Don Gehman

Don Gehman has produced records for everybody from Stephen Stills to John Mellencamp to R.E.M. to Bruce Hornsby to Tracy Chapman to Hootie and the Blowfish. This is his story from Pennsylvania and Clair Brothers, to Florida and Criteria, to name producer. Quite a journey!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Stetts Podcast.
My guest today is producer engineer extraordinary Don Gamon. Don,
how do you produce a record?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Bob, keep your mouth shut? That would be my first thought.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Well, that's an interesting thing because you came up as
an engineer. My observation in the studio is the engineer
has to be quiet and be more of a yes man.
And you became a producer. Well, switching gears to a
smaller question. My original question, how hard was that transition
going from being an engineer to producer?

Speaker 2 (00:52):
It was difficult, it was Hm. Well, you know, it's
a long story, but the tell the story. That's why
we're here, all right. You know. I was fortunate coming
from Live Sound, which is really where my beginning is
as an engineer, that one of my clients on the
road was Stephen Stills, and he took a liking to

(01:14):
me and took me to Caribou, which was a ranch
up in the Rocky Mountains, and I spent a month
with him finishing a record that he had started, and
at the end of it he gave me a production credit.
So right out of the gate I was given not

(01:35):
only engineering, but production credit. And then he turned around
and got me a position at the Record Plant in
Los Angeles and Criteria Recording in Miami and said, this
is your next step. So I quit my day job,

(01:57):
which was live or Live sound, and moved to Miami,
where I promptly stopped producing and just started engineering. And
really realized at that point how much I did not
know about making records. Stephen was a great teacher, but

(02:19):
I had so much to learn about recording techniques, operating
tape machines, editing. There was just a myriad of things
that I knew nothing about. Even though I thought, well,
I know everything about the equipment that I'm using, it
was not even close. So that process took almost ten
years before I got my next full on recording producing credit,

(02:42):
and I think it was nineteen eighty two.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Okay. Why did Stills take such a liking to you
that he would bring you from the road to the
studio and then give you a production credit.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I think probably what he saw in me the situation
I was on the road with Manassas, which was one
of Stevens' many bands after I guess that would have
been after his solo career and my job was I

(03:22):
was hired as a monitor system for the stage. This
would have been nineteen maybe seventy two, and I had
already been on the road since about nineteen seventy. I
started in sixty five, and we were brought in at

(03:42):
that time because we were the only people that actually
had a stage monitoring system which split out the microphones
on stage and that put the console on the side
of the stage, and that had monitors on the sides,
and it slants in the front and different mixes for
differ locations. All of that kind of thing was very,

(04:03):
very new, and I think it was what's the San Francisco.
He had hired another production company to do the main
sound and lights, et cetera. So I was just kind
of in a dndum and so I was separate. I
was more noticeable because I was hired as an extra
and my job was to sit side of the stage

(04:25):
and take all the heat as things get that back
and they couldn't hear themselves, and it was a very tense,
you know, a couple hours while you're trying to make
it through the show without glares coming from Stephen. And
I think I withstood the heat really well, is what

(04:47):
it was. And there was a day, especially bad day,
that I was really having trouble with some whistling and
the monitor. Steven kept on looking over at me during
the set, you know, like get it louder, I can't
hear myself, And finally, in a rage, he just turns
and throws a drumstick at me from you know, mid

(05:10):
mid stage to the side, and I caught it and
threw it back at him. And I think that was
kind of the beginning of our relationship, was this you know,
willingness to be straight up and he appreciated that. And
shortly after that time we did Michael John Bowen, who

(05:32):
was his manager at the time ex Marine wonderful man
who's since deceased, put together a tour that he thought
we could be much more efficient touring if we did
it from central locations, and he wanted to do it
from Boulder, where Steven had a house up in Golden

(05:52):
and do shows that were you know, three five hundred
mile drives from that location. And so he wanted to
build a semi that had two levels in it where
we could put a lighting trust on the first floor
and then all of the band's equipment and sound equipment
on the second and I was the driver, and so

(06:17):
I took on a role as a stage manager, truck driver,
mixing engineer for about a year before this all happened
with the studio stuff. So that's just one little piece
of my that's actually the end of my recording.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Oh okay, I got a lot of questions. Don't you
need a license to drive a truck?

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah you do, But you know, I wasn't driving for money,
and so there's this exception with Class C licenses, I
think is what they're called, or at least maybe that's
what was called in Pennsylvania, which is where I was from. Anyhow,
I had fortunately a West Coast driver who was our

(07:04):
driver on the Manassas Tour, a lovely guy, you know,
career semi driver who I rode with for probably a
year before I did it myself, and he taught me
all the ins and outs of proper breaking technique, coming
down the grapevine and losing your brakes, you know, all

(07:24):
of that kind of stuff. That was so, you know,
of course important.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Well, how hard is it to drive a semi?

Speaker 2 (07:34):
It's not it's hard. There's a lot of technique, there's
a lot of keeping it in a very narrow rpm
range regardless of your speed. The diesel engine doesn't like
revving up and revving down. It was just sit right
in a little three hundred rpm window. The transmissions are
usually thirteen speed, and you learn to shift them without

(07:58):
using the clutch. You do it all with. There's a
number like twenty one hundred RPMs where it will slide
from one gear to the next, and it's very fluid.
It almost feels like an automatic transmission when it's done properly,
and you can go up and down the gear ranges
like that. Backing up is a whole another thing that

(08:22):
backing up is like, and especially at the kind of
venues we were playing, and we had built a trailer
that was eleven foot high instead of the normal like
I think thirteen maybe or so that we could get
in these venues and get in closer. We didn't want
to have to roll stuff, you know, blocks away, so
backing in curved backing. I still look back at and think,

(08:47):
how in the world did I do that and get
away with it?

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Okay? There were two Minassas albums. It was the double
album in seventy two was subsequent single album the double
album was one of the great products of all time.
You've seen a million bands. How hot was Manassas live?

Speaker 2 (09:08):
They had great nights? Uh yeah. A lot of it
dependent on how on Stephen was, you know, and it
was material sometimes it was, but you know, the arrangements
were amazing. Stephen is to this day. I just amazed
at his ability as as a writer, a producer and arranger.

(09:32):
You know, those songs were just so well put together.
And what we carried on the road was everything that
was on the record. It was the same band, and
so yeah, it could sound amazing.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Okay, you know he's a public figure. Didn't you work
with him for so long? What does the average person
not know about? Stephen still's.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Shy you know about I don't know that I can
speak to it that well. I saw him about a
month ago. I hadn't seen him for probably twenty five years.
I did see him. No, No, that's wrong. I saw him
at the Buffalo Springfield concert here in town. I don't know.

(10:20):
Andy Summers took me and I'm going to say it
was probably four years ago, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
The Buffalo Springfield I think was twenty eleven.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
No, it wasn't that long ago. They've played at the
Wiltern or.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Whatever you saw not important. You saw him at the
Buffalo Springfield Show, and you know, I said hello, but
we haven't spent any time where we've sat down and talked.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
I did see him at the bookstore in Studio City
just a month ago and walked up to him and
kind of surprised him. You know, hello, it's Don Gamon.
He took one look at me and said, wow, we've
gotten old. And then we talked, and you know, he

(11:12):
talked about how happy he was and how different life
was for him right now compared to you know, the
last twenty five years, and that, yeah, he seemed like
he was in a really good place. And we exchanged
numbers again and said that we're going to get together.
You know, before that, when I was working at Criteria,

(11:35):
I would probably there was a record that I did
in like seventy five was Neil and Steven together, And
it's probably the last time I spent significant time with him.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Well that's a legendary record. Long may you run? Because
I believe the first dates were in Florida. Stills flew
down and then Neil Young sent a telegram saying, you know,
essentially I'm out.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Well that's kind of the story. I can give you
the actual, the more complete story. Actually. The thing that's
remarkable about this, it says so much about both of them,
is that they put together. We're going to make a
record together, just Steven and I and I'm going to

(12:24):
come in a couple of weeks before we're going to start,
and I just want to get acclimated. So Neil comes
in town and promptly buys like a fifty foot old
junker wooden boat, as Neil would, and parks it in
Coconut Grove in the Marina and starts to write the

(12:45):
songs for the album. And so his pre production was
I'm coming to town to get the flavor and I'm
going to write the album here right now, which he did.
And then Steven shows up probably a day before we're
going to start, and he checks in the best hotel
in town, and and then we go in the studio
and Steven's got a couple of songs I've been sitting

(13:07):
around for a while, and then he's got a few
more that he's not finished, and Neil's all ready to go,
and so we record the record, and it's going really well,
and it's a it's a good band, mostly Stevens players
from Midasses, and uh, all of a sudden, David and

(13:28):
Graham show up. And there hadn't been a lot of
the four of them together, Uh, you know, probably for
I don't know. I don't know that it was a while.
And they show up and everybody's getting along really great,
having a wonderful time. And I'm not sure who invited,
but somebody said, why don't you sing on this song?

(13:52):
And so the David and Graham go out and sing
background so on one of the songs, and then it
turned into three songs, and then five songs, and then
now there's talk of why don't we record one of
David's songs in one of Graham's songs, and oh, now

(14:12):
we're making a CSNY record, and the the vibe all
of a sudden. I don't think I even realized it
until it was habitual that every morning at nine o'clock,
Neil would call me at home and say, this is
what I'd like to do today. Can you get this

(14:34):
stuff up? We'll do this overdub, we'll look at this.
And he called me at nine o'clock this morning, and
he said, Hey, I'm in Zuma and I go Zuma.
He says, yeah, I'm here in Zuma. I flew out
last night. And isn't Zuma on the West coast and

(14:57):
he says yes, yeah. He says, you know, I'm not
really happy with the way things have been going. It's
not what you know, Steve and I said we were
going to do. So, you know, would you just kind
of go in there and, you know, clean up the tracks,
put things back the way it was before, David and Graham,
you know, put their vocals on it. And then when
you get all that done, give me a call. I'll

(15:18):
come back and we'll finish the record.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
And then what happened.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
That's what we did. I cleaned it up.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Okay, did you put all that stuff in there? What
did Stephen, Graham and David say about what Neil said?

Speaker 2 (15:43):
You know, I don't remember there was any discussion. It
was just you know, or maybe I was withheld from
what that might have been. But all I knew was
that the next time we were back in the studio
it was just Steven and Neil again.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
But going to the next step a tour was guard
did or booked, excuse me, and Neil was booked and
ultimately he did not go out. Can you tell us
anything about that?

Speaker 2 (16:11):
No, Honestly, I don't even recall that, but I'm sure
you're right. That's something you'll have to kind of bear
with me, Bob. There's there are giant holes that. Honestly,
I look to other people that it might have been
there for their recollection, you know. I know that shortly
after that, all four of them did get together, and
then I went out on the road. I recalled doing

(16:32):
shows in like Wimbley Stadium. I took my leave from
Criteria to go Douche and I only think it was
one show, but there might have been more that the
four of them did together.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yeah, Okay, let's go back to the beginning. You're from where.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Okay.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Home of the Pennsylvania Dutch. When you are in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
because now Lydditz, which is right in that area, is
the epicenter of live music, staging audio. Was there anything
like that there when you were growing up? No?

