Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Stetts Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is producer engineer extraordinary Don Gamon. Don,
Speaker 1: how do you produce a record?
Speaker 2: Bob, keep your mouth shut? That would be my first thought.
Speaker 1: Well, that's an interesting thing because you came up as
Speaker 1: an engineer. My observation in the studio is the engineer
Speaker 1: has to be quiet and be more of a yes man.
Speaker 1: And you became a producer. Well, switching gears to a
Speaker 1: smaller question. My original question, how hard was that transition
Speaker 1: going from being an engineer to producer?
Speaker 2: It was difficult, it was Hm. Well, you know, it's
Speaker 2: a long story, but the tell the story. That's why
Speaker 2: we're here, all right. You know. I was fortunate coming
Speaker 2: from Live Sound, which is really where my beginning is
Speaker 2: as an engineer, that one of my clients on the
Speaker 2: road was Stephen Stills, and he took a liking to
Speaker 2: me and took me to Caribou, which was a ranch
Speaker 2: up in the Rocky Mountains, and I spent a month
Speaker 2: with him finishing a record that he had started, and
Speaker 2: at the end of it he gave me a production credit.
Speaker 2: So right out of the gate I was given not
Speaker 2: only engineering, but production credit. And then he turned around
Speaker 2: and got me a position at the Record Plant in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles and Criteria Recording in Miami and said, this
Speaker 2: is your next step. So I quit my day job,
Speaker 2: which was live or Live sound, and moved to Miami,
Speaker 2: where I promptly stopped producing and just started engineering. And
Speaker 2: really realized at that point how much I did not
Speaker 2: know about making records. Stephen was a great teacher, but
Speaker 2: I had so much to learn about recording techniques, operating
Speaker 2: tape machines, editing. There was just a myriad of things
Speaker 2: that I knew nothing about. Even though I thought, well,
Speaker 2: I know everything about the equipment that I'm using, it
Speaker 2: was not even close. So that process took almost ten
Speaker 2: years before I got my next full on recording producing credit,
Speaker 2: and I think it was nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 1: Okay. Why did Stills take such a liking to you
Speaker 1: that he would bring you from the road to the
Speaker 1: studio and then give you a production credit.
Speaker 2: I think probably what he saw in me the situation
Speaker 2: I was on the road with Manassas, which was one
Speaker 2: of Stevens' many bands after I guess that would have
Speaker 2: been after his solo career and my job was I
Speaker 2: was hired as a monitor system for the stage. This
Speaker 2: would have been nineteen maybe seventy two, and I had
Speaker 2: already been on the road since about nineteen seventy. I
Speaker 2: started in sixty five, and we were brought in at
Speaker 2: that time because we were the only people that actually
Speaker 2: had a stage monitoring system which split out the microphones
Speaker 2: on stage and that put the console on the side
Speaker 2: of the stage, and that had monitors on the sides,
Speaker 2: and it slants in the front and different mixes for
Speaker 2: differ locations. All of that kind of thing was very,
Speaker 2: very new, and I think it was what's the San Francisco.
Speaker 2: He had hired another production company to do the main
Speaker 2: sound and lights, et cetera. So I was just kind
Speaker 2: of in a dndum and so I was separate. I
Speaker 2: was more noticeable because I was hired as an extra
Speaker 2: and my job was to sit side of the stage
Speaker 2: and take all the heat as things get that back
Speaker 2: and they couldn't hear themselves, and it was a very tense,
Speaker 2: you know, a couple hours while you're trying to make
Speaker 2: it through the show without glares coming from Stephen. And
Speaker 2: I think I withstood the heat really well, is what
Speaker 2: it was. And there was a day, especially bad day,
Speaker 2: that I was really having trouble with some whistling and
Speaker 2: the monitor. Steven kept on looking over at me during
Speaker 2: the set, you know, like get it louder, I can't
Speaker 2: hear myself, And finally, in a rage, he just turns
Speaker 2: and throws a drumstick at me from you know, mid
Speaker 2: mid stage to the side, and I caught it and
Speaker 2: threw it back at him. And I think that was
Speaker 2: kind of the beginning of our relationship, was this you know,
Speaker 2: willingness to be straight up and he appreciated that. And
Speaker 2: shortly after that time we did Michael John Bowen, who
Speaker 2: was his manager at the time ex Marine wonderful man
Speaker 2: who's since deceased, put together a tour that he thought
Speaker 2: we could be much more efficient touring if we did
Speaker 2: it from central locations, and he wanted to do it
Speaker 2: from Boulder, where Steven had a house up in Golden
Speaker 2: and do shows that were you know, three five hundred
Speaker 2: mile drives from that location. And so he wanted to
Speaker 2: build a semi that had two levels in it where
Speaker 2: we could put a lighting trust on the first floor
Speaker 2: and then all of the band's equipment and sound equipment
Speaker 2: on the second and I was the driver, and so
Speaker 2: I took on a role as a stage manager, truck driver,
Speaker 2: mixing engineer for about a year before this all happened
Speaker 2: with the studio stuff. So that's just one little piece
Speaker 2: of my that's actually the end of my recording.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, I got a lot of questions. Don't you
Speaker 1: need a license to drive a truck?
Speaker 2: Yeah you do, But you know, I wasn't driving for money,
Speaker 2: and so there's this exception with Class C licenses, I
Speaker 2: think is what they're called, or at least maybe that's
Speaker 2: what was called in Pennsylvania, which is where I was from. Anyhow,
Speaker 2: I had fortunately a West Coast driver who was our
Speaker 2: driver on the Manassas Tour, a lovely guy, you know,
Speaker 2: career semi driver who I rode with for probably a
Speaker 2: year before I did it myself, and he taught me
Speaker 2: all the ins and outs of proper breaking technique, coming
Speaker 2: down the grapevine and losing your brakes, you know, all
Speaker 2: of that kind of stuff. That was so, you know,
Speaker 2: of course important.
Speaker 1: Well, how hard is it to drive a semi?
Speaker 2: It's not it's hard. There's a lot of technique, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of keeping it in a very narrow rpm
Speaker 2: range regardless of your speed. The diesel engine doesn't like
Speaker 2: revving up and revving down. It was just sit right
Speaker 2: in a little three hundred rpm window. The transmissions are
Speaker 2: usually thirteen speed, and you learn to shift them without
Speaker 2: using the clutch. You do it all with. There's a
Speaker 2: number like twenty one hundred RPMs where it will slide
Speaker 2: from one gear to the next, and it's very fluid.
Speaker 2: It almost feels like an automatic transmission when it's done properly,
Speaker 2: and you can go up and down the gear ranges
Speaker 2: like that. Backing up is a whole another thing that
Speaker 2: backing up is like, and especially at the kind of
Speaker 2: venues we were playing, and we had built a trailer
Speaker 2: that was eleven foot high instead of the normal like
Speaker 2: I think thirteen maybe or so that we could get
Speaker 2: in these venues and get in closer. We didn't want
Speaker 2: to have to roll stuff, you know, blocks away, so
Speaker 2: backing in curved backing. I still look back at and think,
Speaker 2: how in the world did I do that and get
Speaker 2: away with it?
Speaker 1: Okay? There were two Minassas albums. It was the double
Speaker 1: album in seventy two was subsequent single album the double
Speaker 1: album was one of the great products of all time.
Speaker 1: You've seen a million bands. How hot was Manassas live?
Speaker 2: They had great nights? Uh yeah. A lot of it
Speaker 2: dependent on how on Stephen was, you know, and it
Speaker 2: was material sometimes it was, but you know, the arrangements
Speaker 2: were amazing. Stephen is to this day. I just amazed
Speaker 2: at his ability as as a writer, a producer and arranger.
Speaker 2: You know, those songs were just so well put together.
Speaker 2: And what we carried on the road was everything that
Speaker 2: was on the record. It was the same band, and
Speaker 2: so yeah, it could sound amazing.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know he's a public figure. Didn't you work
Speaker 1: with him for so long? What does the average person
Speaker 1: not know about? Stephen still's.
Speaker 2: Shy you know about I don't know that I can
Speaker 2: speak to it that well. I saw him about a
Speaker 2: month ago. I hadn't seen him for probably twenty five years.
Speaker 2: I did see him. No, No, that's wrong. I saw him
Speaker 2: at the Buffalo Springfield concert here in town. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Andy Summers took me and I'm going to say it
Speaker 2: was probably four years ago, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: The Buffalo Springfield I think was twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't that long ago. They've played at the
Speaker 2: Wiltern or.
Speaker 1: Whatever you saw not important. You saw him at the
Speaker 1: Buffalo Springfield Show, and you know, I said hello, but
Speaker 1: we haven't spent any time where we've sat down and talked.
Speaker 2: I did see him at the bookstore in Studio City
Speaker 2: just a month ago and walked up to him and
Speaker 2: kind of surprised him. You know, hello, it's Don Gamon.
Speaker 2: He took one look at me and said, wow, we've
Speaker 2: gotten old. And then we talked, and you know, he
Speaker 2: talked about how happy he was and how different life
Speaker 2: was for him right now compared to you know, the
Speaker 2: last twenty five years, and that, yeah, he seemed like
Speaker 2: he was in a really good place. And we exchanged
Speaker 2: numbers again and said that we're going to get together.
Speaker 2: You know, before that, when I was working at Criteria,
Speaker 2: I would probably there was a record that I did
Speaker 2: in like seventy five was Neil and Steven together, And
Speaker 2: it's probably the last time I spent significant time with him.
Speaker 1: Well that's a legendary record. Long may you run? Because
Speaker 1: I believe the first dates were in Florida. Stills flew
Speaker 1: down and then Neil Young sent a telegram saying, you know,
Speaker 1: essentially I'm out.
Speaker 2: Well that's kind of the story. I can give you
Speaker 2: the actual, the more complete story. Actually. The thing that's
Speaker 2: remarkable about this, it says so much about both of them,
Speaker 2: is that they put together. We're going to make a
Speaker 2: record together, just Steven and I and I'm going to
Speaker 2: come in a couple of weeks before we're going to start,
Speaker 2: and I just want to get acclimated. So Neil comes
Speaker 2: in town and promptly buys like a fifty foot old
Speaker 2: junker wooden boat, as Neil would, and parks it in
Speaker 2: Coconut Grove in the Marina and starts to write the
Speaker 2: songs for the album. And so his pre production was
Speaker 2: I'm coming to town to get the flavor and I'm
Speaker 2: going to write the album here right now, which he did.
Speaker 2: And then Steven shows up probably a day before we're
Speaker 2: going to start, and he checks in the best hotel
Speaker 2: in town, and and then we go in the studio
Speaker 2: and Steven's got a couple of songs I've been sitting
Speaker 2: around for a while, and then he's got a few
Speaker 2: more that he's not finished, and Neil's all ready to go,
Speaker 2: and so we record the record, and it's going really well,
Speaker 2: and it's a it's a good band, mostly Stevens players
Speaker 2: from Midasses, and uh, all of a sudden, David and
Speaker 2: Graham show up. And there hadn't been a lot of
Speaker 2: the four of them together, Uh, you know, probably for
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know that it was a while.
Speaker 2: And they show up and everybody's getting along really great,
Speaker 2: having a wonderful time. And I'm not sure who invited,
Speaker 2: but somebody said, why don't you sing on this song?
Speaker 2: And so the David and Graham go out and sing
Speaker 2: background so on one of the songs, and then it
Speaker 2: turned into three songs, and then five songs, and then
Speaker 2: now there's talk of why don't we record one of
Speaker 2: David's songs in one of Graham's songs, and oh, now
Speaker 2: we're making a CSNY record, and the the vibe all
Speaker 2: of a sudden. I don't think I even realized it
Speaker 2: until it was habitual that every morning at nine o'clock,
Speaker 2: Neil would call me at home and say, this is
Speaker 2: what I'd like to do today. Can you get this
Speaker 2: stuff up? We'll do this overdub, we'll look at this.
Speaker 2: And he called me at nine o'clock this morning, and
Speaker 2: he said, Hey, I'm in Zuma and I go Zuma.
Speaker 2: He says, yeah, I'm here in Zuma. I flew out
Speaker 2: last night. And isn't Zuma on the West coast and
Speaker 2: he says yes, yeah. He says, you know, I'm not
Speaker 2: really happy with the way things have been going. It's
Speaker 2: not what you know, Steve and I said we were
Speaker 2: going to do. So, you know, would you just kind
Speaker 2: of go in there and, you know, clean up the tracks,
Speaker 2: put things back the way it was before, David and Graham,
Speaker 2: you know, put their vocals on it. And then when
Speaker 2: you get all that done, give me a call. I'll
Speaker 2: come back and we'll finish the record.
Speaker 1: And then what happened.
Speaker 2: That's what we did. I cleaned it up.
Speaker 1: Okay, did you put all that stuff in there? What
Speaker 1: did Stephen, Graham and David say about what Neil said?
Speaker 2: You know, I don't remember there was any discussion. It
Speaker 2: was just you know, or maybe I was withheld from
Speaker 2: what that might have been. But all I knew was
Speaker 2: that the next time we were back in the studio
Speaker 2: it was just Steven and Neil again.
Speaker 1: But going to the next step a tour was guard
Speaker 1: did or booked, excuse me, and Neil was booked and
Speaker 1: ultimately he did not go out. Can you tell us
Speaker 1: anything about that?
Speaker 2: No, Honestly, I don't even recall that, but I'm sure
Speaker 2: you're right. That's something you'll have to kind of bear
Speaker 2: with me, Bob. There's there are giant holes that. Honestly,
Speaker 2: I look to other people that it might have been
Speaker 2: there for their recollection, you know. I know that shortly
Speaker 2: after that, all four of them did get together, and
Speaker 2: then I went out on the road. I recalled doing
Speaker 2: shows in like Wimbley Stadium. I took my leave from
Speaker 2: Criteria to go Douche and I only think it was
Speaker 2: one show, but there might have been more that the
Speaker 2: four of them did together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, let's go back to the beginning. You're from where.
Speaker 2: Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Okay.
