You started out as The Littlest DJ in Florida. You were seven years old.
I used to listen to a transistor radio under my pillow at night when I was about that age and younger. I got to know all the pop hits really well, but as much as the songs themselves, the sounds of the records appealed to me as a young child. I would notice the compression on drums, for example.
As a child?!
Yeah. I would notice that on all the British records and the records that were imitating [them], there was a lot of compression on the drums. Everything was pumping and I thought, wow that's really cool!
What kind of kid pays attention to the compression on a record?!
I also used to question things. When I was five or six years old, I used to wonder if, during the choruses of a song, similar sections were copied and pasted. I used to wonder how the records were made, in other words. I was obsessed with recording. Soon my parents bought me a little tape recorder — a reel-to-reel Norelco. The first thing I did was to cut off the erase head so that I could overdub. My radio obsession was going on for a few years when one Sunday, we were going to the beach. In Florida, you go to the beach a lot. They were doing a live broadcast, called Beach Party. I marched over to the DJ and said, "I wanna be a DJ." He said, "Well, you can announce the next record." I really liked announcing the record, and he seemed to enjoy it, so he let me announce the next song. Pretty soon I had a weekly gig doing Beach Party. "Live From Municipal Beach," every Sunday, I was The Littlest DJ.
What artists did you play on your radio show?
It was a top 40 station, but my favorites were some of the artists that I still like today, like Donovan. "Hurdy Gurdy Man" was one of my favorite records in '68. Cream. Of course, I liked anything by the Beatles. There was a west coast band called the Beau Brummels. I liked pop hits and I looked at who produced those records. Micky Most was a big producer in England at the time. Soon, I noticed the T. Rex records, and I would see Tony Visconti's name. I was very pleased to see that his name was Italian. I loved and still love the sound of T. Rex records. In a way, Tony was updating the Beatles' sound, and he carried on the tradition of the well-constructed pop tune with well-constructed production and well- constructed arrangements. The sound of the music has always been as important to me as the writing of the song itself. There was something about the sound of particular records, which really appealed to me as a child. . .
The first band you produced was your own in Florida, called The Snails, which you have described as "proto New Wave." How old were you?
Late teens. We were a guitar band, a sort of power trio.
Did you ever record anything with The Snails?
We recorded a lot. The whole idea of Snails was to give me an excuse to get into the recording studio. We used to book into a studio called Rec-Nac in Tampa. All they had for recording equipment was a primitive mixer and two Teac 1/4" 4-tracks. We'd mix to the other machine and then bounce back and forth. I learned a lot about recording there. The sounds we got were pretty good, considering. Songs with titles like "Shopping Mall Queen", "Poodle Party", "Turn Your House into a Donut Shop". In the studio, we used a Fender Rhodes with heavy distortion, played through a big Marshall stack to create a wall of sound. The Snails had a bit of the early Ramones' punk energy, and there was a humorous aspect to the music that we did. This was my time to learn how to get the sounds that I wanted.
You moved to New York City with the intention of going to NYU Film School to study film music. You wound up meeting the guys who would become The Bongos.
I started going to CBGB's and all the clubs, and soon met a lot of musicians. I met the guys who would become The Bongos on that scene. We were at a B52s show when we decided to start a band. I said, "What should we call the band?" Our drummer said, "The Bongos," because Cindy of the B52s was sitting on the floor at CBGB's that evening, playing bongos. We got signed fairly fast. I sort of forgot about film school. The Bongos signed to a British label called Fetish Records, and soon we were recording and touring.
How did that happen?
We were playing a show at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey. Rod Pierce, who was also very young — he was like 21 himself and starting this label in London — happened to see us and really liked what we were doing, so he signed us. Our first recording was done here in the states at Mix-o-lydian Studios in New Jersey. "Glow in the Dark" / "Telephoto Lens." The concept was to only make singles. The single is a certain style of writing. When I was The Littlest DJ, listening to those pop sounds of the late '60s, I fell in love with the "compression" of a pop single. When I speak about singles, I don't just mean "compression" as we would talk about it technically — as processing tool or effect. I mean the compression of a song into a three-minute statement. Our songs were small and concise, often exactly two minutes long. We never intended to make an album. It was just, keep cranking out these 7" and 12" vinyl singles. In America we got signed to a label called PVC Records. They wanted a full album. We finally agreed to compile all the singles, and that was Drums Along the Hudson. We got signed to RCA Records because of the success of Drums Along the Hudson. Once we put out that album, I felt that we had accomplished that goal — so the next project we did was entirely different. The Bongos evolved.
At this point, other bands began to approach Richard Barone as a producer.
I was especially open to that from the beginning. The first outside productions I did at this time were for Coyote Records, a Hoboken label. Steve Almaas, formerly of the Suicide Commandos, had been playing with The Bongos as an auxiliary member for a bit and when he wanted to do an EP, he asked me to produce it. He called it Beat Rodeo, and it was the blueprint for his new band of the same name. The EP was a sort of stylized take on rockabilly. We went down to North Carolina to do that, with Mitch Easter [Tape Op #21] as engineer and drummer.
Of early REM fame.
