So, your studio's name is Black-Eyed Pig. How did it come about that you were recording bands?
Probably the same way a lot of people get started. I played in bands for a while and had a little cassette four track pretty early on. Then I got a couple of these ¼" Dokorder reel to reel machines. I had two of those and was recording whatever band I was in and started recording some other friends. I was moving out of an apartment in the Mission into North Beach and both tape decks were stolen out of the car. I had renter's insurance, which covered them! They were both made in the mid-seventies, I would guess, and when they were made they were very expensive; a couple of thousand dollars. The clause they had was for replacement costs, so they take how much they were worth then and they increase it by the cost-of-living index for twenty years.
So you decided you'd better buy some real equipment then.
Right! The option is that you can take cash for them for the depreciated value of the objects, which meant the decks were worth $25 each, or I could go out and buy something new, up to a certain level. The problem was that I had to buy something brand new and I couldn't go over this limit. It put me in an awkward position, machine wise. I ended up getting a machine that I don't like. I got a ¼" Tascam that I do like-it's a BR 20 — that I do like.
Eight track?
No, it's just a ¼" 2 track. I got a mixdown deck first 'cause I knew I wanted one of those. Then I got a ½" 16 track that I don't like at all. It's also a Tascam. It's the DBX which is the problem. The narrow format you just can't run without noise reduction and the noise reduction doesn't sound very good.
It's got that sorta weird compression on it.
It just kills the high end. I think those machines were originally made to do post-production, dialog for movies and such, so to actually do music on them you gotta really battle them. This was all pre-ADAT and all that stuff.
I don't know if you're better off one way or the other with that.
It's hard to say. It'd be nice to have been able to kick in some of my own money and get something decent.
You couldn't buy anything used? You should have worked out a deal with a friend at a music store... buy something and bring it right back. So when was that?
That would have been seven years ago.
So you had that stuff...
Yeah, and a crappy, old piece-of-shit mixer, one reverb and two mics. So I had a brand new 16 track, a brand new 2 track, and 2 microphones. I was in the process of moving into this little place in North Beach, it was this little cottage behind a Victorian, and it had been built after the earthquake as temporary housing and they never tore it down. The place had no foundation, it was just sitting on pilings, and you could go under the house and you could see that there were just beams sitting on stacks of bricks. Over the years the thing had settled so much you couldn't open any of the doors or the windows. We would always look for tables with three legs, 'cause those would stand. Anything with four legs; no way. It was this little-bitty four room place. It had a kitchen and every other room was all about the same size, 9 by 12. I lived in one and turned one into a control room and one into a studio. It was so cramped. We made a lot of records there.
Did you ever have a noise problem there?
Yeah, but I tried to do mostly quiet stuff. Sometimes on the weekend we'd have one loud band track.
What bands did you work with there?
There's this woman, Sonya Hunter; kind of a singer-songwriter and we did a lot of her stuff. Lots of local bands demos. A friend of mine had a studio that went out of business and he wanted to do some recording after that and instead of him paying me I took it all in gear. I got a whole bunch of good mics, some decent outboard gear and a ton of mic stands. Then we were rolling. Then I got the Mackie board. A 24 by 8 bus. I've got a 32 by 8 and it's kind of a luxury to have so many channels. I don't use mine for in-line tracking very often. There's lots of good things about the board but if you do it in-line there's no mutes on the mix-B path.
I've only used that for a couple of headphone mixes.
If you run it in-line and use that for tape playback... sometimes it's hard. So I had that place in North Beach for about three years and then I moved to an actual commercial work space down in the Tenderloin in S.F. It has a store front at street level and then a basement of this apartment building. It's about 2500 square feet or so. It's pretty big. It had been abandoned and was just a mess down there. It was full of shit. The landlord had owned a couple of other buildings and every time something broke, or didn't work, instead of paying to get rid of it he just threw it in the basement. We cleaned it all up and soundproofed the room. We put in some great big windows. I didn't have any windows for the control room in my other place. I still have some problems, leakage wise, with the bass cabinets, but everything else seems to be pretty contained.
Are there people upstairs from where you record?
Yeah. I'm in the basement and on the first floor there are offices. Above that is where people live.
