Let's talk about how you got into this, and why. I mean, because obviously you started out as a musician...
Well, I still am. I don't think of myself as a producer, that's like way down the list of things that I think about.
Well how did even fall into knowing how to even run a tape machine?
Oh, just always interested as a kid, just like a lot of people are, you know. I bought a little Pintron tape recorder, it was before cassettes had been invented, so it was like one of these little tape recorders with tiny little reels, and make little tapes. I always loved to sing. I went out to California between my junior and senior years in high school, worked on a wildlife refuge, and made a bunch of money, like $2.70 and hour which was a lot back then! This was in the summer of '68. I came home with all the money I'd saved up and bought a Panasonic sound-on-sound tape recorder. When I was in junior high school, I chose to play bass because of the control that it offered. I played a little guitar; played a lot of things by ear. There was the coolest band in town, where the organ player played bass on pedals, and I knew they needed a bass player. I like the fact that, if somebody's playing a C-chord, and I'm playing an A, it was an A minor seven. That's something that I figured out on piano. I like the compositional control of the bass. I bought a bass, one of those great Danelectro Silvertones, and I wish I had it back. From Sears for $79. Then a few months later I really liked upright, so I found an old upright in a church in Charlotte, and just was sort of self-taught on those things, but I could read music.
I began doing some sessions, there was a jazz guy named Louis McGloughn in Charlotte, which was the closest big town to where I grew up. He had seen our band and he was always looking for a young guy who could play upright to do sessions and stuff so I started doing sessions with him. That was sort of my introduction, when I was 15 or 16, to the studio. And I was interested in recording, so I'd sit around and make up my own Jimi Hendrix songs in funny tunings, and record that stuff on my old Pintron that I had bought for $30, and then I saved up and bought that nice Panasonic... So I was always just interested in the sound of things, and was working on sessions and doing things....
So you were around studio stuff....
Yeah, there were a couple of decent studios in Charlotte. Charlotte had been in the 30's like a little Nashville, with a lot of bluegrass and blues recorded there in the 30's. And then there was a guy named Arthur Smith who had a really nice studio, a real professional studio there in Charlotte, which is where I did most of my recording.
What kind of stuff are we talking about?
Well, you know, he probably had a Scully eight track...
Which was quarter-inch or half-inch?
Oh no, the Scully would have been a one-inch. The formats went this way: everything was on one-inch, those one-inch four tracks that were used for all the Beatles records, and then the four track standard in the United States was half-inch, and then they did the one-inch eight. Later the two-inch technology was really picked up from the two-inch video transport technology, the MM1000 Ampex machines, which were basically a whole bunch of 440 electronics on this bed that had been made as a video transport. Because video went from two-inch to one-inch pretty fast, less than probably five years, they used those old two-inch transports to build their sixteen track machines. It all kind of happened real fast and then it just stopped there. I mean, they tried to come out with a three-inch machine for a while, and that Stevens guy came out with that 40 track two-inch machine, which was a nightmare for alignment. The Stevens electronics actually sound pretty good because they're very simple. You can't do much to it, but you can put something on tape that's got a lot of juice to it.
So he [Smith] probably had some U-47's or something?
He had great mics. Everybody back then always had great mics.
Well you could probably go buy a Neumann for about $200 at that point or something?
But again, people worked all day in a factory for about $30, so that was still a lot of money by any standards.
But it just seems like everyone had them back then.
There were no budget microphones. The budget microphones were CB/Turner mics, and then the good microphones were good microphones. You bought Telefunkens or Neumanns. AKG was not even really in the big-time ballgame here in the United States. They were in Europe.
EV to an extent at that point, right?
Well, EV was good, I mean EV had the RE 20 which was a great mic. Shure had a couple of good mics...
Like the 545, was that one of the early ones?
Yeah, and the RCA 77DX.
And they had the 44, which was a smaller version of that. So, um, you're at that point, you're a teenager, you're out of high school at this point, then...
I went to college in Chapel Hill, and we got a band together, that turned into Arrogance, and we learned allof the first Black Sabbath album, which was an import only. That kind of metal, they really invented it. And then we would do most of the Beatles' Abbey Road. An interesting combination of stuff. And lots of heavy blues songs, like a few Ten Years After versions of songs.