Yes. Mitch was soon to produce REM. In fact, I think he may have already produced their first single and given it to me when we did this record. With Beat Rodeo, we really tried to capture a sound with the analog gear that we had, including an old Echoplex. We used a lot of different kinds of tape delay devices, including one bizarre unit that Mitch had picked up a church sale. We also experimented with making gigantic tape loops, one surrounding the entire control room. We used a loop as the main drums on a couple of songs. It was an interesting way to have an old rockabilly thing going on, but at the same time do something new. We came up with some really nice sounds — enough so that it got Steve signed to IRS to do his next record. The Phosphenes, another group I produced at the time, was a big wall of sound. It was pre-grunge, but it had a grunge element to it with washes of guitar. Then I made a record with one of the future Bongos — James Mastro. We went back down to North Carolina and recorded a record called Nuts and Bolts, just the two of us. It was also done at Mitch Easter's studio, which was actually his parents' garage — Drive-In Studios. He had a 3M 16-track machine and a good console. We made a very nice record — sort of sweetly primitive. Nuts and Bolts was an appropriate name for that. It was all about, "Hey, guys — let's build a record!" We experimented with drum sounds, particularly using room mics and gating things as far as we could. I remember recording the guitar amp in a place where Mitch kept his dog food cans, so that the cans would rattle a certain way when the guitar amp was loud. We played around with the sounds, and we played around with the fact that we were recording in a garage. I'm still very pleased with that one.
Getting back to The Bongos and Drums Along the Hudson, "Mambo Sun", a T. Rex cover, was your first Billboard charting 12" single. This did two things for you: It got you on the charts, and Tony Visconti called.
Tony heard our version of "Mambo Sun" and got in touch with us to tell us that he really liked it. Immediately I told him that we wanted him to produce our next record. We were just getting signed to RCA, though, and they wanted us to record in New York — even though we had recently gotten back from London and had done well there. At first they wanted us to use their studios on 6th Avenue and 44th Street, where we had made a great demo for them. Tony's studio was in London at the time [Good Earth Studios], so it wasn't to be. I guess it wasn't time for me to work with Tony just yet. In a way, it was a blessing because we got to work with Richard Gottehrer, whom I also admire. We loved him and he was perfect for the early Bongos stuff — he had a great history, having written songs like "I Want Candy" and "My Boyfriend's Back", and had performed in the '60s with his own band, The Strangeloves. Plus he'd had recent successes with The Go-Go's, who were in a similar pop vein to The Bongos. We recorded Numbers with Wings exactly the way we wanted to, with Gottehrer producing. It was an EP, which is another way of working. In this case, we had the exact opposite of the singles mentality. We were making a record where there were two songs on one side and three on the other. The EP — or as RCA called it, the "mini-LP" — was a marketing experiment for the label. It gave us a chance to make a great-sounding record, because when you cut vinyl with so few songs, you can have wider grooves and get much more bass on it! So, there was also expansion sound-wise. The engineer, John Jansen, had some really great drum recording techniques. We recorded at Skyline Studios. There are minimal effects on the drums. It's all mic placement and the building of a 12 foot-long tunnel in front of the bass drum — mic'ed close, of course, and then at the very end of the tunnel. We also put the drums in the precipice of a doorway, right under the frame, facing into the studio. I'll never forget that — because I thought it was the most awkward situation, to have to squeeze by the drums to get into the room each time we wanted to do a take. But the result of positioning the drums in that doorway was incredible.
Let's talk for a moment about the sounds that you have gravitated towards in your productions, beginning with The Bongos.
One of the reasons The Bongos designed our live shows the way that we did and had to add a fourth member was because in my head, I always heard my electric guitar with a certain amount of distortion, doubled by an acoustic guitar as the clear delineator of the chords. The drums were sort of like Donna Summer meets Buddy Holly. The bass drum was always to be like a dance record, but then the top, the guitar strumming, was always like Buddy Holly, like early rock and roll — not particularly heavy, but really groovin'. The kind of distortion I had on my amp [a 1966 Fender Deluxe] — just a bit of it — gave more body to the guitar. It wasn't really there to make it heavy or nasty. I thought of the mix as shaped like a pyramid, with the vocal on top, the guitars, and then the drums very fat at the bottom, heavy on the tom toms. I also like hearing the ambient room sound of the studio that I'm in. I got that from listening to Tony Visconti's productions, especially the T. Rex album, Slider. I'm always looking for some reflective corner in which to place a room mic. Digital recording eats up a lot of the ambience — Bob Ludwig [Tape Op #105] taught me that. There's no air. It just becomes the signal and you don't really get any space. Even though we were still analog on The Bongos' records, we always made a point to have mics around the room. Recording digitally it's even more important. In the '70s there was, of course, the trend of very dead recordings. One thing I like about that is the control you can have on the drum sound in that setting. It's nice sometimes on certain kinds of records, like the Johnny Rodgers record that I produced this year. On his album, I put the drums in a booth, because you can really hear the skins — especially if the drummer uses calfskins, which I often like them to do. I'm really into drum tuning. The first time I worked with a drummer who knew how to do that was J.D. Daugherty, who is the drummer for the Patti Smith Group. He played on one of my solo albums, Primal Dream. He was so meticulous with the drum tuning, you could actually hear the notes of the drums. Ever since then, when someone doesn't tune their drums properly, it really sticks out to me in an annoying way. Tuning the drums to the track, to the song — to the bass especially — gives it a finished production sound. So often I hear records and the drums are just so out of tune — it's funny that people don't realize it. It sounds like a racket. If that's what you're going for, great, but if you're doing a melodic song, the drums have to be in tune.
You liked engineer John Jansen on Numbers with Wings so much that you hired him as producer for The Bongos' next album, Beat Hotel. Tell me a little bit about the rather extravagant production for that album.
