How did you guys end up working together?
T: I was working at a car wash..
R: And I had to get my Mercedes cleaned.
T: And I was wiping it down and putting the fake ArmorAll on the tires and I thought, "Man, I gotta get me one of these cars." So I asked Rob how he got the car.
R: So I told him, "It's from doing publishing deals with artists and taking all their money."
T: And I said, "Wow. That doesn't seem right. Yet you have this very big car."
R: And I said, "Thatís what makes it right."
T: The end always justifies the debauchery.
Uhhhhhh...
R: Any other questions? No, we met at the Record Plant [long-time LA studio]. We were both working there.
T: 1988
R: And we were both runners, broom pushers and it was pointless and stupid.
T: When Robin Crosby from Ratt would throw up I'd have to clean it up.
Cool.
T: That was my job. That was at the first studio I worked at, Cherokee, just months before I met Rob. Robin would come in and say, "Tom, I got sick in the bathroom." It was really, kinda nice of him.
Did you guys have recording school backgrounds?
T: No. I took one course at Humboldt State University. The closest they had was an audio for film so it was taught by film people who are inherently, masterfully knowledgeable of all recording techniques. That, of course, confused the hell out of me. I spent the whole quarter trying to figure out what a buss was.
R: Other than what you take to college.
T: Yeah, I didn't know what a buss was...
R: I was working in a studio in D.C. and I had went to a college that had a studio there but basically they taught you physics and electronics. The studio kinda sucked. I got in there, and that's the last three years of college... that's what I did. I blew a lot of stuff off.
And recorded?
R: Yeah. Just make bad recordings as often as I could.
T: That's why I took that course in film. To get into the studio.
R: You gotta make the bad ones before you make the good ones. Just like you gotta write the bad songs before you write the good ones. Sometimes you have to revisit the bad.
So you were working shit jobs at Record Plant....
T: That's where we met and I was doing this project at this studio I'd worked at before. I'd found this band through my girlfriend, and they had a lot of money, so I went to this studio that I used to work at and we made this tape. Rob heard the tape and said, "Oh, that's cool." And then we just skipped to producing together. That started on Christmas day, 1988. We've been working ever since.
Have either of you done projects on your own since then?
T: Projects we're pretty much all together. We both record stuff at home all the time. Sometimes we collaborate with other people as well as ourselves. Whether they be artists or bands or other producers or engineers. There's lots of great people out there to work with.
When I watch you work in the studio I'm trying to figure out who delegates what. It switches back and forth.
T: As the Dust Brothers say... We like to use nonverbal communication in the studio. That evolves.
It seems like sometimes you can work faster. Youíve got the setup in the back here with the digital editing.
T: That happens a lot through every project we do... splitting off into two rooms. Sometimes when itís a traditional band setup with a tracking scenario weíve set up another 24 track deck in a closet or a storage area and one guy will keep tracking and the other guy will be cutting the tape to pieces.
R: Or it can even be that one person keeps recording while the other is attending to the psychological warfare aspect.
T: Or one person's on the phone getting the string section together. When you're making a record that's not gonna be a compromise in terms of time or technical limitations and you're gonna have whatever you need at your disposal.... that sounds easy but the reality is you have to build yourself in parameters and limitations or it just immediately falls apart. There's an incredible amount of coordination and stuff that doesn't have to do with moving a fader or pushing play. That's where the "two" thing is really great.
There isn't a set pattern of who does what?
T: No. We're just always going back and forth. Sometimes somebody will give one of us a number so we'll just start following up on it.
R: Or, "I really hate that person. Could you talk to them?"
That could be handy. Do you think that there's any areas that one of you has more expertise in?
R: It's different personalities.
T: See who's jelling with who and get out of the way. Rob has a really extensive collection of guitars from being a guitar player so that's an area of expertise.
Do you play any instrument?
T: I play guitar a little bit. At the point where one would usually be in a garage band, I was in a garage with my buddies recording them.
But you really had an interest in recording...
T: Since I was a kid. It never stopped. I got really into records and record collecting. I'd buy a record and obsess about it for months. I was into it but it wasn't like I was buying records every day.
Rob, what kind of background did you have? Was it more from being a musician?
R: Well, it's been in the family. My father and uncle had a studio in New York City. I was always more into the music and my dad was more technical.
T: Yeah, your dad didn't seem so into the art of music...
R: He's not really into the bullshit, intangible stuff. He was really pragmatic so he was just into getting stuff onto tape. When I was a little kid he used to take me to the studio. It was always sort of, "Well, that's pretty much what I'm gonna do."
So now you guys are at the point that you get to pick and choose what you're gonna work on...
T: We kind of always have...
And now you can spend longer working on a record?
T: We've always found ways to spend the time.
R: Sometimes you're compacting a month into a week but we've always worked on stuff until it was right.
T: It doesn't mean you have to work in big ostentatious, elaborate studios.
R: Yeah. Beck's Mellow Gold was done at Karl's house and my house.
T: In a series of living rooms! The lead vocal on "Loser" is a hand-held Radio Shack PZM. And the slide guitar. I held the PZM up to the acoustic.