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Well, then the Claire brothers, the two brothers lived in Lettitts.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Okay, so you're growing up is there music in the house.
How do you become infected with music?

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, I guess my story is that, you know, probably
in third grade I was I wanted to join the orchestra,
and the orchestra director said to me, I need a violist.
You're going to play viola very typical way that things
people learn instruments. So I start practicing in viola, taking lessons.

(17:47):
I do that for many years, eventually become like first
chair in the district of Blancaster County Orchestra. So I
was a decent violist. But right around nineteen sixty four
sixty three, the Beatles came along and I started letting

(18:10):
my hair grow a little longer. And in those days,
because I was on the swimming team, you had to
have it above your ears and above your forehead and
all these kind of hair rules. And my father, who
was recovering Mennonite, did not like me letting my hair
grow either, And basically I got thrown out an orchestra,

(18:32):
even though I was a decent player, because the orchestra
conductor did not like the fact that I was getting
interested in rock music. And what happened was I got
together with a trombone player and we formed a rock band.
The rock band needed equipment, especially vocal equipment.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Let's stop late, wait, let's stop, let's stop right. Your
father was a recovering Mennonite. Tell me a little bit
more about that.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
You know, the my father was raised as a Mennonite,
and which is kind of the origins of the Amish.
The Amish kind of breakaway from the Mennonites. And what
happened was during World War Two. The Mennonites are conscientious subjectors.
They they do not believe in going to war and
qualify as I think as four F or whatever the

(19:30):
classification is. That's that my father disagreed with the Mennonites.
He is a conscientious subjector and reverse and left the religion,
joined the Presbyterian Church and joined the army. And so
I guess the point of all this I'm making is

(19:51):
that I grew up with a very conservative father who
church going, very active. That that was something I was
around a lot, and moving more into the the rock
music scene and the whole Beatles thing was I'm sure

(20:12):
very you know, just distant from what their experience was.
But nevertheless, he allowed me to pursue it, and that
entailed initially as the rock band. I knew I couldn't
afford to buy an AMP, and so I went about trying.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh wait, wait, wait, wait, I don't want to get
to I want to stop you once again. Was your
mother a Mennonite?

Speaker 2 (20:43):
No, no she was. I don't even know what church,
probably another Presbyterian kind of church, you know, But no
she was not.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
And then since your father left the Men in Knight,
didn't he have relatives? Did you have contact with him?

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Not?

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Contact with him?

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah, but not a lot. I mean I can remember
going to family reunions where there'd be there might be
some horses and buggies in the front yard, you know,
because there was definitely a cross pollination of this stuff.
I had many uncles and aunts that were Gamings, but
we weren't close with any of them. I had a
grandmother who was Mennonite and who was an incredible cook

(21:23):
that would see often on Sundays and she'd make these
giant meals, and she wore you know what you would
think of men andite woman wears very conservative you know,
play dress. And same with my grandfather. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
One of the big things in Lancaster is scrapple. Is
that a Mennonite. Is that a Mennonite thing or is
that just a regional thing.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
That's probably mennnight. Yeah, it's one of the many things
that all cultures do with leftovers, right, grind things up
and mix them with some a grain, smother it with
maple syrup. Yeah, I actually missed that.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Okay, how many kids in the family.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
Just one sister?

Speaker 1 (22:12):
And what she would her life turn out to be?

Speaker 2 (22:15):
She became a second grade teacher and pretty much her
whole life.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
Okay, you're leaning towards electronics. So in school, were you
good with science?

Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yeah? I was was very good with pretty much. I'm
a decent school person, especially once I got into junior high.
I had a closet in the basement. Believe it or not,
that would be from one hobby to the next, chemistry, photography, biology,
butterfly net's dissecting stuff, to the point that in like

(22:50):
seventh grade, I think the science teacher got me a
college course in invertebrates, and I had a shark and
a cat and all this stuff that I could dissect
that was kind of on the side. So at the
time I was thinking about medicine, I was I might
want to be a doctor. I liked all this stuff
and it's probably well suited for it until the rock

(23:14):
and roll thing came along and that just blew everything up.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Okay, you were playing the viola. You talk about organizing
a band. What I mean, Jerry Goodman played the violin
in the flock. But what was your instrument in the band?

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Bass?

Speaker 1 (23:34):
And how did you learn how to play the bass?

Speaker 2 (23:37):
Very badly? I was a horrible bass player. I looked
back at it with total regret. But it wasn't a
great bass. It was a national bass, short neck, not
a very great tone. I built my own amp out of.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
Well, well this is where this is. That's where you
were going. Yeah, you had the bass, and of course
the bass requires Okay, I'll ask you. You're the big expert.
Why do you need a specific base amp.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
You needed big speakers, you know, the biggest ones they make,
so that the base takes more for you know, more power.
It needs more surface area. I wanted basically a Fender basement,
you know, it would been what I wanted. The best
bass player in town had a Fender basement, and he
was with a Fender base and he was great. I

(24:30):
was not great, But I needed a good base amp.
And at the time I was also very interested in woodworking,
and I had bought my own table salt, which I
set up in the garage, and so I was building
my own speaker cabinets and I copied them like the fenders,
with vinyl coverings and corners and pretty groklaw looked exactly

(24:51):
like a Fender basement. Actually, as far as an amp goes,
it performed well. But that process I'm going through that.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
Wait, okay, it's one thing to build the speaker cabinet.
I think you had two fifteen's in a Fender basement.
How the hell did you build the amplifier you did?

Speaker 2 (25:12):
There was these things called Dina kits oh yeah, if
you recall the oh yeah, and they sold like a
thirty five watt amp, you know, power amp tubes. And
then they had a little pre app to had a
phonograph premp in it that had an ox position on it.
And so I built those two things, and then I

(25:34):
modified the inputs that would take a guitar jack and
that was that. I mean, it was basically the same
stuff that's in a Fender basement. I just didn't have
the overdrive capability, which on a bass, you don't really
need that much.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
But okay, so you're in the band, you're playing the bass,
you've built your own imitation bass man. What happens next.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Well, we needed a vocal system. So the next step
was to go to the local Lancaster parts store where
they sell everything that unique speaker parts. And I'm down
there looking about maybe buying some speakers, and I run
to this Guy's name is Jean Claire, and he's the

(26:18):
working in the parts store, and I told him what
I'm doing, and he says, you know, my brother and
I we run a little business on the side making
vocal monitors for churches, and we need somebody that could
maybe crank out these vocal columns. Would you be interested,
and we'll help you out with the stuff you're looking for,

(26:38):
and you know, maybe you can use that for your band.
And so basically I started as a cabinet maker for
these two brothers building these church vocal columns, you know,
like a sure vocal column. They are basically copies of
the six eight inch speakers. I think it was in
a stack and any So that was the beginning of

(27:01):
my relationship with Claire. And at the time they had
a two car garage in Lititz where they built their stuff,
and then I had my garage in Lancaster and it
grew very quickly from that to a point where we
were building stuff to do live shows at Franklin and

(27:25):
Marshall College for the bands that were coming through, booked
by the by the people there.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Okay, you graduate from high school and you go right
into making these cabinets or what happened?

Speaker 2 (27:41):
No, no, no, this is all. I was fifteen. This
is long before graduating. I was fifteen when I was
The next generation speaker was an A seven, which is
an altech lancing voice of the theater. It's a monstrous
box with a horn and a wolfer and a horn.

(28:02):
Hard to build, by the way, because it's got curved
wood in it, but we built two of those and
we're using it at Franklin and Marshall. I think the
first time we used it was maybe Peter Poul and
Mary came through and we added some stuff for them,
and then fortuitously the Four Seasons came through town and

(28:28):
we set that up for them, and they really liked
roy and decided to hire roy On to go on
the road with them permanently. And then so that I
think he was a shop teacher at the time and
he quit his teaching job and this is all well,
I'm still I mean, I can remember driving to Atlantic

(28:52):
City to do shows with the Supremes and the Four
Tops on the boardwalk and driving a cor of Air
van on a learners permit, and that was kind of
my beginning with live sound. And the systems were very rudimentary.
I think we had maybe four microphones and I don't

(29:14):
even know what we use for power amp, probably something horrible,
but it was better than what most people were offering.
It was a real infancy for what sound was. And
but we grew so fast during that time, moving into
building our own consoles and then eventually partnering up with

(29:37):
the newest people that were building transistor power amps, and
then we were off to the races.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
Okay, you're working at Franklin and Marshall, the local college.
How do you get a gig in Atlantic City?

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Four seasons I think was the ticket that got us out.
You know, they were seeing us on the road, or
not me, but Roy with his setup for them, and
it worked. And so we go through and often it
would be the promoters like Philadelphia, Larry Maggott and the
Speedback Brothers. You know, we became close with them, the

(30:13):
Belkans in Cleveland so quickly. You know, the promoters knew
that they could get sound equipment that worked for these
bands that had nothing, because production wasn't something that bands,
you know, carried at that time. It just came in.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
Ultimately, you know, from an outside viewpoint, there's Clear Brothers
and Showco. When Clear was starting and starting to gain traction,
was there any competition or was it just a regional business?
What was going on?

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Yeah, there was Mannis. It was a Boston company that
was quite large. They were using the eight foot tall
movie theater straight horn I forget, the model number two
ten Altech I don't remember, and the multicellular Altech lancing

(31:16):
horns that were monstrous. And then they had semis and
the dance floor. They are in the front of the
semi that's up on top of the tree. They had
built racks of Macintosh to power amplifiers and that was
how they built the first really big systems. And not

(31:39):
many people I don't even know who was using that stuff.
It was at the big gigs. But we were opportunists,
right at that moment we realized we could build a
better base enclosure, and we came up with a rebuild
of a W box which was just about as big
two fifteens, weighed probably five hundred pounds. It was ridiculous,

(32:05):
and we had systems very quickly that were four of
those cabinets and the two by five cellular horns with
double throated drivers on the back, pretty loud, and we'd
stack those up on the side of stage. I remember
doing Iron Butterfly shows with a system like that, and

(32:25):
it actually worked pretty well a great low end. There
was probably a three hundred watt system tops, but what
we were using before was probably sixty. So yeah, already
were off to the races. And what happened was McManus,
which was the big company that had acts signed up

(32:45):
for production. We bit by bit started stealing their clients.
I think Bloitzweat and Tears might have been one of
the first ones. Iron Butterfly were the West Coast companies
that were was it Osley? Which guy is that that's

(33:06):
the one who's the.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
About the LSD king with the grateful.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah, yeah, but I think that one of these guys
was the was the brains behind the grateful deads sound.
You know, he really understood time alignment and all this stuff.
It was a whole different concept. Those people were some
sort of competition, uh certainly inspiration for their technology. Yeah, No,

(33:36):
there was a lot of competition. But what we had
going for us was that we were very light on
our feet and we had this company in California called
SAE that was building a three hundred watt transistor app
that was uh road worthy, And we started racking those
things up and all of a sudden we were off
to the races and much louder.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Because the say he ended up being a consumer brand too.
Uh huh. So, right, how do you go from building
speakers and amplifiers to mixers desks? You know, that's a
totally different I mean they're all connected, but it's a
different thing.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah. It was exciting, you know. For for me, I
was kind of in the throes of what am I
going to do with my life as a seventeen eighteen
year old And at that point, you know, my parents
are disappointed that didn't look so good for the medical career,
and I would saying, what do I do that's going
to be able to further this career that I'm really loving,

(34:37):
you know, the combination of music and electronics and invention
and and so I thought, well, I'll go to Penn
State try and get an electrical engineering degree, and I applied.
I got in. On a side note, they gave me
an interest test I think it was called the Smith

(34:59):
interest test when I was admitted, and it was kind
of a precursor to whether or not you would succeed
at what you were pursuing. And there was also the
test were dim. They gave me a fifteen percent chance
of passing as an electrical engineer, and I like a
ninety five percent chance as a psychologist and a ninety

(35:23):
percent as a musical arranger. So I mean, I don't
know that I really took it to heart at the time,
But of course, now looking back at it, they were right,
you know, because I still am not a great I
understand technical things really well. I'm not an inventor like
people that we eventually hired that built all this stuff.

