Steve’s 6-year Blondie project started with long-lost tapes found in guitarist’s garage
Jewish Telegraph, August 2022
FOR a music nerd like myself, speaking to Steve Rosenthal is akin to Charlie Bucket finding the golden ticket in his chocolate bar wrapper.
But you won’t find four-time Grammy Award-winner Steve’s name on the front cover of any albums, although his place in rock history is assured.
He is a music archaeologist — salvaging music that was long thought to be lost and lovingly restoring it from his MagicShop Archive & Restoration Studios (MARS) in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
For the past six years, Bronx-born Steve has been working on the Blondie boxset Against The Odds 1974–1982, which is finally released next Friday.
It comes in a variety of formats from two-disc and three-disc versions to a lavish eight CD or 10 vinyl version.
But how did Steve become involved in this project?
“Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and Clem Burke were upstairs at the Magic Shop with producer John Congleton making (2017 album) Pollinator, which was the last Blondie record that came out.
“I was downstairs working on a folk music project. I believe I was working on Dave Van Ronk, a really amazing songwriter. And (guitarist) Chris came down to one of my restoration rooms and asked ‘What the hell is this?’.
“And I explained to him, that I work on legacy material. I stopped engineering new records sometime in the late 1990s. And really started focusing my life on working on legacy projects.
“So he said, it was really funny as he had some stuff and would I be interested in seeing it?
“And I said, ‘Yeah, of course’, I got really excited. But he said, ‘One thing, though. It’s all been underwater’.
“I have worked with tapes that had been flooded before. And so I organised a road trip up to the garage, where Chris had these assets.”
What the 69-year-old found was a treasure trove of Blondie demos on a number of tapes, many of which were covered in mould.
He showed me photos of the tapes, including ones labelled Once I Had A Love and Will Anything Happen, which became classics Heart of Glass and Hanging on the Telephone, respectively.
The process to clean the tapes and make them playable is fascinating, but to cut a long story short, Steve has to use a special vacuum cleaner before baking the tapes in an oven.
“If you play the tapes before baking them, they will shred,” he explained. “And literally pieces of the tape will fall off. And once pieces of the tape are gone, they’re gone.”
Steve, who has three daughters and a son, added: “There were two parts to the Blondie process. One was the digitisation of all of the tapes that we found in Chris’ garage.
“Those were done by Kabir Hermon at my studio in New York. Kabir is an amazing engineer. He did all the high resolution transfers, and then he did rough mixes of all the material that was in the garage.
“The second part of putting together the box was the years that I spent searching through the Universal archives.
“Blondie were on a number of different records labels. So their tapes were stored literally all over the world. Reels in London, Los Angeles and New York.”
Kristina Fox at Universal helped Steve find the original tapes of the first six studio albums — then they were all remastered for release on the deluxe edition of Against The Odds.
“This was a two-and-a-half year process,” he added. “So it’s not something you do in ten minutes. And then the tapes had to be sent to the proper studio, and they had to be baked and transferred.
“I would get the files, then we would do rough mixes of them. And those mixes would be sent to the band and to Ken Shipley, the head of Numero Group, and Tommy Manzi, who is Blondie’s manager, and my co-producers on the boxset.”
Of the songs found in Stein’s garage, Steve restored 73 which he sent to Blondie, of which the band agreed to 50 being released.
“It’s amazing that the band let us into the process of making records,” Steve said.
“Because, it shows them in process, it shows the moments where it’s not yet figured out. Sometimes artists are not willing to show themselves in the process.
“And I really thank Debbie, Chris and Clem for going on this adventure and being willing to let people see what it was like to create these records, and to show people what it was like when they didn’t have it.
“On the boxset, there are four versions of Heart of Glass and you see the evolution of it.
“The first version is from a rehearsal tape when Blondie didn’t exist yet; they were called The Stilettos. So you really get to see the evolution of the song, which is an amazing thing to see how much of it was there in 1974, but how different it was when it got released, finally, on Parallel Lines.
“This idea that you can make a song instantaneously, it’s delusional, it doesn’t really happen. It takes a lot of work.”
In a sense, this is like a Blondie audio version of Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back.
“That section where Paul McCartney writes the song Get Back in front of you is probably one of the most important five minutes in music history,” Steve said.
“You get to see the process of where the song comes out of the air through him. And it becomes this thing that we love.”
Back to Blondie, he explained that one of the most important aspects of the boxset was that it was the first anthology authorised by the group.
“Up until this point, they’ve had nothing to do with all of their remastered things and all of the outtakes that have shown up; they were not consulted,” he explained.
The deluxe editions are a bit pricey, but Steve pointed out that “this thing took six years to make” and included “thousands of hours of work and research and mixing and mastering.
“It involved people like Tony Lyons, who did the artwork, a multi-Grammy winning art designer, and Erin Osman, who wrote a track-by-track analysis and interviewed the band for it.”
Steve “grew up in a very Jewish area of the Bronx, Mosholu Parkway and Gun Hill Road. One of my grandmothers was Orthodox and the other one was a non-believer.
“I went to public school and after school I would have to go to Hebrew school. It was the last thing I wanted to do after being in school from nine to three.”
Steve’s career started in the early-1970s, when he joined a studio in Manhattan owned by Herb Abramson, one of the original founders of Atlantic Records.
“At first, I was just cleaning, and doing intern things. And then Herbie taught me this sort of Atlantic Records way to make recordings; he had a very specific way to make recordings,” he explained.
