Ed Stasium makes one thing perfectly clear.  “I just love to record.  I just love to make records.  That was my destiny somehow, since I was a kid. The path leading to Stasium’s destiny is marked by a series of remarkable milestones and coincidences.

Young Ed became wise to the existence of records throughout the 50’s via Martin Bloch’s “Make-Believe Ballroom” radio program and his parents’ pre-rock & roll Pop disc collection. In 1960, he received a transistor radio for his birthday and fell in love with 45’s.  “I had no concept of what a recording studio was. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a recording studio at 10 years

old.”  In his middle-class world of Greenbrook, N.J., he didn’t know about “these big city things.”  “My parents couldn’t afford to buy alot of stuff, but they would always try to buy me what I wanted for Christmas. They were very supportive.  As it turns out, everything I really needed to help me in my career was given to me at Christmastime, guitars and tape recorders.” 

At a 1961 New Years’ Eve party, Ed was transfixed by his first sighting of a working reel-to-reel tape recorder.  “I heard the music playing and I didn’t see a record player.  I saw the reels turning and after a while, I put two and two together.” When he heard his voice on tape for the first time that night, “that was it, that was a startling revelation for me.”

A succession of obsessions with Ed’s own personal tape machines followed; the small battery-operated transisitor job and the little mono electric model with the “magic eye” meter in place of a VU. His first “session” took place when a kid named Wayne came over to the house with his guitar, an instrument Stasium saw “in person” for the first time that day.  He learned about overdubbing from an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney” that showed Patti Page demonstrating the procedure on two tape machines in a living room setting with “The Siamese Cat Song” from “Lady and the Tramp.”  Another huge revelation.

Like a lot of cool pre-teen and teenaged boys of the 60’s, Ed played in a series of bands “I was the guy with my ’65 Strat in one hand and a Lafayette tape recorder in the other.”  He proudly adds, “I never made it to the AV squad, though.”  One fine aggregation called Brandywine signed a production deal with Ritchie Havens’ Stormy Forest concern and Ed found himself in his first “real” session (at New York City’s Mediasound Studio) with a real engineer (Bob Margoloff, of Stevie Wonder fame) and producer at the helm.  The band subsequently cut an album in 1971 for Decca affiliate Brunswick (with the Chi-Lites’ Willie Henderson producing and Bruce Swedien engineering).

During this time, Ed was employed on the printed circuit assembly line and/or shipping department at the Ampeg-Altec factory in Linden, N.J.  “It was a big day for all the workers at the plant when the Stones or Small Faces amps were sent in for servicing!” His eyes were first opened to the existence of compressors, pre-amps and EQ by poring over the company’s catalogs. “I eventually got fired for being late all the time.”

Brandywine eventually fell apart amidst arguments and small claims court settlements after their album went nowhere fast.  “Certified lead,” says Ed.  He, his first wife and their crying six month-old son, Jason were inhabiting Ed’s parents basement when one fine day, Stasium found himself in Bamberger’s department store in Plainfield, NJ  where a sale on bicycles was being held.  The destitute young man purchased two bikes for $110.  A bargain, for sure.  “I bought them with the last money that I had in this world.  I have no idea why!”  When his Dad hollered incredulously in protest, all Ed could reply as he assembled the contraptions was “they were on sale!”  But in fact, it was destiny.

The next day, he and his wife pedalled around Greenbrook and ran into Michael Bonagura, an ex-bandmate of Ed’s (and later a successful songwriter in his own right) who informed Stasium that “hey, my Father’s friend Tony Camillo is building a recording studio in his basement in Somerville.  His partner, Tony Bongiovi, is an engineer and he said that if I start a band that we can record down there and put out a record!”

The two chaps visited the digs, where a shell of a studio was still in the dust-covered, console-on-the-floor, nails and hammer phase. “It was a mess.” Over the course of the next year, as Ed collected unemployment and played swim clubs, he assisted in the construction of the room, and in so doing, learned the makings of a state of the art recording facility from the ground up. In the summer of ’72, Tony Bongiovi, who was also working at Media Sound in NYC, brought Ed to witness a session with Kool & the Gang. “I had the worst case of hiccups in my life that day.” After a satisfactory basic track was waxed, Bongiovi turned to Stasium and told him to record the vocals while Tony went out for a sandwich. “This was a Top Ten recording act! The singer said ‘let’s try one on another track,’ and I’m there ‘homina, homina, homina, homina.’ I had no idea what I was doing! At least I knew enough to look at a VU meter. It was 16 track, no assistant, the locator had no numbers. I somehow sensed how to work the patchbay, do overdubs and punch-ins on the spot. It was totally sink or swim. I’m nervous as hell, but I’m not showing it, of course. Tony ended up coming back two and a half hours later. I did it! That one day at Media Sound passed me through my freshman year of engineer and producing schooling.”

