I worked with David Briggs for seven years at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu and Sound City in Van Nuys, both in sunny southern California. And both locations could not have been more different. I met David at Indigo in the fall of 1982. And it would be seven years before I got the call to work with him on Ragged Glory with Neil and Crazy Horse.

Indigo was in the hills of Malibu up a remote canyon and sitting in the idyllic location of one of John Barrymore’s old – shall I say hunting lodges where he and his pals and other miscreants could imbibe, gamble and carry on without Hollywood staring over their shoulders.

Sound City on the other hand was located in an industrial area of Van Nuys with liquor stores, strip malls and seedy hotels nearby and the Budweiser Brewery across the freeway from the studio complex. The studio was home to great live spaces and Neve consoles and a funkiness that only could be described as hippy meets industrial complex with what seemed like shag carpeting on some of the walls as well as the floors in one of the control rooms. It had formerly been a Vox Amplifier testing facility in years past.

I had known Richard Kaplan the owner of Indigo since the mid seventies and had asked for a part time tech job there for a long time. We always stayed in touch. Eventually he hired me and I started in the little maintenance shack across from the studio. I could smell that indescribable fragrance of summer sage as it wafted into my cramped but sunlit workbench area in the sweltering late summer heat. This was the setting while I fixed console modules, outboard gear and headphones in my quiet work area stacked with old analog outboard gear and parts. I was blessed to work here and I knew it.

When I heard Briggs was going to camp out there and do a mixing project, well. . . . the table was set. I knew the day tech was not going to want to hang all night and babysit the session for this outlaw engineer so I volunteered to work nights and fix things in my shack. Sure enough the dam broke; I got called in and I met David for the first time. I didn’t care about Neil when I met Briggs, I knew David had done Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and had also produced Spirit’s Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus as well as his work with Nils Lofgren and Grin.

I wanted to work with that guy who got those guitar sounds, tones and sheer volume onto tape. The fact that he was the guy in the coonskin hat and held a lever action Winchester on the inside cover of Everybody Knows was the clincher. He looked like he meant business and that there could be hell to pay if you didn’t. What could possibly go wrong….?

So as a complete opposite vibe to my little maintenance shack solitude, I would get called into the control room as needed when something broke during the session. Other than that, I never went near the clients, engineers or artist as my job was to keep things running and stay out of the studio and control room. If I got called in, it was never good because that meant something had broken to such a degree that the session ground to a halt and the creative energy got interrupted.

Of course, just that had happened and I was thrust into the studio by Briggs when he said “where are you going” indignantly as I was leaving the control room after fixing some slap tape machine feedback problem in the middle of one of his Neil Young mixing sessions. He said to lend me your hands, we could use an extra pair on the mix, although I think it was more like, ”Get the hell up here and start mixing”. Richard Kaplan looked relieved, as there were now three pairs of mixing hands available. This was prior to effective automation at the time.

That started my relationship with David Briggs. I had never met Neil and that was okay. We went on to work together intensely for the next seven years mostly at Sound City where I was staff when he called in the late fall of 1989 to say, “get ready to record the Horse with Neil up at Broken Arrow”. In the spring of the following year we did just that, and started recording the new album.

The first time Briggs brought me there was March of 1990 and it was like dropping into a scene out of The Hobbit. Beautiful doesn’t even come close to describing the ranch property as you drop down off the ridge looking west to the ocean several thousand feet or more below.. It took my breath away then as it would now. I would be living there for the entire month of April.

David didn’t really say much about how to record because our styles were completely simpatico. I would be capturing live band performances. He said leakage would become your friend. That is to say the bleed of instruments into other microphones nearby. Sure enough, it would be the kiss of death to solo a mic channel thinking you could EQ it to your hearts content. He taught me to always listen in the track. Not always obvious at first glance when recording multitrack.

