While you may or may not recognize Mark Bingham's name, his career as a musician, engineer, producer and arranger has spanned four decades. From sessions in the '60s watching the Doors record, producing cult bands in the '70s, working briefly with R.E.M. in the early '90s, to his recent opening of a fine studio in New Orleans, he has recorded more styles of music than there are categories. Mark Bingham's career started at Elektra's studios when the label was still setting trends. After leaving Elektra, Bingham and his then- frequent collaborator Mark Hood recorded classics like MX- 80 Sound's Out of the Tunnel and the Bush Tetras' "Too Many Creeps" single. He has worked with experimental jazz giants like saxophonist Kidd Jordan and bassist Mark Dresser. Today, his Piety Street Recording in New Orleans helps to preserve the work of local legends like Aaron Neville and Allen Toussaint.
Bingham formed a rock band while still in high school. "Our band won a band battle, and the judges were Howard Cosell, Cousin Bruce Morrow, and Bill Harvey from Elektra Records, the art director who made those beautiful Nonesuch LP covers. They liked the songs, and I was writing the songs, so they brought me to Elektra, who signed me up as a songwriter. I was 17 and still in high school. It's goofy. I was making all this music that had backwards [parts] in 1966. In the spring of '67, I signed with Elektra's publishing wing. I was still in high school, and they gave me money! Immediately, they were saying, 'Now you've got to learn to write boy-girl songs, me-you songs.' I'm just writing all this crazy stuff in six parts, and I was stupid and stubborn. My boy-girl songs were not so good. It was very stupid. There was one song I wrote [that] the Everly Brothers did. I heard it — I don't think it even got released on a compilation or anything."
While on staff as a songwriter, Mark enjoyed his opportunity to investigate the studio. "They gave me the job of apprentice producer. I did everything from get coffee. I got to see Bruce Botnick, John Haeny, Paul Rothchild and Frazier Mohawk [Barry Friedman] make records. I got to see Doors records getting made, Judy Collins, Rhinoceros. I got to see an awful lot of great music go down as an 18- and 19-year-old. A lot of the sessions I saw were [recorded] live. People were just playing music in a room. I remember this combination of loose and groovy with very meticulous engineering. They had very limited equipment. I remember dealing with the low end of the room. I learned about using omni mics and getting 'em real close on acoustic guitars, over- amping compressors. I also saw how people would put mics up two feet away and get a really beautiful [sound] that never would happen when you stuck mics really close to things. Love's Forever Changes "was around that [time], and that was — and still is — amazing. There's a Nico record called The Marble Index. That's one of the coolest, strange, pop records. Nico and John Cale and that was it. It was all John Cale overdubs. John Cale making this really amazing sound and then the engineers [would] manipulate the sound as it was going down. Frazier Mohawk produced those Nico records.
"You learn how to do stuff with home tape recorders, and sometimes it doesn't translate in big studios. Fortunately for me, I learned early on that you could bring your cassette deck into this big recording studio, plug your guitar into it, put it into record and pause, turn the mic preamps all the way up, and plug that into your amp. That's going to give you this incredible sound just like you got at home that you liked. These professional guys would tell you, 'Oh you can't do that because it's going to do something bad to the equipment.' I, early on, had a bad attitude toward engineers because they were the people that told you you couldn't do things. The good thing about the Elektra engineers was they were willing to try anything. I finally, eventually, understood the concept of turning down, but I've always been into letting 'em play, and figuring out how to sort it out from there. Not going, 'You have to do this because of technology.'
"In L.A., in those days, studios were building their own consoles, like the console at Elektra, I think. I remember that Allen Emig had built a console at Columbia and maybe one at Capitol. He was the Elektra head tech. Engineers were constantly trying to get things to work better, and shit was falling apart left and right, and it was a big ordeal to do audio and get it to sound great. Now, what we've learned is that by having those kinds of equipment where each component did one thing, even if it was difficult and noisy, there's something about it that we liked very much, and that's why all this stuff is now coming back in droves, [with] new capacitors and new parts, and they work great.
"In 1969, I got a deal with Warner Brothers. I've still got my single on Warner Brothers from that era. They signed me as an artist. I started making a record, and then stopped making a record. It's produced by Frazier Mohawk, who was an Elektra producer. [He] had a bunch of legal problems and that's when I went back to Indiana. I [had] started Indiana University right out of high school, but then I just left immediately and went to L.A. to work for Elektra because I didn't like school very much. After my L.A. experience, I went back [to Indiana] and I did the school part again."
In the early '70s, when Bingham played in the band Screaming Gypsy Bandits, hippie culture of the '60s remained more prominent in college towns like Bloomington than in big American cities. It combined with newer influences to produce unusual results. "Screaming Gypsy Bandits started before I got there. Because I had the experience in Los Angeles and I knew about studios a bit, I started being sort of the producer, simply because I could. I had a grandiose idea that we could record a lot of the stuff in Indiana and get it out into the world. When I made all the Bloomington compilations, most of the bands were probably better left undone."
