In 2012, I ran across a series of in-studio videos of Bloomington, Indiana's Lily & Madeleine on YouTube. I found myself utterly absorbed — not only by the performances of the two sisters, who were high school age at the time, but also by the style of the recordings. In the videos, a single RCA Type 77-DX ribbon mic is prominently placed in front of the two sisters, and there's an abundance of lush, but obviously artificial, reverb. Intrigued, I went searching for more information and soon discovered the man behind these videos — Paul Mahern, whom I quickly recognized as the singer of the legendary '80s punk rock band, Zero Boys. Digging deeper, I realized I had many records in my collection that were engineered or produced by Paul, including albums from Articles of Faith, Small Ball Paul, Sloppy Seconds, Toxic Reasons, Blake Babies, and Magnolia Electric Company. I also learned that Paul engineered The Fray's debut album, How to Save a Life, which held the title of Best Selling Digital Album in 2007. In addition, Paul has been engineering, mixing, and producing albums for John Mellencamp for two decades, including his T-Bone Burnett produced album, No Better Than This, which was recorded entirely with a single mic and a mono tape recorder. Lily & Madeleine's Keep It Together, produced by Paul, was released in February of this year.
What was the music scene like in Indianapolis when you were a teenager?
It was mostly cover bands until the punk movement came along. By the time I was 16 or so, the punk movement formed, or was starting to form, in Indianapolis. In Bloomington, which is an hour south, there was a band called The Gizmos. From Lafayette, which is the college town just a little north, there was a band called Dow Jones and the Industrials. Both of those bands made great records. My band, Zero Boys, started playing right around the time I was 17 years old. That was the beginning of the punk scene in Indiana.
When I was growing up in DC, the punk scene was very much tied to the new wave scene. In the early '80s, new wave and punk were almost synonymous. At The 9:30 Club, it would be the same crowd of people. One day we'd all dress punk rock, and the next day we'd go to see a new wave band, and we'd all dress new wave. We'd see Simple Minds one day and Black Flag the next. It was still the same crowd of people, just different makeup.
That's exactly right. There's actually a record that came out recently that is kind of a history of that early punk/new wave scene. It all revolves around this club called Crazy Al's that was in Indianapolis. One of the discs is art and punk, and the other is pop and new wave. All of these bands played that one club. Some of the bands were Cars-ish new wave, and some of the bands were more Sex Pistols/Ramones. There wasn't a real division of those scenes, because there were only three hundred or so potential people who would go to those shows.
When you joined Zero Boys, what was informing you about music? How did you even discover punk rock?
I lived in Chicago through junior high. I was really aware of rock music, but I was into bands like Black Sabbath, KISS, Aerosmith — whatever I thought was the hardest, scariest music I could get my hands on. It was all kinds of commercially produced. I think I had heard of Blondie, maybe before I moved to Indianapolis. I remember I discovered the Ramones through Creem magazine, and then I discovered the Sex Pistols, again through Creem. I didn't really differentiate in my mind that there was a significant difference between the Ramones and Aerosmith. They were both rock to me. When the Sex Pistols appeared on the cover of Creem, my whole world shattered.
What year was that?
That would have been '77 or '78.
What about radio stations?
Radio stations were just straight rock. Midwestern rock radio stations. They didn't play anything. I think the first new wave record I ever heard on the radio was "Watching the Detectives" by Elvis Costello. That was it, that one song that just got on one radio station's playlist. Yeah, there was no real exposure. There were no college radio stations there, so they were still playing REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Styx, and stuff like that.
I remember in high school at that time, in the early '80s, discovering 'zines — people Xeroxing and distributing their thoughts to hundreds of people.
For me, there were no 'zines. The only record store in Indianapolis you could buy a punk record at was two bus-rides away. I had to get a transfer and ride the bus all day long to get to the one record store that had a section of punk rock that was maybe 20 records deep at any time. It took quite a bit of effort. In my high school, I had spiky hair, wore a leather jacket, and all the other kids in school called me "Fonzie," because they had no concept of punk rock. I was the only person who had heard the Ramones or Sex Pistols. It gave me a great sense of pride. At that point, I thought I was so much fucking cooler than the other people at this school because they thought I was trying to be Fonzie, even though I was actually trying to be Sid Vicious.
