BY DR. JOSHUA SHERMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY JOSIAH GLUCK
Josiah Gluck is an award-winning music engineer and producer who is celebrated for his exceptional work in live television and studio recordings. Now in his 32nd season at Saturday Night Live (SNL), Josiah has worked with such renowned artists as Prince, Adele, Foo Fighters, and Taylor Swift, among many others. He has won an EMMY and has been nominated for three GRAMMYs for his engineering and mixing. Beyond SNL, Gluck’s impressive engineering portfolio includes television shows like Last Call with Carson Daly and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and B.B. King’s GRAMMY Award-winning album, Live at The Apollo. He also considers Vermont home.
JS: Welcome to Old Mill Road Recording, Josiah! Let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born?
JG: I was born and raised in Manhattan. I grew up about six blocks from where I live now, right by Riverside Park. That’s where my kids go sledding or play in the playgrounds, and where I take my dog, Leonardo, in the mornings, and have him run around all in the same place. I like to say my life is like a John Irving novel. I’m right back where I started.
JS: Were your parents musically inclined?
JG: My mom could play a little bit of piano, and they both really appreciated music. I’m the byproduct, for better or worse, of two college professors with doctoral degrees from Columbia University. They met as students there and stayed in the neighborhood, and that’s where me, my twin brother, and my younger brother were born and raised. But I went to concerts and theater, and I had a lot of exposure to many of the cultural offerings of New York City growing up.
JS: You ended up attending Johns Hopkins University, where you earned a B.A. in Humanities and Art History. How did you end up going from general humanities and art history into the music industry?
JG: I’ve always been interested in and just fascinated with technology: Audio technology, movie projectors, radios, tape recorders, TVs, and things like that. I always loved gadgetry. I played around with things in high school, and even before then, I was trying to figure out how things worked. When I ultimately got to college, there was a radio station, and I had the opportunity to work with equipment, to learn from a lot of people, and to learn from my mistakes. I was fortunate to be able to take a couple of classes—very informal stuff—at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, which is in Baltimore, and is now part of Hopkins. Back then, it wasn’t. Between my junior and senior years, I lucked into a job at a studio as an apprentice. I was barely an assistant. I was emptying ashtrays and hoping they didn’t screw up the lunch order that I called in, because I would be the one that got blamed for that. I met some people that I still am in touch with now, and I finished up college. I didn’t land a job at that studio after college, but there was a studio up the block that they recommended. And I just walked in, and I got hired on the spot as an assistant. About three months into working there, my boss, who was the chief engineer and owner, got up out of his chair and just walked out of the room. I thought, “Well, I guess I should just sit down and keep going.” The various artists in the room were great musicians like Rob Mounsey, Jeremy Wall, and this Japanese sax player named “Sleepy” Matsumoto. They were like, “All right—now Josiah is doing this.” It was just one of those things. Like I tell people, if you are handed an opportunity, try your best to run with it and not drop the ball. That’s how a lot of it happened for me. You have to take the initiative.
JS: One of the things that you have to learn when you are starting off is when to lead and when to follow—and how to read the room. What were some of the other early lessons that you learned that helped you in terms of advancing your skills as an engineer, as well as your
understanding of how to work with artists?
JG: This fellow, Jack Malken, who ran Secret Sound, used to say, “When you’re sitting behind the console, you’re 1/3 technician, 1/3 musician, 1/3 politician.”
JS: I like that.
JG: That’s the three-cornered hat that you’re wearing. I teach that phrase to every newbie I work with, and I always say, “I can teach you the technical stuff you need to know, but bedside manner, being aware of what’s going on, reading the room, and all of those things, that has to come from you.”
JS: We’re going to talk about your career within the music industry in general, but you’ve been with Saturday Night Live for over 30 years. Correct?
JG: This is my 32nd season there.
JS: How did the job come about?