“For example, you could only put three microphones on the drums. As the months went on, he gave me more responsibility. And then one day, he booked a session and didn’t show up.
“I called him and said, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I’m not coming. I think you can do this’. So he kind of threw me into the deep end, and it was with an artist named Lee Fields. I think I did okay.
“Herbie’s business was based on R&B stars past their prime. I made a wonderful record with Herbie with Otis Blackwell, the guy who wrote Return to Sender and Great Balls of Fire, an amazing songwriter, and he made this record at Herb’s place that I engineered called These are My Songs.”
Steve’s move into the restoration world came when he met acclaimed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax in the 1990s. He had already started to explore that path after working with Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ original producer.
Around 1994, he worked with Lomax and Matthew Barton, who is now the curator of sound for the Library of Congress.
This led him to meet Nora Guthrie, daughter of folk music legend Woody Guthrie.
“Around 15 or so years ago, I was introduced to Nora, who I love madly, and we got along really well,” Steve explained.
“And so for the last I don’t know how many years, I’ve been working with Nora and her family on lots of great Woody Guthrie projects.
“Some are restoration projects of Woody’s music, and some are making new records from Woody’s lyrics. Nora’s an amazing person and I’m really honoured with her friendship and I learned a real lot from her.”
Steve owned a studio in New York City for 28 years, The Magic Shop, which closed six years ago.
“It was where David Bowie made his last two records in secret,” he said. “But there are lots of fabulous records that got made there over the years.
“The way the Magic Shop worked was there would be people upstairs making new records and I would be downstairs in these production rooms, working on restoration and legacy.”
Steve’s work can be quite nerve wracking as if he gets one part of the process wrong, he will be wiping out unheard parts of music history.
“You have to really honour the recordings and treat them with kid gloves,” he said, “because they’re old and they can degrade over time.
“Analog tape is a very resilient format. And you can do a lot of stuff to them. And you can do some really awful things to them, but they can be retrieved.
“Over the years, I’ve learned how to triage and restore damaged audio.”
Steve calls himself the “king of NDAs (non-disclosure agreements)” as he has to keep quiet on his upcoming projects.
But next month will see the release of Words & Music, May 1965 — demos and home recordings in a folk style by Jewish singer Lou Reed which were later released by Reed’s proto-punk band Velvet Underground.
Steve worked on the songs a couple of years ago with Don Fleming.
“It was fascinating,” he said. “We wore white gloves taking the tape out of the box. We had no idea what was going to be on the tape.
“But it was very challenging because Lou had recorded over an older piece of tape. So one of the difficult things about working on this tape was that there was music going in both directions, and at multiple speeds.
“So it took hours and hours and hours to really separate out the songs that Lou had done.
“I did those transfers for the tape. And that’s all I had to do with that.”
He added: “The really fascinating thing about it is Lou as a folk singer. You think of Lou dressed in black, you don’t think of him with a harmonica doing a Bob Dylan cover, so that part of it was just fabulous.
“Once again, through an archival project, you get to learn more about what the process and artists went through to become who they eventually are.
“I digitised Lou’s collection in Brooklyn for the New York Public Library. At the Lincoln Center, all of Lou’s music, hundreds of reels of shows, it’s all up and publicly available.
“And Laurie Anderson (Lou’s widow), who’s a really wonderful person, hired me to digitise and organise all of that material that went to the public library.
And I did it here and it took months and months and months.”
Steve says record companies are making a lot of money from archive recordings and see it as a “really potent part of their streaming business. So there is an incentive to search for catalogue material and archival material.
“There’s like a gold rush of content aggregators. The multi-million dollar companies are searching and buying catalogues and publishing and masters, so I do know that the present is pretty potent right now.”
As for a dream client, Steve said that now he has done Blondie, he would love to do a “Talking Heads thing”.
He explained: “When I was a kid, I played at (legendary New York venue) CBGB when I wanted to be a rock star. I wasn’t very good, but there were a lot of people at CBGB who weren’t very good.”
The club’s Jewish owner Hilly Kristal died in 2007, a year after the venue closed.
“Hilly was nice,” Steve recalled. “He gave me a gig there. I used to play my electric guitar on stage while the bands were setting up.
“So I’d love to work on material from one of these great New York bands.”
Winning his first Grammy for best historical recording in 2006 for The Complete Library of Congress Recordings “was really surprising and really delightful,” he said.
While Steve isn’t in for the accolades but because of his love of music, he is still proud of the awards.
“I’ve worked a long time in the music business and I’ve done a lot of stuff,” he said.
“So it was really fun. I didn’t think we were going to win. I’ve got four of them now — one for each of my kids.
“That part of it is like a mystery, why you get them, how you get nominated. It’s really difficult to get nominated and it’s really very difficult to win.
“I feel really happy that I was part of a number of really historically important projects. One was The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 (which he won in 2008) which was the only live recording ever.”
Steve also won in 2016 for Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965, The Rolling Stones film boxset, as well as the 2007 best world music Grammy for his work on The Klezmatics’ album Wonder Wheel.
“I was really happy to be involved in these kind of projects.”
Steve and his wife Jennifer Gilson also owned music venue The Living Room in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn for 18 years.
“It was just an amazing place,” Steve said. “We really miss it. Both the Magic Shop and The Living Room were victims of real estate greed. So it’s been a tough thing.
“But I loved The Living Room and miss it, and so do the community of artists who played there through the years.”
