Who do you credit with keeping you engaged on so many fronts, and in so many disciplines? You've had a very successful music career, but you've led a life that's full of all these other things related to the music space.
I'm groping my way through the business, honestly, trying to figure out what to do next. Around the early 2000s or so I got this notion that it was driving me a little bit crazy that the main focus of my life was essentially being in a band, getting up in the morning, and going to work coming up with songs or ideas. I decided that I would treat my band a little more part-time, and I'd already been doing other things like producing records. I started branching out, for my own sanity, into things related to music. I wasn't having to sweat Cracker or Camper Van Beethoven eight or ten hours a day, six days a week. Part of it was branching out and away from my bands. For instance, I could go and work on somebody else's record for three or four months. We had the studio complex in Richmond, Virginia [Sound of Music Studios]. Before the crash of the digital age, that had grown to be quite big. It was basically two main tracking rooms and a couple of side rooms in this four-story building in downtown Richmond. We'd sometimes have three or four different groups in there recording at a time. Doing these other things related to music was important to me. It kept my head in the game and let me look at what other people were doing, how other people were approaching music, how they lived their life, how they approached creativity, what they did for songwriting, and stuff like that. It helped me get outside of my own head.
Were you involved with most of the bands that were coming through there?
No, because we had some pretty good house engineers; producers like John Morand [Tape Op #140], Alan Weatherhead [#157], and Rich Hasal, before he moved to Europe. There were a ton of people that came through there over the years. Lamb of God did one of their big records there. I was usually producing four or five things a year. A lot of indie projects.
Can you talk a little bit about the economics of running a big commercial studio? When you and I were making records in the '90s, you remember studios like Toast and Hyde Street and a bunch in the East Bay.
Yeah, we had Fantasy and…
Studio D.
Yeah, It was an incredible scene there. I think for Sound of Music in Richmond, we were already an off market. There's a point, where it's like, "Oh, do we buy the quarter of a million dollar board?" We were like, "No," because that's not who our clientele was. We had started out with an MCI board; a pretty small board. We bought a studio that existed there and a Studer tape deck, 16-track, 2-inch. We were a little more down-market. And at some point we upgraded to the Sony MCI board from the MCI 428. That was all we ever did. We went through a couple of different tape machines, and eventually we got into [IZ Technology] RADAR instead of [Digidesign] Pro Tools for a long time. We tried to keep a place so that we didn't have a big note on the equipment in the studio and spend our money on outboard gear and microphones. It's gone through a lot of changes since I left, but it stayed in business for a lot longer than other studios that had a much higher overhead. It was something we had to do, because our market was largely indie bands, a lot of punk, a lot of metal, and a fair amount of Americana. It wasn't big money stuff.
You've said in lieu of writing an autobiography you made this album, Father, Sons and Brothers, a 28-song offering. I felt like I was reading a book and it made me feel I knew you a little bit better in a way that I don't always get when I'm listening to records. A song like the first single, "I Wrote a Song Called Take the Skinheads Bowling," is the answer to, "How did you get your start"?
Exactly. And how random it was and such. Yeah, so "I Wrote a Song Called Take the Skinheads Bowling" actually started because I was at a Cracker soundcheck somewhere, and I think Bryan [Howard, bass] and Coco [Carlton Owens, drums] were playing the heartbeat groove, mid-tempo, and then I started playing the "Take the Skinheads Bowling" groove. Instead of singing "Take the Skinheads Bowling," I started playing around with it. I'd been in the middle of doing these autobiographical things, and even though this didn't end up being the music that we used or anything like that, I was like, "Oh, I should probably tell the Camper Van Beethoven origin story by explaining this song, right?" And it's really short, I don't know if you noticed that.
It's real short.
It's two minutes, seven seconds or something like that. It has a lot of words in it. A lot of the songs on the album have a lot of words in them, where I'm trying to fit in the story, and I need to get in an extra sentence here or something like that. I have to do that in the song. Later, I thought about this… I'm doing what they're doing when people make musicals. You know how in musicals sometimes the plot being told in the words has to take precedence over the rhythm and the meter of the lyrics. In a pop song, you wouldn't do this. I'm doing that a lot on this record, and that's one of the songs where that really comes out. "He went on missions all around the world, while I toured around, meeting girls that like the song called 'Take the Skinheads Bowling.'" It was really hard to figure out how to do it, but it was fun.
You do talk about how you grew up in what might not be considered a "rock 'n' roll origin story." You grew up in a stable family. Your parents stayed married. I'm assuming you moved around a little bit because you were a military brat. One of the songs on this record, "How Does Your Sister Roller Skate?" feels cheeky, but it's also a really touching story.
I think one of the things is that if you have a disabled family member, sometimes your family essentially focuses… the family is built around the needs of that person. In some ways, you could see it as a hardship for the family. I'm sure it was, in some ways, a hardship. But, by the time we were in California in the early '70s, I was coming home from school, my mom would be at home, and there would be the after-school snack. My mom stayed home as the homemaker because she had to take my sister to various classes or therapy and generally had to be available to get her from school. So, while the rest of my neighborhood was emptying out as families fractured, and mothers began to work, I sort of had this perfect Leave it to Beaver, family household in this neighborhood. Everybody was always in our house…"Hey, what is your mom making today?" Even though my family was built around the needs of my sister in a lot of ways, it was also idyllic in a way. I had a childhood that I think a lot of other people didn't. I've always thought that that was a blessing of having my sister that way. But then again, as I say in the song, it was a less enlightened time. People were cruel and unkind. The harassment that my sister was subject to. It's kind of a story of persevering and having more or less a normal life. It's a very sweet song. It's very cheeky, though. It's based on the joke about "How does your sister roller skate?", which we don't have to go into right now.
When you have somebody who's disabled and the family focus is on them, the non-disabled sibling also perhaps has a little less parental oversight at times, which leads me to the song "Disneyland Jail", which I found highly entertaining.
"Disneyland Jail" is basically a true story of me and my friend Dale. You know, after we got our driver's licenses, we were in high school, and man, boys – when they're teenagers – your brain isn't totally formed. You take a lot of risks. There was one of those evenings they had at Disneyland at that time – I think you had to be over 16 – you would go to Disneyland, and it would be open all night for teenagers. I don't know exactly how that went.
All night?
We did. You had to get parental permission. So, we went. We drove in his car and we, of course, brought mushrooms and liquor with us and proceeded to get pretty wasted. What ends up happening is I maintained. As we would say back then, "Maintain, Maintain", but Dale was loopy as hell, he ended up attracting the attention of the plain-clothed security in Disneyland, and they took us down under Main Street to what is essentially Disneyland Jail. They have little holding areas for people who are acting up, doing bad things, or shoplifting. The story is of going to Disneyland Jail, but it's also a snapshot of that. At 17 years old you're doing all kinds of crazy shit, getting up to whatever it is you get up to when you're in high school, and you have your driver's license. I had a motorcycle. I can't believe my parents let me have the motorcycle! Just all the things that you get up to. I was thinking about that. By the time I wrote that song, I had two teenage boys, and it is literally my plea to them. "Please do not do the stuff that I did! If you're out somewhere and you're drunk or you're too high to drive or you're in a situation. No judgment, I will come and get you and not say anything about this. Anything bad that you did, you have complete amnesty, get out of jail free card from me." They never took me up on it, so…
Another great song is "Leaving Key Member Clause," which seems to be the Cracker origin story.
Yes.
It covers you going to your house, your gear has been stolen, and the only thing left is a crate of records, you sell them, and you buy some recording equipment.
True story. Yeah.
I love the Johnny Hickman [Cracker partner] anecdote.
