from 2011
PAUL FREEMAN AND BOB WACKERMAN
talk about their start in the audio business,
and the "voice" of Disneyland
(part 1)

by Scott Wolf

One of the joys that I get from doing Mouse Clubhouse is sharing the stories of the people you may not have heard of, but are an essential part of Disney magic. What would a great Disney show or parade be without great audio? Paul Freeman and Bob Wackerman produce that aspect of many Disney experiences. If you've been in "it's a small world holiday" in Disneyland, seen "Fantasmic!" in Walt Disney World or "Aladdin" at Disney California Adventure, you've heard their work, but their countless list of credits extends internationally.

As a huge audio buff, and a fan of Disney's live entertainment, I'm so grateful that Paul and Bob took the time to share their fascinating stories with me, and to Larry Billman for introducing us! We shared a lot of laughs during the interview, and it's evident they have fun with their work, but it's just as obvious that they take their jobs seriously - because they're the best in the business!  

Scott Wolf: Paul, how did you get your start in the business?

Paul Freeman: Which business?

SW: The audio business. What were you doing before that?

PF: Nothing.

Bob Wackerman: This is going to be a good interview!

PF: I was a musician, I was a guitar player, played in bands forever and kind of migrated into the control room and enjoyed that side better than the other side and never left.

SW: How old were you when you first got in the control room?

PF: Fourteen. We were recording all the time and back then it was all like two track mono. We’d all play and sing and do our thing. Then one by one you’d have to be out of the room so they could do their little sound on sound overdub for the next thing. There was no place else to go so I just went in the control room.

I was amazed how “trash-canny” it sounded out in the room and how much better it usually sounded in the control room and it just kind of fascinated me.

SW: Why is that?

PF: It’s the room that you’re recording in, it’s the microphone placement, it’s the gear, it’s everything. That was the big turning point in my recording life. I had been on the road playing and I decided that when I got off the road playing I was going to start recording a solo project.

I had a friend of mine that I’d done a lot of work with at a studio in Huntington Beach, and I contacted him and he was going to record my stuff so I started doing all these demos in the garage of a friend of mine. We bought like $500 worth of drapery material and it hung in his garage and I went out and bought a four track recorder and all this gear and started recording this stuff as demos. The drums sounded like trash cans and just everything sounded really bad.

As time went on and progressed we decided that we would build a really major studio in Orange County, and try to get in the recording industry in Orange County. There were two of us building major facilities right on opposite sides from each other of John Wayne airport.

We wound up spending the national debt on this facility and I just figured as soon as this thing is open and I’ll start recording there, things won’t sound like trash cans anymore and it’ll sound like a record.

I put the drummer out there and did my first pass at recording on my own. It sounded like trash cans. I was really bummed after spending all that money, and at that point it dawned on me, it’s not just the gear and just the facility, it’s everything that goes into it. Mic placement taste – which I had none. I had no taste. I knew what I liked and what I didn’t like but I didn’t really know at least how to get there. If there was something that I wanted to sound like something, I didn’t have a clue as to how to accomplish that. It was a very expensive tutelage.

SW: How did you end up learning it?

PF: Just doing it, watching other people and experimenting. For me, there is no right or wrong way. I remember reading things… “you use one db,” “two db of this frequency” blah blah and I’m sitting there cranking the knob as far to the right as I could and going, “I shouldn’t be doing that!” because I read that you shouldn’t be doing that but I liked that sound. At that point in time I said it doesn’t matter what anybody says.

People ask me all the time, “How did you get that sound?” or “How did you do that?” and I go, “It’s just taste, it’s just what I do.” Any monkey can turn a knob. That’s really the bottom line, you need to know what your taste is and what you want to accomplish.

The biggest thing in recording from that standpoint is understanding how everything affects everything else. A solo guitar might not sound like what you’d want it to sound like as a solo, but when it’s in the mix, or with an orchestra, or all this percussion, it’s how they physically interact with everything else that’s going on.

