How'd you get started as an engineer and producer?
My dad was a musician, so I grew up hearing music. I started playing guitar when I was 12. I got into punk because I could play it. I was living in Washington, D.C. I bounced back and forth quite a bit, because my parents were divorced and my dad was out here in California. I started playing guitar, and I was part of the D.C. punk scene. I played in a band called Double-O. I was in The Meatmen. I was part of the Dischord Records world, even though I never actually was on Dischord. I was in a band called Scream too. They kicked me out, but some of my songs are on their record. It was a small world.
Did you know Don Zientara [Tape Op #8]?
Oh, yeah. Inner Ear, the first place I recorded, was with Don. I was in another band called 9353 and he recorded our record. He recorded the Double-O record. Don was legendary. He still is. He'd record in his basement in Arlington, and his kids' toys were in the room. It was awesome. Playing in bands got me into the studio doing recording. That's the kind of person I am; I had to touch everything. I started to figure out what was going on, and then people started to ask me to produce them. That was hilarious, because I was only 17 or 18 years old, so I had no idea what the fuck that meant. But I said, "Okay, I'll sit in the studio and produce you." I moved to California in the late ,80s and I did live sound. I was the sound guy at The Stone; this infamous shithole venue in North Beach [San Francisco]. Everybody played there – a lot of rock and a lot of punk, like KISS and every weirdo middle-of-the-road size rock band. It had an 800 seat capacity, and they would stuff twice as many people in there. Then from there I hooked up with my friend Jacquire King [Tape Op #88, #45, online this issue], who's a super producer now. We used to paint houses together on the side. He was doing sound for this band Consolidated, and touring with them. He got a gig working at Slim's and didn't want to do the next tour, so I did that tour. Then I met [Consolidated's drummer] Philip Steir, who partnered up with Craig Silvey shortly after – another producer – and they started Toast Studios in San Francisco, which is the Bill Putnam-designed room [originally Coast Recorders]. I said, "I'll do anything you guys need. I'm tired of fucking heavy metal and touring." I was one of the first guys in in that place. We wired it all up and went from there.
That was the first incarnation of Toast Studios?
Yeah. Dan Alexander had it before, and it was still called Coast. If I remember correctly, there was something about changing the business name. It was a great place to be. It went on a run. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of people and to work on a shit ton of major projects.
Who were some of the bands coming through back then?
The Breeders did that massive hit record [Last Splash] there when it was still Coast. When we were in there, it was Neil Young, Tom Waits, R.E.M., Rick Rubin, and Third Eye Blind. That's where I met Third Eye Blind. Phil did a lot of remixes. Back in those days it was a big thing, and it was an opportunity to work on projects like remixing Pete Townshend, Nine Inch Nails, Chumbawamba, or Butthole Surfers. It was a great place to be.
You worked on a couple of Third Eye Blind records, right?
Yeah. I knew the bass player, Arion Salazar, from The Stone. He played in a band called Fungo Mungo. Arion and I were friends. He told me, "I'm doing this gig man. It's a pop band, but I'm getting paid!" This was when they first got signed. Then they came to Toast to record with Eric Valentine [Tape Op #45, #133] producing, so I assisted on some of those sessions. Jacquire King was the main assistant engineer for those sessions, but they went on for a long time so I filled in. I also assisted Eric in mixing one of the songs where he had laid out colored tape all over the console. It was about four o'clock in the morning and we got started with a song called "Narcolepsy." [laughter] I was red, blue, and yellow tape, and we each had this series of moves that we had to do; this weird dance.
The console wasn't automated?
It had this [Neve] Necam 96 automation, which was just a pig. It had those floppy disks from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Eight-inch floppies?
Yeah, comical. Then the computer, if you want to call it that, was in this cubbyhole you had to crawl into and access by climbing up a wall! It was fucking horrible getting up there. It was easier to do it manually.
All hands on deck mixing?
Yeah. I remember it was dawn and I kept fucking up and Eric was looking at me, disgusted. I think I was finally able to pull my end of the stick though. That's how I met those guys, and I hit it off with them. Then they got some weird gig doing the Scooby-Doo theme [for Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island]. I was in Utah driving my mom out from New York, and they called and said, "Can you do a session tomorrow?" I said, "Yeah, of course!" I drove back with my mom and went straight into recording "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?" with those guys. Pretty fucking hilarious. But anyway, Toast, at that time, was where Jacquire King and Craig Silvey worked. Those guys have gone on to do some pretty cool work.
You did more work with Third Eye Blind.
It was about '95 when Toast started. In '98 Third Eye Blind asked me to produce their follow-up record to their big, super smash. So, we started doing this record Blue. We recorded some of it at Toast, but then we moved over to The Plant in Sausalito. We worked on that record for a fucking year or something. That was a whole different era. When we started to mix it, we went to The Site in Marin County. That's when I started to phase out of Toast and travel around. Then there was a whole series of gigs that were in different places, so I'd go down to L.A., New York City, and Vancouver B.C. (to Bryan Adams' studio [The Warehouse]) on a series of different projects. I ended up building a studio in San Francisco called Morningwood Studios with Third Eye Blind – I shared that place with them. It was in the South Park area. Chris Pelonis [Pelonis Sound & Acoustics]; he's a great designer and he did that room. Then I did the Out of the Vein album with them there. That record went on and on; I took a hiatus from it. I started working on other projects and I produced The Donnas [Spend the Night]. I moved out of the studio; it was too hard to do my work and have to share that space, so I built a studio at my house in Berkeley. I had this property that was on two different streets. It was originally a metal shop. I turned that into a studio, and Chris Pelonis came and designed it.
