BACKGROUND AND SCHOOLIN'
Goodmanson is a graduate of Washington's premier institution of liberal/progressive education, The Evergreen State College in Olympia. The college has several multi-track studios including a 16-track room with a pretty sweet API and a beat up Ampex MM1200, some cool outboard gear and microphones that students can check out from Media Loan, an electronic music lab, and even, when I was a student there 13 years ago, a monstrous Buchla synth. Despite the excellent gear and fine instructors, Evergreen should not be misperceived as a recording school. At Evergreen, Goodmanson delved into every aspect of audio engineering, became music director at KAOS radio, played with his band Dangermouse, involved himself with the ubiquitous student concert series, yet laughs that he "emerged from there with the worst sounding demo of anyone that had ever applied at a recording studio. 'Cause they're totally not about being competitive in the real world at all, they're completely on the theory side and nothing on the practical side."
Nevertheless, he had a great college experience, and after graduation moved directly into a job at the former Music Source, on Seattle's Capitol Hill. Here he recorded bands at night and cut commercials and dialogue replacement (for the TV show "Northern Exposure") during the day, often working 80 hour weeks. It was at the Music Source that John began his collaboration with producer/composer Steve Fisk, himself a former 'Greener, and learned many tricks of the trade — how to work lightning fast, learn by trial and error (and "trial by fire"), and how to deal with artists ranging from hip-hop to punk rock.
Goodmanson realized a longstanding goal to start his own studio when he left the Music Source. Together with Stuart Hallerman [Tape Op #18], owner of Avast! Recording, he opened John and Stu's Place in 1993. Surely John knew he made the right move, explaining: "[I opened] my studio, two weeks later Eddie Vedder's on the cover of Time Magazine, and he walks in the door, and it freaked me out. Those were my first clients at John and Stu's. Jeff [Ament] and Eddie doin' demos for Pearl Jam."
Were your experiences mostly positive owning your own studio?
Yeah it was awesome. You know there's not a lot of money in it. I started doing a lot of work out of town, and then the studio business kind of went south for a while, at the end of 2000. It was too expensive to keep a room sitting empty.
What was your basic setup over there?
It was an Otari 24-track and the Quad-Eight console.
The Quad-Eight from the Hollywood Bowl, right?
Yeah. It's still a great board, man, but you gotta [maintain them]. I had Stuart's [Ampex MM] 1200 forever, which was the best sounding machine but you couldn't punch in on it.
And that studio used to be Reciprocal [Jack Endino's [Tape Op #13] place] and later Word of Mouth?
Yeah, and it was Triangle first, like back in the new wave days. [Note: the studio is now Hall of Justice, run by Chris Walla] [#111]
I have a really good memory for details like this, but I think I remember at Evergreen [Dangermouse] getting ready to play and you were running up and down the stairs trying to patch cables to the radio station upstairs.
It was always like that, and I had to drive to go pick someone up that was supposed to be playing, and I realized on the drive that one side of the entire mix was out of phase with the other, 'cause I had a mono radio in the car. This is a perfect example of student projects at Evergreen, 'cause we went in through some wacky patch cables some student had built, didn't check 'em, and on FM radio you know half the time it's summing to mono, especially a low wattage transmitter like that, so all you could hear was whatever the guy had panned. [long laughter] So it was like two guitars, some toms, no vocals. Just really bad. So we fixed that as soon as I got back. But, [another] crazy night, Fugazi played before any of their records had come out. And they were so anti-commercial that they were letting people copy the 13 Songs record, so everyone in Olympia got a copy. They played in that funny space that was in the bottom of A Dorm. So I was running PA, my band was opening, and I had my radio show that night all at the same time — it was pretty awesome. They were fucking amazing.
That would have been pretty cool to see Fugazi in A Dorm.
And at that point, they were touring all over the place but they didn't charge money, they would just collect donations from the crowd. [laughs] They were so punk rock! Calvin Johnson [Beat Happening/Dub Narcotic/K Records] [Tape Op #32] got up and passes the hat for Fugazi at the bottom of A Dorm! I mean, all we knew was it was the guy from Rites of Spring and the guy from Minor Threat. But they were fucking great. I mean that was a total life-changing experience for me.
SURVIVIN' THE BIZ
Goodmanson recorded some of the seminal bands of '90s Northwest indie rock — Treepeople, Sleater-Kinney, Silkworm, Team Dresch, Harvey Danger, 30 Ought 6, Unwound, Bikini Kill. The list goes on and on. To hear these records is to experience the emotional ferocity of that decade in the Northwest, and I daresay these recordings define Goodmanson's noted production style of pulverizing drums and cascading, crash-diving, in- your-face guitars. Nevertheless, when the post-grunge boom finally hit the wall, studios felt the hit. Seattle's Steve Lawson Productions closed it's two famous analog rooms (Studios A and B) and yanked out their old custom APIs and funky '70s acoustic treatments, causing discern and anger among many, as the studio was sold and became a Pro Tools house for commercials and sound design. Other studios simply went belly up. Goodmanson sold John and Stu's and picked up freelance work, yet things were slow enough that he debated getting a day job to pay the bills.