JG: It came about through another show called Night Music, or Sunday Night, which was hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn, who just passed away. The show was kind of SNL turned inside out, in that it was mostly music, maybe a little talk or sketch piece. It was an hour long, and it was on tape, so there was still the same amount of craziness and pressure and whatnot, but it was produced through Broadway Video, and Lorne Michaels was the Executive Producer on it. And there was a lot of cross-pollination between the SNL crew and Night Music. Unbeknownst to me, there were a couple of people who had talked me up to this gentleman, Stacey Foster. He hired me for Night Music. He was an editor at Broadway Video before he became Lorne’s Technical Supervisor for SNL. Ultimately, it was Stacey, who told me to come in. He said, “I need some help with this one area of the show.” It was audio tape playback, playing back music cues and voiceovers and things like that, almost akin to doing radio. I said, “I’ve never really done this kind of thing before.” And he said, “Good. The show is very specific. I’d rather you not have a lot of preconceived notions about how this all works.” So, I did that for three seasons, working with the late Hal Willner. He was my direct boss, and he was picking all the music cues, and I was frantically throwing things on carts. Back then, I had 31 rickety mono cart decks, or stereo cart decks, or playback-only cart decks. And you really hoped when you hit that button—because you’re the first cue of the night—it better play. These are things like, “Ladies and Gentlemen, a message from the President of United States,” kind of things. And then, three years into that, I had the opportunity to move in and work in the music room as the assistant there with Jay Vicari, who’s been the main music mixer for 36 or 37 years at this point. That’s basically where I’ve stayed ever since. Jay and I share the duties. Sometimes he’s off doing other things, and I’ll mix the show. But I will say, and I tell people this, I waited 10 years. I spent 10 years in there as a rather overly-qualified assistant before I did a show on my own. And I was happy to wait and to take the time, because there’s so much to learn and so much to absorb.
JS: We’re going to come back to Saturday Night Live and discuss it at length, but before we do, tell me about GRP Records and Dave Grusin.
JG: I had written them a letter, because I was just a huge fanboy of that label. I used to play all their stuff on the air at WJHU 88.1, “Far Left Radio,” as we used to call it—all the way down there at the end of the dial. I knew all of their stuff. And I was a huge fan of Dave Grusin as an arranger and film composer. I’d written them in the summer of 1980 and gotten crickets in response. And then one day, one of their artists, a guy named Tom Browne, a trumpet player, who had been a sideman on someone else’s record down at Secret Sound, decided he wanted to do his next record at Secret Sound. He didn’t want to be at A&R Studio in Midtown with corporate and people telling him what to do. So, Larry Rosen walks in, and I see that it’s Tom Browne, and I’m like, oh my god, this is a GRP project. And then about a day or so after we started, Dave Grusin came by. At one point, Larry says to me, “Go ask Dave what he wants to order for lunch.” So, I walked in, and he was in the studio, because everything was being done in the control room. It was very embryonic stuff with synths and what have you. He was playing piano in the studio, And I said, “Larry wanted me to ask you what you want for lunch.” He was playing something, and I said, “Oh, that’s ‘Rag Bag,’” which was from the album Mountain Dance. And he blinked at me and said, “Yeah.” I said, “I’m a big fan.” And I mentioned something about the score to Heaven Can Wait, the Warren Beatty film, which I really love. About 10 days after that, Larry got a hold of my number from the studio and called me. He said, “So, look: You’ve seen my studio. I need someone to run it. It’s a permanent, full-time position for one individual. You’ve got eyes for it?” I was like, “Yes.” I came in the next day and walked in there with my paltry resume and a demo reel. He never read the resume, and he never listened to the reel. He just said, “I don’t really know you as an engineer, but you know your way around the control room, and you seem like a nice guy, and I think we should give this a shot.” And you can do the jump cut from the end of that sentence to the downbeat of my 32nd year at SNL.
JS: Well, then, let’s talk about Saturday Night Live! Can you walk us through your typical week there?
