So you've been in Athens since '81, did you come to school here?
Yeah I grew up in Atlanta and then moved out here to go to school. If you like rock music it was a pretty great time to move to Athens. I played in a bunch of local bands around here and started Mercyland in '85 and that's when I got serious about it. [Back then] there were only about 20 or 30 local bands and even though there are better bands now, it was exciting because it was a genuine under- ground. [After Mercyland,] Buzz Hungry start- ed and six months after that, Bob [Mould] called and I started doing Sugar. So Buzz Hungry from '91-'96, Sugar was from '92-'95, sort of tucked there in the middle.
At what point did you start recording Mercyland?
Well, I had been recording stuff since I was a child, my parents were musicians and they were in the jingle business. So I've been in studios forever. I cannot remember not being in a studio. I recorded my bands as soon as we had real drums and amps. When I was about 12 or 13, I'd be recording shit in the basement. Up here, though, Mercyland went into the studio three weeks after we were a band. We had written some songs in '85 and I had been recording other people's bands on my four track before then. I was a really avid our tracker, and had a little set up in the back of my house. We would go to people's practice spaces and record. That kind of gave me the idea that I knew what I was doing, even though I really didn't. Right after Mercyland got to go into the studio, the BBQ Killers went to John Keane's [#65]. I went over there with them as "the producer," even though I didn't know what the knobs and the buttons in the studio did. I was just to be the guy to say; "Okay. That sounds good do it like that." Or, "You can play it better. The snare drum sounds weird." Once I did that, I was constantly telling people I knew more than I really did so I could go into the studio with them. So I went into the studio with a ton of bands to help without knowing shit about engineering. Most well- known being the BBQ Killers and the Jack O'Nuts and a ton of others that have since fallen by the wayside. I was also more and more, obviously, not doing the Mercyland recording. So [in '91] when Mercyland broke up, John Keane called me up and said he realized he had a need for a second person to work in his studio. I had been in that studio enough times to know just enough so that I could identify what I thought was a good drum sound from a shitty one and I could identify what I thought was in tune and out of tune. Basically, I knew what I needed to know about making some pretty rudimentary recordings, I just didn't have the knob twiddling skills. So I went over there and interned with him for a few months and then went to the Recording Workshop in Ohio, where John had been years before, which basically amounted to a six week crash course which was the greatest thing. The first five weeks were basic recording theory and technique. It's a lot better than some of these other things where you go to school for two years and you have to take all these other classes that are somewhat related to recording music, but cover a much broader spectrum so they can charge a lot more money that way.
Was this like a recording engineer's boot camp?
Basically. Depending on your studio schedule for the day you would go from either like 9 AM to 9 PM with a couple of breaks tossed in there or from like noon to at least midnight or one. It was great, they really stressed signal flow, how the sound travels down the wires and that's what John wanted me to learn. So when I came back home, he let me do a band for one day to show him I could do it and do them for free. So I did Liquor Cabinet over at John's, did one song then John went out of town and then I was on my own. I was actually making people's records, local granted, but I was recording a week or two back from boot camp. I wasn't like making coffee or sweeping floors. He gave me the keys to the studio and alarm code. It was the greatest thing anyone has ever done for me because John just totally threw me into the fire. He also let me record really cheap, so I could drum up some busi- ness. So I did Daisy and Roosevelt who were two of the very first ones.
John Keane's is an expensive studio, comparatively speaking.
Yeah, probably now more so because he does all the major labels. At the time it was $550 a day, which now would be a steal for that stu- dio, but at the time it was by far the most expensive place in town. The local bands couldn't go over there and record for $30 bucks a hour. So I called everybody I knew in a band, and it worked out great. I was so busy. Then from there, I got the Sugar opportunity from Bob. It was such a great time for me because I had just learned all this stuff in school, so I was totally obsessed about record- ing. After getting involved with John, I was really wrapped up in it and then I got to go with Bob to make Sugar records at nice studios. Those were done with Lou Giordano, who had done our first two records.
So you got to learn with them?
Oh God! Hanging out with Bob and Lou in the studio is just a different style, different part of the country, different sound studio. Just a different set of experiences all together. When we made Copper Blue and Beaster, Bob and I both stayed at the studio in sleeping bags. He stayed for about 6 weeks and I was up there for about a month, but it was great There has been several times like that where I've just stumbled on an opportunity to learn something else.
So when Sugar ended in '95 you just came back to Athens and started recording again?
