In this second part of the LEGENDS: Podcast by All Day Vinyl interview with music producer Mark Howard, host Scott Dudelson speaks with Howard to look behind the scenes on the recording of Neil Young's Le Noise & Tom Waits Real Gone album sessions, and remixing of Joni Mitchell's debut album "Song to a Seagull"
Immerse yourself in the world legends as Howard shares first-hand accounts of their quirks and idiosyncrasies. In the first part of the episode we dig into the production of Le Noise by Neil Young which was produced by Daniel Lanois and recorded/mixed by Mark Howard. Howard shares some incredible stories about the way Neil Young work and his creative process. Learn how the full moon and a single marijuana joint helped shape Neil Young's song "Hitchhiker," perhaps the centerpiece of the album.
In the second part of the episode we dig into Tom Waits production of Real Gone with Howard sharing some incredible stories about Waits' unique style of production, recording and writing.
In the final part we talk about Howard's work with Joni Mitchell on remixing her first album "Song to A Seagull" which was originally produced by David Crosby in 1968. Howard shares details of those sessions and great stories about how Joni aimed to achieve the sound she wanted for her first album.
Get a glimpse into the world of iconic musicians and a rare peek into the behind-the-scenes intricacies of music production. If you like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits in-studio stories, this episode delievers the goods.
Please Rate and Subscribe if you like this content. Also check us out on YouTube for the video interview @alldayvinyl and on Instagram @alldayvinyl
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Thank you for listening. This is the Legends Podcast by All Day Vinyl,
and I'm your host, Scott Dettelson.
After you finish this episode, please subscribe and rate it,
and please check us out on Instagram at All Day Vinyl.
Today, I'm here with Mark Howard, and we're having part two of our conversation.
You can check out part one where we talked about Mark recording and mixing Time
Out of Mind and No Mercy with Bob Dylan.
(00:21):
Today, we're going to talk about his work with Neil Young on the album La Noise,
and also Tom Waits' Real Gone.
So thank you mark thank you again yeah appreciate
having you so linois by
neil young is one of my favorite neil young albums it's
probably the stuff he did with david briggs in the mid 90s right yeah and neil
(00:43):
notoriously has his own crew of people he works with yeah which now includes
rick rubin so tell me how you you got involved you and danielson worked with
them yeah at the time At the time,
Dan also had the same manager as Neil, Elliot Roberts.
And so me and Dan had made a record called Black Dub, which was filmed.
(01:08):
The record is filmed live as we were playing it.
And so that way, the recording and the film all lines up. It's not cut together.
It's one piece, and they're like filmed pieces.
And so each song, we did exactly that way.
And so elliot had showed these
to to neil and neil really thought they he really
(01:29):
liked it and he goes why can't i have a record like that and so
they neil and daniel emwa started talking
and they agreed for neil to come down
to dan's house in silver lake the house
called bella vista and so i had
set up a rig in the hallway of dan's
house and he had a full studio in the basement
(01:51):
with a Neve 8068 but it was
I didn't like the vibe in the basement it was like a dungeon and
so he's got a beautiful living room and a beautiful
hallway so I just set up my rig in his
hallway and so like I was telling you before about how my sound system works
I use a playback system that's got like big 18 inch subwoofers and it's got
(02:16):
like multiple speakers towering and so when you play Playback stuff sounds bigger than real.
So then it really happened and exciting and it makes the artists happy and they
really dig it. So when, when.
Neal decided to come down. We had tested all Dan's mics, and I got everything
(02:37):
all lined up and which guitars we could use and amps, and we picked the best of everything.
And so we did all of our kind of like homework before he got in.
So it would be like, oh, Neal's coming in tomorrow at noon.
We're there waiting, and Neal don't show up that day.
And then it's like, he's coming in tomorrow, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
(02:58):
And so you know right and show up the next day they're like what's going on
so he finally shows up on the third day you know he rolls in there but before
that he had sent one of his.
Techs with a van with all of his instruments and pump organ and a bunch of other
all of his amplifiers and stuff like that guitars and so when neil eventually
(03:23):
got there he explained that But he was waiting for the full moon.
He claims that he can't work only on three days before the full moon.
So he was waiting for that three days before the full moon so he can start recording.
He claims if you record before that or after that, that you're not going to
(03:45):
get as good as a performance or a vibe. Is that how he's done his career?
I don't know. But that was this particular record. He really wanted to push that. that.
The record took six months to make because we're waiting for all the full moons.
Eventually, once he came in, we started working and it got to a point where
(04:06):
Neil had some songs, meant to be acoustic record.
I developed the sound. I thought, how the hell am I going to better his guitar sound?
I'm a big fan of- Using the whole black guitar.
He's got the acoustic end of it.
(04:27):
This is supposed to be an acoustic record, just film each song on acoustics and stuff like that.
But he had also brought a record to Les Paul, Paul, the 57 Les Paul gold top
that he's painted black.
And so. What he used on Hey My Mom.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's the classic. Yeah. And then he's got this other guitar
(04:52):
that it's, it's a white Falcon Gretsch and it's a special guitar because it's a twin stereo output.
So the top three string, top three strings come out of one pickup and the bottom
three strings come out of another pickup.
Up so you split that into two amps and so
you have to play it a certain way and so he
(05:13):
plays like you know like crazy like so it's like a very stereo and you read
if you listen to that record first yeah yeah so it's pretty cool and so so we
started with the acoustics and he had his his acoustic there, and he called it Hank.
(05:33):
And it used Hank Williams' guitar.
But Dan had a little guild, a little mahogany guild.
And I tested every pickup known to man, and I came up with LR bags.
So I put the LR bags in that. And then so I miked it, and then I ran a DI of it.
(05:56):
So I had a direct signal at the same time. And so we had Neil set up in this
big beautiful living room.
And so it just and i was in the the hallway and but as we were checking the guitars,
i had a couple of effects that i had on it so when when neil would hit the low string of the guitar,
(06:18):
it would trigger the sub harmonizer that i had and it would just shake the house
like an earthquake it was like what the hell is this though he'd never felt
that off an acoustic before so i I thought, okay, this is good. He had a big smile.
He really liked it. And so we ended up cutting Love and War.
I think the song was in. If you listen to that, it's like in headphones.
(06:40):
It's just got this sub. It's just so warm and dreamy. Yeah, yeah.
It's unlike anything that he'd ever done. Yeah. And so I was excited.
And I created a sound for him that he'd never heard before and never felt.
And because I play and I got the speakers on and it gives you that kind of fulfillment
(07:02):
that you're live and you're on a stage and stuff like that.
So I think that part of it really worked well for that.
And then, so we'd cut, I think there was another song called Peaceful Valley,
Peaceful Valley something on that record. That was an acoustic song.
And so that one, the low frequency didn't work as well as Love Me.
(07:27):
And so we cut those two and he went away.
We waited for the next full moon. And on the next full moon,
he comes back. Did you know you were waiting, or was that a plan?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. We were told that we were waiting for this full moon.
So he comes back, and so then he's got the two electrics with him.
(07:47):
And he says, I want to try walk with me with this Les Paul.
And so we set up two Tweed amps.
And he's got this special treatment on his amps where the Tweed amp has tubes in it.
And what happens is the tube amps heat up and
then your tone goes away because it's too hot so he
has these fans blowing cool air on the tubes keep
(08:10):
the amp cool as possible to keep the
tone there all the time and so so he pulls out the guitar and and i'm just you
know it's the same faders everything that's kind of it's only like two channels
or three channels or whatever and And then I got my effects coming back on another console.
(08:32):
And so I got the speakers kind of turned up pretty loud.
And then he hits that chord on that guitar and it just blew his mind.
His pant legs were swaying. The house was also shaking. And we had to tape all the windows down.
It was a pretty serious sound.
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so that became kind of like a bit of the sound.
(08:57):
It was also another treatment that I did on that record.