One of our advantages is our recording projects are short. By the time we get in the studio, we’re in the studio for a day or maybe two days and then it’s on to the mix. We’re very prepared going in knowing what everything’s going to be so that we can spend the least amount of time we can in the studio.

SW: Was that studio the beginning of Audio By the Bay?

PF: No, this was back in 1974. This was Overland Recording studio in Costa Mesa. That’s when I started working on the Main Street Electrical Parade with Don Dorsey.

I did that for quite a long time and then I wound up going over to that other studio that was our big competitor which was the largest studio in the western hemisphere at that time. Stevie Wonder was living there, literally. He was in a trailer living there. We did everybody there from Kenny Loggins to Stevie Wonder to Ambrosia. You name it at the time.

As I was there longer and longer, I was the vice president of record production, I started disliking the music more. I was doing a Doobie Brothers record and they would come in and they would fight. I’d sit there and go, “I hope these guys start fighting soon so I can get out of here.”

One night I was driving home and I was saying this is really dumb because I’m getting paid when I work but I just can’t wait for them not to work. I just couldn’t stand what was going on anymore so I went off with a friend of mine that was Herb Alpert’s lead trumpet player in Tijuana Brass. I’d known this guy forever and he used to be an arranger for me. We started a computer software business so I could kind of pick and choose the recording projects that I was doing.

At that time I just started doing Disney. I stopped doing records, I stopped doing all that stuff that I was hating and just started doing production music.

SW: Do you remember how you started doing the Disney things?

PF: My original introduction was with Don Dorsey. At the time Jack Wagner was the music department basically. Then Jack Eskew came into the picture and Jack and I became friends, and with Don and I it just became what I did.

It was great because I could do the computer business and make a really good living at that and still record, but only have to record the projects that I wanted to do and I didn’t have to do all the other jobs. It’s like a wedding photographer having to do weddings. He may want to do fashion, but the weddings pay the bills. I didn’t have to do demos or anything anymore to pay the bills.

I did that until I could see there was a direction going in the side of the computer industry that we were doing that I didn’t like, and it just got very convoluted and really weird so I started doing records again. I started doing the pop division for Telarc records, an audiophile label out of Cleveland. They pretty much started the whole audiophile CD industry. They were a classical label and my job was to get them into the non-classical world – to start doing jazz records and pop records. We did the very first all-digitally recorded surround sound record. It was my group, Spies, which was like a fusion thing.

I did that for about three years and I was toying with moving on to a ranch in central California and just becoming a teacher at San Luis Obispo or something and living the easy life but I found that it was too expensive to do that. The guy that I replaced at our competitive studio, who was the keyboard player in Three Dog Night, called and said he had a video post production business called The Edit Bay, and he said Orange County really needs an audio post production facility, "Would you be interested in doing something?" I said I don’t know what that is, but it sounds fun. So we sat down and talked and the next day we were doing business and I was trying to figure out what to call it. Everybody called the place The Bay. The Edit Bay was the name of the company, and I literally woke up at 6:30 in the morning and went Audio By the Bay, because we were in the same facility.

THE NEW "VOICE OF DISNEYLAND"

By that time Jack Wagner had retired and his contract was up for somebody to grab it, so I went after his contract. When I first met Jack he was everything, he was post production, he was the voice of Mickey Mouse, he was Goofy, he was Chip and Dale. He was all of the male characters. He taught me how to edit tape. He taught me a lot of stuff, plus he was a really funny guy.

When Jack Eskew came in and the thing became more of a business, a music department kind of thing, Jack Wagner was still doing the post side but then Don Dorsey had moved into post production. Don took on the majority of the post production work away from Jack Wagner. Jack got older and his voice was failing and he retired. His voice contract was up for somebody to get. Well, I don’t have that voice but I had half the contract. I just needed to get a voice. I could record it and I could post it and I know the venue, this was in 1992.

