New Deftones LP: Private Music

The first time I saw Deftones live was at the Cattle Club, a small 250 person capacity club in Sacramento, CA, in the early 1990s. The Cattle Club was a total dive that sounded pretty bad, but promoters Jerry Perry and Brian McKenna, with sound engineer Eric Bianchi, made the best out of what they had to work with. Besides hosting up and coming touring bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Green Day, and Alice In Chains, they were extremely supportive of local music, and this venue was where then-local bands like CAKE and Deftones played many of their first shows. 

The last time I saw Deftones live was a few months ago, at the Chase Arena in San Francisco. The show was sold out to the rafters, and the audience seemed to range from about 16 to 66 years old. The band sounded amazing, and to be honest, I felt a huge amount of hometown pride in seeing them. 

I used to go skating with Chino Moreno [Tape Op #123] and Stephen Carpenter from the band at our local skatepark, The Daily Grind, as well as various drainage ditches and street spots. Chino had a serious ollie with a hefty pop, could be pretty easily talked into trying a gap that nobody else wanted to tackle, and he’d usually make it. As we all got older, I’d be more likely see drummer Abe Cunningham at the local Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op, and we’d have a pleasant catch-up chat. Their current touring extra guitarist and backing vocalist, Lance Jackman, is another skating buddy who is also a solid engineer and used to work out of my studio, The Hangar, in Sacramento, or Sacto as we call it. 

The Deftones tracked a song at The Hangar for the Saturday Night Wrist sessions with Bob Ezrin (Tape Op # 31) producing and Brian Virtue (#47) engineering, and in 2005 I worked for two weeks with Chino finishing up his Team Sleep LP along with Todd Wilkinson, Zach Hill, Chris Woodhouse, AJ Wilhelm (who is now Tape Op’s website tech director), Rick Verret, and Rob Crow. The sessions were pretty intense, but I gained a lot of respect and insight into Chino’s musical aesthetic during those couple of weeks. 

It’s been really nice to see Deftones mature into that rare kind of band that, after 30 years, are still making interesting, relevant music and gaining new fans rather than becoming simply a legacy act. In a recent Guardian interview with Chino a reader commented that “I work at HMV in a small town and we sell at least five copies of 1997’s Around the Fur to teenagers every week – way more than Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Nirvana’s Nevermind. To what do you ascribe its longevity?” And in a Pitchfork review of Private Music Sadie Sartini Garner says “…to find another artist from the 1990s whose influence has only grown, and is still making records at a high level, you probably have to start thinking about Deftones as being in a category with Radiohead (who haven’t made a record in a decade) and Björk (who, despite her continued popularity, is not doing multiple nights at the Forum). They are, against all odds, elite.”

Private Music was produced with Nick Raskulinecz [Tape Op #50] and primarily recorded by Nathan Yarborough and Nick with Rich Costey mixing. The records sounds huge, with interesting production and a very clear mix, but it’s by no means overly produced or sterile sounding. Chino, Stephen and Abe are all sounding like they could still be in their early 20’s, but they now have a musical maturity that’s only earned with years of hard work and listening. 

And in one last Tape Op tie-in, the band rented Larry’s Soundelux ELUX 251 microphone for some of Chino’s vocal tracking sessions in Portland!

We did a short interview with Chino in #123 about working with Terry Date (#123) and Greg Wells (#123).