And it's something that I spend a lot of time in Jamaica, and I do a lot of dub work.
So I've got a lot of dubs on that record where.
Like these real strange psychedelic sounds.
(09:17):
And they're all done by this old lexicon delay that's going to touch hold on
it. And so I kind of developed the style the way I use it.
And I can like hold words or sounds and then, but you can lower them. Yeah.
I'm just doing all this stuff on the fly as he's playing. He's like,
(09:41):
what the hell is this sound?
So he was pretty excited about it.
So we'd cut a couple of those ones with that guitar and we did it.
Then he brought out the White Falcon.
So I split the pickup and went into it. Then I thought it was the one that he may have played.
(10:06):
Walk with me on yeah i think that was the one actually not blackie blackie who i think was.
Hitchhike so tell me tell me a story on hitchhiker that's
that's the centerpiece of to me
the album yeah well he had written hitchhiker i
guess in the 60s and there was a version of it but
(10:28):
he never felt it was completely let me let me let me just uh maybe you know
this story maybe you don't know know the story but what i read was he wrote
it in the mid early mid 70s and actually played it for bob dylan you know bob
dylan came over one day and played it and bob dylan's comment on it was,
that's very honest that's very honest and neil didn't know what to do with it
(10:53):
and i was kind of yeah shelved it from there yeah they could pick us up yeah
30 years later yeah so it it poked his his head out again, this record.
So Neil would go away to Hawaii and Dan would call him up and said, you got any new songs?
He'd say, no, I'm sitting here over the rabbit hole and nothing's coming out.
(11:16):
So it got to the point where after he'd go to Hawaii and then we'd get a call
saying, I've written this one song and I'm sure it was Hitchhiker.
He finished it there anyways. He finally finished the last verse or whatever it was.
Then when he came back in, I think that's when he performed it.
(11:39):
And we had the film guy, the director, Adam Volokh, his name was.
And so he's a Canadian guy.
And he came down. So it was like, we're all Canadians in this room doing this record.
So we had projectors that we were projecting the sky and all the clouds kind of going by.
(12:01):
And so we're doing the projections as we were recording.
And we got the front doors of Bella Vista open. and everybody in Silver Lake
heard that record go down. I had it so bloody loud.
Real quick, go back on Hitchhiker. So you had shared a story with me.
I hope you could share it again.
So when he was in Hawaii, he got some inspiration and they brought that inspiration back.
(12:25):
Yeah, so he had said that he had finished the song and he had this joint that he had smoked in Hawaii.
And he thought, well, I wrote it on this joint.
Joint i want to record it on this joint so he put the joint out
and he carried the joint all the way back for him and
so when we're about to record he sparked it back up so he could be
(12:45):
high on the other side of the joint yeah yeah
so so it was it was an interesting thing but
he had gone through he had a brain aneurysm just
before this record and the doctor said don't smoke
weed you know like don't don't even do it
and so you know after the sessions i would
(13:06):
usually just take a little hit you know and i think it may have got him started
again but yeah so when he came in you know he we recorded it after he smoked
it and we listened back and it was it was pretty,
incredible and i had dub a lot of dub works on that
(13:28):
that track also it's a great song and it's
a and for anyone who's not familiar with it definitely find
it it's not streaming but you could find it somewhere and it's a drug song
it's all about Neil's history with he says the word hash his hash and I think
he talks about every yeah I am that his autobiography what I understood okay
(13:50):
he's drug journeys mm-hmm and so what he wrote knew was the last verse I think yeah.
And then after that session, he went away again.
And during that session, Daniel Lanois got in a motorcycle accident and broke his ribs.
(14:12):
And he was up for a while or down for a while.
And so Neil kept on saying, when are we going to finish? When are we going to
finish? And kept calling him.
And so at that time, there was a running joke, you know, about Lanois' last
name. People don't know how to say it properly and people call him LeNoise.
(14:35):
So Neil would always call Dan LeNoise, LeNoise.
So the record was supposed to be called Hitchhiker. I did the tour and they
had hitchhiker shirts made for that tour.
But as we were mastering and as a joke, that became the name of the record based
(14:56):
off of Lanois' last name.
That's why it's called La Noise, which was pretty crazy.
We would drive up to Neil's ranch up in Northern California,
and I brought some speakers with me, and we'd go listen to it up at his ranch.
He's a bar. Is it the barn? Oh, he's got multiple places.
(15:20):
We stayed in what was called the White House, And that's where his band always stayed.
And then he's got Redwood Digital. I think that's the studio.
But then he's got a couple of other houses. His house is pretty phenomenal.
It's like a big log cabin added on over the years. It's huge, beautiful inside.
(15:43):
But then he's got his car collection in a big kind of room.
And then behind his car collection is his amp collection. and it's just like
a wall of every hand we ever had it was pretty pretty amazing and then i said.
I said you know didn't you buy like well a
train company that makes toy train he says
(16:03):
yeah lyle i think it was called the line
of light yeah and so he brought us
into this other building where he had this huge train
set that he built for his son the one one
of them that was in the the wheelchair and so it
was phenomenal like oh it was like pretty huge
it was the size of a warehouse of trains and all kinds of different landscapes
(16:26):
and so it was interesting to see and how what he's been up to and stuff like
that I was you know you work with Bob Dylan you work with Neil Young these two
from your icons of music history out of a how are they same and how are they different.
Lyrically, I think. Work-wise. Work-wise, yeah.
(16:47):
They definitely got two different kind of work methods and how they work.
And Neil is quite set up with his full moon.
But at the same time, Bob, he only likes to record at night.
He said there's something about nighttime where things are a little more slowed down.
And also, he prefers to work at night.
(17:09):
And Neil only works before the full moon.
So it's crazy so
i think that's the kind of difference that's similar
to it kind of their their work methods but and
but as far as lyrics and
stuff like that i got to see it you
(17:31):
know kind of firsthand i'm of
the opinion that they're very well read
you know they've read the classic they know all
of that stuff and and i you know
i didn't read any of that stuff but i found
out later by reading some of that stuff that some
of those things may have been taken from some of those and freedom inspiration
(17:55):
yeah i was looking through this book and there it was boom right in front of
me time out of mind that's what i was like yeah so i think that's where and
and as when When we get into it,
Tom Waits is pretty amazing with the lyric,
but he gets some from some of those too.
(18:15):
Let's talk about Tom Waits. You worked on Tom's album, I think it was 2004, Real Gone. Yes.
Well, how did you get involved with that? Because that wasn't through the Daniel Lanois. No.
But there's a record company called Antti, and one of the guys there at Antti
(18:36):
Records, He really loved the Lucinda Williams record.
And so he had called me up and he said, his name was Andy Culkin.
And Andy said, I'd really like you to make a record with Tom.
And I proposed it to Tom and Tom's going to call you.
And so I said, oh, that'd be great. I'd love to make a record with him.
(18:59):
And so we kind of left that. And Tom never called. About a year later, I get a call from Tom.
It's so serious. Out of the blue. Just out of the blue. Like, boom.
Them you come up on your phone it says tom wade no no
i just i just pick up the
number and leave and so he goes hey mark
(19:19):
it's tom i said hey tom and he
goes uh i hear you you make some
great records and i know you produce a lot of your records but
i was wondering is it possible if you could come
and make a record with for me where you
just kind of like you know record it and and and mix
it i said yeah i do that all the time for a
(19:40):
lot of people and it'd be you know easy for me
to do and he says yeah well just you know
the way we work is me and my wife kathleen we
kind of deal with the the production and writing
and all that stuff i said okay great yeah
so and so what happened is
is i i was working out of a place in
(20:00):
la in a beautiful big
huge mansion called the the paramour and it was
like a 1920s movie star estate that was
once owned by tonio marino and anthony
marino sorry and and he married daisy
canfield who was oil family from la
and her father built this amazing place
(20:22):
so i was that's where i made lucinda's record and.
