Everybody knows you from working with Tom Petty for so many years, plus archiving his work. How did your career begin?
My dad was a musician, and I found his tape recorder when I was a kid. I got myself a tape recorder when I was a 13, a TEAC that had sound on sound. You could take the 1/4-inch stereo and bounce one thing to the next track. I got a 4-track TEAC when I went to college when I was 17, and I put a little studio together. I was always recording music. I got my foot in the door at a real 24-track studio [Studio Sound Recorders] in 1978, and I worked on a record. The producer was George Tobin, who had an artist called Robert John; he did a track called "Sad Eyes." It was Robert's song, and he wanted to cut the vocals with me. We cut the vocals, and he said, "Stop me if you hear anything bad." I said, "Really? You want me to do that?" He sang it, we cut the vocals, and then they picked that track from the album and it went to number one. Within six months of getting my foot in the door, I'd worked on a number one record!
You were fairly young, and right out of college?
Yeah, I was 21. Right after that, they [George Tobin and Studio Sound Recorders] had an association with Ariola Records. A French artist, Alain Chamfort, came in, and the first record I ever cut everything on was his album [Poses]. Then a Latin guy, Juan Gabriel, showed up. I did two albums right then, and Recuerdos went on to be number one. Alain Chamfort's single, "Manureva," went to number one and sold a million and a half copies in France. Juan Gabriel – the guy was huge, so after that I got all these French and Latin artists showing up, and I went independent in 1982. I've been independent ever since.
They were searching you out based on the credits?
Yeah. I ended up working with French people, like Johnny Hallyday, who was the "Elvis" of France.
I looked at your discography and thought maybe you didn't even live in the U.S., initially.
Yeah. Back in those days, artists who had their act together knew that if they could come to L.A. they could make a big record. The studios and musicians were pretty established in Los Angeles at that point. I worked with these artists, even though I didn't speak any French or Spanish. When I went independent, I did some work with Herb Alpert [Tape Op #140]. I bounced around and got pretty far into the Latin world. I ended up producing some for Juan Gabriel; he had an artist, Isabel Pantoja, who I worked with, and her Desde Andalucia was the number one Latin album for eight months. Crazy. Then that played its course out, and I got into doing sound design. This is way too much about me. [laughs]
No, I wanted to find out the path that led to where you are now!
Well, it's interesting. I met Craig Harris, who became a good friend of mine. He was one of the first guys to get the first Synclavier, with a direct-to-disk system. Eight channels that you could record to a 30 megabyte Winchester hard disk that cost $10,000 and was as big as a refrigerator. I was fascinated by the technology, so I started working with him. He was doing sound design for 30 second national TV spots, like Budweiser [commercials]. He'd done a lot of sound design for films, like Back to the Future; making crazy sounds, speeding them up and slowing them down, and making collages. I spent three years doing that. Honestly, that helped with everything I've done since: working with sounds, 30 second spots, figuring out voiceovers, dialog, and how to do all that. It helped me when I jumped back into record production. After that, I got involved in doing sound for theme parks, and I did all the music and sound design for an attraction at a Japanese theme park. While I was there, I met David Bianciardi, who was the show control designer. He and I decided to create this interactive entertainment, where we were going to have a club where you walk into it, there's a central beat going on, but you walk into different zones. You walk into a zone, looking at real-time computer graphics you can affect by your movements, and you're also changing the sound of samples. We created this whole prototype of an Interactive Dance Club that we premiered at SIGGRAPH [Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques] in 1998. It was fun trying to figure out the "future" of music, but I guess the world wasn't ready. Right after that, a friend of mine said, "Jeff Lynne's looking for an engineer." I showed up that day and ended up hanging out with Jeff Lynne for about ten years.
He had his own studio at that point?
Yeah, he had his own place. I got to meet Ringo [Starr], Paul [McCartney], and George [Harrison], before he passed. A dream come true!
You worked on Brainwashed, George's final record.
Yeah. That was a special project. The Concert for George – the tribute concert they did at the Royal Albert Hall – that still is a high point for me.
I assume that's what led to meeting Tom Petty?
That's right, because the Heartbreakers flew out for that. The first time I actually met Tom was when he came over to Jeff's to listen to the playback of one of the tracks we had mixed on that concert. Then Jeff produced [Tom Petty's] Highway Companion album.
Right, which you were the main engineer on.
Yeah, exactly. I got a good credit on it; I got to work with Tom, Mike [Campbell, guitar], and Jeff. Getting to know those guys was a joy, plus seeing how Tom worked. There's this great story: Jeff says, "Tom's coming over. I want to get everything ready for him. I want to have it set up right." I said, "Okay, let's get the amp all mic'd up and everything going." We had the amp out in Jeff's room and Tom's in the control room with the guitar. Tom had brought Alan "Bugs" Weidel, his longtime right-hand man. Tom's sitting there; he plays a few chords, plays the parts a little bit, and he goes, "I don't like the sound of this guitar." I'm thinking, "Oh, shit; I'm screwed." He goes, "Hey Bugs, get me a different guitar." And I thought to myself, "I like this guy."
Right. He's not going to turn around and blame you.
No, he gets what the deal is. We got along really well.
How did that work lead into you working with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers?