JG: For a live show, on Wednesday evening, I will get an email from the music department, and it will say, “These are the following sketches that need music this week.” And they might say, “Needle drop, needle drop, needle drop,” which is an old expression from radio production days, where you put the needle down on the record and play that cue. So, this will be library music, or some other song that has been licensed, etc. There might be other music that is created by the music department with samples put together in Logic. And sometimes they’ll mix it, sometimes I’ll mix it. And then there are sketches with live music. Typically, it’ll be something like a monologue or some music sketch. Monologues are usually big production numbers, and that’ll be the start of my week. I’ll know what that’s going to be on Wednesday. Thursday is when we bring in the musical guest. On Wednesday, I will already have the input list. My monitor guy, who works out a lot of this stuff, does a lot of the advance with the band. He’ll say, “Here’s what they have. Anything you want me to rearrange, or anything you want to do?” And I’ll say, “Yeah, this is fine as is.” Or, “Move this block of stuff here.” And if Jay is mixing that week, I’ll usually just make those calls anyway, because I know how he likes the board laid out. And I’ll get that all set up, and I’ll do that on a Thursday morning, unless I’m working on a repeat on Tuesday and Wednesday. In that case, I try to get it done on Wednesday, so it’s all set to go on Thursday. The band comes in, and we’ll get the crew setting things up. We’ll scratch and sniff mics. We’ll make sure all the mics are working and we’ve got everything coming up where it should be coming up. That’s starting at around 9:30. Around 11:30, we start making noise with the band. We’ll start getting sounds and putting things together. By noon, or shortly thereafter, the artist comes out, and we’ll get two or three passes of each song. They’ll also be working with monitors. They’ll be working with PA, working with me, and ultimately, there should be a lunch break from 1 to 2 p.m. Then, at 2 p.m., we look at each song twice on camera, and we’re still tweaking things. Everything is recorded, so I can do what we like to call “Virtual sound check.” I can play this back an infinite number of times, and any EQ or compression or echo or any manipulation of the individual sounds is only in the monitor path. That is, it’s not recorded with processing into Pro Tools, because it’d be the equivalent of you taking a bunch of photographs with various color filters, and someone saying, “Oh, well, I don’t want that filter.” “Well, it’s already embedded. It’s already done that way.” I can’t take it out, so I don’t want to put anything on tape that I can’t remove, because sometimes you’ll get a producer or someone who’s not going to even show up until Saturday. You don’t want them to go, “What the hell is that? Fix that.” “Well, I can’t.” So, that’s what Thursday is all about, and we’ll have time to tweak things sometimes on Fridays, if it’s not a terribly busy day for me. Friday, we’ll be there to catch whatever little bits and bobs come my way, work with the artist, or record or mix some stuff for the house band. More often than not, if it’s a big musical monologue, or the cold open has music, or there’s a sketch with music, we will rehearse those things on Friday. And if it’s a musical monologue, it’s usually on the rundown for the day. From 10:30 to 11:30, we’re rehearsing the monologue. And then, you realize at 11 o’clock they still haven’t started yet. So, those can be long days. On Saturday, I get in around 9:30, and the house band starts rehearsing any music that they may have specifically for a sketch. Then we do sketch run-throughs. Then, at around 5:30, the guest band comes in, and we have an hour to work with them to make sure everyone’s happy with it. In theory, nothing should have to get changed, because it’s exactly how we left it, although there are those bands that come in and you finish up on Thursday and it’s like, “Okay, we’ve got to take all this stuff out, because we have a gig in Boston on Friday,” but then we’ll put it all back in on Saturday. Part of Saturday is spent doing line check and making sure everything got plugged back in. And then, typically what happens is, after we do that, then they usually rehearse Weekend Update, which is basically the last thing to be written. And then there’s a dress rehearsal from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. And then we’re on the air live from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.
JS: I had the chance to sit in with you on both the dress rehearsal of a Saturday Night Live performance recently and a final taping. You mentioned dress rehearsal from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. and then the show from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m., but you left out the most interesting part, which is what happens between 10 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., in between the dress rehearsal and the show. Can you let us in on that?
