You grew up in Southern California?
I did. I grew up in Ontario and Pomona. My dad was a horse trainer. It was pretty rural in those days. There was a racetrack at the Pomona fairgrounds. He came from Oklahoma during the depression. He was a big Bob Wills fan, which was the first music I remember listening to. I listened to a lot of country when I was a kid. In those days, they had music education starting in fourth grade and I was a trumpet player. Thank god, because that's the only reason I can read music.
What other music were you hearing as a kid?
Early rock 'n' roll. KFWB and KRLA were the AM rock stations there. Being a trumpet player, I played classical music and had a love for that. I had a cool band director in junior high, and he's the one who turned me onto jazz. The tune that did it for me was "Maiden Voyage" by Herbie Hancock. That band director was cool. He took us to see Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and big bands from his era. He moved up to the high school, so I was with him for about six years.
Were you studying jazz trumpet?
I was already working. I was into guitar. I loved The Beatles, of course.
That took over everybody's consciousness.
Absolutely. I found a guy up in the desert who could play some country songs. He showed me a couple of songs, and we immediately started going to the beer joint and playing. Then it went off from there. I started playing at bars when I was 13.
Were you playing trumpet?
No, I was on guitar. I ended up working with a bunch of guys who had been big when I was a kid. It was Western swing guys, like Billy Armstrong, Tex Williams, and Smokey Rogers, when I was a teenager. They'd do fairs and such. By then we'd moved up to the high desert, outside of Victorville, [California]. I spent a lot of time in L.A. right around the final years of high school. I graduated in 1970. I knew a lot of guys down there. I ended up doing a session when I was 16 at a studio called Criteria. I found out later from Glen Campbell, Lee Hazlewood, and Snuff that they all did demos in that 4-track studio.
That had nothing to do with Miami's Criteria [Recording Studios]?
No, no. It was my first studio experience. For me, I never liked performing. I didn't like going out and playing.
Were you nervous, or it just wasn't satisfying?
It wasn't about the music; it was just drinking. I was working at rough joints. But I loved playing. I did the session, and a little lightbulb went off in the studio. I'm like, "Oh, this is cool because there are no civilians here. It's just musicians."
The best environment! [laughs]
Working class kid. I'd hooked up with these guys and played Nevada for two and a half years. There are all these casinos. I did some great gigs and met some great people. Eventually, I felt we were doing these gigs and I was repeating myself. I thought, "It's not going anywhere." My folks were back in Oklahoma by then. I'd been on the road for five years. I decided, "I'm going to go back to school because this is going nowhere." I ended up studying music. I went to a year of school in Oklahoma and took the music classes that I wanted. By then, I was a little older and already jaded. "You can't be in the jazz band if you don't play in a marching band." I'm like, "Fuck that." I did that in junior high and high school. I changed my major, and that's when I came out to Arizona to finish grad school. They'd moved up to Prescott, Arizona, and I put a solo show together. I could kick bass pedals and play guitar; I had an electric and an acoustic. I didn't want to mess with anybody else.
A one-man act?
Yeah. I knew all these tunes and I worked six nights a week. But, after about a year and a half of it, I was so sick of listening to me. I started doing some duos, first with a friend of mine, Rick Lamb, who was building a studio. He sang, and played bass, and Rhodes [electric piano], so we could do a lot. We did [covers of] The Everly Brothers, The Beatles, and some more sophisticated music. He built a studio here called Lambchops Studios. That was when I got an understanding of that.
The studio process?
Yeah. I did a lot of records with him. He got into advertising, because that's where the money was. He probably did 65 percent of the voiceovers in this town for quite a few years.
There was a time when jingles and ad work were such a big deal for local studios.
Absolutely. I got all that down by working there. Then I opened my own place. The first studio I had was in '81, one block south of where I am now, at my girlfriend's house. She had a patio and I enclosed it. I had a [TEAC] 3340S [4-track reel-to-reel], and I worked with a bunch of songwriter friends. Then I bought an [TEAC/Tascam] 80-8. You know what? I'm glad that happened. When we do that and have limitations, we figure the shit out, right?
Oh, yeah! If we've got minimal tracks, we've got to be ten steps ahead with arrangement and where we're going with the recording.
Absolutely. Everybody makes fun of [Alesis] ADATs, but I can tell you ADAT changed my life when they came along. All of a sudden, I was working with a lot of people. I couldn't afford some of the studios. I went to work for some friends of mine doing re-records. I did the Four Tops and The Animals. Re-recording their hits, so they could lease them for film and TV.
Oh, with the actual artists?
Yeah. It was all the Four Tops; I spent ten days with those guys. It was all on ADAT. Tower of Power's 30th anniversary record, Soul Vaccination: Tower of Power Live, Tom Flye cut that. He did an incredible job on a 32-track Mitsubishi [deck]. Emilio Castillo [saxophone, producer] wanted me to mix it. I was like, "I've got ADATs. Can you do that?"
Then they dumped it over to ADAT?
Yeah. There were six machines locked up in a Neve room that I worked at a lot. I did the whole record on that. All of a sudden, I had at least 32 tracks. It was incredible. The first digital machine I ever had was a Nakamichi DMP-100 [Digital Mastering Processor]. It's like a [Sony PCM-F1] that stored [2-track] digital code on VHS tape [via a VCR]. I had a [Sony] Betamax hi-fi [VCR], and I was tracking the symphony. I either spaced omni mics, or even two sets of omnis, depending on how much time they had. I'd hang some other mics and put that on the hi-fi portion of the Beta VCR. I had quad in the truck. Nobody's ever going to hear those, but it was cool!
