When the Bottom Line closed, in January, 2004 — a month shy of its 30th anniversary — it marked the decline of the cabaret-style rock venue in New York’s Greenwich Village. In fact, the owners, Allan Pepper and the late Stan Snadowsky, had kept the club going mostly on fumes for its last few years, the sit-down-and-listen format having largely already faded as live music migrated to pricey dance clubs and warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens. The demise of the Old World Order of record labels, which were falling to consolidation as online piracy and file trading undermined their creaky economics, meant they were no longer able to “paper the house,” as Pepper used to call the practice of a label buying out the 400 or so seats for the early show to support an act.
More than a few people thought of the Bottom Line as a relic of a bygone era in music, and in a sense it was, in that it demanded an audience’s attention be focused on the stage and on the performer — a connection that was becoming harder to achieve as mobile phones and other devices stole our concentration and music saw its inherent value erode. The sit-down style is still with us, but mainly in a confined and affluent kind of chitlin’ circuit — the City Winery rooms or high-dollar clubs like Le Poisson Rouge, both a few blocks from where the Bottom Line once stood (or perhaps it makes more sense to say “sat”). These clubs largely cater to a mixture of Boomer and Gen-X patrons who put tickets on platinum Amex cards.
But, as it turns out, the Bottom Line isn’t finished with us. In fact, it’s actually a time capsule, a trove of recordings dating back to the 1970s, on just about every tape format ever conceived of. And they’re just now finding their way out.
The Bottom Line Archives
The club hosted shows by a Who’s Who of late-20th century music icons, including Prince, Hall & Oates, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, The Ramones, Miles Davis, Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen (who did a legendary week-long stand there in 1975 that heralded Born To Run) and Lou Reed, who recorded his Live: Take No Prisoners LP there. However, those shows took place at a time when rights issues and the money they’re worth were far simpler and slighter than today. Thus, the releases slowly being doled out over the last two years on an album series called The Bottom Live Archives, which has released about a dozen titles so far, are artifacts of their own: Tony Orlando, Doc Watson, Pete Seeger with Roger McGuinn, the Roche Sisters and a few others of interest mainly to cognoscenti.
But in an era when just about every concert large and small is recorded to an integrated Pro Tools platform, the process of retrieving and making this huge hoard of music history available is a story unto itself. Jessica Thompson, an audio restoration specialist who was working out of the Magic Shop Studios in Manhattan, sent a team of prospectors to Pepper’s house in Tenafly, New Jersey to cull through seemingly endless cardboard boxes filled with reel-to-reel tapes, DATs, cassettes and CDs. “It was truly thrilling to pull up a tape box and see Billy Joel or The Ramones or Bill Evans written on the side and know that performance had been captured,” she told me.
Working with series producer Gregg Bendian, Thompson took the tapes to the Magic Shop and transferred them to Pro Tools at 192k/24 bits. “Almost none of the tapes have tones, so we have to calibrate by ear,” she recalls. “We researched the tape machine used for most of these recordings, so we have that to go on.” Some were radio broadcasts on WNEW, live shows mixed for a radio audience, with applause flown in at appropriate moments and room mics that give a sense of the dimension of the space and the size of the audience. More than a few tapes or their boxes were mislabeled, and in some cases they were taped over with later shows. Some recordings were painfully dry, lacking ambience or audience reaction, effects that Thompson says she added in to reestablish that they’re live recordings.
“Sometimes the engineer was mixing on the fly and I have to undo or redo panning and EQ moves that probably sounded great in the room at the time but sound weird and jarring on tape 30 years later,” she recalls.
There’s the usual array of restoration needs: fixing dropouts or tape warbles, dealing with excessive tape hiss, or random mic or electronic noises. “I often have two sets — an early and a late set — to work from, so that enables me to choose the best takes and find edits for the inevitable moments when a really amazing performance is cut off because the tape ends,” she says.
But the work was rewarding and served to remind that while the technology may have been near primitive compared to today, it did the job and then some of capturing some incredible moments. For instance, for the Willie Nile two-CD set, she worked from an analog tape recorded in 1980 and a DAT recorded in 2000. “Guess which sounded superior?” she asks, utterly rhetorically. Of course, it was the 35-year-old analog recording. “I had to make both sound cohesive while being true to the richer, fuller sound of the tape,” she says. “It took a lot of analog TLC to make that DAT match the warmth and punch of the tape.”
Thompson is trying to recreate what club patrons would have heard then and there, through a P.A. system that was considered state-of-the-art at the time. Ron Lorman, the club’s FOH mixer and later stage manager during much of the 1980s, remembers the console as a custom Chaos Audio desk built by John Chester, who was also the chief sound engineer for Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.
The first P.A. system was an Electro-Voice, which used JBL C-Scoop drivers and four horns. This was replaced sometime in the ‘80s with a Gauss system. Both were cobbled together by Chaos Audio. The stage monitors were Community wedges and stayed there forever, four on stage and one vocal monitor aimed down from above. Brit Row or See Factor would bring in additional monitors when needed.
The original FOH position was in a cramped perch just below the ceiling, which wasn’t that high to begin with. “You learned to mix without being able to hear,” Lorman laughs. “I took my cues by watching the audience. If they were moving and grooving, we were good; if they were just sitting, it was time to fix the mix.” In later years, the FOH position was moved to the floor against a rear wall, where it caused the loss of a few seats, though at a time when they were producing dwindling revenue.
The FOH sent a passive split to an even more cramped cubby next to and above the stage, where David “Rover” Vanderheyden monitored the recording onto a changing series of decks, starting with a Tascam open-reel two-track machine and ultimately including an Advent cassette deck.
That was more than 40 years ago, and the music is just now making its way back. But the music business’ unraveling still isn’t finished with the Bottom Line’s legacy project. Just as the restoration team was hitting its workflow stride, the Magic Shop headed to magnetic heaven, closing on March 16. It was a victim, like the Bottom Line itself, of unbridled real estate values. Thompson subsequently moved her work on The Bottom Line Archive to Coast Mastering in Berkeley, CA with Bendian collaborating from NYC.
It’s worth wondering aloud again why so little music that was recorded live makes it into the mainstream today, as it did regularly 40 years ago. It may be that the ubiquity of live music, along with the availability from artists’ websites of last nights’ shows and a small universe of archival sites like Wolfgang’s Vault, makes having copies of it irrelevant. Bringing the Bottom Line into that universe is a welcome addition to the archive.
