Jeff Powell – Memphis Flyer

Four years ago, the music scene lit up with news of a fresh face in town, hungry to play gigs. Stephen Chopek was clearly a drummer’s drummer, having cut tracks and toured with Charlie Hunter, John Mayer, and Jesse Malin, among others. Any fears that this Jersey City native wouldn’t get the Memphis groove were quickly laid to rest, and he has become a fixture with some of the great performers around town.

Says Chopek, “New York City was going through a lot of changes. So I was ready for the move, and it worked out great. I’ve worked with some great musicians: John Paul Keith, Amy LaVere, David Cousar. It’s been fantastic as a drummer, and also in having the time and space to do my own thing, too.”

That last comment is something you don’t often hear from drummers. But even before his move south, Chopek was exploring his own thing — as a songwriter. Ultimately, it was part of his larger attitude toward personal growth.

Jamie Harmon

Stephen Chopek

“As a gigging drummer, sometimes you’re creating things with people, and other times you’re just learning somebody else’s parts and playing gigs. Which is great fun, but there was something that was missing. Songwriting has helped me not just as a musician, but as an overall creative person, to have that balance of building something from the ground up, something I could direct on my own. As I go on in my career, and I grow as a human being, I’m seeing the importance of those situations that make you uncomfortable at first.”

Now, with his third full-length album dropping Friday, it would seem Chopek has hit his stride. Begin the Glimmer is not a typical do-it-yourself clutch of demos. It sports one perfectly crafted tune after another. They’re all built on a solid foundation of Chopek’s acoustic guitar strumming, which nestles in with his drum parts so perfectly that each song churns forward with aplomb. The songs were painstakingly constructed, as Chopek layered bass, keyboards, and lead guitar over his basic rhythm tracks. With Chopek’s plainspoken lyrics floating over it all, and everything kept in the kind of perfect sync only a drummer can create, the end result is a shimmering folk-pop gem that leaps from the speakers.

Some listeners may be familiar with two of the album’s tracks, released earlier this year as a seven-inch single. While many of Begin the Glimmer‘s tracks are of a personal nature, the single’s two tracks have a more historical bent. “The Ballad of Cash and Dean” is a kind of fantasia about two icons of the 1950s, Johnny and James. But the real period study is the A-side, “Radio Caroline,” an exuberant celebration of American rock-and-roll hitting the United Kingdom.

“Radio Caroline was a pirate station in the early ’60s in the U.K.,” says Chopek. “It was a time when the BBC saw rock-and-roll as this crass fad. So Radio Caroline was this pirate radio station on a boat off the coast that played all the blues and soul that young people of the time were interested in. I first heard about it in interviews and things, and then I did some additional reading. There was something about it that resonated with me. Something romantic about their DIY ethos, championing this new music.”

As a whole, the album’s sparkle is a refreshing break from “the Memphis Sound,” whatever that may be these days. But Chopek considers it part and parcel of his adopted home. “This is my first real Memphis record,” he notes. “I recorded it with Harry at 5 and Dime; I mixed it with Doug Easley; I mastered the vinyl with Jeff Powell at Sam Phillips. And working with Doug, with his contribution to Memphis music, was really something. I’m glad I didn’t know too much about him when I first started working with him, because I think there would have been an intimidation factor. I just got to know him as a person, and then slowly realized all the things that he had his hand in with Easley-McCain Studios: Sonic Youth, Pavement, Cat Power, the White Stripes, Wilco. All these things that were formidable in my development as a musician. So just getting to know Doug and working with Doug was a great Memphis experience.”

Begin the Glimmer‘s record release show is Saturday, November 10th at Otherlands.

Audio engineer/producer Jeff Powell has been working in the music business in Memphis for over 27 years. He got his start answering phones and running errands at Ardent Studios, working his way up the ranks to staff engineer, and eventually becoming one of the studio’s go-to freelance producers. Along the way he got to work on classic recordings by folks like Stevie Ray Vaughn, the Afghan Whigs, B.B. King, Alex Chilton, and Big Star, among many others.

Powell’s career took a dramatic turn in 2008, however, when he convinced Larry Nix to teach him the delicate art of mastering music for vinyl using the studio’s lathe.

“I had been pestering him (Nix) to teach me for years because I had such a keen interest in vinyl records, the way they were made and the way they sounded, and he kept saying no. He just didn’t want to mess with it anymore,” Powell says.

“One day in the parking lot at Ardent while I was following him to his car talking to him about it and he was inches from a clean getaway, I told him if he taught me, I could cut records at night after he and Kevin [Nix’s son] were done for the day, and he would start seeing a check for renting me the lathe on the turntable when he came in to work in the mornings. He stopped, turned around smiling, and said, ‘OK, let’s do it.'”

And so Nix taught Powell to use the lathe, and Powell (with help from his trusty assistant engineer Lucas Peterson) began cutting vinyl for clients on the side of his usual recording and mixing gigs. Little by little, as consumer demand for vinyl started to rise, mastering music for vinyl started to become his primary business venture and passion.

“I really kind of stumbled into this passion for cutting vinyl records because I care so much how recorded music sounds to the listener,” says Powell. “If it’s done well, it sounds so good and makes me feel the music in a different way.”

Earlier this year, Powell made the decision to strike out on his own, and, as fate would have it, lucked into an opportunity to purchase a lathe from fellow vinyl mastering engineer Chad Kassem.

“Chad runs a huge vinyl pressing operation in Salina, Kan. called Quality Record Pressings, and they do really good work,” Powell says.

“They had pressed some things for me in the past and had always done a high-quality job. So Chad and I had a nice chat on the phone, I wished him good luck, and that was that. The next day, I just dropped him a short email saying that it was nice to meet him and I looked forward to doing more business with him in the future. He wrote me back and said to let him know if I ever needed a lathe. I couldn’t believe it. You have to understand that there just are not any lathes for sale out there anymore. I mean none. They are extremely rare, and if you do find one, it is probably in really bad shape. Nobody is selling a working lathe these days. I called him back immediately, and he said he had one in a church studio that he owned, that he didn’t really want to sell, but was thinking about it. He told me to give him a number. I did, and he called me back the next day and said we had a deal if I could get him the money in 10 days. I scrambled and came up with the money and wired it to him on day 10 and became the proud owner of a Neumann VMS70 lathe.”

Powell and Peterson quickly rented a 15-passenger van and headed for Kansas to retrieve the lathe — which had to be meticulously taken apart and packed for the journey to Memphis — with the help of expert lathe technician Chris Muth. Around that same time, he struck a deal with Sam Phillips Recording Services Inc. to install the lathe in the room that was once the control room to the B studio.

“It is a very fragile machine with lots of parts,” Powell says. “It took four days in all to get it back to Memphis. It was a great feeling coming across the bridge into Memphis with the lathe.”

Just last week, Powell, Peterson, and Muth finally installed the new lathe at Phillips — which, to say the least, was no small task.

“Lucas oversaw the building of the mastering suite and did a remarkable job,” Powell says. “Again, I hired Chris, the best lathe expert there is, to come to Memphis to help put it all back together and go through every single electronic component and ball bearing on the entire machine. It wasn’t cheap, but it was worth every penny.”
And now Powell and Peterson are back doing what they do best, cutting records to vinyl for a host of eager clients and mastering a once-forgotten craft.
“The lacquers I have cut on it so far sound incredible,” Powell says. “I know a lot about cutting vinyl records, but it is a mountain to climb to know everything about the art of it, the science of it, and how to do it well and be one of the best at it. I am constantly learning as I continue to do this and striving to become one of the best.”