When did you start playing music?
When I was in third grade or so. I started playing piano; my mother taught me. She got a book and she showed me a few things - the basics. Music was all that I wanted to do! They had to limit me playing records when I was 7, because all I wanted to do was sit in front of the record player. This is why I became a record collector, so that I could have as many records and listen to them as much as I wanted. They limited me to an hour a day at one point, because they couldn't take it. [laughter] Everyone knew I loved music. I remember my parents opening up their trunk, and it was stuffed with records that people had passed on for me. First, they got me a toy saxophone. Then the piano; an upright. I learned a little bit, and I immediately started playing songs by ear. I really impressed my family when I learned to play "The Age of Aquarius" on my own. [laughter] They would make my relatives listen to my horrible renditions. In school I was given the choice between violin or viola; I chose violin. The worst choice ever, if you wanted to carry an instrument that was [essentially] a neon sign that said, "Beat me up."
I thought any instrument might make someone a mark for bullies.
No, you could play sax. I was the only boy in the string section. That's a whole other level of commitment - to not just learn an instrument, but to get hazed and have your ass kicked in the process. My teacher was terrible. She didn't teach vibrato, so I got headaches all the time. Vibrato is what makes you sound good.
So, you gave yourself a headache with your own playing?
I think so. When I was in 7th grade, my mom gave me the choice to play guitar. We had an awesome teacher that would teach us music theory, as well as Led Zeppelin and Don Ellis, which was pretty crazy out in the suburbs. I would come home and lock myself in my room and play all day, every day. Within two hours of picking up the guitar I had written a song, which I had never done with piano. Guitar immediately resonated with me.
What year do you think the East Bay punk scene started? And what year did it end?
Well, there'd been an East Bay scene since 1977. But what the East Bay became known for - the scene around 924 Gilman Street - started in 1986. That scene never ended; it is still going. Obviously, it peaked in fame when Green Day became popular, and with that perhaps some of the initial innocence and lack of self-consciousness were lost. That brought some interlopers, though I don't think many of them actually joined into that scene. I would call the interlopers the bands from outside that scene who would suddenly say, "We're kind of punk rock. We sound like Nirvana and Green Day," without ever having gone to Gilman. Kind of like the journalists who never wrote a word about Gilman until Green Day hit it big, and then couldn't shut up about it. I mean, if you lived in the East Bay and missed seeing and writing about Operation Ivy, you couldn't have been that good of a rock journalist, could you?
How was the reception to the early East Bay punk scene?
Well, everything was met with resistance by reviewers. They later embraced it. But did anyone write about that before it became successful? There was that whole period previously where punk rock was just considered garbage. You just have to go with your heart. I think the Gilman bands influenced each other, yet they remained unique at the same time.
What was your first studio experience?
I was in bands back then, and if you were in punk rock bands you ended up recording with people at studios that hated you. I started producing before I started engineering. I made my horrible single. Some people liked the way it sounded, so they asked me to produce them. I hired the right engineer, the best engineer, to do my single. I listened to all the local records and picked the one that sounded the best. And this guy was a fucking coke freak. He was a good engineer, but he was fucked-up on drugs. He was annoying, and I didn't get along with him. This is one of the things that got it into my head to do engineering. This guy was doing lines every 15 minutes! At the end of the day he'd say, "I don't know what kind of studio you've been to before, but usually the artist brings drugs for the engineer." [laughter] Everyone hated the record, but it sounded good. Most independent records just didn't sound good.
How did you get involved with engineering?
I decided I was going to engineer, so I went back to school in 1986 or so. And the first day I was at school, I got a job from Matt Wallace, since I had been hounding him. That's how I got into engineering. My intention was to go to SF State's program. My first day on the job was Matt Wallace teaching me how to run an 8-track recorder, which he had learned at a community college in the East Bay suburbs. The ironic thing is that the first few projects I engineered just sounded terrible.
Why did you hound Matt Wallace for a job?
Because he told me he was looking for someone. I called him every day for a month. He hired me because I showed the most interest. He wanted to move onto larger studios. He owned this little studio, so he trained me for a month. We did a session where I tried to run the whole thing, and then he was like, "Here are keys. Start booking yourself. These people are calling." I started working all the time, and Matt still worked sometimes, too. Dangerous Rhythm was on 12th Street, across from the Fruitvale BART station. The building is still there.
