What inspired BarFunGul?
That was easy. At the time I was recording a lot of bands from Europe and at the end of their sessions back home bands would typically go out for a pint. So they were always looking for a place to drink. In Millbrook nothing's open past ten at night. So the bands would have to drive over to Poughkeepsie to find a bar, and then they'd end up getting arrested for drunk driving on their way back to the studio. They'd be driving on the wrong side of the road and shit — being from Europe, England or wherever. I got tired of having to call the record company and explain to them that I needed ten grand more so I could bail their band out of jail. I built the bar so the bands would have a safe place to drink. I think it was inevitable; my first studio was called The Brewery. [laughs] But some guys see this and they get the wrong impression. They walk in here and think, "Great we're gonna drink all day and record" and I have to tell them that the bar is only open at the end of the day. Once we've wrapped up the session for the day, everybody is welcome to drink. It's also quite an incentive to get work done.
So how did you come up with the name for the bar?
About six months after I started the bar, I had the first gathering of what would become the Beer Club For Men. It happens about every three months usually on the first Monday night. My friend Eddie Kramer was living up here at the time. We had our first gathering and were looking for a name for the bar and Eddie said, "I know, BarFunGul," and we knew, it fit perfect and that name stuck ever since. It's hysterical to see these guys, 'cause these guys will bring everything. Anthony DeMaria [ADL] would bring salmon and cook it up. Eddie would bring a casserole during the winter months, and he makes a hell of a casserole. To just hear these guys talking about cooking and how they made this and that. It's just nuts.
What did we have on tap last night?
Aventinus Eisbock, a German bock beer — 14% alcohol. The middle tap was La Chouffe, a Belgian golden ale — 8%. Right tap was Scaldis, Belgian Ale — 12% alcohol. No Miller, Bud, Coors or any of that other regular crap here. And you can quote me on that. You were mainly drinking the Aventinus.
You got started in the business as a musician, right? A guitarist?
I was a classically trained guitar player, really kind of the usual way. We had gotten a small record deal and went into this studio [Quadraphonic] with my band in the early '70s, and every time I asked the engineer for something he said, "You don't want that" or, "You can't do that." So I'd reach over and do it myself and I figured if I had to do it myself, I'd build my own place. Then I wouldn't have to hear how it couldn't be done. So I built my own place to get what we wanted — The Brewery in Queens.
Do you think your connection with KISS was why you became known for your work with metal and hardcore bands?
That and the whole Golden Earring recording. When I did that, suddenly I had all these Dutch bands and people contacting me wanting to come to Millbrook to record. I'm known for getting drum and guitar sounds, so I get all these hardcore and death metal bands all the time. On the same hand I do a lot of jazz and blues acts. Ahmad Jamal loved it in here. He felt right at home. I think that's why people come here — people really like the feel.
In capturing these great guitar sounds, you pioneered a few unique and unusual techniques along the way. Can you elaborate on some of these, like your in-the-control-room guitar amp head/studio cab/combo /and multi-mic set up?
It's a shelf. [laughs] I designed it 'cause when working here I like to be efficient. So if I have a blues band coming in, I'll take the metal heads out and put up all the blues heads. These are hooked up to four different cabinets in the live room with different microphones on them. It's all wired to a patch bay that I can switch any amp head to any bottom. It's really about efficiency and making it easier to keep the flow going during the session. This is really for the overdub process, as I still like to cut the rhythm section together if I can. But some guitarists just like to cut all their parts in the control room anyway — whatever way they want to do it. The blues guys really love how fast we can change things around and never lose the vibe. It's all about the vibe — the vibe and the emotional content of the song itself. That's what I feel is lacking in a lot of music now. You know, I have the Stones original 8-track, 1 inch of Sticky Fingers, right? When I first put on "Brown Sugar" and pushed up the fader, here's the drums, in mono, coming at me and there's all this feeling and emotion and the song is just there in the beat. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Here we are recording all these multiple drum channels, 10, 16, whatever, and he [Charlie Watts] has us all beat with a mono drum track.
Is that part of the reason why you started your own label?
Yeah, in fact this is the first artist that will be on the Retrophile label that we're listening to. I came up with this idea of using a bit of the old — that's the retro — and I've always been a bit of an audiophile, and I wanted that reflected in the music hence, Retrophile. So the idea is my response to people not making decisions anymore, recording drums on 48 tracks and 16 tracks of guitar and all that shit — never committing to anything until the mix. So my idea is to capture the bands and artists using the recording techniques of the past — minimal mics, vintage usually, and capturing it to the most accurate of modern formats — The Genex 9000 series DSD recorder. Now when I say old concepts I mean vintage, like three or four mics on the drums recorded to stereo. If we do overdub, having several parts playing at the same time, things like that — working out the parts ahead of time. A lot of my favorite records as a teenager were recorded on 4- or 8-track machines, so my Genex is outfitted with eight tracks. Finding bands with that mindset — that it's okay to record only to minimal tracks — they have to be into this vibe of cutting only to 8-track. Having that [Stones] tape, playing it back made me decide what I was going to do with this label. Preproduction is now important again. It's key. I'm looking at not only having the vintage recording quality but the vintage emotion — what connected you in the past — the feeling of the record. The cost would be minimal because of only having eight tracks to deal with. I'm also a firm believer that location is very important to creating vibe, so I needed to make the system portable — that's why I went with the Genex DSD. And I need that for my own creativity, to get out of the studio. The location is so important to capturing the performance.
