How did you get into recording?
In 1965 my mother bought me a Sony 7" reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was mono, with one microphone. I'm not even sure why I wanted it. I soon became bored just recording my favorite records and began recording sound effects. Then I got bored with that and discovered if I put a band-aid over the erase head, I could create a sound on sound recording. I would record records at different speeds; sometimes backwards, people talking, stuff off the TV, until the half-hour reel was full. If I kept doing layer upon layer, I would get this garbled collage of sound. Mind you, I couldn't hear what was previously recorded because when I put the recorder into record the speakers would shut off. It was always a surprise. Years later my friends and I would sit around at night smoking pot and play the tapes. Hey, it was 1968.
Did you play an instrument?
I played the drums from the age of 15 until I was around 30. When I couldn't play in a band and engineer at the same time I stopped playing professionally. Although, this year I did find the time to play in a Yardbirds tribute band I call The RaveUps, great fun
What kind of music did you play?
I was into rock and played in a band called the Rockets in 1972. Eddie Mahonie was our lead singer before he became Eddie Money. We had a big following in the Bay Area that eventually attracted an engineer by the name of Tom Lubin from CBS studios in San Francisco. Tom arranged for the band to record at his friend's studio in Ojai, California.
Was this your first recording studio experience?
Not exactly. We did a recording in a small studio in San Francisco's Chinatown district a year earlier. They wouldn't let us into the control room. When we stopped playing they handed us a reel-to-reel tape in a white box and asked us to leave. I think we were too loud.
When did the recording engineer bug start to bite you?
In Ojai, working on the Rockets recordings. It was a loose atmosphere and they let us fool around with the equipment and do some mixing. When the Rockets broke up a year later, the owner of the studio hired me as a caretaker/intern for a studio they were trying to build in the mountains above Santa Barbara. I moved there hoping I would someday be the chief engineer, making tons of money and hanging out by the pool with famous rock stars.
And the reality was...
Well, the studio was never built because the land was actually in a National Forest and after a year they ran out of money fighting all the legal roadblocks. I went back home to the Bay Area and started over. But I knew I wanted to be a recording engineer and I took whatever job I could get in the business to pay my bills. I road-managed a band for Elektra/Asylum records for a year. I helped build a touring PA company with some friends that specialized in "onstage monitor mixing," a big new thing in the late '70s. I eventually landed a gig with Stevie Wonder mixing monitors but I still wanted to get into the studio. By now I was the father of a three-year-old girl and the pressure was building to make it happen.
What were the circumstances surrounding your first recording experiences?
In the late '70s, if you wanted to be a studio engineer you had to know someone at a studio and work your way up the pecking order or build your own studio. But you couldn't go to a store and buy a studio like you can today. You instead had to find used gear and then fix most of it. My good friend Dan Alexander, the former guitar player in the Rockets, was a vintage guitar dealer at the time. He too wanted a studio so he turned his attention to finding used recording equipment. He eventually amassed enough gear to outfit a 16-track studio that had a tape recorder the size of a small car. It was there, in a converted mom and pop grocery store he called Tewksbury, that I recorded my first record, for a Jamaican reggae band called Soul Syndicate. It was also there I met and recorded the Dead Kennedys and Joe Satriani's pop band, The Squares. But I was still doing live sound and playing drums to make ends meet. It was very hard and I was beginning to question my future as a recording engineer. It wasn't until 1987, when I recorded Joe Satriani's Surfing with the Alien, that I began to actually do better than just survive. That record attracted a lot of attention and received a Grammy nomination. I started getting calls from record labels to do other guitar bands, mostly speed metal and punk stuff.
How did you end up working with the Dead Kennedys?
I was an employee at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco in 1980 and was asked to engineer the Dead Kennedys' second full-length album with Thom Wilson as the producer. After about a week of recording they had a falling out with Thom. They kept me on to engineer and the band finished the record they titled Plastic Surgery Disasters.
Were they difficult to work with?
No, at that point I had established a relationship with them. They could trust me to oversee the recording. But it was like riding a wild horse. They were a really good live band. Essentially the records were recorded live. The vocals were overdubbed, and some of the guitar parts were added later. It was not a crazy, drugged-out event. It was more of a deliberate, professional approach.
You were still pretty new to studio engineering.....
