You went to Evergreen, in Olympia, WA, and studied recording there, didn't you?
Yeah.
Was that where you first got into recording?
No, I was playing with synthesizers and things that required tape decks way before then. An older friend of mine used to smuggle me into the Moog studio at USC when I was 17. Once and a while we had an 8 track in there but the rest of the time we had a Teac 3340. I remember that it was bigger than a regular 4 track; I had friends that had 4 tracks when I was a kid. I did a science-fiction-y kind of sample and hold thing on a 4 track when I was 16 with this other friend of mine that had another older friend that had a connection with somebody that had a 3D fish-eye lens that would make 3D films and stuff. We were making a mock-up for the porno sequence in this 3D porno movie--the space/porno scene in this 3D porno film. I was doing that in the garage when I was real young. I had this other friend that was a lot older that had two Sony 1/4 inch deck semipro machines and when I first got my synthesizer we would go over to his place and just do sound-on-sound going back and forth between the decks making this hideous, useless, noisy Todd Rundgren synthesizer shit. So synthesizers first got me into recording. Evergreen was the first time I got into using microphones. Everything else was just 1/4 inch plugs.
Were you thinking of a career in recording when you went to Evergreen?
I wasn't thinking of a career as much as I wanted to be a composer. Once again, synthesizers were the main point and then it was; we have quad and 8 track and 16 track here. My friend Peter Randlin, sort of my entry into all that. He played on a bunch of it and helped me write songs. It wasn't really songs, it was more like 6/8 quadraphonic salsa/fugue jam that was sort of my thesis piece, (if there ever was such a thing at Evergreen.) I worked on it for about a year and it was set up for quadraphonic tape playback that was on 16 track so it had things flying around the room. Congas and tympany set up in a serialized pattern. It was very intellectual. Then there was live shit that me and Peter did on top of it. I did tons and tons of Fripp and Eno kind of tape loop shit; got that all out of my system. Never had to deal with that in my real life. Like a lot of other people are stuck doing! It's a cool trick and it's nice. Have you ever listened to Wonderwall Music, the George Harrison record?
I've never heard that.
He does the Fripp and Eno thing way early. He does the Eno ambient synthesizer with too much echo way early in the game. It was all stuff he'd offered the Beatles and they didn't want to have anything to do with it. He was the smart Beatle. He was a lame singer so everyone just sort of wrote him off. The Wonderwall album...I have to say it loud now 'cause there's so many people who think that "Wonderwall" is a song by Oasis...the Wonderwall album is like a Beatles instrumental record. Ringo plays all over it and what bass playing there is, is George or Klaus Voorman who played like Paul McCartney back then so it was sort of the Beatles instrumental album with Paul and John out of the way. It's on CD now and it sounds great. It was recorded when all the great Beatles' stuff was recorded but nobody gave a shit 'cause it was George's side project. So he's doing all kinds of abstract stuff with wonderful Indian musicians and putting it through flanger and phaser and compressing the living crap out of it. Plus the most blown up Ringo drum sounds ever and Eric Clapton, right out of Disralie Gears, doing really groovy backwards guitar solos. When Eric Clapton was good. Back when all these people were good!
So how did you end up doing what you do now?
You don't have time for a Steve Fisk history! When people get it, they print it all wrong. Don't worry about that. People don't care about it anyway, and it's certainly not how anybody else would do it. I'd done a lot of "punk rock" 4 track stuff in Olympia, aside from the synthesizer work at Evergreen. I recorded Calvin Johnson's first band on a 4 track in a basement of the college. I recorded the Beakers on a 4 track in a basement in Seattle; that's one of the 45s I helped put out. We used one of those really rancid Tascam mixers that had little switches instead of dials for the EQs and six inputs and two outs. That was my mixing board. Once and a while I'd get to take stuff up to the synthesizer studio. So I'd take the four track and take the saxophone and put it through the quad. Back then there was really wonderful 4 track stuff coming out. There was the early Devo material, "Warm Leatherette" and "TVOD." So there was a lot of synthesizer/punk rock shit and it was really radical and real minimal. So anyway, that's the kind of shit I was doing when I didn't know what I was doing. Then I went down to San Francisco and got called a producer a few times when I was in Pell Mell. I got to sit around and make aesthetic calls at the top of a ship of fools in a few studios. Fantasy [Studios] being the notable ship of fools. A friend of mine smuggled me in there and I got to pretend to be a producer on a record that was way too ambitious and recorded way too much material in three days.
What was it?
It was called Paris Working, one of those San Francisco new wave bands. They were contemporaries of Wire Train. They were good but their record isn't any good, although it does have a dub mix on it that's kind of groovy. Phil Hertz played drums in that band, if you remember who Phil Hertz is.