Well, the whole time I was in Sugar we didn't tour that much because I already had kids. So a record would come out in August, and from September until right before Christmas we would be gone three weeks, home for a week, gone for three weeks. After Christmas, go to Japan for a week and that would be it for six months. So I had half the year to record. I was constantly coming back here to record and John had gotten a lot busier. I branched out, first from John's to the local studios around here. At the time there was John's, Kelly Noonan's, Mark Maxwell's Full Moon and Andy Baker's Rock Central and then from there I got a call to go to Atlanta and record Fiddlehead at Bosstown. So once I went down there and did that I was like; "Well, shit, now I'm in Atlanta. I can work down here too." It's like all these steps. I'm always thinking that I can just move into the next thing and I can just figure it out when I get there. It is what I've always done anyway. So then I started freelancing in Atlanta. Now I think that there are a lot of good choices around here for people to record with. There are a lot of things I wouldn't do a good job at because I don't know the vocabulary. I should never be asked to record a heavy metal record, I would do a terrible job. I don't know anything about it. But for a lot of these punk rock bands, I value [what they're trying to do in the studio because] I've been in these same sort of bands. I understand that somebody might want the guitars louder than the vocals or the drums to sound like you're in a room with them as opposed to some incredibly processed sound. That was good timing for me too because there wasn't a lot of competition. By the time I came back from doing Sugar, I really got steady doing it, and from the beginning of '95 until we opened this studio in '97 I really picked up the free- lancing. I was working from 25 to 30 places a year just between here and Atlanta. Brooks Carter [guitarist for the now defunct Jack'o'Nuts who now lives somewhere in the Industrial Triangle, NC] and I went in together on a digital 8 track and a Mackie 16 channel board. I already had some good mics so then we started recording people in their houses.
I remember that's the way you did Skinner Pilot, right?
Yeah, Skinner Pilot was done that way. I recorded some of their sessions at Elixir and Brooks recorded some over at their house. We then took it over to Brooks' apartment to mix. The first Harvey Milk record was recorded at Paul Trudeau's [HM's drummer's] house then mixed at Brooks' apartment. I think Harvey Milk spent approximately $1,000 making that record. John let me bring my stuff into his studio and just recorded the basic tracks in that room so we could have a sound proof studio set up. We did it in one day and it was really cheap for them. Then we took all the stuff over to Paul's house and the tape machine over to Brooks' house and mixed in his apartment. He didn't have any kind of reverbs, we just ran the drums out a guitar amp out into the stairway and hooked up a couple of mics. So on that song that has the long pauses in it, if you listen closely, you can hear crickets in the back- ground because they were coming in the win- dow. That was an invaluable period of record- ing because it's little more of a challenge to make it sound good in a more rudimentary sit- uation. Also, people are more comfortable in their houses, so that was fun. We built this place [Chase Park Transduction] in early '97 and it opened in May of '97. Since then, I've occasionally been going to other places to work. I went to Illinois to do Son Volt and a few times I've gone over to Tom Lewis' studio where he is doing sixteen track as well. So a couple of times, if we have been busy here, I've taken a reel of tape over there and mixed something or done overdubs.
Were both Andys brought in right as you opened this place?
Yes. Tom Lewis and I were going to do a studio together. Andy and Andy were going to open a studio together and we were both having an impossible time finding buildings. Tom and I decided to do our own things, it just wasn't going to work because we both have similar needs. Andy. B and I have always been really friendly so we kicked around the idea of finding a temporary space together until he and Andy could get their building together and I could build my own place. I wanted to build a studio in the woods and just do it out there. So we started looking around and we found this place. Once we started building it was obvious this partnership was a good thing and we should take this a little more seriously. It's always been three of us in partnership in the studio. Andy Le Master had a studio in Toccoa called The Furry Vault. The Vault was a small cinder block shed behind his parent's house. It was so small that the guitar over dubs would be done in a car or van. They'd back the van up to the door of the place and put the amps out there and the mics in the van. Andy learned how to record on some pretty rudimentary stuff as well. Andy and Andy decided to get together on this building in Colburn that fell through and I was going to build this encampment out in the woods. Then I finally realized that when I built the building I wouldn't have any money left to buy equipment. So we just all kind of fell together because we all had very compatible situations. That is, as a freelancer I had always bought one piece of incredible equipment at a time. If I needed some more mic pres to record something in some remote place or a studio that didn't have good sound ing mic pres, well I'd go buy two API mic pres or two Neve mic pres or ribbon mics cause the studio doesn't have any so I would buy one Coles ribbon mic. So basically over the course of five or six years before I opened, the studio I had massed a pretty great arsenal. I had about a dozen great mics to supplement the meat and potatoes of most studios. Even the most basic studios have a few SM 57's, Sennheiser 421's, one or two condenser mics, a [AKG] 414. So what I did was bought more esoteric things that worked well with a meat and potatoes mic collection. Andy [Baker] had the studio in his house. He had a Trident console and 15 mic stands. He had the meat and potatoes mic collection and a couple of nice ones. So, when you put it together it was basic. To open a studio all we needed to buy was a 2 inch machine cause we had everything else, but we did buy a bunch more stuff. While I was freelancing I knew I wanted to open a studio one day. I just knew that a lot of studios I'd go into there would be some regret on the part of the person that owned the studio, like "I wish I had known what I was doing a little bit more when I opened this place up because I would have set my patch bay up differently, laid my rooms out differently. I wouldn't have bought this board, I would have bought a different one." So I sort of figured if I just bought all the really cool stuff a piece at a time, just slowly amassed it while I was sort of figuring out what I wanted out of rooms and consoles and stuff, then when it came time to open a studio all I would need was the board and the tape machine.
Andy Baker's old studio [Rock Central] was right across the street from where I lived, and that was an interesting set up.
Yeah, it sounded great. I think he completely opened up the underground recording scene in Athens. It sounded great in that house and you could work there for really cheap. I mean it was- n't slick, there weren't tens of thousands of dol- lars of great equipment but for what it was, it was totally great. I always liked working over there. He had Rock Central and Andy Le Master had the Furry Vault and I was just a guerrilla.