(35:45):
But I was a better mixer. I understood the music intrinsically.
Sitting in an orchestra had its effect, you know. I
understood counter melodies and where parts need to be featured
and all that kind of stuff. It just came naturally.
And so as we got more and more of the
stage miked up and you had daters for drums and
bass and guitars and everything there you need, somebody then

(36:09):
understood what the music was. And most people were not
carrying their own mixers, so that became another element. Anyhow,
I wound up at Penn State and I lasted I
don't know, ten weeks twenty weeks before I quit and
moved into their technical program at a local community campus

(36:31):
and did two years and then went on the road.
And I was on the road all through college. I'd
go to classes Monday through Friday and then drive home
to let us pick up a truck and go out
for the weekend.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
Okay, one of the Claire brothers goes out with the
Four Seasons. Does he come back or does he continue
to go on the road.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah, I mean there was scheduling like anything else. You know,
he'd be out with the Four Seasons for you know,
two months while they do the summer tour or whatever,
and then he'd have some time off. And very quickly
it became you know, I think Jane would be out
on the road with his set of acts. I had
mine after college, probably nineteen seventy. I had logans of Messina,

(37:20):
the James Gang, Stephen Stills. Yes, those were kind of
my acts that would rotate. There'd be scheduling things where
I'd have to cover for one of Jean's or Deane
would cover for one of mine. But generally speaking, we
all had sets of acts that were are our domain.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
Okay, so you have the clear brothers, then you're the
third person. Do they cut you in on ownership?

Speaker 2 (37:50):
You know? And never? Yes, they always talked about it.
It was kind of what happened more than anything, I
think in all fairness, is that I started to realized
that this was like within a year, probably two years
after being out of college, that living on the road
like this was not what I wanted to do. The

(38:13):
last year I was on the road, I did three
hundred and twenty one night ers and I drove two
hundred thousand miles and we didn't have a bus. I
did the driving and it nearly I mean, I was
in a truck accident I should have died where the
guy that was driving fell asleep. There was those kind
of things that were happening at that time in nineteen
seventy two, where I think that's when the production really

(38:37):
turned and everybody started to realize that. It's probably when
the ticket prices started to go up because they started
to spend money on tour buses and proper semi drivers.
Everything became what we see today on a small scale.
And so I by the time nineteen seventy Tree came

(39:00):
around and Stephen had given me this offer of doing
some studio work, it was like a godsend. It was like, oh, yes,
this is what I love.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Okay, when you left the road, how many people were
working for Clear Brothers.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
Maybe twenty twenty five. We had already gone through two
generations of I think when I left we had a
six stocks semi warehouse with a wood shop, of painting
booth and electronics shop. We were building our own consoles
or own speakers or own packaging. It was a big

(39:37):
operation in by seventy three. And of course that's nothing
compared to the city of Litits and whatever they call it,
Rock of something. When I look, I haven't never I've
never been there. But when I see what happened out
of what we created, it's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Tay Towers production. Physical production is also there. Okay, you're
on the road with all those acts. A in retrospect,
although it is fifty years ago, it seems like yesterday.
How good were those systems compared to the systems of today?

Speaker 2 (40:14):
Oh, it was a joke, just on the level of
how loud they were and how far they would penetrate
into a room. I mean, the system I took on
the road with the James guy was four speakers. That
had I had eight fifteen inch speakers, eight in four
ten minutes, and I had I had maybe six seventy

(40:41):
what JBL drivers for the mid range, and then about
that many for tweeters. And we would do you know,
ten thousand seats you know arenas, you know, and you'd
walk around. You could hear, I mean you could hear
there's music, but if the crowd got too excited, it
overwhelmed it. I mean, we were in the Hollywood Bowl

(41:03):
the other night, and I'm just that might even be
a Claire system. There's a whole arm of Claire Brothers
now that builds nothing but installations that are permanent. It's
almost turning to the point now where everybody realizes that
the systems are in there are great. You just bring
your own board and plug in that. I mean, it's
just there's no comparison. There's a guy that we brought

(41:25):
in that was part of this transition that really was
the kind of another what do you call it, a catalyst.
His name is Bruce Jackson, and I don't know if
you know him. He was Australian. He died unfortunately in
a plane accident about I don't know, maybe ten or
fifteen years ago. But the brilliant, brilliant sound engineer on

(41:50):
the road with Springsteen for years, did so many things
that were He understood time delay, He understood how speaker
rays had to be. What we see was shape of
how these things are hung with. This guy invented all
of that stuff. He knew that there had to be
ways of lining up all the drivers that would all

(42:11):
come out together, and the same thing with you put
delay towers in all of that stuff. And he was
such a great inventor. Well, a quick story, that's funny.
One of our accounts after Bruce was there was Elvis Presley,

(42:32):
and this was Bruce's account, and the Colonel had come
to him said, if you can build me a system
that we can hang over the stage so I can
do three sixty. I can make YadA YadA more money.
So build me something so I can have a three
sixty sound so I can remember coming home. And Bruce
would be designing this thing, and the metal shop in Efrita,

(42:53):
which is a little town outside of Lancaster where there
was a metal shop, and they built this giant metal
structure that would hold six speakers in a circle, Wilfer's
tweeters mid range, all mounted focus. And then it had
this miracle thing called a chain climber, which is a
motor that climbs a chain, so you hang a chain

(43:14):
from the ceiling and it hoists the whole thing up
right from the middle of the stage. And it came
apart in a clamshell and you'd roll it in the truck,
all pre set wired and everything, roll it out, roll
it on, hoist it up. So he built this thing
and probably gobs of money doing it. And he said,

(43:34):
would you come on the road with me for the
dry run. We'll do the you know, the two of
us together. You've feared me two engineers to scope out
whether this really works or not. When we get to
the gig, We set it up, get it in the air.
Everything seems to be working fine. Show starts and we
get maybe a minute into the first song and the

(43:56):
whole top end goes nothing but mush. We couldn't figure
out what's going on. And so the long short of
it is, we never thought about the fact that the
whole structure was built out of metal, and that if
anything would blow where the voice coils would touch the

(44:16):
metal of the driver, it would short out to everything else.
And that's why all the amps blew, all the drivers
blewe and so we had to We limped through that
one show before we realized we had to isolate everything.
But it was an embarrassment of sorts.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
Okay, was that part of the deal if you went
on the road that you had to drive the truck too?

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Pretty much? Yeah, we did not have drivers in those days.
I never had a driver except on the Manassas tour
and he taught me how to drive.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Tell me about the avenu of monitors.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
You know, it was my I failed. Basically. Roy came
to me and said we're going to start building monitors
bronze stage and I said, what are You're crazy? What
do we need monitors, for can't they hear themselves? And
he said, no, no, no, they want to hear themselves.
I want to build a little tiny speaker. Make it
as small as you possibly can, have an angle up
so that it points up at the guy singing. All right,

(45:26):
So I build it, and my heart wasn't in it,
but anyhow, so I built something rudimentary to what exactly
what we see today as far as a little monitor,
and Roy said, that's not going to do. I'm Roy
was a task master. He was a real you know,
you imagine your shop teacher criticizing your joinery. That's what

(45:49):
Roy was and probably still is. And and he turns
around and one day later cranks out basically the same thing,
but like a beautiful piece of furniture. Routed edge is
good seams weight a ton. And then he had put
them in complimentary angles so you could have two of
them back to back. In a case, you can roll

(46:11):
them on the truck. And so that was our first
slanted monitor, which you could say that was probably the
first one invented. I've heard people dispute it that maybe
on the West coast there was somebody that came up
with the same idea. It wasn't that radical an idea.
It was just the idea of what it would take
to make it run, because you're going to have to
have a separate mix to just put the vocal mic

(46:34):
through it or whatever he might want to hear.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
So once you invent the vocal monitors and you need
a board for that, you now have two engineers on
the road.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, you've got a monitor guy in a front of
house guy.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
Okay, the front of house, which you did a ton of.
What's the key for a front of house mix?

Speaker 2 (46:57):
Well, getting a good location is probably half of it,
you know, because most of the houses would say this
is where you can put the mixer, and in many
cases that might be so far back you really don't
know what's going on, might be behind the whole crowd,
or maybe you're off to the side where you really
can't tell if the low end's doing anything. In those days,
the systems were so uneven that the best place to

(47:20):
mix it would be right in front of the speakers,
maybe one hundred feet away. And so that's what we
always tried to get. If you get to a place
where you can get something, where you're actually here, then
the task becomes whether or not you know what to do,
you know, to make it sound good, you know what's
a good balance. And of course in those days, everybody
was enamored with the kick drum, and so that to

(47:42):
this day, I'm still upset with how loud people make
kickdrums in live pas It's like, come on, this is
like what about the rest of the band, But yeah,
it's it's it's a matter of having a good sound check,
making sure that everything is balanced coming off the stage first.

