So this house started with Fred Drake?
It started with Fred. He moved out here in '91 or '92. He was here with some friends and saw a sign that said, "Three houses for rent." He came up, looked and he said, "I'll take it" and moved out of L.A. At the time he didn't even have a car, all he had was a cooler. Every morning he would walk to get ice from the store. Finally he got a truck. It wasn't that long, but when he first moved out here it was pretty hardcore.
What was he doing before that?
He was an engineer. That's how I ended up meeting him. A friend of ours — Dean Chamberlain who plays in the band Code Blue and was in The Motels for a time — had a studio and Fred was the engineer. Dean and I played in bands together, so that's how I ended up recording with Fred. It was kind of funny because Fred was like, "I want to move to the desert and start a studio." So, he moved out without anything and in a couple of months he got a call from a friend of his, a singer named Hugh Harris. Hugh had a 24-track Tascam and a board of some sort that he sold to Fred. So within a couple months Fred had a studio. Within another month Dean was shutting down his studio. I was living in New Orleans and I actually had a restaurant out there — I had given up the music business. I said, "Fuck this. I hate L.A." and I moved to New Orleans. I get a call from Fred in early '93 saying, "Dean is selling his gear and he wants to know if we want to buy it" which I thought was interesting since I was living in New Orleans and he's living out here. He was like, "It's just six thousand dollars for the board, the tape machine, a bunch a mics" — not good mic's but 57s and 58s — "and some cables and everything we need" — speakers and stuff. I said, "Yeah, sure. Let's do it." He said, "All we have to do is give him a thousand dollars down and make one hundred dollar a month payments." His wife at the time just wanted him to get out of the business and it wasn't really about the money. I sent Dean my three grand and I said [to Fred], "Okay. You take care of doing the payments for your half." So we had a studio and I was still in New Orleans. Daniel Lanois [Tape Op #37] had taught a woman named Trina Shoemaker to record. She did Victoria Williams' Musings of a Creekdipper record here and she engineered The Queens of the Stone Age's Rated R. She ended up working for Daniel Lanois, and now he was looking for a location. At the time he was in Baja [California, Mexico] and he had a giant mess tent set up with all this gear. His engineer, Mark Howard, showed up at the door here one day — no call or anything — and knocked on the door. Fred opened it and he said, "I'm Mark Howard. I work for Daniel Lanois. Trina said that Dan would probably like to record here and I just wanted to check it out." Daniel Lanois — Fred's favorite producer in the world! Mark walked in and [clapped] and was like, "This will work fine. Dan will call you." Fred gets a call from Dan and he said, "This is what I've got: I've got a vintage Neve console." He had [Fender] Strats that felt like you were playing barbed wire — like '58 Strats that felt like they had the original strings. He had Eno's keyboards, like [Yamaha] DX7s. We were like, "Oh my God, it's Eno's keyboard!"
The broken DX7?
It's a broken DX7! His deal was, "Here's what I'm going to do. I'll leave all my gear here for at least six months. I'll probably record two or three weeks in that six months and when I have a week I'll come out."
This is long before he did the Teatro Studio in Oxnard, California?
Yeah, before. He went from here to San Francisco for a short time. Then he did Teatro. It was wild. Fred was working with Dan. It was really weird because Fred got pretty ill and he had a roller IV [intravenous therapy] so he was helping Dan Lanois engineer while he was walking [the IV] around. I mean, Fred was a tough motherfucker.
I guess so.
It was the best thing ever for him.
It was like a dream come true.
It's ridiculous, right? I love Dan's productions. Especially in the early '90s — they really have their own sound. They still do, but especially at that point, it was so completely out there. Fred's stuff, if you listen to some of his stuff — especially considering Fred did it on a Soundcraft board with a 16-track 1/2" Tascam — he was really good.
What did Lanois work on at Rancho?
He did a record called Trip. I think it was soundtrack stuff that he was working on. [It was a promo-only compilation of soundtrack pieces. -LC] It was just trippy experimental stuff that he did. He loved it out here.
What fell into place for you to start doing things here?
Right around that time my restaurant caught on fire and I lost it. After a few months of living in New Orleans, people were starting to call me to do work for them. My best friend Hutch [QOTSA's live sound engineer] who lives next door — we were talking and he said, "I'm going to Europe with this band, Kyuss" — which were friends of mine through Chris [Goss]. I was like, "Fuck. I need a job. I've never been to Europe. I'll guitar tech." They said, "Yeah, that sounds great." I went to Europe with them and while we were over there [I told them] I'd just started this studio up in Joshua Tree, so they came up here to do some recording.
That was their final record?
It was an EP [Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age] that they did. They came out here and then came back to finish up and it was the last stuff they recorded.
Was it really three days on mushrooms?
Yeah, it was three days on mushrooms — horse farts and everything. Lizards and horse farts. Fred had this horse called Kashmir that was a stallion. It was a great horse but it was a motherfucker. It was hilarious — while they were trippin' Fred decided to ride the horse into the house. It was pretty out there.
That was Fred engineering alone for this?
A guy named Billy Bizeau was helping him. You can imagine it was pretty crazy. I love that stuff — I think it sounds great. At the time it was on a Soundcraft board with a 1/2" deck. It still has a great sound, but it wasn't the Lanois Neve with the 2" machine. We did a little bit of stuff. We did some earthlings? recordings on his gear and a band called Wool. The singer for the earthlings?, Pete Stahl — that was his band.
At that point were you living out here full time?
Yeah. Hutch and I moved into the house next door in June of '99.
