peteWhat made you want to be a rock star?
Some people have The Beatles on Ed Sullivan as their launch point, but for me the launch point was seeing Devo on a TV show called Fridays. Seeing them on the treadmills — they did the song "Jerkin' Back 'n' Forth." I was 11 or 12 at the time. Even now looking at it, it's amazing, but back then my mind was blown. "What is that? They have plastic hair." It was astonishing. I remember seeing that and [David] Bowie with Klaus Nomi on Saturday Night Live, being like, "What the...? Wow." That's when I decided, "I want to do that."
Hanging out with you and your brother Paul yesterday, it was cool to see that you clearly have a yin-and-yang working relationship with no competitive tension.
I don't think we've ever been competitive with each other, although he let me swim in the water by myself for a while before throwing in the life vest! With engineering, he never taught me much until recently. He was always saying, "You'll figure it out."
How much older is he?
Three years. He started as a live engineer, and he's worked his way up to being a super-duper, top L.A. mix engineer guy. He's done stuff with Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers and artists like that. But Paul and I came up together. He'd be rehearsing with his band and they would go take a lunch break. I'd run into the space, start playing his guitar and he'd come in and say, "Put my guitar down!"
Kid brother stuff.
Totally. But he's been very supportive. He was a big inspiration as far as being professional about things — how your guitar rig should be wired to be professional and sturdy. At the time I was working a straight job in marketing and worked my way up in this computer company — wheeling and dealing until I made a decent salary. I lived in a really nice apartment near Fenway Park. One day I was in the company gym looking around at all these guys, and something snapped in my brain and I was like, "Oh my God. I'm going to end up like this!" I had this big freak out. I went home and called up all of my friends and had them bring garbage bags over. I gave everything away. Around the same time I had met Alvan Long and Andrew "Mudrock" Murdock, who ran New Alliance Studio. I think he cut me a deal for doing any late-night sessions I wanted, if I gave him $1500 a month.
Did you quit the straight job?
Yeah. Eventually I had no money and no home. At this point Alvan cut me a deal. The studio had a broom closet. He goes, "You can live here if you clean the toilets and sweep the floors in the building." It was a big rehearsal complex. "In exchange I'll give you studio time after-hours." I did that for about two and a half years. During that time we had talked about starting a label, and he wound up getting investors like Jason Priestly to start Curve of the Earth Records, which put out The Elevator Drops' record. One day a drummer came in who was subbing with us and he said, "You know my girlfriend just started playing and you should come check her out. She's got these really cool songs and maybe we can get her in here." I said, "Maybe we'll work something out, and I will sneak her in late at night." That turned out to be Tracy Bonham. We went in there, and she had already done some demos with Scott Riebling. Coincidentally, Curve of the Earth was assembling an all-female compilation. It was perfect timing. He wound up putting those songs on there, and she had a lawyer that was building a buzz and wound up in this big bidding war. My brother and I produced her first EP [The Liverpool Sessions]. I learned studio technique by going into New Alliance every night and literally blowing gear up by accident. The studio owner wasn't too happy with me, but that's how I learned.
Eventually stuff stopped blowing up.
Yeah, I didn't know anything about the science of it, EQ or anything. I would turn knobs until it sounded good, and eventually started figuring out what a compressor does and what a tape delay can do. My brother Paul is a really amazing mixer, like Bob Clearmountain, Jack Joseph Puig and those guys. I've always been influenced by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and a more organic, ambient sound. I think at the time it was an interesting point in music. It was 1992-My Bloody Valentine, The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev and The Orb — there was still this rave scene going and all the British influences — shoegazer stuff. That was a lot of fun because I was making use of a lot of the technology at the time, like the horrible, low-bit reverbs. I still have them and think they sound great. After The Elevator Drops imploded around '99, I went off and helped Matt Sharp (from Weezer) produce his records in Nashville and played in his band The Rentals. After that I started the Garvy J thing, plus playing and touring with Adam Green (The Moldy Peaches) a little bit. Then I moved to New York and started working with a lot of Brooklyn bands, like Joan As Police Woman. In between I'd lived in L.A. and got into building props and set dressing as a side job. It was interesting.
Who were The Elevator Drops?
The Elevator Drops were the most cursed band. The whole concept was originally, "What would it be like if you had a band like Kiss that had good songs?" We came up in the '80s as kids with the philosophy of "putting on a big show." Lights, fog, costumes and playing in front of 100 people — you just DO it. It was, "What would it be like if we crossed Devo with Led Zeppelin and maybe take a little Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine?" The Elevator Drops had an element of danger, where the audience didn't know if they were going to get hit in the head with a guitar or spat on or bled on.
The band's reputation was controversial in Boston, and then you guys got very big on a national level.
For a minute. [laughter] You'd come to the show and we'd give you a white paper jumpsuit. Everybody had to wear these white paper jumpsuits. It erased the individuality of, "I'm a punk rocker" or "I'm a jock." The lights were on the people in the audience. We got signed to Arista/Time Bomb and they put us on tour with all of these bands like Blur, Pulp, Garbage and Echo & The Bunnymen. It was like taking actors out of a play and sticking them on an empty stage. It didn't work. We ditched the makeup after a while and became a much better band, but it was not as much fun. This is when I started producing other bands on the side.
The possibly final Elevator Drops album, OK Commuter, was 10 years in the making. Did you mix it?
I mixed some of it, Paul Kolderie mixed some and my brother mixed some with Anthony Resta.
I liked that some of the songs had [singer/bassist] Dave Goolkasian's vocals buried in a really cool, creepy way.
Probably the ones I mixed. Kolderie did more of the rock 'n' roll, Who-ish stuff.
Those are great too. The drum sound is huge on the whole thing.
That is the old Q Division Studios room. That place had a great sound. We did the drums there to analog tape and laid a scratch sync track on ADATs. The band broke up about 60 percent of the way through working on this album. I was living in a van down by the river, and then wound up moving into a rehearsal space and sleeping on the floor. [Scott] Fitts, our drummer, had just moved to L.A. I remember one day he came in and I'm sitting there with boxes of DATs and ADATs and I'm cataloging all of the tracks. He says, "You're pathetic. The band is over man. What are you doing cataloging this stuff?" I was like, "If I don't catalog this stuff, this is gonna be lost. This is a great record." That record went through a big process to get it all done. Years went by and finally I said, "I've got to finish it." This was a decade — not a continuous 10 years, but it took a long time. That record was interesting, recording in so many different places — everywhere from rehearsal spaces to my parent's basement.
Who is Garvy J?
Garvy J is my character from The Elevator Drops. It was a name that came from a belt buckle that I found. It said, "Garvy J," and it had a little picture of Michael Jackson on it. The solo Garvy J stuff is weird because it started out really basic when I lived in the loft. It would be one [Shure] SM57 on the drums in a big, cement room. But I didn't have Pro Tools or anything — I had a CD burner and a little Mackie board (later I had an Altec 1567A mixer and a dbx compressor). I tracked through that to the left side of the CD player. I put the music on the right side. I would take that disc out, rip that into the computer, make another submix and put that other CD on the right side. That's how I was multitracking, because I didn't have an interface. That album started there, and eventually I hooked up with my friend Tom Flowers — he is an amazing engineer who lives in Austin now. We would go up to Santa Barbara and work at this place called Orange Whip Recording. Eventually I got my own rig and started adding to it.
Do you have any particular gear that you use in the studio?