(48:08):
And I think that's probably the thing I would always
do in sound check is go up on stage and
listen to what they're doing without the system on it,
and then turn on the house system and say, okay,
can you hear yourself singing out of the house, And
then you know we balanced from there, and then you
fill in the stage monitors.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
Okay, you're on the road with all these bands, although
you're working morning, noon and night. Needless to say, there
were no self honed cameras. But to what degree was
it sex, drugs and rock and roll or was everybody
working so hard? It really wasn't like that.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
There's some of both, you know, it's very much it's
all the Gamut. You know both.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
Okay, you did so many shows. We talked about the
Elvis Show and the problem. Tell me about two great shows.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Mm hmmm. Two great shows.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
Were two great tours.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Well probably you know Logins and Messina was uh we
tore over to him for about a year off and
on and I had a decent system. The same that
was so great about that band was what was coming

(49:45):
off stage, just like with Manassas, was almost exactly what
the record was. All the parts were there. Jimmy and
Messina was a taskmaster extraordinaire. The guy was you could
say he's an asshole, but really he was just very
focused on what was right and wrong and a real producer.
He knew what was how to how to make things

(50:07):
sound good and so yeah, the shows were consistently great
every night. You know, Kenny Logan singing and uh and
well well arranged band with lots of colors, uh, minimalized.
It wasn't over the top. There wasn't too much. You
could really make things sound great and so that was

(50:29):
a lot of fun and it was well run. There
was uh, you know, the touring was was reasonable. The
other one was uh, the James Gang, which which is
an amazing show. You know, good songs, Joe Walsh amazing
guitar player, but you know Jimmy and Dale. It's for

(50:52):
a three piece band. It was, and you could make
it sound amazing because it was so simple and but
probably the most fun that I've had mixing was the
Mellencamp And this is much later what happened later on
for me in a little out of order, but the

(51:13):
ten years from like seventy three when I started in
the studio until eighty two when Mellencamp and I had
our first big record with the American Full John Wood
would basically commandeer me from my studio work and say,

(51:33):
you got to come out in the road now. The
guy here's doing the sound doesn't know what he's doing,
and so I would go out in the road with
him and do tours. And this was right when he
was starting to pick up eight, probably eighty two to
eighty five, and we had much bigger systems then, and
they weren't clear systems. They were they were probably show cover,
but it was a big loud system. I didn't have

(51:54):
to do any of the work except show up and
mix and amazing sound shows. Probably some of my most
favorite shows are Mellencamp shows.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Okay, now you show up in Miami because Steven Still's
got you the job. You know, they're the Alberts there.
You know, Tom Dowd's working there. You show up, what
is your job? And how do they treat you?

Speaker 2 (52:22):
They're so nice? I mean, there was certainly. The only
jealousy was from others who were like me, trying to
make their way through as engineers. And I had been
given a leg up because of Stephen, and yeah, I
did have you know, eight years on the road behind me,
and I knew how to set up equipment and run

(52:45):
on my cable. But these guys, you know, might have
come in and been you know, serving coffee for the
last two years. So there was that. But from the
other end, like the Alberts were nothing but wonderful. Everyone
was so nice to me. And I went through my

(53:05):
initial doing Cuban bands, you know, for probably the first
year that I was there. It's probably a good thing,
doing a lot of any track work, building an album
in a day, really getting my editing chops up, and
I was impatient. I can remember going to the owner
of Macamerman and saying, you know, I'm gonna I'm going
to mix my first record, and he would look at

(53:27):
me like nuts. You know, there's you need about ten
years under your belt before you can be a good mixer,
and it was about right. Uh yeah, I would say
that Initially, I also found a niche because of my
ability as an engineer, speaker design. I was way ahead

(53:50):
of everybody else. I knew more about a lot of
elements of the technical stuff than anybody there, even the
even the engineering department, because we had built so much stuff.
And there were issues that we had with m c I,
which was the local uh Fort Lauder deal company that
built the tape machines and the consoles that I get

(54:12):
in arguments with about you know, they were using these
ICs in their consoles that sounded horrible, and nobody would
believe me. You know, I said, look what's going on.
API has got nave. All of these companies they use
they don't use integrated circuits, they use discrete components and
the transformers and things that sound good. And they would

(54:34):
just tell me, no, this is natural. It's unity in,
unity out. And no one understood that we were in
the business of coloring, that we're painting with air and
that you have to have things that make coloration. It's
not supposed to be what comes in goes out. That's
high five shit. When you're when you're recording something, it's

(54:56):
entirely different. And so there were those kind of battles.
I wound up redoing a lot of the monitoring systems there.
I worked with a guy named Ed Long who was
a San Jose speaker designer. He built time ALIGNE speakers

(55:17):
monitors and we played around with that for a while,
all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
So you're there. Traditionally, you know, you start as second
engineer and you work in like sixteen twenty hours a day.
Was that your experience?

Speaker 2 (55:35):
Oh yeah, it was wonderful. And overtime is the key
to survival, so you know, obviously, you know, if you
can put in one hundred hours a week every week,
your paychecks a lot better because the minimum I went
from a great, amazing amount of money I was making
when I was on the road to virtually nothing. You know,

(55:58):
when I started in the studio.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
And what was the key to going from a second
to a regular engineer.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
You know, I didn't spend much time as a second,
so they threw me into the lower echelon, you know,
like the Cuban bands that would come in for a
day and just kind of let me flounder and I
would get through it. And it didn't take me long
before I could, you know, get through a session on
my own with with with a second engineer. I didn't

(56:30):
spend much time as a second engineer. Maybe no, not
really fortunate that in most cases because I was lousy,
My printing wasn't good enough, all the stuff that seconds
are supposed to do. Setups. Yeah, so.

Speaker 1 (56:54):
You're doing Cuban bands, etc. What do you learn about
studio sound as a host a live sound studio engineering?

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Well, it's like we're talking about just a second ago,
that painting with air is the way that I like
to think about this. It really is. And everybody has
a unique way that they want something to present. And
that's kind of why I think I've had such a
long career, is that I've always been willing to draw

(57:26):
a bit a different kind of painting for each band,
and that I, in fact, what I would do as
a process would be to look at it and say
that guy's got a certain kind of guitar tone and
some way that he plays that that's kind of special,
and maybe the grooves special here, and that these things
need to be given more room, and that thing over

(57:48):
there which is just covering everything up, maybe we just
get rid of it. So there's this kind of very
quickly trying to make an assessment of of what's important.
And then because you're the engineer, you can influence all
this stuff without a word. You just make the balance
the way you hear it, and if it sounds good

(58:10):
and everybody agrees, you're on your way. Well, of course
that's a whole different story. But yeah, I think that
that's the main difference is the creative process of it's
actually kind of the same thing of what a good
producer will do is realize the strengths that he has

(58:33):
to work with and not demand out of the band
something they're not capable of.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
Okay, when do you go from Cuban, you know, sort
of off the radar bands to bands with a higher
or acts with a higher profile.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
Well, they're the ones that were my clients. Like Steven
would come in with Neil and so that would be
my project for that three months or whatever. I started
working with the Albert brothers because the Albert brothers both
liked producing and not doing so much of the engineering,
even though Ron was a phenomenal engineer, and as a

(59:14):
team they're really really good at what they do. They
wanted they wanted me to be their engineer and so
basically I came in and it was the three of
us and so there were jeez, pure prairie League mcgwynn,
Clark Hillman. Uh. Eventually it was John Mellencamp. Uh. The

(59:37):
first record I made with John was with the Albert brothers.
I don't know, there was there was a ton of them.
So that was kind of my next step was working
with producer known producers at at the and they were
the premier producers at Criteria other than Tom Down their residents.

(59:57):
Tom would come and go between New York and in Miami.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
So at what point, other than Steven did you start
to get your own projects? And how did you do that?

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
You know? There was the key was the front office
and knowing the person who was taking the bookings, and
so it would be kind of a daily checking in
with Margie or it was Edith and what came in, Well,
Cat Stevens just called in to do a day. Oh

(01:00:38):
what is anybody assigned in it note, what could I
do that I think I'm available? You know, that would
be that kind of thing, and so Cat Stevens would
come in, we'd spend the day mixing something that he had,
So those kind of that would be it. Further on,
you know, like I only had the opportunity of working
with Tom Dowd directly one and that was on a

(01:01:00):
Firefall record, and that was amazing. I mean, that's graduate
level production. Doesn't get any better of, you know, watching
somebody who really understands everything.

Speaker 1 (01:01:17):
So how did you go from moving the faders to
being the producer?

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
You know, there never really was one or the other
until much later. Initially I knew that my engineering was
going to be my ticket to the producing thing. Well,
there's a whole section where I worked with the Beg's
for about three years, and that probably is part of
the transition, is that I worked with the production team

(01:01:48):
of Alvi Gluten, Carle Richardson and Barry Gibb and we
did the first thing I did with them was a
Barbara Skreuisan record, and it was tied into them moving
from doing their records at Criteria to building their own
studio over in Miami. Beach. They hired me to help
them build the studio. At the time, Criteria was starting

(01:02:09):
to be in doldrums. I think it was probably seventy eight,
maybe music business was tanking. All of the bands that
had to come to Miami to record from the Eagles
and Simsic and all that stuff was starting to dry up,
And so I took the job and kind of went
off the salary at Criteria and built their studio and

(01:02:33):
then helped them make the striis In record, which was
a continuation of their thing that they did with looping,
with making tape machines, have tape running a circle, A
lot of a lot of brainstorming kind of stuff, no costs,

(01:02:54):
spared a lot of learning cases what not to do,
because we eventually spent like a million dollars on a
record of their own. We built drum machines that were
actually drums that had arms that hit We used solenoids
to hit the drums and then send claviers to trigger them,

(01:03:17):
and we spent weeks. We had jeff Riccaro and Steve
Gadd and Russ Kunkle come in for two weeks at
a stretch and try and aim at a two beat
loop on a twenty four track machine. Crazy stuff, you know. Anyhow,

(01:03:41):
that was kind of what I did right before Mellencamp
called and said, will you come and make a record
with me? And that was when I started my transition
to producing. He said, you can. You can co produce
the record with me, but I want you to engineer.
I want you to help me the people keep me

(01:04:02):
from getting too crazy. Probably the reverse or which album
was that American full Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:04:11):
Legendarily he presented it to Mercury and they said, this sucks,
We're not going to put it out and he stood
on his ground. What was the experience making the record?

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):
It was horrible, you know. I booked a new studio
that we had just finished at Criteria for about three months.
One summer he came in and rented a house. I
had just finished working with the Beg's on a record
that they released it. I think I told you they

(01:04:47):
spent a year on it and sold forty thousand copies.
It was a disaster, but I'd learned so much stuff
about how to combine all these elements, and the lind
drum machine was one of the things that we were
playing around with. We had access to one of the
first ones. And so during that summer I kept on

(01:05:10):
saying to John, you know, it can't just be two
guitars based and drums. We have to have some other
stuff too. And I've learned all this stuff. I'm not
saying it's right for you. And so we started experimenting,
and this is what Jack and Diane came out of
the use of the lind drum machine, and event we
worked on that for the whole summer. It took forever

(01:05:30):
to figure out how to I think Kenny was even
on with you, and he described how long it took
until he finally came up with a drum beat that
was like, Goddess out of this adul drums of that,
you know, it's like anyhow, the record was really hard John.

(01:05:51):
I mean, I think he would admit this too, that
he really didn't understand songwriting and arranging yet. And I
wasn't very good at it either. I mean, my my,
I didn't have one hundred songs that I knew how
to play on an instrument, which I think is that's
where good arranging and songwriting comes from. And so we struggled,

(01:06:12):
you know, with a lot of things that weren't really
that good, but we got Jack and Diane out of it,
and we did finish it during that three months long
short of it is, we handed it in and I
think the comment was what happened to our Neil Diamond?
What are you guys doing? And they wanted to drop him?

