Your first studio gig was at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton [Ontario]. What did you get out of there, skill-wise?
Grant Avenue was like a testing ground for me. I was already recording at home, and once I got to Grant Avenue I learned how to punch in and edit; those skills that came in really handy later on in life. I learned how to cut 2-inch tape. You've got to line it up on the head of the tape recorder with a China marker. I'd mark it, pull it off, cut it with a razor blade, pull the tape until I got to the other line I cut, and then I'd glue it back together. Bang, that's your edit! Those are the skills that I got from there.
Was this after Daniel Lanois had sold the studio to Bob Doidge?
Yeah. Daniel had sold it a couple of years before. After six months, I found myself going to all night sessions, because Bob [Lanois, Daniel's brother,] only wanted to work 9-to-5. I did these syndicated radio shows and late-night Hamilton crews who came through. Then they put me on with this guy, [Daniel] Lanois. I had no clue who he was. I ended up doing his session with Bill Dillon. He was always trying to stump me. He'd say, "Put my guitar on track 12. Do it now." I'd say, "It's already there. You can record right now." He'd say, "Really?" I was on top of whatever he was looking for – I used my own intuition. If he was talking about guitar tracks I'd be set up for it, thinking that's what they were going to be doing next. You've got to be on top of it. I treated it like a live show. As soon as people walk in the studio, you'd better be ready to record right then. You can't be setting up a sound while they're waiting.
It's like wasting time, and it could be intimidating to a client who's not used to a studio.
Exactly. Just come in and play; don't worry about technical stuff. I think I won over Lanois with that. Then, six months later, he called me up and asked if I'd help him make a record with The Neville Brothers. He said, "It's only for six months. You've got to come down to New Orleans and help put the studio together [Kingsway]." I took the chance, and Bob Doidge said, "If you leave, the job's not here when you come back." I said, "I'll take that chance." I left, and I never came back. Then Dan ended up going to Ireland to work with U2. He left me in charge of the studio in New Orleans. That's where I started making records – we opened the studio up to people. It was private before that. That's how I ended up working with R.E.M. and Iggy Pop. The first record made at Kingsway was Crash Vegas' Red Earth. That led into a record by Chris Whitley [Living with the Law] that Malcolm Burn [Tape Op #35] produced and I recorded. Malcolm mixed a bunch, and so did I. Kingsway went on. Then we left Kingsway, Lanois and me; we went on tour and then we never came back. We ended up in L.A. Daniel said he wanted to go down to Mexico, so I had to go scout some locations in Mexico and find a place to work out of. I brought some studio gear from Kingsway and also bought a new Amek console. I put a rig together that we could take down to Mexico. I never wanted to stay in New Orleans; I always wanted to keep moving.
When I interviewed Daniel, he was talking about how places like Mexico and Jamaica were good for clean magnetic fields.
Mexico was the cleanest sound that we got. There're no overhead wires. There's no interference. When you play your guitar through a single-coil pickup into a tube amp, it's super clean. It's amazing. Then in Jamaica, it's the same. There was not a lot of electricity flowing around where we were working, so we were getting some amazingly quiet sounds on guitar. In the city, it's hard to do. A lot of times you can't get it, because there's too much electricity, or there's a big power transformer outside of the studio. These are all the types of things you need to look for when you're building studios.
What do you use to measure? Some meter of sorts?
No, no. I used an acoustic guitar pickup. I'd plug that into a little battery-powered Peavey amp. No meters at all; I could hear the hum. I would troll the pickup along the floor in any place I was thinking of recording. You'll know right away; if you plug it in and get a hum, it's not a good place to make a record. If you troll it around the floor, you'll find hot spots. This technique worked really great for finding a quieter spot. When we were recording a tube amp and a single-coil pickup, Daniel would say, "Put the guitar amp right here. You sit right there." It's the quiet spot.
How are bigger cities for these magnetic fields?