I don't.
He works for Cargo now but he was an Evergreener. He didn't live at the Sub Pop house but there was a house on the west side that Bruce always brought the tapes to whenever we'd get the old Sub Pop stuff. Me and Phil and about 3 or 4 other people had all of our gear in one house. We had two 4 tracks, some synthesizers and a bunch of mics and cables. When Bruce was putting together the original Sub Pop cassettes, which back then were new wave and experimental and hardcore...Bruce was always coming up the hill with the mail saying, "Oh, let's check this one out." So the home studio that me and my friends had in college was also sort of the launching point for the Sub Pop empire! So what I've been trying to say for 10 is that when Pell Mell broke up in '85 I moved to Ellensburg and my friend Sam Allbright had built this gorgeous 8 track over there in a huge room. Velvetone Studios. Named after Jimi Hendrix's first band. That's where I was the house engineer, forever, with a beautiful Otari 8 track.
A half inch?
Yeah, and a huge room which would've accommodated a 24 track beautifully and Sam had hopes that if the studio took off...but as it was it was just this gorgeous, acoustically crazy, but kind of cool room. We had 5 [Shure] SM 57's, 2 AKG 460B's, a Neumann KB3 and that was it.
You did all the early Screaming Tree's stuff there?
Yeah, Beat Happening, the Soundgarden Fop remix and no bands that anybody knows about!
So after that you moved to Seattle and worked on more stuff. What's been some of the latest projects?
Three Mile Pilot. Crowsdell. They're a 3 piece from Florida and they just moved to Brooklyn. I did their second record for Big Cat Records. They're great. I don't know what to say. Pretty good singer--it kinda rocks. Damien Jurardo. He's put out a few singles on Sub Pop. His first LP's gonna be out in the fall. I recorded that at Avast.
That's a cool space.
Yeah. Board's falling apart; they're getting ready to put an API in there. I'm getting ready to jump into the second Violent Green album. I'm gonna do that when I get back. The Low record just came out. The Unwound record that came out a month ago.
Have you done all the Unwound records?
All five. They're still very young.
They're pretty darn good, too.
They rock! The new record is...do I dare say it...Beatle-y. They called for many things to be brought to them and they played them all themselves. We had tympany and vibraphones...all kinds of shit on the record.
How do you select what stuff you work on? Are you selective?
Yeah. There's certain kinds of music that I'm just not good at recording anyway 'cause I don't have any interest in it. I couldn't spend a week on it without getting really antsy. For being as cynical and hateful as I am I actually like a lot of different music. It's a combination of what the dynamics of it are gonna be and what the expectations of the band are. Some people have such stupid expectations you just really don't want to get involved with them.
Like in what way?
"Hi. I want to make a killer record. We've got three weeks in an ADAT studio and I've got a friend that knows some string players and I want to add strings and I want to add horns. Yeah, it's a Mackie board but we got a deal on it." I'm not gonna help that guy. He's gonna find out the hard way that you can't do that. I don't do metally shit. I guess some people might think Unwound is metally but I don't do metal shit at all. I'm waiting for somebody to bring me something I'd like to do. I stay away from that. When I get demos...I guess I sound like some politically correct fascist or something...I try as hard as I can to listen to the lyrics. I don't want to record a song that's got something...I don't like, "She's a Hurricane," "Hot Blooded," you know, woman as natural force-of-nature kind of song.
Those cliche's and sexism have been driven into the ground already.
Once somebody sent me this band, they had money to spend, they were on a major label, and the first song on the demo was just this idiotic, stupid diatribe about Courtney Love. It was all a first-person fuck you to Courtney Love. I thought, "Well, even if I was mad at her why would I do this?" It was just stupid. This band has no place to take on Courtney Love in a song and I don't want to help them. That would just be pointless. So, you sort of listen for stupid-factor.
Plus you're gonna have to spend weeks cooped up in a room with these people.
There have been some people that I have at least gotten into conversation with where I thought there were some things that I really wanted to help alter or obliterate from their previous album. "I'll take this on but we can't do horns like you did the last time around." Things that weren't executed right or things that they were trying to do stylistic that I understand where they got it wrong. If I find out that they think they got it right or they're not interested in what I'm doing, I'll say, "Great, there isn't anything to talk about. You just keep doing your stupid records."
Does where you can record affect your decision?