So that would have been when?
About '69. And we recorded out first single...at a pretty nice studio in Greensboro that was another real place, they had a lathe and everything, where you could cut the actual acetate. That came out as Arrogance, it was a single called "Black Death," it was anti-war, [sings]: "Dressed in crimson shadows, caught in shades of dark despair." [laughs] So that was cool, we had a great guitar player who didn't stay in the band very long.
What were you playing bass-wise at this point?
I played an EBO with red, white, and blue tapewound strings...
Oh man! What kind of a stage rig did you have?
Four giant cabinets, each with one 15" [speaker] in it, but each cabinet was like as big as this room, and two Sunn 200's. The Sunn 200's aren't really that loud, but I loved the way they sounded, I'd love to get any of that. A little-known fact about Sunn: one of my heroes when I was growing up Norm Sundlum, who was the bass player for the Kingsmen, the bass player on "Louie Louie," and he played an EBO, so I bought and EBO. And he and his brother went on to start the company Sunn amps, right there out of Portland. And I didn't know that till a few years ago, otherwise I would have tried to find him. The Sunn amps were great...
OK so you're cutting and this point and you release the first single as Arrogance...
Yeah, we released "Black Death"... I kind of ended up producing that, it was a little four track thing, but we did three songs.
What was the board at this point?
I don't remember what they had in there. It was probably a Neotek, but that is a very filtered memory.
Are we talking four inputs? Eight?
I don't know, it was a pretty big console. This guy knew what was going on, I mean he had a lathe in his place.
Oh, I forgot it's like 1969. I forgot that by that point things had jumped ahead pretty fast.
Well, the Reflection console was a homemade one, but it was a pretty good one. It had some Fairchild EQ's and it was a pretty clean console. The records we made on that original console sound pretty good now.
Were you working with any outside bands at this time? Anyone other than yourself?
Not really, I mean I was just some dumb-ass draft-dodging freshman in college. And I was playing in several bands, still playing jazz with some people. I did audition my sophomore year for Buddy Rich, and he wasn't real happy about my hair. They offered me a job but I was going to have to lose a whole semester in college and everybody warned me that I would probably get fired and left in Belgium, you know, that he went through bass players really fast. But there were a lot of things still going on, and I didn't want to leave the band. In a nutshell, that band turned into more of an acoustic version with me and the other guy who did most of the singing and writing. We'd just play and sing. It was mostly designed to write these new songs and work out vocal stuff. We did an album with that version of the band, the acoustic version. We have an album called Give Us A Break that came out in '72, that was the acoustic version where we had a conga player, and guitar, bass, and piano. Then that band did another independent record like that, more of that odd kind of blend of acoustic-y Beatles things.
So you were learning more about the studio as all this was happening?
Yeah, we're recording these records in Reflection, we had a production deal with them. Recording there and releasing them on our own little independent label. Meanwhile, we're getting a really good following in Chapel Hill, and creating sort of an environment that is receptive to original music. So we're sort of helping to create this; there are clubs popping up and we're filling them up, we're playing a lot, like 150 nights a year. We're doing this for a living. And then we get a lot of interest for this woman at Elektra, by now the PBS station is doing a special on us, we can fill up the big clubs, we do a special for a big theater there. And this woman comes and sees us, and then she quits her Elektra job and ends up at Vanguard. We signed with Vanguard, went and made a record in New York, lived in the Chelsea Hotel, and we made this record with a guy named John Anthony who had produced Ace. He was a coke freak, nice guy, but he made a bad record with us. And we tried, and I learned a lot during our first record. I did my first string writing, and got to record it with real New York guys, which was a little nerve-wracking.
How big a place are we talking studio-wise?
The Vanguard studios were really nice. We were working days and Elvin Jones was making a record at night, so we had to break down and setup every day during a week and a half of that record. It was huge, giant, not like your typical New York studios. Most New York studios aren't that big, because space is a premium there. These old places were big, still one big room. Most of these rooms were big because they were doing a lot of soundstage stuff in New York in the 30's and 40's. They needed to put the whole orchestra in and do radio shows at these places. It was a giant room.
You always see pictures of places in the 60's with about a thousand gobos there! It's like, let's reduce this room a little, it's rock and roll!