Of the five samplers, only one was ultimately released, 1975's Bloomington One compilation. "We were attempting to find a populist musical vision. Frazier Mohawk had turned me on to Charlie Parker and Archie Shepp. I had gone from being groomed to be a pop star kid to wanting to listen to John Coltrane. Screaming Gypsy Bandits were playing — as was fairly typical of that time — Sun Ra stuff and 'Trane heads with a back beat, and playing country music at the same time, all mixed together. It's funny, now, that whole concept is back in the jam band thing. I feel like it's a flashback."
In Bloomington at the time, "there was this guy Jack Gilfoy. He was Henry Mancini's drummer, and Nancy Wilson and Johnny Mathis. Jack was an African music expert and had hundreds of African drums — he was of another generation than the Screaming Gypsy Bandit crowd. Jack was not a hippie, but was a sympathizer. He didn't care how weird anybody was — he was into music. Jack Gilfoy was the linchpin of the whole thing. He was trying to keep up and have good equipment. When I first went there, he had an 8-track — the first Screaming Gypsy Bandits stuff was 1" 8-track. By '73 he had a 2" 16-track. He had [Neumann] U87s and a lot of ElectroVoice [mics]. He had a circumstance where people could actually play music together. A lot of it had to do with shutting the piano [lid] and putting a [baffle] over it. The drums were probably too soft and [mimics timid '70s drum sounds]. You don't realize that you can bring your own drums, move the microphones back five inches — it'll sound fine. We already knew about the Glyn Johns' [Tape Op #109] three-mic drum sound that now so many people use all the time, or four mic as it were, snare, kick, one here and one there. We didn't know anything about the Coles. We knew about ribbon mics, but we knew kind of that they were bad and that you couldn't put them in front of a loud amp, that's sort of all. I think he had a Spectrasonics board at that point, which is good. We had big JBL monitors and that was it. In about '74 or '75, I discovered that I could take my AR 7s, and that the mixes would be much better if we listened on those things. People started bringing Auratones in, but Auratones are some cheesy stuff. Then I started using those little metal Radio Shack [Minimus 7s]. Those became another standard that people would use.
"Mark Hood was the engineer. Mark Hood is still in Bloomington, and has a studio, Echo Park. Mark had been recording orchestras since he was a kid. He was really good. The funny part is I worked with him for years and I never learned anything because he was so secretive about what he was doing. In those days, a lot of engineers, they didn't want to tell you anything because they'd lose their gig. I didn't really know how to bus things. I'd say, 'Okay, I want to send these four mics down to stereo,' and, 'Yes sir.' He retained a lot of power by basically being the only person who knew how to do anything on that level."
Bingham and Hood started the Bar- B-Q label to release albums by the local bands that they recorded. "A Caroline Peyton thing and a Bill Wilson thing actually became sort of national [hits], on the radio, [with] like 150 stations playing those things. That 'Stardust Train' song [by Bill Wilson], you'd hear it next to 'Dream Weaver'. I was trying to just infuse it with some musicality that wasn't just Nashville. That's notable as being the first recorded performance of [John Cougar Mellencamp drummer] Kenny Aronoff. Bill hated it so much that he went and re-did the entire record by himself on a small label because I had put on a backwards saxophone. Caroline Peyton had this song called 'Call of the Wild' that was everywhere. It was really bizarre. That meant we had to press 30,000 records, and of course the distributors never paid us and the record label went out of business. That was the '70s. You get two hits out of this little dipshit label in Indiana and then that's the end, your hits. Otherwise we were making 1000 records at a time and getting rid of them.
"We had a relationship with Jack Gilfoy, where — I can't remember if we gave him a thousand dollars a month to get all the off hours — it was something ridiculous like that. We were trying to record all kinds of stuff, and we did a lot of really wild music. We [also] recorded the Carillon bell tower — climbed up into the back and hung boom mics out to get 'em 15 feet away. I didn't know how else to do it. We couldn't go up in a helicopter, couldn't build a 200-foot mic stand."
Guitarist Bruce Anderson, who went on to found MX-80 Sound, "was in the Screaming Gypsy Bandits. He's an amazing guitar player, he really approached the guitar in an entirely different way than anyone I've ever seen. He put that band [MX- 80 Sound] together, and there was really nothing like it on earth. He took guitars and mutated them, and put different strings in different levels, which ended up being the whole signature of Sonic Youth, ten years later. MX- 80 was originally a quartet. It had two drummers — neither very accomplished. Dale Sopheia, the bass player, had been a music major and he was learning to play bass. [Later] they got [vocalist and saxophonist] Rich Stim, and Rich basically was a comedian."