(01:06:36):
Was the net net? There were a lot of conversations.
I remember he was talking to Jimmy Ivan. I think
Jimmy Ivan was like, I don't know that he was
really trying to work his way in, but he was
certainly somebody that was offering opinions. And fortunately Billy Gaff,
who was John's manager and label, had enough faith in

(01:06:59):
him to to keep on shopping. You started shopping it
and we gave it a rest and then went back
in the studio for another stint for a month, and
by then he had paired up with a songwriter named
George Green and written Hurt So Good and I think
maybe two other songs, and we recorded four more songs

(01:07:21):
and then finished the album, turned it in, still didn't
like it, and it went through another couple of months
of the label losing interest until had a promotion at
the rock radio said I'm going to give this thing
a try and see if it works, and he put
it on radio in Pittsburgh, I think it was Pittsburgh.

(01:07:44):
He put it on rock radio, maybe ten stations, and
it reacted, so they put it on one hundred and
the rest is what we see today.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
So how did that feel?

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
Oh? Are you kidding? I was down to that we
had borrowed money from so many people. They had given
me fifteen thousand dollars for the co production, and I
didn't have any other income. And this was like a
two year process. We were like borrowing money from friends
and my parents and my sister just to make the

(01:08:17):
house payments. And it was it was amazing. And then
the fear of how am I going to like not
fuck this up? I remember that being Okay, we got
this far, now what you know, how are we going
to keep it going? You know?

Speaker 1 (01:08:38):
So what was the next step?

Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
Were you? Well, get out of debt? You know? I
think I did a record with Michael Stanley, who there's
a legendary Cleveland you know, Bruce Springsteen ish, wonderful man,
wonderful man. I made a record with him, paid me well,

(01:09:00):
the Balkans treated me well, they managed him, and that
got us out of debt, and by then I think
there was Alan Grubman was my attorney at the time,
and he got me a good deal on the American
Fool record, was a fair deal for co production, and

(01:09:21):
it was just a matter of waiting for the money
to come in, you know, And that kind of got
us out of howk. The next move was really realizing
that Miami wasn't going to be good for me anymore,
that I needed to try and take advantage of some
of this heat and see if I can maybe move
to Los Angeles or New York and get some more work.

(01:09:44):
So I thought Los Angeles. I was never that enamored
with New York. It was not my kind of town.
And so I moved out and knocked on doors for
a couple of weeks and didn't get really didn't get
my foot in the door, and I was at a
loss and I didn't want to do and I thought,

(01:10:05):
you know, who do I know that would maybe have
an idea? And I was thinking, well, Bobby COLUMBI wasn't
a close friend, but he was somebody that I toured
with and he knew who I was, and so I
managed to get his phone number and I called him
up and Bobby was like, done, you need an agent,

(01:10:26):
you need a manager. You can't You'll never get anywhere.
And the guy you need is Bob Boziak. And yeah,
he did me such a solid what a great guy. Anyhow,
So I met Bob, and Bob took me on and
told me to turn my beard up a little bit
and sent me out on meetings and got me some

(01:10:49):
work and bit by bit, but generally speaking, for the
first few years, it was from one mel Camp record
to the next that built my momentum.

Speaker 1 (01:11:00):
You're talking about we implying a significant other. When did
you have time to even find a significant other?

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
I met Grace, my wife currently, and then to my
only wife in nineteen seventy eight, right around the time
that I switched from Criteria to working with the Bechis,
and we got married in seventy nine. And yeah, it's

(01:11:34):
been forty five years.

Speaker 1 (01:11:36):
Okay, So you work on the next album, Pink Houses,
which is also a success, and then the breakthrough of Scarecrow.
You're doing all this with Mellencamp. Anything else going on
of any significance other than Mellencamp, Well.

Speaker 2 (01:11:52):
It was I need a discography. Cock Robin. Probably that's
one in there that I recall being in amongst the
Mellencamp brack oh Arian that's the big one. Yeah, nineteen
eighty maybe eighty four, Yes, it was. It might have

(01:12:18):
been right after the Aha record, which was our second record,
which we did in a shack which I built out
of a mobile recording truck, and Arim was looking for
a producer. They didn't like the idea of me. I
was too mainstream, too known. They wanted somebody more esoteric. Probably. Anyhow,

(01:12:49):
I had gotten the invite through one of John's guitar
techs and he knew somebody there in Athens and got
a meeting awkward, very very awkward situation. Ben was lovely,
Michael Stipe was elusive, as always seems to be. Net

(01:13:11):
was that they decided to try me out in a
local studio. I went into a studio, did a demo
with him, and they really liked it. And so I
had just finished building a studio for John in Indiana
from the ground up. It was like a real studio,
and we decided to make the record there, which was

(01:13:32):
a blast and probably one of the most revealing records
of my career as far as style and how I produce.
Learned so much from them.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
So how was the process these You know, Michael Stipe
is a guy who's got a reputation for knowing what
he wants and having it go that way.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
You know what we did was we did the tracks first,
because Peter Buck, I think it probably would be the
core songwriter of sorts. He came in with the core
you know, this is what I've written, this verse, chorus,
no words. Everybody kind of put parts together. They did
it all in their own and so we recorded guitar

(01:14:16):
based and drums, and then Michael would go off with
that who knows where stay up all night and come
in with words that were certainly evocative, but from my perspective, nonsensical.
And this was this was the discussions that he and

(01:14:39):
I would have because I was pushing for let's make
a radio record, Let's make something that makes sense somewhat.
You're always up a loud, have a great voice. Let's
let's bring you forward into to record making. And you know,
we had our arguments. He he didn't see a that way,

(01:15:01):
and I began to see it his way, and I
think he saw I think there was a middle that
we both came to He for sure became comfortable with
my idea of the balance being that I could make
his voice sound consuming so that you didn't think about
what he was saying. You thought about, Wow, what a
great sound he makes with his He's got a great voice.

(01:15:22):
And then we made the production just a little fuller
and a little more esoteric because I had a pump organ,
some unusual instruments that we had found that we that
we would use, and Michael Mills, Mike Mills was like
my partner in crime. He could play everything, and I'd say,
what about if we had a part that came in here,

(01:15:43):
can you do something, you know, maybe just to spend
through here, you know. And so we colored our way
through it, and then it was a blast, and really
it really made me start to trust a not being
in control.

Speaker 1 (01:16:09):
Okay, at what point do you become just a producer
and you hire an engineer?

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
Right around then, probably I think, oh, Jimmy Barnes and
all the Melancamp records. We would hire extra engineers, like
I would be doing the overdubs, I'd be running the
tape machine, I'd be doing the editing. When it came
to mixing, because we were doing everything manually. There'd be

(01:16:39):
three sets of hands on the board. It would be
that old style where we'd be rehearsing and editing and
you know, working your way through. So I was never
doing it by myself. There would always be Greg Edward
was one of the engineers, God rest his soul. Ed Thacker.

(01:17:00):
No attacker was on Barnes. Dave Dillner a great engineer.
He did pink houses that era of records. So I
always had somebody that was an engineer that I was
producing per se in addition to engineering. And it wasn't

(01:17:22):
until much later after I stopped working with Melan Camp
that I started using engineers for a short period of time,
mostly across the Jimmy Barnes records, which was Australian artist
that I started working with and maybe eighty nine wonderful

(01:17:48):
guy probably made four or five records with him.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):
Okay, they're varying kinds of producers. They're producers who were engineers,
have an engineer personality. It's more about getting ving in
and then there are divas come up with their own
ideas and are constantly battling where are you and how
important is that you make the band happy, or you

(01:18:11):
make yourself happy with the record.

Speaker 2 (01:18:16):
You know. I think that for me, I'm certainly not
a songwriter. I don't have any songwriting credits, and I
don't play a guitar enough to say play a C
major at this moment. But I know all of the
words about how to make someone who knows those things
do what I want. I don't do well in situations

(01:18:42):
that the song is not any good in the first place.
I'm not going to come in and save the day
fixing a song. I might be able to produce it
better so that it fits, you know, but yeah, I
need more to work with. I think the specialty for
me has always been that I have enough of all

(01:19:02):
the different bases that I can cover a week link
if the band's good. So in some situations I might
be more of a task master about the performance. You know.
Maybe maybe it's it's not tight enough for the grooves wrong.
Another situation, it might be it needs a bridge. You

(01:19:23):
guys need to go out there and write a bridge
for this. So it's more about asking the questions. I
think the other thing, it's even more important. Producers usually
wind up in the position of picking the songs So
if you're given a set of fifty songs, are you
capable of picking the ones that are the right group

(01:19:43):
of songs for the band? Which ones are the hits?
And I'm not saying I've picked the hits over the years,
because anything but the truth. But I've been near them,
you know, and I was involved in making them before
they became hits. But in almost all the cases, I
you know, with Melanchamp with it's like, well, hurts so good,
it's probably our hit. Well we hoped, you know, but

(01:20:04):
I don't know. We thought hold my hand might be it. Two.

Speaker 1 (01:20:08):
Okay, So how important is it to maintain a good
relationship with the act you're producing.

Speaker 2 (01:20:17):
I think it's very important. I think that if you don't,
you don't have a I mean, you're going to argue.
I'm not denying that that you can have an argument
with somebody, but you I can't say that I've had
success with situations where I'm not getting along with the artists.

Speaker 1 (01:20:34):
And to what degree does an artist's opinion of the
experience in the project depend on commercial and critical success.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
Well, I would say that most of the people that
I've worked with that's very important. I can't say, Ariam
would probably want to be one of the few that
would tell you, oh, I don't care. You know. Really
they did want success. The more artsy people that I
worked with, the record's never happened, you know, So I

(01:21:05):
don't know. I think everybody's you know, in that world,
and this is all we could get lost in this one,
the whole thing about what happened. We can make records
and you can give it to a great label. But
I have so many stories. Whodi's one of them. Of

(01:21:29):
they sign it on research. The research says this is
something people like you make the record. It goes into
the record company. The record company thinks that shit, they
don't that. All of the politics that go on in
the company do everything that's possible to drown the record.
Finally somebody comes along who has power over the president

(01:21:50):
that makes it peak through and now it's made its
way to being visible. Now that's the one of the
biggest records of all time. Hoody and the Blowfish Crack
rear View, that was so close to not even seeing
the light of day, so close they'd only invested seventy

(01:22:10):
thousand dollars in it. They weren't like far along that
happened to me quite a bit. Nearly happened with Mellencamp.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
Okay, you talk about the seventy thousand dollars. To what
degree was it your responsibility to deal with the budget
and make sure you're living within the lines.

Speaker 2 (01:22:31):
It's pretty much always. I mean now, I've even had
money taken out of my back end because I went
over not a lot, but I knew that that. You know,
one of my first responsibilities was coming in under budget.
And if I thought I needed more money, which sometimes
I did, that you went back to them and got

(01:22:52):
their approval before you spend it. But yeah, I would
say that running a ship that's on course and under
a budget I always thought was a big part of
the job.