So i invited tom and his wife kathleen down
to la because they live up by san francisco petaluma area
and so they came down and tom says i've been you know working on these songs
and i go into the bathroom late at night while everybody's sleeping and i got
(20:45):
this four-track cassette and what i do is i've been making these rhythms with my mouth.
And then i hit it with a pan,
and so he had all of these songs and all of these different rhythms that he'd come up with,
(21:06):
on this four-track cassette but he had no way to hear it here are these songs
unless he played it off this four-track cassette i said let's go through all
the ones you got i'll make a cd for you and you can take it home with you and
you can listen to it and we can pick the best ones,
and i said you know once we pick the best ones we'll re-record them you know
(21:28):
with my you know really nice equipment and you know nice microphones and and
so i said all right so and i said you know uh would you like to,
could you come down here and, you know, finish? And he goes,
no, I can't work here. I got to stay close to the family and stuff like that.
And so Tom, he lives out past Petaluma. And if he wants to go to a studio,
(21:53):
it's like two and a half, three hours away.
Prairie Sound, I think, is the closest one. So I said, well,
let me. He said, but I found this building at the end of my driveway.
It's the old schoolhouse.
He said, will you come up and look at it? And I said, yeah. Yeah,
so I flew up there, and I looked at it, and it was exactly the same size as the Paramore.
(22:17):
And so I said, yeah, I'll bring all the gear up. We'll make it here, and it's close for you.
So I went back to the Paramore, packed up all my gear, and drove it up there.
So it was going to be for a couple months. We were camped up there.
There but the schoolhouse was also used for farmers to show off their livestock
(22:38):
and their prized pigs and so that so we in the middle of the record i had to
pull everything out so they could have this kind of like farm meeting and then
go on there but yeah so that that's became like.
This spot where we were made real gone and it
was a strange record where tom he
can't really talk in normal terms of
(23:01):
technically like if he wants you to turn
the vocal up he can't just say turn the vocal up he'll say
put a little more hair on it like oh yeah i'll put
a little more hair on it like here's the air but like i better
and like so you gotta like kind of think about what
he's he's talking about but you know it's like you know
as you know when we first started
(23:21):
recording i was being pretty enthusiastic
i was excited about you know what where we're going with this record and how
it was sounding and you know like i'd say i'm more of a guerrilla recordist
than i am and i like to use different methods and stuff that is very lo-fi to people and so So me,
(23:43):
by being too enthusiastic, I get this phone call.
I'm staying in this hotel in Sebastopol.
And he calls me. He goes, Mark, it's Tom. I said, hey, Tom.
He goes, Mark, I'm feeling a little bit more like you're the pharmacist and I'm a patient.
I said, okay. He goes, you try to prescribe me Zyaxidil and I need to be on Triaxidil.
(24:06):
And I said, oh, yeah, yeah. yeah, he goes, but maybe I need to be on,
you know, you know, on this drug.
And, but, and I, I need to, and so in other words, shut up, let me find my own
way. And, and this is the way I work. So I said, okay, cool.
And so throughout the record, there's always like no different terms for, for that.
(24:29):
He had for like, if we cut a take and it was like the first take and it just
happened, it was natural.
It was that one came out of the ground, like a potato.
Gone so so it's it's
you know he's got this kind of quirky kind of persona about
him that he he talks in a in a
strange manner but he drifts in and
(24:51):
out of it i think he puts it up on sometimes just
to but when it's just me and him in the room it's just
it just seems like he's just like a normal guy and we can
talk about anything you had the les claypool in
that album right les came in and
the drummer also from primus and
no they call him brain right is it was what's his real name brian right yeah
(25:15):
but somebody had spelt his name wrong and they called him brain and so yeah
so he was there and so he was it was an interesting and then mark rebo from
new york came in mark is kind of a master of,
crazy guitar sounds and amazing rhythms and stuff like that.
But he'd never played live with Tom on a record. He'd always overdubbed it afterwards.
(25:41):
The record was recorded live?
Yeah, this record was pretty live up the floor.
There was two bathrooms. There was a boy's bathroom and a girl's bathroom and the schoolhouse.
There's still the board, i went all the way around
the ceiling with the alphabet on it and numbers and stuff like
that you can see it and but we had
(26:04):
a setup in the girls bathroom and it had these stall
doors and so i put brain
in there and i didn't use i wasn't
using microphones i was using a sony
cassette player it's like
it has two speakers in it it's got two microphones put a
cassette in the front and then you put it in record and
(26:25):
it has two lines out and i would take those lines out and what
it is is that for whatever reason that
has this compression in it that makes everything sound more
exciting than it actually is because it's it's
lo-fi and so i had that in the
bathroom and i kept it on all the time so we
could hear so brain had gone into the the
(26:46):
bathroom and tom goes what's that
sound i go it's brain he's in the bathroom i guess yeah right you know it goes
and then you hear him stop and open the stall door and it slams he goes what's
that i go that's the stall door it slammed he goes i want to use that sound
i said okay cool and so i go in there and tell brain you know like how much you did like.
(27:10):
Slam the door, and the rhythm goes boom. Then when you hit the downbeat,
hit the wall with this piece of wood, goes boom, boom, boom, boom.
Coming through this cassette deck, it was like this crazy cool sound.
I thought, that's amazing.
(27:31):
We cut the track with it on, and right at the very end of the song, He pulls the door.
The door falls off the hinges and hits the ground right in time.
It's like, wow, pretty cool.
And so Brain had his, what was called an MPC-60 drum machine.
(27:55):
And he had it because he lived in Frisco. It was like car culture there, like custom paintwork.
And so he had his drum machine painted with this custom car paint.
And it looked pretty sharp. So he took that sound of the door slamming and mixed
it with some other kind of sample that he had.
(28:16):
That made it that sound. And then another time, he brings back in there and
he's got a snare drum and he's got to roll a gaffer tape.
And he's taping the gaffer tape to mute this drum sound.
And so Tom hears that. He goes, well, what's that sound?
I go, he's got the gaffer tape. He's gaving up his snare drum.
(28:36):
He goes, I want to use it. it and so we had to get brain to play with the gaff tape so it was like.
And then he matched that with a like an 808 kick drum so it was,
boom boom boom and so it was this cool cool effect that was going on,
(28:57):
and or i think it was a song make it
rain or one one of those make it rain
or another one but you hear it right away like right at
the top of the song so yeah so that that was another
kind of crazy sound that we got and then
he had invited his son to come do some scratching because he liked to do the
(29:19):
dj thing and so tom says here casey take those hundred dollars go into frisco
and get some bino so casey takes the hundred and he leaves in the morning and
then we hear him come come back,
Crisco and Tom opens the door and, oh no,
I go, what, what happened?
(29:40):
He goes, he put the vinyl on the back window.
Warped all of the vinyl that he just bought. Anyways, it was,
we still did some scratching. It was pretty cool.
And it was mostly just me and him half the time. And so there's a bunch of tracks
that never made the record that I think should have but they're political and at that time about a,
(30:08):
Yeah, I think Mark Rebo is Jewish, and I think he expressed some kind of concern about this.
Tom, sometimes he reads stuff right out of the New York Times and looks at certain things.
He was using some names of people.
Mark Rebo thought he would get into trouble if he named them.
(30:30):
They'd come after him. But, you know, with Tom, he married Kathleen,
his wife, and they had some kids together.
He doesn't like to go on tour or leave his house and
Kathleen said yeah we were in New York and you
know Tom freaked out and he wouldn't go out on stage unless
he had this kick drum with this painting of the Alps with these mountains on
(30:51):
it and it was at his mother's house in in in the Bronx and so we had to send
somebody out to the Bronx keep the audience in there for an hour or in this
big, huge hall in New York.
And so they finally got the kick drum there and he agreed to go out on stage.
And so, but he never played it. It just sat there.
