How did you hook with these high profile players right off coming from New York?
At the time I'm only 16 years old. Most people are still in high school and I'm already out of the womb. I ended up down in Santa Cruz, a great beach and surf town, which was the home of the road crew of the Doobie Brothers, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne. We had this whole team of roadies down there called the Rock 'n' Roll Mercenaries that I immediately hooked up with. They brought me to a rehearsal studio called the Alley in L.A., which turned out to be really fortuitous thing. It still exists. It's been like my second home. I've always believed if you keep your eyes open, it's not only all about lucky breaks — it's about doors that open. You have to see them open and go through them.
Right place at the right time?
Well, it seems that when you're open for the right people to be in your life, if your eyes are open and you're present to that, then you probably will see them, whoever they are. And if you're not, then you're probably going to miss them. [laughs] So I connected up with this whole family of music. Coincidentally, my brother is an artist, so I had the whole art crowd — including the guy, Neon Park, who did the covers for Little Feat. I just gravitated towards them — just like minds.
So the Alley became home?
Right. It's still vital. The [Red Hot] Chili Peppers are in there doing pre-production right now. Before them, System of a Down. But in the mid-to-late '70s, you'd have Little Feat, Poco, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Mick Fleetwood, Billy Burnett, punk bands. At any point in time they'd be in there rehearsing. I was just like, "Who needs me to work for you?" That was my attitude. So I went to work.
What kinds of work were you doing?
I tuned guitars, set up drums, drove around L.A. and went on the road. The punch line of it all is that I befriended people that, to this day, are crucial to my career- most of all, David Lindley, who was Jackson Browne's guitar and slide player. He's a wailing slide guitar player and multi-instrumentalist. David started a band named El Rayo-X that did this white hybrid reggae music, and made a record that's an underground favorite. They had a hit named "Mercury Blues". I was in the studio with him while he was making his record and found myself running the tape machine at one point. That was the entry into, "Hey, this is what I want to be doing!"
Were you still doing road gigs?
Well, one of the things I learned really early on is that the concept of service, serving the moment, and being aware of what's needed, is crucial. And that's what has always been in the forefront of what I do. It's okay to serve people. There's nothing demeaning about being a roadie if you're a great roadie, or a great tech, or a great engineer; maybe it's not important to be the producer. Maybe on a monetary level, if you don't feel like you're paid enough, that's another conversation. But strictly from a separating-yourself- from-the-credit-and-money sort of thing, it's really pretty cool to travel around, work for great musicians, do a great job making sure there's cables and batteries, guitars are in tune, and then stand on the side of the stage. You've served them so they can play a great show, so all they have to do is play [laughs] and all you have to do is listen to great music.
That's not too rough of a life. [laughs]
Not at all. So when it comes to engineering, for me it was a natural progression — it was the next level of serving musicians. I get to be closer to the process. I get to be part of that thing where, when I was a kid, I would pore over the credits on records. I saw that early on, but the closest I would get is to sit in front of the board when someone took a smoke break, but I'd be like, "You don't have to come back..." [laughs]
You had the musical background, the connections, and the great attitude. From an engineering perspective, did you ever go through any formal training?
Besides the road, I did live sound for a club in Santa Cruz called the Catalyst. I got to set up the sound system there — it was such a rocking club back then. At that time, I took some electronics courses, circuit board layout and design, and some applied math and physics at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz for a short period of time in the late seventies. I had thought about getting an Electronics Engineering degree if what I was doing [in music] didn't pan out. I was also taking some deep music theory classes, too, but it's all stuff I ended up learning to forget.
You've worked with a lot of classic artists, like John Fogerty, Melissa Etheridge, Roger Waters, Fleetwood Mac. What do you think makes you so accessible to these artists such that they seek you out? Is it a reputation from the 'service' attitude?
Yeah, I think it is. I know that, for example, with Melissa, she was working with another producer who I work with a lot, and he brought me in to engineer one track with her. I guess the experience stood out to her, because I end up getting an email from her manager months later saying, "Aren't you that guy that Melissa worked with on that one track? She wants to talk to you." She could barely even remember my name, but she remembered the experience of whatever I did and she said, "Track this guy down." I guess in some ways I'm like the 'musician's guy.' For instance, Kenny Aronoff, one of the greatest drummers in the world, is one of my greatest supporters. I should be sending him royalty checks or something. [laughs] Musicians seem to say, "Oh, get Ross because he takes care of me." That's great, because it's what I try to do. I want to make sure they're happy, because that's where the best music comes from. With Melissa, all she wanted to do was go in the studio, have some fun, and make some music, whether the label liked it or not. Now, she can do that, she's Melissa Etheridge — but we went in and made a bunch of music that made her happy. [laughs] It was great.
How do you walk into a new session?
It's always different, but it's always the same. I have to be myself. I don't want to present a persona on a first meeting that is radically different on a second, third, or fourth interaction. So it's really crucial to me that when I meet with a band or an artist, even if there's no real commitment to working together, that they get who they're going to be working with. This, instead of something like a date, where maybe the next day you realize you're with a psycho or something. [laughs] Sometimes, that's me saying I may not want to work with them, like a band that brings me a bunch of demos I don't even know what to do with. There's a side of me, and a side of making records, where you really have to be passionate about what you're doing or you can't really be making great records.
I know you won a Grammy at one point...
That record one is one of my favorites. That was with an artist named Keb' Mo'.
That was Slow Down, right?
Right. For me, artists that really have it in their nature to want to make a difference. I know this sounds awfully airy-fairy — call it karma, whatever — but music really has the ability to touch and change a lot of people's lives, either on a daily basis or in the bigger picture. On a smaller, not-so-significant scale, there are a lot of artists that just believe in what they're doing. Keb' Mo' is like that. And at that point, I just needed a record like that. I'd just lost my father, and I needed to be around people who just loved what they were doing.
You also did Motley Crüe's Girls, Girls, Girls...
[laughs] Yeah. That was an interesting time in my career. I had been off the road for a few years and I ended up working on all these seminal records at Rumbo Recorders in the valley, like Ratt's "Round and Round". Of course, we didn't know they were seminal at the time. Here's how it tied together: My favorite record that I did at that time was R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pageant. R.E.M. was produced with Don Gehman, who introduced me to Rumbo Recorders Studio in L.A., which was the San Fernando Valley home of metal in the '80s. This is where Guns N' Roses Appetite For Destruction was recorded. At Rumbo, I got to do Ratt, Dio, and Motley Crüe. In fact, Rumbo's Studio B turned out to be the design for John Mellencamp's Belmont Mall Studio we built for Scarecrow in Indiana, where Don Gehman and I recorded R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pageant. So I came back from Indiana, then right into the studio with Motley Crüe.
That's a change.
