How did you first get interested in music?
Oh, I don't know. I guess I first got infatuated with tape machines before I did anything. This was probably when I was about 6. My dad was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. That was back before cell phones and so we would make reel-to-reel tapes and say, "Hi daddy" and all that stuff. It was cool but when I heard my voice back and it didn't sound like me so I was like, "Who the fuck is that?" and from that point on I was real infatuated with tape machines and recordings. It was quite some time after that that I ever picked up an instrument. I was into recording before I was interested in being a musician.
So how did you start recording?
I started recording on a jam box that had a cassette player and a TV. I saw this thing in a store and I bussed tables all summer and finally got it and at that time period I had begun playing guitar. So I always said that that was my first studio... my "Mobile TV" studio.
And what came out of those sessions?
Oh, just more fascination with trying to figure out how to make better sounds. I was also making my own tapes of records and I was amazed that they sounded better than the tapes that you could buy at the store. So one of the first things I learned was that mass recorded music wasn't very good... at least on tape.
So what was the first stuff you started recording.
That would be me, noises around the house, dogs. I recorded The Monkees straight off the TV. I loved the Monkees... "Day Dream Believer" ...that used to break my heart.
Then what happened?
I got into being in punk rock bands and I was still recording on my TV Mobile Unit. Then I got a hold of an X15, one of the first [Fostex] 4-track cassettes, and I got introduced to the idea of multi-tracking through that shitty cassette recorder which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. After that I decided that I wanted to go to Full Sail recording school. Not a very good name but pretty good school. It's funny because a bunch of my friends talked me into going to school with them to become an engineer and none of them are doing it now. Most of them interned and hated it. The reason that they went was to be involved in the rock and roll studios but once you get involved it's all tedious bullshit for the first few years so none of them lasted. It was a 9-month program of 12-16 hour days. I guess I learned some shit but I still didn't know how to align a tape machine when I got my first internship. I had to fake my way through it.
Where was your first internship?
At the Castle Recording in Franklin, TN. It was a nice recording studio. I got my first gig because an intern before me snapped a tape and broke the master in half so I got a foot in the door. It was with the 3M digital recorders. The first ones that came out had a really weird mechanism. It was like film the way you loaded the tape. It weaved in and out of all these different heads. So this intern had finally gotten on a session. It was his first session and he put it in there wrong and he snapped the tape right in the middle of the song. So he just left a note saying, "Well I guess I'm fired."...and he never returned. So when I showed up they were real paranoid about me. I faked my way through the first couple of years. So that got me my first internship and I just stayed until they started paying me.
What kind of work did you do at The Castle?
When I first started it was doing god-awful cataloging. I was taking reel to reels and cataloging them on DATs. I did that to thousands of shitty songs that no one was ever going to record. I did that for about a year. I did that until the main engineer got a better job and I moved up to his.
What kind of music were you recording?
Mainly country music. Hank Williams Junior, some cool stuff, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, but a lot of really bad shit as well. There is so much bad stuff I don't know where to begin.
You've spent such a long time as an engineer working on other producer's projects. What's the difference between those two roles... engineer and producer.
I did learn a lot throughout the years from working with different producers like Berry Beckett, who was a great producer who came from the whole Muscle Shoals/James Brown era back when they had a great scene going on down there. I learned a lot of things about "feel" from him. I also worked with a lot of producers where I learned what not to do. What shit went bad.
Well give me an example of those.
With Berry Beckett, he was always focused in on the groove of the way things felt. He was that way all the way through mixing to where he'd be slowing the machines down or speeding them up even after he thought he had it to where he wanted it. He was just constantly obsessed with the way the track feels. I'm sure now days he's probably driving himself mad with Pro Tools. Then there are other producers where feel wasn't even a consideration. They would just call the musicians and let them produce the record by themselves. They were just sort of the coordinators. Which is fine. I mean the musicians are paying for the record so they should have a say in how it sounds. They should have a whack at it until you start telling them what to do. I'm sort of in-between those two schools. I usually don't say anything unless a) I have an idea or b) they are fucking up to where they aren't getting by. I usually add all my shit later. The way I engineer I become the 5th musician. I work the sounds so that they are more musical. The way Brian Eno worked with the Talking Heads' records.
How does that work when you don't know the musicians that well?
Well it's harder, you kinda just have to let it happen. Sometimes you'll figure out after it's been done... "Well I should've done this or that."
For example?
Well, just having the wrong drummer or having a guitar player and asking him to do something that he's not very good at. Maybe later on you'll do a song a different way and he'll be brilliant and you'll realize he should have been playing that way all along. It's a learning process. It's taken me two records now before I even got comfortable with Lambchop. The first record I just sort of let the tape roll. Which was fine. They had never really done a studio record where everybody played at the same time. But at the same time... when I first worked with them there were so many people playing I didn't know who was doing what. Who was playing good, who was fucking up. So I'd have to say if you go to work with a band that has 12 members and you don't know a lot about that band you are in for a lot of surprises in the studio.
It seems to me that you are pretty interested in the surprises, particularly after working with people who are "so-called" professionals. You told me a story earlier tonight about session singers coming in to do back-ups on a record and wanting to sing in a way that they could do the minimum singing and still save their voices for a later session. So it wasn't about making the best record it was about getting through and on to the next session. I know so many people who record and so few of them that work in a world where you would call up and hire professional singers.
It's definitely like the Ford Motor Company in Nashville. Music Row is very much like that. You bring in your carburetor from here... You have steel players that play a certain style. You need that sound you call them up. There's so many musicians here that you can cover any base as long as you've been here long enough to know who to call to do what. There's a guy in town named Brent Mason who does all this "chicken picking" shit and everybody always tries to get that sound through other guitar players and nobody else can do it as well as him. So you end up with real lame versions of it on a whole lot of other records because you know who they are trying to emulate. But there has always been a big strain in Nashville that is about emulation. In Nashville the emulation is all based around what is selling. They want "that producer", "that engineer", "those musicians", "those songwriters" ...whoever was involved but only after their hit. Everyone does the same thing to try to be successful until they burn that out. Then they are back to looking for the new hot thing to copy. Nashville has really lost its tradition. There used to be a real insiders club here. For example, they didn't let hippies play. In the '70s if you had long hair they didn't let you play sessions. It was very close knit — they didn't like outsiders so they didn't teach the craft to many people. So the ones who knew it died off and stopped playing. Most of the folks you get here now are failed NY and LA pop artists and musicians who came here and, I believe, destroyed the genre. They killed it.
Well, tell me about that. I know you've worked on a bunch of very successful country records. Tell me your two best and worst experiences.
Oh, shit... I don't know what to say about the best. The best thing is just being around certain people. People like Pig Rollins who was the original piano player on a lot of early country hits, like Patsy Cline's "Crazy". He's been around that long... and he's still playing. Keith Stegall uses him a lot on Alan Jackson records. He's just phenomenal. The guy is country music. Nobody uses him on any of the modern records but Keith. It's a terrible shame. It's just that he's looked upon as "too old-style" but he's really the deal. Meanwhile you've got all these younger players with all the hip gear who can do a lot of different crappy shit and they get all the gigs. You know Pig doesn't show up with anything. He just plays the piano that's there in the studio. That probably hinders him but he's got a "feel" thing that is far superior to everybody else in town. Worst? Well there are so many bad stories. I mean I've worked on three to four hundred records and maybe only a dozen that I'm proud to have worked on. A lot of it is just radio fodder. Written by committee for a label deciding what's on what. "Your look is more important than your singing ability." This sentiment has really ruined this town.