(31:13):
So he has like this, so he doesn't like to tour very often. And he does some
TV stuff, but he's pretty particular.
He did a Black Rider, it was like a play that he'd done in San Francisco.
And so he had gotten marianne faithful to come in to do some of it and another
(31:35):
girl from canada that maybe i think she remember her name but she'd quit and
so marianne was taking over,
but it was interesting to see i went to that play and it was pretty pretty cool
he had all the music in there it's pretty interesting oh yeah what a crazy environment
to make records in Absolutely.
(31:56):
I want to talk about one more legend that you work with so many, by Joni Mitchell.
Who you remixed a song of seagull with her
first album yeah how did that come about
and why did uh joni want that remix well
i'd known joni from before mixing that record she came in to sing on brian blade's
(32:18):
jazz record and so that was in oxnard and so i knew her from that and i you
you know, recorded all our vocals on this record.
And then what happened was, is somebody had called me from the CBC in Canada.
They were going to be interviewing Joni at her house.
And so they asked if I could come in because they had saw this documentary piece
(32:43):
that Neil had done about making Illinois.
And they said, well, we want to have all Canadian crew too.
And they said, would you come in and record her vocal for us?
And, you know, we'll match it up later. her so I
said yeah yeah no problem so went to Joni's house and
I know she's oh yeah Elliot's been
talking about you Elliot Roberts was her manager and helped her out too at the
(33:06):
same time so and so she remembered me and she was I need your help and can you
come back you know after this and help me and so yeah I said yeah sure and went
back up to her house a couple days later and and told me what she was looking to do.
She said, my first four records were all just acoustic and voice.
(33:30):
But the very first one was produced by.
David Crosby. And she goes, David, he misproduced my record.
And he made me double my guitar.
And for all these years, I've never liked it. I never liked my first record.
And it's got some great songs, but I want to get back. So I had to find the tapes.
(33:54):
And most of them were on Cosby, Neil, Nash, the multi-tracks,
in between other songs. Oh, yeah.
Like they had pieced a lot of this stuff together. like
you know when they weren't working they use the same role
put her on it and stuff like that some of
it was done on acetate which it's a different type
of tape that you record on more more film type
(34:17):
of stuff was done on acetate but i got it all and i transferred it into digital
so i was able to go to her house and i was able to mix it right there in front
of her and so she just sit on the couch and smoke and you know you know say
how she is she active in how Have she wanted it to sound?
Oh, well, I would mix it the way I wanted it. And then I would make her a CD.
(34:40):
And then she pulled the same thing out on me that Dylan kind of did.
She goes, I've been listening on my TV, and it sounds better with the Dolby
off than with the Dolby's on.
And I said, yeah, that's probably not a good reference. That's your only reference
is to listen off of your TV.
So anyways, we went a couple of rounds. with kind
(35:02):
of changing a couple things that she wanted but it was just more levels than
than other things because it was just a good voice and it's a joke yeah so so
she just wanted a couple of pieces that were just the voice was a little loud
on so but other than that yeah and so she had also.
(35:22):
After I finished that, she had had a brain aneurysm, just like Neil had, you know, like bang.
She lived in this beautiful house in Bel Air by herself.
You know, I thought, well, you should have a caretaker, somebody that looks after you.
And she had this, like these little dogs, and they're always jumping,
and she's always tripping over them.
This is just a disaster waiting, you know, you're going to fall one day,
(35:46):
trip over the dog or whatever.
But she ended up having that aneurysm, and that slowed her down a lot.
Lot and everything went quiet after that and she was
wanting to make like a box set and so she
wanted to include the that first record in
there also that's why she wanted a remix she's performing at the hollywood bowl
(36:06):
in the end of the year yeah yeah yeah yeah well she just did the grammy thing
and then she did she won for the newport jazz festival they recorded that and
that so she She went for like a live record.
Did you record anything with her playing?
Well, the thing is, yeah, she wouldn't play or sing. She just wanted me to mix.
(36:28):
And then she wanted some drums on some tracks.
And so I invited Brian Blade up to put some drums on a song called Strange Boy,
which just had percussion on it.
And then she's a big Jocko fan.
Jocko played on a lot of records. and my friend hal craig and he's a you know
bass player and he's just you know jocko everything.
(36:51):
So i said my friend you can play like
jocko a little bit so she said get him over here and
so my friend hal came over and he played on a couple of the tracks that i had
with her and so and so she was directing him left and right and so too hard
too soft he really was on him like but he He was such a Joni fan and he's just
(37:12):
grateful for me that I invited him.
Did you have any stories of sharing anything about the original sessions for that first album?
Anything that helped give you insight on how to better.
Mix it now not really she
just really wanted to get it back to sounding like her other reference that
(37:35):
is just very just straight and clean you get that yeah and then but she doesn't
consider herself a musician she's an artist like she thinks first she's a painter
that's what she She complains and so,
and then, but also, you know, as a musician,
a lot of musicians are like, they can't believe she invented a chord chain.
(37:58):
Nobody had ever had, had made before. And so she had developed that by herself.
And so she was, you know, definitely, you know, by her peers,
like, you know, the top of the bunch for sure.
But yeah, it was kind of interesting record, you know, to hang out and mix and,
and, you know, but she was just chain smoking and I'm like, Oh boy, still doing it.
(38:22):
And so it's, it was, it was a nice, you know, she was trying to put this,
the compilation record of all of her records.
I said, Joni, like, do you have any records?
She's like, Nope. You don't have any records. Nope.
He goes, I got divorced and he took all my records.
And I thought, what do you mean? It's like, you don't have any of your.
(38:44):
Ends up so larry klein she was married
to this guy larry klein i guess 80s maybe
larry produced some or a couple of them so there are a lot of these stories
or these stories and other stories are also in a book that you wrote called
listen up that's correct and also in your photographer as well so you're taking
(39:05):
a lot of pictures of these sessions yeah and put them out in another other book.
So this is my newest book. It's called Recording Icons slash Creative Spaces.
And so over the last 30 years, I've been doing what's called time-lapse photography.
Because, you know, if you take a camera and you put it up,
person changes their face the way they act and just
(39:27):
you know but if you do time lapse you capture people
i call it like it's national geographic i'm
capturing these wild animals in their natural habitat and so that's what i've
been doing with that dylan and joni and neil and so i've got some amazing photos
of them singing and performing in the studios that i built for those records
(39:50):
and And so it's architectural.
It's, you know, creative and, you know, you get an all, all different kind of
like views of, because you wouldn't be able to put a photographer in a studio
and, and take photos and capture them in, in these kind of like, you know, these,
while they're singing, you know, so it's like having a photographer that's not
(40:11):
there, you know, so it's the new book is doing well.
And so I've been doing a lot of book signings.
And in the meantime, I've been doing, I watch a lot of movies myself.
And so I'm kind of a big James Bond fan, but I don't like to watch the films.
I like to watch them with what's called where the director talks about it and everybody else.
(40:36):
So it's like a commentary. so i've been
doing projecting the pictures from the
book and i do a commentary along with
it and then that turned into those commentaries turned
into i've made a little film out of it now where i
just show this film with my commentaries there so i
don't have to do it off the cuff like you know making like i
(40:56):
do here you're working on a documentary as well yeah so this
is the documentary that that from from that book
and so hopefully that will be all finished soon and
that will be another next step after
after that hopefully i can put that in
some film festivals and so i'm kind
of going by bob dylan's rules he said anything
(41:17):
over that over an hour is a waste of time and
so that's why all of the shows are one hour and he's off
to say no and i think it's you know
these people don't have a lot of attention span these
days so and you know a lot movies are all quick
edits bang bang bang to keep your attention so i
tried to do in in this kind
(41:39):
of a little documentary thing where you get a
nice piece of music to listen to and then i talk about it and then so i just
want to make sure that you know it's not and then the music is still there underneath
my commentary but it makes for a pretty cool watch you know for you know learning
you know Like we've been talking here, I have these same stories in there too.