I got half the contract and Scott Rummel was my “voice,” and Bill Nesbitt was the other half of the contract. There were actually two of us and we kind of migrated into doing the Magic Music Days announcements and Bill Nesbitt did more of the show announcements. The kinds of things that were the plum jobs. The Magic Music Days was more of a factory.

I wanted the whole contract and Bill wanted the whole contract. During that early period of time people were calling me every day, “I want to be the voice of Disneyland.” I would do demos of them and I would direct them and it would get to the point where maybe one out of every ten or so were worth listening to. Part of my agreement was that I would send these demos over to the park.

One day, a gentleman that was running the department that I was working for requested Bill Rogers to do this announcement for a parade that we were working on. To this day, I think that was a mistake, I think he didn’t realize the difference between Scott and Bill. He didn’t know who Scott was and he didn’t know who Bill was because he just interfaced with me. I think he probably saw a cassette tape there with Bill Rogers’ name on it and put Bill’s name on as the request. Well, now I have a tape request with Bill Rogers’ name on it. So I tell Scott, “I’m sorry you’re not doing this. They requested Bill Rogers,” and Bill’s been the guy ever since. It was better for all of us.

SW: Wasn’t that a bad break for Scott Rummel?

PF: No, Scott has a great career, he does movie trailers, he was the voice of Levi Strauss. Scott didn’t suffer and it was great for Bill, Bill’s much more of a Disney act than Scott was and Bill’s become just part of the family.

SW: You said you were working on the Electrical Parade? What did you do on that?

PF: I recorded it. Don played it and I recorded it and Jack produced it. The first generation came out and there were just a few floats and then it was brought down for a couple years. When it remounted, we added floats to it and that’s when I got involved.

I’d been working with Don on a Pepperdine University project and that’s how I knew him. He was teaching at Saddleback at the time. We had been recording this Pepperdine stuff and some other oddities, a rock band that we were working on together and just some weird things. He said, “I need to record this Electrical Parade stuff,” and I had heard of it but I didn’t know what it was. It had only run for about a couple years I think and we had to add all these units because the thing was going to get expanded. The mandate was nothing but synthesizers. No matter what sound you need to create, it’s got to be made from the synthesizer. We would record white noise on a piece of tape and one of the first units that we did was Cinderella I think. We’d just record a big hunk of white noise and then we’d cut leader in there at different spacing, with the spacing getting shorter as it went on and you would play it and it would make a sound like the end of a piece of fireworks. We’d just do a piece of track to that and it would sound like fireworks going off. It was just all that kind of stuff. It was all minimoog, all monophonic synthesizer stuff. Oh, and Don brought an ARP (synthesizer), too.

BOB WACKERMAN’S START

Scott Wolf: How did you get your start, Bob?

BW: When I was five years old I started playing bass. My dad’s a music teacher so I started playing upright bass in his elementary school jazz band and my brothers all played as well.

Then when I was ten they took eight people out of my dad’s jazz band, Sonny Anderson actually auditioned us and we were in the Mouseketeer band, the new Mouseketeers at Disneyland. 1973, I had my summer between fourth and fifth grade. Larry Billman was the show director and Barnette Ricci was the choreographer. It was just a live park show and they brought some of the original people back like Bobby Burgess. So I played that for a year.

Then as I went through school, in my last year of high school I played (the Disneyland stage show) “Show Biz Is..” in the band. I was out of school by 10:30 and I was over at the park by 1:00. Barnette Ricci was the show director for that, too.

SW: Wasn’t the music pre-recorded?

BW: Paul was recording those shows at the time. They would record a sweetener track.

PF: I think it was all mono – we would record all the stuff and then I think we’d mix it to four tracks. All the stuff that got played live would be on one track, then everything else would be on their own tracks. One track was click.

SW: Was click listened to with headphones, like to keep everybody synchronized with the pre-recorded elements?

