Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Zweig is a writer, lecturer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. His latest book, Invisibles, is about the power of embracing anonymous work in a culture obsessed with praise and recognition.

He has released two critically acclaimed albums, All Now With Wings and Keep Going. Both albums charted on college radio playlists and garnered accolades for Zweig, with the press calling him a "symphonic pop prodigy."

Zweig's debut novel, Swimming Inside The Sun, a modernist bildungsroman about identity and self-consciousness, was released fall 2009. It quickly gained notice with a rave review from Kirkus calling it a "terrific debut from a talented writer."

Zweig has been invited to lecture at universities, academic conferences, and corporations around the U.S. and the world. As a freelance journalist, his pieces have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. More at davidzweig.com

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INTRODUCTION
L ed Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. The Beatles. Eric Clapton. Van Halen.

Let's start off with a little quiz. Which one of the above doesn't belong?

Maybe you're thinking Eric Clapton because he's the only single artist, not a band, on the list. Or maybe Van Halen because their heyday was in the 1980s, and the others were a decade or two before. But you'd be wrong on both counts. The outlier in this list is actually the Beatles. All the rest of the artists are linked by one person: a man named Andy Johns.

Cavernous, thunderous, terrifying even, the opening bars of Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" constitute possibly the most beloved drum intro of all time. The track, and especially that intro, is seminal, a sonic benchmark thousands of bands, including some of the most successful acts in rock history, aimed for or were inspired by. As the music recording magazine Sound on Sound noted in a piece on drum recording, it's "one of the most sought-after sounds in rock." The drum loop has also been widely sampled all over the musical map, from the Beastie Boys to Björk, Eminem to Enigma. Even if you don't know "When the Levee Breaks," you've heard these drums or their imitations.

Ubiquitous now, we take for granted how radical the sonics of (Zeppelin drummer) John Bonham's drums were in 1971, when the band's fourth album was released. As studio technologies were advancing at the time, the trend was toward more mics and more gear in general. On many recordings of the era bands were using multiple mics on the drum kit, usually with one near the bass drum. Also, for some time a more "deadened" and close drum sound, popularized by the Beatles' later recordings, had been gaining popularity. Yet Johns, as the album's recording engineer, the person responsible for getting the band's sounds on tape, tried something counterintuitive, and revolutionary in a way, to achieve such an exceptionally massive sound-he took just two microphones and hung them over a banister high above a staircase that was in the room where Bonham was pounding away. (The band recorded in an eighteenth-century country house rather than a traditional studio, enabling them to incorporate its varied acoustics, such as the stairwell, in the recordings.) He also compressed the signal and ran it through an echo unit, effects which, utilized together, made the overall performance sound simultaneously louder yet more distant, key to its mesmerizing quality.

When we think of our favorite songs, we think of the artists performing them. Perhaps if you're a serious music fan, you'll know who produced the tracks. But we never think of the engineer, which truly is an oversight. The unusual production on "When the Levee Breaks" is "arguably one of the most significant factors in its popularity and longevity," wrote Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum, now a professor of Music Technology at Laval University in Quebec, in the Journal on the Art of Record Production.

Johns didn't achieve this sound alone. Of course, Bonham's performance is what this all rests on, and Jimmy Page, the band's guitar player and producer, is widely credited, and rightfully so, as the mastermind behind much of Zeppelin's oeuvre. But it takes nothing away from Page and Bonham to acknowledge Johns's critical role. He was a highly skilled craftsman, who married a deep technical knowledge with an artistic gift for knowing how to get that sound on so many recordings. Beyond Led Zeppelin IV, Johns engineered nearly all of that band's most successful records, plus the Rolling Stones classics Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, and numerous other acclaimed albums. This man's stamp is on some of the most widely shared cultural touchstones of a generation. Yet, other than a blip of recognition following his death in April 2013, he, and his work, have remained invisible.

7:30 p.m. Peter Canby shuffles a stack of marked-up article proofs, flicks off his desk