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
Okay, you work with Bruce Hornsby's first album made his
name as the Way It Is, et cetera. Second album
not as successful. You did the third album, A Night
on the Town, which is either the absolute best work
he did or you know, you can compare it to
the first album, phenomenal record. Can you tell me about
making that record?

Speaker 2 (01:23:27):
Uh? What a great guy. I just saw him about
six months ago, play up here in Oxnard, actually in Ventura.
No OHI it was an OHI gig outdoors. It was amazing,
A great, great guy what I mean, just so full
of positive energy and friendly and just a magnet for musicians. Uh.

(01:23:54):
You know, it was tricky. It was the first record
that he had made, you know, using a band in
the asked. He had always you know, used machines and
his signature Juno piano kind of sound that kind of
featured mostly drum machine and uh and piano in his voice.
So he wanted to make a more band oriented thing.

(01:24:16):
And I would say it was pleasant. He did not
argue a lot. He was very positive. Uh. Probably the
most difficulty we had was was in the mixing. He
he turned into Bruce Springsteen and and and had just
clear mountains told me his stories about Bruce once twenty

(01:24:39):
mixes snare up, one dB, snare down, one dB based,
drum up, one dB based down, one snare up. You
know these take all these combinations home. We had a
little bit of that getting the mixes to where he
was happy, but that was the only thing that And

(01:25:00):
there was all of the wonderful experiences of these friends
that he had come in as guests, you know, Jerry Garcia, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:25:12):
Do you remember anything you might have told him to do.
To what degree your he and prints are on the.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):
Record, No, I mean I think that probably more than anything.
But he came to me because of my talent with
working with bands, which which is how to make a
set up. You know that everybody can do. Any studio
set up where the band gets to play together is
that's a thing all of its own. And we did

(01:25:40):
a lot of that at Criteria, a lot of that.
That's one of my things that I missed so much today.
You just don't hear that much of what happens when
everybody's playing in the same room, go gos all around
and leak each here and there, and looking at each
other and changing arrangements on the spot. It's a different style.

(01:26:01):
It creates a different kind of urgency.

Speaker 1 (01:26:04):
And what about the issue of leakage, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
Well, you realize after you become a good mixer that,
oh jeez, this guitar needs a little bit of a
kind of an echo. And I don't want the kick
drum to really be that dry. It sounds kind of lonely.
And when you make us set up the right way,
it's all built in. And when you go back to
Tom Dowd's you know Leonyard Skannard, Almond Brothers, those two.

(01:26:34):
I mean we used to say he wasn't that great
of the mixer, but his ability to use leakage amongst
the instruments and create a sound that's you know, we
always say, if you can make a record that in
the first beat we did with melanchapelot one snare drum band,
you know what the song is and you know what
the band is. And that was something that Tom could

(01:26:56):
do where he created these signatures that were immediately wreckorzable,
and a lot of that's leak each you know.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
Go a little bit deeper on the leakage for those
people aren't sophisticated enough.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
Well, when you like, studio will be, which is where
I think Layla was made. Minassis I did a Firefall
record there. They it's a setup that's just one room
and in the corner there's a booth that looks like
a tiki bar that the drums go in and it's

(01:27:31):
a dead little nothing, probably great for an R and
B sound, really tight, and then there's a piano with
a set of of baffles that go around it and
blankets to go over it, and there's a place where
you put the guitar. It's this like time tested way
that you do a setup in this room. And then

(01:27:52):
there's certain microphones that use that aren't really tight patterns.
They pick up a little bit around them, and that's
their joy is that they're that way. And when you
put that room together in this configuration with these instruments,
it makes a sound that sounds unified. It's the guitar

(01:28:13):
mic picks a little bit of the snare and the
high hat up the vocal mic in the room. Of course,
that gets all kinds of stuff in it, and maybe
you have to turn that off and overdub it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:24):
So how do you overdub if there's leakage?

Speaker 2 (01:28:28):
You can't, you know, you punch in. It depends, but
generally speaking you have to be very careful. We would
do things like punching the whole band, which is totally
ridiculous if you don't have a click. But you know,
we were doing crazy things in those days. That was
part of the joy of experimenting at Criteria.

Speaker 1 (01:28:51):
So tell me about mixing. What's the key to mixing?

Speaker 2 (01:28:56):
Well, I mean it comes for me. It comes from
this place of painted with air again, so you're realizing,
you know, there's the issue of the monitors, right. So
everybody's got their pair of monitors that they kind of
trust that this is what's going to get you out
the door and sounded good in the car. So working

(01:29:19):
from the back to the front, you need a pair
of monitors that you understand in an acoustic situation. Then
the next problem is you're taking something that is one
hundred and twenty decibels loud, hugely loud, and you're reducing
it so that it sounds that loud when you play

(01:29:41):
it in these little air pods, which you know don't
reproduce any kind of dynamic range. That process of squeezing
it down taking their dynamic range away so that now
you can put all of those little tiny elements that
sound big together.

Speaker 1 (01:30:03):
It's a.

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):
Lot of trial and error. I think that I listened
to Chrys Lord Algy he did a podcast on the
other day, and and you know, and I admire him
so much. He's mixed some records for me, and he's amazing,
and he has developed a way that he channels all
this stuff in like I'm describing, he reduces it down

(01:30:29):
to a certain number of things that he's going to
look at. He pre mixes sections and gets it so
it's manageable. Then he goes into his last set of
things that he knows what they do to get them
down so they fit together. And that's what I would do,
but I would have to do a different kind of
that thing for each project in order that it would

(01:30:50):
sound totally different. And this would be where I would
say to Melichamp, let's have Clear Mountain do this mix.
Why are we just fooling around in our little studio
here in Indiana when we could throw it out to
I don't want it to sound like everybody else's record done.
I don't like those SSL boards. They sound crappy. It's
got to be more open than that. You know. It's

(01:31:11):
like this is a where you get into the what
makes horse races.

Speaker 1 (01:31:16):
And what is Clear Mountains magic.

Speaker 2 (01:31:21):
It's very similar to, I think, to what Chris talks about.
It's this saying to your client. You know, he sees
a song every day it comes in and he looks
at it and says, these are the parts that I
think are significant, and these are less, and let me
squeeze this down to a manageable form. And then he

(01:31:41):
runs it through I think very similar colorations, compressors limit
or's echo so that he gets because the low end
is kind of what regulates your whole record. If you
can get your basin, bass drum centered so they're taking
up the right amount of space, everything else follows. And

(01:32:04):
that's the hard part, and that's where both of those
guys are really good at it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:15):
So let's say you hire a third party mixer. Do
you give him any instruction or just say here's the tapes,
go at it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
I've done both. As hard for me as a producer
to say, go at it. I got to say that
generally speaking, I know what I think are the elements
that should be featured. And if I ran into this
with Tom Lord aunt you on a record that I
was making for MCA, and I think he was right,

(01:32:48):
But you know, my view of it was, you know,
all these things that I thought needed to be featured
at certain moments, and he was like, this is all
this is not important. You're missing it. So maybe I
was too close.

Speaker 1 (01:33:00):
So how do you decide whether to mix it yourself
or to give it to someone else.

Speaker 2 (01:33:05):
Usually that's somebody else's decision. I had a label at
MCA for five years, and you know, I could make
my own decisions there for those things. But generally speaking,
when you're in in co ownership like I was with mcaight,

(01:33:26):
you have a lot of people that are weighing in.
Maybe that's part of the problem, is the communal aspect
of of the way a lot of those things used
to work. Especially I saw less of that if you
worked for Warner Brothers or or or even Atlantic.

Speaker 1 (01:33:46):
So okay, we've been through so many evolutions recording equipment.
You know, when you're mixing, to what degree are you
using outboard equipment outboard effects, Well.

Speaker 2 (01:34:00):
You know, it depends on the era, right when you know,
when I started mixing, say in nineteen eighty eighty two
American full we were using you know, a Trient console,
a big a range triedent antique console and all kinds

(01:34:22):
of fair childs in eleven seventy six compressors and everything
had had stuff on it. There was nothing that was flat,
and generally there'd be API equalizers on this thing, and
then there'd be a knave on that one, and you
know a lot of cross polonization to get a certain

(01:34:43):
kind of tone. That all became much easier as it
turned into good digital. Now, good digital for me didn't
happen until probably around maybe twenty ten eight, whenever Chris

(01:35:03):
started putting out his own plugins. It started to make
more sense. Before that, Waves had some stuff that was good.
But I think when you finally had engineers weighing in
with this is the right thing that I do, that
it really got rich. It got juicy. Before that, I
started my first pro tool system I had in two thousand.

(01:35:26):
I bought because I had a daughter, and two thousand
and I knew that I didn't want to spend a
lot of time in the studio and I want to
be able to shut a mix down after four hours
and go home, And so I bought a pro tool system.
And that didn't work that well. It was okay, but

(01:35:47):
the early systems were kind of thin. So but now
you know, you look at what the power of the
modern mixing board is amazing. How hard I used to
work to get a simple explosive snare sound. You can

(01:36:07):
probably do it in thirty seconds with what's available today.
Before it's taking me a couple of hours to set
it up.

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
And why is that?

Speaker 2 (01:36:17):
Because you're dealing with stuff that really isn't that powerful.
You know, it's you're lucky if you can get ten
dB of compression out of an analog compression compressor, and
maybe the release time is slow enough that it doesn't
make something explode. You want something that opens up a
certain way. And all this stuff's immediately available with the

(01:36:40):
digital stuff because you just go in and you crank
in how deep you want to go and how fast
you want it to let go. And that's just one example.
Let alone the echo that you might put put a
gate on it, that well, let's just make it a
little longer, a little shorter, a little brighter before it
would be all look go short in the plate. We
would do it with EMT plates and now let's put

(01:37:03):
some gates on it. But well, jeez, the gates aren't
releasing right, and you know it would just be badly.

Speaker 1 (01:37:09):
And to what degree are you equipment agnostic or you
want to work on a specific board.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
Well, now you know, if I was going to I
don't do any of this anymore. So, but today, if
I was going to mix a record, I would just
have a PROTOL system. I would. It would be no board.
It's just that's all I would want the stuff that's available.
I mean, I still hear people talking about running it
back through some analogus something or other that they think

(01:37:42):
that makes a different sight. I don't think I believe
in that somebody else can run it through.

Speaker 1 (01:37:48):
Tell me more about not doing this anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
See what I'm seventy four, Well I will be the
day after tomorrow, and happy birthday, Thank you. I would
say that. You know, this has been a process since
about twenty fourteen of just slowing down. Well, my wife

(01:38:17):
and I didn't have children for a long time. We
both were enjoying just the two of us, and up
until nineteen ninety six, until after Hoodie's first big record,
we didn't have any children. And then, you know, obviously,
you know, I think some of it was the fact
that we didn't really care about having children. Then there
was also the biological clock, oh, if we're going to

(01:38:39):
do it, we better do it. And there was also
that oh my god, we just got to check for
wow from the Hoodie record, and it was kind of like, well,
what are you going to do with your life now?
You know, now that you have some financial security which
we had never had before. We lived well and we
always saved a lot because we knew that a year

(01:39:00):
from now it could be all gone. And that's the
way we lived. Then we decided to have kids.