Speaker 1: Home of the Pennsylvania Dutch. When you are in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: because now Lydditz, which is right in that area, is
Speaker 1: the epicenter of live music, staging audio. Was there anything
Speaker 1: like that there when you were growing up? No?
Speaker 2: Well, then the Claire brothers, the two brothers lived in Lettitts.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're growing up is there music in the house.
Speaker 1: How do you become infected with music?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess my story is that, you know, probably
Speaker 2: in third grade I was I wanted to join the orchestra,
Speaker 2: and the orchestra director said to me, I need a violist.
Speaker 2: You're going to play viola very typical way that things
Speaker 2: people learn instruments. So I start practicing in viola, taking lessons.
Speaker 2: I do that for many years, eventually become like first
Speaker 2: chair in the district of Blancaster County Orchestra. So I
Speaker 2: was a decent violist. But right around nineteen sixty four
Speaker 2: sixty three, the Beatles came along and I started letting
Speaker 2: my hair grow a little longer. And in those days,
Speaker 2: because I was on the swimming team, you had to
Speaker 2: have it above your ears and above your forehead and
Speaker 2: all these kind of hair rules. And my father, who
Speaker 2: was recovering Mennonite, did not like me letting my hair
Speaker 2: grow either, And basically I got thrown out an orchestra,
Speaker 2: even though I was a decent player, because the orchestra
Speaker 2: conductor did not like the fact that I was getting
Speaker 2: interested in rock music. And what happened was I got
Speaker 2: together with a trombone player and we formed a rock band.
Speaker 2: The rock band needed equipment, especially vocal equipment.
Speaker 1: Let's stop late, wait, let's stop, let's stop right. Your
Speaker 1: father was a recovering Mennonite. Tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: more about that.
Speaker 2: You know, the my father was raised as a Mennonite,
Speaker 2: and which is kind of the origins of the Amish.
Speaker 2: The Amish kind of breakaway from the Mennonites. And what
Speaker 2: happened was during World War Two. The Mennonites are conscientious subjectors.
Speaker 2: They they do not believe in going to war and
Speaker 2: qualify as I think as four F or whatever the
Speaker 2: classification is. That's that my father disagreed with the Mennonites.
Speaker 2: He is a conscientious subjector and reverse and left the religion,
Speaker 2: joined the Presbyterian Church and joined the army. And so
Speaker 2: I guess the point of all this I'm making is
Speaker 2: that I grew up with a very conservative father who
Speaker 2: church going, very active. That that was something I was
Speaker 2: around a lot, and moving more into the the rock
Speaker 2: music scene and the whole Beatles thing was I'm sure
Speaker 2: very you know, just distant from what their experience was.
Speaker 2: But nevertheless, he allowed me to pursue it, and that
Speaker 2: entailed initially as the rock band. I knew I couldn't
Speaker 2: afford to buy an AMP, and so I went about trying.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, wait, wait, wait, I don't want to get
Speaker 1: to I want to stop you once again. Was your
Speaker 1: mother a Mennonite?
Speaker 2: No, no she was. I don't even know what church,
Speaker 2: probably another Presbyterian kind of church, you know, But no
Speaker 2: she was not.
Speaker 1: And then since your father left the Men in Knight,
Speaker 1: didn't he have relatives? Did you have contact with him?
Speaker 2: Not?
Speaker 1: Contact with him?
Speaker 2: Yeah, but not a lot. I mean I can remember
Speaker 2: going to family reunions where there'd be there might be
Speaker 2: some horses and buggies in the front yard, you know,
Speaker 2: because there was definitely a cross pollination of this stuff.
Speaker 2: I had many uncles and aunts that were Gamings, but
Speaker 2: we weren't close with any of them. I had a
Speaker 2: grandmother who was Mennonite and who was an incredible cook
Speaker 2: that would see often on Sundays and she'd make these
Speaker 2: giant meals, and she wore you know what you would
Speaker 2: think of men andite woman wears very conservative you know,
Speaker 2: play dress. And same with my grandfather. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: One of the big things in Lancaster is scrapple. Is
Speaker 1: that a Mennonite. Is that a Mennonite thing or is
Speaker 1: that just a regional thing.
Speaker 2: That's probably mennnight. Yeah, it's one of the many things
Speaker 2: that all cultures do with leftovers, right, grind things up
Speaker 2: and mix them with some a grain, smother it with
Speaker 2: maple syrup. Yeah, I actually missed that.
Speaker 1: Okay, how many kids in the family.
Speaker 2: Just one sister?
Speaker 1: And what she would her life turn out to be?
Speaker 2: She became a second grade teacher and pretty much her
Speaker 2: whole life.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're leaning towards electronics. So in school, were you
Speaker 1: good with science?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I was was very good with pretty much. I'm
Speaker 2: a decent school person, especially once I got into junior high.
Speaker 2: I had a closet in the basement. Believe it or not,
Speaker 2: that would be from one hobby to the next, chemistry, photography, biology,
Speaker 2: butterfly net's dissecting stuff, to the point that in like
Speaker 2: seventh grade, I think the science teacher got me a
Speaker 2: college course in invertebrates, and I had a shark and
Speaker 2: a cat and all this stuff that I could dissect
Speaker 2: that was kind of on the side. So at the
Speaker 2: time I was thinking about medicine, I was I might
Speaker 2: want to be a doctor. I liked all this stuff
Speaker 2: and it's probably well suited for it until the rock
Speaker 2: and roll thing came along and that just blew everything up.
Speaker 1: Okay, you were playing the viola. You talk about organizing
Speaker 1: a band. What I mean, Jerry Goodman played the violin
Speaker 1: in the flock. But what was your instrument in the band?
Speaker 2: Bass?
Speaker 1: And how did you learn how to play the bass?
Speaker 2: Very badly? I was a horrible bass player. I looked
Speaker 2: back at it with total regret. But it wasn't a
Speaker 2: great bass. It was a national bass, short neck, not
Speaker 2: a very great tone. I built my own amp out of.
Speaker 1: Well, well this is where this is. That's where you
Speaker 1: were going. Yeah, you had the bass, and of course
Speaker 1: the bass requires Okay, I'll ask you. You're the big expert.
Speaker 1: Why do you need a specific base amp.
Speaker 2: You needed big speakers, you know, the biggest ones they make,
Speaker 2: so that the base takes more for you know, more power.
Speaker 2: It needs more surface area. I wanted basically a Fender basement,
Speaker 2: you know, it would been what I wanted. The best
Speaker 2: bass player in town had a Fender basement, and he
Speaker 2: was with a Fender base and he was great. I
Speaker 2: was not great, But I needed a good base amp.
Speaker 2: And at the time I was also very interested in woodworking,
Speaker 2: and I had bought my own table salt, which I
Speaker 2: set up in the garage, and so I was building
Speaker 2: my own speaker cabinets and I copied them like the fenders,
Speaker 2: with vinyl coverings and corners and pretty groklaw looked exactly
Speaker 2: like a Fender basement. Actually, as far as an amp goes,
Speaker 2: it performed well. But that process I'm going through that.
Speaker 1: Wait, okay, it's one thing to build the speaker cabinet.
Speaker 1: I think you had two fifteen's in a Fender basement.
Speaker 1: How the hell did you build the amplifier you did?
Speaker 2: There was these things called Dina kits oh yeah, if
Speaker 2: you recall the oh yeah, and they sold like a
Speaker 2: thirty five watt amp, you know, power amp tubes. And
Speaker 2: then they had a little pre app to had a
Speaker 2: phonograph premp in it that had an ox position on it.
Speaker 2: And so I built those two things, and then I
Speaker 2: modified the inputs that would take a guitar jack and
Speaker 2: that was that. I mean, it was basically the same
Speaker 2: stuff that's in a Fender basement. I just didn't have
Speaker 2: the overdrive capability, which on a bass, you don't really
Speaker 2: need that much.
Speaker 1: But okay, so you're in the band, you're playing the bass,
Speaker 1: you've built your own imitation bass man. What happens next.
Speaker 2: Well, we needed a vocal system. So the next step
Speaker 2: was to go to the local Lancaster parts store where
Speaker 2: they sell everything that unique speaker parts. And I'm down
Speaker 2: there looking about maybe buying some speakers, and I run
Speaker 2: to this Guy's name is Jean Claire, and he's the
Speaker 2: working in the parts store, and I told him what
Speaker 2: I'm doing, and he says, you know, my brother and
Speaker 2: I we run a little business on the side making
Speaker 2: vocal monitors for churches, and we need somebody that could
Speaker 2: maybe crank out these vocal columns. Would you be interested,
Speaker 2: and we'll help you out with the stuff you're looking for,
Speaker 2: and you know, maybe you can use that for your band.
Speaker 2: And so basically I started as a cabinet maker for
Speaker 2: these two brothers building these church vocal columns, you know,
Speaker 2: like a sure vocal column. They are basically copies of
Speaker 2: the six eight inch speakers. I think it was in
Speaker 2: a stack and any So that was the beginning of
Speaker 2: my relationship with Claire. And at the time they had
Speaker 2: a two car garage in Lititz where they built their stuff,
Speaker 2: and then I had my garage in Lancaster and it
Speaker 2: grew very quickly from that to a point where we
Speaker 2: were building stuff to do live shows at Franklin and
Speaker 2: Marshall College for the bands that were coming through, booked
Speaker 2: by the by the people there.
Speaker 1: Okay, you graduate from high school and you go right
Speaker 1: into making these cabinets or what happened?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, this is all. I was fifteen. This
Speaker 2: is long before graduating. I was fifteen when I was
Speaker 2: The next generation speaker was an A seven, which is
Speaker 2: an altech lancing voice of the theater. It's a monstrous
Speaker 2: box with a horn and a wolfer and a horn.
Speaker 2: Hard to build, by the way, because it's got curved
Speaker 2: wood in it, but we built two of those and
Speaker 2: we're using it at Franklin and Marshall. I think the
Speaker 2: first time we used it was maybe Peter Poul and
Speaker 2: Mary came through and we added some stuff for them,
Speaker 2: and then fortuitously the Four Seasons came through town and
Speaker 2: we set that up for them, and they really liked
Speaker 2: roy and decided to hire roy On to go on
Speaker 2: the road with them permanently. And then so that I
Speaker 2: think he was a shop teacher at the time and
Speaker 2: he quit his teaching job and this is all well,
Speaker 2: I'm still I mean, I can remember driving to Atlantic
Speaker 2: City to do shows with the Supremes and the Four
Speaker 2: Tops on the boardwalk and driving a cor of Air
Speaker 2: van on a learners permit, and that was kind of
Speaker 2: my beginning with live sound. And the systems were very rudimentary.
Speaker 2: I think we had maybe four microphones and I don't
Speaker 2: even know what we use for power amp, probably something horrible,
Speaker 2: but it was better than what most people were offering.
Speaker 2: It was a real infancy for what sound was. And
Speaker 2: but we grew so fast during that time, moving into
Speaker 2: building our own consoles and then eventually partnering up with
Speaker 2: the newest people that were building transistor power amps, and
Speaker 2: then we were off to the races.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're working at Franklin and Marshall, the local college.
Speaker 1: How do you get a gig in Atlantic City?
Speaker 2: Four seasons I think was the ticket that got us out.
Speaker 2: You know, they were seeing us on the road, or
Speaker 2: not me, but Roy with his setup for them, and
Speaker 2: it worked. And so we go through and often it
Speaker 2: would be the promoters like Philadelphia, Larry Maggott and the
Speaker 2: Speedback Brothers. You know, we became close with them, the
Speaker 2: Belkans in Cleveland so quickly. You know, the promoters knew
Speaker 2: that they could get sound equipment that worked for these
Speaker 2: bands that had nothing, because production wasn't something that bands,
Speaker 2: you know, carried at that time. It just came in.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, you know, from an outside viewpoint, there's Clear Brothers
Speaker 1: and Showco. When Clear was starting and starting to gain traction,
Speaker 1: was there any competition or was it just a regional business?
Speaker 1: What was going on?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was Mannis. It was a Boston company that
Speaker 2: was quite large. They were using the eight foot tall
Speaker 2: movie theater straight horn I forget, the model number two
Speaker 2: ten Altech I don't remember, and the multicellular Altech lancing
Speaker 2: horns that were monstrous. And then they had semis and
Speaker 2: the dance floor. They are in the front of the
Speaker 2: semi that's up on top of the tree. They had
Speaker 2: built racks of Macintosh to power amplifiers and that was
Speaker 2: how they built the first really big systems. And not
Speaker 2: many people I don't even know who was using that stuff.
Speaker 2: It was at the big gigs. But we were opportunists,
Speaker 2: right at that moment we realized we could build a
Speaker 2: better base enclosure, and we came up with a rebuild
Speaker 2: of a W box which was just about as big
Speaker 2: two fifteens, weighed probably five hundred pounds. It was ridiculous,
Speaker 2: and we had systems very quickly that were four of
Speaker 2: those cabinets and the two by five cellular horns with
Speaker 2: double throated drivers on the back, pretty loud, and we'd
Speaker 2: stack those up on the side of stage. I remember
Speaker 2: doing Iron Butterfly shows with a system like that, and
Speaker 2: it actually worked pretty well a great low end. There
Speaker 2: was probably a three hundred watt system tops, but what
Speaker 2: we were using before was probably sixty. So yeah, already
Speaker 2: were off to the races. And what happened was McManus,
Speaker 2: which was the big company that had acts signed up
Speaker 2: for production. We bit by bit started stealing their clients.
Speaker 2: I think Bloitzweat and Tears might have been one of
Speaker 2: the first ones. Iron Butterfly were the West Coast companies
Speaker 2: that were was it Osley? Which guy is that that's
Speaker 2: the one who's the.
Speaker 1: About the LSD king with the grateful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but I think that one of these guys
Speaker 2: was the was the brains behind the grateful deads sound.
Speaker 2: You know, he really understood time alignment and all this stuff.
