‘Burn me up this time fellas!': when movies represent the recording studio

Abstract

Since 1950, sound recording studios have become a recurring setting in the narrative fiction feature film. This essay historically situates the early appearance of the studio interior as movie set, using Keightley and Gracyk's notion of ‘record consciousness'. The article traces the shifting visual semiotics of the studio interior through four phases: the 1950s era post-war technophilic (and implicitly authoritarian) ideal, which gives way to a ‘pop' 1960s mode in which the studio is a site of residual and inconsequential power only, which in turn gives way to a series 1970s and 1980s era representations in which the studio is re-invested with coercive power. More recently in the retro-themed biopic, the studio becomes nostalgic refuge. The essay then turns to the nearly always present disjunctures between soundtrack and visuals that attend the studio scene, and in particular the points of transition between sync sound and ‘imported' sound, between failed take and ‘breakout' take, suggesting that these transitions, or ‘rhymes' might function as a cinematic way of phenomenologically representing immersive, boundary-dissolving moments of musical experience.

Notes

^1. Keightley (2005, 2010), in a number of public talks has demonstrated the burgeoning of the studio trope in the early 1950s, with a plethora of album covers and publicity images showing microphones dangling in front of singers, leads coiled haphazardly on studio floors, batteries of dials and VU meters, tape spools, music stands, and so on. The emblematic instance, he argues, occurs in a 1956 poster for a live appearance at the Sands Hotel by Frank Sinatra: the ‘live' show is promoted with a photograph of Sinatra in a recording studio.

^2. Another binary we could apply here: Charles Keil's distinction between popular music in the Dionysian mode (music of the bar, tavern, the dancehall, for instance, marked by excess, spontaneity, ‘impurity') opposed to music in the Apollonian mode – characterized by refinement, control and ‘purity'. The 1950s rock'n'roll, rockabilly, rhythm and blues largely inhabits, or at least derives from the Dionysian; movie music is entirely Apollonian (Keil and Feld 1994, 211–212).

^3. The rare cases of truly live studio scenes are instructive. In The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell 1972) we see a sweaty, ecstatic Jimmy Cliff singing the title song, in the actual Dynamic Sound studio in Kingston, Jamaica. The live take is cruder, funkier than the two versions which made it onto the soundtrack album. In this case we have a micro-budget, vernacular film, using indie music and found locations, characterized by low production values, (but compensated for by rich genre qualities: pace, sex, violence, music). There is as much break-out here as there is break-in, in many senses. This particular cinematic project approaches independent popular music in its level of capitalization. The group in Brothers of the Head (2005) ‘the Bang Bangs', seen and heard live in the studio, is an energetic punk band (the singer and lead guitarist are, in the story, conjoined twins) and the punk ‘alibi' presumably authorizes the liveness, and concomitant variations in production values. Likewise the fictional band ‘Visiting Day', in the Sopranos episode, ‘A Hit is a Hit', is of dubious musical quality, providing another alibi for the lower production values resulting from the liveness. David Simon in Treme, as with his previous series The Wire, is at pains to include elements of local culture wherever possible, and so a documentary-like liveness characterizes many of the scenes which show musicians performing, be it on the street, at home, on stage, or in the studio, and the production makes little detectable use of lip-syncing.

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Notes on contributors

Peter Doyle

Peter Doyle is the author of Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960 (Middletown: Wesleyan, 2005). He also writes about forensic photography (City of Shadows, Sydney: HHT, 2005, Crooks Like Us, Sydney: HHT, 2009) and is the author of a series of crime novels. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.