How long have you been doing this?
Twenty-five years. I graduated from college 25 years ago.
And how did you get into it? Did it start out as a hobby?
I started taping Dead shows in college and that was huge. In my college they had a deal where you could get into any concert for free if you would haul around gear and help out. You wouldn't get paid but you got to see all of these great shows for free. I worked at the radio station at school, too. I graduated from college with a degree in American Studies from Notre Dame. So at the end of college everyone was interviewing with companies and I didn't do any of that shit. I got home from school and did a year at Columbia College and took some recording, broadcasting and TV classes. After the second day I knew that I wanted to be a recording engineer. Then I had a job editing tapes from medical conventions. I had to go through and edit out all of the pops and clicks and "aaahhs" and bad jokes. From there I got a job at a cassette duplicator and they had a little studio there. They would prepare tapes for duplication. They would do some voice recording, training tapes and stuff like that. The whole time I was there was at the start of the whole punk thing. I graduated college in spring of 1977 and that's when punk hit Chicago. The week I got home from college there was a gay club on Halsted called La Mere Vipere and they had punk night on Sundays. The week I got home they switched over to punk seven days a week. I jumped right into that scene. I got out of the Dead thing and was going to all of the shows and hanging out. This friend of mine that I had met named "Bootleg" Bob, who was this famous collector of bootlegs — he didn't make them, just collected them — called me up and asked if I was going to see Devo at this place called Beginnings in Schaumberg. It was owned by one of the guys in the band Chicago and they had cool early punk shows there. They had The Ramones, Devo and all of these cool bands. So Bob asked if I was going to see Devo and if I could give a friend of his a ride. His name was Terry Nelson and he had a radio show on WZRD, which is Northeastern Illinois University's radio station. It was called The Sunday Morning Nightmare and he played punk rock. He started that in 1976 and I think he's the first guy to start what we know now as "college radio". One thing led to another and when punk bands came to Chicago he knew them all because he had traveled all over England and was just one of these guys that knew everybody and was in the scene. So these bands would come to the station after the shows late at night and get drunk and tape interviews and be obnoxious. Then some of them said, "Why don't you tape our show?" So he said to me, "Hey, you're a recording guy," and I started helping him tape these punk shows. So from, like, 1978 to 1981 we recorded every punk band that came to town: Buzzcocks, Gang of Four, Cramps, The Only Ones, Nick Cash and 999... just tons of bands.
Where did you do most of this?
P-Tuts, which used to be called The Quiet Night and was at Belmont and Sheffield. That was a great place. Schubas, which back then was called Gaspar's. We recorded Squeeze there. Their record Cool For Cats was number one at the time in England. They weren't punk, but were part of the scene. Their record is number one in England and they're here at Schuba's for only 200 people. We just had this little 4-track and cobbled together all of this gear. We'd borrow gear, kind of stole gear, brought it back. So I did this for a few years with him and then my friend Bob called me up and said the guy that does concerts for WXRT (he had a show called "The Sunday Night Un-Concert" because it was sponsored by 7-Up the "Un-cola") was looking for someone to tape the shows because the guy who had been doing it had a disagreement with the station and wasn't working for them anymore. So Bob told me to call them. I did and I got interviewed and they asked if I could do it and I told them about the Sunday Morning Nightmare and they knew about that and said they wanted to try me out with Rockpile, who was opening up for Blondie at the Park West. They asked if I had the gear and I lied and said, "Sure I have the gear," and borrowed it and did the show and did a little mix at the studio I was working at. So I got the gig. The same week I got that, I was at the cassette duplicator and heard about this job at a real studio in Des Plaines called Sound Impressions and also got that gig. That was a great week. So I worked during the day doing voiceovers, some music and a lot of industrials. Then at night and on the weekends I was still recording the punk shows for Terry but also doing shows for 'XRT. When you're young and stupid you can work 24 hours a day. I could never do that now. Then I bought some gear and would schlep it around in the trunk of my car and set up in a bathroom or a closet and I realized that was too much work. I read in some hi-fi magazine about this recording truck and it hit me like a ton of bricks. A truck! Duh! I realized that no one in Chicago had a truck and this was the second or third largest market in the United States, so I thought I [had] better get a truck out there quick. I bought this 1969 International Harvester van, which looks like a smaller version of a UPS truck, from this friend of mine's company and we rebuilt the inside. It was ugly as hell. We painted it green. I wanted a dark green, but it came out like bright acid green, like Linda Blair vomit- green, so it became known as The Vomit Comet — mostly because if you drove it too long you'd feel sick and want to throw up. I had a 4-track Tascam and three 8-channel Tascam boards, so we could patch together 24 channels for the 4-track. Then I got a Neotek 24- channel console, an 8-track recorder, then a bigger console, then a 1" Tascam 16-track. We got a new truck in '83 that we built, a real truck with a real console in there and the 16-track and then once I got a 2" 24-track, I quit the studio, where by that time I was chief engineer. I was much more experienced. So then I went full-time with the truck in '84 or '85. Then in '88 I got another 24- track, so I had two. We built this new truck in '97 and '98, and that's where we are now.
So you're running two trucks now.
Yeah, we took all the gear out of the other truck in '97 and '98 and placed it in this truck, so the other truck was empty. Meanwhile, I had built this porta rig, this flight case system, that was built around a little 8- bus Soundtracks Topaz desk and a stack of DA-88s and we stuck that stuff in the old truck just to do more gigs. The weekends are really popular for live recording and I was turning down gigs on Saturdays. So I got a friend involved and one thing led to another and now we've recently rebuilt that other truck so it's nice and we can use it. The reason I had to get a new truck was that the chassis on the old truck was shot and it was too small. At one point we took the box from the old truck and put it on a newer chassis. This truck is called M-48 because it's 48 tracks and the other truck has 48 tracks but we call it M-40. M-48 is a little more extensive. As you can see, we have quite a bit of outboard gear and the other truck has a little less, but is still very powerful.
And now you're recording to DA-78s?
Right. In this truck I have two 48-track stacks of DA- 78s. We'll frequently double record at 24 bit because I don't want any dropouts, so I have a simultaneous safety copy. The other truck is an 88 and five 38s.
Do you run a backup at the same time for that, too?
We can. A lot of times that truck will be a 24-track gig so we just double record on that 48-track rig, but I have other tape machines floating around that we can patch in there. We still have a porta rig, which is 48 channels of PreSonus Digimax LT mic pres, and go straight to the tape machines and then monitor with a Behringer 3216 desk. Just to monitor and do rough mixes on.
Are you doing a 2-track safety as well?
