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“The whole arrangement came together in the studio,” Richardson recalls. There, Richardson sat in the middle of the studio with Seger and the band, running the newly minted “Night Moves” down, making decisions such as the addition of an acoustic guitar-and-vocal breakdown in the middle of the song, while Christian—assisted in part by Richardson’s son Garth, who has gone on to rack up his own significant engineering credits for Rage Against the Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers—ran the custom Audiotronics console and 3M 79 16-track 1-inch multitrack deck running Ampex 456. Monitoring was through a pair of Super Big Reds loaded with Altec speakers and a Mastering Lab crossover, driven by 60-watt stereo Citation amps, which Richardson admits were pretty underpowered but he felt sounded best with the speakers and room.
The track is sparse—bass, drums, acoustic and electric guitars, piano and a Hammond C-3 with a Leslie speaker cabinet. The drum kit was miked using a Shure SM57 on the snare and a pair of Neumann U67 tube microphones as overheads. The guitar amp had an SM57 close in on the speaker cone, a Sennheiser 421 near the outer edge; the acoustic guitar, which Seger played as an overdub after playing the acoustic piano on the basic track, was recorded with one of the six KM84 microphones that Richardson personally owned. The piano was miked with a pair of U67s in an overhead-V configuration; the Leslie cabinet had a Sennheiser 421 on the bottom rotor and two U67s on the top rotor. When the “record” lights went red, Richardson was in the control room tapping a pencil on an SM53 as a metronome. “It was sparse, but I looked at Bob as a kind of a street singer,” Richardson says. “The delivery of the whole track needed to be kind of raw. It wasn’t a matter of reflecting the needs of this one song; it was about reflecting the way Bob comes across.”
The lyric inspiration, Seger once said, came from his youth: “I was shy; super shy. And I happened to fall into a faster crowd than I’d ever been in before. Because I played music, I was sort of a gimmick for those guys. And I got to meet the really ‘hot’ chicks, and I had my first great love affair, which is what ‘Night Moves’ is about; it’s about that girl. You know, the girl with the big breasts that we all went kazappo for when we reached puberty. It was a really mad, crazy affair. The album as well as the song were inspired by American Graffiti. I came out of the theater thinking, ‘Hey, I’ve got a story to tell, too! Nobody has ever told about how it was to grow up in my neck of the woods.’”
The basic track for “Night Moves” went down in fewer than 10 passes on the last day of tracking for the entire four-song project—and that was allowing, Richardson reminds, for the fact that two of the bandmembers were no longer there. “There was definitely some time involved for the band and the studio guys to get their communication together,” he says. The bulk of the song was cut, the session was suspended while Seger recorded the acoustic guitar interlude, then the band resumed for the big finish. The three parts would be spliced together by Richardson and Christian on the 2-inch tape after the vocals were done.
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Reprinted with permission from
Magazine, April, 2001© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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