Once Camillo’s Venture Sound was up and running, Ed spent miles and miles of tape experimenting and learning to record with his own material. This period included some heavy-duty sessions with Holland-Dozier-Holland, Dionne Warwicke and yielded some hits (including Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Number One smash “Midnight Train to Georgia” and others).

The studio, an underground addition to the house belonging to Tony Camillo (a respected music college professor and arranger), had the feel of a mini suburban Jersey resort. “Bongiovi and Camillo had a falling out and I became the house engineer for three years. Steve Gadd, Alan Schwartzberg, Will Lee and Bob Babbitt, all of these hot N.Y. session players loved coming out to Somerville. Tony would go pick them up and cook these big Italian feasts. It was a lot of fun. We’d knock out nine, ten tracks in one all day session.”

Stasium’s first co-production was a single called “Take You For A Ride” by the Steel Road Band for Warner Brothers Records. “I paid got fifty bucks for it. I was thrilled.” But it was an unreleased album by a band called Another Pretty Face that made a producer out of young Ed.

In September of ’75, Ed had grown weary of the routine production methodology at Venture and had become enamored with the current standard of British production, particularly the “Trident Sound.” He attended the AES show in NY and brought home a copy of DB magazine that had an ad for Le Studio at Morin Heights in Montreal that was seeking an engineer to work with a Trident A Series console. “I called the number in the ad that moment that I saw it. I flew up to Canada the next day, interviewed with Yael Brandeis and Andre Perry and was hired on the spot. Perry was the guy did the remote hotel room recording of the Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace A Chance” during John and Yoko’s famous honeymoon “bed-in” for peace. He was Montreal’s enfant terrible, the big recording dude up there.” Far ahead for its time, Morin Heights was a “fabulous, fabulous studio out in the woods on a hill above a lake. It was a contemporary-looking place, sort of like the Caribou Ranch of Canada, but it wasn’t a ranch. They had the Trident console, a Studer machine, all this great outboard gear. Anything that was new, Andre would get. I remember one winter night, sitting looking out the big window overlooking the lake, being so thrilled that tears came to my eyes.”

From November ’75 through August ’76, Stasium took his recording schooling to the next level in Canada, cutting a slew of French/Canadian projects (including Garolou, whose second LP gave Ed his first Gold Album). It was there that he worked with the man who produced Queen, just as “Bohemian Rhapsody” was making a big splash. “If there was anybody who influenced me profoundly with recording and production concepts, it was Roy Thomas Baker. We did an album by the British group Pilot (of “Magic” fame) together. I remember his jovial presence fondly. He was always having fun, always doing something ridiculous, like recording a fire extinguisher with a 414, just to see what it sounds like. Nuts. The guy’s absolutely out of his bean.”

Up until this time, Ed’s studio experience was limited to the ‘70s world of isolation, padded drums, and dead-sounding rooms. Baker opened Stasium’s eyes and ears to room sound. “He would try all of these wacky things like micing things 20 feet away, micing the back of guitar amps, pointing mics away from the drums to get a room sound and putting it on separate tracks. Everything clicked for me. Why didn’t I think of all this?!”

Stasium left Morin Heights in 1976 and was hired by his old pal Tony Bongiovi who was in the planning stages of building a new studio. Ed was brought in to be the first staff member of the New York’s famous Power Station (he actually came up with the name for the place) and conceptualized the “huge, big old room to put drums in there. My first concept was a pyramid then it turned into a dome. I talked to Tony and Bob Walters about this and Tony ran with the idea and went to the MIT computer, did some acoustical calculations and actually designed the room.”

Stasium’s work with the Ramones and the Talking Heads put him in the thick of the seminal New York punk and New Wave scene of the late 70’s. He almost recalls the many late nights hanging out at CBGB and the Mud Club. Ed likens his first ear-assaulting witnessing of a live show by the brothers Ramone to “being run over by a locomotive.” Bongiovi called on Ed to engineer the Ramones’ second and third albums. Vocal overdubs and the mixing of Rocket To Russia was done at the Power Station, making this Ramones album the first record ever to be worked on at the studio. The only gear the facility had at the time was a console, a 24-track machine and some Pultecs. Reverb came from the stairwell in the building. Ed went on to engineer subsequent Ramones LPs and augmented Johnny Ramone’s guitar parts and some bass on a number of their recordings. His first bona-fide co-production (since that Steel Road Band single) was their 1978- album “Road to Ruin.”