Speaker 2: It was a whole different concept. Those people were some
Speaker 2: sort of competition, uh certainly inspiration for their technology. Yeah, No,
Speaker 2: there was a lot of competition. But what we had
Speaker 2: going for us was that we were very light on
Speaker 2: our feet and we had this company in California called
Speaker 2: SAE that was building a three hundred watt transistor app
Speaker 2: that was uh road worthy, And we started racking those
Speaker 2: things up and all of a sudden we were off
Speaker 2: to the races and much louder.
Speaker 1: Because the say he ended up being a consumer brand too.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. So, right, how do you go from building
Speaker 1: speakers and amplifiers to mixers desks? You know, that's a
Speaker 1: totally different I mean they're all connected, but it's a
Speaker 1: different thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It was exciting, you know. For for me, I
Speaker 2: was kind of in the throes of what am I
Speaker 2: going to do with my life as a seventeen eighteen
Speaker 2: year old And at that point, you know, my parents
Speaker 2: are disappointed that didn't look so good for the medical career,
Speaker 2: and I would saying, what do I do that's going
Speaker 2: to be able to further this career that I'm really loving,
Speaker 2: you know, the combination of music and electronics and invention
Speaker 2: and and so I thought, well, I'll go to Penn
Speaker 2: State try and get an electrical engineering degree, and I applied.
Speaker 2: I got in. On a side note, they gave me
Speaker 2: an interest test I think it was called the Smith
Speaker 2: interest test when I was admitted, and it was kind
Speaker 2: of a precursor to whether or not you would succeed
Speaker 2: at what you were pursuing. And there was also the
Speaker 2: test were dim. They gave me a fifteen percent chance
Speaker 2: of passing as an electrical engineer, and I like a
Speaker 2: ninety five percent chance as a psychologist and a ninety
Speaker 2: percent as a musical arranger. So I mean, I don't
Speaker 2: know that I really took it to heart at the time,
Speaker 2: But of course, now looking back at it, they were right,
Speaker 2: you know, because I still am not a great I
Speaker 2: understand technical things really well. I'm not an inventor like
Speaker 2: people that we eventually hired that built all this stuff.
Speaker 2: But I was a better mixer. I understood the music intrinsically.
Speaker 2: Sitting in an orchestra had its effect, you know. I
Speaker 2: understood counter melodies and where parts need to be featured
Speaker 2: and all that kind of stuff. It just came naturally.
Speaker 2: And so as we got more and more of the
Speaker 2: stage miked up and you had daters for drums and
Speaker 2: bass and guitars and everything there you need, somebody then
Speaker 2: understood what the music was. And most people were not
Speaker 2: carrying their own mixers, so that became another element. Anyhow,
Speaker 2: I wound up at Penn State and I lasted I
Speaker 2: don't know, ten weeks twenty weeks before I quit and
Speaker 2: moved into their technical program at a local community campus
Speaker 2: and did two years and then went on the road.
Speaker 2: And I was on the road all through college. I'd
Speaker 2: go to classes Monday through Friday and then drive home
Speaker 2: to let us pick up a truck and go out
Speaker 2: for the weekend.
Speaker 1: Okay, one of the Claire brothers goes out with the
Speaker 1: Four Seasons. Does he come back or does he continue
Speaker 1: to go on the road.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there was scheduling like anything else. You know,
Speaker 2: he'd be out with the Four Seasons for you know,
Speaker 2: two months while they do the summer tour or whatever,
Speaker 2: and then he'd have some time off. And very quickly
Speaker 2: it became you know, I think Jane would be out
Speaker 2: on the road with his set of acts. I had
Speaker 2: mine after college, probably nineteen seventy. I had logans of Messina,
Speaker 2: the James Gang, Stephen Stills. Yes, those were kind of
Speaker 2: my acts that would rotate. There'd be scheduling things where
Speaker 2: I'd have to cover for one of Jean's or Deane
Speaker 2: would cover for one of mine. But generally speaking, we
Speaker 2: all had sets of acts that were are our domain.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you have the clear brothers, then you're the
Speaker 1: third person. Do they cut you in on ownership?
Speaker 2: You know? And never? Yes, they always talked about it.
Speaker 2: It was kind of what happened more than anything, I
Speaker 2: think in all fairness, is that I started to realized
Speaker 2: that this was like within a year, probably two years
Speaker 2: after being out of college, that living on the road
Speaker 2: like this was not what I wanted to do. The
Speaker 2: last year I was on the road, I did three
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty one night ers and I drove two
Speaker 2: hundred thousand miles and we didn't have a bus. I
Speaker 2: did the driving and it nearly I mean, I was
Speaker 2: in a truck accident I should have died where the
Speaker 2: guy that was driving fell asleep. There was those kind
Speaker 2: of things that were happening at that time in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, where I think that's when the production really
Speaker 2: turned and everybody started to realize that. It's probably when
Speaker 2: the ticket prices started to go up because they started
Speaker 2: to spend money on tour buses and proper semi drivers.
Speaker 2: Everything became what we see today on a small scale.
Speaker 2: And so I by the time nineteen seventy Tree came
Speaker 2: around and Stephen had given me this offer of doing
Speaker 2: some studio work, it was like a godsend. It was like, oh, yes,
Speaker 2: this is what I love.
Speaker 1: Okay, when you left the road, how many people were
Speaker 1: working for Clear Brothers.
Speaker 2: Maybe twenty twenty five. We had already gone through two
Speaker 2: generations of I think when I left we had a
Speaker 2: six stocks semi warehouse with a wood shop, of painting
Speaker 2: booth and electronics shop. We were building our own consoles
Speaker 2: or own speakers or own packaging. It was a big
Speaker 2: operation in by seventy three. And of course that's nothing
Speaker 2: compared to the city of Litits and whatever they call it,
Speaker 2: Rock of something. When I look, I haven't never I've
Speaker 2: never been there. But when I see what happened out
Speaker 2: of what we created, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Tay Towers production. Physical production is also there. Okay, you're
Speaker 1: on the road with all those acts. A in retrospect,
Speaker 1: although it is fifty years ago, it seems like yesterday.
Speaker 1: How good were those systems compared to the systems of today?
Speaker 2: Oh, it was a joke, just on the level of
Speaker 2: how loud they were and how far they would penetrate
Speaker 2: into a room. I mean, the system I took on
Speaker 2: the road with the James guy was four speakers. That
Speaker 2: had I had eight fifteen inch speakers, eight in four
Speaker 2: ten minutes, and I had I had maybe six seventy
Speaker 2: what JBL drivers for the mid range, and then about
Speaker 2: that many for tweeters. And we would do you know,
Speaker 2: ten thousand seats you know arenas, you know, and you'd
Speaker 2: walk around. You could hear, I mean you could hear
Speaker 2: there's music, but if the crowd got too excited, it
Speaker 2: overwhelmed it. I mean, we were in the Hollywood Bowl
Speaker 2: the other night, and I'm just that might even be
Speaker 2: a Claire system. There's a whole arm of Claire Brothers
Speaker 2: now that builds nothing but installations that are permanent. It's
Speaker 2: almost turning to the point now where everybody realizes that
Speaker 2: the systems are in there are great. You just bring
Speaker 2: your own board and plug in that. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: just there's no comparison. There's a guy that we brought
Speaker 2: in that was part of this transition that really was
Speaker 2: the kind of another what do you call it, a catalyst.
Speaker 2: His name is Bruce Jackson, and I don't know if
Speaker 2: you know him. He was Australian. He died unfortunately in
Speaker 2: a plane accident about I don't know, maybe ten or
Speaker 2: fifteen years ago. But the brilliant, brilliant sound engineer on
Speaker 2: the road with Springsteen for years, did so many things
Speaker 2: that were He understood time delay, He understood how speaker
Speaker 2: rays had to be. What we see was shape of
Speaker 2: how these things are hung with. This guy invented all
Speaker 2: of that stuff. He knew that there had to be
Speaker 2: ways of lining up all the drivers that would all
Speaker 2: come out together, and the same thing with you put
Speaker 2: delay towers in all of that stuff. And he was
Speaker 2: such a great inventor. Well, a quick story, that's funny.
Speaker 2: One of our accounts after Bruce was there was Elvis Presley,
Speaker 2: and this was Bruce's account, and the Colonel had come
Speaker 2: to him said, if you can build me a system
Speaker 2: that we can hang over the stage so I can
Speaker 2: do three sixty. I can make YadA YadA more money.
Speaker 2: So build me something so I can have a three
Speaker 2: sixty sound so I can remember coming home. And Bruce
Speaker 2: would be designing this thing, and the metal shop in Efrita,
Speaker 2: which is a little town outside of Lancaster where there
Speaker 2: was a metal shop, and they built this giant metal
Speaker 2: structure that would hold six speakers in a circle, Wilfer's
Speaker 2: tweeters mid range, all mounted focus. And then it had
Speaker 2: this miracle thing called a chain climber, which is a
Speaker 2: motor that climbs a chain, so you hang a chain
Speaker 2: from the ceiling and it hoists the whole thing up
Speaker 2: right from the middle of the stage. And it came
Speaker 2: apart in a clamshell and you'd roll it in the truck,
Speaker 2: all pre set wired and everything, roll it out, roll
Speaker 2: it on, hoist it up. So he built this thing
Speaker 2: and probably gobs of money doing it. And he said,
Speaker 2: would you come on the road with me for the
Speaker 2: dry run. We'll do the you know, the two of
Speaker 2: us together. You've feared me two engineers to scope out
Speaker 2: whether this really works or not. When we get to
Speaker 2: the gig, We set it up, get it in the air.
Speaker 2: Everything seems to be working fine. Show starts and we
Speaker 2: get maybe a minute into the first song and the
Speaker 2: whole top end goes nothing but mush. We couldn't figure
Speaker 2: out what's going on. And so the long short of
Speaker 2: it is, we never thought about the fact that the
Speaker 2: whole structure was built out of metal, and that if
Speaker 2: anything would blow where the voice coils would touch the
Speaker 2: metal of the driver, it would short out to everything else.
Speaker 2: And that's why all the amps blew, all the drivers
Speaker 2: blewe and so we had to We limped through that
Speaker 2: one show before we realized we had to isolate everything.
Speaker 2: But it was an embarrassment of sorts.
Speaker 1: Okay, was that part of the deal if you went
Speaker 1: on the road that you had to drive the truck too?
Speaker 2: Pretty much? Yeah, we did not have drivers in those days.
Speaker 2: I never had a driver except on the Manassas tour
Speaker 2: and he taught me how to drive.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the avenu of monitors.
Speaker 2: You know, it was my I failed. Basically. Roy came
Speaker 2: to me and said we're going to start building monitors
Speaker 2: bronze stage and I said, what are You're crazy? What
Speaker 2: do we need monitors, for can't they hear themselves? And
Speaker 2: he said, no, no, no, they want to hear themselves.
Speaker 2: I want to build a little tiny speaker. Make it
Speaker 2: as small as you possibly can, have an angle up
Speaker 2: so that it points up at the guy singing. All right,
Speaker 2: So I build it, and my heart wasn't in it,
Speaker 2: but anyhow, so I built something rudimentary to what exactly
Speaker 2: what we see today as far as a little monitor,
Speaker 2: and Roy said, that's not going to do. I'm Roy
Speaker 2: was a task master. He was a real you know,
Speaker 2: you imagine your shop teacher criticizing your joinery. That's what
Speaker 2: Roy was and probably still is. And and he turns
Speaker 2: around and one day later cranks out basically the same thing,
Speaker 2: but like a beautiful piece of furniture. Routed edge is
Speaker 2: good seams weight a ton. And then he had put
Speaker 2: them in complimentary angles so you could have two of
Speaker 2: them back to back. In a case, you can roll
Speaker 2: them on the truck. And so that was our first
Speaker 2: slanted monitor, which you could say that was probably the
Speaker 2: first one invented. I've heard people dispute it that maybe
Speaker 2: on the West coast there was somebody that came up
Speaker 2: with the same idea. It wasn't that radical an idea.
Speaker 2: It was just the idea of what it would take
Speaker 2: to make it run, because you're going to have to
Speaker 2: have a separate mix to just put the vocal mic
Speaker 2: through it or whatever he might want to hear.
Speaker 1: So once you invent the vocal monitors and you need
Speaker 1: a board for that, you now have two engineers on
Speaker 1: the road.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got a monitor guy in a front of
Speaker 2: house guy.
Speaker 1: Okay, the front of house, which you did a ton of.
Speaker 1: What's the key for a front of house mix?
Speaker 2: Well, getting a good location is probably half of it,
Speaker 2: you know, because most of the houses would say this
Speaker 2: is where you can put the mixer, and in many
Speaker 2: cases that might be so far back you really don't
Speaker 2: know what's going on, might be behind the whole crowd,
Speaker 2: or maybe you're off to the side where you really
Speaker 2: can't tell if the low end's doing anything. In those days,
Speaker 2: the systems were so uneven that the best place to
Speaker 2: mix it would be right in front of the speakers,
Speaker 2: maybe one hundred feet away. And so that's what we
Speaker 2: always tried to get. If you get to a place
Speaker 2: where you can get something, where you're actually here, then
Speaker 2: the task becomes whether or not you know what to do,
Speaker 2: you know, to make it sound good, you know what's
Speaker 2: a good balance. And of course in those days, everybody
Speaker 2: was enamored with the kick drum, and so that to
Speaker 2: this day, I'm still upset with how loud people make
Speaker 2: kickdrums in live pas It's like, come on, this is
Speaker 2: like what about the rest of the band, But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's a matter of having a good sound check,
Speaker 2: making sure that everything is balanced coming off the stage first.
Speaker 2: And I think that's probably the thing I would always
Speaker 2: do in sound check is go up on stage and
Speaker 2: listen to what they're doing without the system on it,
Speaker 2: and then turn on the house system and say, okay,
Speaker 2: can you hear yourself singing out of the house, And
Speaker 2: then you know we balanced from there, and then you
Speaker 2: fill in the stage monitors.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're on the road with all these bands, although
Speaker 1: you're working morning, noon and night. Needless to say, there
Speaker 1: were no self honed cameras. But to what degree was
Speaker 1: it sex, drugs and rock and roll or was everybody
Speaker 1: working so hard? It really wasn't like that.