What I would do is called a star ground system. I'd nail these copper rods into the ground, five feet apart, and tie them all together. I would use that for my own grounding system, away from the house's grounding system. You want to have your own self-contained grounding, other than the house's ground. For The Neville Brothers' record [Yellow Moon] I had to cover up the windows with sheets of lead because of the magnetic fields from the streetcars going by. Each time they'd go by there was a big pulse in all the guitar amps. It was a funny sound.
One of my favorite recordings that you've done is Le Noise by Neil Young. That's just guitar and vocal, but when I listen to it on a good system it almost seems like each string has its own separate treatment.
Neil was coming in to make an acoustic record; that's what we set up for. Then, when he came in, he was like, "Well, I brought a few electrics with me." He brought one guitar that he called "Old Black" – a '53 Les Paul Goldtop that he sprayed black. He put [Gibson] Firebird pickups in there, so it's a lot hotter than what a normal Les Paul would sound like. Then he also brought in this other guitar, which turned out to be the legendary guitar called the [Gretsch] "White Falcon." It was a guitar that he lost in a poker game, and then somebody else got it. Stephen Stills ended up with it. It has this crazy history of how he got it back. He had that guitar, and then he brought in another Gibson guitar that he calls "Hank," because it was Hank Williams' guitar [a Martin D-28]. At the time, I thought, "How in the hell am I going to be able to get any of the sounds he's ever done on all of his records?" I admired him so much. It was a pretty big challenge, but I felt like I brought it to the table. I think there are some sounds that really surprised him. He loved it. It started with the acoustic; we got Hank out, trying all these different pickups. We ended up with an LR Baggs that we put through a Korg delay, and I treated it with a subharmonic harmonizer. When he played the low strings, there was this super sub-bass response coming from it.
Yes. Especially on the song "Love and War."
I had it loud. When he played it, his eyes lit up and he was like, "What the shit is this coming out of the speakers?" He was pretty impressed with that. He played it, and we did a couple of takes. Lanois was focused on filming it, and I had the job of recording and mixing. I was able to do whatever I wanted. I was never told what to do, or what microphones to use. I used a couple of nice tube mics on the Gibson, along with these treatments on it. Suddenly we've got this beautiful sound on this acoustic track. That's why we had the same settings on the board when he ran the electric guitars through, with the sub-harmonizer on it. It was like thunder! We had stacked Dynaudio BM15As, so my playback sound was massive. When he hit that string and hit that chord, the whole house was shaking and rattling. He'd never felt that power before when playing the guitar.
That was going to the iZ [Technology] RADAR, right?
Yep. Neil wanted everything on tape, so it was all going onto tape at the same time and then coming back down through RADAR. But it still kept the quality. Then we came to playing the White Falcon – a stereo guitar. The top strings went to one output, and the bottom strings went to another output. I panned it left and right, so he had a technique where it was a low string on the right, and then on the left. It was pretty cool. I think it was on "Hitchhiker." I think that Neil was really excited. He'd play the melody on one part of the low strings, and he came up with a really cool jam.
Did he have an array of pedals or effects?
No pedals at all. Just one delay unit, a Korg SDD-3000, to add a little bit of echo. It went straight into a tube 1950's [Fender] tweed Deluxe amp. We had eight tweed Deluxe amps, all lined up. We went through them all, found the best two, and used those. I always recorded two amps on him, whether it was a stereo guitar amp or one guitar going into two amps. When he played, we had it blasting with the doors open, and everybody must have heard that all day.
The first tune ["Grace, Too"] off of the Tragically Hip album [Day for Night], or Iggy Pop's song "Corruption" [off Avenue B]; are the guitars tracked on lesser-quality amps?
Yeah. On the Tragically Hip record it was a small [Zinky Smokey] cigarette amp. It looked like a cigarette pack. The guitar sounds far back; it's got a sandpaper type sound. On Iggy's record he was going through a regular amp, but that sound was treated through a bunch of effects.
That, and the drums too, right?
