Flashback: It's the summer of 1986 and one of the omnipresent radio staples of the season is a bouncy little new wave number about nuclear holocaust. Timbuk 3's "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" was the feel-good downer of the summer. It was produced by a studio-guitarist-turned-producer from Mississippi named Dennis Herring. Fast forward to the summer of 2004: One of the most heard numbers blasting from radios is "Float On" by Modest Mouse, a bouncy little new wave number about life and death, another feel- good downer produced by Dennis Herring. In the last 20 years, Herring has come full circle — both musically and geographically.
Growing up in Saltillo, a tiny town just north of Elvis Presley's birthplace of Tupelo, Herring headed west upon graduation to make his way in the music business. "I moved to L.A. when I got out of high school to be a studio musician, and it worked," says Herring, now in his mid-40s. "I did that for about six years, I guess. I burned out and started playing around, recording things in my basement. And I ended up being a producer." These days, Herring is back in north Mississippi, settled into Oxford, a college town best known as the birthplace of author William Faulkner. There, he operates Sweet Tea Recording, which has played host to a wide range of artists that encompasses Modest Mouse, Buddy Guy, Elvis Costello, Jars of Clay, Garrison Starr, the Crimea, and Jimbo Mathus.
Initially reticent to leave Los Angeles, a stint in the Northwest convinced Herring that many artists might be willing to go elsewhere to record. "I went to Seattle and helped a friend of mine start a record label," Herring said. "I was afraid that, by being out of L.A., I wouldn't get producing work anymore. But I started calling these people, saying, "Would you mind coming to Seattle to work?" And people were more excited to go somewhere else to work than to come to L.A. and work. "That's what really started to open my eyes to the idea that I could live wherever I wanted to."
It was also about that time that Herring realized that he missed the land he couldn't wait to leave when he was younger. "I'd find myself thinking about how the South kind of has this thing, and how people all over the world long to have a thing," he said. "And the South actually has one, and I missed that. I missed it a lot in musical terms. I missed being more deep inside a thing." In time, Herring got serious about relocating and began searching for the proper place. "I'd been thinking about moving to a smaller town, but still with a high quality of life," he said. "So I went and stayed in some different places, sussing them out. I stayed in Austin. I went to Athens, I went to Chapel Hill, just wandering." Oxford was also on his list. Just before going there, Herring received a demo from a label of a band that consisted of mainstays Neilson Hubbard and Clay Jones (called Spoon at the time, they eventually changed their name to This Living Hand in deference to the Texas band with the same name). Not knowing the band's origins, Herring expressed an interest in working with them. "So I called the label and told them, 'Hey, I really love this thing.' And they said, 'Yeah, it's these two guys in Oxford, Mississippi. One guy does all the music and stuff, and the other guy's the singer.' So I go, 'Hmm, that music guy's pretty good,'" Herring said, referring to Jones, who today works with Herring at Sweet Tea and is a burgeoning producer in his own right.
That prescient visit to Herring's homeland yielded one moment that sold him on his ultimate destination. On his last day in town, Herring had breakfast at Smitty's, a local institution on the Square then operated by an elderly matron, Ms. Louise, who was working the cash register on this particular morning. Herring's dad, who'd driven over from Saltillo, struck up a conversation with Ms. Louise, pointing out that his son was considering a move to Oxford. As a bit of parting advice, she told the Herrings, "I can tell you something about Oxford: We don't suffer fools, but we tolerate our eccentrics." "
That pretty much sealed it for me," Herring said. Not long after Herring settled in Oxford, Geffen Records approached him about producing Garrison Starr's debut album with the caveat that there was already a producer on board, so he'd have to share credit with that producer, who wound up being Jones. That project paved the way for Herring and Jones' other collaborations. While Jones is beginning to get notice as a producer for his work with Starr, Hubbard, Trent Dabbs and Tywana Jo Baskette, his role at Sweet Tea is a good deal more flexible.
"My role has evolved to kind of an all-purpose floater," Jones said. "In recent times, I've been doing a lot of engineering and stuff like that, and I've ended up doing a lot of Pro Tools, kind of becoming the person who can sit around and do the Pro Tools stuff that needs to be done."
According to Herring, "On the second Buddy Guy record we did, Clay was the photographer. They did a cover based on one of his photos, and he was hired as the photographer for the project. And on the Elvis Costello record we just finished, Clay and Chris [Sheppard] and I mixed the record. Clay had as much of a role as Chris or I."
