I can't believe we've never met.
I was thinking about that. I can't believe it either. Didn't John Baccigaluppi used to write for Tape Op?
He actually co-owns Tape Op and is my partner in it!
He's still in! Give him my best, will you?
Certainly. I worked out of his Sacramento, California, home studio in his basement in the later '80s, and then at his Enharmonik Studios. Later that was The Hangar, and your pal Henry Robinett was working out of there.
Yeah. I recorded there once with Henry. I was doing pop and John was doing punk. I did one punk record [laughter] in 1979; the first record I ever produced. Do you know Rick Daprato? He had a record store called Esoteric Records and he had a band called Labial Fricative. Two drummers, two electric guitar players.
Right, that’s in your book! As I was reading it, you mentioned Pleasant Valley Road in Penn Valley. That’s the road we lived on when I was a kid.
Get out! That's amazing.
I used to work at Englebright Reservoir on the Yuba River there.
When I was a little kid, my dad, uncles, and aunts used to [water] ski at Englebright a lot. That was one of the places that we spent a lot of weekends at.
It was right between where we were both living.
I’m so grateful for growing up in that area. I was just talking to a friend the other day, and we were reminiscing about what a great time it was in music in Northern California to grow up in. I hope that comes across in the book, as a tribute to that.
I think Northern California and the music scene back then always gets strangely overlooked. Everyone talks about the “summer of love” and that era. By the time we hit 1980, I always felt there was a media block against anything the rest of us did for the next 10 years or something.
Yeah, I think so too. There was a little bit surrounding the Mabuhay Gardens, in terms of punk and new wave. There were massive hit records being made at The Automatt and at Tarpan Studios in San Rafael with Narda Michael Walden. And yeah, those didn’t get a lot of press either. There was a lot going on. Then there was sort of the next punk movement, which was huge in Northern California. Of course, there was a lot of R&B, soul, and hip-hop being done as well.
A lot of great Oakland music!
I guess people just moved on to whatever the next big story was. I don't think there were galvanizing characters, like Bill Graham, who were so magnetized to draw people to the story. During the ‘60s, there were a lot of alliances between Clive Davis, David Rubinson, and Bill Graham.
And Tom Donahue.
Yeah, exactly. There were just a lot of strategic alliances between New York, San Francisco, and L.A. that kept people paying attention to the cities.
Especially as radio consolidated the scenes got worse.
Yeah. I knew the history of it. Even when I moved to Nashville, I had a record company president who used his imprimatur to get me a $100,000 dollar loan to build my first studio out here. I went to Dan Alexander [Tape Op #143] immediately, because I knew he was the steward of the Coast Recorders gear. When I wanted to get my first vintage mic, an [AKG] C12, I went to him – in ‘89 or ’90 – and I paid $5,000, which was a lot of money for a single microphone. I used it on hundreds of albums until one day I woke up, and I just didn't hear the C12 anymore!
Really?
I could do a mic shootout, and I would pick the C12 every time for 20 years. Suddenly, I just stopped hearing it. I always thought that was just indicative of not so much me, but how we have these shifts in culture where we hear sound differently. We want to hear EQ slightly differently. There’s maybe this tacit understanding amongst all the engineers and musicians that, “Hey, we're moving in a slightly different direction now.” We're going to have less high-end. Or we're going to heighten the mids. But if you listen to 70 years of pop music, you get this whole story about equalization, as well as the microphones that were used.
It's true.
I was always grateful for Dan that he was there, and this was a very early serial number. My fantasy was always that Tony Bennett had sung on it or something. [laughter] I think it was 1957 or ‘58 when it was made.
You always wonder!
Yeah. I want some names!
I was at ANALOGr in L.A., and they had Tom Dowd's Neumann U 67, I think it was. “Oh, this was used on Aretha Franklin.”
Yeah.
A producer had borrowed it. He’d taken that to the client, “Aretha sang on this.” Okay, great. Good enough!
Exactly. All of a sudden, everything you do sounds great. I've used that trick before, especially with younger, insecure singers. It’s just a little encouragement. “Hey, you're singing on the same microphone that Al Green used.”
At the end of the day, the recording equipment's always secondary to the performance.
Exactly. I've always said that it's great to have the best gear, but there's no replacement for astonishing ideas. The same goes for performances. When you take a great singer, it doesn't matter whether it's a [Shure SM]57 or a U 67, it's still going to sound great. You're not going to be disappointed!
