What they also had were a bunch of rented percussion instruments lying around, left over from the previous week’s sessions, and not slated to be picked up until Monday. Gaudio and Crewe chose an African hair drum that happened to be there, and Saltzman, who was set up in the middle of the room with the rest of the band, played it along with a rack tom to create the opening bars of the song and the rhythm tattoo that carried the choruses. An open tambourine was also placed on the snare drum, which enhanced the fourth beat of the chorus measures, creating a sharp smash, which was in contrast with the tom/hair drum combination’s lower tones.

“The overtones of the tom and hair drum were very pronounced,” says Gaudio. “And the damn echo was slapping everything around. But it’s interesting that we noticed it mainly in retrospect. The media of the time—like AM radio—simply couldn’t reproduce it, so you didn’t hear it over the radio. The same with the monitors of the time, especially in a demo studio. You play the CD now and you think, that’s not what I heard back then.”

The track was laid down without a guide vocal. The group had learned and rehearsed it around a piano before the session. It is a very Spartan track; aside from the drums and percussion, only the bass, a bit of DeVito’s Fender electric guitar, and a counterpoint melody, played by Gaudio on a Farfisa organ, peek through the wall of echo-laden vocals. “We might have orchestrated it a bit more if we had the time,” Gaudio says. “But once the vocals were on, we could see it wasn’t needed.”

The background vocals went on first, with Valli singing as part of the four-part ensemble arrangement that Gaudio had come up with, typically Four Seasons, with the top and bottom notes the same. It was an approach used by The Four Freshmen, a group that Gaudio admired and emulated early in his career. Background vocals were double-tracked, with each vocal track and the basic allocated to a single track of the Scully 4-track deck, and then bounced down later to allow for overdubs, such as the upbeat Gospelesque handclaps that appear only on the rideout, another tambourine part, and Valli’s lead vocal. All the vocals were recorded with a Neumann U47 microphone, Crewe recalls. The Four Seasons arranged themselves around a single microphone, much the same way they had around streetlights in Newark, and usually only with half the headphones on. “We were very into balancing ourselves,” Gaudio explains.

“There was a lot of generational loss on that record, because it was 4-track and we had to bounce,” Gaudio notes. “But again, radio forgave a lot of that. And while we were sensitive to that, and often relied on mastering to fix it, ultimately we were always into the feel of the record. That always came first.”

The tracking and vocals took the better part of the day. But thanks to the track-bouncing during the session—and the fact there were only four tracks—the mix was fast and easy. “We were definitely committed on the drum sound, including the echo chamber,” says Gaudio. “Fortunately, the echo fit in nicely with the same chamber on the vocals. It wasn’t swimming in reverb, which was the original concern. All the track needed—and all we could do, anyway—was add a little bit of EQ here and there and a little extra echo.”

Like many recordings from that era and before, CD versions and FM radio reveal all sorts of anomalies on the tracks. You can hear the bangles of the tambourine being moved away from the microphone in between verse and chorus, and there’s one spot where the tine sound is slightly out of time and sounds like it was accidentally hit. Recordings like “Rag Doll” were never intended for this kind of microscopic scrutiny, but Gaudio says it wasn’t an issue then or now. “It really became part of the sound,” he says. “It created a sound that was fresh and worked on radio.”

The hurried nature of the making of “Rag Doll” didn’t end with the session that Sunday night. Gaudio remembers that it was rushed to mastering and was on the radio within 10 days of the session. But The Four Seasons were old hands at doing things quickly. “We once did an entire Christmas album in 28 hours,” Gaudio says proudly. “And right after that we did five shows at the Apollo. Now that’s fast.”

BACK | REC NOTES

Reprinted with permission from Magazine, December, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved