"I had been working at Radio Recorders for about two years. I started as an apprentice. In 1957, I started mixing. I had done a lot of jazz records, almost the entire Mode Records series, people like Richie Kamuca, Stan Levy, Jimmy Guiffre and Sonny Stitt, and the Marty Paich Octet. In those days, it was live to mono and two-track, so you could do a whole album in a day, because there was no mixing. I had done a lot of stereo recordings, because they had bought an Ampex 350 two-track. Most of the stereo records coming out at that time were what we called ping-pong stereo, you know, the bongos on one side and the tambourine on the other."

"I was a drummer. When I was at Georgia Tech, I was playing six nights a week. I graduated with a degree in electronics and communication. I met Shelley Manne when he came through town, and he said to me: 'You're a musician, you know about electronics, and you should come to California and become a recording engineer. None of those engineers are musicians, so they don’t know what a rhythm section should sound like.' "

"So I moved to California, and met John Williams. He and I used to go out and play on jam sessions together. We were social friends. He started working at Universal and met Mancini. John played on the Peter Gunn sessions, and that's probably how I got the gig. It was going to be done on two dates, the first with the big band, and the second with the small group. I did the big band tracks, but Si (Rady) was difficult to work with. He said to me: 'This is going to be a big hit, and I want to cut a hot 45, so I don’t want to see the needle out of the red the whole time we're recording.' "

"I told him that what we did in the studio only goes to the tape, so when he makes the record, he can make it as loud as he wants. If we overload the tape, it'll be distorted. But he kept insisting on it. I had to protect the quality of the recording, so I kept the needle down. At the end of the date, he found out about it and he was furious. But we kept the tracks, and they ended up on the album. I went to the chief engineer and told him I wasn’t going to do any more sessions with Si. So they hired Al Schmitt for the small group recordings. He and I were good friends. He was the right guy to finish up that album."

I told Howe that I liked the "live" sound of the album, that it felt like the music was being blasted out a window on a city street at three o'clock in the morning. He laughed and told me why.

"Let me tell you about that echo chamber we had. That chamber was a dream. I used the room and the directional microphones. I had played in a band, and I knew that the guys should be able to hear each other. I used RCA 77 DX microphones on the brass. I put two of them back to back and split the sax section so that three guys were facing two guys. I used at least two mikes on the drums. On the theme, Bob Bain had an amp, and it was clear that his guitar was an important part of the chart. So he was miked separately. That sound you liked - that was the sound of that Studio B echo chamber."

"In those days, you could cut four tunes in three hours. Those kinds of sessions went really fast, because the guys that played were really great; they'd run it down twice, and they would have it. They had a powerhouse brass section, the guys from the Sinatra albums."

"Everybody enjoyed working with Hank. It was the first time I got a chance to really know him. He was a sweetheart of a guy. I loved the music that Hank wrote, especially 'Dreamsville.' What a pretty tune that is. When someone put lyrics to it (Jay Livingston and Ray Evans), I tried to get Ella (Fitzgerald) to record it."

Howe went on to engineer and produce many hit records for rock and pop groups such as the Association, the Turtles, the 5th Dimension, and singers from Johnny Rivers to Tom Waits, with whom he did five of his classic albums. He was chief engineer for the Monterey Pop concert film and Elvis Presley's 1968 Christmas TV special, and music supervisor for films such as La Bamba and Back to the Future.

As engineer Bones Howe alluded to, Bob Bain's guitar was the driving force behind the Peter Gunn theme. After knocking around Los Angeles in the early 1940s, Bain joined Tommy Dorsey's band, and also worked with Bob Crosby and Harry James. Later, working with arranger Nelson Riddle, he backed up Sinatra and Nat Cole. In fact, the famous guitar intro to Cole's recording of "Mona Lisa" was created (but ultimately not played) by him.

On the theme, Bain told me that he used a 1953 Fender guitar. "It became a very well-known guitar, because it was built a little differently. It has a different bridge on it and a different pickup. I had mine modified a little bit. Hank wanted that special sound, so I didn’t play it open-stringed; I muffled it a little. Ever since that record came out, it's been known as the Peter Gunn Guitar."

"On the record, I remember playing the bridge to 'Dreamsville.' I had never heard that tune before, so I just sight-read it. I made that long gliss (glissando - sliding up from one note to another) to get in position to play the rest of it. Every time I run into some guitar player, he'll say, 'I liked the way you played that gliss.' At the time, I wasn’t even aware of it."

When he was called for the session, Bain had worked with Mancini quite a bit already. "Dominic Frontiere and I did Hank's first album, on Liberty Records (The Versatile Henry Mancini). It was just accordion and guitar, and Hank had written these Italian-style arrangements. We were always laughing, because it was just two guys and a leader playing an album of Italian street songs. I also worked with him on several films: Rock Pretty Baby and Touch of Evil."

"Another guitarist, Tommy Tedesco - he was a fine player and a good friend - did some sidelining on the show. Sidelining never paid much, and you could spend all day on the set just waiting to go on. I never did it. So Tommy does the first show where the combo is playing at Mother's. A couple of days before it runs on TV, he calls everybody in his hometown of Buffalo and says, 'Watch Peter Gunn. That's me playing.' It wasn’t, of course; it was me."

"We had a lot of fun on those sessions, doing the cues for the weekly shows. On the tens (10-minute breaks mandated by the musicians union), we played touch football in the alley next to the building: Dick, Ted, Cip (Cipriano) and I. We'd go in at 8:00 in the evening and finish by 11:00 - and make 90 bucks."

"Then Hank started doing all those great pictures, and he was using the same guys. I used to get calls from people I didn’t know, and they'd ask, 'Are you Mancini's guitar player?' We worked together for a long time, and then I got hired for the Tonight Show."

Al Schmitt

At the next session, Mancini and the gang found Al Schmitt at the controls.

"I had just moved out from New York," Schmitt told me. "They had wanted that big sound on the first date, but when they recorded the small group numbers, they wanted a more intimate sound. Everybody was really happy with it. Hank was the easiest guy in the world to work for. He’d get everything set up and then light up his pipe."

"In those days, if you went even one minute overtime, you had to pay the musicians for a half-hour more. Right at the end of the date - Hank was famous for this - we’d get down to about three minutes before the end of the session, and the producer would say, 'OK, Hank, that’s great. We got it.' And Hank would say, 'No, we’ve got to do one more take.' And we would go one or two minutes over, and then we’d wind up using the take before. That was his way of saying thank you to the musicians. He gave them that extra half-hour. He was a wonderful guy, with a great sense of humor. And he was a brilliant arranger."

"RCA had no idea what they had when they put that record out. It just flew off the shelves to the point where they had to sell the record in generic covers, because they didn’t print enough covers. People had to come back to the record store and get the real cover two weeks later. I started doing all of the Mancini records: More Music from Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Grammy nomination) and Hatari (Grammy)."

Schmitt went on to win 15 Grammys (so far), and has engineered for everyone from Jefferson Airplane to Diana Krall, and Sinatra to Streisand.

Cipriano told me he was in awe of Schmitt's talents. "Al was great. He got a sound on the bass flutes that still hasn’t been duplicated. I don’t know how he did it. That’s a soft kind of instrument, and he had us way out front."

I asked Schmitt if he remembered that John Williams was in the sessions.

"Sure. He was a sweet guy. He had rosy cheeks. The last time I saw him, I said, "You're big now, but in those days, I could get John Williams for three hours - and for just 42 bucks."