Well they need all the gobos to do the radio shows. And since everything was live, they needed to create little dead areas for the vocalists, dead areas for the percussion.
So that was probably the biggest place you'd worked in?
Up to that point. It was a big room, I mean you gotta remember, the room in Charlotte was gigantic, the Arthur Smith room was huge. And Reflection was more your typical kind of Memphis size, the original version was a nice, small little place. But it was still a real studio, they went to a lot of trouble to make round things that they saw. The guy who owned Reflection had played on hits for Ernest Tubb, he was a troubadour, so he'd played on "Sweet Thing" and stuff like that and he'd been in Nashville for years. I mean he knew what the stuff looked like, he knew that they had round things, there were no real signs like "This will help break up standing waves." [laughter] And it did.
Were you intimidated going in there at all? Were you the producer at this point?
I was just trying to be a guy in the band. By then I had already produced a few things, but again the producing stuff was all by accident. The first thing, in 1972, was this package record deal. They would come through Reflection. There was this guy named Toby King, who had his own band, and he bought the typical thing, which is four hours of time, and you get 500 singles for $500, which we'd send out in about three weeks. That was kind of the deal. People would really respond to those deals, they think they don't have to do anything, like some Crackerjack surprise in the mail. They did a lot of gospel records, a lot of things under these packages. And then they would just work out a deal with the local guys to print, do the mastering, all that shit. And this [Toby King] thing kind of had potential, it was a song called "Operator", and I was just sort of there helping engineer. After they'd spent a couple of hours, the band kind of sucked, but the singer was really good and the song had some potential. We took him in the back and said, "Look, we'll put some more time and money and effort into this if you sign on the dotted line." Well, I didn't have anything to do with that, I still got my $25. So I went back in and replayed a lot of the stuff after the band left. We kept the vocals, and there was a girl singer, and she and I came up with a background vocal. It got picked up by Delight or one of those labels at the time. And it did OK. And that was the first thing I kind of co-produced. That was '72. The reason we did Give Me A Break was... I sat up in bed one night and said, you know, these assholes [gospel producers] come with $1500 and put out a thousand records — why don't we do that? So that's why we started doing our independent records. We'd collect $200 from five friends, pitch in the other $500 ourselves, and split the money out when we sold them. We never tried to make a big deal out of those records, never sold more than a couple thousand of them, we just wanted them to perpetuate what was going on until we could get a real deal.
So you weren't looking for national distribution?
No, which is where we made a mistake, because we didn't know... and I also didn't want to become a business man.
Well, I find it very interesting, because I think a lot of us think that the independent records scene has been relatively new, like it started in the 80's or something. This has been going on since rock and roll started.
Well, yeah, we did our first single in '69, we put it out and we sold some. So it wasn't totally unprecedented for me to say, "Well, we can do this," because we'd already done it. But we had been chasing the major label golden apple after that. Well, actually, we hadn't really, we just tried to be able to make a living, open up the club scene, and have places to play. And we succeeded. And it was very hard, you know! Well, anyway, after that experience with Vanguard, we asked to be released, because somebody at Elektra or Epic had expressed some interest in us, and there was this new manager guy hanging around, and it ended up taking quite a few years before we got another deal, but we ended up getting a deal with Warner Brothers through this guy. Meanwhile I was recording other stuff, like that Sneakers EP which was done on my four track, or maybe Chris [Stamey]'s, in '75... we did the first half of that at Cat's Cradle but got kicked out because we were too loud for the dinner crowd, and had to finish it up at the bass player's girlfriend's apartment. Which was a hell, the console on the bed. I had this cool little Valvetech console, really nice with a compressor built in.
So were you aware of Big Star at that point?
Chris and Mitch [Easter] used to try and get me to give a shit about Big Star, and I just never could, still can't hardly. I like Jody, and Alex is kind of an asshole, but personality aside, it never meant as much to me as it did to them. I was listening to Mingus and stuff. I went through periods, even in high school, of casting it all aside. And for whatever reasons, what they were trying to do was a lot of what I felt like I never like about the Replacements, just too much unfinished ideas and debauched drunkery on tape.
Is part of it just because you considered it retro at the time?
