Thirty Years Behind The Glass

In a recording career spanning some fifty years, bridging a range in time and style that reaches from the early days at Memphis’s Stax Records to Carlos Santana’s eight-Grammy year in 2000 and beyond, producer Jim Gaines has operated the mixing board for some of the greatest artists in American music. Journey, Huey Lewis and the News, Steve Miller, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Dionne Warwick are just a few of the influential musicians who have entrusted their creativity and talent to his proven abilities. Gaines still remembers the day—April 4, 1968—when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Hearing the sirens and seeing the smoke rising from the downtown Memphis skyline, Gaines remembers loading tapes from Stax studio that night into various employees’ vehicles to be taken away for safekeeping until the unrest in the city subsided. Near the other end of his career, Gaines recalls receiving a phone call during a break in the session at Willie Nelson’s studio near Austin, where he was recording demo tracks for the rising Texas group, Los Lonely Boys. The date was September 11, 2001. Once again, there would be no more recording completed that day. In this wide-ranging collection of personal interviews and reminiscences, Gaines, with the help of author Lee Zimmerman, offers readers the priceless opportunity to sit down with a true music industry veteran and hear a lifetime’s worth of stories from inside the studio.

In a recording career spanning some fifty years, bridging a range in time and style that reaches from the early days at Memphis's Stax Records to Carlos Santana's eight-Grammy year in 2000 and beyond, producer Jim Gaines has operated the mixing board for some of the greatest artists in American music. Journey, Huey Lewis and the News, Steve Miller, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Dionne Warwick are just a few of the influential musicians who have entrusted their creativity and talent to his proven abilities. Gaines still remembers the day--April 4, 1968--when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Hearing the sirens and seeing the smoke rising from the downtown Memphis skyline, Gaines remembers loading tapes from Stax studio that night into various employees' vehicles to be taken away for safekeeping until the unrest in the city subsided. Near the other end of his career, Gaines recalls receiving a phone call during a break in the session at Willie Nelson's studio near Austin, where he was recording demo tracks for the rising Texas group, Los Lonely Boys. The date was September 11, 2001. Once again, there would be no more recording completed that day. In this wide-ranging collection of personal interviews and reminiscences, Gaines, with the help of author Lee Zimmerman, offers readers the priceless opportunity to sit down with a true music industry veteran and hear a lifetime's worth of stories from inside the studio.

"A journalist's quest to find a wild Asian arowana--the world's most expensive aquarium fish--takes her on a global tour through the bizarre realm of ornamental fish hobbyists to some of the most remote jungles on the planet."--Dust jacket.

Why are we capable of such dignified ascension of the average and expected? It's probably because we have never been either. Our English class has a unique chemistry that rivals that of the Curies. Settling disputes through Jenga wars and daring to decry influential literature, we demand nothing less than passion. Emotions run high when Jenga blocks waver, swaying with our expectations; every class member leans in with bated breath and often baiting words, transfixed to the point of enchantment. However, we have learned to transfer our frustration at the toppling Jenga tower into driving excitement in Socratic forums. This driving emotion force has fueled our late night reading and early morning classes. Emotion inspired dedication to the book you now grasp. It is the emotion of a class all its own, and this is ours.

The Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928, is an icon of architectural modernism and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Behind the Glass tells the true story of the large family connected to it, who rose to prominence through industrial textile manufacturing. The book traces the transformations in the life of the family, from their roots in a Jewish ghetto to part of the wealthy bourgeoisie in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to adaptation in interwar independent Czechoslovakia and flight in the face of Nazi invasion. Michael Lambek examines the generation born in the first decade of the twentieth century, especially Grete Tugendhat – Lambek’s maternal grandmother – who commissioned, inhabited, championed, and relinquished the distinctive modern house. An exploration of life in and surrounding the Villa Tugendhat offers a factual portrait that runs counter to the fictional one portrayed in Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room. The book also provides unpublished correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Tugendhat, Grete’s son, as well as a description of the impact of a 2017 family reunion. Behind the Glass reflects on the meaning of a "family" and suggests that it is more than a nuclear household – a family reproduces itself over generations, a product of how it represents itself and is represented by others.

Behind the Glass, Volume II presents another prime collection of firsthand interviews with the world's top record producers and engineers, sharing their creative secrets and hit-making techniques – from the practical to the artistic. In these pages you'll find Daniel Lanois (U2, Bob Dylan) discussing the future of digital recording; T-Bone Burnett (Robert Plant and Alison Krauss) sharing his unique view of creating complex low end; and Hugh Padgham (Police, Genesis) analyzing the state of the business today. For real-world advice on everything from home recording to mixing to coaching a nervous singer, check out author Howard Massey's conversations with Mark Ronson (Amy Winehouse), Tony Brown (Reba McEntire), Gus Dudgeon (Elton John), John Simon (The Band), Russ Titelman (Steve Winwood), Bruce Swedien (Michael Jackson), Rodney Jerkins (Mary J. Blige), Simon Climie (Eric Clapton), Matt Serletic (Matchbox Twenty), and more.