Speaker 2: There's some of both, you know, it's very much it's
Speaker 2: all the Gamut. You know both.
Speaker 1: Okay, you did so many shows. We talked about the
Speaker 1: Elvis Show and the problem. Tell me about two great shows.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm. Two great shows.
Speaker 1: Were two great tours.
Speaker 2: Well probably you know Logins and Messina was uh we
Speaker 2: tore over to him for about a year off and
Speaker 2: on and I had a decent system. The same that
Speaker 2: was so great about that band was what was coming
Speaker 2: off stage, just like with Manassas, was almost exactly what
Speaker 2: the record was. All the parts were there. Jimmy and
Speaker 2: Messina was a taskmaster extraordinaire. The guy was you could
Speaker 2: say he's an asshole, but really he was just very
Speaker 2: focused on what was right and wrong and a real producer.
Speaker 2: He knew what was how to how to make things
Speaker 2: sound good and so yeah, the shows were consistently great
Speaker 2: every night. You know, Kenny Logan singing and uh and
Speaker 2: well well arranged band with lots of colors, uh, minimalized.
Speaker 2: It wasn't over the top. There wasn't too much. You
Speaker 2: could really make things sound great and so that was
Speaker 2: a lot of fun and it was well run. There
Speaker 2: was uh, you know, the touring was was reasonable. The
Speaker 2: other one was uh, the James Gang, which which is
Speaker 2: an amazing show. You know, good songs, Joe Walsh amazing
Speaker 2: guitar player, but you know Jimmy and Dale. It's for
Speaker 2: a three piece band. It was, and you could make
Speaker 2: it sound amazing because it was so simple and but
Speaker 2: probably the most fun that I've had mixing was the
Speaker 2: Mellencamp And this is much later what happened later on
Speaker 2: for me in a little out of order, but the
Speaker 2: ten years from like seventy three when I started in
Speaker 2: the studio until eighty two when Mellencamp and I had
Speaker 2: our first big record with the American Full John Wood
Speaker 2: would basically commandeer me from my studio work and say,
Speaker 2: you got to come out in the road now. The
Speaker 2: guy here's doing the sound doesn't know what he's doing,
Speaker 2: and so I would go out in the road with
Speaker 2: him and do tours. And this was right when he
Speaker 2: was starting to pick up eight, probably eighty two to
Speaker 2: eighty five, and we had much bigger systems then, and
Speaker 2: they weren't clear systems. They were they were probably show cover,
Speaker 2: but it was a big loud system. I didn't have
Speaker 2: to do any of the work except show up and
Speaker 2: mix and amazing sound shows. Probably some of my most
Speaker 2: favorite shows are Mellencamp shows.
Speaker 1: Okay, now you show up in Miami because Steven Still's
Speaker 1: got you the job. You know, they're the Alberts there.
Speaker 1: You know, Tom Dowd's working there. You show up, what
Speaker 1: is your job? And how do they treat you?
Speaker 2: They're so nice? I mean, there was certainly. The only
Speaker 2: jealousy was from others who were like me, trying to
Speaker 2: make their way through as engineers. And I had been
Speaker 2: given a leg up because of Stephen, and yeah, I
Speaker 2: did have you know, eight years on the road behind me,
Speaker 2: and I knew how to set up equipment and run
Speaker 2: on my cable. But these guys, you know, might have
Speaker 2: come in and been you know, serving coffee for the
Speaker 2: last two years. So there was that. But from the
Speaker 2: other end, like the Alberts were nothing but wonderful. Everyone
Speaker 2: was so nice to me. And I went through my
Speaker 2: initial doing Cuban bands, you know, for probably the first
Speaker 2: year that I was there. It's probably a good thing,
Speaker 2: doing a lot of any track work, building an album
Speaker 2: in a day, really getting my editing chops up, and
Speaker 2: I was impatient. I can remember going to the owner
Speaker 2: of Macamerman and saying, you know, I'm gonna I'm going
Speaker 2: to mix my first record, and he would look at
Speaker 2: me like nuts. You know, there's you need about ten
Speaker 2: years under your belt before you can be a good mixer,
Speaker 2: and it was about right. Uh yeah, I would say
Speaker 2: that Initially, I also found a niche because of my
Speaker 2: ability as an engineer, speaker design. I was way ahead
Speaker 2: of everybody else. I knew more about a lot of
Speaker 2: elements of the technical stuff than anybody there, even the
Speaker 2: even the engineering department, because we had built so much stuff.
Speaker 2: And there were issues that we had with m c I,
Speaker 2: which was the local uh Fort Lauder deal company that
Speaker 2: built the tape machines and the consoles that I get
Speaker 2: in arguments with about you know, they were using these
Speaker 2: ICs in their consoles that sounded horrible, and nobody would
Speaker 2: believe me. You know, I said, look what's going on.
Speaker 2: API has got nave. All of these companies they use
Speaker 2: they don't use integrated circuits, they use discrete components and
Speaker 2: the transformers and things that sound good. And they would
Speaker 2: just tell me, no, this is natural. It's unity in,
Speaker 2: unity out. And no one understood that we were in
Speaker 2: the business of coloring, that we're painting with air and
Speaker 2: that you have to have things that make coloration. It's
Speaker 2: not supposed to be what comes in goes out. That's
Speaker 2: high five shit. When you're when you're recording something, it's
Speaker 2: entirely different. And so there were those kind of battles.
Speaker 2: I wound up redoing a lot of the monitoring systems there.
Speaker 2: I worked with a guy named Ed Long who was
Speaker 2: a San Jose speaker designer. He built time ALIGNE speakers
Speaker 2: monitors and we played around with that for a while,
Speaker 2: all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So you're there. Traditionally, you know, you start as second
Speaker 1: engineer and you work in like sixteen twenty hours a day.
Speaker 1: Was that your experience?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it was wonderful. And overtime is the key
Speaker 2: to survival, so you know, obviously, you know, if you
Speaker 2: can put in one hundred hours a week every week,
Speaker 2: your paychecks a lot better because the minimum I went
Speaker 2: from a great, amazing amount of money I was making
Speaker 2: when I was on the road to virtually nothing. You know,
Speaker 2: when I started in the studio.
Speaker 1: And what was the key to going from a second
Speaker 1: to a regular engineer.
Speaker 2: You know, I didn't spend much time as a second,
Speaker 2: so they threw me into the lower echelon, you know,
Speaker 2: like the Cuban bands that would come in for a
Speaker 2: day and just kind of let me flounder and I
Speaker 2: would get through it. And it didn't take me long
Speaker 2: before I could, you know, get through a session on
Speaker 2: my own with with with a second engineer. I didn't
Speaker 2: spend much time as a second engineer. Maybe no, not
Speaker 2: really fortunate that in most cases because I was lousy,
Speaker 2: My printing wasn't good enough, all the stuff that seconds
Speaker 2: are supposed to do. Setups. Yeah, so.
Speaker 1: You're doing Cuban bands, etc. What do you learn about
Speaker 1: studio sound as a host a live sound studio engineering?
Speaker 2: Well, it's like we're talking about just a second ago,
Speaker 2: that painting with air is the way that I like
Speaker 2: to think about this. It really is. And everybody has
Speaker 2: a unique way that they want something to present. And
Speaker 2: that's kind of why I think I've had such a
Speaker 2: long career, is that I've always been willing to draw
Speaker 2: a bit a different kind of painting for each band,
Speaker 2: and that I, in fact, what I would do as
Speaker 2: a process would be to look at it and say
Speaker 2: that guy's got a certain kind of guitar tone and
Speaker 2: some way that he plays that that's kind of special,
Speaker 2: and maybe the grooves special here, and that these things
Speaker 2: need to be given more room, and that thing over
Speaker 2: there which is just covering everything up, maybe we just
Speaker 2: get rid of it. So there's this kind of very
Speaker 2: quickly trying to make an assessment of of what's important.
Speaker 2: And then because you're the engineer, you can influence all
Speaker 2: this stuff without a word. You just make the balance
Speaker 2: the way you hear it, and if it sounds good
Speaker 2: and everybody agrees, you're on your way. Well, of course
Speaker 2: that's a whole different story. But yeah, I think that
Speaker 2: that's the main difference is the creative process of it's
Speaker 2: actually kind of the same thing of what a good
Speaker 2: producer will do is realize the strengths that he has
Speaker 2: to work with and not demand out of the band
Speaker 2: something they're not capable of.
Speaker 1: Okay, when do you go from Cuban, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of off the radar bands to bands with a higher
Speaker 1: or acts with a higher profile.
Speaker 2: Well, they're the ones that were my clients. Like Steven
Speaker 2: would come in with Neil and so that would be
Speaker 2: my project for that three months or whatever. I started
Speaker 2: working with the Albert brothers because the Albert brothers both
Speaker 2: liked producing and not doing so much of the engineering,
Speaker 2: even though Ron was a phenomenal engineer, and as a
Speaker 2: team they're really really good at what they do. They
Speaker 2: wanted they wanted me to be their engineer and so
Speaker 2: basically I came in and it was the three of
Speaker 2: us and so there were jeez, pure prairie League mcgwynn,
Speaker 2: Clark Hillman. Uh. Eventually it was John Mellencamp. Uh. The
Speaker 2: first record I made with John was with the Albert brothers.
Speaker 2: I don't know, there was there was a ton of them.
Speaker 2: So that was kind of my next step was working
Speaker 2: with producer known producers at at the and they were
Speaker 2: the premier producers at Criteria other than Tom Down their residents.
Speaker 2: Tom would come and go between New York and in Miami.
Speaker 1: So at what point, other than Steven did you start
Speaker 1: to get your own projects? And how did you do that?
Speaker 2: You know? There was the key was the front office
Speaker 2: and knowing the person who was taking the bookings, and
Speaker 2: so it would be kind of a daily checking in
Speaker 2: with Margie or it was Edith and what came in, Well,
Speaker 2: Cat Stevens just called in to do a day. Oh
Speaker 2: what is anybody assigned in it note, what could I
Speaker 2: do that I think I'm available? You know, that would
Speaker 2: be that kind of thing, and so Cat Stevens would
Speaker 2: come in, we'd spend the day mixing something that he had,
Speaker 2: So those kind of that would be it. Further on,
Speaker 2: you know, like I only had the opportunity of working
Speaker 2: with Tom Dowd directly one and that was on a
Speaker 2: Firefall record, and that was amazing. I mean, that's graduate
Speaker 2: level production. Doesn't get any better of, you know, watching
Speaker 2: somebody who really understands everything.
Speaker 1: So how did you go from moving the faders to
Speaker 1: being the producer?
Speaker 2: You know, there never really was one or the other
Speaker 2: until much later. Initially I knew that my engineering was
Speaker 2: going to be my ticket to the producing thing. Well,
Speaker 2: there's a whole section where I worked with the Beg's
Speaker 2: for about three years, and that probably is part of
Speaker 2: the transition, is that I worked with the production team
Speaker 2: of Alvi Gluten, Carle Richardson and Barry Gibb and we
Speaker 2: did the first thing I did with them was a
Speaker 2: Barbara Skreuisan record, and it was tied into them moving
Speaker 2: from doing their records at Criteria to building their own
Speaker 2: studio over in Miami. Beach. They hired me to help
Speaker 2: them build the studio. At the time, Criteria was starting
Speaker 2: to be in doldrums. I think it was probably seventy eight,
Speaker 2: maybe music business was tanking. All of the bands that
Speaker 2: had to come to Miami to record from the Eagles
Speaker 2: and Simsic and all that stuff was starting to dry up,
Speaker 2: And so I took the job and kind of went
Speaker 2: off the salary at Criteria and built their studio and
Speaker 2: then helped them make the striis In record, which was
Speaker 2: a continuation of their thing that they did with looping,
Speaker 2: with making tape machines, have tape running a circle, A
Speaker 2: lot of a lot of brainstorming kind of stuff, no costs,
Speaker 2: spared a lot of learning cases what not to do,
Speaker 2: because we eventually spent like a million dollars on a
Speaker 2: record of their own. We built drum machines that were
Speaker 2: actually drums that had arms that hit We used solenoids
Speaker 2: to hit the drums and then send claviers to trigger them,
Speaker 2: and we spent weeks. We had jeff Riccaro and Steve
Speaker 2: Gadd and Russ Kunkle come in for two weeks at
Speaker 2: a stretch and try and aim at a two beat
Speaker 2: loop on a twenty four track machine. Crazy stuff, you know. Anyhow,
Speaker 2: that was kind of what I did right before Mellencamp
Speaker 2: called and said, will you come and make a record
Speaker 2: with me? And that was when I started my transition
Speaker 2: to producing. He said, you can. You can co produce
Speaker 2: the record with me, but I want you to engineer.
Speaker 2: I want you to help me the people keep me
Speaker 2: from getting too crazy. Probably the reverse or which album
Speaker 2: was that American full Okay?
Speaker 1: Legendarily he presented it to Mercury and they said, this sucks,
Speaker 1: We're not going to put it out and he stood
Speaker 1: on his ground. What was the experience making the record?
Speaker 2: It was horrible, you know. I booked a new studio
Speaker 2: that we had just finished at Criteria for about three months.
Speaker 2: One summer he came in and rented a house. I
Speaker 2: had just finished working with the Beg's on a record
Speaker 2: that they released it. I think I told you they
Speaker 2: spent a year on it and sold forty thousand copies.