BW: Yeah, the click would go to the rhythm section and actually the horn players had it, too, I think. The click would go to the band and we’d play along with the click, but the sweetener track that was already recorded by Paul was coming out of the system with the live band, too. That way you can have eight live musicians and then you’d have a bigger sound because you’ve got all the other stuff on tape.

SW: Had you ever played with a click track before that?

BW: Just in the studio a few times. I did various projects growing up. That’s where I originally met Paul was just from doing sessions that he was engineering on.

So I did that when I was attending college, then I played on the road with Maynard Ferguson, Rick Springfield and Henry Mancini, Wynton Marsalis for a weekend, just various people and I started doing studio work. I was a studio musician for about ten years. That’s where I got to know Paul even more because it’s a small community.

In 1993 I wanted to get more into production. I was actually doing a live TV show on Fox. A comedy show and doing a little bit of writing for that, but I was really interested in getting more into production.

I knew Mike Davis who used to be the VP at Disneyland and I heard that they were looking for a production person in the music department. I applied for that and got that job and started working with Bruce Healey.

Bruce is great, he really took me under his wing and taught me a lot. Taught me the whole business side of recording big music projects, big orchestras, what it takes, what it costs. He introduced me to the post production side.

The year before I started at Disneyland Paul had officially started Audio By the Bay with Skip (Konte). Bruce would bring me over see Paul at Audio By the Bay where Disneyland did all their sessions. At the time it was here’s what an edit is, and more from the music side of what Bruce in the music department does. Paul was engineering, and to this day I’m not an engineer, I only understand the theory of it.

During those years we did the “Pocahontas” show out there, the “Hunchback” show, we did the big “Pocahontas” opening in Central Park. We did “Fantillusion” for Tokyo, that was all Bruce, myself and Paul. We actually had a great time, it was really fun.

At that time, the Disneyland music department was almost the music department for all the live shows for the Disney Company. They did all the Tokyo stuff, a few things for Paris when they were opening up, and all the Buena Vista special events. All those El Capitan shows.

Then in 1996, I sat in a meeting with upper management and they decided that if you work for Disneyland, you need to focus on Disneyland projects. So I talked to Paul and we decided we should really start a music production side of Audio By the Bay to service other parts of Disney. That’s when I gave my notice in June, and Mike Davis was still there at the time and requested I stay through September to see some projects through, which I did, and pretty much October 1st, 1996, I came over with Paul and I started the music production side.

That’s how that all came to be.

PF: You know, people ask me, “Do you miss doing records? Do you miss hanging with those people?” No, I wouldn’t trade this for that – you stand out on a street and the day a show opens, you watch thousands of people get it. That’s the whole experience, whereas if you’re doing a record you spent nine months to a year working on it, you’re at the mercy of a marketing guy who either likes it or doesn’t like it or either gets success or doesn’t. You get one shot at it and then six people hear the record and you’re out trying to cultivate your career again after you’ve been hibernating for a year. This kind of stuff, even if the show is not as successful as you would have liked it to have been, you still get that gratification thing and it still plays for more than 99% of all records that are released.

Don Dorsey used to say we do things that change people’s lives, and that may sound arrogant, but if you cause an emotion and you make somebody feel that little bit of wonderment with their family and stuff for a 17 minute hunk of time in their lifetime and they carry that with them for the rest of their life, you have changed their life.

BW: We truly have a blast. There is a business side and it’s work-

PF: But we goof off a real lot!

BW: But for the most part what we do is really a lot of fun and there’s not a lot parts of entertainment industry anymore that are doing the 60 or 80 piece orchestras because it’s the right thing to do. The record industry and TV shows have pretty much gone into people’s closets, that’s just the way the music business has been going so we’re pretty fortunate that we get to continue doing this. Usually because we sit around and go, “What do we think we need on this?” If it’s something that should be a big orchestra and we say this is going to need to be that, and most of the time they’ll come up with the money for it – or at least close.

See my interviews with many of the people mentioned above including Sonny Anderson, Larry Billman, Bobby Burgess, Don Dorsey, Bruce Healey, and Bill Rogers.