I was listening to Twin Infinitives today and I was wondering how it was recorded. There's all these layers of stuff going on.
Yeah there was. It was done 8 tracks at a time and dumped down.
Was this done on 8 track or was it 16?
No, this was done at Greg Freeman's in San Francisco.
Yeah, I know. I've worked with him.
He had a 2' 16 and he also had an 8 track there.
Did you do the second and third records with Greg?
No, we just did Twin Infinitives. Also some songs that we ended up using on the Live and Unreleased CD.
On Cats and Dogs did you play everything on that or did you have a live band?
We had a band. We actually did that in a 24 track studio with an API board that had belonged to Brian Wilson at one time. Omega Studios is the name of the place. It was really overpriced and all but we got a deal with this guy and we tracked in 2 days and mixed in two. It was with a drummer, a second guitar player, Neil and myself. As far as the basic tracks, it was all done simultaneously-live.
It sounds that way. That's pretty damn fast to record a record!
I guess it really was. It just seemed luxurious because I guess it was our first time ever in a very expensive studio.
Was that the first time with a band?
Yeah.
Did you rehearse a lot?
Yeah, yeah. Neil and I wrote all the songs and then we picked the musicians that we wanted to work with. It was three weeks straight of playing the set and trying out the arrangements.
Were the vocals live or did you over dub them?
The vocals? The vocals were live. I did my vocals, and I have a completely different phrasing than Neil does, so I did mine and he did his but without having each other in the headphones. Hearing that kind of thing...
It'd throw you off. So at this point you guys have a studio at your house.
You have 4 ADATs?
We have three ADATs but we just bought ProTools so it's all synced up. Kind of unlimited tracks.
Cool. Go crazy with that stuff.
We haven't replaced the BRC yet. It's so much easier than a mouse. We've got a clean board; a Mackie 24 by 8 but we have 16 channels of Drawmer 1960 mic pres. Everything goes through the Drawmers.
Where did you score those?
Through this place in Indiana called Sweetwater.
Yeah, I've gotten stuff through there.
We had a sales rep and we were buying so much stuff through them we were getting cut some really good deals.
So you went to recording school?
I went to recording school for a year and I went to college...
Pre Royal Trux?
College was simultaneous 'cause I moved to New York while we were doing it. Neil was gonna move to New York so I only applied to one school. I was a freshman and you can only get into the classes you can get in. There was one class that was on theory that was beyond calculus and I was like, 'Hmmmm.' There was one really technical class where it was about soldering and it started there and went on. It was all done at Planet Sound which is where the Fat Boys recorded. Neil and I had already started recording the first record and we'd gone to so many different studios-we'd worked with Wharton Tiers and all these different guys that all had this information about how things should be done. It's not that I disagreed but I wanted to know why they were saying it and what was going on. So I would go to the class at the studio and ask all these questions. 'Why this?' 'Why that?'
Were you driving them crazy?
Yeah, I guess I kinda... They were like older people that were trying to make a career and I was a real pain in the ass. But then I quit and dropped out of college and we moved to San Francisco. The School for Recording Arts in San Francisco. You know that place? You can take a semester for $400, and they had this certificate thing and I wanted to have it as an ID whenever I went in to record somewhere I would just flash it and keep moving. 'Pardon me.' I was there for two weeks and I blew it, I quit, but I picked up enough about what the hell was going on. Fundamentally it is all pretty simple.
What was the reason for bailing on the place?
In San Francisco? Uhh...
I can guess...
There was definitely problems.
Anyway, that whole Virgin Records deal enabled you to buy a house and set up a studio. Then you ended up working with David Briggs...
Yeah, he was the most awesome guy.
I kind of figured he helped you set up the studio.
The first Virgin album was done down in Memphis at Keynote recording studio that was, at the time, owned by Joe Walsh. David was a really particular and peculiar guy. He didn't really do a whole lot of work in his life, Spirit, Easy Action [Alice Cooper], and a bunch of Neil Young records. I remember the day he called me, and he said, "Cats and Dogs... I love this. I'm coming out to your house." Two days later he flew out to the mid- dle of nowhere in Virginia and was sleeping on our floor. When the record was done, it didn't end. For a year afterwards he was call- ing twice a week. Then he got really sick, and we were always talking until the day before he died. There's liner notes in the Spirit reis- sues and Randy California wrote this really succinct description of David Briggs. You should get it.
Did he come across your stuff accidentally?
He had done a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record and he'd been sent a bunch of records that were coming out around that time and he got Cats and Dogs. Then we signed to Virgin and he was a producer that we were kind of interested in talking to so we had our A &R person call him and he knew Cats and Dogs so he said, "Why don't you just call them?" So he called us and we started talking.
Were you under pressure to find a name producer?
No, we wanted one! We'd never had the money to have one. I mean, we were gonna use him for Sweet Sixteen too, and we were already talking about how we were gonna do it and that's how it came to pass that he'd come out to see the house after we'd bought it and we were doing a lot of remodeling and construction and we started talking about bass traps and stuff for the back room. He didn't know he had cancer- he just thought he had a really bad back. Sweet Sixteen, we were gonna do it there. Then he got really sick and we couldn't find... We met with one other producer, this guy, Peter Cohn, who had done a lot of Rush records and also happened to be the brother of our A & R person. It didn't work out that great. It was meant to be this other way, but since it can't be, we're just gonna deal with it on our own. And we had the guy, Greg Archilla, who did the engineering for Thank You, do the mixing as if everything had gone to plan.
Did Virgin want to supervise mixing?
They would have loved to have done all those things. They would have loved for us to use Peter Cohn, they would have loved for us to have not taken all that money and built a studio. It didn't make them happy at all. At a certain point I think they were like, "Hands off. If we give them enough rope they'll just hang themselves." It wasn't like a "Fuck You" to them at all. It was just how we thought it should be.
So, your last record you did all at home. Did you mix it somewhere else?
No, we mixed Accelerator there.
Through the Mackie? I've got a Mackie 32 x 8...
We record through the pre-amps but nothing goes down to tape without being put through them again. Everything is outboard. We don't even use EQ on the Mackie. It's basically the faders. It's just like a landscape machine.
So you've got a bunch of outboard EQ? Do you have a lot of racks?
You must have a massive patch bay system!
