The latter part of the 70s saw Tom Dowd working with several artists of a softer musical persuasion, inlcuding Firefall, Kenny Loggins, and in a vicarious way, ABBA.
'The credit I was given on the ABBA record is similar to one that appeared on the first album by Yes. ABBA were impressed with the nature of a pile of records that had come out of Atlantic Records, or the Warner Brothers complex, and they were interested in trying to put together an American rhythm section to try and make demos of several songs of a particular type. I was in California and they were on holiday in the Bahamas and they called up Atlantic and said they'd like to go to Criteria Studio in Miami to see those rhythm sections that you talk about, and make a record with them. Atlantic was looking for me, but I wasn't there, so they used Ronnie and Howie (Albert), who put a rhythm section together, and they went in.
I got back to Miami, and my wife said, "ABBA are looking for you, they're up at Criteria right now", so I got back into the car and drove up to the studio. They were running through one or two songs and trying to experiment with the rhythm section, and I got on the floor and changed the parts, and changed the sequence and everything, and we made a good demo that day, and they wanted to come back the next day to rework that song and some other things, and we made two tracks for them the next day. And they said they'd like to possibly come back and do some more songs with these people, but they didn't have any written - and that was the last any of us saw of them (Björn and Benny) until the record came out and we recognized one of the tracks that we had made that they had put things on top of, and then finished. So they gave us all a "Thanks" credit on that track, "Voulez-Vous", but that was their brief encounter with us, just two days on a whim because they were writing in the Bahamas on a vacation, and decided that they were close enough to the mainland and wanted to come in to study our techniques and see how we got some of our sound.'
No comments:
Post a Comment