Tell me about starting out. Did you go to recording school?
I did go to recording school. I'll give you a real brief synopsis of my history — I got really interested in manipulating audio when I was eleven years old. My friend and I recorded "Revolution 9" from the [Beatles'] White Album onto a cassette tape, which were fairly new in 1969, and then we took it apart and flipped it around so we could hear it play backwards. It was an incredibly spooky experience. After high school I started doing live sound. I did that for four years in the Western Canadian bar band circuit and got to the top of where I could go. I went to New York on a visit and really loved it there, so I tried to find a reason to go back. I discovered the Institute of Audio Research, and I went there for a year, in 1983. I went back to Canada, couldn't find work in studios there, went back to New York two years later and started out as an intern at a studio called Platinum Island, that was an up-and-coming, state-of-the-art studio that eventually rivaled The Power Station, which was the studio of the time. Then, after a couple of years working there as a staff engineer, Bill Laswell came in — he was looking for an alternative to the Power Station, where he normally worked. We hit it off and when I went freelance not long after, my first few years were as his full-time engineer at his Greenpoint Studios that he opened up in Greenpoint [Brooklyn].
That was the late '80s?
I started as an intern in 1987, went with Bill Laswell in 1989 and went freelance in '89-'90.
From your school experience through being an intern, an assistant and finally a staff engineer, was there a particular methodology that you feel you learned?
Well, there's a pedigree. The great thing about working at a commercial New York studio is that you work with all kinds of well-known producers and engineers in different types of music. I sort of aligned myself mostly with the people from The Power Station. My main engineer-teacher was Jason Corsaro, and his pedigree was The Power Station and Bob Clearmountain. I learned how to get big drum room sounds from Jason and Tom Edmonds, who started out working with Todd Rundgren up in Woodstock. Roger Moutenot [issue #20] passed on the lineage of another top New York studio called Skyline. I learned a great technique from Roger when he recorded Caetano Veloso singing and playing acoustic guitar. He placed a [Neumann] FET 47 at about the level of his chin angled toward his mouth. The rejection side of its pick-up pattern was facing the guitar to minimize guitar bleed. Some months later I used the same technique for recording the Turkish saz player, Talip Özkan. His album, The Dark Fire, was an early successful recording for me. I learned how they did things at the Hit Factory from Robert Musso and Bruce Tergesen. But back to Jason Corsaro — when I did live sound, it was predictable that every drummer would come up and tell you, "I want my drums to sound like John Bonham, Led Zeppelin," except at one point a drummer came up to me and said, "I want my drums to sound like the drums from Power Station," and it was my friend Jason who came up with that sound. It was such an incredible sound that when John Bonham died one of the drummers they were thinking of getting was the drummer in Power Station — they tried him out and he wasn't that great. Because it wasn't his playing that was so awesome — it was the sound that Jason got.
You're talking about Robert Palmer's band, Power Station?
Yeah. They were called Power Station because they worked at the studio a lot.
You're saying that sound was more tied to the engineer than to the studio — if he worked somewhere else he'd get a similar sound?
He was a unique engineer and he never got the same sound twice, but yeah, he would stretch the box in that way and get sort of breakthrough sounding records. I worked with him as an assistant on the Swans' Burning World and Ginger Baker's Middle Passage.
Does it create friction when a band asks you to get a specific sound, but you want to do something new?
No, because I don't have a particular thing I personally am going for. What I'm trying to do is translate the vision of the artist. I'm trying to be transparent — there is no "Oz Fritz sound". I'm trying to tune in to what they're looking for — which they don't really know exactly (no one does) — to align myself with that. You work with a new band or producer, and there's a little period where you're finding out how to relate to each other, and what each other wants. When you develop a relationship where you're working with the same producer over time like I have with Bill Laswell, he doesn't have to tell me. I get the mix set up, he comes in and it's already sort of how he wants it, but then he does the fine-tuning. It was like that with me for Tom Waits. I find after a while there gets to be almost a telepathic musical connection.