(42:02):
Awesome. I'm working with this guy who used to be Rolling Stone's editor and
now he's running Rolling Stone's films and,
I'm about to go to Jamaica, and then after Jamaica, I go to Barbados with this
guy from New Orleans, Anders Osborne.
(42:22):
So they want to come and document on the sailboat where I'm going to make his
record and outside of Barbados. It's going to be crazy.
So hopefully they'll pick up with the doc, and they might be able to put it out for him.
But it's all early stages of it. That would be a good home for me.
Yes. you know thank you for listening to the second part of this interview with
(42:45):
mark howard if you enjoyed it please rate it subscribe or share and visit us
at all day vinyl on instagram.
Thank you for listening. This is the Legends Podcast by All Day Vinyl,
and I'm your host, Scott Dettelson.
After you finish this episode, please subscribe and rate it,
and please check us out on Instagram at All Day Vinyl.
Today, I'm here with Mark Howard, and we're having part two of our conversation.
You can check out part one where we talked about Mark recording and mixing Time
Out of Mind and No Mercy with Bob Dylan.
(00:21):
Today, we're going to talk about his work with Neil Young on the album La Noise,
and also Tom Waits' Real Gone.
So thank you mark thank you again yeah appreciate
having you so linois by
neil young is one of my favorite neil young albums it's
probably the stuff he did with david briggs in the mid 90s right yeah and neil
(00:43):
notoriously has his own crew of people he works with yeah which now includes
rick rubin so tell me how you you got involved you and danielson worked with
them yeah at the time At the time,
Dan also had the same manager as Neil, Elliot Roberts.
And so me and Dan had made a record called Black Dub, which was filmed.
(01:08):
The record is filmed live as we were playing it.
And so that way, the recording and the film all lines up. It's not cut together.
It's one piece, and they're like filmed pieces.
And so each song, we did exactly that way.
And so elliot had showed these
to to neil and neil really thought they he really
(01:29):
liked it and he goes why can't i have a record like that and so
they neil and daniel emwa started talking
and they agreed for neil to come down
to dan's house in silver lake the house
called bella vista and so i had
set up a rig in the hallway of dan's
house and he had a full studio in the basement
(01:51):
with a Neve 8068 but it was
I didn't like the vibe in the basement it was like a dungeon and
so he's got a beautiful living room and a beautiful
hallway so I just set up my rig in his
hallway and so like I was telling you before about how my sound system works
I use a playback system that's got like big 18 inch subwoofers and it's got
(02:16):
like multiple speakers towering and so when you play Playback stuff sounds bigger than real.
So then it really happened and exciting and it makes the artists happy and they
really dig it. So when, when.
Neal decided to come down. We had tested all Dan's mics, and I got everything
(02:37):
all lined up and which guitars we could use and amps, and we picked the best of everything.
And so we did all of our kind of like homework before he got in.
So it would be like, oh, Neal's coming in tomorrow at noon.
We're there waiting, and Neal don't show up that day.
And then it's like, he's coming in tomorrow, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
(02:58):
And so you know right and show up the next day they're like what's going on
so he finally shows up on the third day you know he rolls in there but before
that he had sent one of his.
Techs with a van with all of his instruments and pump organ and a bunch of other
all of his amplifiers and stuff like that guitars and so when neil eventually
(03:23):
got there he explained that But he was waiting for the full moon.
He claims that he can't work only on three days before the full moon.
So he was waiting for that three days before the full moon so he can start recording.
He claims if you record before that or after that, that you're not going to
(03:45):
get as good as a performance or a vibe. Is that how he's done his career?
I don't know. But that was this particular record. He really wanted to push that. that.
The record took six months to make because we're waiting for all the full moons.
Eventually, once he came in, we started working and it got to a point where
(04:06):
Neil had some songs, meant to be acoustic record.
I developed the sound. I thought, how the hell am I going to better his guitar sound?
I'm a big fan of- Using the whole black guitar.
He's got the acoustic end of it.
(04:27):
This is supposed to be an acoustic record, just film each song on acoustics and stuff like that.
But he had also brought a record to Les Paul, Paul, the 57 Les Paul gold top
that he's painted black.
And so. What he used on Hey My Mom.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's the classic. Yeah. And then he's got this other guitar
(04:52):
that it's, it's a white Falcon Gretsch and it's a special guitar because it's a twin stereo output.
So the top three string, top three strings come out of one pickup and the bottom
three strings come out of another pickup.
Up so you split that into two amps and so
you have to play it a certain way and so he
(05:13):
plays like you know like crazy like so it's like a very stereo and you read
if you listen to that record first yeah yeah so it's pretty cool and so so we
started with the acoustics and he had his his acoustic there, and he called it Hank.
(05:33):
And it used Hank Williams' guitar.
But Dan had a little guild, a little mahogany guild.
And I tested every pickup known to man, and I came up with LR bags.
So I put the LR bags in that. And then so I miked it, and then I ran a DI of it.
(05:56):
So I had a direct signal at the same time. And so we had Neil set up in this
big beautiful living room.
And so it just and i was in the the hallway and but as we were checking the guitars,
i had a couple of effects that i had on it so when when neil would hit the low string of the guitar,
(06:18):
it would trigger the sub harmonizer that i had and it would just shake the house
like an earthquake it was like what the hell is this though he'd never felt
that off an acoustic before so i I thought, okay, this is good. He had a big smile.
He really liked it. And so we ended up cutting Love and War.
I think the song was in. If you listen to that, it's like in headphones.
(06:40):
It's just got this sub. It's just so warm and dreamy. Yeah, yeah.
It's unlike anything that he'd ever done. Yeah. And so I was excited.
And I created a sound for him that he'd never heard before and never felt.
And because I play and I got the speakers on and it gives you that kind of fulfillment
(07:02):
that you're live and you're on a stage and stuff like that.
So I think that part of it really worked well for that.
And then, so we'd cut, I think there was another song called Peaceful Valley,
Peaceful Valley something on that record. That was an acoustic song.
And so that one, the low frequency didn't work as well as Love Me.
(07:27):
And so we cut those two and he went away.
We waited for the next full moon. And on the next full moon,
he comes back. Did you know you were waiting, or was that a plan?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. We were told that we were waiting for this full moon.
So he comes back, and so then he's got the two electrics with him.
(07:47):
And he says, I want to try walk with me with this Les Paul.
And so we set up two Tweed amps.
And he's got this special treatment on his amps where the Tweed amp has tubes in it.
And what happens is the tube amps heat up and
then your tone goes away because it's too hot so he
has these fans blowing cool air on the tubes keep
(08:10):
the amp cool as possible to keep the
tone there all the time and so so he pulls out the guitar and and i'm just you
know it's the same faders everything that's kind of it's only like two channels
or three channels or whatever and And then I got my effects coming back on another console.
(08:32):
And so I got the speakers kind of turned up pretty loud.
And then he hits that chord on that guitar and it just blew his mind.
His pant legs were swaying. The house was also shaking. And we had to tape all the windows down.
It was a pretty serious sound.
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so that became kind of like a bit of the sound.
(08:57):
It was also another treatment that I did on that record.
And it's something that I spend a lot of time in Jamaica, and I do a lot of dub work.
So I've got a lot of dubs on that record where.
Like these real strange psychedelic sounds.
(09:17):
And they're all done by this old lexicon delay that's going to touch hold on
it. And so I kind of developed the style the way I use it.
And I can like hold words or sounds and then, but you can lower them. Yeah.
I'm just doing all this stuff on the fly as he's playing. He's like,
(09:41):
what the hell is this sound?
So he was pretty excited about it.
So we'd cut a couple of those ones with that guitar and we did it.
Then he brought out the White Falcon.
So I split the pickup and went into it. Then I thought it was the one that he may have played.
(10:06):
Walk with me on yeah i think that was the one actually not blackie blackie who i think was.
