ENGINEER ROY CICALA WORKED ON ALL OF JOHN

Engineer Roy Cicala worked on all of John Lennon’s albums from Imagine onwards, and in ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’, recorded the only solo number one hit single of Lennon’s lifetime.

John/Madison Square Garden,Nov1974

In June 1974, John Lennon’s life was in disarray. Not only was he battling a deportation order by the US government on the grounds of a 1968 UK drug bust, and embroiled in litigation over the legal dissolution of the Beatles, but publisher Morris Levy was alleging copyright infringement of the Chuck Berry song ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ on the Beatles’ ‘Come Together’. In his personal life, meanwhile, he was separated from wife Yoko Ono — who had, bizarrely, orchestrated his affair with her personal assistant, May Pang — and making tabloid headlines due to booze-and-drugs-fuelled excesses with fellow revellers Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr, which had disrupted sessions for a Phil Spector-produced album of rock & roll oldies. Lennon was in the midst of what he’d later describe as his 15-month ‘Lost Weekend’. Nevertheless, he was also about to turn things around.

The previous December, following three months of star-studded craziness at A&M and, after they’d been kicked out of there, the Record Plant (West) — characterised by Spector once showing up in a surgeon’s uniform and, on another occasion, firing a gun into the control room ceiling — the maniacal producer had disappeared with the master tapes, which eventually had to be retrieved at a cost of $90,000 to Capitol Records. Having renewed his friendship with Paul McCartney and forged stronger ties with his estranged son, Julian, Lennon decided to get his career back on track by placing the Rock ‘n’ Roll project on hold so that he could record a new album of original material.

Eventually titled Walls & Bridges, this transported John Lennon to the top of the US charts, courtesy of songs that variously documented how he missed Ono (‘Bless You’, ‘What You Got’, ‘Going Down On Love’), his love for Pang (‘Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)’), his emnity towards former Beatles manager Allen Klein (‘Steel & Glass’), and his ongoing struggles with insecurity and depression (‘Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)’, ‘Scared’). What’s more, it also provided him with a pair of hits in the form of ‘#9 Dream’ and ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’, the latter featuring a harmony vocal and piano contribution by Elton John that helped secure John Lennon his only chart-topping solo single during his lifetime.

Recorded at New York’s Record Plant (East) in June and July of 1974, Walls & Bridges dispensed with the many luminaries recruited by Phil Spector for the Rock ‘n’ Roll sessions and instead utilised a core group of Lennon-enlisted session players. A rhythm section comprising drummer Jim Keltner and bass player Klaus Voormann was joined by guitarists Jesse Ed Davis and Eddie Mottau, keyboard player Nicky Hopkins, saxophonist Bobby Keys and percussionist Arthur Jenkins. The final piece of the puzzle was Ken Ascher who, as well as playing electric piano, Clavinet and Mellotron on Walls & Bridges, arranged and conducted the string and brass musicians from what Lennon listed in the liner notes as New York’s “Philharmonic Orchestrange”.

It was a stellar line-up, led by John Winston Ono Lennon’s own contributions as a vocalist, guitarist, pianist and percussionist — each role attributed to an assortment of self-penned pseudonyms. Behind the console were engineers Roy ‘I only like singles’ Cicala and Shelly ‘I can’t take the pressure’ Yakus, not to mention studio assistant Jim ‘What it is’ Iovine.

Cicala,John & Harry Nilsson,1974

“He became like a brother and a friend to me,” says Cicala, who served as an engineer on all of Lennon’s albums from Imagine (1971)to Double Fantasy just before his death in 1980. Cicala also produced and engineered many of the world’s biggest stars during two decades of running the Record Plant in New York, including Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Madonna, Elton John, Sting, Frank Sinatra, Dire Straits, David Bowie,Harry Nilsson,Miles Davis,Queen, Aerosmith,Bon Jovi,Liza Minnelli,Roberta Flack,the Who,Frank Zappa,Lou Reed,Prince, Santana,Charlie Mingus.It’s a list that has garnered him 10 platinum discs over the course of a career that commenced back in the early ’60s.

Born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Roy Joel Cicala initially helped install the church organs that his father designed, before marrying singer-songwriter Lori Burton and running his own small demo studio. Then, having landed a job as an assistant maintenance man under the guidance of Tom Hidley at the four-track A&R Recording facility of Phil Ramone — whom Cicala watched, on his very first session in 1963, record Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto’s ‘The Girl From Ipanema’. There, he “learned how to make phasing machines out of tape machines, keeping old-fashioned tape machines within half a second from reel to reel”. Soon, Cicala began engineering there himself and, in late 1965 and early 1966, sat behind the board alongside producer Tom Dowd for the classic, eponymous debut album by soul-rock outfit the Young Rascals.

 

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