I know it was an 8-track, 1/2-inch Tascam with a Carvin mixing board. What was in your microphone locker?
[laughs]
Okay, what was your best mic then?
A [Shure] SM57. Our condenser mics were from RadioShack, and they were battery-powered. We had a pair of Sennheiser MD 421s. That was our high-end mic. Matt set up this studio with no money and cheap equipment, and he was making really good recordings. But for my first year, I was sucking. The rooms sounded amazing. Those were the best rooms for drums, ever.
How many rooms were there?
A moderate-sized main room, a drum booth, a vocal booth, and this outside room that was a reception area. I started recording drums out there, opening the door and putting mics out, and I would get this huge '80s drum sound. When I started, I really loved reverb and room sounds too much. Matt came up with this way where you put a snare through a speaker and then mic'd and gated it. I'd get that '80s awful snare sound, which I started putting on everyone's records, regardless of the necessity. It sounded horrible. There are a lot of people whose records it is on. Please let me use this forum to say, "I'm sorry." [laughter]
Did Matt teach you to splice tape?
Yes. When I was just producing, I wasn't getting hands-on, but I was observing the engineers. People used to come into a studio, be overwhelmed, and think, "How am I going to learn all that?" But if you look at a mixing board, you only have to learn one channel and the patchbay. In my career I learned that people had trouble with the patchbay because they didn't memorize it. When I had to go into different studios, I would go in the day before, write down the patchbay, and then go home and memorize it. It looks more overwhelming than it is. Obviously, it gets more complex when you get to mic'ing and signal path and all that. But people were paying for me to learn.
You later went on to own the studio, correct?
Yes, I bought Dangerous Rhythm Studios with my old business partner, Bill Raymond, from Matt. We owned it for two years. When you own a business, you end up having to do all kinds of details and busy work that aren't about engineering. Also, I realized that to upgrade equipment would cost more than it was worth. I could freelance and get the same rate I would be charging at the studio, with a lot less headache. We were too small of a business to get a business loan; we were laughed at by a loan officer.I got out of the studio and built relationships with better small studios, like Dancing Dog in Emeryville and Sound And Vision in San Francisco, which were both wonderful and cheap.
What was the first record that you were proud of, on a sonic level?
The first Mr. T Experience record [Everybody's Entitled to Their Own Opinion] because they didn't give me enough time to fuck it up. We had a 13-hour budget for the whole thing. I had been screwing up and, yes, John Golden [Tape Op #121] showed me how I had been screwing up.
What were you doing wrong?
I was cranking the high-end on the vocals and I wasn't using a de-esser, so John had to use a de-esser on the whole song. Worse, I was cranking the high end and running it through delays, so the S's were going all over the place. John sat down me and patiently said, "This is what you are doing to the grooves of the vinyl." He showed me the view under a microscope, and said that if it was any more, the record would just skip when played and he couldn't master that. "You have to go get a de-esser. That will cure your problems." I went and bought a $100 de-esser, and the next record I did was Mr. T Experience. It was the lowest-budget project that I had ever done, so all I could do was throw up the microphones, record it without doing anything, and mix it in two or three hours. I couldn't go crazy with manipulating sounds. It didn't sound awful. That was the first time I came back from the mastering and thought, "Hey, that's okay. It sounds better than the things I spent hundreds of hours on."
Who turned you on to John Golden?
Matt Wallace told me about John. Just like John mentioned in the interview you did with him of how his reputation spread. Matt said to me, "I just went to this guy and he listens to the record all the way through." That did not happen elsewhere. "He takes his time, listens to your stuff, and suggests what else you could do." The next record I did, I went down there and he showed me what I was doing wrong. It was a life-changing moment.
What were the studio options for alternative bands in the 1980s in the Bay Area?
There were very few. There was a place that I found in Oakland called Bay Sound Reproduction. They were more into soul music, but they tolerated me. I'd done my own demos there. That's where I took the first bands I produced: Love Circus, Pariah, and the Church Police. It didn't sound great, but it had a nice environment. In hindsight, I can see that a lot of things I worked on didn't sound great, but the performances were there. That's what I was good at. The records had a good vibe on them.