Hitchhike so tell me tell me a story on hitchhiker that's
that's the centerpiece of to me
the album yeah well he had written hitchhiker i
guess in the 60s and there was a version of it but
(10:28):
he never felt it was completely let me let me let me just uh maybe you know
this story maybe you don't know know the story but what i read was he wrote
it in the mid early mid 70s and actually played it for bob dylan you know bob
dylan came over one day and played it and bob dylan's comment on it was,
that's very honest that's very honest and neil didn't know what to do with it
(10:53):
and i was kind of yeah shelved it from there yeah they could pick us up yeah
30 years later yeah so it it poked his his head out again, this record.
So Neil would go away to Hawaii and Dan would call him up and said, you got any new songs?
He'd say, no, I'm sitting here over the rabbit hole and nothing's coming out.
(11:16):
So it got to the point where after he'd go to Hawaii and then we'd get a call
saying, I've written this one song and I'm sure it was Hitchhiker.
He finished it there anyways. He finally finished the last verse or whatever it was.
Then when he came back in, I think that's when he performed it.
(11:39):
And we had the film guy, the director, Adam Volokh, his name was.
And so he's a Canadian guy.
And he came down. So it was like, we're all Canadians in this room doing this record.
So we had projectors that we were projecting the sky and all the clouds kind of going by.
(12:01):
And so we're doing the projections as we were recording.
And we got the front doors of Bella Vista open. and everybody in Silver Lake
heard that record go down. I had it so bloody loud.
Real quick, go back on Hitchhiker. So you had shared a story with me.
I hope you could share it again.
So when he was in Hawaii, he got some inspiration and they brought that inspiration back.
(12:25):
Yeah, so he had said that he had finished the song and he had this joint that he had smoked in Hawaii.
And he thought, well, I wrote it on this joint.
Joint i want to record it on this joint so he put the joint out
and he carried the joint all the way back for him and
so when we're about to record he sparked it back up so he could be
(12:45):
high on the other side of the joint yeah yeah
so so it was it was an interesting thing but
he had gone through he had a brain aneurysm just
before this record and the doctor said don't smoke
weed you know like don't don't even do it
and so you know after the sessions i would
(13:06):
usually just take a little hit you know and i think it may have got him started
again but yeah so when he came in you know he we recorded it after he smoked
it and we listened back and it was it was pretty,
incredible and i had dub a lot of dub works on that
(13:28):
that track also it's a great song and it's
a and for anyone who's not familiar with it definitely find
it it's not streaming but you could find it somewhere and it's a drug song
it's all about Neil's history with he says the word hash his hash and I think
he talks about every yeah I am that his autobiography what I understood okay
(13:50):
he's drug journeys mm-hmm and so what he wrote knew was the last verse I think yeah.
And then after that session, he went away again.
And during that session, Daniel Lanois got in a motorcycle accident and broke his ribs.
(14:12):
And he was up for a while or down for a while.
And so Neil kept on saying, when are we going to finish? When are we going to
finish? And kept calling him.
And so at that time, there was a running joke, you know, about Lanois' last
name. People don't know how to say it properly and people call him LeNoise.
(14:35):
So Neil would always call Dan LeNoise, LeNoise.
So the record was supposed to be called Hitchhiker. I did the tour and they
had hitchhiker shirts made for that tour.
But as we were mastering and as a joke, that became the name of the record based
(14:56):
off of Lanois' last name.
That's why it's called La Noise, which was pretty crazy.
We would drive up to Neil's ranch up in Northern California,
and I brought some speakers with me, and we'd go listen to it up at his ranch.
He's a bar. Is it the barn? Oh, he's got multiple places.
(15:20):
We stayed in what was called the White House, And that's where his band always stayed.
And then he's got Redwood Digital. I think that's the studio.
But then he's got a couple of other houses. His house is pretty phenomenal.
It's like a big log cabin added on over the years. It's huge, beautiful inside.
(15:43):
But then he's got his car collection in a big kind of room.
And then behind his car collection is his amp collection. and it's just like
a wall of every hand we ever had it was pretty pretty amazing and then i said.
I said you know didn't you buy like well a
train company that makes toy train he says
(16:03):
yeah lyle i think it was called the line
of light yeah and so he brought us
into this other building where he had this huge train
set that he built for his son the one one
of them that was in the the wheelchair and so it
was phenomenal like oh it was like pretty huge
it was the size of a warehouse of trains and all kinds of different landscapes
(16:26):
and so it was interesting to see and how what he's been up to and stuff like
that I was you know you work with Bob Dylan you work with Neil Young these two
from your icons of music history out of a how are they same and how are they different.
Lyrically, I think. Work-wise. Work-wise, yeah.
(16:47):
They definitely got two different kind of work methods and how they work.
And Neil is quite set up with his full moon.
But at the same time, Bob, he only likes to record at night.
He said there's something about nighttime where things are a little more slowed down.
And also, he prefers to work at night.
(17:09):
And Neil only works before the full moon.
So it's crazy so
i think that's the kind of difference that's similar
to it kind of their their work methods but and
but as far as lyrics and
stuff like that i got to see it you
(17:31):
know kind of firsthand i'm of
the opinion that they're very well read
you know they've read the classic they know all
of that stuff and and i you know
i didn't read any of that stuff but i found
out later by reading some of that stuff that some
of those things may have been taken from some of those and freedom inspiration
(17:55):
yeah i was looking through this book and there it was boom right in front of
me time out of mind that's what i was like yeah so i think that's where and
and as when When we get into it,
Tom Waits is pretty amazing with the lyric,
but he gets some from some of those too.
(18:15):
Let's talk about Tom Waits. You worked on Tom's album, I think it was 2004, Real Gone. Yes.
Well, how did you get involved with that? Because that wasn't through the Daniel Lanois. No.
But there's a record company called Antti, and one of the guys there at Antti
(18:36):
Records, He really loved the Lucinda Williams record.
And so he had called me up and he said, his name was Andy Culkin.
And Andy said, I'd really like you to make a record with Tom.
And I proposed it to Tom and Tom's going to call you.
And so I said, oh, that'd be great. I'd love to make a record with him.
(18:59):
And so we kind of left that. And Tom never called. About a year later, I get a call from Tom.
It's so serious. Out of the blue. Just out of the blue. Like, boom.
Them you come up on your phone it says tom wade no no
i just i just pick up the
number and leave and so he goes hey mark
(19:19):
it's tom i said hey tom and he
goes uh i hear you you make some
great records and i know you produce a lot of your records but
i was wondering is it possible if you could come
and make a record with for me where you
just kind of like you know record it and and and mix
it i said yeah i do that all the time for a
(19:40):
lot of people and it'd be you know easy for me
to do and he says yeah well just you know
the way we work is me and my wife kathleen we
kind of deal with the the production and writing
and all that stuff i said okay great yeah
so and so what happened is
is i i was working out of a place in
(20:00):
la in a beautiful big
huge mansion called the the paramour and it was
like a 1920s movie star estate that was
once owned by tonio marino and anthony
marino sorry and and he married daisy
canfield who was oil family from la
and her father built this amazing place
(20:22):
so i was that's where i made lucinda's record and.
So i invited tom and his wife kathleen down
to la because they live up by san francisco petaluma area
and so they came down and tom says i've been you know working on these songs
and i go into the bathroom late at night while everybody's sleeping and i got
(20:45):
this four-track cassette and what i do is i've been making these rhythms with my mouth.
And then i hit it with a pan,
and so he had all of these songs and all of these different rhythms that he'd come up with,
(21:06):
on this four-track cassette but he had no way to hear it here are these songs
unless he played it off this four-track cassette i said let's go through all
the ones you got i'll make a cd for you and you can take it home with you and
you can listen to it and we can pick the best ones,
and i said you know once we pick the best ones we'll re-record them you know
(21:28):
with my you know really nice equipment and you know nice microphones and and
so i said all right so and i said you know uh would you like to,
could you come down here and, you know, finish? And he goes,
no, I can't work here. I got to stay close to the family and stuff like that.