The Power Station’s stayed busy with jingles, Meco and Chic but Ed made an amicable split from the staff when he couldn’t obtain lockout for his projects. The Power Station went on to become one of the premier studios in the city with Bob Clearmountain manning the chief engineer’s chair. Ed went on to be one of the city’s first independent engineer/producers. He kept busy although his career stayed in limbo until the late 80’s.

A move to LA in 1981 found him sleeping on friends’ floors and schmoozing until he found friends at Eldorado Studio. He engineered/produced Ratt’s first EP with Liam Sternberg, alot of promises were made but lacking any paperwork, he found himself screwed out of royalties garnered by a subsequent million seller. “That’s when I started to take care of business.”

In November 1983 when Stasium’s associate Dave Jerden’s scheduling didn’t permit him to engineer a Peter Wolf album, he recommended Ed for the job. Working on Wolf’s LP put Ed in contact with the likes of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and others in the rock world’s elite. Following the success of Wolf’s album Lights Out and the title single making the Top 10, “the production thing opened up for me.”

Ed mixed Lights Out at NYC’s Right Track, a studio that became his home base during his return to residence in the Big Apple. It was at Right Track that he jumped in head-first to learn to work on an SSL console and established a relationship with Paul Hamingson, who has assisted Stasium on the majority of his productions during that time.

Ed’s next “big break” also came by way of Jerden when he recommended Stasium to engineer vocal sessions for Mick Jagger’s Primitive Cool album. Two weeks in Barbados turned into two and a half months of vocals and re-doing guitars and drums. When they returned to NY and set up camp at Studio A at Right Track for mixing, Jagger took an interest in a group called Living Colour and produced several of their demos in Studio B. They also became chummy with Stasium.

Here comes another amazing tale of “destiny” and thus begins Ed Stasium’s self-described “15 minutes of glory.” As he exited right Track one day in 1987, Vernon Reid was coming out of Manny’s Music, also on 48th Street’s Music Row. At a brief curbside meeting, Reid told Ed that Living Colour had just signed with Epic and that his name was bandied about when potential producers were discussed. They made plans to meet at Stasium’s apartment the following night to “cook up some tasty fish” and talk about the prospect of working together. For some reason, Ed decided to walk home that day. As he made his way up Broadway he spied what seemed to be a homeless man selling his belongings, included were some old records. Stopping to check his wares Stasium found a copy of an album that blew his mind.

Back at Venture Sound in 1972, the first record that Stasium engineered and mixed was an album by a Newark, N.J. funky R&B trio called Skull Snaps. Their eponymous LP was released on Lloyd Price’s GSF label. Ed didn’t even know if it had ever been issued. Here at the corner of 68th an Broadway, some old dude was unloading a copy of Skull Snaps for a dollar. “I went ‘holy shit!’ I gave him twenty dollars! I had to have this record! I’d never, ever seen this record before.”

The next night, Vernon comes to dinner, they have their meeting. “I tell him about my production values, what I’ve done, bla bla bla. We finished dinner, we’re talking about stuff and I tell him the story about finding the Skull Snaps album. I held up the cover to show him and he starts screaming, ‘I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!’ It turns out that the Skull Snaps album was the first record he ever bought and learned how to play guitar by! That clinched the deal for me! He started hugging me. ‘You gotta do the record! You gotta do the record!’

Ed did the record. Vivid sold over two million copies. And as for the Skull Snaps, a song called “It’s A New Day” on that fabled album features a drum lick that had been sampled on more than eighty rap songs. Now Ed gets queried as to how he got that now-desirable drum sound back in ’72! His reply: “by not knowing what the heck I was doing!”

In 1990, three of Stasium’s productions dwelled in the Billboard Top 100 Album chart simultaneously: the aforementioned Vivid by Living Colour, Hell To Pay by The Jeff Healey Band, and Smithereens 11 by The Smithereens. “The Smithereens, my fellow New Jerseyans, were probably the best pop I ever worked on, in my opinion. Pat DiNizio told me that when he was 14 he used to come into The Piano Shop, a music store in North Plainfield where I gave guitar lessons. Apparently I assisted him with trying out guitars back then.”

Ed Stasium keeps on keeping on, doing what he loves. He readily offers any young hopeful engineers, producers and/or musicians the same good advice that he continues to follow himself. “Listen carefully, follow your instinct. If you truly are what you are, it will just come out. Don’t really follow the rules. Follow your bliss.”

COPYRIGHT 2020 ED STASIUM, ALL RIGHT RESERVED