Yeah. The early years for you, in the late ‘70s we were starting to see smaller multitrack tape decks that you could own, as well as ways of taking the recording process into your own hands as opposed to having to always go to a studio.
Yeah. I was in high school when I started. I used lawn mowing money and bought my first two 2-track machines on which I did sound on sound. Bouncing, changing reels, flipping the reels back around, and learning to overdub that way. There's no punching in, because you're giving a solid performance. Play the bass part one time, or play it all again. I think there's a certain discipline that comes from that, or maybe a different way of hearing or anticipating. I'm about to make a mistake. How do I recover from it before I do it? These sorts of mental exchanges that you have with yourself in a performance. Having that primitive gear helped with that. The next stage for me was to use a TEAC 4-track. That was much simpler instead of flipping reels back and forth between these 2-track machines. And I could punch in. They actually had a foot pedal for that too, but I didn't have one of those.
Too fancy!
Yeah. All of that was me playing drums, bass, super-primitive guitar and piano, and singing and writing my first songs. Once I went to Sacramento, I had saved up some money and my wife's grandmother had given me a gift of some money. It was my first paying session. I believe it was 1977. That was at Moon Studios in Sacramento, and Steve Holsapple engineered that. After the session, he said, “Hey, I want to work with you, if you'd like to do that. You don't need to pay anymore.” That was a real gift. Steve and I became songwriting partners, and I was a session musician at Moon. I played on tons of records, jingles, and anything else that I could play on. That's really how I learned; that first early phase at Moon. I think it went from 8 to 16 to 24 tracks while I was there!
That was all happening so fast.
It was. I remember when Brent Bourgeois got the first TASCAM cassette 4-track. People started using those, and that was also at the advent of the earliest drum machines, like the [Roland TR-series] 808, 707, and 606. Brent and I, between us, had all of those! When I started working with David Kahne at The Automatt, that was the first time that I saw the Linn Drum. He had an LM-1 prototype from Roger Linn in early 1980. I think we used a version that had Prairie Prince's drums in it.
A great drummer.
Yeah. That was an interesting time. As I said in the book, I told one story about playing at Berkeley Square in Berkeley. Buddy and Julie Miller [Tape Op #34] were living in San Francisco at the time. There was this new software that had come out that you could run on your [Apple] Mac. I was reading up about it. I remember one time I was flying to Europe for a couple of weeks of concerts, and I stopped off at a music store in Marin County in order to look at this Passport Designs 8-bit and 12-bit digital recording device. I would always tell people in the studio, “Wouldn't it be cool if we could shrink down really small, go inside the tape, and move stuff around?”
Window edits.
I was already there. Buddy and I have known each other a long time now, and it's just funny to me that the king of Americana was one of the pioneers of digital recording. [laughter] I mean, he has analog machines too. I wasn't the purist that he was. I was eager to sell my 24-track, but I kept it for years.
I've still got a 16-, 24-, and 2-track all ready to go.
I wish I had a 2-track right now because there are some tapes I want to listen to.
It’s nice to have that for archiving.
It is. We're in the middle of a big archive project with our family right now. Everything from documents to music and whatnot.
Oh, I know what archiving is like. I went back and listened to your first record [Lie Down in the Grass] from 1983. I was working at KCSC in Chico, and I remember that record coming in and playing it on the air. It is on the cutting edge of some of the technology, like overdubbing real drums on drum machines.
I didn't know it at the time, but I wanted to do hybrid stuff. Later, when I moved to Nashville, we had this whole big programming period. A lot of the music was programmed. Then we did hybrid sessions. But in ‘83 and ‘84 we were already thinking, “I really love that we're locking the beat up with the kick and snare, but let's do the hat and the toms live.” We didn't really have the sample length. If you were doing gated toms, then playing them through an [E-mu] SP-12 or a LinnDrum made sense. But if you really wanted the tom to ring, we didn't have that sample length. To have a [memory] chip that would allow you to let a tom ring that long was like $100,000!
I remember how the cymbals on digital drums would die off really fast.
Oh yeah. I think the first E-mu SP-12 that I had came with 2.5 megabytes of memory. [laughter] We were always trimming our sounds. Like every time we added another sound then we'd be like, “Oh, I don't have any memory left.” I'd like truncate more of the sounds. That's one of the reasons why the drums are just so choppy. But can you imagine Prince without that sound? There were certain kinds of music back then that sounded right by having those clip like that and making it funkier.