And so Tom, he lives out past Petaluma. And if he wants to go to a studio,
(21:53):
it's like two and a half, three hours away.
Prairie Sound, I think, is the closest one. So I said, well,
let me. He said, but I found this building at the end of my driveway.
It's the old schoolhouse.
He said, will you come up and look at it? And I said, yeah. Yeah,
so I flew up there, and I looked at it, and it was exactly the same size as the Paramore.
(22:17):
And so I said, yeah, I'll bring all the gear up. We'll make it here, and it's close for you.
So I went back to the Paramore, packed up all my gear, and drove it up there.
So it was going to be for a couple months. We were camped up there.
There but the schoolhouse was also used for farmers to show off their livestock
(22:38):
and their prized pigs and so that so we in the middle of the record i had to
pull everything out so they could have this kind of like farm meeting and then
go on there but yeah so that that's became like.
This spot where we were made real gone and it
was a strange record where tom he
can't really talk in normal terms of
(23:01):
technically like if he wants you to turn
the vocal up he can't just say turn the vocal up he'll say
put a little more hair on it like oh yeah i'll put
a little more hair on it like here's the air but like i better
and like so you gotta like kind of think about what
he's he's talking about but you know it's like you know
as you know when we first started
(23:21):
recording i was being pretty enthusiastic
i was excited about you know what where we're going with this record and how
it was sounding and you know like i'd say i'm more of a guerrilla recordist
than i am and i like to use different methods and stuff that is very lo-fi to people and so So me,
(23:43):
by being too enthusiastic, I get this phone call.
I'm staying in this hotel in Sebastopol.
And he calls me. He goes, Mark, it's Tom. I said, hey, Tom.
He goes, Mark, I'm feeling a little bit more like you're the pharmacist and I'm a patient.
I said, okay. He goes, you try to prescribe me Zyaxidil and I need to be on Triaxidil.
(24:06):
And I said, oh, yeah, yeah. yeah, he goes, but maybe I need to be on,
you know, you know, on this drug.
And, but, and I, I need to, and so in other words, shut up, let me find my own
way. And, and this is the way I work. So I said, okay, cool.
And so throughout the record, there's always like no different terms for, for that.
(24:29):
He had for like, if we cut a take and it was like the first take and it just
happened, it was natural.
It was that one came out of the ground, like a potato.
Gone so so it's it's
you know he's got this kind of quirky kind of persona about
him that he he talks in a in a
strange manner but he drifts in and
(24:51):
out of it i think he puts it up on sometimes just
to but when it's just me and him in the room it's just
it just seems like he's just like a normal guy and we can
talk about anything you had the les claypool in
that album right les came in and
the drummer also from primus and
no they call him brain right is it was what's his real name brian right yeah
(25:15):
but somebody had spelt his name wrong and they called him brain and so yeah
so he was there and so he was it was an interesting and then mark rebo from
new york came in mark is kind of a master of,
crazy guitar sounds and amazing rhythms and stuff like that.
But he'd never played live with Tom on a record. He'd always overdubbed it afterwards.
(25:41):
The record was recorded live?
Yeah, this record was pretty live up the floor.
There was two bathrooms. There was a boy's bathroom and a girl's bathroom and the schoolhouse.
There's still the board, i went all the way around
the ceiling with the alphabet on it and numbers and stuff like
that you can see it and but we had
(26:04):
a setup in the girls bathroom and it had these stall
doors and so i put brain
in there and i didn't use i wasn't
using microphones i was using a sony
cassette player it's like
it has two speakers in it it's got two microphones put a
cassette in the front and then you put it in record and
(26:25):
it has two lines out and i would take those lines out and what
it is is that for whatever reason that
has this compression in it that makes everything sound more
exciting than it actually is because it's it's
lo-fi and so i had that in the
bathroom and i kept it on all the time so we
could hear so brain had gone into the the
(26:46):
bathroom and tom goes what's that
sound i go it's brain he's in the bathroom i guess yeah right you know it goes
and then you hear him stop and open the stall door and it slams he goes what's
that i go that's the stall door it slammed he goes i want to use that sound
i said okay cool and so i go in there and tell brain you know like how much you did like.
(27:10):
Slam the door, and the rhythm goes boom. Then when you hit the downbeat,
hit the wall with this piece of wood, goes boom, boom, boom, boom.
Coming through this cassette deck, it was like this crazy cool sound.
I thought, that's amazing.
(27:31):
We cut the track with it on, and right at the very end of the song, He pulls the door.
The door falls off the hinges and hits the ground right in time.
It's like, wow, pretty cool.
And so Brain had his, what was called an MPC-60 drum machine.
(27:55):
And he had it because he lived in Frisco. It was like car culture there, like custom paintwork.
And so he had his drum machine painted with this custom car paint.
And it looked pretty sharp. So he took that sound of the door slamming and mixed
it with some other kind of sample that he had.
(28:16):
That made it that sound. And then another time, he brings back in there and
he's got a snare drum and he's got to roll a gaffer tape.
And he's taping the gaffer tape to mute this drum sound.
And so Tom hears that. He goes, well, what's that sound?
I go, he's got the gaffer tape. He's gaving up his snare drum.
(28:36):
He goes, I want to use it. it and so we had to get brain to play with the gaff tape so it was like.
And then he matched that with a like an 808 kick drum so it was,
boom boom boom and so it was this cool cool effect that was going on,
(28:57):
and or i think it was a song make it
rain or one one of those make it rain
or another one but you hear it right away like right at
the top of the song so yeah so that that was another
kind of crazy sound that we got and then
he had invited his son to come do some scratching because he liked to do the
(29:19):
dj thing and so tom says here casey take those hundred dollars go into frisco
and get some bino so casey takes the hundred and he leaves in the morning and
then we hear him come come back,
Crisco and Tom opens the door and, oh no,
I go, what, what happened?
(29:40):
He goes, he put the vinyl on the back window.
Warped all of the vinyl that he just bought. Anyways, it was,
we still did some scratching. It was pretty cool.
And it was mostly just me and him half the time. And so there's a bunch of tracks
that never made the record that I think should have but they're political and at that time about a,
(30:08):
Yeah, I think Mark Rebo is Jewish, and I think he expressed some kind of concern about this.
Tom, sometimes he reads stuff right out of the New York Times and looks at certain things.
He was using some names of people.
Mark Rebo thought he would get into trouble if he named them.
(30:30):
They'd come after him. But, you know, with Tom, he married Kathleen,
his wife, and they had some kids together.
He doesn't like to go on tour or leave his house and
Kathleen said yeah we were in New York and you
know Tom freaked out and he wouldn't go out on stage unless
he had this kick drum with this painting of the Alps with these mountains on
(30:51):
it and it was at his mother's house in in in the Bronx and so we had to send
somebody out to the Bronx keep the audience in there for an hour or in this
big, huge hall in New York.
And so they finally got the kick drum there and he agreed to go out on stage.
And so, but he never played it. It just sat there.
(31:13):
So he has like this, so he doesn't like to tour very often. And he does some
TV stuff, but he's pretty particular.
He did a Black Rider, it was like a play that he'd done in San Francisco.
And so he had gotten marianne faithful to come in to do some of it and another
(31:35):
girl from canada that maybe i think she remember her name but she'd quit and
so marianne was taking over,
but it was interesting to see i went to that play and it was pretty pretty cool
he had all the music in there it's pretty interesting oh yeah what a crazy environment
to make records in Absolutely.
(31:56):
I want to talk about one more legend that you work with so many, by Joni Mitchell.
Who you remixed a song of seagull with her
first album yeah how did that come about
and why did uh joni want that remix well
i'd known joni from before mixing that record she came in to sing on brian blade's
(32:18):
jazz record and so that was in oxnard and so i knew her from that and i you
you know, recorded all our vocals on this record.