JG: Well, it’s really just a question of what sketches they feel worked or didn’t work. The main thing that happens is they reorder the show, if need be. It could be for certain things, like when a sketch that was the cold open has been cut, and some other sketches are now turned into the cold open. A cold open is typically political in nature, but sometimes there might be something where, “Well, that other sketch was really good, and the political thing, it’s not really hitting.” But things also get cut for time, too. We can do a dress rehearsal that usually has 30 minutes too much material for a 90-minute show. And then we’ll go into the air show knowing that we’re six or seven minutes heavy, anyway. And we know that once we get past 12:30, something’s going to get cut. Something’s going to fall off the rundown. And you really have to listen very carefully to hear what’s going on. You’ve got to be ready to roll.
JS: At Saturday Night Live, you’ve worked with countless artists. Prince, Brandi Carlile, Adele, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Michael Bublé, Sheryl Crow, Lady Gaga, Rihanna—the list goes on and on. Tell me a few of your favorite experiences. What were some really meaningful moments, either because they were music heroes of yours that you’ve got to work with, or because you were really impressed with them as artists, and it was a happy experience?
JG: Well, right off the bat, just in the past couple years, working with Brandi Carlile was amazing. I knew of her, but I wasn’t that familiar with her stuff. I just became besotted with her. She’s just fabulous, great musicianship. Recently, this young woman from England, Raye, was just phenomenal. Foo Fighters are great. U2 are always fun to work with. In the context of working on the show, by and large, everybody I have met has been really nice. They’re complimentary, and they’re fun. Taylor Swift is really sweet.
JS: Let’s talk about Vermont. You’re not originally from Vermont, but it’s definitely home for you and your family, including your Goldendoodle, Leonardo. When did you first discover Vermont?
JG: I first came here and went to Bromley. I was at a summer camp in the Adirondacks in Schroon Lake. There was one day when we went to Bromley and did the Alpine Slide. I think we got one or two runs in for the day. I hadn’t been here in ages, and my wife, Barbara, and I came back up here for the first time in the Summer of 2000. I went down to West Dover, where Barbara and her family have gone skiing for years, and now my twins are skiers. I do not ski. I tried it. I couldn’t hack it, but it’s better to get on skis for the first time when you’re 6, and not 46. I tried cross country, which was fun for a while, but I just absolutely love it up here. I just love the pace, the quiet, and the cleanliness. I like grilling outside and going for walks. We love going up to Quechee. Years ago, we took our bikes up to Charlotte and Burlington and took a ferry across Lake Champlain. We would have lunch in Essex and come back. I’ve always liked being up here. I love it in the winter when it’s very cozy. You can’t help but unwind.
JS: What’s next for you? SNL is coming up on its 50th Anniversary.
JG: I believe February 15, 2025, will be the big 50th Anniversary broadcast. I know there are other plans for other things that I don’t think I’m really at liberty to discuss right now. I’ve got other projects coming up, and I’ve been doing some teaching down at Appalachian State and Peabody. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to sub at The Tonight Show.
JS: When you were 17 or 18, did you ever think, “I’m gonna end up at Saturday Night Live?”
JG:: Oh, no! I didn’t even know what I was gonna do. Actually, working at the radio station at Hopkins, I felt like, “Well, you know, I could possibly do something in radio. This might be fun.” And I actually was the classical music director for WJHU for a moment or two there. It was also back in the day, when you could go up to New York and come back laden down with cartons of Deutsche Grammophon and RCA and Columbia Records. I would play these various records, pop records, jazz records, and fusion stuff. And you’d start to see, “Oh…all of these records have these musicians that I really like, have these producers, and these engineers in common, and these studios are in common. Okay…these are the guys who are doing the stuff that I like. Maybe I’d like to try to figure out how to do that.” It all ballooned from there. I also think in some ways, I was like a punch-drunk fighter who just didn’t know to stay down on the canvas. I don’t want to say this to be blasé or have false modesty, but sometimes I can look back and be like, “I don’t know how this happened.” I think it’s just paying attention. And if you’re handed an opportunity, if someone walks out of the chair, or if someone says, “Hey—you do this or that,” you just do it.
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