You're describing your role almost as a conduit, in service to the artist.
Exactly, but I'm not in service to the artist — well I am, but what I'm really in service to is the music. To me, music is a sacred thing — it's the closest thing I have to a religion. When I worked in a studio in Madras, India with Bill Laswell, they treated their recording studio like a temple. The only places you had to take off your shoes in India were in the Hindu temples and in the recording studio.
Wow!
When you walked into this recording studio, which was a major one in that city, you walked through a little lobby area and then a little anteroom before you got to the control room and the studio. In the anteroom there was a huge Indian altar set up, and there was a woman whose sole job was to tend to that altar with all of its pictures of deities and flowers. Before we actually started recording we did a little ritual to mark the beginning of the project. It was acknowledging the sacredness of what we were doing. I try to honor that and serve that.
In contrast, would you say the reverence for the recording studio as an institution has diminished in this culture?
I really couldn't answer that question. What I think has diminished with the advent of home recording systems is that music has gone from something that you feel to something that you think about. I'll try to explain that better — Robert Fripp wrote a series of incredible articles for Musician magazine that influenced me a lot in the early '80s, and he talked about the three different aspects of a musician, what he called the head, the heart and the hands. All three aspects, in order to make great music, had to be aligned and going to the same place. Nowadays with Pro Tools you're able to mainly go into your head and look at the waveform, and you're doing things based on how you think it should sound, rather than how it feels. That's what I observe a lot, and I think it's a bit of a tragedy that people over edit their music and try to conform to some ideal, perfect standard, because to me it loses feeling.
The project you're working on right now at my studio with Mark Growden — you're doing live band takes, almost exclusively live vocal takes, a minimum of overdubs, a minimum of editing...
I've found, although I can't prove it, that my respect for music has meant that the projects I get are usually musically great, like Mark's music, and they are more aligned with how I approach things. It just works out that way, that I end up working with people like Mark. And the whole approach to making this record was his, partly based on budgetary limitations. Limitations aren't necessarily a bad thing. Limitations are part of the parameters of your project and can be approached creatively, rather than feeling like it's a detraction from the project. I try to keep it on that course. It's funny, because Mark had an engineer who had requested being there, as an intern type of thing. I took a break and they started editing stuff and I come back, and all of a sudden they're editing more and more. So I had to say, "Hey guys. Wait, we're not doing it this way." I'm not against editing, I just think it gets carried too far... you've got to use it cautiously.
Are there any other projects you're working on now or coming up that you're excited about?
A couple of festivals with Bill Laswell in the summer and the upcoming mix of Rupa & the April Fishes. I'm currently working with Johnny Boyd, who had a band called Indigo Swing, on his solo project.
You mentioned that about 75% of your work these days is at Prairie Sun [in Sonoma County, CA]. Do you think being away from a city can help in the process of making a record?
I've found it helps, because it takes away some of the distractions that you get in the city. It tends to make people more focused and concentrated on what they're doing. It's my personal preference, but it's not something I set out to do. I got turned on to Prairie Sun by Tom Waits — he wanted to work there so we worked there. I don't look for clients at all and I don't have a manager — I have a lot of other stuff I do when I'm at home [in Grass Valley, CA]. It just happened that I developed a relationship with the owner of Prairie Sun [Mark "Mooka" Rennick]. We have a mutual relationship in that he'll recommend me to clients and he uses me as a marketing device. Conversely I'll bring my clients to Prairie Sun. I also do believe in the sound of Prairie Sun. It's quality stuff — not by default.
In this climate the relationship between the studio owner and freelance engineer is important and has to be mutually beneficial.
But you're both interested in the same goal, which is making great music. In the old days studio owners were often disconnected from the process of recording, believe it or not. To them it was another business, but instead of selling shoes they were selling music production. Mooka is himself, like you are, a producer, engineer and musician. He knows gear, he can relate to my needs and so he talks to me about what gear he would like to get. The relationship extends beyond us just getting clients — we talk about how we'd like to improve Prairie Sun.
