What was the path that led you to Austin City Limits?
I went to UT [University of Texas] from '68 to '73. I was in the Electrical Engineering program. I was also the drummer in a UT jazz band. We were building our own gear and I was always hanging out at the electronic music lab. I got to play around with Moog synthesizers. We were also building our own stomp boxes. This is when Electro-Harmonix was just getting started. We were playing around with germanium transistors and fuzz boxes. We built our own speaker boxes. Back then there wasn't anything of the sort at RadioShack.
You could buy the raw parts at RadioShack.
Yes. And then it came time to get a real job, so I started poking around recording studios. That's when I met Malcolm Harper with Reelsound Recording. He was just putting together his very first portable studio, so his console was waiting on the Airstream trailer he'd ordered. It was his console that we dragged up to do the pilot. It was B.W. [Buckwheat] Stevenson first and then two weeks later it was Willie Nelson. I was still trying to find a day gig and that's when I fell in with the PBS affiliate — back then it was Channel 9, KLRN -there was an opening in the audio department. We were in a new facility in 1974 that'd been built on the UT campus [in Communications Building B]. The bilingual children's program was using the smaller recording studio and 6A was totally empty! That crew used to take their breaks and play volleyball [in there]. [laughter] Bill Arhos, our program director at KLRN, said, "Let's do something based on The Armadillo World Headquarters [music hall], send it to PBS and see what happens." We sent them a couple of pilots and PBS said, "Send us some more."
Did you set up a temporary control room for tracking?
It was a built control room, but there wasn't any equipment in it.
It was built for that TV studio?
Yeah, that floor had two control rooms and two studios but they were only using one of them. So they built a temporary set. The producer, Paul Bosner, and the director, Bruce Scafe, came down from Dallas for those first two seasons. They were the ones trying to come up with the name of the show. "Should we call it Crossroads or what?" Paul was driving into town and saw the Austin city limits sign. He wrote that down and it stuck. It's a good one.
It doesn't really say anything specific, except "Austin."
Yeah, it doesn't lock it into country music, which is a good thing in case the music scene changes. The first two years were so fun; it was mainly promoting local bands. I'd have to look at the discography to remember it all.
I'm sure it's a ridiculous list of "Who's Who." I'm sure you had Asleep At The Wheel [Tape Op #32].
Yes, and the Texas Playboys came out of retirement. It was great! After the second season, Paul and Bruce figured that was that and they returned to Dallas. But then PBS ordered another season. I was getting my resumé together and thinking about heading to California, but I didn't really like it there. I came back for the third and fourth seasons. I was the A1 position [audio engineer], at that time.
What had been your position before?
On the pilot, I think they let me manipulate the master fader. [laughter] "Just make sure those meters don't go into the red."
The human limiter!
That was the first few years. The director of the fourth year dragged the editing out to Nashville to work on a CMX system out there. We built the entire season of 14 shows in seven days. That wasn't all that fun. Then [director] Allan Muir and [producer] Terry Lickona joined us in 1978, and that's when it got to be fun. That's the crew that locked in and pulled together. Most of that crew is still with us. That's when we started getting Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, Leo Kottke, and Pete Fountain.
What do you think it is about a crew when it does lock in? Is it just a combination of personalities and the same vision?
A lot of it has to do with a sense of humor! [laughter] A lot of it is the M.A.S.H. version of working — you're under so much stress, you have to use humor to pull through. A lot of these people have become family at this point.
Did you ever imagine that it would just keep going and going?
You know, I figured it would go year to year. It wasn't until Allan Muir was around for a few years, and when Gary Menotti took over directing in season 8, that I stopped worrying about it. The show was fortunate to have access to the UT campus. Equipment-wise, it was all analog. After we did the pilots on the borrowed rental gear, we had a budget to buy a console because of the children's bilingual TV show — they were the ones who had the budget. So we bought a 16-channel Neve console that had the 1073 or 1081 units in it, and we got a Studer A80 16-track.
You could do far worse!
Right! And then when bands came in, like Roy Orbison, we'd borrow an outboard console. At one point, I ended up buying a 10 x 4 Ramsa console to do drums and keyboards.
And you could sub-mix things.
Yeah. We could only use 12 tracks for the band. We did that through '87. Finally we got some nice letters from larger acts out of Nashville that convinced our very tight-budgeted general manager to spend some money. That's when we finally upgraded to a 36-channel Neve and a 24-track Studer A820 with Dolby SR.
Did you use the big 14-inch reels?
Yeah, the big reels. They were affordable back then! [laughter] Those are all sitting in the library right now. We ran 2-inch, 24-track from '87 — even after we traded in the Neve — until 2000. We were still recording on 2-inch for about two or three more years (seasons 29 to 36) until we got the Pyramix [digital audio workstation]. I think we stuck with that 2-inch for so many years because we were just in the habit of buying tape. Then when I showed the numbers of what it would cost to backup to an LTO [Linear Tape- Open] it was like, "Oh, let's do that!" We went with Pyramix because of the MADI [Multichannel Audio Digital Interface] connections.
I noticed a lot of MADI here. One of the things you can encounter in the digital realm is overs that tape wouldn't have.
Exactly! Having been through analog all these years, I still track at analog levels. My peaks are only about -10 or -6 dB, and I always aim low because the band plays louder at night in front of a crowd. No kidding.
The sound check and run- through are always totally different from the live show.
Alabama Shakes are a perfect example. She [Brittany Howard] wouldn't sing at all during rehearsal, but during the show she was like a whole different person. It was unbelievable! We knew ahead of time that she'd be saving it. The other funny thing about levels is that broadcast is a whole different loudness than CD or even DVD these days. PBS, even though they're not a commercial outfit, have decided that they're going to follow the CALM [Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation] Act. So that's been my nightmare for the last few months — delivering shows that aren't too loud. The year before that, they were just concerned about dialogue. That wasn't too bad. But the last show I delivered was Wilco and their songs are all over the place dynamically.
They can be very dynamic!
I know, but the broadcasters want everything the same loudness. The way they're measuring loudness on their gear... music is at a disadvantage on that metering. It's because there's a lot more RMS energy. So the meter comes on and it builds up and tells you that it's louder than my ear is telling me. Then the dialogue comes up between the songs and it drops way down. What am I going to do about that? In the analog days, it turns out I was hitting dialogue at -27 [LUFS (Loudness Units, relative to digital Full Scale)], which is what the film guys do. But PBS wanted it louder, so I turned it up. But that meant the music got louder too! [laughter] I didn't want to do that. This last year, after delivering Wilco's show and having three or four shows rejected for being too loud in spots, I pulled out my Ampex ATR 104 [tape deck] and fired up my VU meters. I brought up what they said was 2 dB too loud in my meters and pulled it down. So I'm back to mixing on VU meters now! [laughter]
Really? Is it in the main control room here?
It's in 6A where we used to shoot. We do all our post work in 6A. This room, at Moody, is set up to capture, record and mix. When I do the final editing, mastering and delivery, that's up at 6A back at the UT campus. All the Avid Euphonix System 5 stuff is in both rooms, uptown and downtown. When we spec'd this console, [we made sure] it's exactly the same as what we've had for the past 12 years up in 6A. And we also got the old desk upgraded to the whole new layout. I could take a thumb drive with this layout and finish a mix uptown.
Do you ever have to run both places at once to get a project done?
Sometimes I do.
With a band live on stage, one of your main jobs is to be back here making sure it's getting captured.
Yep.
Are you making a live, 2-track mix at the same time?
Yep. That's the fun part.