I'm lucky 'cause Seattle's got two really cool medium to cheap priced studios. They'll have all the gear I need to record guitar, bass and drums properly. Basically, it's not a rocket science, and I spent years working with the right mic, the [Shure] SM 57. When I finally got through the Logics 8 board [in Ellensburg] to the goddamn MCI board [at Music Source in Seattle] to (finally) a Neve module [at London Bridge in Seattle] I was, "Wow, this sounds great on drums and good on guitar." Then I got to work with the API and it is really good too. Even Trident rocks. There's a reason why these songs sound right through the older gear. It's because the bulk of the historical information we have in the 20th century is a vibrating guitar string through a pickup that had something to do with Leo Fender, Gibson or something, going through an amplifier that has something to do with Leo Fender going through a Neve, API or Trident console onto a piece of regular analog tape. That's how that sound happened. You can't make that happen on a Tascam console and you can't make that happen on an ADAT. You can't even hope to make that happen on a Mackie. If somebody can, bless their hearts. I've been forced to use things like that, in demo situations, and it's so demoralizing. Greg Freeman's [Pell Mell member and Lowdown Studios owner--see Tape Op #1] got a great way around a bunch of this shit right now. He got a great way by using the EQ as little as possible and preamps. He's still got a Mackie in the back end. It's interesting though; his Mackie upgrade was a good one because his console before wasn't really giving him a clear picture of his tape deck. Now that he's got a Mackie in there he can actually hear what's glorious about his tape deck. He's also got all this hot-rod signal path TLA gear. I brought along my rack so we can use the Joe Meek for drum sounds. That studio, with the concrete walls, it just sounds great with programmed compression and all that.
Do you find that you'll choose projects that you know will get a good label push and be heard?
Some of my favorite things I've worked on are totally unheard. Ask that one more time before I answer that one 'cause that's political.
I'm sorry. I do that, on a much smaller level. I'd rather work on something that's gonna get released than someone's damn demo cassette.
Well, Yeah. I've got to stand behind what I record, at least at this point in my life. Five years from now I may not be able to answer that question the same way. I kind of endorse what I record.
The Steve Fisk stamp of approval.
I certainly recorded some major label stuff that I was quite passionate about that disappeared. A majority of it, actually.
Does that bum you out?
Yeah. It's pretty demoralizing and there's people tied to all that and they all have lives. The 360's had a very bad relationship with what their thing turned into and that's a record I cared a lot about. Wedding Present, for god's sake, they were bungled completely.
And the production on that record has been called brilliant.
I still get a lot of work based on that record. That's a record where the band was radically involved with their sound even if they didn't even know what they were fucking talking about. The Wedding Present is one of the only bands I've worked with that's done 8 albums. It's a band that people are passionate about and it's a "song" band so what the producer does is pretty obvious from record to record. I can't talk about that record without throwing down props at John Goodmanson, my trusty engineer/co-producer. He's all over it and has a good deal to do with why that record rocks and why the guitars sound the way they do. John's really great.
How would you describe his role when you two work together?
We have a lot of shit in common and he knows what I'm trying to do. At the beginning we did a lot of talking about things; which mics on which, which mic pres and what to compress and what not to. The more we work the more there's less spoken. Now, it's more like I turn around and everything's going how I would expect it to go anyway and unless I've got something to fuck with him about, he takes care of a lot of the stuff himself. A lot of times I don't touch a lot of knobs. It's really great and gives me time to deal with the musicians and answer their questions and run off on a piano and bang out parts with them. It definitely puts John in co-producer territory. I would really love to keep working with him for a long time in a situation where he's getting his props, more or less 'cause he's really great. He's doing major label production now and he's been doing independent production for years and really making some incredible records.
He did that last Juned album, didn't he? It sounds great.
I like his Bikini Kill record and his Team Dresch record. He does record more metally rock bands that I'm not into. He's a guitar player.
When you work in a place like that do you find some good sounding rooms?
Oh, they sound incredible. The Village has got this one room that's the echo chamber that everybody liked to use, like Eric Clapton and George Harrison. So when you're running Three Mile Pilot flying tympanies and weird whirling horns through it you go, "Well, there's got to be something right about this reverb." There's some kind of justice in that. Old studios are great. You find crazy shit, like, "Here's the piano they recorded 'Ricky Don't Lose That Number' on." Up at Sear Sound, the piano there is from 1910. I worked with Soul Coughing and the piano player and I were talking about the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Double Fantasy record that was done there and he knew all the parts and started playing them on the piano and it was like, "Wow!" That's really cool working in historical places because their historical for a reason. Hundreds of things have been tweaked over 15 or 20 years and they're all tweaked a certain way and a certain thing happens. That's why Power Station and Hit Factory are so lame to record at because so much music is done there that you recognize the sound even though it's all the right gear. "Oh yeah, that sound!"
Have there ever been any sessions you've done that have been excruciating?
I once recorded in a part of the world where the electricity was very undependable. It was a 220 [volt] country and putting a SM 57 on a guitar amp...it was really funny...by the time you got into the control room, the sound of the guitar would be 3 dB's louder. We're getting fluctuations in voltage over the course of the day. The guitar sounds would be shitty, then the guitar sounds would be great. That was pretty hateful. I've been at another studio in England that was very badly maintained. It looked like it was gonna work for the first day and then about three or four days into it I realized we'd been waiting around hours for this.