Definitely. I was just learning how to be a recording engineer, and I had to learn how to work quickly and set my priorities. Early on I tended to spend too much time with details that would get in the way of the performance. It's a mistake a lot of new engineers make. If I've got a band who's ready to record and the energy is up in the room, I shouldn't spend the next two hours listening to a snare drum or trying to find a better place to put a microphone on a speaker. The idea is to get in there and to capture what they're doing... so they come in, set up and the tape better be rolling. But what if I didn't spend time getting good drum sounds or putting the bass in a good place for isolation where it wouldn't leak all over the drums? To work fast I had to learn how to fix or cover up my mistakes later on. As I made more and more records I learned what and what not to do. I would fall back on things I knew would work. All experienced engineers do this. They fall back to a bottom line of skills that guarantees a good recording. In situations like this, or in live situations, it's invaluable. You've gotta be able to know you can put a Shure SM-57 on the snare in this position, record it flat, and be guaranteed something you can work with later. As opposed to, "Well, gee, today let's try this old tube mic cause I read in a magazine that so and so uses it."
You knew the Dead Kennedys were ready to play and you had a limited amount of time. How did you go about it?
I treated them like a live band. If you were doing live sound at a concert, you do the tried and true. You use gear you can rely on. At the time we were using a nice sounding all discrete Trident B series console [the console with which Queen recorded A Night At The Opera]. I just didn't do anything that would be too artsy. It didn't require the recording engineer to take risks that might interfere with their performances. I wasn't that confident in my own skills to want to try and make a "great" recording. It was more incumbent on me to document the event. Later on I took more creative liberties.
Like with the Joe Satriani recordings?
Yes, and the next DKs album, Frankenchrist. As I built up my confidence I started experimenting more with mic placements, effects and tape editing.
Did you use these experiments to develop your own sound?
Not at all. If you listen to Surfing With The Alien and then Frankenchrist, there's nothing similar in the way they sound. I always took great pride in not having a "sound" as an engineer. Satriani had a sound and the Dead Kennedys had a sound, and it's my obligation to present that to the world, to document what it was they're doing. My role with the DKs was very different than it was with Joe. Joe was much more methodical, much more experimental. We had the time and luxury for me to try five different microphones on an instrument and to experiment with arrangements and recording techniques. But the DKs' unstated goal wasn't to sound like other punk bands at the time — very in your face, very dry and aggressive sounding. The Dead Kennedys wanted something different. Ray, the guitar player, used a Fender 12-string and a lot of tape delay, an Echoplex, so he was already shaping the sound of the band. Hyde Street had some really wonderful-sounding live echo chambers. I could go in there and move the mic and the speaker around and experiment. I started using reverbs with the Dead Kennedys and they liked it — a lot — and they wanted more and more. Pretty soon Frankenchrist turned into a roar of reverbs that created a sound no one had done before on a punk record. But when we did the next record, Bedtime For Democracy, we got self-conscious and I was forced to pull back on it, which I think now was a mistake. I believe Frankenchrist established a sonic landscape for the band that wasn't followed up by Bedtime... It was starting to sound more like classic rock production, where you'd use reverbs discriminately.
Was that a decision they left up to you?
I'm not sure exactly how it came about. Maybe our sensibilities kicked in. When we were making Frankenchrist it was more the lack of experience and not being inhibited; maybe not being concerned about what we were doing and just doing what it was we wanted to do. Making a record we liked. Many hardcore fans wanted conformity in their punk records and didn't like the reverb. I think we were getting a bit worried. I think of myself as a recording engineer. I've never been comfortable with the title of producer. The first person to call me a producer was Satriani, after the success of Surfing With The Alien. He said, "I'm going to give you co-producing credit on that and Not Of This Earth as well," and I was shocked cause I'd never thought of myself as a producer. I mean, a producer — that's George Martin, Quincy Jones, Daniel Lanois [Tape Op #37]. They're producers. They can produce music. They can go into a room, pick up an instrument and produce music. I'm a recording engineer. I love the art of recording.
You're the first person I've heard actually use the phrase "music producer" literally...
To me it just makes sense. I've been around producers who can stop the band in the middle of a take and say, "Rather than going to the A there, go to an A minor and let's hear how that sounds." I would never do that! I might say, "You know, I want to try a different mic on you," something technical. With the Satriani records it was more challenging, I had to create a sound field for his guitar to reside in, something unique. I was given, within reason, as much time as I needed to experiment. I also helped Joe pick takes, sequence the record, and I would often choose the studios and book the sessions. My role as engineer slowly expanded as he trusted me more.