That sense of self-worth — how did that carry on to your playing in, singing in, and creating music for Zero Boys?
Well, in high school I had a band that I formed with some guys I'd met in classes. It was just for fun. We'd practice after school. Then we had a party, and a lot of the older people from the punk scene I had met from going to shows at other houses came and saw us. A couple of the guys who came were some of the original members of the Zero Boys, and they took me from my high school band. They had a real vision. I was 16 years old, but they were all 22 or 23. They'd been in bands for a long time. When I joined the band, they handed me a cassette. It had a bunch of Iggy Pop, Ramones, and MC5 on it. I hadn't heard MC5 before. They said, "Learn all these songs." I learned them, we got together and rehearsed a couple of times playing covers, and then it was time to write some new songs. It was totally a natural progression. I have older brothers and sisters, so I was listening to [The Beatles] White Album [when I was younger]. I knew from that point in time what my destiny was, and that was to be involved in music. I never considered becoming a great musician. I was just really interested in the vibe of rock music, and the records in particular. It was always just a way to try to get into making records. As soon as the Zero Boys formed and we had about five songs, I was like, "Dude, we need to make a record!" That's how I got into the studio for the first time. It was even more magical than I had imagined. I knew it was exactly what I wanted to do, forever.
When you say that you knew from a young age you wanted to make records, do you mean that you wanted to be on the side of the glass where you're tweaking the knobs, engineering, and producing?
I don't think I really knew how records were made. I just knew [there was] The White Album. That record in particular — the variety of the material — it just seemed like a real journey. All I knew was that I wanted to be involved in that. In my mind, I didn't have a picture of The Beatles on stage in front of these screaming fans. I had a picture of these guys in a space making this thing that was broadcast from one time and space into my living room. That was what I was into, from the very beginning. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that when I was that age, all my brothers and sisters were in their teens. I was a lot younger than them.
You saw your friends reacting from a record — not from seeing it live?
From a record. That's right. I was too young to go to a show. There was no MTV back then. Maybe a rock band would appear on The Tonight Show every once in a while, but to me, the records were totally accessible in the living room; even as an eight or nine year old. Listening to records with headphones on — I was doing that by the time I was eight or nine. That was my fantasy world.
Other than The White Album, what inspired you to be a record maker as a child?
[Stevie Wonder's] Songs in the Key of Life was a record very similar to The White Album, where it was just this mind-blowing journey. But also records like the first couple of Black Sabbath albums. They were scary. It wasn't scary like a scary movie, but because you had to fill in the gaps. Like, "Who the fuck are these people? What's the 'Iron Man' thing going on? What's that voice?" It blurred the lines between entertainment and reality, which is what records and music do, right? It was that. So, yeah, the first couple Sabbath records were really important to me, as well as the first three Aerosmith records, the first three Queen records — it all hit me that way. When I was really young — eight, nine, ten, eleven years old — the only record that really hit me on that level was The White Album. We didn't have enough Curtis Mayfield records around at that time.
When I think about the production that went into The White Album, versus what I hear in the Zero Boys' Vicious Circle, I hear Vicious Circle and it sounds so live to me. But, at the same time, I hear all the influences and expertise in it too. I think everyone in the band was a real musician and was also well-informed of the history of music. You hear rock 'n' roll, R&B, and you even hear some funk in that record. This record is played by experts, unlike many other punk rock records of the time. But, in my mind, it's still played live.
It is. It was cut in one day. The trick, the sleight of hand with Vicious Circle, is just what you said. You've got three guys who have been in bands for a long time. The bass player played in the Indianapolis funk scene, and the singer was fucking 16 years old. That's the trick. You've got this band of badass guys with this snotty little kid who didn't know any better. He's just working completely on intuition and excitement. We rehearsed that record — we did 4-track cassette demos — to death. Every day, for two months, we rehearsed to go into the studio to make that record. Everything you're hearing on that record is live, including the vocals, except for the background vocals and the secondary guitar, because Terry ["Hollywood" Howe] did all the guitar. But even for that record, before I was a producer and engineer, I knew what I liked about records. If you want an interesting experience, listen to Vicious Circle and then listen to (GI) by The Germs. What I did was I went into the studio with a copy of (GI), which I thought was the best-sounding record. I said to the producer/engineer [John Helms], who'd never heard punk rock before, "This is what we want it to sound like." The guy was smart. He heard the harmonizer on the guitars. We cross-referenced The Germs. If you listen to those records back to back, you'll go like, "Oh, yeah, totally."
