By Steve Morse, Globe Staff, 11/14/99

Joni Mitchell helped create a songwriters' revolution.

rom the slapback echo that enhanced Elvis Presley's first records in Memphis to the computerized sounds that regularly spice today's hip-hop CDs, this century has seen a roller-coaster ride of music mixed with technology. Some might also call it a love-hate affair, as artists and consumers have been drawn to technology, then repelled by it, then drawn back - back and forth, like a yo-yo.

The songwriter is still the primary shaper of music - from Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters and John Lennon, from Joni Mitchell to

Alanis Morissette, from James Brown to Puff Daddy, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, from Johnny Rotten to Kurt Cobain - but the ways musicians can present their songs on stage and in the studio have changed dramatically.

The rapidity of technological advances has made careers in the blink of an eye, and destroyed them just as quickly, once the technology has become obsolete. Remember Human League, the avatars of synth-pop in the early '80s? Remember quadrophonic sound? Remember those disco productions? Two-track recordings? Talk boxes? All those have gone the way of the dinosaur.

The new buzz words are loops, autotuners, Pro Tools, and ISDN lines, which bounce off satellites and allow Barbra Streisand, for instance, to sit at her Malibu beach home and listen to mixes of her album beamed to her from a New York studio. And in real time, no less.

To use or not to use - that's the question artists have faced in dealing with technology since the dawn of the rock era in the '50s, back when Les Paul refined the electric guitar and invented overdubbing and tape echo.

Some have gone overboard with special effects - think back to the first $1 million studio album, Fleetwood Mac's bloated ''Tusk'' in 1979 - while others have gone the minimalist route, such as Boston's Godsmack, which made its self-titled, near-double-platinum CD for just $5,000 last year. The century has shown that there's no one route to success - which is what is so fascinating and so dangerously addictive about the pop business.

''There are records that someone made in a basement that sound great, and some made for a million dollars that sound terrible,'' says Mike Denneen, owner of Q Division studio in Boston and producer of records for Aimee Mann, Letters to Cleo, Guster, and Gigolo Aunts, among others.

It would be nice to say that artists are always able to choose their methods of recording, but that isn't true in this century and not likely to be true in the next, either. The likes of Springsteen and Michael Jackson can do what they want, based on prior success, but many new acts have been stuck with producers chosen by their record labels. The result can be gimmicky studio sounds layered into their records whether the acts want them or not. Thus, we've had a century of bands often apologizing for their records, saying instead, ''Come see us live. That's where you'll see the real us.''

That's not always true, either, of course. The proliferation of backing tapes - kicked into high gear by Madonna and Janet Jackson - has made some concerts a disquieting study in artifice. That's hardly what the founding fathers of rock - Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison - had in mind.

Wonderful accidents

But technology has also prompted some wonderful accidents.

''Technology gets developed to serve music, but people will find uses and ways for it that are different from how it was conceived,'' says Bob Weir, the longtime Grateful Dead singer/guitarist. ''Look at guys like Muddy Waters in the late '40s and '50s who took their amps and cranked them all the way up. You'd think you would get a distorted sound, but he and some of his Chicago friends got a great sound that became the future of the blues, then of rock.'' (As Waters sang, ''The blues had a baby and they called it rock 'n' roll.'')

John Lennon, an icon even after leaving an iconic band.

The Grateful Dead are a marvelous example of a band that often took a minimalist approach in the studio - recording some albums that explored sparse folk and country-blues - but a maximalist approach on stage. They pioneered large, stadium-ready sound systems; in their later years, they were among the first to use high-tech miniature monitors that fit inside the ears of musicians to help them hear each other better, replacing the outmoded monitor speakers that once cluttered the stage floor.

As for performance quality, the century's advances can be summed up by contrasting the Beatles' show at Shea Stadium in 1966, which few fans heard because of the inferiority of the speaker system, to later stadium shows by Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and U2, which required up to 15 trucks of equipment. The last Rolling Stones tour featured the best, most equalized sound ever heard in a stadium setting.