Well, Tom had this way; if he liked you, he'd call you up. All of a sudden I got a call from Tom, or Tom's manager, saying, "There's this other little thing, and Tom wanted to know if you'd be into doing that." Tom said, "I want to cut this track. Can you help me?" I called a friend, we booked a studio, cut that track, and it was such fun. We cut ["I'm Walkin'"] for a Fats Domino tribute album [Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino] they were putting together for the Tipitina's Foundation. What a great session. These guys were great to work with. We brought in Jim Horn; he played the saxophone parts and nailed it. After that, I started getting more calls. They were starting to work on this documentary film [Runnin' Down a Dream], so they were pulling me in to ask if I could mix some songs for that. Then, when the Highway Companion album got done, they had gone out live and they were promoting the single, "Saving Grace," from the album. They recorded live at Bonnaroo, and they asked if I could mix that. At one point, Tom said to me, "Look, I've got this idea about my old band…"When he'd made the documentary, they went back and interviewed everybody.
Right, back to Gainesville, Florida, and his pre-Heartbreakers band [Mudcrutch].
Yeah. A lot of the interviews were with the Mudcrutch guys; Tom Leadon and Randall Marsh. Tom got this idea, "Why don't I make an album with those guys? Wouldn't that be fun?" He called me up and said, "Look, I wanna make an album, but I don't want to make them feel all intimidated. I don't want to go into a studio to have red light fever and all that, because these guys have been off doing other stuff." Mudcrutch was going to be Tom, Mike [Campbell], and Ben [Benmont Tench], and then Randall on the drums and Tom Leadon on guitar. Tom Petty would play bass in the band.
Like he used to.
Yeah. So, that was the lineup. But Tom said, "I don't want to intimidate them. Is there a way we can take the Clubhouse and turn it into a studio?" The Clubhouse is where Tom kept all his gear and guitars, and where they'd usually rehearse before tours. I worked with his front-of-house guy, Robert Scovill, who at that point was working with Digidesign. They'd come up with this VENUE System live board where you could run everything through the board, and it would also record flat to Pro Tools. I set up a Pro Tools room in one of the offices next door and turned it into a control room. They brought that board in, we put Mudcrutch in there, and then we tracked them as they were rehearsing. They weren't wearing any headphones; they had [monitor] wedges. They thought they were just playing, and I was secretly recording an album in there.
That's the perfect way for a good rock band to stay comfortable!
Yeah. We made so many albums with that setup. That's how we proceeded from there on, with [Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers'] Mojo, Hypnotic Eye, and everything else. We fell into a cool groove, and a great way to make music.
Mojo and Hypnotic Eye both feel like a band playing the songs live.
It is. That's the thing that's so great. All those guys in that band are so good. At that point, Tom was not going to play them demos. He didn't want to influence their take on the song by playing a demo of it, so he'd come in and play the song on acoustic guitar. "Here's the song." Everyone would gather around and listen. I once clocked it – from the time he came in and played the guitar and to the time we got a decent take was 35 minutes. "Okay, that's good. Come on in and listen." They were so intuitive. It also meant that when we'd hear it back, we could immediately get if it's going in the right or the wrong direction. We all got to the point where it was, "Yeah, we could spend another three hours and make this a tiny bit better." Or, "We could cut our losses right now and say, 'Screw it, this is not working.' Let's move on to something else and try a different idea." Where they were at as a band, and he was at as a writer, was joyful and effortless.
I'm sure you've been in sessions where it's all becoming very tedious, for one reason or another. It's nice to step away from that world.
Yeah, that's the thing I loved about him, and that's why I was always so lucky. I was working with people who were at the top of their game, and also smart enough to know not to fall into those traps. We made some great music; I'm proud of Hypnotic Eye, especially. Tom always kept the bar high, and everybody was going to get over it. There were several times we'd cut tracks, and we're saying, "Oh, this is great!" He'd say, "No, we've done that before. Give me something else." On [Hypnotic Eye's] "American Dream Plan B," they played it once and he said, "No, I want a badass bass part. I want it stripped down. How can we make this thing powerful with just a bass thing?"
How did your role come up with working on what Tom Petty had in the vaults?
I dipped my toe in when we did The Live Anthology. At that point we'd just finished the Runnin' Down a Dream film, and Warner Bros. said, "We want to do a live album." We had done a live album in the Runnin' Down a Dream film. [Director Peter] Bogdanovich edited it around a 2006 Gainesville concert that they did. When you bought that DVD, you got the big, 4-hour plus documentary, and then the other disc was that entire concert on its own. If we put out another concert from the same era, it's the same tunes. Tom, Mike, and I got the idea, "Well, how many tapes do we have in the vault? Let's look at all of them and come up with the greatest live album, ever." That took one year to do. It was 400 reels of tape, digital tracks, and 3,200 rough mixes. It was crazy. I spent at least three months transferring tapes and making rough mixes. I'd get a mix set up, bounce it to two tracks, hit record in Pro Tools, and go have lunch.
It's a lot of work.
I never had a problem with that. That's the engineer part of me, the nerdy part who wants to keep on drilling into this until I find that little gem. Tom wasn't the kind of guy who was going to say, "Oh, let's find that concert from Boston and use that. Give 'em a record and let's be done." It's like, "No, this could be the best." We went through all those takes and found what we thought were the best takes of all those songs, and then we came up with all this material. Tom took another couple of weeks and sequenced it, because he was into the running order of [albums] and how that tells a story. He sequenced each one of those four discs as its own mini-concert. There's an arc to it. If there's one thing that I've learned since Tom's passed – and we've done these other projects, like American Treasure and Wildflowers & All the Rest – is that I've tried my best to stay within that lane, in terms of thinking about how tracks are sequenced and what the larger story is that they're telling. Being an archivist, if all that work gets you to the point where you can bring out something that's wonderful and everybody's going to love, then it's a labor of love.
Yeah. Wildflowers & All the Rest is the most recent release. I found that fascinating that you and Tom had been able to put together the first bonus disc there, right?