Was John Helms producing, in the sense that he heard this and said, "You need to arrange your songs"?
No, no. We'd already produced it. I call him a producer because I didn't know what I was doing. He was an engineer, and a really good one; a guy who probably made five more records after he made that, and then went and got a regular job. Complete shame.
Vicious Circle is sequenced so well. To me, it's like listening to a good radio show. The songs flow together in a way that's meaningful, not only in terms of lyrics but in terms of sound.
Yeah, but it was intuition. I think, partially because of the rehearsal process, but I'm sure that if it wasn't completely my order, it was mostly in the way it was going to flow slow to fast, and the way that I crammed a lot of the fast songs together to make them feel like one song. That was all a concept. And the fact that it had to be like stop-beat-start, it's almost all in-tempo. That was a concept. It's a concept based on me knowing how records should work, and knowing what a radio show should sound like from a fan's perspective.
When I think about the lyrics to that record, there's social commentary, sexuality, self-awareness, and all the other s-words.
When I was 16 or 17 years old, living in the Midwest with far fewer influences than you would find in New York City or L.A., my connection to the world — my "Internet" — was records. I'd been listening to Black Sabbath. I listened to "War Pigs." I'd been listening to Bob Dylan records. I hadn't experienced much of that, at that age, but I knew what a fucking revolution song was supposed to sound like before I was ever in a punk rock band. The Zero Boys first made our Livin' in the '80s EP, and you can tell that it's a kind of slow, punk-rocky, glammy thing. Then we heard Circle Jerks, The Germs, and the Dead Kennedys, and it opened a door. I learned a lot of my language from those records. I was just a collage artist. "This is what a punk rock song is supposed to sound like. Let's do it like this." But I was always interested in writing songs that I felt would push buttons a little bit. When we wrote "Livin' in the '80s," to say that you didn't like The Beatles or the Stones was a bit offensive to some older folks. "Civilization's Dying" — I just wanted to write a song about John Lennon being shot. I didn't want to do it in a way that sounded disrespectful, but it seemed like a news report. It just seemed obvious.
You ran a record label for years, although the concept of a record label was very different than it is today. You're doing artist management now. How do your skills as a record maker, both behind the board and running a label, factor into what you're doing now?
First of all, I wasn't interested in the business aspect. I just wanted to make records. The first record that my company put out was called The Master Tape. It was a Midwestern hardcore compilation. I did that out of necessity, because Zero Boys were playing with bands like Die Kreuzen, Articles of Faith, and Toxic Reasons, and I thought these were the greatest fucking bands in the world. I borrowed some money to do that, and then lost a bunch of it with a distributor. I didn't want to fill out mail orders. I just wanted to be in the studio making records. But it immediately made me a record producer. A lot of people become engineers or producers by interning or going to school. I borrowed some money and brought my favorite bands into the studio, which immediately put me in charge. I went in with John Helm, and I was like, "Okay, what's that button do?" I bought the time to record these awesome musicians, but because I was a client, I was able to figure out how it was done. The whole thing with the record company was just a means to learn the craft. All I wanted to do was record punk rock records, but then I had a son when I was 20. As soon as you have a kid, your ideologies don't go out the window, but you have to do whatever it takes to make money. I started recording gospel records, country records, commercial jingles — whatever would pay the bills.
During this era of your life when you were learning the craft of producing, you were also learning the craft of engineering.
I just hung a shingle out. Like, "I've made three or four records. I know how this goes. I know what treble and bass is. I know how to place a microphone." I slowly started to become a better engineer over time. But, even still, a couple of times a year, I'll learn I've been doing something wrong for so long.
Because you watch something else when you go into another studio and see an engineer do something?
It's always because I watch somebody else.
What's one example?
