to play as long [and whatever] we wished.”
With that kind of reputation, it was inevitable that others would come calling. In 1960 Chisholm pulled up stakes and headed to United Recording in Hollywood. He did very well financially (”A lot of gifts were bestowed upon him to get him to do the good job he was going to do anyway,” remembers Ramune), but the West Coast lifestyle was not for him. By his own admission he “burnt out,” and after about three years he returned to Chicago. He worked at other studios for a few years, and in 1966 he returned to Chess (in his interview with Steve King he recalled “Howlin’ Wolf’s 1964 Killing Floor as one of those sessions “when the hair on my arms started to stand up,” which indicates that he also did some freelance work for Chess before he came back to them fulltime).
The blues era was winding down, but Chicago was still an important center for R&B. Artists such as Syl Johnson, Donnie Hathaway, Minnie Ripperton, Rotary Connection, Arthur Prysock, and the Dells all did significant work at Chess between the mid-’60s and early ’70s, and Chisholm was there for some of their most important sides. The Dells came in for a session,” he remembered, “and they did There Is and O-O I Love You, and the arrangements were great and the band was on. I did something which I don’t often do, that is, turn to somebody in the control room and said, ‘I think we’re going to do a half a million on this,’ and sure enough, they did.”
Between 1968 and 1970 he took a hiatus from his post as Chess’ chief engineer to sign on with Paragon Studios, but he then returned to the Chess fold until 1973. By that time the studio’s recording activity had dwindled and, as Ramune puts it, “He just felt that things were changing significantly where he needed to move on.” He continued work at various other studios around town, and in the ’80s he signed on at Columbia College to teach courses in recording, electronics, and acoustics. Although he loved teaching, he found that the academic environment chafed on his sensibilities. He reacted with a characteristic blend of hipness, aggressiveness, and impish good humor. “He’d use street talk,” chuckles Ramune, “just to upset them, you know? He wouldn’t call it an apartment or condo or whatever – he’d call it ‘our crib.’ He started talking and telling people in Columbia circles, ‘Oh, I’m a high school dropout.’ It was almost like, ‘What are you gonna say about that?’ It was kind of like a little game, and Columbia hated it – they hated it.
“But I would say an awful lot of his students worshipped the ground he walked on (as evidenced by comments that his students made on an online forum, CLICK HERE). People just wanted to hang around him because he was so interesting. Once it was first day of class, Malcolm started out by saying, ‘Well, none of you will probably make it in this business anyway. If you’re not sure about this, this is the day for you to take advantage of it.’ And a couple of people actually got up and left. So Malcolm went over there, closed the door, turned around at his students with a big grin on his face and he said, ‘Now that we’ve got rid of the wannabes, let’s get to work!’”
Aside from the technical instruction he imparted, it’s likely that Chisholm shared insights with his students not unlike those he shared with King on WGN. “An engineer is more a musician than an engineer,” he pointed out. “The musical demands are the ones that are met. The technical stuff comes very second.”
He also made clear his preference for recording live in the studio and using real instruments whenever possible. “The drum machine is not a rhythm instrument,” he declared. “It’s a metronome. And it’s not really musical. There’s this general attitude that records are supposed to be overdubbed and put together a bit at a time. You can’t dub in the feeling after the session! If you don’t have it in the grooves, and if you don’t have it in the first eight bars, you ain’t got it – not just sound, but excitement!”
Chisholm cherished excitement in all aspects of his life (”Life is uncertain – eat dessert first” was one of his favorite aphorisms), but the excitement he derived in the studio was purely in-the-moment – there was no sense of history being created, at least not at the time. “It’s very interesting, very exciting work,” he told King. “More fun than anything else I know of you can do, at least with your clothes on. But we didn’t think of ourselves as ‘living legends.’ When a good session came by, when the hair on my arms starts to stand up, I think maybe we’re onto something, and we’re probably going to sell some records. But we were just trying to make a couple of bucks and stay in a business which was more fun than driving a cab. That was our line of work.”
Nonetheless it was a line of work that made a deep imprint on him, especially where his longstanding friendships were concerned. Despite their divergent backgrounds, he and Willie Dixon formed a bond that, according to Ramune, transcended the emotional and entered the realm of the psychic:
”One morning he was sitting in a chair. It was early, because it was dark; it was January. And he was crying. Sobbing. And I said, ‘Malcolm what’s wrong with you?’
