Tape Op is about music recording in all kinds of scenarios. Ever since I started it, you've been in the back of my mind as the perfect interview.
Well, I do have my own methods; that's for sure! [laughter]
Exactly. I wanted to talk to you a bit about all of your various personal recording scenarios.
Sure.
It's well-known that a lot of home recording happened around the Tusk era, but did you have home recording setups before that, in the Buckingham/Nicks era, or in the Bay Area before that?
I did. When I was a late teenager and was in the band [Fritz] up in Northern California – that Stevie [Nicks] and I were both in, I was playing bass – I had an old commercial Sony 2-track. It had that sound-on-sound feature, where you could take one recording, say on the left channel, and then bounce it over to the right channel as you were recording something over it. I could begin to get a multitrack effect, one track at a time, which is pretty much the way that Les Paul [Tape Op #50] did it. That was his method and example that probably hit home with me. Then, a little bit later, probably about when I was 20 or 21, I acquired an Ampex AG-440 4-track, which obviously still had limitations. But hey, The Beatles cut Sgt. Pepper's… on those, so it opened up the whole idea. It gave me much more flexibility. I was already into what I would call that "painting process" as early as that point, where I was putting things down all by myself, and doing the architecture around a song.
Did that influence the way you arrange guitars? I've interviewed Ken Caillat [Tape Op #96] before about how you put little filigrees and figures in; sometimes they are very simple parts to build a whole.
Right. Well, so much of my function in Fleetwood Mac was to take raw material and fashion it into a sound. I had the vision to do that, and I apparently had the tools to do that. Much of that was based around having a ground-up familiarity with a self-sufficiency, if you will; doing it myself and then bringing that into a more communal arena, for sure. So yeah, absolutely.
Did you have a home setup around the time of the self-titled Fleetwood Mac album?
When we first joined Fleetwood Mac, all of Stevie's songs and my songs were already demoed out on my AG-440. That album only took a few months to do, and part of that was Keith Olsen [Tape Op #33] being in control of the engineering, as well as overseeing that things didn't get too – shall we say? – self-indulgent. There was a lot at stake for them, because they were almost ready to be booted by Warner [Bros.] before we joined. They'd had so many non sequitur albums. The ability to make that album so quickly was largely due to the fact that all of Stevie's and my material had been blocked out. What you hear on the record would be very close to what the demos were like, of course without John [McVie] and Mick [Fleetwood] as the rhythm section. I didn't get a 24-track until a bit later, until there was a little bit more money coming in. Somewhere in the middle of the Rumours process is when I probably got one.
Right. That must have been a big step. A 24-track tape deck is nothing without a console, and then you need speakers and something to mix to.
I first got a 24-track and the machine at my house, [the one] that I did most of the work on my songs that ended up on Tusk. I would start these tracks as paintings, and then discover and find something which was a little bit more to the left. Then I'd bring them in for the band to add to. What's funny is that I did not have a proper console at that time. I had enough channels to be able to play everything [back] at once, but it wasn't a large thing. It was more or less something you'd take on the road. I didn't get a proper console until maybe 1985 or '86, when I put one into my studio in my house up in Bel Air, and that's the console I still have.
Oh, really?
A Neotek. It still sounds great and still works great. That's what we cut Tango in the Night on. It took me a while to get there.
Your engineering chops obviously kept improving. A lot of this was necessity, but were you observing engineers in the studio?
Well, some of it was learning the specifics of EQ and understanding what that was. But so much of it, as with everything else I've done – like with my learning to play guitar – was all self-taught. It was intuitive. Yes, of course being around other engineers had some influence. But I think it was more that my method flourished. If you track the solo work, it seemed to unfold over time and the writing process became increasingly intertwined with the recording process. Unlike making an album with Fleetwood Mac, where I've gotta go in with more or less a complete idea, everything is more conscious and political, and getting from point A to point B has to be verbalized. It's probably a bit more like making a movie. What I was doing, as I say, was like painting. It's the one-on-one I get with the canvas. The better painter you become, the more it all starts to become one thing. The engineering skills fell into place as an aspect of everything else improving as I went along. Including my writing, hopefully.
Is that painter version of recording and creating the reason that you did so much instigation of ideas and working at home around the Tusk era, even though the studio at The Village [Recorder] was ready for you to work in?
Well, there was also a kind of work ethic and philosophy that kicked in at that point in the post-Rumours environment that we were living in. I think when Rumours was finished, everyone assumed that it would be successful, because we knew we'd made a good album. We knew we'd made a truthful album. Clearly the first album before, that had sold multi-millions of copies by the end of the day. But no one could have predicted the scale that it eventually got to, where the success becomes less about the music than about the success itself.
Right.
You find yourself potentially in a place now poised to begin to buckle to the external influences and expectations that are now completely surrounding you. Those are expectations from fans, maybe even from within the band to some degree, and certainly from the record label. You see so many artists who may start to paint themselves into the corner. We could have said, "Let's make Rumours 2, and let's do it to try to repeat the commercial outcome," which could never have been repeated anyway. I was going completely the other way, thinking, "No, I've got choices to make here for myself and for the band." I don't think we wanted to become a piece of product, or to fall prey to the corporate formula, which is: If something works, run it into the ground until it's dead and then move on. We wanted to continue to do things on our own terms, to be spontaneous, and to take risks. That was the mindset. If you're going to try to define yourself in the long term as an artist and not just as a piece of product, that's where you've got to go. You can take examples where it was done far more incrementally, like The Beatles, where they took the whole world along with them. We made a complete left turn, because that's where the music took me. It ended up being a completely different scenario for making an album. It was great. The band might have been a little skeptical or worried about it at first, and then they eventually got totally drawn into the spirit of it.
Yeah, definitely. And considering you've got three songwriters in the band, it gave a lot of room for everyone to have different songs and vibes going on on that whole record.
Right. Obviously, Rumours was all about the two couples, and the dynamic and dysfunction. I think there was something about the post-Rumours environment that invited that kind of breadth that you found, and the slightly more – well, more than slightly – esoteric approach you find on Tusk.
Following that, you expanded your studio with the Neotek console. Was it taking over your home at this point? Did you have enough space?
No, it wasn't. It was a relatively small studio. It's not like I had a control room with glass and then a recording room. It was all in what had been a three-car garage. But there was still plenty of room to set up a kit of drums and to track. It was all in an external building from the house proper. I'll tell you what did take over the home, in a sense, was just the presence of the band being up there for so long. The reason that I took leave of Fleetwood Mac after making that album – and didn't want to do the tour – was because everyone, certainly the other four, had hit critical mass in terms of their lifestyle and the alcohol and substance intake. It had gotten pretty unfocused and dysfunctional. One of the triumphs of Tango in the Night was that we were able to again prevail in a fairly chaotic environment, where we only saw Stevie for a few weeks out of a year. Mick was living in a trailer in my front yard. That did begin to impinge on the home scene, having those two things in one place. But, other than that, when the band was not there, it was just a logical extension of my psyche, and it was an important thing to have nearby.
Did you use a lot of the same equipment to do the new self-titled solo record too?