"They would rehearse almost every day. They recorded a lot of their rehearsals. I believe the first sessions we did were [a Neumann] KM84 over each drummer [and] a kick drum mic on each drummer. The kick drums really sounded like waterbeds in those days. It was a whole different concept of kick drums. So the first [MX-80 Sound 7" single] that was called 'Big Hits' was actually recorded pretty good. Bruce was in the office with his amp. We had the drummers in the same room, the bass in the same room. It wasn't that big of a space. Mark Hood could record anything — he's really good.
"The next record [Hard Attack] was really amazing. Somehow it ended up that Rich was so fuckin' loud on that record, his vocal. It ended up like this giant singer and this little band. I don't know what was wrong with us and how we managed to screw that up." MX-80 Sound assert that Island altered the sound of the album in mastering in a misguided effort to market it to heavy metal audiences. "We may have made it almost like that and they made it worse, who knows. I felt like I wanted remix it, but I think Rich took the original master tapes and recorded over it so we'll never be able to do it. I did at one point make a remix of 'Crushed Ice' that was pretty amazing."
The second and third MX-80 Sound albums, on the Residents' label "Ralph were pretty simple recordings. The band just rehearsed all the time. You didn't put effects on Bruce. You just recorded it, and compressed things as you needed. Oliver DiCicco," who engineered Out of the Tunnel "was really good. 'How do you want to do the drums?' 'Let's do them like regular, let's put two overheads, and we'll mic the toms and we'll mic the snare drum. Occasionally I would do stupid shit, like I'd find somebody with a Marshall Tone Modulator or something, and put the underside of the snare drum in the Marshall. I didn't do too much of that stuff. Rich's saxophone is so out of it that I'd often put a lot of weird shit on that just because I couldn't stand [it]. I've been used to playing with real great musicians. MX-80 was trying to then become more commercial or something, whatever that means. They were doing more 'pop' songs, and [one] drummer, Jeff Armour, left because he couldn't stand that they were trying to be straight.
"I did play guitar on 'Gary and Priscilla', but in those days you're just not even credited on things like that. I feel stupid because it would have been good if I had played a lot, because I could play good with Bruce. Out of the Tunnel is so amazing, so intense. We were mixing to 1/2" analog and smearing. Oliver had a console that ran on a car battery, I think, so it was so clean and it didn't distort anywhere. You'd have to ask him [what it was]. Now he's got Neves, but 20-some years ago, God knows what he had. I think the [7" single] they made [with DiCicco] that I didn't work on called 'O Type' [is] a really beautiful piece.
"I was in New York for a long time, but I would go to Indiana because I'd still have gigs in Indiana, and I'd go there and play and work with MX-80. [In] '76 I actually moved. I didn't quite know what I was doing [in New York]. I got a job managing a massage parlor on the weekends, and that was really curious. I'd take money from guys and they'd go back and pick out a girl and go in a room. I got to see the world of gangsters and prostitutes and pimps. I did that for six months and I couldn't take it anymore. The gangsters actually went out of their way to hire musicians, because musicians never had to pay for sex and were less likely to be interacting with the prostitutes.
"I started the Social Climbers with two basses. Everyone in the scene is nothing but a social climber so we'll just call our band that, which was kind of stupid. This woman, Jean Shaw, a music major at Indiana too, just took up the bass, like everyone was taking up instruments back then. The Social Climbers played a lot of gigs. We went to Europe and we toured all over the country. We never made any money. Some people actually liked the band." The Social Climbers' lone 7" on Gulcher wins raves from everyone able to track it down. "From that, I started doing utility guitarist for Theoretical Girls, and Jeffrey Lohn and Glenn Branca. I was a composer too, and I could read music enough. That's how I met Elliott Sharp. If you're in that scene and you could actually read music and knew how to direct traffic a little bit, it was cool. I recorded the Bush Tetras single 'Too Many Creeps'. I got no credit for it, because me and Mark Hood stole the studio time on a Sunday at this studio Mark was working in. We just went and did it and we couldn't give it credit. Ed Bahlman of 99 Records — everyone always wants to take credit for everything they didn't do, so let 'em have it. That record came out and it did really good, but it didn't help me any because no one knew that I had anything to do with it.
"In New York, I went for years without any studio. I was a producer and a collaborator, a writer and arranger. I did a couple of theater things. I tried to start a studio in New York, in the late '70s. We ordered a Neve compressor [that he still owns], and got wire in the walls, and that's as far as we got. Eventually Philip Glass and Kurt Munkasci took over the space and had a studio there for a while, so the wires came in handy for them.
"I used to record at Media Sound. It was this old temple on 57th Street that they turned into a studio. It had this huge arched ceiling. It got ruined because they were doing subway renovation during the workday. It went out of business. They would record guitars with [Sennheiser] 409s slammed up right against the amps.
