Someday I would like to write a book, ‘The Life and Times of David Briggs’. I could research everyone he touched and really get to the bottom of some things about my mercurial, mysterious brother.
He was born Manning Philander Briggs on February 29, 1944, and grew up in Wyoming with family members who took care of him. His best friend was Kirby, and one day in the mid-sixties they up and went to LA to find their fortunes. Kirby became a grip, working in the movies, and Briggs became a record producer, eventually marrying a Wyoming girl, Shannon, and having a son, Lincoln Wyatt Briggs, in Topanga Canyon, which is where I met him. Shannon was a great girl, and he loved her. He was a wild man, and she loved him. Lincoln was a good boy, and I’m not sure how he is doing now, although I worry about him sometimes.
Briggs and I made my best records, the transcendent ones, the ones where I am closest to the Great Spirit. I say that because She visited me more often with Briggs than when I was with any other human being. Briggs and I had a way of getting to the place. We somehow knew the way. He was the most influential person on my music of anyone I’ve met. His guidance and friendship through the creation of countless pieces of music are one of the greatest gifts of my life, right up there with my wife’s love and all of my children. I feel the loss. I feel the memories. I feel the weight of every mistake I made in our long relationship, the times he was right and I was wrong, the times I didn’t use him to produce for the wrong reason, every battle we had. I feel the absence of his unbelievable energy for music, combined with mine. There is no replacement for that. It is one of life’s little voids.
So there he was in his apartment in San Francisco with Bettina, his sweetheart. Barely standing and all crooked and bent over. Short in stature, this giant of a man, now resembling a tree with no leaves waiting for winter, was looking right at me. It was obvious he was dying from something and the process was well advanced. I was surprised at how far it had come in a short time, having only heard he was sick. It had been a few years since we had worked together, and this was not the Briggs I remembered. Be that as it may, there he was, barely able to stand, which he did, for some reason I can’t remember. He was in pain from an ailment, a mysterious ailment that may have visited him once earlier in life, in the seventies. At that time, he had disappeared for a few months and come back as if nothing had happened. There was a rumor of cancer and a hospital stay in Sacramento, but nothing was for sure. David was mysterious, and that is the end of that. Nobody knew what was really happening with David, ever. That is why a book on the subject might be worth a shot.
So now here we were with David’s second big bout against whatever it was, and it had pretty well gotten him. He was taking a lot of morphine for the pain and looked terrible, although the spirit was still in his eyes, weak as it was.
“Do you have any advice for me on my music going forward?” I asked David.
“Just make sure to have as much of you in the recording as you can,” he said. “Stay simple. No one gives a shit about anything else.”
He told me to keep it simple and focused, have as much of my playing and singing as possible, and not to hide it with other things. Don’t embellish it with other people I don’t need or hide it in any way. Simple and focused. That is what I took away. He didn’t exactly say that, but I got that message. I have failed to do that in some instances. “Be great or be gone,” his famous phrase, echoes in my head. I have to remember that for sure. Damn.
So I left the apartment after a hug. It was devastating. He died a week later. He wanted to go. His body was all fucked up. He asked to be OD’d, and they did it, I think. Apparently it did not go as planned and it was not easy. His tenacious spirit would not let him go.
from ‘Waging Heavy Peace’
more. . . .
David Briggs
How to Make Records
I can teach you everything I know in an hour. Everything. That’s how simple it is to make records. Nowadays, buddy, the technician is in control of the medium. They try to make out like it’s black magic, or flyin’ a spaceship. I can teach *any*body on this planet how to fly the spaceship. If you look at the modern console, there’ll be thirty knobs – high frequency, low frequency, midfrequency, all notched in little tiny, tiny, teeny tiny degrees – and it’s all bullshit. All this stuff doesn’t matter, and you can’t be intimidated. You just ignore it – all of it.
I walk into studios with the biggest console known to mankind, and I ask for the schematic and say, “Can you patch from here to here and eliminate the ENTIRE board?” I just run it right into the tape machines. All the modern consoles, they’re all made by hacks, they’re not worth a shit, they sound terrible. None of it touches the old tube stuff – like the green board from Heider’s. It has two tone controls – high end, low end and a pan knob – and that’s it. I had great good fortune when I was a kid and started makin’ records. I made ‘em at Wally Heider’s, Gold Star, so all the people that taught me were Frank Dimidio, Dave Gold, Stan Ross, Dean Jensen – these guys were the geniuses of the music business, still are.
They taught me more about sound and how sound is made and the principles of doing it, and it’s unshakably correct what they said to me: You get a great sound at the source. Put the correct mike in front of the source, get it to the tape the shortest possible route – that’s how you get a great sound. That’s how you do it. All other ways are work. The biggest moment of my life – the one I haven’t been able to get past every, really – is 1961, when I first got to L.A. I got invited to Radio Recorders to see Ray Charles, and I walk into the studio, and Ray’s playin’ all the piano parts with his left hand, reading a braille score with his right hand, singing the vocal live while a full orchestra played behind him. So I sat there and I watched. And I went, “This is how records are made. Put everybody in the fuckin’ room and off we go.” In those days everybody knew they had to go in, get their dick hard at the same time and deliver. And three hours later they walked out the fuckin’ door with a record in their pocket, man.
Of course, in those days they didn’t have eight- , sixteen- , twenty-four- , forty-eight- , sixty-four-track, ad nauseum, to fuck people up, and that is what fucked up the recording business and the musicians of today, by the way – fucked ‘em all up to where they’ll never be the same, in my opinion. People realized they could do their part…later. Play their part and fix it later. And with rock and roll, the more you think, the more you stink.
It’s very easy for people to forget what rock and roll really is. Look man, I’m forty-seven years old, and I grew up in Wyoming, and I stole cars and drove five hundred miles to watch Little Richard, and I wanna tell you somethin’ – when I saw this nigger come out in a gold suit, fuckin’ hair flyin’, and leap up onstage and come down on his piano bangin’ and goin’ fuckin’ nuts in Salt Lake City, I went, “Hey man, I wanna be like him. This is what I want.” Even today he’s a scary dude. He’s the real thing. Rock and roll is not sedate, not safe, has truly nothin’ to do with money or anything. It’s like wind, rain fire – it’s elemental. Fourteen-year-old kids, they don’t think, they feel. Rock and roll is fire, man, FIRE. It’s the attitude. It’s thumbing your nose at the world.
It’s a load. It’s such a load that it burns people out after a few years. Even the best of ‘em burn out. People get old – they forget what it’s like to be a kid, they’re responsible, they’re this and they’re that…. You can’t have it both ways. You’re a rock and roller. Or you’re not.
I wanna tell you something’: Neil’s never been insecure about anything in his fuckin’ life. First among equals is Neil Young, and it’s always been that way. When Neil’s got his ax in hand, it’s like the Hulk. His aura becomes solid – he becomes eight feet tall, six feet wide. The only guy other than John Lennon who can actually go from folk to country to full orchestra. The only guy. I think when it’s all written down, he will unquestionably stand in the top five that ever made rock and roll.
American record producer
David Briggs was an American record producer best known for his work with Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse. en.wikipedia.org
– Born: February 29, 1944, Douglas, Wyoming
– Died: November 26, 1995
– Nationality: American