Speaker 1 (01:39:07):
We had.

Speaker 2 (01:39:08):
We have a son who's twenty eight and or will
be in a week, two weeks, and a daughter who's
twenty four. They're both out of school. And so I
think that what happened to me was the process of
making records, which is tedious and if you really want

(01:39:28):
to do it, well, it's pretty all consuming. It's not
something you just casually do. I grew tired of it,
you know, making vocal comps. It's hard, and it just
you know, I think I just ran my course with it.
I'm not saying I would never do it again if

(01:39:49):
somebody came along. That was, you know, something that really
lit me up that I wouldn't go in the studio
for a couple of weeks or a month, you know.
But right now, between the climate of what you make
being a record producer, which is pretty negligible, you know,

(01:40:12):
it's all streaming based and there's not much money.

Speaker 1 (01:40:17):
In it, how hard was it to let go? Very hard?
Very hard.

Speaker 2 (01:40:26):
I would say that it probably has been ten years
of of trying to find other things that I find
enjoyable and meaningful. Yeah, that kind of that's been the
replacing it because I'm an active person. I I like
doing all of stuff. We've bought a second home here

(01:40:47):
in Channel Islands and we have a beautiful place to be.
It's where I'm at today and I enjoy There's a
whole different kind of world. But I never We used
to have boats when we lived in Miami. I had
a three bedroom home on a canal with a sailboat.
And part of the criteria reality was my wife and

(01:41:10):
I going out in are little inflatable zodiac and water
skiing in the inner coastal before I went into the studio.
That was you know, we loved that, and so that's
coming back. We just bought a powerboat. We went out
to Santa Cruz Island yesterday and with ten other boats,
had a great time. Some findy other things that I

(01:41:31):
enjoys challenging because I was never this kind of a
boating person, so I don't know much about navigation, fixing things.
I'm a fix it guy. I know a lot about
all kinds of handyman stuff. So taking care of the
boat's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:41:49):
To what degree letting go was because the generations change
and there's not as many opportunities for work.

Speaker 2 (01:41:58):
I think he nailed it. That's totally it. Nobody was
calling me up, you know, somebody, somebody that I might like.
I'd say, well, i'll give you a hand, and they
might give me, you know, a thousand dollars to do
a sount a song, and I'd spend a couple of
days on it, and it wouldn't be about the money.
It would just be about, well, I like the guy,
and I thought he needed a leg up. You know,

(01:42:19):
I'll see if I can help. I did that quite
a bit over the last few years, and.

Speaker 1 (01:42:27):
That was okay.

Speaker 2 (01:42:28):
You know I think that. I mean, I almost hate
to say this. I love music. I love making music.
I love being a part of hit records, and I
love getting the paycheck. And I think all of that
is hard to come by today. It's every every one

(01:42:52):
of those things is hard to get at now. It's good.
Did what you talk about all the time in your
when you write about how what you have to do
in order to make it through. It's it's everyone has
the ability to get themselves out there along with two
million other people and to get through it all, and

(01:43:16):
I don't know what the solution is. Part of me
thinks sometimes that we need more curating of people that
we respect, and I don't know who that person is.
You know, my daughter's good at it. She comes to
me with the list of things that Wow, where did
you find this person? You know, I mean a couple
of years ago, she came there with this artist, King Princess,

(01:43:38):
who was like, Wow, this is amazing. Why isn't this
person huge? You know, she's a great writer, a great singer,
a sound that's totally unique, and she does okay. You know,
but I would have thought that would have been anyhow,
But that world is a little different.

Speaker 1 (01:43:56):
Right now, Let's go back to the technology for minutes,
taking blog versus digital and vinyl. What are your thoughts
about all those?

Speaker 2 (01:44:06):
Well? As a producer, recording engineer, I hate vinyl. Vinyl
is a nightmare. If you're trying to make a vinyl
record and have it represent anything close to what you mixed,
you should just lower your standards because the pressing process

(01:44:29):
makes it into an entirely different animal. Now, a lot
of people like the way that animal sounds. But you know,
when we got out of the the analog thing. I
love the way analog records sound. I love old equipment
that and I love new equipment that's made with all
the things that I understand about. Maybe we're going to

(01:44:52):
talk for a second about the fact that transformers create
a distorted waveform. It will make a square wave into
something that looks like a bunch of wiggles. And that
wiggle is the sound that we all love. And so
analog is a wonderful thing. It colors and worms. If

(01:45:12):
it's what you want or what you need right now,
I think you should use that stuff along the way.
New digital stuff does that just as well. It emulates it.
They've figured out these equations. Now as far as going
back to tape, give me a break, is that's a wink.
It's I'm not hearing the difference. So my my hearing

(01:45:34):
is not the greatest, but it's good enough to get
me by, you know. And and I think that better
better to use that on good microphones, good compressors. If
you want to use all your analog gear when you record,
that's great, record it.

Speaker 1 (01:45:49):
Yeah, Okay, let's go back to a couple of records.
Tracy Chapman has huge success with the first album Fast Car.
Then does not have success, even worked with Jimmie I
Leven doesn't have success. Then she worked with you and
has the biggest record of her career. Tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (01:46:12):
She's a doll. It was, you know, it was. It
was a wonderful experience. I gotta say, we did it
in San Francisco, or not in San Francisco. What's the name.
It's up near Lucas Ranch out in the woods there.
I don't remember the studio's name, but old big Neve console.

(01:46:35):
She liked recording digitally, so it was a Missubishi thirty
two track. I think it was the first time I'd
ever used that particular machine. And that made sense because
a lot of her material is very quiet. There needed space,
it needed depth to not be occupied by his or

(01:46:56):
tape noise, and so that was okay. She also, like Hornsby,
wanted to make a record with a band, and in
the past she had used a band that played after
she recorded. She like they would like Fast Car was.

(01:47:16):
She she played it alone and then Danny Farnkheiser would
go in and he played the drums to it, and
then everybody would follow him. And that's the way she
made her records because she I think was probably not
comfortable playing with other people. That confused her. I think
that her being on the road by the time I
started working with her, she was very comfortable working with

(01:47:39):
playing with people. And she had come up with this
set of material with a band that they were friends.
It was a unit, you know. So that was really
nice because she she basically came in with something that
I recorded live, and we kept a lot of it live.

(01:48:07):
She was picky, but not unduly, you know. There were
ideas that I would put forth about, you know, how
we might record her voice and her guitar together. Because
we did a lot of it and kept everything. We

(01:48:27):
didn't overdone many guitar vocals, as I recall, so a
lot of it was built around whether or not we
liked the vocal and the guitar performance, and a mixing
process got a little trickier. And there was this one

(01:48:47):
song called The Promise that was just her playing acoustic guitar,
that amazing song that she I don't know, I never
really did understand exactly what she was looking for. I
think that probably that was okay, but we played it
every day for I'm going to say at least a month.

(01:49:11):
While we were mixing, it would be the end of
the day, Okay, let's do a couple of takes to
the promise, and then she'd come in the next day
and it was long. It was like a six minute song,
and she would come in the next day and say, no,
that's not it, We'll have to do it again. And
that went on for quite a while. Eventually, she uh,
after about I don't know, maybe one hundred takes, she

(01:49:35):
found something that she liked and we dressed it up
with violin and cello and a few other things. Beautiful song.

Speaker 1 (01:49:47):
Though you have any idea that the album and give
me one reason we're going to be so huge?

Speaker 2 (01:49:55):
None? And the thing was that, you know, everybody was, well,
we don't have a single, and because all the songs
were you know, five, six, seven, eight minutes long, and
she would not editing was not in the thing in
the equation, and she said, you guys will figure it out. Well,

(01:50:17):
I think give me one reason. Was three minutes and
forty five seconds was the only song on the record
that was short enough. And so the record company kind
of threw their arms up and said, well, let's just
put this one out because it's the only one that's
shortened for radio, and she won't let us edit anything else.
There were a couple other songs that they liked, but

(01:50:37):
she wouldn't, so anyhow, they put it out and it was,
as I recall it, it made a tour of the formats.
It might have whatever it was at Triple A and
then adult and then pop I think it was, or
maybe college, Triple A adult pop. It went through like

(01:50:59):
four different formats that each one of them lasted probably
three or four months while it worked its way up
the chart. Then it would go to this one and
so over a year it had a year of on
the charts, And I think that's what what did it?
It just it just bit by a bit opened up
another section.

Speaker 1 (01:51:25):
Now she did not use you on the next album.
What's it like to have so much success in someone?
The same thing with Hornsby, although he didn't use a band,
it was a solo record. Thereafter, what's it like for
them to say, great, we had used success and then
they don't call you.

Speaker 2 (01:51:43):
M I what I was doing? You know? I don't know.
You know, it's funny because Bruce just mentioned that when
I saw him recently that he says because he built
a studio. I think maybe that's part of the answer
for him. Was after the record that we did, they
bought this place in Williamsburg in Virginia where he lives now,

(01:52:07):
and a large property, and he built a studio. And
I remember looking at the plans for the studio and
he hadn't put any kind of a window in between
the control room and and the recording space. And I
looked at him and said, you need a window something
so that you can at least, you know, point at
somebody to give a cue something. Put a window in

(01:52:28):
And he said to me just the other day, he says,
we have the don game and window. And It's like,
what do you mean? You know, what are you talking about?
So he says, we think of you every time that
we go through that window. You're right, And he said
I would have used you if it hadn't been for
the fact. And I forget what the reason was, but
he kind of apologized for it, not continuing. I don't know,

(01:52:51):
I'm a little I'm not sure what I was doing
at that time. It could have been the whole ninety
four to six. There were Hoody records in there there
was me looking for a label deal with Jeff Aldridge
and Larry Frasen, and I had this thing in my
head because my my manager at the time. It'll come

(01:53:16):
back in a second, Sandy robertson, Yeah, you know, there
were there were all of these things that I was
furthering my career or whatever, you know. To who knows,
it does seem odd. But I know that Tracy was
upset with me because after the big success with I

(01:53:41):
don't think she would mind me sharing this because it
was a shortcoming on my part. There was an edit
that was on one of the other songs that they
thought they could make it work, and she wanted to
use this new pro Tools system that let you turn
off the edit things horizontally, which is what we all

(01:54:02):
do all over the place. Now, you know, keep the
drums here, but take the guitar from the first verse.
She wanted to be able to do that, and I
didn't know that this was Kate. I thought it was
just an editing thing, like normal editing, but digital. And
when I came in too, I've done. She was not
happy with the fact that I was not up to
speed on the technology that she wanted to use and

(01:54:27):
that might have might have colored the future.

Speaker 1 (01:54:30):
So tell us about whody.

