When were you born?
In 1951. I was born in L.A. and the family moved to Orange County when I was about five. I had an uncle up in L.A., and when I was ten years old, I went up to spend time in the [San Fernando] Valley with him for a couple of weeks. He had a Voice of Music stereo tape recorder. I say he was my uncle, but he was only two years older than me.
More like a brother?
Yeah. He was friends with a bunch of guys from school who played music. We went over to one of these guys' houses and these boys were sitting around playing music. My uncle said, "Let's go get the tape recorder and record what they're doing." So, we went to get it and the mics it came with. I didn't know what to do, because I was ten years old, but we recorded a bunch and it sounded pretty good! Over the two weeks that I was there staying with my uncle, this is what we did almost every day. I loved it. I knew nothing, but it was fun! I went back down to Orange County, and I explained to my mother that it was necessary for me to have a tape recorder.
Necessary.
Necessary! [laughter] My neighbor had almost the exact same Voice of Music recorder, and they didn't use it. They said, "You can't have it, but take it and use it." My brother played drums. He was five years older than me, and he was playing in bands. He would practice. I said, "Mike, can we go in your bedroom and record?" I fell in love with the idea of recording.
Did you end up setting up some sort of studio at home?
I became hungry for technology. I wanted more. In the apartment building where my grandmother lived was a guy named Charlie Weber. He was a professional sound engineer who worked mostly for Disney. I would visit my grandmother and go upstairs to the apartment he lived in. He gave me a foundation on how all this nonsense worked. He taught me about microphones and signal path. I even helped him record the organ at the newly-built Angel Stadium. Within a week or so after that, my uncle called me up and said, "You know those guys that you recorded last summer? They're making a record at a studio called Western. Would you like to come along?"
Wow!
I mean, forget school. Forget life! I was gone. Somebody drove me up there. I was in Western One, which is a great studio. I remember I walked in just totally blown away by the whole scene, and I talked the ear off the engineer. I must have driven him crazy. But the weird thing was, because of the time I'd spent with Charlie, I asked questions as this 11-year-old kid, like, "So, that's the new [Ampex] AG-440?" They had an AG-440 4-track. He said, "Yeah." I said, "Yeah, I've only used the [Ampex] 350." He replied, "What?!"
“Who is this kid?”
Yeah! I spent a couple of days with these guys, watching what was going on, and then I went and talked to the studio manager. I said, "I'd really like to learn about this," and he said, "You're welcome anytime." That's kind of what happened. I don't want to give the impression that I was going to Western every day after school. It didn't work that way.
Well, you didn't live that close!
Instead, what happened is they introduced me to a guy who had a secondhand sound recording business. Jerry Cubbage owned Coast Recording Equipment Supply. The idea was that I should have a recording setup, we should work out how much it was going to cost, and then I’d go out and earn the money to do it. The decision was an Ampex 600 recorder and a couple of mics, one Ampex MX-35 mixer, and a speaker. All of this equipment would cost $500 or $600. For an 11-year-old kid, it might as well have been a million dollars. I needed to get the money! So, I'm Jewish, and the center of our social life in Orange County happened to be the synagogue. I go to the rabbi, and I said, "Do you think any of the people that are getting bar mitzvah-ed would want a recording of their ceremony?" He said, "Yeah, probably." So, I ended up with a business. I was charging $150 per event! I was recording weddings, bar mitzvahs, and speeches at the Kiwanis Club and at the Lions Club. I was at the Anaheim Convention Center, recording conferences, and I was 11 years old! So, it didn't take very long before I had two MX-35s and a bunch of mics. I really didn't know what I was doing, but I had Charlie upstairs from my grandmother. Once every month or two, I would find myself up at Western. I built this portfolio, and that got me money, which allowed me to buy equipment, which allowed me to record bands. Then Western decided to open up a studio in Orange County. I turned up one day just to see what was going on. They said, "Good! An extra pair of hands." For two or three weeks, I was there helping them get the gear in and wiring it up. There was some guy named [Bill] Putnam there doing bits and pieces, although I never had a chance to speak to him in any meaningful way. Now, on top of kind of knowing vaguely how to do things in a recording studio, I got an insight into how the studios were actually put together. I tried to emulate, in my bedroom studio, what I had seen. Interestingly enough, the quality of the recordings went way up!
Was there anyone of note that you recorded in your home studio?
I would love to say yes, but the truth of the matter is I recorded people who were on the fringe of “of note.” There was a very famous band that came out of Santa Ana High School called The Chantays, and they had a big hit with “Pipeline. " Lore associates me with that record, but I had nothing to do with it. I recorded people in that band, but not the band itself.
I think "Dick Dale" was what you told me once. Was he one of the guys that recorded with you?
Well, that is true. I guess he's of note!
I know there's a story about your bar mitzvah, and what you bought after it.