As far as gear breaking down?
Yeah, and being able to trust the monitors. Something would sound wrong and then you'd throw on a reference CD and realize the monitors are fucked up. Then you start fixing the monitors and they'd get them half together but things are still wrong.
Ouch.
Yeah. That's a place where they're charging the equivalent of a thousand a day. It's pretty horrible.
Have you had trouble with people in the studio?
Well, I don't work with junkies. Drunks are fucked. They get all drunk and they think their mix is good and they go home and it's not how they wanted it.
It's your fault.
"But you were drunk and you said it was good. I told you not to drink, then you got drunk and now you want me to do it again." That's a drag. People dying. It sort of evened out a bit but just with people dying...John and I were doing all kinds of work and it seemed like every other session the phone would ring and somebody's dead. If it wasn't somebody you knew it was somebody all your friends knew. Now we've got to work on a record and somebody that a lot of people loved is dead and it's gonna be part of that dynamic. Seattle kind of needed people dying. If you're from LA or Manhattan or San Francisco a lot of original punk rockers died real hard. Whereas in Seattle it's just kind of a new thing. It's really sad that people in their early 20's are now writing songs about dead friends. So yeah, death is a real drag. Heroin's a real drag. Suicide's a real drag. It really can fuck up sessions, even if they don't happen to anybody in the band.
It'll cast a mood over everything...
Or, "Oh wow, this song now changed. It's now more important than it ever was before because it happened when the phone call came in. It's getting better now. They're still be more people dying, you can count on that. The universe is kind of strange. What else? Brothers and sisters have one kind of problem. Brothers have another kind of problem. Sisters have another kind of problem. Couples always have problems! Something starts at the breakfast table and you carry it into the session and everyone's wondering why you're getting so pissed off.
Anyway... you said you had a Joe Meek box.
You know what sounds better than any tube compressor? The Joe Meek. It is expensive but it's paid for itself for me. I bought it when I did the Boss Hog session. They had one lying around there and I didn't know who Joe Meek was and I'd seen references once and a while but it never really clicked who it was. John Spencer was, "You gotta know about Joe Meek." I asked Ray Farrell [former Pell Mell mgr./current DGC employee] about him and he made me a cassette. I bought a bunch of CDs and became a full on Meek-o-phile. We've got a Clavoline down here at the Pell Mell studio.
Are you gonna put a reverb chamber in your attic? [like Joe Meek was rumored to have done]
We don't have an attic here. These guys are building a ball park.
Are they knocking down Greg's studio [Lowdown]?
Sometime in the next couple of years.
Oh man. That's a piece of history.
I know. You'll be able to look out the third base dugout. That's the drum sound, right there in the dugout. In Japan when they do that they allow you to keep your business in the new building they put up. It'd be great. Happy Donuts [infamous local eatery] would be over in centerfield, some stoned rock band wandering around buying hot dogs on their break. I don't think we'll see that. I'm rambling; you got any more questions?
Umm, yeah. I think this will be a good interview 'cause a lot of these dorks think I'm promoting the 4 track revolution or something and I'm looking for where good records come from.
I'm waiting to find out that there's some record I love that was done on a Tascam 388 and a Mackie board but I haven't heard it yet. I love Guided By Voices, they sound great. When some band comes to me and wants to do a 4 track record I say, "Well, can we use 4 channels of a 24 track?" Why put it on a Fostex cassette deck? It's not the same thing the Beatles had.
No. And they had 7 or 8 of the best 4 track reel-to-reel decks in the world sitting around...
And a staff of 4 or 5 people operating everything and plugging it in for them.
And great tube consoles with giant round fader, knobs and rooms that sound really good.
And a radical, bad-ass producer that was gonna become a very important producer later on but no one realized it when they were starting that George Martin was going to be very important. You can't really say that Beatles rocked on 4 tracks. Well...no. There's a guy in Seattle that's got some well maintained Ampex tube 4 tracks that I'm interested in using at some point or another.
I hear a lot of times that even just using the input stages on those as tube pre amps works real well.
I've never been lucky enough to have one of those lying around. Sear Sound's got some crazy decks. They've got an Ampex 300, 1/2 " tube mastering deck. The only functional one in the country. It poses interesting problems, since when you take the tape out of there it's not the same on a regular deck. They've got a Studer 1 inch 2 track that they're restoring and getting ready to hook up.
That gives you plenty of track room.
Yeah. Once again, mastering becomes a problem. I think they burn all of them onto CDR and take that in to mastering.