Speaker 2: It was a disaster, but I'd learned so much stuff
Speaker 2: about how to combine all these elements, and the lind
Speaker 2: drum machine was one of the things that we were
Speaker 2: playing around with. We had access to one of the
Speaker 2: first ones. And so during that summer I kept on
Speaker 2: saying to John, you know, it can't just be two
Speaker 2: guitars based and drums. We have to have some other
Speaker 2: stuff too. And I've learned all this stuff. I'm not
Speaker 2: saying it's right for you. And so we started experimenting,
Speaker 2: and this is what Jack and Diane came out of
Speaker 2: the use of the lind drum machine, and event we
Speaker 2: worked on that for the whole summer. It took forever
Speaker 2: to figure out how to I think Kenny was even
Speaker 2: on with you, and he described how long it took
Speaker 2: until he finally came up with a drum beat that
Speaker 2: was like, Goddess out of this adul drums of that,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like anyhow, the record was really hard John.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think he would admit this too, that
Speaker 2: he really didn't understand songwriting and arranging yet. And I
Speaker 2: wasn't very good at it either. I mean, my my,
Speaker 2: I didn't have one hundred songs that I knew how
Speaker 2: to play on an instrument, which I think is that's
Speaker 2: where good arranging and songwriting comes from. And so we struggled,
Speaker 2: you know, with a lot of things that weren't really
Speaker 2: that good, but we got Jack and Diane out of it,
Speaker 2: and we did finish it during that three months long
Speaker 2: short of it is, we handed it in and I
Speaker 2: think the comment was what happened to our Neil Diamond?
Speaker 2: What are you guys doing? And they wanted to drop him?
Speaker 2: Was the net net? There were a lot of conversations.
Speaker 2: I remember he was talking to Jimmy Ivan. I think
Speaker 2: Jimmy Ivan was like, I don't know that he was
Speaker 2: really trying to work his way in, but he was
Speaker 2: certainly somebody that was offering opinions. And fortunately Billy Gaff,
Speaker 2: who was John's manager and label, had enough faith in
Speaker 2: him to to keep on shopping. You started shopping it
Speaker 2: and we gave it a rest and then went back
Speaker 2: in the studio for another stint for a month, and
Speaker 2: by then he had paired up with a songwriter named
Speaker 2: George Green and written Hurt So Good and I think
Speaker 2: maybe two other songs, and we recorded four more songs
Speaker 2: and then finished the album, turned it in, still didn't
Speaker 2: like it, and it went through another couple of months
Speaker 2: of the label losing interest until had a promotion at
Speaker 2: the rock radio said I'm going to give this thing
Speaker 2: a try and see if it works, and he put
Speaker 2: it on radio in Pittsburgh, I think it was Pittsburgh.
Speaker 2: He put it on rock radio, maybe ten stations, and
Speaker 2: it reacted, so they put it on one hundred and
Speaker 2: the rest is what we see today.
Speaker 1: So how did that feel?
Speaker 2: Oh? Are you kidding? I was down to that we
Speaker 2: had borrowed money from so many people. They had given
Speaker 2: me fifteen thousand dollars for the co production, and I
Speaker 2: didn't have any other income. And this was like a
Speaker 2: two year process. We were like borrowing money from friends
Speaker 2: and my parents and my sister just to make the
Speaker 2: house payments. And it was it was amazing. And then
Speaker 2: the fear of how am I going to like not
Speaker 2: fuck this up? I remember that being Okay, we got
Speaker 2: this far, now what you know, how are we going
Speaker 2: to keep it going? You know?
Speaker 1: So what was the next step?
Speaker 2: Were you? Well, get out of debt? You know? I
Speaker 2: think I did a record with Michael Stanley, who there's
Speaker 2: a legendary Cleveland you know, Bruce Springsteen ish, wonderful man,
Speaker 2: wonderful man. I made a record with him, paid me well,
Speaker 2: the Balkans treated me well, they managed him, and that
Speaker 2: got us out of debt, and by then I think
Speaker 2: there was Alan Grubman was my attorney at the time,
Speaker 2: and he got me a good deal on the American
Speaker 2: Fool record, was a fair deal for co production, and
Speaker 2: it was just a matter of waiting for the money
Speaker 2: to come in, you know, And that kind of got
Speaker 2: us out of howk. The next move was really realizing
Speaker 2: that Miami wasn't going to be good for me anymore,
Speaker 2: that I needed to try and take advantage of some
Speaker 2: of this heat and see if I can maybe move
Speaker 2: to Los Angeles or New York and get some more work.
Speaker 2: So I thought Los Angeles. I was never that enamored
Speaker 2: with New York. It was not my kind of town.
Speaker 2: And so I moved out and knocked on doors for
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks and didn't get really didn't get
Speaker 2: my foot in the door, and I was at a
Speaker 2: loss and I didn't want to do and I thought,
Speaker 2: you know, who do I know that would maybe have
Speaker 2: an idea? And I was thinking, well, Bobby COLUMBI wasn't
Speaker 2: a close friend, but he was somebody that I toured
Speaker 2: with and he knew who I was, and so I
Speaker 2: managed to get his phone number and I called him
Speaker 2: up and Bobby was like, done, you need an agent,
Speaker 2: you need a manager. You can't You'll never get anywhere.
Speaker 2: And the guy you need is Bob Boziak. And yeah,
Speaker 2: he did me such a solid what a great guy. Anyhow,
Speaker 2: So I met Bob, and Bob took me on and
Speaker 2: told me to turn my beard up a little bit
Speaker 2: and sent me out on meetings and got me some
Speaker 2: work and bit by bit, but generally speaking, for the
Speaker 2: first few years, it was from one mel Camp record
Speaker 2: to the next that built my momentum.
Speaker 1: You're talking about we implying a significant other. When did
Speaker 1: you have time to even find a significant other?
Speaker 2: I met Grace, my wife currently, and then to my
Speaker 2: only wife in nineteen seventy eight, right around the time
Speaker 2: that I switched from Criteria to working with the Bechis,
Speaker 2: and we got married in seventy nine. And yeah, it's
Speaker 2: been forty five years.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you work on the next album, Pink Houses,
Speaker 1: which is also a success, and then the breakthrough of Scarecrow.
Speaker 1: You're doing all this with Mellencamp. Anything else going on
Speaker 1: of any significance other than Mellencamp, Well.
Speaker 2: It was I need a discography. Cock Robin. Probably that's
Speaker 2: one in there that I recall being in amongst the
Speaker 2: Mellencamp brack oh Arian that's the big one. Yeah, nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty maybe eighty four, Yes, it was. It might have
Speaker 2: been right after the Aha record, which was our second record,
Speaker 2: which we did in a shack which I built out
Speaker 2: of a mobile recording truck, and Arim was looking for
Speaker 2: a producer. They didn't like the idea of me. I
Speaker 2: was too mainstream, too known. They wanted somebody more esoteric. Probably. Anyhow,
Speaker 2: I had gotten the invite through one of John's guitar
Speaker 2: techs and he knew somebody there in Athens and got
Speaker 2: a meeting awkward, very very awkward situation. Ben was lovely,
Speaker 2: Michael Stipe was elusive, as always seems to be. Net
Speaker 2: was that they decided to try me out in a
Speaker 2: local studio. I went into a studio, did a demo
Speaker 2: with him, and they really liked it. And so I
Speaker 2: had just finished building a studio for John in Indiana
Speaker 2: from the ground up. It was like a real studio,
Speaker 2: and we decided to make the record there, which was
Speaker 2: a blast and probably one of the most revealing records
Speaker 2: of my career as far as style and how I produce.
Speaker 2: Learned so much from them.
Speaker 1: So how was the process these You know, Michael Stipe
Speaker 1: is a guy who's got a reputation for knowing what
Speaker 1: he wants and having it go that way.
Speaker 2: You know what we did was we did the tracks first,
Speaker 2: because Peter Buck, I think it probably would be the
Speaker 2: core songwriter of sorts. He came in with the core
Speaker 2: you know, this is what I've written, this verse, chorus,
Speaker 2: no words. Everybody kind of put parts together. They did
Speaker 2: it all in their own and so we recorded guitar
Speaker 2: based and drums, and then Michael would go off with
Speaker 2: that who knows where stay up all night and come
Speaker 2: in with words that were certainly evocative, but from my perspective, nonsensical.
Speaker 2: And this was this was the discussions that he and
Speaker 2: I would have because I was pushing for let's make
Speaker 2: a radio record, Let's make something that makes sense somewhat.
Speaker 2: You're always up a loud, have a great voice. Let's
Speaker 2: let's bring you forward into to record making. And you know,
Speaker 2: we had our arguments. He he didn't see a that way,
Speaker 2: and I began to see it his way, and I
Speaker 2: think he saw I think there was a middle that
Speaker 2: we both came to He for sure became comfortable with
Speaker 2: my idea of the balance being that I could make
Speaker 2: his voice sound consuming so that you didn't think about
Speaker 2: what he was saying. You thought about, Wow, what a
Speaker 2: great sound he makes with his He's got a great voice.
Speaker 2: And then we made the production just a little fuller
Speaker 2: and a little more esoteric because I had a pump organ,
Speaker 2: some unusual instruments that we had found that we that
Speaker 2: we would use, and Michael Mills, Mike Mills was like
Speaker 2: my partner in crime. He could play everything, and I'd say,
Speaker 2: what about if we had a part that came in here,
Speaker 2: can you do something, you know, maybe just to spend
Speaker 2: through here, you know. And so we colored our way
Speaker 2: through it, and then it was a blast, and really
Speaker 2: it really made me start to trust a not being
Speaker 2: in control.
Speaker 1: Okay, at what point do you become just a producer
Speaker 1: and you hire an engineer?
Speaker 2: Right around then, probably I think, oh, Jimmy Barnes and
Speaker 2: all the Melancamp records. We would hire extra engineers, like
Speaker 2: I would be doing the overdubs, I'd be running the
Speaker 2: tape machine, I'd be doing the editing. When it came
Speaker 2: to mixing, because we were doing everything manually. There'd be
Speaker 2: three sets of hands on the board. It would be
Speaker 2: that old style where we'd be rehearsing and editing and
Speaker 2: you know, working your way through. So I was never
Speaker 2: doing it by myself. There would always be Greg Edward
Speaker 2: was one of the engineers, God rest his soul. Ed Thacker.
Speaker 2: No attacker was on Barnes. Dave Dillner a great engineer.
Speaker 2: He did pink houses that era of records. So I
Speaker 2: always had somebody that was an engineer that I was
Speaker 2: producing per se in addition to engineering. And it wasn't
Speaker 2: until much later after I stopped working with Melan Camp
Speaker 2: that I started using engineers for a short period of time,
Speaker 2: mostly across the Jimmy Barnes records, which was Australian artist
Speaker 2: that I started working with and maybe eighty nine wonderful
Speaker 2: guy probably made four or five records with him.
Speaker 1: Okay, they're varying kinds of producers. They're producers who were engineers,
Speaker 1: have an engineer personality. It's more about getting ving in
Speaker 1: and then there are divas come up with their own
Speaker 1: ideas and are constantly battling where are you and how
Speaker 1: important is that you make the band happy, or you
Speaker 1: make yourself happy with the record.
Speaker 2: You know. I think that for me, I'm certainly not
Speaker 2: a songwriter. I don't have any songwriting credits, and I
Speaker 2: don't play a guitar enough to say play a C
Speaker 2: major at this moment. But I know all of the
Speaker 2: words about how to make someone who knows those things
Speaker 2: do what I want. I don't do well in situations
Speaker 2: that the song is not any good in the first place.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to come in and save the day
Speaker 2: fixing a song. I might be able to produce it
Speaker 2: better so that it fits, you know, but yeah, I
Speaker 2: need more to work with. I think the specialty for
Speaker 2: me has always been that I have enough of all
Speaker 2: the different bases that I can cover a week link
Speaker 2: if the band's good. So in some situations I might
Speaker 2: be more of a task master about the performance. You know.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe it's it's not tight enough for the grooves wrong.
Speaker 2: Another situation, it might be it needs a bridge. You
Speaker 2: guys need to go out there and write a bridge
Speaker 2: for this. So it's more about asking the questions. I
Speaker 2: think the other thing, it's even more important. Producers usually
Speaker 2: wind up in the position of picking the songs So
Speaker 2: if you're given a set of fifty songs, are you
Speaker 2: capable of picking the ones that are the right group
Speaker 2: of songs for the band? Which ones are the hits?
Speaker 2: And I'm not saying I've picked the hits over the years,
Speaker 2: because anything but the truth. But I've been near them,
Speaker 2: you know, and I was involved in making them before
Speaker 2: they became hits. But in almost all the cases, I
Speaker 2: you know, with Melanchamp with it's like, well, hurts so good,
Speaker 2: it's probably our hit. Well we hoped, you know, but
Speaker 2: I don't know. We thought hold my hand might be it. Two.
Speaker 1: Okay, So how important is it to maintain a good
Speaker 1: relationship with the act you're producing.
Speaker 2: I think it's very important. I think that if you don't,
Speaker 2: you don't have a I mean, you're going to argue.
Speaker 2: I'm not denying that that you can have an argument
Speaker 2: with somebody, but you I can't say that I've had
Speaker 2: success with situations where I'm not getting along with the artists.
Speaker 1: And to what degree does an artist's opinion of the
Speaker 1: experience in the project depend on commercial and critical success.
Speaker 2: Well, I would say that most of the people that
Speaker 2: I've worked with that's very important. I can't say, Ariam
Speaker 2: would probably want to be one of the few that
Speaker 2: would tell you, oh, I don't care. You know. Really
Speaker 2: they did want success. The more artsy people that I
Speaker 2: worked with, the record's never happened, you know, So I
Speaker 2: don't know. I think everybody's you know, in that world,
Speaker 2: and this is all we could get lost in this one,
Speaker 2: the whole thing about what happened. We can make records
Speaker 2: and you can give it to a great label. But
Speaker 2: I have so many stories. Whodi's one of them. Of
Speaker 2: they sign it on research. The research says this is
Speaker 2: something people like you make the record. It goes into
Speaker 2: the record company. The record company thinks that shit, they
Speaker 2: don't that. All of the politics that go on in
Speaker 2: the company do everything that's possible to drown the record.
Speaker 2: Finally somebody comes along who has power over the president
Speaker 2: that makes it peak through and now it's made its
Speaker 2: way to being visible. Now that's the one of the
Speaker 2: biggest records of all time. Hoody and the Blowfish Crack
Speaker 2: rear View, that was so close to not even seeing
Speaker 2: the light of day, so close they'd only invested seventy
Speaker 2: thousand dollars in it. They weren't like far along that
Speaker 2: happened to me quite a bit. Nearly happened with Mellencamp.