Here's what was happening: I upgraded everything. I went stereo after my bar mitzvah. Nobody gave me anything but money for my bar mitzvah, because they knew that I would go buy recording equipment with it. From Jerry Cubbage, I got a Neumann U 47 and a bunch of other stuff. I went from the mono 600 Ampex to a stereo one – the 601 mark 2.
Didn't you get a Fairchild limiter?
A Fairchild 660, yeah. The bands would then have a disc, and they could go to venues and say, "Hire our band to play. This is what we sound like." I had labels for the records that said, "Weinreich Custom Recording," and my home phone number. Other bands would go to these venues and say, "How can our band get hired?" The venue would say, "Oh, you've got to have one of these demo discs." The band would write down the phone number and call me. So, I started to charge for it. This was a commercial relationship. They wanted the demos.
I presume they were getting paid for the shows.
Yeah. I had some pretty good bands come in, and my profile got bigger and bigger. It was at that point that Western got pissed off at me.
Oh. You were taking their business away!
I guess… I don't think the Orange County studio that they built was doing very well. They said, "How about we give you a job and you close your studio?" I said, "Yeah. That sounds like a good deal." Well, they never gave me any work! Western said, "You've got to learn what you're doing." I replied, "But you're not doing anything to teach me." It did two things. It killed my garage recording business, and it completely soured my relationship with them. I just stopped going in. So, let's fast forward a couple of years. My brother was at UCLA. He called and said, "They have a little recording studio here where they record all the voices and the music for their cartoons, and they don't have an engineer. Why don't you come in and talk to them?" I did. They gave me a job.
How old were you at this point?
I became a house engineer at 17! But the cool thing was where they were. They were on the top floor of the building where The Village Recorders was.
Oh, hey!
So, purely by chance, I found myself in a relationship with The Village. It was similar, but healthier than the relationship that I had with Western. I was upstairs recording quirky cartoon music, sound effects, voiceovers, and all that. Stephen Bosustow ran the studio. It gave me an opportunity to go downstairs and hang out at The Village.
Did you end up working at The Village?
Kind of as a freelancer. They only had a couple of engineers. They would give me jobs that were befitting of someone of my limited experience. I'm not going to say I did scores of sessions. I did a few, and mostly what I did was stuff for the owner, Geordie Hormel. He was a really interesting guy. As you might gather from the name Hormel, he was related to that family – Hormel Foods. He went to Hollywood and composed some soundtracks. He did little films that needed sound recording, so I was around for a lot of that but I wasn't sitting in the hot seat.
But you got to observe some of those bigger sessions with engineers with more experience?
Oh yeah, for sure. The thing about those early days in Western is that the Beach Boys recorded there. Chuck Britz did that down in Studio 3. I never saw them once, but I saw a lot of bands like them come and go. There'd also be Sammy Davis Jr. working with a big orchestra, and Frank Sinatra before he started to record at Capitol. So, I was at university and working for Bosustow almost full time. One of the films that I worked on [Is It Always Right to Be Right?] just happened to win the Oscar in 1970 for the best short subject! I had no interest in film. It was something I fell into because I met Bosustow and started to work in his little animation studio. I happened to record Orson Welles, which is another story entirely and probably the reason this film won the Oscar. The guy that directed the film, [Lee Mishkin] went to England, called me up, and said, "You need to get on a plane and come to London." I said, "I'm at university…" Well, I dropped out and went to London! I worked on a bunch of stuff in a film capacity, and I ended up teaching sound at the London Film School. Why? I needed a visa. My girlfriend, at the time, was from London. She wanted to go to film school. So, I went along with her for the interview for the London Film School. By the way, I'm married to her now. I've been married to her for 50 years!
Wow!
And, at a lull in the conversation, the woman doing the interview looked at me and said, "What do you do?" I said, "I work a little bit in sound and film," and she exclaimed, "Oh, sound? We are desperate for someone in our sound department." I said, "Well, I'm not really that qualified, except a film I did did win the Oscar last year." She said, "You're American, right? What are you doing about a visa?" I said, "I'm just here on a visitor's visa." She said, "We can get you a visa." She got me a visa, which allowed me to stay in England. I taught two days a week at the London Film School. A student, Roger Morris, called me up and said, "I'm doing a documentary. I'd like you to do the sound for it. I don't want one of the students to do it because it's really important. We're going to go down to Kent, and we're going to go interview a guitar player." We loaded up Roger's car and we drove down to Wadhurst, in Kent. We pulled into this big, stately home. It's overrun with cats, maybe thousands of cats. We introduced ourselves and a guy says, "He's in the garage." We go to the garage, and there in a pair of black jeans and a t-shirt covered in grease is Jeff Beck. He was working on one of his hot rods and he is pissed! I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "The fucking thing won't start!" I knew a little bit about engines. I left out the fact that part of my high school was spent wasted at the drag strip, and my parents happened to be in the car business.
There you go.
