Let's talk about your early days as a musician.
I bought my first synth when I was about 14 — a Micromoog. It was one of the first "affordable" synths. This was around 1974, and people still had this image of synthesizers as big machines with lots of patch cords.
So this was pre-MIDI, obviously.
It was pre-MIDI, and before samplers and drum machines, except maybe those old Korg rhythm boxes. I was never much of a technician as a keyboardist — my interest was more in programming, creating cool sounds and textures. Of course, it was kind of limited in those days, because you needed a lot of money to get a synth with more than one oscillator. The Micromoog has this square wave function to alter the waveform, and I'd play with that and the LFO. I used to go into Sam Ash and play with the ARP 2600 until they'd kick me out. It was amazing how tolerant they were, to let this kid just come in and play with this expensive synth for hours.
You grew up in New York?
Yeah, I grew up in Forest Hills [a section of Queens]. Everyone in my high school was into prog rock, myself included. A friend of mine, Fred Maher, was a drummer who later went on to become a pretty successful producer himself — he worked with Lou Reed, Matthew Sweet, Lloyd Cole and bunch of other folks. Around 1978 we met Bill Laswell, who was rehearsing out of a space in Manhattan owned by this guy named Giorgio Gomelsky [issue #62]. Giorgio was something of a musical impresario at the time — he had produced the Yardbirds, moved to New York and put together this space called the Zu Club, where they were showcasing prog bands like Gong and Henry Cow. Fred, Bill, myself, [guitarist] Cliff Cultreri and another keyboard player formed a band and started rehearsing in the Zu Club's basement. We did our first few gigs as The Zu Band. Then around '79 we hooked up with (former Gong singer) Daevid Allen, and went on tour with a bunch of other prog bands in an old school bus with most of the seats torn out.
So eventually prog rock evolved into....
Yeah, the nature of what we were doing began to change radically right after that tour, around '79 or '80. We were down to the four of us — Bill, Fred, myself and Cliff — and we were listening to a lot of Eno, punk, Kraftwerk, Miles Davis and all the nascent new wave bands like Magazine and XTC. We changed the name of the band to Material and started getting gigs around town. It happened relatively quickly. Over the course of a year or so, we were playing at a lot of the best clubs. Bill was a great networker — good at chatting people up.
There was a pretty heavy scene already happening in New York — Blondie, Television and Talking Heads.
We were just behind that big wave. Blondie and Television had already come through — Debbie Harry was a big celebrity by then. But we still had to prove ourselves, which we did, repeatedly. We started bringing in this revolving circle of guest singers and players, and Material started evolving into more of a network than a band, per se. Looking back, as a live band we were pretty amateur. I'd never been on stage before our first gig, and it was a pretty harrowing experience. In fairness, Bill was a fantastic bass player. His technical ability was a big draw, and he and Fred were a great rhythm section.
You all worked on Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts around that time. How did that come about?
Bill was the only one from Material who actually played on it. After that Eno began working on a new project with Bill, Fred and Bob Quine, who played guitar with Richard Hell. They moved to our studio in Brooklyn, which led to Eno asking me if I wanted to get involved.
Material's recordings were so eclectic. Were you a band with an identity crisis?
Yeah, those three albums in particular definitely had a personality crisis, even within each album. I think one of the problems with Material was that we were trying to please these small circles of people in the community who knew us. So we'd do an electronic, experimental EP; then we'd do a record for Bruce Lundvall's label [Elektra/Musician] that had a lot of elements of free jazz; then another record for Elektra that was heavily R&B. So we drew from a lot of ideas, but it never really coalesced. It was interesting, though. Even though we weren't the right people to pull it off, it was interesting to see how far you could actually push a bunch of different musical ideas within the context of an artistic endeavor, rather than box ourselves in to one theme or sound. Of course we had a lot more freedom back then — the industry wasn't so corporate. And it was interesting working with a guy like Bruce, who really pushed for that artistic freedom.
So Material had the artistic freedom to evolve as a "producers' band," so to speak.
Very much so. Most of what we were doing was basically Bill, myself and Martin Bisi [Tape Op # 51] (after Fred left) collaborating with a series of other musicians.
And it was around that time you hooked up with Herbie Hancock?
That was in '83. I didn't actually meet Herbie until we'd done most of the principal recording for "Rockit," and Bill and I were in L.A. to put Herbie's parts on the track.
When did you and Bill start pursuing separate paths?
In 1983, shortly after we'd completed "Rockit." After a certain point, we both just felt it wasn't working anymore. I began to work on stuff myself, and I faced that vast landscape of "what does a person do who has never done this before?" — especially since I'd gone from youth to relative adulthood without any real sense of standing on my own two feet. Being inside an organization like Material, I hadn't really had a chance to stand on my own and be assessed by others. It was a challenge, because people had associated Bill as the main guy in Material, and the main guy behind Herbie's record. It took me a while to move past that. Eventually I met someone at EMI who told me about this band he had called Red Hot Chili Peppers. Even back then, those guys were really pushing the envelope, but they still hadn't really defined what they were doing. They hadn't really combined all the elements yet, and it was still unfocused. They had done a record with Andy Gill [issue #71], which played into the punk element, and a record with George Clinton, who imparted a lot of funk influence, but that didn't really take them where they needed to go. We spent months working on demos for the record. There was a lot of drama, but eventually we got into Capitol Studio's Studio B and made a really good record.
So that record [The Uplift Mofo Party Plan] was your first major label production?
It was my first U.S. project. I had done two Canadian records, but this was my first solo U.S. project. It was a lot of work, but in the end it was worth all the work to see these guys come out of it stronger. We made another record [Mother's Milk] that was a turning point in their careers, and brought them to mainstream awareness.
You were instrumental in creating the Ultra Analog format, running eight tracks on 2-inch tape. Where did that come from?
One of the things I always liked about tape was that if you used it in a certain way, it could become a tone modification device as opposed to a storage medium — compression, but also the way it changes the tone of a recording. The idea itself came more from the conceptual perspective — I'm not a very technical guy. I figured if 24-track analog sounded good and 16- track sounded better, what would happen if someone decreased the amount of tracks, but kept the size of the tape head? I got in touch with John French at JRF Magnetics, and had him design us an 8-track headstack. What made it unique was how he was able to integrate a time code track. He made a tiny center track between tracks four and five.
What machine were you using it on?
It was a modified Studer A800. The first one we got was anactual8-track-aMKI-andIhaditkittedout with MK III electronics, which was a job in itself. The first time we used it, we had it shipped out to Paris to work with Ozzy [Osbourne]. I'll never forget when we played back that first recording. It's always an amazing thing when what you hear going in is breathtaking, but then what you hear coming out has the potential to stop your internal organs from functioning — it just doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard before. Everyone's jaw hit the ground. It was literally amazing. All of a sudden there was this phenomenal low-end extension. Physics dictated that it shouldn't happen. You could listen to drums on [Yamaha] NS10s, and everyone would swear there was a sub in the room. NS10s were actually reproducing low end comfortably. I was running it at 7 1/2 ips. French had said it should sound good at 15. Since it was a MK I, the speeds were 7 1/2 and 15, and I figured, "Well, I always run 16 tracks at 15 rather than 30, so 7 1/2 would probably sound better with eight tracks." We did a comparison, and 15 ips sounded beautiful — definitely better in the highs. But when we went down to 7 1/2, something happened sonically that was just uncanny. Things like that are what I love about this work. That sense of discovery — feeling that you're in uncharted territory. And it feeds on everything everyone else does. It's exciting, and it inspires others to raise the bar.