Located a stone's throw from downtown Oxford, Sweet Tea's building consists of two main rooms. While they are ostensibly considered "tracking" and "control" rooms, both are used extensively for recording. The control room is huge, with bookshelves and a bar that runs down the middle of the space, separating the Neve console and considerable stacks of outboard gear (much of it built by local gear whiz Frank Lacy) from the "opium pit," a comfortable sitting area furnished with vintage furniture. A drum kit surrounded by makeshift baffles constructed from antique doors belies the multipurpose nature of the space. The tracking room is only slightly smaller, with the same tall ceilings and retro decorating as the room on the other side of the glass.
According to Herring, his facility is an ever- evolving work in progress. "When I was a studio musician in L.A., I worked for a lot of 'real producers' and 'real engineers' in 'real studios.' People started coming to me, wanting me to produce things when I was in my early 20s, so I went to some of the studios I was working in and asked them what it would take for me to come in at two in the morning to work on something. And usually, people would just give me free time, and sometimes engineers would volunteer themselves."
"The thing I found, working in studios like that, was that I could never quite get comfortable, coming from a producing point of view," Herring continued. "I couldn't really get things to sound the way I thought they wanted to sound, and I didn't really know how to do it myself. There's that pressure that, 'We've gotta be out of here by five in the morning, or so-and-so's coming in at noon, so we've gotta leave.'"
One project Herring worked on eventually landed a major label deal. When the corporate giant decided against hiring the upstart to produce the project, they paid Herring off for his previous work. "I took that money and bought a bunch of recording stuff and put it in the basement of my house, and that always just worked better for me," he recalled. "This was in the early '80s when people really didn't have home studios so much, but to me that just seemed more like the way you'd do it."
It didn't take long for that basement setup to produce results, and soon a recording Herring produced for Timbuk 3 ended up on the desk of IRS Records president Miles Copeland. "Well, the next thing you know, I do this record for IRS, and it had a hit on it," Herring said. "I'd done all this on my little Fostex 8-track down in my basement. So I was thinking, 'Golly, I better figure this out, because now I'm going to have to do other records, and I can't just sit here and do them on a Fostex 8-track.'"
When he moved to Oxford, Herring planned to set up a studio that was geared toward overdubbing. "If you knew what you were doing, you could say we need two weeks or ten days or whatever to track a record, and you could usually do that. It's sort of the same thing for mixing a record," he explained. "But this whole thing of overdubbing is more amorphous. Sometimes they'd take a week; sometimes they'd take six months. And it should be that way if it wants to. I like it when it can stretch out when it wants to or you can tighten it up if you want to."
Starting with a 2" Ampex tape machine, a few mics and a "shitty" console, Herring went to work. "You could always cut tracks anywhere, you could always mix anywhere, but you could bring the tapes to my studio and play," he said. "That would be the workshop. You could just sit with a singer and really figure out how to do a song. I wanted to work with bands that I thought were really cool, but they usually didn't have any budget. But this was a way they could make records that were just as good as the major label records, because you could have more time. And I could do that by underwriting the costs of overdubs a lot."
In time, though, Herring realized he needed to be able to do entire projects on site. The purchase of his Neve console was, as he calls it, "the missing piece of the puzzle."
Although Herring has continued to travel when necessary (Virginia to work with Cracker or to California to work with Counting Crows, for example), the vast majority of his work now takes place at Sweet Tea. It's an excellent workplace, put together to suit Herring's unique tastes. "This doesn't have to be a studio that caters to everybody," Herring said. "You don't have to convince 50 different producers to bring their projects here. As long as I can get it to kind of work and we can do the kind of records we want to make and we can do our best... If something seems like a hindrance, we try to spend some money and fix it."
Herring's long experience in various studios contributed to his vision for his own space,. "I've never really liked real treated rooms, like these real official recording studio spaces," he explained. "It's like when you really have fun listening to music, where are you? You're usually in your living room, or you're in your car, or in some club. Those are the places where music really sounds good and the idea of music sounding better than that somewhere only for 90 percent of people to hear it in their boat or in the bathtub. That never really made a lot of sense to me.
"I'd also done a record at Kingsway in New Orleans, Daniel Lanois' studio. He was going on the road, and he was kinda inviting people to come down and do records, so I came down and did an Innocence Mission record there. That was really eye-opening, because there was no tracking room or control room. If you didn't sit right up next to the near-field monitors, it just sounded crazy. If you sat three feet back, it sounded like there was reverb on everything. At first, you were going, 'How do you make records like this?' But within a week I was like, 'Yeah, this is how you should make records.' This is just more environmental."
