Talking To...John Timmins
#NK For me it was getting back to an artist I had some familiarity with, but it was the impact his part of the record had on someone that was less familiar with his work. I ended up lending him a couple of my reissue cds and the first thing he said to me when he returned them was "I know why he made that Greenpeace album."
Moving onto a different music experience, you've got the whole Cowboy Junkies heritage as well.
#JT It's a nice fit; the Cowboy Junkies were very much influenced by the singer/songwriters genre. I as a member of the band brought an appreciation for Joni & James.
#NK It also brought you the experience of that other great single microphone album, well for my generation at least, "The Trinity Session".
#JT That was the ambisonic microphone from Sony. That was very much like I guess it was in the early days. At the time I remember someone saying that in a less technological, less sophisticated age, the way the likes of Billie Holiday recorded. The big bands would play into this type of mic. That's what we did. We just sat around it was all very very carefully positioned and Peter Moore, who has done all the remastering on this record, was the engineer on The Trinity Session. It was he that brought the amibsonic mic to that recording.
#NK I hadn't actually clicked on that.
#JT Oh yeah
#NK And the next question was going to be, having been involved in recording an album like that, did it make doing Amchitka easier because you had personal experience of the way it was recorded?
#JT Not really. What made it easier was that I had been in studios for a good number of hours in my life. That meant I knew how to talk to the likes of Peter, I knew what I wanted in terms of the ambience of the record and, most importantly, I knew Peter and knew what he was capable of doing with a fairly scratchy old recording.
#NK What was the original source, was it on studio tape?
#JT Originally it was recorded on a Revox reel-to-reel on half inch tape. What happened then was that master got lost. Fortunately it had been transferred by Irving Stowe to one quarter inch tape and put away in a box. His son had transferred it to cd, which was where I first heard it. After that it was a case of trying to find the master half inch. We couldn't find it, we looked everywhere. At one point we were on an island off Vancouver in a girl's camp because we'd been lead to believe it was in a box under one of the beds. That's how far and wide we looked. We put ads in newspapers, asking people to check their attics and basements, couldn't find them.
We were left with the quarter inch tape and that's what I gave Peter. It was in fairly good shape. Irving Stowe knew well enough to look after it. He was a real music fan. In his day, he would record bands, with their permission. He recorded Louie Armstrong and a number of other jazz players in a personal, private kind of way.
He knew what he was doing. That quarter inch tape was put away and when I gave it to Peter, the first thing he said was "Oh god forty year old recording tape, it's probably all fused together." If that happens, you have to bake the tape in order to open it up, before you dare put it on a reel. In fact, it wasn't fused, it was in good shape. They were good enough for Peter to work with.
I would love to be able to give you a sense of how much Peter did on this album. He went through that whole tape and took out noises only he and dogs could hear little pings and high frequencies. He's got the capability in his great studio in Toronto where he just spent hours, loving the music and doing all the cleaning. Then there was all the eqing to get all the highs and lows and get some real depth to it. That's something that's really difficult to do when you're working on a mono aural recording from essentially one microphone, but he did it. He is really a very talented master, something he proved years ago with the early Cowboy Junkies.
#NK Definitely something special. Away from the music. Do you imagine when Phil, Joni and James played the concert, they could imagine that forty years down the line there would still be a Greenpeace and they would still be helping to fund it?
#JT I think it's a wonderful legacy to us, Greenpeace as it is today, from the founders of the organisation, the musicians, no doubt the musicians. It really is a beautiful reminder of how we started in those days with a vision, with principles and faith in our ability as a collective to do something. This album comes at us through the decades as a reminder of that. It's like a message from the founders. That's one of the reasons why we dedicated it to Irving Stow. He was a dedicated social activist. I think he'd be very proud of this.
#NK I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you for your time.
For more information on the Amchitka CD please go to http://www.amchitka-concert.com/
Photocredit:
- John Timmins, producer, Amchitka, the 1970 concert that launched Greenpeace and Cowboy Junkie alumnus performing recently in Toronto. Photo credit: Jovan Matic.