That wasn't a bad audio path, using the Beta hi-fi recorders.
Beta hi-fi sounded great. I would go out and do these classical dates on the F1, and then I had to dump it to my tape deck to edit. That would get crazy.
How many ADAT machines did you end up with at the studio?
I had five. I would have three or four up at a time.
That were actually working?
Exactly. The first thing I found was a guy who could work on them. You've got to have a backup deck. I spent ten days with the Four Tops. All the music was on ADATs; at least 24 tracks. I thought, "I'll sum this music to two tracks and take that back there [for vocal overdubs]." The more I thought about it, the worse of an idea I thought it was. I made copies of it all, and then I had four ADATs. We were supposed to work at a great studio; Aretha [Franklin] wanted to come in, so we got canned at the last minute. We went to the place where Funkadelic recorded at.
In Detroit? United [Sound Systems]?
Yeah! I went in, and there were two Neve [console] rooms. "How hard is it going to be to find four mic preamps and four mics?" Well, the first night I had to send the Tops home, because I couldn't get anything to work. The studio hadn't done any maintenance for years. I finally got it working. They were in their 60s. Levi [Stubbs] was one of the great voices of all time. I went back there with the tracks, and they were pretty impressed. They were looking at each other, and one thing I overheard was, "Man, when's the last time you've heard it sound like that?" Levi, in the first 15 minutes of my time with him in Detroit, he sings a song, and he goes, "Clarkey, how was that?" I said, "It's great. Unfortunately, that's not what you did on the record, and we've got to get it close." He replies, "I've been singing this song for 35 years." I'm like, "Oh, fuck. This is the first 15 minutes and I've got to deal with this shit now." I knew it was coming. I had the lyrics printed out all big. I said, "Levi, what you did 39 years ago was actually this." He says, "That ain't right!" I play him the original, and of course I'm right; I'd just lived with it for six weeks of tracking. He said, "Goddamn, that's news to me!" From then on, he'd come in and go, "Clarkey, what did I do?" It was like that for ten days. We never stopped laughing!
How did these jobs land in your lap?
From working with [guitarist] Al Casey, who'd worked with Lee [Hazlewood] a lot.
The [Wrecking Crew] session guitarist?
Yeah. He played on the Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra records. He was from Arizona. He knew all of these guys who had early rock 'n' roll hits. I also ended up working with Lee too. These guys would come over and do demos. There was this other studio in those days that I worked at called Apache Tracks. They had a 46-channel Neve [console] in there and a 32-track Mitsubishi [digital tape deck]. We'd do these live sessions, including Ed Black, a steel player who'd played with Linda Ronstadt. We'd put these bands together and just do the music. Greg McDonald had been Rick Nelson's manager, and he had recorded Eric Burdon [The Animals' vocalist] and it was all sequenced. It sounded horrible. I couldn't believe that Eric would even do this! Anyway, I replaced all that.
With real musicians?
Yeah, it was great. At the end of [the film] Casino, where they're killing Joe Pesci out in a field, that's our version of "House of the Rising Sun." It was right down my alley to try to make those songs sound right.
You were tracking everything in your studio?
Here. I've been here, from '83 on. The first two years, because I got hung up with the city, it was just two rooms.
A smaller, garage-type space.
I was doing seven-piece funk bands from L.A. I figured out how to do this in these two rooms. You can't have better training than that. That's one of the problems I see today. Now everybody has access to every plug-in and everything in the world. They never really learn one thing. They just keep adding shit to it. That's the thrust of my class at ASU [Arizona State University], which I've taught for 35 years. "You guys are coming in in the middle of this shit. I have a real plate reverb. I want you to see it and I want you to hear it." I had [Digidesign's] Sound Designer for years. That changed my life to be able to edit. It became Pro Tools later. Every time I'd do a Pro Tools session in L.A., shit would crash and I'd be losing tracks. I was like, "Fuck that. I can't lose tracks." I was late to Pro Tools; I was waiting for the bugs to get worked out.
We met through Snuff Garrett years ago, when I interviewed him.
I knew him well. He didn't like to fly, so when we were doing film work, we'd drive to L.A., and then I got to know him way better. He treated me like a son. I'm a music guy, and I learned the business side from him, because he screwed me on several things. [laughter]
That's how you learn!
I'd go, "Okay, now next time, this shit will be different." And there would always be some other way. God damn it! But then, he'd give me some expensive shit or something. He couldn't get out of that Hollywood thing, where he had to screw someone. It was that deal. Later on, we'd be in the middle of something, and I'd play him what I was working on. He'd say, "Could we get the publishing on this?" I'd say, "These are friends of mine. I wouldn't even ask them for that, Snuff." "Goddamn, we've got to have the publishing." We had a meeting of the minds many times. As far as producing goes, when I met him, this was in the early '80s. I was used to George Martin and that ilk. The guys who were involved musically, like Quincy Jones.
Musical producers.
I was asking him, "What mics did you use on the Bobby Vee songs? He's like, "Well, how the fuck would I know that?" None of that mattered.
He's correct, in a way.
Yeah, exactly. He was a song guy. He could hear a song. I heard him say 100 times that he didn't care about music. That's complete bullshit. He cared a lot about it. We'd be doing sessions, and his input would be, "Is that right?" He always had music guys. Leon Russell, Steve Dorff, and myself later.
Somebody who's keeping track of everything.