Yeah, the drums were treated with this TC Electronics FireworX. I had one setting that I came up with to time the delay for drums. You could add filters and flange on it. I'd record Iggy while [producer] Don Was [Tape Op #113] was out. When I played it back with all these effects on it, Iggy was like, "Wow, this sounds cool, man!" Then Don comes in and hears it and says, "What does this sound like with all the effects off?" We played it, and it sounded really boring and flat. So, Iggy's like, "Stop! Stop! Put the effects on. I don't want to hear it." That's how it happened. We only used eight tracks on that record, with a Tascam DA-88. A lot of the drums were mono, and all the synthesizers were done in mono. It was lovely. One vocal track, and that was it. That record's got a certain sound because of that. I'll always love that record.
You mentioned in your book how you had 100-plus channels of RADAR and Pro Tools going for a session.
Oh, that was U2. They had a 24-track Studer machine running, and that was locked to the RADAR 24-track, which was locked to 32 tracks in Pro Tools. They had this huge console inside of the studio called Teatro. All three of the machines were fanned out in this practice hall. It was all automated with Flying Faders. They piled on all the tracks.
You tend to do drum treatments quite often.
Yeah. I've used a Lexicon Prime Time [Model 93] – an old delay that made some crazy sounds. You hear it on Neil's Le Noise record, where he's tapping the guitar and his voice is adding echoes to it; I'm flying it back in, doing a lot of treatments on top of everything else. The Prime Time definitely has a lot to do with those sounds.
You were saying you were going for an emotional interpretation, either at the mix or recording stage. Do you look at lyrics?
Yeah, I definitely try to get my head in the lyrics. Sometimes people come up with all different lines when they sing a verse, so I'll take out my favorite ones and get them to use those so that everything's equal – so every line feels as good as the next. Especially with Iggy Pop, he would do three takes of the same song, and he'd change the lyrics completely on every take. It was really hard to pick, because they were all great, so we had to make the decision which take was going to be with which lyric. It was pretty interesting.
How about on Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind?
With Bob, I would write down the first word and the last word of every line of the verse. Every time we'd listen to it, I'd add the next word and fill it in as he went. Dylan would always look over my shoulder to see his lyrics and see what he wanted to do. He was really clever with lyrics, for sure. Sometimes he wanted to take the first verse – "Don't give the song away in the first verse" – and put it in the last verse, and then take the last verse and put it in the first verse. I had to be on top of it. It wasn't a challenge, but he tried to challenge me. There was a song called "Highlands" that's 17 minutes long. He'd say, "Go to the 15th verse and punch me into the third word." I knew what the first line was, so I let a few lines go by and then I'd punch him in. He was playing with me like that for a while. I think I was a little embarrassed when Time Out of Mind came out. We started the record at the Teatro studio in Oxnard, California. I was getting a killer sound there. I thought, "Wow, this is going to be amazing!" But suddenly Bob said, "I can't work here." It was too close to home. "Let's go to Miami." So, we packed everything up – all this gear – and rode motorcycles to Miami and made the record at Criteria Studios. It was, like, 15 people playing on the floor live, all at the same time, and nobody knew what key we were in. It sounded really bad! But it ended up turning out really amazing once we got out of Miami, and mixed it at Teatro. That's how that record really survived.
I knew that album totally hit me hard, in a good way, when I heard the first song ["Love Sick"], with the little treatment on the vocal.
Yeah, I loved that they were out on the floor, so I did this kind of flat vocal and a flanger on top of the voice to try some things out. When everybody came back into the control room, I played back the song. As I was doing that, I did a "performance mix" to make everything exciting, and make sure the guitars were coming out in the right parts. I had this flanger on his voice, and I printed a couple of mixes to DAT. We put that on the record, the playback mix that came from the control room in Miami. We never touched it again – it sounded so cool.
There's something about doing a mix the same day that you've tracked.
Everything [I do] is flying by the seat of my pants, all the time. I try to keep it that way. It keeps you on your guard. If you're working in the same spot all the time, you get used to doing the same thing all the time. It doesn't give you a chance to grow your sounds. My whole body of work is quite strangely different, from record to record.
Who would you say was the most receptive and experimental with getting sounds?