Speaker 1: Okay, you talk about the seventy thousand dollars. To what
Speaker 1: degree was it your responsibility to deal with the budget
Speaker 1: and make sure you're living within the lines.
Speaker 2: It's pretty much always. I mean now, I've even had
Speaker 2: money taken out of my back end because I went
Speaker 2: over not a lot, but I knew that that. You know,
Speaker 2: one of my first responsibilities was coming in under budget.
Speaker 2: And if I thought I needed more money, which sometimes
Speaker 2: I did, that you went back to them and got
Speaker 2: their approval before you spend it. But yeah, I would
Speaker 2: say that running a ship that's on course and under
Speaker 2: a budget I always thought was a big part of
Speaker 2: the job.
Speaker 1: Okay, you work with Bruce Hornsby's first album made his
Speaker 1: name as the Way It Is, et cetera. Second album
Speaker 1: not as successful. You did the third album, A Night
Speaker 1: on the Town, which is either the absolute best work
Speaker 1: he did or you know, you can compare it to
Speaker 1: the first album, phenomenal record. Can you tell me about
Speaker 1: making that record?
Speaker 2: Uh? What a great guy. I just saw him about
Speaker 2: six months ago, play up here in Oxnard, actually in Ventura.
Speaker 2: No OHI it was an OHI gig outdoors. It was amazing,
Speaker 2: A great, great guy what I mean, just so full
Speaker 2: of positive energy and friendly and just a magnet for musicians. Uh.
Speaker 2: You know, it was tricky. It was the first record
Speaker 2: that he had made, you know, using a band in
Speaker 2: the asked. He had always you know, used machines and
Speaker 2: his signature Juno piano kind of sound that kind of
Speaker 2: featured mostly drum machine and uh and piano in his voice.
Speaker 2: So he wanted to make a more band oriented thing.
Speaker 2: And I would say it was pleasant. He did not
Speaker 2: argue a lot. He was very positive. Uh. Probably the
Speaker 2: most difficulty we had was was in the mixing. He
Speaker 2: he turned into Bruce Springsteen and and and had just
Speaker 2: clear mountains told me his stories about Bruce once twenty
Speaker 2: mixes snare up, one dB, snare down, one dB based,
Speaker 2: drum up, one dB based down, one snare up. You
Speaker 2: know these take all these combinations home. We had a
Speaker 2: little bit of that getting the mixes to where he
Speaker 2: was happy, but that was the only thing that And
Speaker 2: there was all of the wonderful experiences of these friends
Speaker 2: that he had come in as guests, you know, Jerry Garcia, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you remember anything you might have told him to do.
Speaker 1: To what degree your he and prints are on the.
Speaker 2: Record, No, I mean I think that probably more than anything.
Speaker 2: But he came to me because of my talent with
Speaker 2: working with bands, which which is how to make a
Speaker 2: set up. You know that everybody can do. Any studio
Speaker 2: set up where the band gets to play together is
Speaker 2: that's a thing all of its own. And we did
Speaker 2: a lot of that at Criteria, a lot of that.
Speaker 2: That's one of my things that I missed so much today.
Speaker 2: You just don't hear that much of what happens when
Speaker 2: everybody's playing in the same room, go gos all around
Speaker 2: and leak each here and there, and looking at each
Speaker 2: other and changing arrangements on the spot. It's a different style.
Speaker 2: It creates a different kind of urgency.
Speaker 1: And what about the issue of leakage, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Well, you realize after you become a good mixer that,
Speaker 2: oh jeez, this guitar needs a little bit of a
Speaker 2: kind of an echo. And I don't want the kick
Speaker 2: drum to really be that dry. It sounds kind of lonely.
Speaker 2: And when you make us set up the right way,
Speaker 2: it's all built in. And when you go back to
Speaker 2: Tom Dowd's you know Leonyard Skannard, Almond Brothers, those two.
Speaker 2: I mean we used to say he wasn't that great
Speaker 2: of the mixer, but his ability to use leakage amongst
Speaker 2: the instruments and create a sound that's you know, we
Speaker 2: always say, if you can make a record that in
Speaker 2: the first beat we did with melanchapelot one snare drum band,
Speaker 2: you know what the song is and you know what
Speaker 2: the band is. And that was something that Tom could
Speaker 2: do where he created these signatures that were immediately wreckorzable,
Speaker 2: and a lot of that's leak each you know.
Speaker 1: Go a little bit deeper on the leakage for those
Speaker 1: people aren't sophisticated enough.
Speaker 2: Well, when you like, studio will be, which is where
Speaker 2: I think Layla was made. Minassis I did a Firefall
Speaker 2: record there. They it's a setup that's just one room
Speaker 2: and in the corner there's a booth that looks like
Speaker 2: a tiki bar that the drums go in and it's
Speaker 2: a dead little nothing, probably great for an R and
Speaker 2: B sound, really tight, and then there's a piano with
Speaker 2: a set of of baffles that go around it and
Speaker 2: blankets to go over it, and there's a place where
Speaker 2: you put the guitar. It's this like time tested way
Speaker 2: that you do a setup in this room. And then
Speaker 2: there's certain microphones that use that aren't really tight patterns.
Speaker 2: They pick up a little bit around them, and that's
Speaker 2: their joy is that they're that way. And when you
Speaker 2: put that room together in this configuration with these instruments,
Speaker 2: it makes a sound that sounds unified. It's the guitar
Speaker 2: mic picks a little bit of the snare and the
Speaker 2: high hat up the vocal mic in the room. Of course,
Speaker 2: that gets all kinds of stuff in it, and maybe
Speaker 2: you have to turn that off and overdub it.
Speaker 1: So how do you overdub if there's leakage?
Speaker 2: You can't, you know, you punch in. It depends, but
Speaker 2: generally speaking you have to be very careful. We would
Speaker 2: do things like punching the whole band, which is totally
Speaker 2: ridiculous if you don't have a click. But you know,
Speaker 2: we were doing crazy things in those days. That was
Speaker 2: part of the joy of experimenting at Criteria.
Speaker 1: So tell me about mixing. What's the key to mixing?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it comes for me. It comes from
Speaker 2: this place of painted with air again, so you're realizing,
Speaker 2: you know, there's the issue of the monitors, right. So
Speaker 2: everybody's got their pair of monitors that they kind of
Speaker 2: trust that this is what's going to get you out
Speaker 2: the door and sounded good in the car. So working
Speaker 2: from the back to the front, you need a pair
Speaker 2: of monitors that you understand in an acoustic situation. Then
Speaker 2: the next problem is you're taking something that is one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty decibels loud, hugely loud, and you're reducing
Speaker 2: it so that it sounds that loud when you play
Speaker 2: it in these little air pods, which you know don't
Speaker 2: reproduce any kind of dynamic range. That process of squeezing
Speaker 2: it down taking their dynamic range away so that now
Speaker 2: you can put all of those little tiny elements that
Speaker 2: sound big together.
Speaker 1: It's a.
Speaker 2: Lot of trial and error. I think that I listened
Speaker 2: to Chrys Lord Algy he did a podcast on the
Speaker 2: other day, and and you know, and I admire him
Speaker 2: so much. He's mixed some records for me, and he's amazing,
Speaker 2: and he has developed a way that he channels all
Speaker 2: this stuff in like I'm describing, he reduces it down
Speaker 2: to a certain number of things that he's going to
Speaker 2: look at. He pre mixes sections and gets it so
Speaker 2: it's manageable. Then he goes into his last set of
Speaker 2: things that he knows what they do to get them
Speaker 2: down so they fit together. And that's what I would do,
Speaker 2: but I would have to do a different kind of
Speaker 2: that thing for each project in order that it would
Speaker 2: sound totally different. And this would be where I would
Speaker 2: say to Melichamp, let's have Clear Mountain do this mix.
Speaker 2: Why are we just fooling around in our little studio
Speaker 2: here in Indiana when we could throw it out to
Speaker 2: I don't want it to sound like everybody else's record done.
Speaker 2: I don't like those SSL boards. They sound crappy. It's
Speaker 2: got to be more open than that. You know. It's
Speaker 2: like this is a where you get into the what
Speaker 2: makes horse races.
Speaker 1: And what is Clear Mountains magic.
Speaker 2: It's very similar to, I think, to what Chris talks about.
Speaker 2: It's this saying to your client. You know, he sees
Speaker 2: a song every day it comes in and he looks
Speaker 2: at it and says, these are the parts that I
Speaker 2: think are significant, and these are less, and let me
Speaker 2: squeeze this down to a manageable form. And then he
Speaker 2: runs it through I think very similar colorations, compressors limit
Speaker 2: or's echo so that he gets because the low end
Speaker 2: is kind of what regulates your whole record. If you
Speaker 2: can get your basin, bass drum centered so they're taking
Speaker 2: up the right amount of space, everything else follows. And
Speaker 2: that's the hard part, and that's where both of those
Speaker 2: guys are really good at it.
Speaker 1: So let's say you hire a third party mixer. Do
Speaker 1: you give him any instruction or just say here's the tapes,
Speaker 1: go at it.
Speaker 2: I've done both. As hard for me as a producer
Speaker 2: to say, go at it. I got to say that
Speaker 2: generally speaking, I know what I think are the elements
Speaker 2: that should be featured. And if I ran into this
Speaker 2: with Tom Lord aunt you on a record that I
Speaker 2: was making for MCA, and I think he was right,
Speaker 2: But you know, my view of it was, you know,
Speaker 2: all these things that I thought needed to be featured
Speaker 2: at certain moments, and he was like, this is all
Speaker 2: this is not important. You're missing it. So maybe I
Speaker 2: was too close.
Speaker 1: So how do you decide whether to mix it yourself
Speaker 1: or to give it to someone else.
Speaker 2: Usually that's somebody else's decision. I had a label at
Speaker 2: MCA for five years, and you know, I could make
Speaker 2: my own decisions there for those things. But generally speaking,
Speaker 2: when you're in in co ownership like I was with mcaight,
Speaker 2: you have a lot of people that are weighing in.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's part of the problem, is the communal aspect
Speaker 2: of of the way a lot of those things used
Speaker 2: to work. Especially I saw less of that if you
Speaker 2: worked for Warner Brothers or or or even Atlantic.
Speaker 1: So okay, we've been through so many evolutions recording equipment.
Speaker 1: You know, when you're mixing, to what degree are you
Speaker 1: using outboard equipment outboard effects, Well.
Speaker 2: You know, it depends on the era, right when you know,
Speaker 2: when I started mixing, say in nineteen eighty eighty two
Speaker 2: American full we were using you know, a Trient console,
Speaker 2: a big a range triedent antique console and all kinds
Speaker 2: of fair childs in eleven seventy six compressors and everything
Speaker 2: had had stuff on it. There was nothing that was flat,
Speaker 2: and generally there'd be API equalizers on this thing, and
Speaker 2: then there'd be a knave on that one, and you
Speaker 2: know a lot of cross polonization to get a certain
Speaker 2: kind of tone. That all became much easier as it
Speaker 2: turned into good digital. Now, good digital for me didn't
Speaker 2: happen until probably around maybe twenty ten eight, whenever Chris
Speaker 2: started putting out his own plugins. It started to make
Speaker 2: more sense. Before that, Waves had some stuff that was good.
Speaker 2: But I think when you finally had engineers weighing in
Speaker 2: with this is the right thing that I do, that
Speaker 2: it really got rich. It got juicy. Before that, I
Speaker 2: started my first pro tool system I had in two thousand.
Speaker 2: I bought because I had a daughter, and two thousand
Speaker 2: and I knew that I didn't want to spend a
Speaker 2: lot of time in the studio and I want to
Speaker 2: be able to shut a mix down after four hours
Speaker 2: and go home, And so I bought a pro tool system.
Speaker 2: And that didn't work that well. It was okay, but
Speaker 2: the early systems were kind of thin. So but now
Speaker 2: you know, you look at what the power of the
Speaker 2: modern mixing board is amazing. How hard I used to
Speaker 2: work to get a simple explosive snare sound. You can
Speaker 2: probably do it in thirty seconds with what's available today.
Speaker 2: Before it's taking me a couple of hours to set
Speaker 2: it up.
Speaker 1: And why is that?
Speaker 2: Because you're dealing with stuff that really isn't that powerful.
Speaker 2: You know, it's you're lucky if you can get ten
Speaker 2: dB of compression out of an analog compression compressor, and
Speaker 2: maybe the release time is slow enough that it doesn't
Speaker 2: make something explode. You want something that opens up a
Speaker 2: certain way. And all this stuff's immediately available with the
Speaker 2: digital stuff because you just go in and you crank
Speaker 2: in how deep you want to go and how fast
Speaker 2: you want it to let go. And that's just one example.
Speaker 2: Let alone the echo that you might put put a
Speaker 2: gate on it, that well, let's just make it a
Speaker 2: little longer, a little shorter, a little brighter before it
Speaker 2: would be all look go short in the plate. We
Speaker 2: would do it with EMT plates and now let's put
Speaker 2: some gates on it. But well, jeez, the gates aren't
Speaker 2: releasing right, and you know it would just be badly.
Speaker 1: And to what degree are you equipment agnostic or you
Speaker 1: want to work on a specific board.
Speaker 2: Well, now you know, if I was going to I
Speaker 2: don't do any of this anymore. So, but today, if
Speaker 2: I was going to mix a record, I would just
Speaker 2: have a PROTOL system. I would. It would be no board.
Speaker 2: It's just that's all I would want the stuff that's available.
Speaker 2: I mean, I still hear people talking about running it
Speaker 2: back through some analogus something or other that they think
Speaker 2: that makes a different sight. I don't think I believe
Speaker 2: in that somebody else can run it through.
Speaker 1: Tell me more about not doing this anymore.