Again, some acts have gone overboard with concert presentation. But then, fans have come to expect that from pop stars ever since, in the wake of Woodstock '69, the music became big business. The '80s saw Michael Jackson using $500,000 robotic spiders on stage during the ''Victory'' tour that followed his 40-million-selling ''Thriller'' album. The Stones used cherry pickers and metal bridges. Pink Floyd erected a towering video screen and oversized mirror ball rising from the middle of the crowd. And U2's last tour featured a large LED (light-emitting diode) screen and a spaceship.

Rock as fantasy and apocalypse - it's all been done, as stage shows have evolved from the barroom roots of the '50s and '60s.

Today's fin de siecle concerts also feature wireless microphones, headset mikes (pioneered by Peter Gabriel and used extensively by Garth Brooks), hydraulically lifted stage props, computerized Vari-lites, and ceiling harnesses that hoist teen idols like 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys high above the audience.

Music as spectacle

The public has become so accustomed to music as spectacle and special effect that even many of today's club acts have to bring along separate sound and lighting engineers. It's costly, but necessary, to hold the attention of a generation that can quote chapter and verse from the satirical rock film ''This Is Spinal Tap.''

But the lion's share of advances has been in the studio. Presley and other Memphis titans recorded in mono at Sam Phillips's Sun Studio in the mid-'50s. Then came the three-track studio consoles used when producer Phil Spector forged his ''wall of sound'' pop records. And then came the adrenaline rush of the Beatles (and producer George Martin), who went from four-track recording on the breakthrough ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' (1967) to the first eight-track album, ''Abbey Road'' (1969).

Technology then became a runaway express. The '70s saw the influx of 16-track recordings, popularized by Steely Dan, then 24-track in the late '70s. There were even a few 40-track consoles. These, according to Carl Beatty, who teaches recording engineering at Berklee College of Music, were used by Leon Russell (who would ask a backup singer to layer 30 tracks of vocals behind his own) and the British art-pop group, 10cc, whose 1975 hit, ''I'm Not in Love,'' was similarly layered.

Music's mood swings

But pop music, being the cyclical beast that it is, swung back to a minimal use of technology espoused by the punk bands of the late '70s, such as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. They didn't even like guitar solos, labeling them too indulgent.

The '80s saw a return to lush productions, along with the synth-pop era (whose demise was forecast by Keith Richards in 1983 when he said, ''All those new effects you could get two or three years ago - everybody has heard them now''). A new backlash led to a surge of stripped-down acoustic records, such as Springsteen's ''Nebraska'' and Tracy Chapman's self-titled debut, whose songs had been developed when she was a Tufts University student singing in the streets of Harvard Square.

''There's always a cycle of audiences wanting performers to be larger than life and different from them, to be glamorous like Mariah Carey,'' says producer Denneen. ''And then a cycle of audiences saying, `No, we want performers to be just like us, because anybody can be in a band.' You see that cycle repeated constantly.''

Then came digital sound - leading up to the 48-track digital recordings that are popular today - with its own inevitable counter-reaction in the grunge era of the early '90s. That was spearheaded by Kurt Cobain's Nirvana and other Seattle groups such as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. They restored the primacy of the electric guitar, along with lyrics that came from the street and from the heart, not from some pompous songwriting hack.

The rise of hip-hop was also sparked by technology. Sampling devices enabled rappers to set up computerized beats and edit sampled sounds plucked from soul pioneers from James Brown to George Clinton's P-Funk. Pop fusionist Beck made this approach palatable to rock audiences in his landmark ''Odelay'' CD in 1966. It was a sonic collage of surprises, such as applying hip-hop beats to a country melody.

As the new millennium approaches, there's now a device called the autotuner, which corrects the pitch of a singer, both in the studio and in concert. It was used by Cher on her recent album, which shouldn't surprise anyone.

The brightest hope for the next millennium is the way that costs have decreased in recording studios, enabling young bands to make records that sound just as good as those made by superstars. A company called Tascam will soon market a digital, 24-track hard-disc recorder for just $4,000, which could render high-priced studios obsolete.

''I see the cost structure changing the industry, because it's getting so unbelievably cheap,'' says Berklee engineer Beatty. ''It's a fertile period. Things are happening so fast.''

This story ran on page L04 of the Boston Globe on 11/14/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.