By J.R. Jones
Reeves is as big a gearhead as they come, but when he talks about mixing records he sounds like a painter, weighing color, form, and balance. “I like to take answering parts or parts that mirror each other, and I’ll put one of them on the left and the other one on the right,” he explains. “That establishes my parameters and my wall. Then I start building things. I think of things in height–things are up and they’re down, and they’re forward and they’re backward, and they’re to the right and to the left of center, and they’re all the way out. Then we try to even create things that are past the left and right, by using psychoacoustic effects….But if anything breaks those parameters–if any one element is too loud or stands out too much–the effect is destroyed.”
By age five he was becoming malnourished, so his mother sent him to live with her sister Helen Reeves, whose husband, Al, ran Reeves 57th Street Pharmacy, at 57th and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. After about a year Jimmy returned to his mom, but before long he was back to stay, and at 18 he changed his surname to Reeves. “I was the only one that got lucky,” he says. He still talks to some of his siblings, but he’s lost touch with others. His mother is dead, and he thinks his father died a few years ago. “My sister always went after him to try to get him to be a participating parent, but she could never get it to happen. His wife was always chasing her away. She was kind of a diehard–we all thought she was kind of ridiculous about pursuing it.”
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Reeves was among hundreds of New York teens gathering on street corners and subway platforms to harmonize–Lou Reed and Paul Simon were also baptized in the warm waters of doo-wop–but by the time he was a junior in high school he’d begun to tire of pickup singing and wanted to get serious. After all, Frankie Lymon was only 13 when the Teenagers released “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” At a Sunday-night church dance Reeves ran into a friend in the men’s room–where vocal groups liked to rehearse for the echo–and learned of a good group that was looking for a tenor. The other three members came over to his apartment building, and Reeves took them to the back entrance, where the marble walls between the inner and outer doors created an awesome reverb chamber.
He passed the audition and quickly became the group’s arranger, teaching them parts he’d worked out from the records. “I would play the record over and over and over, sticking my ear up to the speaker,” he says. “I would just put myself inside the record and find out everybody’s parts, and I was really careful about it. I had to make sure every note was really what they sang, I couldn’t guess. Sometimes it was really obscure, because an instrument would block it out. You had to learn how to listen past that, which I think probably helped me develop my ear a lot.”
To a young man eager to learn the art of recording, Dave Sarser was the Rosetta stone: in the late 40s he’d helped legendary guitarist Les Paul construct the first eight-track recording system. A violinist with the NBC Symphony Orchestra and audio director for the network’s opera company, Sarser was friends with Skitch Henderson, the bandleader for Steve Allen and then Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, and the two musicians opened Studio Three in partnership with Henderson’s wife, Ruth. According to Reeves, most of the studio’s business was advertising jingles and sound tracks for educational slide shows, but some film scores and chamber groups were recorded there, and Sarser’s old friend Benny Goodman had the run of the place every time he came to town for a TV show.
When Henderson discovered that Reeves was engineering at A-1, he promoted him at Studio Three, where he got to record Vic Damone, Leslie Gore, Benny Goodman’s young singer Barbra Streisand, and Sarah Vaughan, who was doing jingle work at the time. At Incredible Sounds, another independent studio, he recorded Tommy James & the Shondells and as a sideline he started designing studios for people, including producer and songwriter Jeff Barry, who wrote hits for the Archies and the Monkees.
