How did your first album come about?
Jon Auer: We made Failure in my house that I lived in while I was in high school — my father's house. My father was a musician and into recording, and I was very fortunate that he had me as a child. He dropped a lot of coin at one point, buying [at that time] some serious home recording equipment. I think it was a Tapco C-12 board, and a Tascam 80-8 with the dbx cards. He also had a friend who was somewhat of a high-end dealer, who dealt gear out of his house. This was all pre-eBay and the whole Internet thing, so you'd have to find people who had the connections to actually physically acquire this stuff.
Kind of like a drug dealer.
JA: Exactly. So, I got hooked on [recording gear] really, really young. I was twelve or thirteen when I had an 8-track studio in my house. Then meeting Ken, he and I [would] work on all sorts of things together, basically just hang out in the studio and do our thing. Eventually, we came around to the concept of doing The Posies from just being really into pop songs and wanting to make a real pop record. We just said, "Fuck it. We're going to do it ourselves." I play drums well enough and we both could play bass and guitar, so Ken and I set about making the record. We did it in a very odd way — I actually did the drums to a click track, but there were no instruments playing. I don't know why we didn't lay down a scratch track of a guitar or vocal or anything, but I literally played all of the drum parts singing the songs and the arrangements in my head. Ken would [also] be singing along in the control room and he'd hit the talkback and say, "Okay, I think the bridge is coming here." It was a really minimal set-up. The Tapco C-12 is a great, cool sounding console, honestly. The preamps maybe were noisy, but they actually sounded pretty good. Beyond that, I actually had one of the first sidecars they made that was a companion to the C-12. It was an eight-channel sidecar that you connected with this cable in the back. That became the playback side. I'd use the rest for effects and for preamps for recording. I had some small JBL speakers — I can't remember what exactly. I had a Lexicon PCM 42, a [Yamaha] Rev 7. We mostly used one compressor, which was an old Symetrix — I think a 150 or a CL-150 — a fast RMS compressor. That was really the sound of the heavily compressed vocals on that record. I also had a pair of Electro-Voice — I think they were 4500s. They were the mono spring reverbs with the long and short spring in them. That's really the sound of that record.
Awesome.
JA: The other thing about that record is that we needed more than eight tracks. So, we did the thing of mixing the instruments down to two tracks. But the way I did it, I had a cassette deck that had dbx on it — a Pioneer cassette deck. Since we needed eight tracks and we didn't have room to leave two tracks open, I actually mixed all the instruments down to this cassette deck, put [that sub-mix] back on the 8- track, and then we did six tracks of vocals for songs, then mixed it back to that cassette deck again, and that's what the CD is made from.
Oh my god.
JA: It's made from a cassette master. There were no DAT machines. We had a 2-track Revox, but it was broken. The mixing of that record was what I thought would be the most daunting task, although since I had already done sub-mixes of all the instruments, I didn't have many options left as far as that. One night I just said, "Screw it" and I stayed up from midnight until six in the morning and mixed the whole record in six hours — and that was that. I handed it to Ken and I said, "Hey, I just kind of got inspired to go ahead and do this." I think I mixed it on headphones. Then we made cassettes from that cassette and sold about eight hundred of them out of our backpacks in Bellingham and Seattle, where Ken was going to college before I moved down there. Without getting too maudlin or cliché, I really gotta put a shout out in there to my dad, because I don't think The Posies would have been born at all. Or they might have been born, but they wouldn't have had what essentially became a great demo tape for us — that became a record — that became what got us our deal with Geffen... so thanks Dad!
For Dear 23, I seem to remember Jon telling me years ago that you all had to put together the studio, basically. The studio had some gear, but you had to bring more gear in or something like that.
Ken Stringfellow: We worked with an existing studio, which at the time was called Crow Recording. It's now the same space, but not the same gear — called Jupiter Studios. We liked the space, but John Leckie said basically, "I'm gonna rent every piece of gear that I'm gonna use, and I'm not going to use anything that's here except the tape machine." And all of a sudden there was an API board brought in.
JA: Unfortunately we realized once we got it that there were no direct outputs from the preamps, post-EQ. You could only go out from the preamps and that kind of defeated the whole purpose of getting the API. We had to have a tech friend of ours go in and modify this API at great expense, and it took a lot of time.
KS: We wanted to stay in Seattle. It was a nice, comfortable environment, and that was the appeal for us. Leckie was willing to stay in Seattle — it didn't matter to him. He was away from home no matter what. When we had enough of a budget to basically bring at least half of a studio's worth of gear up from L.A., then he was happy.
What did you take away from working with John Leckie?
JA: The thing I got most from John Leckie was really his engineering. He was an amazing engineer. He was very fast and very intuitive, but also very thorough. As a producer, he was very into doing what we wanted to do and was very collaborative. It wasn't a case of where he came in and radically re-worked arrangements. I think he comes from more of a sound perspective and a vibe thing.