Speaker 2: See what I'm seventy four, Well I will be the
Speaker 2: day after tomorrow, and happy birthday, Thank you. I would
Speaker 2: say that. You know, this has been a process since
Speaker 2: about twenty fourteen of just slowing down. Well, my wife
Speaker 2: and I didn't have children for a long time. We
Speaker 2: both were enjoying just the two of us, and up
Speaker 2: until nineteen ninety six, until after Hoodie's first big record,
Speaker 2: we didn't have any children. And then, you know, obviously,
Speaker 2: you know, I think some of it was the fact
Speaker 2: that we didn't really care about having children. Then there
Speaker 2: was also the biological clock, oh, if we're going to
Speaker 2: do it, we better do it. And there was also
Speaker 2: that oh my god, we just got to check for
Speaker 2: wow from the Hoodie record, and it was kind of like, well,
Speaker 2: what are you going to do with your life now?
Speaker 2: You know, now that you have some financial security which
Speaker 2: we had never had before. We lived well and we
Speaker 2: always saved a lot because we knew that a year
Speaker 2: from now it could be all gone. And that's the
Speaker 2: way we lived. Then we decided to have kids.
Speaker 1: We had.
Speaker 2: We have a son who's twenty eight and or will
Speaker 2: be in a week, two weeks, and a daughter who's
Speaker 2: twenty four. They're both out of school. And so I
Speaker 2: think that what happened to me was the process of
Speaker 2: making records, which is tedious and if you really want
Speaker 2: to do it, well, it's pretty all consuming. It's not
Speaker 2: something you just casually do. I grew tired of it,
Speaker 2: you know, making vocal comps. It's hard, and it just
Speaker 2: you know, I think I just ran my course with it.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying I would never do it again if
Speaker 2: somebody came along. That was, you know, something that really
Speaker 2: lit me up that I wouldn't go in the studio
Speaker 2: for a couple of weeks or a month, you know.
Speaker 2: But right now, between the climate of what you make
Speaker 2: being a record producer, which is pretty negligible, you know,
Speaker 2: it's all streaming based and there's not much money.
Speaker 1: In it, how hard was it to let go? Very hard?
Speaker 1: Very hard.
Speaker 2: I would say that it probably has been ten years
Speaker 2: of of trying to find other things that I find
Speaker 2: enjoyable and meaningful. Yeah, that kind of that's been the
Speaker 2: replacing it because I'm an active person. I I like
Speaker 2: doing all of stuff. We've bought a second home here
Speaker 2: in Channel Islands and we have a beautiful place to be.
Speaker 2: It's where I'm at today and I enjoy There's a
Speaker 2: whole different kind of world. But I never We used
Speaker 2: to have boats when we lived in Miami. I had
Speaker 2: a three bedroom home on a canal with a sailboat.
Speaker 2: And part of the criteria reality was my wife and
Speaker 2: I going out in are little inflatable zodiac and water
Speaker 2: skiing in the inner coastal before I went into the studio.
Speaker 2: That was you know, we loved that, and so that's
Speaker 2: coming back. We just bought a powerboat. We went out
Speaker 2: to Santa Cruz Island yesterday and with ten other boats,
Speaker 2: had a great time. Some findy other things that I
Speaker 2: enjoys challenging because I was never this kind of a
Speaker 2: boating person, so I don't know much about navigation, fixing things.
Speaker 2: I'm a fix it guy. I know a lot about
Speaker 2: all kinds of handyman stuff. So taking care of the
Speaker 2: boat's interesting.
Speaker 1: To what degree letting go was because the generations change
Speaker 1: and there's not as many opportunities for work.
Speaker 2: I think he nailed it. That's totally it. Nobody was
Speaker 2: calling me up, you know, somebody, somebody that I might like.
Speaker 2: I'd say, well, i'll give you a hand, and they
Speaker 2: might give me, you know, a thousand dollars to do
Speaker 2: a sount a song, and I'd spend a couple of
Speaker 2: days on it, and it wouldn't be about the money.
Speaker 2: It would just be about, well, I like the guy,
Speaker 2: and I thought he needed a leg up. You know,
Speaker 2: I'll see if I can help. I did that quite
Speaker 2: a bit over the last few years, and.
Speaker 1: That was okay.
Speaker 2: You know I think that. I mean, I almost hate
Speaker 2: to say this. I love music. I love making music.
Speaker 2: I love being a part of hit records, and I
Speaker 2: love getting the paycheck. And I think all of that
Speaker 2: is hard to come by today. It's every every one
Speaker 2: of those things is hard to get at now. It's good.
Speaker 2: Did what you talk about all the time in your
Speaker 2: when you write about how what you have to do
Speaker 2: in order to make it through. It's it's everyone has
Speaker 2: the ability to get themselves out there along with two
Speaker 2: million other people and to get through it all, and
Speaker 2: I don't know what the solution is. Part of me
Speaker 2: thinks sometimes that we need more curating of people that
Speaker 2: we respect, and I don't know who that person is.
Speaker 2: You know, my daughter's good at it. She comes to
Speaker 2: me with the list of things that Wow, where did
Speaker 2: you find this person? You know, I mean a couple
Speaker 2: of years ago, she came there with this artist, King Princess,
Speaker 2: who was like, Wow, this is amazing. Why isn't this
Speaker 2: person huge? You know, she's a great writer, a great singer,
Speaker 2: a sound that's totally unique, and she does okay. You know,
Speaker 2: but I would have thought that would have been anyhow,
Speaker 2: But that world is a little different.
Speaker 1: Right now, Let's go back to the technology for minutes,
Speaker 1: taking blog versus digital and vinyl. What are your thoughts
Speaker 1: about all those?
Speaker 2: Well? As a producer, recording engineer, I hate vinyl. Vinyl
Speaker 2: is a nightmare. If you're trying to make a vinyl
Speaker 2: record and have it represent anything close to what you mixed,
Speaker 2: you should just lower your standards because the pressing process
Speaker 2: makes it into an entirely different animal. Now, a lot
Speaker 2: of people like the way that animal sounds. But you know,
Speaker 2: when we got out of the the analog thing. I
Speaker 2: love the way analog records sound. I love old equipment
Speaker 2: that and I love new equipment that's made with all
Speaker 2: the things that I understand about. Maybe we're going to
Speaker 2: talk for a second about the fact that transformers create
Speaker 2: a distorted waveform. It will make a square wave into
Speaker 2: something that looks like a bunch of wiggles. And that
Speaker 2: wiggle is the sound that we all love. And so
Speaker 2: analog is a wonderful thing. It colors and worms. If
Speaker 2: it's what you want or what you need right now,
Speaker 2: I think you should use that stuff along the way.
Speaker 2: New digital stuff does that just as well. It emulates it.
Speaker 2: They've figured out these equations. Now as far as going
Speaker 2: back to tape, give me a break, is that's a wink.
Speaker 2: It's I'm not hearing the difference. So my my hearing
Speaker 2: is not the greatest, but it's good enough to get
Speaker 2: me by, you know. And and I think that better
Speaker 2: better to use that on good microphones, good compressors. If
Speaker 2: you want to use all your analog gear when you record,
Speaker 2: that's great, record it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, let's go back to a couple of records.
Speaker 1: Tracy Chapman has huge success with the first album Fast Car.
Speaker 1: Then does not have success, even worked with Jimmie I
Speaker 1: Leven doesn't have success. Then she worked with you and
Speaker 1: has the biggest record of her career. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2: She's a doll. It was, you know, it was. It
Speaker 2: was a wonderful experience. I gotta say, we did it
Speaker 2: in San Francisco, or not in San Francisco. What's the name.
Speaker 2: It's up near Lucas Ranch out in the woods there.
Speaker 2: I don't remember the studio's name, but old big Neve console.
Speaker 2: She liked recording digitally, so it was a Missubishi thirty
Speaker 2: two track. I think it was the first time I'd
Speaker 2: ever used that particular machine. And that made sense because
Speaker 2: a lot of her material is very quiet. There needed space,
Speaker 2: it needed depth to not be occupied by his or
Speaker 2: tape noise, and so that was okay. She also, like Hornsby,
Speaker 2: wanted to make a record with a band, and in
Speaker 2: the past she had used a band that played after
Speaker 2: she recorded. She like they would like Fast Car was.
Speaker 2: She she played it alone and then Danny Farnkheiser would
Speaker 2: go in and he played the drums to it, and
Speaker 2: then everybody would follow him. And that's the way she
Speaker 2: made her records because she I think was probably not
Speaker 2: comfortable playing with other people. That confused her. I think
Speaker 2: that her being on the road by the time I
Speaker 2: started working with her, she was very comfortable working with
Speaker 2: playing with people. And she had come up with this
Speaker 2: set of material with a band that they were friends.
Speaker 2: It was a unit, you know. So that was really
Speaker 2: nice because she she basically came in with something that
Speaker 2: I recorded live, and we kept a lot of it live.
Speaker 2: She was picky, but not unduly, you know. There were
Speaker 2: ideas that I would put forth about, you know, how
Speaker 2: we might record her voice and her guitar together. Because
Speaker 2: we did a lot of it and kept everything. We
Speaker 2: didn't overdone many guitar vocals, as I recall, so a
Speaker 2: lot of it was built around whether or not we
Speaker 2: liked the vocal and the guitar performance, and a mixing
Speaker 2: process got a little trickier. And there was this one
Speaker 2: song called The Promise that was just her playing acoustic guitar,
Speaker 2: that amazing song that she I don't know, I never
Speaker 2: really did understand exactly what she was looking for. I
Speaker 2: think that probably that was okay, but we played it
Speaker 2: every day for I'm going to say at least a month.
Speaker 2: While we were mixing, it would be the end of
Speaker 2: the day, Okay, let's do a couple of takes to
Speaker 2: the promise, and then she'd come in the next day
Speaker 2: and it was long. It was like a six minute song,
Speaker 2: and she would come in the next day and say, no,
Speaker 2: that's not it, We'll have to do it again. And
Speaker 2: that went on for quite a while. Eventually, she uh,
Speaker 2: after about I don't know, maybe one hundred takes, she
Speaker 2: found something that she liked and we dressed it up
Speaker 2: with violin and cello and a few other things. Beautiful song.
Speaker 1: Though you have any idea that the album and give
Speaker 1: me one reason we're going to be so huge?
Speaker 2: None? And the thing was that, you know, everybody was, well,
Speaker 2: we don't have a single, and because all the songs
Speaker 2: were you know, five, six, seven, eight minutes long, and
Speaker 2: she would not editing was not in the thing in
Speaker 2: the equation, and she said, you guys will figure it out. Well,
Speaker 2: I think give me one reason. Was three minutes and
Speaker 2: forty five seconds was the only song on the record
Speaker 2: that was short enough. And so the record company kind
Speaker 2: of threw their arms up and said, well, let's just
Speaker 2: put this one out because it's the only one that's
Speaker 2: shortened for radio, and she won't let us edit anything else.
Speaker 2: There were a couple other songs that they liked, but
Speaker 2: she wouldn't, so anyhow, they put it out and it was,
Speaker 2: as I recall it, it made a tour of the formats.
Speaker 2: It might have whatever it was at Triple A and
Speaker 2: then adult and then pop I think it was, or
Speaker 2: maybe college, Triple A adult pop. It went through like
Speaker 2: four different formats that each one of them lasted probably
Speaker 2: three or four months while it worked its way up
Speaker 2: the chart. Then it would go to this one and
Speaker 2: so over a year it had a year of on
Speaker 2: the charts, And I think that's what what did it?
Speaker 2: It just it just bit by a bit opened up
Speaker 2: another section.
Speaker 1: Now she did not use you on the next album.
Speaker 1: What's it like to have so much success in someone?
Speaker 1: The same thing with Hornsby, although he didn't use a band,
Speaker 1: it was a solo record. Thereafter, what's it like for
Speaker 1: them to say, great, we had used success and then
Speaker 1: they don't call you.
Speaker 2: M I what I was doing? You know? I don't know.
Speaker 2: You know, it's funny because Bruce just mentioned that when
Speaker 2: I saw him recently that he says because he built
Speaker 2: a studio. I think maybe that's part of the answer
Speaker 2: for him. Was after the record that we did, they
Speaker 2: bought this place in Williamsburg in Virginia where he lives now,
Speaker 2: and a large property, and he built a studio. And
Speaker 2: I remember looking at the plans for the studio and
Speaker 2: he hadn't put any kind of a window in between
Speaker 2: the control room and and the recording space. And I
Speaker 2: looked at him and said, you need a window something
Speaker 2: so that you can at least, you know, point at
Speaker 2: somebody to give a cue something. Put a window in
Speaker 2: And he said to me just the other day, he says,
Speaker 2: we have the don game and window. And It's like,
Speaker 2: what do you mean? You know, what are you talking about?
Speaker 2: So he says, we think of you every time that
Speaker 2: we go through that window. You're right, And he said
Speaker 2: I would have used you if it hadn't been for
Speaker 2: the fact. And I forget what the reason was, but
Speaker 2: he kind of apologized for it, not continuing. I don't know,
Speaker 2: I'm a little I'm not sure what I was doing
Speaker 2: at that time. It could have been the whole ninety
Speaker 2: four to six. There were Hoody records in there there
Speaker 2: was me looking for a label deal with Jeff Aldridge
Speaker 2: and Larry Frasen, and I had this thing in my
Speaker 2: head because my my manager at the time. It'll come
Speaker 2: back in a second, Sandy robertson, Yeah, you know, there
Speaker 2: were there were all of these things that I was
Speaker 2: furthering my career or whatever, you know. To who knows,
Speaker 2: it does seem odd. But I know that Tracy was
Speaker 2: upset with me because after the big success with I
Speaker 2: don't think she would mind me sharing this because it
Speaker 2: was a shortcoming on my part. There was an edit
Speaker 2: that was on one of the other songs that they
Speaker 2: thought they could make it work, and she wanted to
Speaker 2: use this new pro Tools system that let you turn
Speaker 2: off the edit things horizontally, which is what we all
Speaker 2: do all over the place. Now, you know, keep the
Speaker 2: drums here, but take the guitar from the first verse.