And then what happened was, is somebody had called me from the CBC in Canada.
They were going to be interviewing Joni at her house.
And so they asked if I could come in because they had saw this documentary piece
(32:43):
that Neil had done about making Illinois.
And they said, well, we want to have all Canadian crew too.
And they said, would you come in and record her vocal for us?
And, you know, we'll match it up later. her so I
said yeah yeah no problem so went to Joni's house and
I know she's oh yeah Elliot's been
talking about you Elliot Roberts was her manager and helped her out too at the
(33:06):
same time so and so she remembered me and she was I need your help and can you
come back you know after this and help me and so yeah I said yeah sure and went
back up to her house a couple days later and and told me what she was looking to do.
She said, my first four records were all just acoustic and voice.
(33:30):
But the very first one was produced by.
David Crosby. And she goes, David, he misproduced my record.
And he made me double my guitar.
And for all these years, I've never liked it. I never liked my first record.
And it's got some great songs, but I want to get back. So I had to find the tapes.
(33:54):
And most of them were on Cosby, Neil, Nash, the multi-tracks,
in between other songs. Oh, yeah.
Like they had pieced a lot of this stuff together. like
you know when they weren't working they use the same role
put her on it and stuff like that some of
it was done on acetate which it's a different type
of tape that you record on more more film type
(34:17):
of stuff was done on acetate but i got it all and i transferred it into digital
so i was able to go to her house and i was able to mix it right there in front
of her and so she just sit on the couch and smoke and you know you know say
how she is she active in how Have she wanted it to sound?
Oh, well, I would mix it the way I wanted it. And then I would make her a CD.
(34:40):
And then she pulled the same thing out on me that Dylan kind of did.
She goes, I've been listening on my TV, and it sounds better with the Dolby
off than with the Dolby's on.
And I said, yeah, that's probably not a good reference. That's your only reference
is to listen off of your TV.
So anyways, we went a couple of rounds. with kind
(35:02):
of changing a couple things that she wanted but it was just more levels than
than other things because it was just a good voice and it's a joke yeah so so
she just wanted a couple of pieces that were just the voice was a little loud
on so but other than that yeah and so she had also.
(35:22):
After I finished that, she had had a brain aneurysm, just like Neil had, you know, like bang.
She lived in this beautiful house in Bel Air by herself.
You know, I thought, well, you should have a caretaker, somebody that looks after you.
And she had this, like these little dogs, and they're always jumping,
and she's always tripping over them.
This is just a disaster waiting, you know, you're going to fall one day,
(35:46):
trip over the dog or whatever.
But she ended up having that aneurysm, and that slowed her down a lot.
Lot and everything went quiet after that and she was
wanting to make like a box set and so she
wanted to include the that first record in
there also that's why she wanted a remix she's performing at the hollywood bowl
(36:06):
in the end of the year yeah yeah yeah yeah well she just did the grammy thing
and then she did she won for the newport jazz festival they recorded that and
that so she She went for like a live record.
Did you record anything with her playing?
Well, the thing is, yeah, she wouldn't play or sing. She just wanted me to mix.
(36:28):
And then she wanted some drums on some tracks.
And so I invited Brian Blade up to put some drums on a song called Strange Boy,
which just had percussion on it.
And then she's a big Jocko fan.
Jocko played on a lot of records. and my friend hal craig and he's a you know
bass player and he's just you know jocko everything.
(36:51):
So i said my friend you can play like
jocko a little bit so she said get him over here and
so my friend hal came over and he played on a couple of the tracks that i had
with her and so and so she was directing him left and right and so too hard
too soft he really was on him like but he He was such a Joni fan and he's just
(37:12):
grateful for me that I invited him.
Did you have any stories of sharing anything about the original sessions for that first album?
Anything that helped give you insight on how to better.
Mix it now not really she
just really wanted to get it back to sounding like her other reference that
(37:35):
is just very just straight and clean you get that yeah and then but she doesn't
consider herself a musician she's an artist like she thinks first she's a painter
that's what she She complains and so,
and then, but also, you know, as a musician,
a lot of musicians are like, they can't believe she invented a chord chain.
(37:58):
Nobody had ever had, had made before. And so she had developed that by herself.
And so she was, you know, definitely, you know, by her peers,
like, you know, the top of the bunch for sure.
But yeah, it was kind of interesting record, you know, to hang out and mix and,
and, you know, but she was just chain smoking and I'm like, Oh boy, still doing it.
(38:22):
And so it's, it was, it was a nice, you know, she was trying to put this,
the compilation record of all of her records.
I said, Joni, like, do you have any records?
She's like, Nope. You don't have any records. Nope.
He goes, I got divorced and he took all my records.
And I thought, what do you mean? It's like, you don't have any of your.
(38:44):
Ends up so larry klein she was married
to this guy larry klein i guess 80s maybe
larry produced some or a couple of them so there are a lot of these stories
or these stories and other stories are also in a book that you wrote called
listen up that's correct and also in your photographer as well so you're taking
(39:05):
a lot of pictures of these sessions yeah and put them out in another other book.
So this is my newest book. It's called Recording Icons slash Creative Spaces.
And so over the last 30 years, I've been doing what's called time-lapse photography.
Because, you know, if you take a camera and you put it up,
person changes their face the way they act and just
(39:27):
you know but if you do time lapse you capture people
i call it like it's national geographic i'm
capturing these wild animals in their natural habitat and so that's what i've
been doing with that dylan and joni and neil and so i've got some amazing photos
of them singing and performing in the studios that i built for those records
(39:50):
and And so it's architectural.
It's, you know, creative and, you know, you get an all, all different kind of
like views of, because you wouldn't be able to put a photographer in a studio
and, and take photos and capture them in, in these kind of like, you know, these,
while they're singing, you know, so it's like having a photographer that's not
(40:11):
there, you know, so it's the new book is doing well.
And so I've been doing a lot of book signings.
And in the meantime, I've been doing, I watch a lot of movies myself.
And so I'm kind of a big James Bond fan, but I don't like to watch the films.
I like to watch them with what's called where the director talks about it and everybody else.
(40:36):
So it's like a commentary. so i've been
doing projecting the pictures from the
book and i do a commentary along with
it and then that turned into those commentaries turned
into i've made a little film out of it now where i
just show this film with my commentaries there so i
don't have to do it off the cuff like you know making like i
(40:56):
do here you're working on a documentary as well yeah so this
is the documentary that that from from that book
and so hopefully that will be all finished soon and
that will be another next step after
after that hopefully i can put that in
some film festivals and so i'm kind
of going by bob dylan's rules he said anything
(41:17):
over that over an hour is a waste of time and
so that's why all of the shows are one hour and he's off
to say no and i think it's you know
these people don't have a lot of attention span these
days so and you know a lot movies are all quick
edits bang bang bang to keep your attention so i
tried to do in in this kind
(41:39):
of a little documentary thing where you get a
nice piece of music to listen to and then i talk about it and then so i just
want to make sure that you know it's not and then the music is still there underneath
my commentary but it makes for a pretty cool watch you know for you know learning
you know Like we've been talking here, I have these same stories in there too.
(42:02):
Awesome. I'm working with this guy who used to be Rolling Stone's editor and
now he's running Rolling Stone's films and,
I'm about to go to Jamaica, and then after Jamaica, I go to Barbados with this
guy from New Orleans, Anders Osborne.
(42:22):
So they want to come and document on the sailboat where I'm going to make his
record and outside of Barbados. It's going to be crazy.
So hopefully they'll pick up with the doc, and they might be able to put it out for him.
But it's all early stages of it. That would be a good home for me.
Yes. you know thank you for listening to the second part of this interview with
(42:45):
mark howard if you enjoyed it please rate it subscribe or share and visit us
at all day vinyl on instagram.
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