What are some of the challenges of freelancing as opposed to working for a studio or running your own?
Freelancing and owning your own place are pretty much the same kind of deal: seat of your pants, scrappy. It's pretty rough. I could totally do with some security in my life. I never know, from week to week, how long I'm gonna be in town, when I'm gonna leave, so I can't really plan vacations. When you have time off you're all worried 'cause you're not workin.' It's hard to be away from home all the time. My dogs don't recognize me when I get home. We're probably going to have to move like in a year or so to some place either close to New York or close to L.A. so at least I'm home half the time. 'Cause there's just not enough going on here right now. When I started the studio there was so much happening here, it was perfect timing. It was right after the grunge boom so I never had to advertise for the studio or anything, it was booked solid for a number of years. At that time I could leave and Phil [Ek] [Tape Op #29] would do records down there, or Kevin Suggs. Then Phil went on the road for a couple years with Built To Spill, and all the business started declining so that was when I had to get out of it.
Do you think home studios are cutting into your work?
I don't think they're cutting into mine, but I think they're cutting into small studios for sure. I mean it's helping and hurting because people who couldn't afford to make records are going for 2 days at [a studio like] Jackpot! and then home to their Digi001 to do all their overdubs, then bring it back to the studio when they want to mix it. Which is pretty cool, there's a lot of stuff you can totally do at home, anything rap and R&B related. But live rock band stuff you still have to go to some room. You can't really do it in a practice space — it's just too hard to get it to sound good. But then the freelance thing, I think I'm kind of in a unique place. I don't know if it's a good place, but I do 60% major label engineering and major label mixing, and then also do Sleater-Kinney records and indie projects and demos in between, and it's hard to make those two worlds coexist. 'Cause those major label projects pay so much they don't understand why you would keep your schedule. Like the Sleater-Kinney record before last, suddenly everyone and their brother wanted to record at Christmas time, and Sleater-Kinney, they've got schedules and tours, and they had to talk to me months before. And when I book something that far ahead, it's gonna move. And then everyone wanted to record at once and it was this giant fucking nightmare.
So are you gonna go where the money is even if you'd rather work with Sleater-Kinney?
Sometimes you have to 'cause they were paying me enough money and I couldn't turn it down. I've got house payments to make. But this last Sleater-Kinney record I promised them I wouldn't move it, and I had to turn down 15 grand worth of work. That's a hard pill to swallow when you have house payments. Those are real life, frickin' hard decisions.
How can you avoid that?
If you play the major label game, you really can't. 'Cause they fight with each other, too. Even if they're on the same label they'll say, "No you're coming over to do this or we're getting someone else." There's always somebody who's going to snatch the gig right up if you're not there right away. That universe functions on its own logic.
So now you've decided to put a mixing room in your house?
Well everything started showing up as Pro Tools files, so I felt like I had to get Pro Tools. Not that I had to but I was always on sessions where 300 bucks a day was going to somebody else, which I could have used to pay for my own system. So I did that but it turned into being on the wrong side of the upgrade. [see letters section, July/August 2002 issue]. I just did the HD upgrade, so hopefully the internal mixer sounds better. The promise of that whole thing is that you can do everything inside the box, which, at least on the old system, you can't — unless you're mixing hip-hop and R&B. You can't mix a rock ensemble inside of Pro Tools and have it be as good as if you mixed it on a regular mixer.
You're going to hear the difference, aren't you?
Yeah, it sounds different. For hip-hop stuff it sounds great 'cause all that stuff is coming out of 16 bit samples anyway, but once you've got a dozen phase coherent microphones to deal with, things get a little funny. But the new stuff is supposed to be better so I guess I'll find out. But the idea is that since I don't have a studio anymore I want to have someplace I can do the weird stuff where I'm not charging people — funny editing or funny overdubs. Hopefully vocals, there's always leftover vocals to do.
You mentioned you're toying with the idea of getting a little mixing board or console?
Yeah like a little Soundcraft or something for the mixing so you don't have to use the software mixer as much. 'Cause that seems to be where the flatness [occurs]. But when I first got [Pro Tools] I thought, I'll mix at my house and everything's going to be great and I'll just do everything digital and it'll be super cool. And I know some guys that are doing it and I did it, and my rough [analog] mixes killed the mixes in the computer, no matter how long I spent on it. And I called up Brett Eliason, 'cause he does all the Pearl Jam stuff, and he's been mixing with the Pro Control for a really long time, and I was like, "Dude, what do you do?" He said you just have to max out all the levels, and don't pay attention to the red lights, and try to keep your faders as close to unity as possible so that the mixer isn't working so hard. And the other thing that he does is use all outboard gear, he doesn't use plug-ins really, at all.