Speaker 2: She wanted to be able to do that, and I
Speaker 2: didn't know that this was Kate. I thought it was
Speaker 2: just an editing thing, like normal editing, but digital. And
Speaker 2: when I came in too, I've done. She was not
Speaker 2: happy with the fact that I was not up to
Speaker 2: speed on the technology that she wanted to use and
Speaker 2: that might have might have colored the future.
Speaker 1: So tell us about whody.
Speaker 2: Well. Hoody is probably the happiest experience I've ever had,
Speaker 2: and it was at a time in my career where
Speaker 2: things were a little dark. You know. This would have
Speaker 2: been ninety four and Sandy Robertson was a manager i'd
Speaker 2: just started working with. My career had kind of sunk off.
Speaker 2: I'd done quite a few records in Australia that did well,
Speaker 2: was making some money, but people weren't asking me to produce,
Speaker 2: and you know, it was like the prices were coming down,
Speaker 2: and so he thought I should try and do something
Speaker 2: more like a Green Day kind of a project. And
Speaker 2: it was mad Abrially. I appeared, which label he was
Speaker 2: at at the time, had an act from Massachusetts called
Speaker 2: The Fix or No the Figs, and they were very punky,
Speaker 2: and so I thought, well, you know, it's good, the
Speaker 2: good songs, and everybody was very excited about them. And
Speaker 2: at the same time, Tim Summer, who was working at
Speaker 2: Atlantic at ann Or at the time, came to me
Speaker 2: with some demos that hood he had done. Actually it
Speaker 2: was a cassette that they were distributing on the road,
Speaker 2: and I heard it. I thought, Yo, this is good,
Speaker 2: but it's kind of like what I've been doing, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not I'm not sure if this is where we're
Speaker 2: going or not. I was kind of okay, I'll do it.
Speaker 2: I can't afford to say no to anything, really, but
Speaker 2: I want to do this other thing first. So I
Speaker 2: met with the band and Lovely People and we said
Speaker 2: just let's do it. And I made the record with
Speaker 2: the other band, which was my focus at the time,
Speaker 2: that sold like two thousand copies, and then went into
Speaker 2: the studio with Hoodie and it was a little discouraging.
Speaker 2: The label gave me fifty thousand dollars to make the
Speaker 2: record and then I think I got twenty. It was
Speaker 2: pretty tight, you know, I budgeted out it was time
Speaker 2: for like maybe eighteen days in the studio, including the mixing,
Speaker 2: so I had ten days to cut the tracks and
Speaker 2: overdub and maybe a week to mix. And so we
Speaker 2: went in and and they were yes on whatever you
Speaker 2: want us to do. You know, we're a little can
Speaker 2: you work something out because the NBA is playing this
Speaker 2: afternoon between two and five, And then we got a
Speaker 2: golf tournament that Darius really wants because you schedule around
Speaker 2: that just a little bit, okay, but if you need us,
Speaker 2: we'll come in, don't worry about. And then Darius would
Speaker 2: be on the golf course at you know, six o'clock
Speaker 2: in the morning and show up at eleven like he
Speaker 2: was supposed to. It was this kind of thing where
Speaker 2: they had other things that were also important in their lives.
Speaker 2: It was like a real view onto somebody that loved
Speaker 2: what they do. We're good at it, but they weren't consumed,
Speaker 2: you know, and that was good for me. And also
Speaker 2: they just let me do whatever I wanted. They listened
Speaker 2: to everything I would. They would do a take, I'd say, no,
Speaker 2: that would that was my thing at the time. I
Speaker 2: pushed the talk back. No, that meant do it again.
Speaker 2: And Darius was just becoming the singer that we all
Speaker 2: hear today, which is phenomenal. Is such he's got such
Speaker 2: a rich voice, and he still hadn't quite zoned in
Speaker 2: on where his pitch was and timing, but he was
Speaker 2: a quick learn and yeah, we did very fast. It
Speaker 2: was floated that wow, it wouldn't it be nice we
Speaker 2: get David Crosby to come and sing on the record.
Speaker 2: And I don't know who called him. It was one
Speaker 2: of the dreams of but I didn't even have to
Speaker 2: do it. It was so somebody from Atlantic called him
Speaker 2: up and Don Gamon's doing a record with a band.
Speaker 2: Would you come in and sing for Don Gamon? I'll
Speaker 2: do anything. And he came in, spent you know, three hours,
Speaker 2: told the band's stories and and gave him a bunch
Speaker 2: of advice, and sang on their first single you know,
Speaker 2: and you can hear Amy's right in there. It would
Speaker 2: not be the same without Uh. Yeah. It was a blast.
Speaker 2: And then of course the whole thing, like I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: with we handed the record in and I wasn't sure
Speaker 2: about it. It was like such a such a departure
Speaker 2: from what I thought a cool thing would be for
Speaker 2: this moment in time, and I didn't have a lot
Speaker 2: of faith in it until I finished it, mastered it,
Speaker 2: took it home and I was doing a project with
Speaker 2: my wife. She's a interior designer, and she was having
Speaker 2: me build a model of a house. And I'm good
Speaker 2: at that kind of stuff. So I'm building a model
Speaker 2: and playing the reference acitate on the thing, and she said, well,
Speaker 2: this is pretty good, and I said, I'm surprised at
Speaker 2: That was the first moment that I realized that the
Speaker 2: record had legs. And then we handed it in and
Speaker 2: I'm starting to hear these horror stories about how because
Speaker 2: the politics, well, in all record labels, but Atlantic, you
Speaker 2: have these little you know, on clubs and this guy's
Speaker 2: got four heavy metal records, and this one's got this
Speaker 2: and this R and B section, Andrea is the only
Speaker 2: one that says which ones get through? And and it
Speaker 2: was like, are we going to get through? And Danny
Speaker 2: Goldberg was the president at the time, and it wasn't
Speaker 2: for his wife. It was Mary Carrol, thank you, who said,
Speaker 2: you've got to take care of my buddy, Timothy. This
Speaker 2: is his band. Don't let it, don't let it slip
Speaker 2: through the cracks. And then Doug Mars picked it up.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, okay, you have this gigantic success. What's it
Speaker 1: like trying to follow that up?
Speaker 2: Oh it's horrible. Yeah, I mean then we're you know,
Speaker 2: because this went on for at least two years. Of
Speaker 2: the process of selling the first ten million units and
Speaker 2: four singles, it was at least two years. And the
Speaker 2: band was ragged, you know this it was this was sad,
Speaker 2: you know, they were they were not what they were
Speaker 2: at the place that happens to everybody where you have
Speaker 2: to you know, seven o'clock radio performances every city, and
Speaker 2: then you know, just worn out. And then okay, we
Speaker 2: got to go back in the studio and make another record.
Speaker 2: And what made the first record was probably five years
Speaker 2: of the band touring the mid Atlantic States, doing bars
Speaker 2: and writing songs together in a band. And then they
Speaker 2: wrote nothing for two years, and so we wound up
Speaker 2: with a bunch of songs that didn't mean much. You know,
Speaker 2: they were and you know, and everybody was mad at
Speaker 2: each other, tired of each other. Darius was starting to
Speaker 2: feel I think, I don't know, I shouldn't speak for him,
Speaker 2: but I know that it was difficult for him as
Speaker 2: a black man, you know, with three white guys that
Speaker 2: it had it. He had his issues with that that
Speaker 2: he was working through. And so making the second record,
Speaker 2: we made a great SOUNDI record, but the only song
Speaker 2: that that sounded strong was something that had been written
Speaker 2: for the first record. And and then then the question was, well,
Speaker 2: do we put a record out now and keep on
Speaker 2: with the momentum or is this where you give it
Speaker 2: a rest? And yeah, I don't I don't know that.
Speaker 2: I don't know what happened. Happened? Do you know this
Speaker 2: old three million units? It's like still did you know? Well?
Speaker 2: But it's I don't know that we ever attained that
Speaker 2: same kind of thing that and I don't know the
Speaker 2: way I ever would have because what was wrong was
Speaker 2: this writing thing, you know, where the four guys they
Speaker 2: needed a year off from each other going out this summer,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you make a deal to make a record,
Speaker 1: let's say, with Tracy Chapman or Bruce Hornsbers, and they
Speaker 1: want to be co producer. How do you split up
Speaker 1: the points?
Speaker 2: Well, that's Sandy's job, you know.
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask it differently. Does the act want
Speaker 1: its name as co producer for vanity or for the money?
Speaker 2: Oh vanity? You know, I think that you know this.
Speaker 2: It's a touchy subject for me. You know, I'm a
Speaker 2: record producer by trade. I'm not a songwriter. I'm not
Speaker 2: asking for a piece of the song, even though I
Speaker 2: was there and maybe suggested that the melody of the
Speaker 2: bridge could have been different. You know. I see in
Speaker 2: Nashville people get songwriting credits for ridiculously little contribution the
Speaker 2: But I never felt that way. I felt like, I'm
Speaker 2: a record producer. It's a tough job. I'm holding down
Speaker 2: the fort and we finish our work. Why do you
Speaker 2: have to have a credit? Which part of this? Okay,
Speaker 2: so you're a big name, you've already had a hit.
Speaker 2: You think I'm writing on your coattails? All right? So
Speaker 2: whose name's first mine? I'll give you a point, you know,
Speaker 2: but maybe it's a five point deal. I don't know,
Speaker 2: you know it's and where are we at now? I
Speaker 2: don't even know what this today? This is like a
Speaker 2: what is this conversation? It's like a it doesn't mean
Speaker 2: anything anymore. I don't know how you divvy up what
Speaker 2: is there today? But you know, generally, I had gotten
Speaker 2: to a point after Mellencamp where those were all co
Speaker 2: productions and they were split or less. And that was
Speaker 2: just because that's where he was at. It's like, you
Speaker 2: want to work with me, this is what you get.
Speaker 2: There was no negotiating. Later on, as I had more
Speaker 2: success on on my own, I would get, you know,
Speaker 2: normal three point deals that might accelerate at a certain point,
Speaker 2: or that kind of thing. And I got to say
Speaker 2: that most people, when when faced with this whole thing.
Speaker 2: They understand. Maybe they want their name underneath. They're happy
Speaker 2: with their name underneath, but it's not about them taking money.
Speaker 2: It's I don't know.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to Mellencamp for a second. What kind
Speaker 1: of relationship do you have with Mellencamp today? If any, none,
Speaker 1: don't have any.
Speaker 2: I'm sad about that. You know, we we found our
Speaker 2: ups and downs. Certainly grateful for you know, all that
Speaker 2: he's done for my career, and I'm sure he's grateful.
Speaker 2: I do believe he's grateful for all that I've added
Speaker 2: to his. So I don't feel like there's any any
Speaker 2: you know, anger between. We've had moments that there was,
Speaker 2: and we've resolved them. And I mixed a record for
Speaker 2: him in nineteen ninety well, boy, I don't remember. That
Speaker 2: was two thousand and one, and we had a good
Speaker 2: time together. My wife has decorated homes for him. We
Speaker 2: were friends with his with all of his wives, So yeah,
Speaker 2: there was a lot of closeness. But over the last jeez,
Speaker 2: probably twenty years now, we haven't been in contact.
Speaker 1: Do you still own your royalties? Yeah? Would you ever
Speaker 1: sell them? No, because.
Speaker 2: It's well, I just don't think it's a good business decision.
Speaker 2: I have children, not that you know, they have to
Speaker 2: have money, but you know, I'm just so blessed over
Speaker 2: the years I've I've managed to between you know, Hoody
Speaker 2: and Tracy and Mellencamp and Ram all the they're all
Speaker 2: they're all acts that have fan bases today. They're they're
Speaker 2: all acts that that if they play locally again, people
Speaker 2: will come see them. They're on people's playlists. They play
Speaker 2: those songs every day, and I make money off of
Speaker 2: it every three months, and it's it's amazing, you know.
Speaker 2: But I looked at it and I hear how people
Speaker 2: are so upset with the Spotify and how tiny the
Speaker 2: royalties are. But nobody thinks about the fact that building
Speaker 2: a fan base of people that are on a playlist
Speaker 2: takes a long long time. It's twenty thirty forty years
Speaker 2: of accumulated work and people that are bands that are
Speaker 2: alive still doing it. And so we get a good
Speaker 2: check that is something that's worth something to uh a
Speaker 2: uh you know investment people. You know, obviously they would
Speaker 2: give me whatever they're multiple is for it, but but
Speaker 2: you know, look at paying taxes on it and then
Speaker 2: getting on lump, and and then me having to manage
Speaker 2: that money to try and get something equal to what
Speaker 2: I None of this makes any sense whereas this will
Speaker 2: go on forever. It's it's you know, as long as
Speaker 2: as that fan base of people that are playing it.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe until those maybe when my generation or
Speaker 2: the previous generation dies, maybe it'll go down. But I
Speaker 2: think until the twenty years probably still. You know, no, no,
Speaker 2: And I understand completely why why some people do it.
Speaker 2: Maybe some people need a chunk of good for them.
Speaker 1: I don't believe in it either, But one more step.
Speaker 1: You know, record companies don't overpay. How hard is it
Speaker 1: collecting this money?
Speaker 2: You know you worry me because I mean, we get
Speaker 2: checks every three months. I don't. I Well, my wife
Speaker 2: keeps on saying, we need to audit these guys. That's
Speaker 2: what she keeps on saying. You know, you know, we
Speaker 2: need to go hire somebody and have them dig around
Speaker 2: a little bit. It's probably right. I'm you know, I'm
Speaker 2: just happy. I see them come in and it's like, wow, Okay,
Speaker 2: we've got to dinner tonight.
Speaker 1: Okay. Don I want to thank you for sharing your
Speaker 1: career and your stories with my audience. Obviously there's a
Speaker 1: lot we couldn't touch in this time deeper, certainly with
Speaker 1: Meloncamp and other records, but thanks for being so open
Speaker 1: and honest.
Speaker 2: The pleasure Bob up to see you again.
Speaker 1: So until next time, this is Bob Left sets
Speaker 2: Sh