Was that out of necessity?
T: That's what we had that day.
R: Fostex ¼" 8 track.
T: And a Roland DM 80 hard disc recorder and Mackie mixers. Technology is to the point where there's enough cheap, transparent stuff that anybody can have the tools. It seems like a lot of people go down the path of thinking they're limited by their tools. It doesn't matter what you have.
R: It's about documenting a performance... whatever that may be.
T: Wherever that leads you.
R: You don't need to document a performance in a $1200 a day room. You can do it in your living room. It's just a lot cooler to do it in a $1200 a day room if you've got two guys with Marshalls! In your living room you'll bum out the neighbors!
True. You can see with something like "Loser" where it could be recorded in an apartment and you're not gonna bug anybody.
T: Or the back room of a dilapidated mansion off of Wilcox.
You mentioned before that you worked with a guy that had a studio and let you use the downtime.
R: That's how we got started. He had this studio up above the Record Plant called the Microplant.
T: Steve Deutsch. That's why, from the very first thing we did together (which was there), we weren't compromised in time. It might take a while but we'd get as many evenings in until we felt it was done. I don't know if that's good or bad but it's always been that way. To leave Microplant it was clear that we were gonna have to have our own studio. Being able to work with people who didn't have money was the key. That's why we've always had a studio, so we could just do it.
So you built a studio up in Northern California in the woods. What is it called?
T: The Shop.
That's right. What year did that happen?
R: In '91.
T: It was in the works for a long time.
You were probably assembling gear...
T: Yep. We had all the gear down here in LA.
You were saying that you only use that part of the year but you have a very low overhead when it's not being used.
R: The key to all this stuff is: If you can, buy it outright with cash.
T: Or don't buy it.
R: Rent is one thing, but loans on gear is a bummer. That makes you worry.
Yeah, yeah... I know.
T: If you have debt it means that a certain amount of the time you're gonna be doing a day job or something to just cover that bill every month.
R: Or it makes you have to be in your studio having to do something you don't want to do.
T: You're gonna be spending a lot of time to cover that debt doing shit that's not gonna further you. If you're out of debt you're gonna spend a lot more time doing things that are gonna further what you're trying to do.
Drag people in to record that might not be getting around to it. With Beck, was that someone you'd seen around?
T: Yep. Saw him once and said, "Wow. We should record." That only happens every two years.
R: Y'know, Elliott was sort of the same way. "Woo, this guy's good." And y'know, Either/Or...
Did you just kind of offer to mix that for him?
T: It was a lot more than mixing it.
I was never sure what was done at The Shop.
T: It's not clear in the liner notes.
It's not clear what was done at my place [Laundry Rules] either!
T: Everything he brought in was on ½" 8 track. Some things were done entirely at The Shop but the bulk of it was half and half.
R: We bumped it [the 8 track] over to 16 track...
T: And added more stuff and then mixed it.
How long did you spend up there?
R: Ten days or something.
T: There was two trips up there to do it so I don't know the total time. One session to collect all the stuff and another session to mix it.
I was always amazed because I'd tracked the vocals on "Pictures of Me" and when I heard the record there were little things added. That record is rather unclear about where things were recorded...
T: That's important too, when you're working on stuff, be sure people can't really tell what you've done. Never be clearly credited. That helps you out! If too many people want to hire you it's a headache. [much laughter]
Yeah, I've done a number of records where there's no recording credit on them.
T: Great! That's good. You're already on top of it! Really, it's good to discuss all that stuff. You don't have to make a contract but just put it on a piece of paper. "This is how my name should be." Ross from Sukia did a remix for Bongload the other day and the last thing he did when leaving was... I said, "Ross, write on this piece of paper how you want your name to appear." He wrote down something that we would've been way off on. We didn't have any of those conversations on Either/Or.
What records were you working on before taking on Elliott's new one here?
R: Lutefisk... Mary Lou Lord...
T: Plastilina Mosh...
How does the work come to you these days? Do you have an agent or do people come to you?
R: We have management. It's a little bit of both.
T: Over time we've certainly picked our own stuff and we found most of it. The one act that came to us, based on someone we'd found and worked with.... We'd worked with this band Wool, which was the outcome of the D.C. band Scream. Then some people at a record company heard that and got excited and...
R: From doing Wool we did the Toadies and the Foo Fighters.
T: That was the direct outcome of that work. You never know by doing one thing, no matter how unrelated they are. That was neat. That was the first project that came directly to us that we would have never known about had we not dome some work before that. That was an exciting thing, the Toadies record.
R: And Wool was a band that we found, recorded and did a single with them on Bongload and then they got signed and we did their EP and then their album. From that we did the Toadies record and the Foo Fighters. That's a cool little illustration of finding something before anyone knows about it and how it can turn into other things. It's like the time you invest into it ends up reaping more.
For the Wool single did you do it after hours at Microplant?
R: Tom had this studio in Van Nuys that was 300 square feet...
T: But it had six rooms!
R: We had our main room, we had our drum room...
T: A control room, our bass booth, a vocal booth, a bathroom (which we used)...
