Rock and Roll; Interview with Cosimo Matassa [Part 1 of 2]

Oh yes oh yes oh yes yes. You know grilled like you know what. Oh yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about growing up in New Orleans and here in music. What kind of music you heard what got you involved in it. Well my parents live in the French Quarter when I was born. So I heard everything it was around that first autos which was a little bit of everything in those days French Quarter was really about 50 percent Italian then and the rest are Asian Germans mostly. And so I had a lot of. Much Music a lot of dance music. New Orleans was and is a good town for parties in that sort of stuff so it was a lot of it. And at home are actually wood at relatives homes mostly I had a lot of the schottische is in birds or clothes and things like that. Did you hear much black music at that time or to go lots of it. I lived in them in what for want of a better word was a mixed neighborhood.

And so yeah a lot of it you know people all around you know. All the guys in the NE. In the traditional bands a bunch of them lived in and around that neighborhood George Lewis and people like that. How did you happen to get involved in recording. Well I kind of backed into it. I went to school to be a chemist about the time I found out what a chemist was I don't want to be a chemist anymore. And it was also about the time I was going to be 18 so I dropped out of school was going to Tulane at the time. So I dropped out of school figured I'd get drafted. My birthday was coming up in April so I didn't I didn't go to the spring semester. Actually then we would have been trimesters because I was beating up everything to make sure we got a degree in time to go off to war in Iraq. And so I didn't I didn't. Sign up for the spring trimester and. Kind of loafed around waiting for something to happen it never did. And my father who owned a little

interest in A. Box business said and well. He'd go back to school go to work you know and you know just sit on your fanny. So I don't wanna go back to school at that point. The chemistry thing is wide open as far as I was concerned. I don't know what else. So I went to work on the jukebox business and. At that time when the war was still going on in 45 when it ended we fixed up a. Store next to where we had the. Original jukebox business and that was at Rampart and main and it was a partners I do not mind have a little in the back where people could record and. It fell to me to run it I was a little bit more technically oriented and I gradually did more and more that unless less of anything else I was trying to do nothing to regarding. It was great if I fell into it but it was just great because it was a nice way to spend your

life you know running a living and enjoying always good music. Was Roy Brown one of the earlier things that you did oh yeah. Yeah. And. We can talk about Lord Browne come in and talk a little bit of good rock and you know people thought of the first rock n roll record. Well I would call it that too. So long as you everybody understands what first is I mean there will really wasn't any first and it won't be any last of course as you know it just sort of grows like Topsy but I think. That would be a good place to hang your hat and say well things kind of started around this time. It was a big band style. Had gospel and blues mixed in with it and he was a good shouter you know. So it had all of the elements that. Everything that came after that kind of grew out of.

It wasn't nearly as. Country as some of the later things were you know really funky kinds of things. It was a little bit polished even though it was kind of rough around the edges. It was it was a fun kind of thing. To listen to lyrics you can tell. Had you story doing anything with the band at this point. Dave It was later but not much. If he was probably the single greatest. Productivity. Producer. In terms of the amount of work I like that I'm sure it was. Oh sure. Yeah I'll get it. Davis I mean it was the most productive of the producers I worked with and on a basis of a length of time he was very busy and a number of people in a number of different things he did and he really spanned a couple of

of the style changes that took place and he did well in both. Can you tell us a little bit about what it took to get records out of a room that's with it and people play it. Well it didn't take much to get him to sound good if you will I was really trying to make him sound like they sounded. I would go out of the studio and listen and go back into the control room and try to make it sound like a head out front. So it wasn't hard in the sense that I doubt I knew where I was going. Getting there was hard sometimes. But because of the kinds of ensemble sounds versus solos. There was no one a lot of tricky arrangements where you had to be cued on cues and things like that. So generally if you got a balance a band balance it worked pretty much from beginning to end. The work was picking the right microphone

out of a few and placing them in the right places and we actually had to move people during takes. Sometimes like to be able to feature things when we needed to be. But other than that it was it wasn't hard. It was because it was a definite target to aim at where we were headed. Or the saxophone player sometimes had to play the piano. Yeah or even a drum Mike and we had a little pencil it was a directional condenser Michael about the size of a few silver dimes 21 be in it and it was around by the snare drum. And quite often the saxophonist had to spin it around play a solo and spin it back to the snare. And if you were working with some of the drummers who who played into the solos and played out of them. That was a good trick. Not always successful I think you hear a couple of records you can tell it's still moving but that's it.

That's a trade secret right now. Well before long I think. You have to work order and you know based on those records you know Dave started beefing up the base with the instruments. Well Dave quite often had a guitar double bass for instance and we would do things to the drums to make him big and thumping and that was kind of unusual because you remember back then they were still using skin heads so they already were thumping compared to what you hear today that crisp plastic drum heads on here now didn't exist then except for a few guys who had really good skins on this Nancy. No one but yeah he we used to do everything. Tape handkerchiefs and and other objects Kotex and things like that the drum here just to give them the right sound. But he he was looking for that that drive you know a real visceral sound you could feel it as much as you heard it.

What do you remember that's first came in and hit me. Well I heard him before I came in the studio but oh sure I heard fats before he came into the studio. And so I wasn't surprised by what he did but he was always amazing in the strength of what he did and unique. He had that that signature you know he could just play a chord and you know it was him. And that's a beautiful thing for an artist to have that that tremendous unique quality. And he had it in spades. Bad pun. But he he did he did play well. He was kind of slow about production values he really didn't he really didn't understand get on the stand about you supposed try to get through quick. He was more interested in doing it the way he thought it ought to be doing done. And so sometimes things

stretched out and a lot of things had to be kind of they were had arrangements as we went along and that sort of thing. I'll say this with Dave he knew in front what he wanted them to sound like. He'd have to make changes sometimes because it wasn't happening to way he wanted it to.