Speaker 2 (01:54:34):
Well. Hoody is probably the happiest experience I've ever had,
and it was at a time in my career where
things were a little dark. You know. This would have
been ninety four and Sandy Robertson was a manager i'd
just started working with. My career had kind of sunk off.

(01:54:55):
I'd done quite a few records in Australia that did well,
was making some money, but people weren't asking me to produce,
and you know, it was like the prices were coming down,
and so he thought I should try and do something

(01:55:18):
more like a Green Day kind of a project. And
it was mad Abrially. I appeared, which label he was
at at the time, had an act from Massachusetts called
The Fix or No the Figs, and they were very punky,
and so I thought, well, you know, it's good, the

(01:55:39):
good songs, and everybody was very excited about them. And
at the same time, Tim Summer, who was working at
Atlantic at ann Or at the time, came to me
with some demos that hood he had done. Actually it
was a cassette that they were distributing on the road,
and I heard it. I thought, Yo, this is good,

(01:55:59):
but it's kind of like what I've been doing, you know,
it's not I'm not sure if this is where we're
going or not. I was kind of okay, I'll do it.
I can't afford to say no to anything, really, but
I want to do this other thing first. So I
met with the band and Lovely People and we said

(01:56:21):
just let's do it. And I made the record with
the other band, which was my focus at the time,
that sold like two thousand copies, and then went into
the studio with Hoodie and it was a little discouraging.
The label gave me fifty thousand dollars to make the
record and then I think I got twenty. It was

(01:56:45):
pretty tight, you know, I budgeted out it was time
for like maybe eighteen days in the studio, including the mixing,
so I had ten days to cut the tracks and
overdub and maybe a week to mix. And so we
went in and and they were yes on whatever you

(01:57:06):
want us to do. You know, we're a little can
you work something out because the NBA is playing this
afternoon between two and five, And then we got a
golf tournament that Darius really wants because you schedule around
that just a little bit, okay, but if you need us,
we'll come in, don't worry about. And then Darius would
be on the golf course at you know, six o'clock

(01:57:26):
in the morning and show up at eleven like he
was supposed to. It was this kind of thing where
they had other things that were also important in their lives.
It was like a real view onto somebody that loved
what they do. We're good at it, but they weren't consumed,
you know, and that was good for me. And also

(01:57:48):
they just let me do whatever I wanted. They listened
to everything I would. They would do a take, I'd say, no,
that would that was my thing at the time. I
pushed the talk back. No, that meant do it again.
And Darius was just becoming the singer that we all
hear today, which is phenomenal. Is such he's got such

(01:58:10):
a rich voice, and he still hadn't quite zoned in
on where his pitch was and timing, but he was
a quick learn and yeah, we did very fast. It
was floated that wow, it wouldn't it be nice we
get David Crosby to come and sing on the record.
And I don't know who called him. It was one

(01:58:31):
of the dreams of but I didn't even have to
do it. It was so somebody from Atlantic called him
up and Don Gamon's doing a record with a band.
Would you come in and sing for Don Gamon? I'll
do anything. And he came in, spent you know, three hours,
told the band's stories and and gave him a bunch
of advice, and sang on their first single you know,

(01:58:52):
and you can hear Amy's right in there. It would
not be the same without Uh. Yeah. It was a blast.
And then of course the whole thing, like I mentioned earlier,
with we handed the record in and I wasn't sure
about it. It was like such a such a departure
from what I thought a cool thing would be for

(01:59:12):
this moment in time, and I didn't have a lot
of faith in it until I finished it, mastered it,
took it home and I was doing a project with
my wife. She's a interior designer, and she was having
me build a model of a house. And I'm good
at that kind of stuff. So I'm building a model
and playing the reference acitate on the thing, and she said, well,

(01:59:34):
this is pretty good, and I said, I'm surprised at
That was the first moment that I realized that the
record had legs. And then we handed it in and
I'm starting to hear these horror stories about how because
the politics, well, in all record labels, but Atlantic, you
have these little you know, on clubs and this guy's

(01:59:55):
got four heavy metal records, and this one's got this
and this R and B section, Andrea is the only
one that says which ones get through? And and it
was like, are we going to get through? And Danny
Goldberg was the president at the time, and it wasn't
for his wife. It was Mary Carrol, thank you, who said,

(02:00:17):
you've got to take care of my buddy, Timothy. This
is his band. Don't let it, don't let it slip
through the cracks. And then Doug Mars picked it up.

Speaker 1 (02:00:28):
So, yeah, okay, you have this gigantic success. What's it
like trying to follow that up?

Speaker 2 (02:00:37):
Oh it's horrible. Yeah, I mean then we're you know,
because this went on for at least two years. Of
the process of selling the first ten million units and
four singles, it was at least two years. And the
band was ragged, you know this it was this was sad,

(02:00:58):
you know, they were they were not what they were
at the place that happens to everybody where you have
to you know, seven o'clock radio performances every city, and
then you know, just worn out. And then okay, we
got to go back in the studio and make another record.
And what made the first record was probably five years

(02:01:19):
of the band touring the mid Atlantic States, doing bars
and writing songs together in a band. And then they
wrote nothing for two years, and so we wound up
with a bunch of songs that didn't mean much. You know,

(02:01:42):
they were and you know, and everybody was mad at
each other, tired of each other. Darius was starting to
feel I think, I don't know, I shouldn't speak for him,
but I know that it was difficult for him as
a black man, you know, with three white guys that

(02:02:06):
it had it. He had his issues with that that
he was working through. And so making the second record,
we made a great SOUNDI record, but the only song
that that sounded strong was something that had been written
for the first record. And and then then the question was, well,
do we put a record out now and keep on

(02:02:27):
with the momentum or is this where you give it
a rest? And yeah, I don't I don't know that.
I don't know what happened. Happened? Do you know this
old three million units? It's like still did you know? Well?
But it's I don't know that we ever attained that
same kind of thing that and I don't know the

(02:02:49):
way I ever would have because what was wrong was
this writing thing, you know, where the four guys they
needed a year off from each other going out this summer,
you know.

Speaker 1 (02:03:00):
Okay, so you make a deal to make a record,
let's say, with Tracy Chapman or Bruce Hornsbers, and they
want to be co producer. How do you split up
the points?

Speaker 2 (02:03:15):
Well, that's Sandy's job, you know.

Speaker 1 (02:03:20):
Well, let me ask it differently. Does the act want
its name as co producer for vanity or for the money?

Speaker 2 (02:03:29):
Oh vanity? You know, I think that you know this.
It's a touchy subject for me. You know, I'm a
record producer by trade. I'm not a songwriter. I'm not
asking for a piece of the song, even though I
was there and maybe suggested that the melody of the
bridge could have been different. You know. I see in

(02:03:51):
Nashville people get songwriting credits for ridiculously little contribution the
But I never felt that way. I felt like, I'm
a record producer. It's a tough job. I'm holding down
the fort and we finish our work. Why do you
have to have a credit? Which part of this? Okay,
so you're a big name, you've already had a hit.

(02:04:12):
You think I'm writing on your coattails? All right? So
whose name's first mine? I'll give you a point, you know,
but maybe it's a five point deal. I don't know,
you know it's and where are we at now? I
don't even know what this today? This is like a
what is this conversation? It's like a it doesn't mean
anything anymore. I don't know how you divvy up what

(02:04:34):
is there today? But you know, generally, I had gotten
to a point after Mellencamp where those were all co
productions and they were split or less. And that was
just because that's where he was at. It's like, you
want to work with me, this is what you get.

(02:04:55):
There was no negotiating. Later on, as I had more
success on on my own, I would get, you know,
normal three point deals that might accelerate at a certain point,
or that kind of thing. And I got to say
that most people, when when faced with this whole thing.
They understand. Maybe they want their name underneath. They're happy

(02:05:18):
with their name underneath, but it's not about them taking money.
It's I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:05:28):
Let's go back to Mellencamp for a second. What kind
of relationship do you have with Mellencamp today? If any, none,
don't have any.

Speaker 2 (02:05:40):
I'm sad about that. You know, we we found our
ups and downs. Certainly grateful for you know, all that
he's done for my career, and I'm sure he's grateful.
I do believe he's grateful for all that I've added
to his. So I don't feel like there's any any
you know, anger between. We've had moments that there was,

(02:06:02):
and we've resolved them. And I mixed a record for
him in nineteen ninety well, boy, I don't remember. That
was two thousand and one, and we had a good
time together. My wife has decorated homes for him. We

(02:06:26):
were friends with his with all of his wives, So yeah,
there was a lot of closeness. But over the last jeez,
probably twenty years now, we haven't been in contact.

Speaker 1 (02:06:41):
Do you still own your royalties? Yeah? Would you ever
sell them? No, because.

Speaker 2 (02:06:50):
It's well, I just don't think it's a good business decision.
I have children, not that you know, they have to
have money, but you know, I'm just so blessed over
the years I've I've managed to between you know, Hoody

(02:07:13):
and Tracy and Mellencamp and Ram all the they're all
they're all acts that have fan bases today. They're they're
all acts that that if they play locally again, people
will come see them. They're on people's playlists. They play
those songs every day, and I make money off of

(02:07:35):
it every three months, and it's it's amazing, you know.
But I looked at it and I hear how people
are so upset with the Spotify and how tiny the
royalties are. But nobody thinks about the fact that building
a fan base of people that are on a playlist
takes a long long time. It's twenty thirty forty years

(02:07:56):
of accumulated work and people that are bands that are
alive still doing it. And so we get a good
check that is something that's worth something to uh a
uh you know investment people. You know, obviously they would

(02:08:20):
give me whatever they're multiple is for it, but but
you know, look at paying taxes on it and then
getting on lump, and and then me having to manage
that money to try and get something equal to what
I None of this makes any sense whereas this will
go on forever. It's it's you know, as long as

(02:08:40):
as that fan base of people that are playing it.
You know, maybe until those maybe when my generation or
the previous generation dies, maybe it'll go down. But I
think until the twenty years probably still. You know, no, no,
And I understand completely why why some people do it.
Maybe some people need a chunk of good for them.

Speaker 1 (02:09:02):
I don't believe in it either, But one more step.
You know, record companies don't overpay. How hard is it
collecting this money?

Speaker 2 (02:09:14):
You know you worry me because I mean, we get
checks every three months. I don't. I Well, my wife
keeps on saying, we need to audit these guys. That's
what she keeps on saying. You know, you know, we
need to go hire somebody and have them dig around
a little bit. It's probably right. I'm you know, I'm

(02:09:35):
just happy. I see them come in and it's like, wow, Okay,
we've got to dinner tonight.

Speaker 1 (02:09:42):
Okay. Don I want to thank you for sharing your
career and your stories with my audience. Obviously there's a
lot we couldn't touch in this time deeper, certainly with
Meloncamp and other records, but thanks for being so open
and honest.

Speaker 2 (02:09:57):
The pleasure Bob up to see you again.

Speaker 1 (02:09:59):
So until next time, this is Bob Left sets

Speaker 2 (02:10:25):
Sh