Didn't you have a vintage console in there?
Yeah, I had the Type 69 Helios that was from Island Records' Basing Street Studios. The group Air [Tape Op #39] had it before I got it, so they shipped it over from France. I know The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, as well as Black Sabbath and a bunch of Bob Marley had been done on that desk, so it had a real pedigree. Universal Audio came and modeled my desk for their Helios plug-in.
Phill Brown [Tape Op #12, Are We Still Rolling?] used to work on that desk.
I contacted somebody who worked at Island Basing Street, and he gave me a list. I don't even have it anymore, but it was a who's who of English rock with a lot of reggae.
Were you looking for a Helios, specifically?
Yeah, I got obsessed with Helios. I bought four modules in the mid-'90s that were out of Island Jamaica. I bought them on a whim; I had heard about those desks. I got them and loved them. They have this amazing high-frequency. When you put a song up on the desk, it opens up to 25 kHz or something. The EQs are strange. Their points are at different places than the norm of where a Neve is, or most of what we're all used to. The way they're laid out, sharing the same potentiometer to add gain and to subtract gain, is strange. The other thing that I eventually realized was that I was running the modules at the wrong voltage. I was running them at 24 volts, whereas they're actually supposed to run at 36, so it made them ferocious. They didn't have a whole lot of headroom, but they were brutal. Then I bought another Helios that was from Munich that was Giorgio Moroder's console; before that it was built as a sidecar for the Rolling Stones' remote truck. The thing with Helios: Dick Swettenham, who made them, was a mad genius guy. He wasn't a note-taking kind of guy, so there's not a lot of documentation about these consoles and where they went. Depending on who ordered the board, he would custom-make it for whoever it was. So, they all sound different. The circuit's relatively simple. It's passive.
So, did you keep any of the Helios gear when you sold the studio?
No. I even had a monitor section that was from The Who. I got rid of it all, man. I hit this point in about 2006, where I was getting all these projects that were the same and I got pegged for doing this pop-punk thing. I had AAM [Advanced Alternative Media] managing me, and I burned out. Conveniently that was when the whole fucking industry tanked. At the time, I was doing shit with Capitol and then a whole bunch of gigs fell through. There was starting to be this crazy pressure, where A&R people didn't want to lose their jobs, so people wanted a hit. But the bottom-line with A&R people is a lot of times they don't fucking know what a hit is anymore. There was a lot of indecision, but with a lot of pressure, so it started to get ugly. Somewhere around 2005 or 2006, punk started to be like, "What the fuck? This isn't punk!" It started to feel like crappy pop. I'd been in a fistfight with Johnny Thunders. I got stoned with the Bad Brains in the 1980s. I went through a questioning-my-existence phase, so I sold most of my gear. I had a bunch of EMI shit, Decca compressors, and a bunch of weird-ass shit. So, yeah; long story short, I didn't keep any of it. Since then, I've got a bunch of other bullshit I bought for my studio, but at that time I wanted out.
That was also the transition era when Pro Tools was becoming more prevalent.
At Toast, it was tape, on a Studer 800 or 827. Everything we were doing when I first started was tape. But it was cool because I got a lot of remix work, because I knew how to do the computer. A lot of engineers didn't know how to do the Pro Tools shit. I remember watching David Bianco [Tape Op #104] and Tom Lord-Alge sitting there saying, "What the fuck is this?" A lot of people didn't know how to work that shit. I was able to make tracks in time way before Beat Detective. I was also able to create weird effects, so I got a lot of remix work at that point. I had an Ampex MM-1200 2-inch machine that was customized with an 11-track headstack that I'd run at 15 ips. That machine was great. One day we put all three of them together and did the shootout. The Ampex dusted everything, but it was a pig – if you didn't brake it properly, if you just hit stop, the reel would shoot across the room. [On older tape machines you had to "rock the reels" to stop them by hitting fast forward or rewind to reverse the direction of the tape travel and then slowly bring them to a stop. -JB] But the pressure back in the tape days, and in 2006, was totally different. When you're fucking punching or editing tape, it could be somebody big. There'd be some big producer sitting there. If you fuck up, you erase their vocal! You're fucking fired. But I think that there's a link between great performances and the pressure of falling off the highwire.
You said in 2006 that you were burned out from dealing with the indecision of A&R people. But records didn't take as long as they do now, even with all the indecision involved.
No. And the artists couldn't fucking take the record home. That's the end of it all, honestly. I produced a record for Rough Trade for Mark Eitzel [The Invisible Man]. I love Mark, but he got Pro Tools. We recorded at Toast, and it sounded fucking great. The record came out fine. It's awesome; but it really changed because he bought Pro Tools and had an LE system at home. He entered into a new level of artistic creativity that was previously reserved for producers and engineers. When people can start taking sessions home, cat's out of the bag.