Then after Dear 23 came what had the working title of Eclipse — later known as Frosting on the Beater.
KS: Right, we did some sessions at Robert Lang Studios, which at the time had a fantastic API board, one of my favorite consoles that I've ever worked on. Craig Montgomery was recording it. He did a good job actually, and I'm sure Jon was helping, me probably not so much. I didn't get into really engineering on records much until about 1995. Craig I think did the bulk of it and I think he did a good job. We just weren't quite ready yet. We still needed to edit through our material, write a little bit more. We actually got some good things out of it, but we didn't end up using any of it.
For Frosting On The Beater you were working in several different studios...
KS: Only two different studios. We worked at what was then called Ironwood Studios, now Avast 2. At that time Ironwood had a Neve VR, and it's a very decent room, actually a very cool studio. It wasn't as well known as perhaps some studios in town, but I really enjoyed working there. We did half of the record there and half of it at Sear Sound in NY.
JA: We kind of blew our chance of being self-producers — the label was not into the idea of us producing ourselves. They said, "Well, it didn't work out" and we were like, "You're right, let's find a producer." We went through a list and we were really into this fellow, Don Fleming. I believe [Teenage Fanclub's] Bandwagonesque is the reason we were into him and we heard that he was a lot of fun. We thought, "Well geez, right now we could use a lot of fun." We were getting very serious and precious.
KS: Don kept things light in a way. He tried to keep our ambitions in a place where the music wouldn't come out overdone. He felt we should streamline our sound quite a bit, and figured it would make a lot more sense to make a record that was not quite so orchestrated [as Dear 23 was]. I totally agree with that kind of thinking, and I think the results are very good. He was good to work with from the psychology point of view. He was never in a bad mood. He tried to keep us from getting bogged down in making such a big deal or being intimidated by the scope of making a $250,000 record. Don was helpful in transporting us from point A to point B to completion. We did those two recording sessions. For mixing, we started to work at the smaller room at the Ocean Way Annex in L.A. We worked with John Hanlon, who to not slander him — we'll say that he was having some "extreme lifestyle changes." I think his work was good for the first couple days, and the two mixes that are on the record are excellent. Then after that he started having a bit of a meltdown, personal crisis, and was not happening. So we pretty much fired him. After all of that, we were left with a couple of things that weren't recorded or produced right or they weren't ready, a couple of songs that had potential, but they weren't quite there and then some stuff that's really great. Then in the fall [of '92], we went back and worked with Don again in Seattle at Ironwood, and finished the recording in five days. Then, we went to L.A. and worked with Dave Bianco to mix the remaining ten songs and he did an excellent job. We mixed all that at Larrabee West, which was on Santa Monica Blvd. It's not there anymore.
JA: One other thing — we tried recording a band version of "Coming Right Along" for that record and we ended up going back and using a 4-track demo that I did. We actually got to New York and tried to do it and Don was finally like, "You know, I don't think it's going to be better than the demo of this, so we have to get your 4-track out here." Luckily, it was one of the few tapes in my 4-track library that I had labeled so someone could find it. We brought it to Sear and we put it on the multitrack, took off the harmony I did and added Ken's harmony and I think a little organ note. Then, Dave Bianco mixed.
Amazing Disgrace to me seems like a sort of hodgepodge of stuff that was kind of culled together.
KS: We basically worked on this record all through the year of 1995. We did the bulk of the work at Bob Lang's place. It's a spacious control room with the effects island behind it, except now it's an SSL room. It has this large recording room with this fantastically high ceiling, and if you know how to rein that thing in, it's quite a boon for recording drums. It basically takes all the work out of recording drums for you, everything just sounds massive right up from the get go.
Well sure, absolutely. That's gotta help that you're catching a vibe off of the sound that you're then gonna add to...
KS: And it can get even bigger... between the control room and the main recording room, there's an intervening room that's basically like a concrete tube that's 20 feet high — so it's like an echo chamber, more or less. You can leave the door open [to that room] and have mics sort of near it, or you can have mics in it if you want like a six second reverb. It's pretty crazy. Then the main room itself is 20 feet high. It's got stone on one side. Nick Launay had pretty much cut his teeth at The Townhouse in London, the place where XTC did the Black Sea album, which he was an engineer on. That place has a crazy stone drum room that, if you do it right, it's really a big — aggressive in a very contemporary sound for 1980.
Like Black Sea!