But you don't rent the offices or stuff.
I have just one of them. The other half is a lawyer's office but he's hardly ever there. Almost all the work that we do is on weekends or the evening anyhow. There's only one guy we ever get noise complaints from and he lives two floors up and he can't hear us but he sleeps on the floor and he can feel the bass.
Did you ever think about buying him a futon?
I've thought about a lot of things... He's wrecked a bunch of people's sessions.
He's come down and said to stop?
Yeah, and I basically have to. He's had some problems with other people in the building too. One day two guys that live next door to him beat the shit out of him and there was an ambulance out front. At the new place we've done a bunch of cool stuff. We did a bunch of Snowmen stuff. There's a record that is finished. It's one of the favorite things I've ever worked on. We did a deal for Richard Buckner that turned out really good. He came in for a whole day and wanted to catalog his songs. He did about 20 songs. It was really fun.
Are there any other CD releases you've worked on?
There's a woman, her name is Alice Beirhorst, and we did some records for her. She plays a lot in San Francisco. We did some more things for Sonya. We did these Pat Thomas records that have been coming out in Germany. Pat's an archive now. He collects everything. If Bob Dylan farts, Pat's got it on tape! Rich [Avella] and I did something the other day that was really fun. It was this Little Princess 7". It's an 8 song 7".
So how does it work out. I assume your rent is pretty low.
Yeah, it is.
And you've got other people working out of there?
Rich has done some pretty cool stuff. He did this Skypark 7" which is coming out on the Mod Lang label. This guy, Rick Wilson, has done a lot of stuff. He's doing a new Sonya Hunter record down there right now.
So the place is busy.
It stays pretty busy.
What are your hourly rates?
Twenty-five bucks an hour. We do daily lockouts for $200. For Rick or Rich I charge them ten bucks an hour and they can charge whatever they want. It's good for them 'cause they get some hands-on experience and they can get paid $15 an hour, which in San Francisco is pretty hard. People take on studio apprenticeships where they don't get paid at all.
So you like where it's at now?
Yeah, it got easier and easier and the truth is I don't have time to do it. If someone else wasn't working down there I would have a hard time justifying keeping it open. I'm only there less than six months a year. This tour is 10 or 12 weeks but there's a week or two ahead of time just getting ready for it and already there's talk of it getting extended. I actually start to feel guilty, sometimes, if I'm not using it enough. It's a shame to have it all and not be cranking on it.
But now you've got two people in there working. Are they watching the books and paying the bills while you're gone?
I do it from here. I kind of have all my bills consolidated in a few places so I can just call up and say, "What do I owe you?"
What's Fuck's process of working in the studio?
Tim lives in New York, Ted and Geoff live in Oakland and I live in San Francisco. Even Ted and Geoff; I don't see those guys until it's time to go out and tour or it's time to record. Most of the songs; someone has the basic idea. They have a boom-box tape of it or something that they recorded at home. We'll swap tapes a couple of weeks before we're supposed to get together to record, listen to each other's stuff, assemble at my place, and compare notes. First, we'll set up everything to record that we think we're gonna need. Set up the drums and mic them up. Mic up all the guitars... set up some keyboard and mic those up. We'll pick the songs. When we start playing we'll kind of jam through them a bit and as soon as it comes into a place we would be happy to work from we'll record it. Sometimes it takes 10 or 20 minutes and sometimes it takes a couple of hours. If anyone's got any specific ideas we'll go from there or we'll just say, "That's fine. What's next?"
Do you do overdubs right away while you're working on the song?
Guitar overdubs or backing vocals. We usually do a lot of those in one session. 25 or 30. Everyone will take those tapes home and we'll decide which ones are worth pursuing. The first few records we put out ourselves so we really took our time. Some of those, from the time a song was recorded to the time it came out, took a year. Now we work a little faster. We'll get back together the next time, maybe at the end of a tour. We have all this stuff, and we'll focus on ten songs and these other two, where the song is right but we got bad versions so we need to re-record the basics. We'll pick one, usually, and work it all the way to the end; mix it and everything. Then we'll pick another song...
So it's much different than your typical studio assembly line process.
