I knew of you as a bass player, engineer, and studio owner before Mojave. What was your path to this?
Bass players are always the guys in the band who had to fix the PA or want to record the band. I was that guy in high school. Growing up in Texas, I was fortunate; I was in a really good band. We had a guitar teacher, Dale Mullins, who was kind of a legend down there; he taught me and our two guitar players. He actually had a studio. In fact, we helped him build it. It was a 4-track, part of his house in the suburbs. I just immediately got the bug. I went to school, played in a bunch of bands, and recorded a lot as a musician. I got in this band called The Barons. They played the south Texas dance halls. They owned a studio in a town south of Houston. It was a 3M 8-track, which back then in the early '70s was a pro studio. I wanted to study recording engineering at UT [University of Texas, Austin], but you couldn't back then. There was no curriculum! The Barons owned this studio, they also had a couple of labels and they recorded Mexican bands. They said, "You want to engineer? Here's the key. Your first session is tomorrow." My first session was a mariachi trio. I had two years of just living in the studio, night and day. I was a kid in my early twenties, making good money in that band. Then I got drafted for a band in Houston, Buzz Bone, which was a ZZ Top spin-off. It was the keyboard player, Tom Moore, and drummer, Dan Mitchell, from the Moving Sidewalks [Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top had played guitar]. That's the band that got me up to L.A. to showcase. We drove out in the middle of the summer and ended up recording at Indigo Ranch [Tape Op #103].
From all accounts, that was a really idyllic setting and an amazing studio too.
It was good. I woke up with a view of L.A. that was like paradise. There's the ocean, there're avocado trees, and there's Catalina Island. It was gorgeous. "I want to live here." The band didn't get signed, and I'd gone back to Houston. We were going to re-form out here. I got hired at Brook Mays Music Company, selling guitars and strings. I found out I was really good at that, and I liked it. When I was ready to move out here, I sent out a bunch of résumés. One of them went to Don Griffin, who owned West L.A. Music. The home recording boom had just started then with TEAC 3340s, Tascam 80-8s and 40-4s, and the Model 5A mixer. Because I had engineering experience, I was the only person who could sell those. All these rock stars were coming in, buying, and thinking, "I'm going to save a fortune. I'll get my budget and record at home."
Those kinds of studios were very different from what someone would know now as a home studio.
Nobody used them. They would get them, and pay me to set them up, but they never used them. There was a learning curve. But that was probably the best education I ever got; those three years at West L.A. Music. I went on to manage the place. I was also playing music every weekend, which was against the rules. You weren't supposed to be in a band. You were supposed to be a professional salesperson. I had a client named Mark Avnet that I had sold one of those Tascam studios. He actually used his. At that time his family owned Guild Guitars, and BIC Turntables. He said, "I'm going to start a studio in Venice. You want to do it with me?" I was burned out on retail. I gave my notice and we started a studio. It was January of 1980 that we opened. It was the original Mad Dog Studios.
Where did the name come from?
We went to fill out the paperwork for the business license. We were just calling it MD Productions, Mark and Dusty. It's like, "MD? That's Mad Dog. We can't call it MD Productions. That's boring as hell." We started with a Scully 16-track. It was a giant machine.
You don't see those very often.
No. We also had a Tascam Model 10 console. That lasted about six months. After six months we had an Otari MTR-90 16-track and an Auditronics Son of 36 Grand console, which I wish I still had. In '86, Mark, my original partner, left. His parents said, "All right, you've had enough time fooling around in Hollywood. Come back and join the family business." He took most of the gear. My second partner, Michael Dumas, who was Dwight Yoakam's front-of-house guy, came on board; a fellow Texan. We pooled every resource we could find and bought our first Neve, a 32-channel 8108, and a Studer 24-track from Keith Olsen [Tape Op #33]. There was a period where we worked for Enigma Records Monday through Friday,. We were like their studio. We got to work with everybody from T.S.O.L., to Stryper, to Channel 3. We did a lot of work with Rhino Records, back when they made novelty albums. I got to play on a bunch of those. Those were really fun. I just wanted to live my life and go into the studio every day. That's basically what I did with my life for 25 years.
You did about ten years, or longer, at the first Mad Dog space?
It was about 15 years. Crack cocaine had made Venice really ugly, and we'd outgrown the place. We just wanted to be in either Burbank or Glendale, to get out of L.A. We were over here looking at another building; we drove past a rehearsal complex called Studio D, and they were putting up a For Lease sign. Some of the soundproofing work was already done.
You had rehearsed there too, right?
Right. With Dwight Yoakam. We called the room The Stage, because it had been a big sound stage.
How many years was Mad Dog in that location?
It was there from '95 to 2008.
What changed for you at the end of Mad Dog?
The model for Mad Dog was I'd have David Bianco [Tape Op #104], Sylvia Massy [#63], or somebody like that in the A Room; almost always with acts on their first major label album with a $150,000 to $250,000 budget. They'd come in there for four to six weeks and do all their tracking. Sometimes they'd mix there, and sometimes they'd go to an SSL room. The rest was indie records and Americana sessions; all the shit I was doing. On a good day, you'd have two of those going on, plus me – a lot of times when all three rooms were booked. After 2001, labels stopped signing new bands. It was the end of artist development. I decided to downsize, move everything to the Stage. I leased out the other side to this poor guy who was doing Foley for the TV show 24. I let him out of the lease eventually and found Scott Cutler; he kind of turned it back into what it was, which made me happy.
What led you out of the studio ownership world?
I worked with a lot of great artists. Lucinda Williams, Jim Lauderdale, and all those great people. That could have kept going on indefinitely. I had that down. But then I went and took two semesters of accounting, and it changed my life. I learned how to use QuickBooks and read financial statements; it really helped. I loved it. I was like, "How do people function and not know this stuff?" All of a sudden, one by one, loans started getting paid off, and I actually started making money. The last six years I was there, I was actually making money off the studio for the first time in like 20 years, just through attrition. There was nothing left to buy. I wasn't paying rent, because all my sub-tenants were paying rent. And the gear was all paid off. It was working. It was a great time.