KS: The thing is, he [Nick] knew how to deal with that room using all the dynamics of an SSL. That was the board that he worked on. So he said [to Bob Lang], "Wow what a great room, but what's this thing?" looking at the API. [We said] "Well that's a great sounding desk, you should really..." He's like, "There's no way I'm working on that. I work on SSL. That's what I know. That's what I like. I'm sorry, that's a deal breaker for me." We said, "You could get this gig, which is a good gig (our third record for a major label, the budget was quite large)...we're working here [at Bob Lang's], and that's a deal breaker for us"...and we won. So, he brought himself to work on "this piece of shit American thing", and guess what? Guess what Nick Launay now only works on?
API.
KS: Yeah, you got it! He learned to love the thing... and I'm telling you this particular API was really something special. I've still worked at the studio a number of times and it's still a great studio, but I kind of can't forgive him [Bob Lang]. He's like, "You've still got it for input modules." But, I don't know man — I miss that thing. A lot of the stuff we recorded was live — two guitars, bass and drums, and a lot of that was kept. Jon and I were out in the big room with a baffle between us. Then in some cases we were standing out in the big room and our amps were in the iso booths, and the drums were out with us. In a couple of significant cases they put Brian Young [the drummer] in the iso booth. We got pretty far along and we started mixing what we had. We went to Bad Animals, which at the time had an SSL room and then two API rooms. Nick was mixing on [an API] now and couldn't be happier. He did a lot of great mixes and then he sort of hit a wall. He just suddenly got stuck on one mix, and on the third day of mixing [this] one song and we were like, "Whoa buddy. Hey, you need to go home now." So we said, "Thanks for all your great work." He got us really close and did a great job. I think the recordings that he did are really interesting. There are a lot of overdubs, but there's a kind of ferociousness to everything that I really like. Some of the mixes he did are fantastic. I think "Song #1" is such a great mix. It's big and nice sounding, but still it's all kind of tough.
Did he just get tired?
KS: He lost focus and was homesick and just burnt out. We worked him pretty hard and he was just done. It was like two and a half months — that's a long time to do one thing. Then we called in Keith Cleversley. He came and he mixed "Throwaway" at Bad Animals. Then oddly enough, he had some issues with the drum sounds, which I don't remember at the time why, but he did with "Please Return It". We went to Avast, [another] API room, Keith set 'em up and Brian played to the existing tracks and re-cut the drums to like three of the songs. What's amazing is, and this definitely speaks to how good of a musician Brian Young is, he did "Please Return It" in one take.
Awesome!
KS: I don't think this stuff was recorded to clicks or anything like that either. Brian just has a really good sense of playing along with the song. I really don't know what the issue was, because we didn't do that for all the songs, and the songs that we didn't re-cut the drums on — I think they sound cool. I think then we de-camped to Stepping Stone and a couple more things got mixed, and then Keith Cleversley ran out of time. He was already booked to do something else. Then over the course of the summer of '95, I think Jon Auer mixed "Grant Hart" on his own at Bad Animals, and I think he and Adam Kasper mixed "Everybody's A Fucking Liar". I'd have to look on the credits to get more details than that.
Well, there's Steve Fisk and John Goodmanson.
KS: That's yet to come. Then towards the end of the year the label was like, "Any chance of squeezing one more, kind of single-y song out of you guys?" I had the song "Ontario", so we hooked up with Steve Fisk and went back to Bob Lang's — John Goodmanson engineered — and we cut that song. Then they mixed the song "Broken Record", which turned out really great. Finally, when they [the label] were kind of narrowing it down they said, "We'd like to have someone who's a real mixer mixer mix the two potential singles" ("Please Return It" and "Ontario"), which didn't get mixed in that (original) session anyway. So Brett Eliason, who was just kind of coming into his mixing career, happily took the gig. Right at the beginning of 1996 at Bad Animals he mixed "Ontario" and "Please Return It" and did again a really great job. So, it was quite an epic task, but almost about 80% of that was done on API — then there are a couple of SSL mixes.
JA: As far as the actual technical aspects of making that record, I think that might be our most accomplished. We really just went for it with Nick. This guy had so many cool tricks up his sleeve from working with really interesting acts over the years. It was the first time we had someone who wanted to use a distorted drum mic to mix in with the kit. He called it the "bollocks mic". He said, "Give me the crappiest equalizer you can find or one that you don't mind being destroyed in case it blows up from me abusing it." He would distort this mic with the preamp and equalizer and lo and behold, I realized that's how a lot of my favorite drum sounds on records were attained, was adding all that distortion. Obviously it's a fairly common thing [now], but back then I don't think it was as common or well known. We'd do all sorts of delay tricks — like instead of having to use a computer to time a delay, we'd actually tune it with an analog delay and then we'd punch in as we'd go along — totally old school. We had a couple of Mellotron parts that were really hyper fast and we'd just slow the tape down and learn the part incredibly slow, half speed, and painstakingly record it... all sorts of fun stuff. Where Frosting On The Beater was no frills, this was like the "Let's throw in the kitchen sink" kind of approach, and I think it really worked on some of the stuff.
