Till the End of Time

As a reporter for Rolling Stone and other publications, I’ve spent more than a few hours in recording studios watching artists, producers and engineers turning musical performances into permanent records. From sessions with Ray Charles, Paul Simon and Jefferson Starship, to Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt and Crosby, Stills & Nash, I’ve picked up numerous pointers on how to produce a decent album.

But I almost always focused on the musicians in the swirl of activity—or the mind-numbing boredom—that was part of the record-making process. Even when my profile subjects were producers like Peter Asher (Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, 10,000 Maniacs) or Richard Perry (Harry Nilsson, Carly Simon, Diana Ross), I paid more attention to their personalities than to the nuts and bolts of record production. And being content as a note-taking behind-the-scenester, I had no plans to produce a record of my own.

Last spring, that changed. I found myself wanting a certain recording to be made, and knowing that if I didn’t do it myself—right then—it probably wouldn’t happen, and a lot of good music wouldn’t be heard.

The artist was no rocker. Larry Ching, 82, was a flat-out crooner. As a featured vocalist at Forbidden City—an all-Asian nightclub that flourished near Chinatown San Francisco in the ’40s and ’50s—he was billed as “The Chinese Sinatra.” However, unlike the Chairman, Ching had a sweet tenor voice imported from his native Hawaii.

After Forbidden City closed in the early ’60s, Ching became a truck driver. Outside Asian nightclubs, there wasn’t much demand for Chinese-American pop vocalists. He re-emerged again in1989, when he appeared in a documentary film, Forbidden City USA. I co-emceed the film’s premiere, where I met Larry and heard him sing. His voice transported me back to the pop music I’d enjoyed as a kid in the pre-rock ’50s. Fascinated by his story about shattering stereotypes by becoming a nightclub singer, I began thinking about getting him on record. Larry readily agreed. But I was always juggling jobs with books and other distractions, and never got around to it.

With the film’s release, Larry began singing occasionally at weddings, fundraisers and senior centers. We met again in November 2002 at a celebration of Forbidden City USA’s DVD release. Once again, Larry sang. At 82, he still sounded fine but was clearly slowing down. Encouraged by members of his family and aware that we had limited time, I decided to get him into a studio. I shared my idea with my friend John Barsotti, a veteran record producer and professor of audio engineering at San Francisco State University; without a moment’s hesitation, he volunteered his studios and services. Suddenly, I was a record producer.

As soon as Barsotti could get us into the studio at SF State, we met on a Sunday afternoon in February. Larry’s and George’s wives showed up to calm their husbands’ nerves. Aside from a few demos he cut back in the ’40s, Larry had never been in a recording studio; neither had Yamasaki, an immigration attorney by trade.

Laura Allan, a singer-songwriter friend, shot the session on video and offered an extra set of professional ears. One of Barsotti’s students served as assistant engineer. Up in the control room I sat alongside the professor, grateful that between the two of us, we made one real producer. I kept track of the takes, tossed in thoughts here and there and popped into the studio once in awhile, mainly to check on Larry and occasionally to make a suggestion about his delivery of a line or the tempo of a song. He nodded and did whatever the hell he wanted to.

Jane Ching, his wife, had been worried about whether Larry would get through the session. He had Alzheimer’s, she told me, and was losing his short-term memory. But the song lyrics? He had them down cold. With Yamasaki positioned near him, offering familiar support, and with the solid backing of two ace session players, bassist Dean Reilly and drummer Jim Zimmerman, Larry nailed the first several tunes on the first take. Within about three hours of recording, we completed 12 tracks, including a downright swinging “All of Me,” a plaintive “Prisoner of Love” and a gorgeous “Hawaiian Wedding Song.”

By contemporary standards, that’s supersonic, but it almost wasn’t fast enough. Because the school building had to be shut down by 8:30 p.m., I pushed to get in all 12 songs. When Larry began to tire and make mistakes, I conferred with Barsotti to see if we could use technology to fix or mask the errors, rather than put Larry and the band through additional takes. Often we could.

“Wow,” Larry said afterward, with a sigh. “That’s the hardest work I’ve ever done.”

Barsotti began mixing and mastering at home in his funky but up-to-date garage studio. There, he deftly removed distracting sounds like lip-smacks, overly audible breathing, and sighs of relief—or, in one instance, a loud “whoosh”—at the end of a take. And after only 20 or so tries, I came up with a sequence for the dozen songs, plus the four demos. They were on scratched-up acetate disks and a reel-to-reel tape, but Barsotti rescued them by getting rid of the 100,000 bits of noise that had accumulated over the past six decades.

Finally, in the first week of May, the last-minute tweaking was finished, and we had a master for the CD. By then I’d written liner notes, and a friend in Sydney had designed the CD package. I researched CD manufacturing, consulting both friends and ads in music magazines and eventually settled on a Canadian company that offered a price of just over a buck a disk. The shipment arrived in late May, and it was a disaster. Because of a printing error, Larry’s name had been left off the cover. I couldn’t wait for a complete reorder, so I plowed ahead with getting copies out. Having heard how nearly impossible it was to deal with distributors—and get paid by them—and knowing Larry was mostly a local story, I chose to go with a handful of online sites and Asian-focused stores in San Francisco, including the Chinese Historical Society of America’s bookshop in Chinatown.

Publicity is a cinch when you have an angle—which we did. We had an 82 year-old artist—a star from a storied, all-Asian nightclub from the ’40s—making his first CD. The producer was this guy from Rolling Stone. Using my media contacts, I got stories in several newspapers and on the radio, television and the Internet. The reviews were warm and generous. “If you dig nostalgia,” wrote Wayne Harada, the veteran pop critic at the Honolulu Advertiser, “you’ll find treasures and pleasures a-plenty.” With help from some very creative friends, I built Larry a webpage of his own, complete with audio samples and videos from the session.

June 2003 was Larry’s month of glory. He did a round of interviews and on the 25th, family, fans and fellow Forbidden City alumni surrounded him at a listening party at the Chinese Historical Society museum. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown proclaimed the day “Larry Ching Day.” On June 30, his CD actually made the Top 200 in Amazon.com’s sales rankings for a few wonderful hours.

A few nights later, Larry Ching died of a brain aneurysm. Family members and friends were stunned, but they couldn’t miss the bittersweet timing. Emerald Yeh—a local television news anchor who had co-emceed with me at the Forbidden City premiere in 1989—wrote: “The timing could not have been more ideal. You let him soar from the world with joy and a sense of being appreciated, as well as a chance to relive the height of his career.”

Jane Ching told one television reporter, “He went out with a bang.” And she told me, “It was like he had a checklist. And he’d just checked off the last item.”

Just one thing, she said. Larry was worried about my having put my own money into the CD, and about whether I’d recoup. On the eve of his death, as it turned out, Till the End of Time hit the break-even mark. Check.