In the Pere Ubu days were you much involved with the recording side of things?
Well, yeah, because back then there was no automation, at least we never recorded with automation, so to do mixes that had any kind of flair to them, you'd always have like three pairs, four pairs of hands on the console, so that was like the first time I ever got involved on that level. All the Pere Ubu records, you know, we fought our way through all the mixes.
Were you allowed to touch your own track's fader?
That was why on those Pere Ubu records the bass is always so loud. [laughs] Oh man. I know David [Thomas] is rolling his eyes right now if he sees that... The first place I ever recorded was this place called Cleveland Recording, with Pere Ubu. I guess that was the summer of '78, a long time ago. I was just so amazed by the studio, and how stuff sounded coming out of the speakers. I remember the first time we recorded, and coming into the control room and they hit 'play', and I was in seventh heaven. I was just like, "I can't believe this." That was Paul Hamann and his dad Ken, who just passed away this year [see Tape Op #13]. Paul was at his dad's side from those days on. His dad did the first Pere Ubu record [Modern Dance] and then Paul sat in for the second [Dub Housing], and he was in the chair for the whole third record [New Picnic Time]. Ken was just really into making things — he made the board. He had like the largest collection of tube mics outside of like L.A. or New York. Now Paul's got this amazing place out in the suburbs of Cleveland called Suma Recording. Big, big live room with wood floors and old barn wood walls, with a huge stone fireplace — you know, the classic stuff.
I've always heard a kind of dub influence in Pere Ubu. Were you consciously aiming for that?
I can honestly say I wasn't aware, back in the '70s, of how dub was really made. I had a bunch of dub records, like Big Youth and Tapper Zukie records. The drummer [Scott Krauss] and I used to listen to dub a lot. We liked that a lot — we liked that Miles Davis stuff. I remember Scott played [A Tribute to] Jack Johnson for me. I couldn't believe how that sounded. And then I found out later Teo Macero spliced a bunch of that record together. Paul was really good with splicing so we did splice in stuff — I mean, that's how you had to do it. But we didn't really think about dub.
How about other experimental studio techniques?
We also had the idea about recording outside. You know, if it's really quiet and you record outside, there's no reflection. We did a bunch of that stuff.
What did you record outside?
Mostly vocals. Vocals sounded pretty cool outside. No reflection. That was at Suma and those guys had all those great mics, so that was a win/win situation... It was really fun because the ambience is gorgeous out there. Suma is built on a lawn that runs down to a cliff that overlooks this beautiful valley, and there were these great trees. It was a great place to get natural ambience.
Did you do a bunch of tape loop stuff?
We were trying to make a really long loop and we had one of those old Ampex 16-tracks there, and we had a loop, smaller than this room, but not a lot smaller, and people were holding drumsticks, holding these big tape loops. I couldn't believe it, we really did it — we had this huge tape loop.
It seemed on tracks like "Blow Daddy O" you'd play around a sound coming from the synth, rather than laying a weird sound on top...
We used to get together three times a week and just play music. And it wasn't really planned that we were going to go on tour and make records. I didn't feel like I was such an experimental musician before I joined that band, but the way Allen [Ravenstine] played the synthesizer and the way David sang, that right there, you're working with two things that are very out of the ordinary. Allen used to practice by playing sounds into an oscilloscope and seeing how the sounds would change by altering the filter or using a sine wave or something... He was a painter, so his whole approach was coming from a different place. He was always very articulate about his ideas... thinking in terms of color, and thinking in terms of when you're creating something, maybe not always putting something next to something, but on top of something, that partially obscures or accents something else. We were really disciplined, we didn't waste a lot of time in the studio, but we had a couple pieces, and "Blow Daddy 0" was one of 'em, where we had the seed for the idea, and when we go into the studio, we'll put the synth down first and we'll add stuff and see what happens. Pere Ubu was always, if you heard something, you could go in and do it. [The Hamanns], I really feel like they fostered that in us, to not be afraid to just to kind of go with the feeling. Don't be afraid to just take a swing at it.
What was it like playing and recording when you first got to New York?
There were still, back in the '80s, a lot more studios, there was a lot more happening, but I was on the road in the '80s, half of the time with Ubu, the other half of the time it was either with Bob or the Mekons. If it wasn't those guys it would be Kelly Willis, or it would be Jill Sobule, smaller tours, but it just seemed like I was always working.
