I know you were doing live sound before starting Blackbird Studios. How did you get into that?
I'll go way, way back. I love music. I'm not a singer, I'm not a player, and I'm not a songwriter. Growing up lower-middle class Wichita, Kansas, in the late '70s, I never considered the fact that you could have a career in music. My dad taught school and my mom stayed at home. I had a great childhood. I went to the bank in the late '70s and told them I wanted to start a recording studio. As you can imagine, they looked at me cross-eyed, laughed, and said it wasn't going to happen. In 1980 I was working full-time and going to school part-time. I went to the Wichita State campus credit union and borrowed $6,000. I bought two speakers, a power amp, a 12-channel Biamp console, a 10-band stereo Biamp EQ, and a 100-foot snake. I also bought two mics: a [Sennheiser] 421 and a [Shure SM]58. I went around to the bars in Wichita and I put up "PA for Rent" fliers. Somebody called, and I started. That's how I got into live sound; it was trial by fire. I loved it, and I worked full-time. I mixed in clubs; by '83 every penny was going back into the business. I didn't care if it was the biggest company in the world or a garage sound company; every penny went back in. I had put together two full club systems, as well as a third monitor rig that was separate. Around 1984 I thought, "If I could borrow $75,000, I could get enough gear to do a concert and make $500 in one night." Remembering my failed attempt at dealing with bankers earlier, I ended up going to the SBA — the Small Business Administration. It took three or four months to put together this proposal that was about an inch thick. They came back to me and said they'd approve my loan, on one condition: my parents had to put up their house as collateral. Their house was their only asset — it was appraised at $75,000. I went home and talked to my mom and dad. I told them that they'd approve the loan but we'd have to put up the house for collateral. My mom and dad said, "We'll do it!" Now I'll tell you, when you start thinking about your parents being homeless, it's a good motivation to work a few more hours!
Oh yeah.
Sure enough, I started doing shows at the Cotillion Ballroom in Wichita. That's where I cut my teeth. I did three or four hundred shows in that place, bands on their way up and bands on their way down. A couple of years later I met Martina and fell in love. In 1987, I went back to the bank and borrowed another $90,000. I don't know how they let me do it, but they did.
At that point they're going to repossess your gear if you don't pay.
I had a six-month tour lined up with Steppenwolf, Alvin Lee, and Roger McGuinn. We went out on this six-month tour, and had I ever used written contracts? Of course not. Five weeks into the tour, they cancelled with one day's notice and put me in a tailspin from hell. It started the hardest two or three years of my life. I was finding anything and everything that I could do to make money to try to keep my parents from losing their house and to keep the bank happy. In the fall of '89 I'd been married a year and I went out and did three shows; Ricky Van Shelton was the headliner, Clint Black was the middle act, and Garth Brooks was the opening act. Garth didn't have any crew. His manager was on the road with him, and he'd sit with the front-of-house guy and tell them where the solos were. One of my guys wanted to try to get the job doing sound for Garth. I said, "Yes, go for it! Of course you should." He went out and auditioned; they liked him so he got the gig. That was the fall of '89. He immediately moved to Nashville. Three months later, so did we. Martina decided that she wanted to be a country singer. We moved to Nashville on January 1st of 1990, and it's been a blur ever since. Within a year and a half Martina had a record deal. And I was production manager for Garth Brooks, which made no sense. But you know what? Hallelujah!
Good news!
So the '90s happened, and things were great. Garth decided to retire in '98. Martina came into her own in '99. In '97 I ended up selling my company to Clair Brothers [now Clair Global] and, for the first time in my life, I had no debt. I was stumbling around wondering what to do. In 2001, I said to Martina, "You know, we should do that studio that I tried to do 25 years ago." So I ended up finding a place and buying it on January 15, 2002. That's 2806 Azalea Place [where Blackbird Studios is now]. Unfortunately, I kind of lost my mind and I kept buying gear, and buying gear, and buying gear. I bought the double lot behind us and we ended up building more rooms. I don't know what happened to me, exactly. But I was like a roadie with a little money to spend, and that's what I did. I started the Blackbird portion of my life, and I tried to do things right. I was very motivated to try to build one of the best studios there could ever be, anywhere. And I feel like we pretty much succeeded.
Yeah, I think so.
We never said no. If we could spend more money, we did. So years went by and I spent all our money. And then I borrowed another $12 million, on top of that. Now we're just working away. With that kind of a loan, your overhead gets a little bit crazy because the loan payments alone are pretty staggering. I thought, "Well, here we are, and we're fighting the fight." As the music business crumbles around us and things are turning to crap, we're trying to maintain our standards and do everything right. [We want to] give people a place to record great music.
It seems like you've bucked the trend of what people would assume about recording studios, at this point in history.
You know what's funny? What's funny is that I won't say that I wasn't warned. A lot of people I knew in the business said not to have a studio, but I didn't listen. I thought that I knew more than they did. I didn't. In the process of building Blackbird, we ended up with eight studios. And we're busy. Thank God for that.
The amount of recording equipment that you've accumulated at Blackbird is pretty staggering. What do you think it is about you that led to your obsession with this?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "obsession." I am an all-or-nothing guy. I'm a little bit obsessive-compulsive. I love gear. Man, I love gear. Especially microphones. I wanted to have enough so that if you wanted to do the whole session with Telefunken [E LAM] 251s then I could provide that. I never want the studio to be the weak link in the recording process. I look at the artist, the producer, and engineer as painters. I want them to have every color in the palette. If they need an Ursa Major Space Station or a DeltaLab Acoustic Computer, I want to have that available so they can get the sound they want, for whatever's in their head.
Anything else would be impeding the art.