”And he said, ‘Willie Dixon. Willie Dixon’.
”I said, ‘What about Willie Dixon?’
”‘He died.’
”And I said, ‘Did anybody call?’
”He said, ‘No. Nobody called.’
”He didn’t get a call until later that day. He knew. He knew. They had very strong feelings for each other.”
It might not be too much of a stretch to suggest that the same focus and dedication (whether conscious or not) implied by that anecdote also informed Malcolm Chisholm’s professional work. It’s an analogy that Ramune herself would probably embrace. “Malcolm was one of those people,” she reflected, “who will automatically do the very best, no matter what they’re doing. Toward the end of his life he started talking to his cancer doctors about his work in the Coast Guard. And then I realized how the discipline that was required to do that gave him this internal discipline to do whatever he was doing exactly the way it should be done. Even redecorating the house – if you’re rebuilding the windows, they had to be lined up. Anything, the basement, wiring, whatever it is, is done really well. It becomes part of your personality to become the very best. And I must admit, after years and years of life with Malcolm I acquired that too. Maybe it was there all along, but he highlighted it – do your very best at whatever you do.”
Ramune welcomes comments about this article. Please feel free to send comments to melissa@bluesheaven.com.
HISTORICAL SESSION
On April 17 & 18, 1968, Malcom Chisholm recorded a historical session Chess that was a tribute recording to Martin Luther King, Jr., called The Last Request, with Ben Branch and the Operation Breadbasket Orchesta and choir. Present were Rev J. Jackson, Vocal solos by Rev. Clay Evans and Rev. Sammy Lewis.
SIDE 1
Precious Lord, Take My Hand
If I Could Help Somebody
Let Us Break Bread Together
We Shall Overcome
Side 2
Motherless Child
My Heavenly Father
Yield No To Temptation
Hard Times
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Phil Upchurch,Bass
Leonard Caston, piano and organ
Morris Jennings, drums
Charles Stepney, organ
Ben Branch, tenor sax
Al Fook,trombone
Bryce Robertson, guitar
Burgess Gardner, flugel horn
Delbert Hill, baritone sax
Wayne Bennet and Bryce Robertson, guitar
Harold Varner, drums on side 2
PARTIAL LIST OF SOLO ARTISTS RECORDED AS A MUSIC MIXER
(Sourced from: http://malcolm.bignoisybug.com/malcolm_resume.txt)
POPULAR/CROSSOVER JAZZ BLUES
Alioto-Haynes-Jerimaiah Alexander Lorez Broonzey Big Bill
Anka Paul Ammons Gene Butler Wild Child
Berry Chuck Brown Odell Diddley Bo
Butler Jerry Brown Ray Dixon Willie
Camarata Tutti Ellis Herb DeSanto Sugar Pie
Campbell Little Milton Fitzgerald Ella Everett Betty
Cantor Eddie Frigo John Evans Margie
Clebinoff Herman Gillispie Dizzy Guy Buddy
Contino Dick Jamal Ahmad Hooker John Lee
Crosby Bob Krupa Gene Johnson Jimmy
Damone Vic Lewis Ramsey King Albert
Dells The McDuff Jack King Freddie
Desmond Johnny McPartland Marion Lenoir J.B.
Evans Richard Marx Dick Mabon Willie
Goodman Stevie Moody James Mitchell McKinley
Guitar Bonnie Mulligan Jerry Montgomery Little Bro
Hathaway Donnie Nordine Ken Russel Leon
Jackson Mahalia Roach Max Taylor Hound Dog
James Etta Peterson Oscar Taylor Koko
Johnson Syl Sims Zoot Walter Little
Jones Spike Smith Paul Waters Muddy
Lewis Jerry South Eddie Wells Junior
Lewis Jerry Lee Stitt Sonny Wheeler Clarence
London Julie Terry Clark Williamson Freddy
Markham Pigmeat Touff Cy Williamson Sonny Boy
Martin Dean Vaughn Sarah Wolf Howlin’
McCall Cash
Mills Brothers
Nelson Rickey
Prima Louis
Prysock Arthur
Riperton Minnie
Sinatra Frank
Smith Keely
Stevens Connie
Tiomkin Dimitri
Tourme Mel
Turtles
Vaughn Billy
Vee Connie
Washington Dinah
Williams Andy
