What is your job?
My job is to find and mix what's not been heard or released. I started as an engineer/producer. I co-produced Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, among other things. I study recording history and I love that stuff. I'm much more comfortable with traditional styles — be it '50s, '60s, '70s, or '80s — than I am with recording styles now. One day I was in the studio working on an album for a friend of mine, Andrew Sandoval — who's also a producer and archivist. The album's producer was Bill Inglot, who's worked with Rhino and Warner Bros. for 25 years. Bill said, "I like the way you record stuff. It's fast; it sounds traditional. Could you make something sound like an older time period?" And I said, "That's one of my favorite things!" So he said, "Great, we're going to do some Doobie Brothers stuff at Capitol Records. We're going through the vaults." They took us to Capitol's Studio B and we went through the outtakes and found some amazing stuff. There are all those Ted Templeman tapes, which are amazing to hear. People with those kinds of skill...
Good quality, huh? [laughs]
Ted, George Massenburg and Bill Szymczyk are about the best I've ever heard. I put up their tapes and think, "How could George get a bass sound like this? I don't know anyone that could record a bass guitar that sounds as good as that, even with all the gear we have now!" How did they do it? They are amazing. So I began with that one project and made the Doobie's sound like 1974 or 1980; whatever was needed. And I keep on doing those archival projects to this day, 15 years later, for major and indie labels.
These are alternate versions of songs, as well as unreleased songs?
Yeah. To make it clear, one of the things we do not do is remix.
What about taking an album that's been released and re-tooling it?
I haven't really done it. Warner Bros., WEA and all their subsidiaries have this amazing catalogue that is perhaps unrivaled in the world. We go through and find what's there that has not been released. If it's usable, let's say an alternate take with a vocal, we'll mix it to sound good; but we do not remix the released master tapes to make existing albums sound "better," or to sound current. I'm happy not to do that — I call it putting a t-shirt on the Mona Lisa. The only time we've ever done remixes of released masters was when Andy Zax and I went through the Talking Heads' tapes — multitracks for every album — and we found two songs, "Drugs" and "Cities," that had been recorded with a bunch of Brian Eno-isms [Tape Op #85] all over them that were used in the mix only a little bit. This was the only time where were found a remix of the released song to be okay. Not to make it better sounding, but to do a different version of those songs.
Because it could be something different.
It's kind of neat because certainly the Talking Heads' "Drugs" is a very psychedelic song. There were a lot of these cool, weird synth effects on the master, so it came out quite different with those mixed in loudly. The band really liked those two remixes and chose to put them on the box set instead of the originals. Generally, I don't want to put much of a personal stamp on things. If someone used a lot of reverb — like Echo and The Bunnymen, for example — we do copy their style, even if it's not so cool to do that now. We once went through hundreds of Ramones outtakes; I would mix something so it sounded really good to me, then we'd compare to the album and say, "Oh, we have to thin the guitars. We've got to make the drums a little more papery" to match their sound. Not the sound I would choose; but matching their choices from that era.
Turn the vocals way up. [laughs]
And we do, because it's not about your ego, it's about matching what existed before so it sounds accurate. The nice part is getting a fresh project, like when I mixed Black Sabbath's Live at Hammersmith Odeon. That was probably one of my favorite things. It had not been released yet, so I got to mix it the way I hear it. It's a very traditional sound that I like. There are a lot of records from the Stones, Neil Young or John Lennon that have that sound — it could have been recorded yesterday, or could be in the future. The opposite [example] is gated reverbs, '80s chorus, tuning vocals, fast limiting, and squashing the hell out of things; those are all very trendy or dated sounds that I'm usually trying to avoid. That being said, if something is from the '80s we will turn that snare drum up real loud and put some gated reverb on it. It's a style choice of that era. For example, in 1969 people were really getting into wide stereo. They'd do hard panning, where the vocals are on one side and drums are on the other. That stereo thing was new to people, and they used it asymmetrically then; we don't now. I try to preserve the history of things. Like stereo reverb wasn't usually used until the '70s. When I was mixing a 1958 Coasters track you can't put a stereo reverb on that; it just sounds wrong. Keeping it true to the style is a really interesting thing to learn. Bill Inglot and I started working on stuff together initially, and he taught me a lot. I've worked with several different producers from Warner Bros. More recently Andy Zax and I have done a lot of stuff like the Talking Heads reissues, the Woodstock box set [Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm], and Rod Stewart [The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971-1998]. We went through hundreds and hundreds of Rod's tapes, for three months, and it made for an amazing four-disc set of unreleased studio outtakes. Even in his '80s and '90s era, which I wasn't such a big fan of, we found good music hiding. Sometimes we took off extra overdubs that didn't need to be there and stripped it down to the essentials. We've all heard so many records from different periods that have some awful thing from that style period that we now agree is heinous! But we don't necessarily grab a master tape and remix it just to remove some dated trend. We're looking for unheard material; we're not looking to change the past.
Do you do a bit of research on where artists were working and on what?
Yeah, I always try to look up the history as much as possible. We did some Dr. John tracks and it happens that Eric Clapton was the guitarist and Mick Jagger came along and sang. You need to feature those parts. If I'm looking at the track sheet and see just "Guitar 1, Guitar 2" I might not notice Eric was there. The history helps you understand what people would want to hear. Research is good, but even more revealing is when I actually pull the physical materials and get the tapes out to explore. It's surprising how badly people labeled boxes and tapes back then! We rarely get track sheets, and they're sometimes wrong or vague. We get a reel of four or five takes; I have to decide which one is the good one and then mix it. It's usually fun. It's really a quest. Audio spelunking!
Are you working directly off the tapes or...
There's no computer in this room. [laughs]
Yeah, I noticed that.
We always work from the master tapes, and we work very quickly. A mix is done in 15 minutes to a half an hour. Period. There are almost no exceptions. I do remember once spending about two hours on a song mix and it was, to me, an exceedingly long time. The stuff I do sounds good and it sounds comparable to the released records because we often have a guidepost as to the original sound. I can mix from scratch very quickly, following their guide. Most good tracks can be done that way, especially when the track layout and sounds are similar from tape to tape. If somebody was tracking in the old days — let's say Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen, or the Ramones — they have a fairly similar setup from song to song. You get to work with what they've got. When we do a live album, it's got to be done in a day. I'm going to have to do maybe 25 complete mixes; but the setup is the same throughout, with small changes. It's mixed by hand and we rarely edit mixes together. It's all full passes, usually.
It is a certain limitation when you're presented with these tracks that need mixing. You can't do overdubs. And, for the sake of historical accuracy, you're not going to go in and Auto- Tune or move beats around.
There are people who do. I mean they've gone through a lot of the Jimi Hendrix tapes. They've tuned him and made takes out of pieces that didn't originate together, like moving a solo and so on. I have a real problem with that. Some people don't mind it.
On the posthumous Elliott Smith work that I've done, occasionally there's been a track that was being sketched out, or a rough take, and I have to look for parts that work. Do you find instances like that?