He had warned me to have plenty of tape and whatever outboard gear I needed. He said if you have to ask whether or not it’s okay to get such and such, then you don’t need it. So I never asked. He trusted my judgment hewn by seven years of working together at Indigo and Sound City. Regarding the tape he said you can never have too much. He also said to keep an eye on Neil at all times and that if he went anywhere near a guitar or piano – to be already recording. He promised that if I didn’t catch the first note, that more than likely that would be the actual take that Neil wanted to use, no matter how many times he and the band ran down the song. And he was right.

We parked the Record Plant Mobile recording truck outside the plywood barn at the west end of Neil’s Broken Arrow Ranch. We used Neil’s PA system and recorded live in the barn. We had the riser set up for the drums and placed the amps in a semicircular arc around the kit with the big PA used as side fills pointing back at the band so they could record everything live including the vocals. To say it was challenging to record, would be a complete understatement.

Ragged Glory was recorded to 24 track digital on Sony 3324 tape machines by yours truly in the Record Plant truck utilizing an API analog console, Neil’s UA “green” board - which is full of tubes, possibly also the Neve BCM-10 mobile console as well as a ton of analog outboard gear.   I did monitor mixes through the API sidecar mixer in the truck. Some of those mixes also went to 1/4” analog tape on an Ampex ATR two track machine. But all of those rough monitor mixes primarily went to DAT digital tape in stereo. There were, if memory serves, log mixes done to 1/4” tape as well.

When we mixed the record at Indigo Ranch in Malibu in the late spring of 1990, we mixed down from the Sony 3324 digital tape machines through the Deane Jensen-Aengus analog recording console to digital audio 2 track format with the Sony PCM 1630 3/4” videotape cassette cartridge format.

In addition, Briggs and I also recorded the stereo bus of the console to 1/4” analog tape on a 3M79 tape machine. Not all the mixes went to tape, however. The album was then mastered from the digital 1630 BVU 3/4” tapes. And four of the ten songs mixes came from the truck DAT format rough mixes done at the time of recording.

Now the good news is we have never utilized the ¼” tape mixes before. Since I am going to be making a vinyl record re-release of Ragged Glory, Neil and I decided to see if we can make the vinyl directly from the analog mixes if there are a sufficient amount of the songs Masters that we used on the album that also went to tape and not just digital. We never even listened to the tapes at the time. I have since heard some of them and they sound great!

And for some more good news, Neil and I plan on working on an expanded Ragged Glory re-release with possibly up to five or six previously unreleased outtake song performances done by Neil & Crazy Horse during these recording sessions.

Actually two of the songs were previously released but in very limited form. One is the acoustic band version of Interstate which was on the vinyl only of Broken Arrow a full 6 years after the recording we did at the ranch barn, and never out on the CD of that album.

The other is Don’t Spook The Horse, which came out as the B side to the CD single of Mansion On The Hill around the time of Ragged Glory’s release in September1990.

In addition there is a track of the full band playing a kickass take of Boxcar with Neil driving the rhythm with a tremolo clean electric guitar sound. This song was played on the road with a different band line up by Neil and The Bluenotes in ’88 and on tour again with The Restless and Lost Dogs in early ’89. But this one is Neil & The Horse and done in the studio, I mean ahem, “The Plywood Barn”.

Also there is a Born To Run performance by this band that has never been heard. It had first been tackled by Neil & Crazy Horse around the time of Zuma in 1975, and now in April 1990 during these sessions. We also have Natural Beauty done during these sessions as an acoustic band performance.

Lastly there are two very different takes of Dreamin’ Man. One is with electric guitars and full band and the other is an acoustic guitar version that might not make the grade. The band version is good but the rough mix I did at the time blew cuz I didn’t get the vocal up enough. We will review. The song was not done again until the ’92 acoustic tour and then finally for Harvest Moon.

I hope this sheds light on the history, process and what has been uncovered in the prelude to and making of, Ragged Glory. The current album was mastered from digital. The vinyl, CDs and cassettes were all made from that digital master. Now I have a chance to reveal the true Ragged Glory if the tapes hold up!

John Hanlon