I know you were in The Healers with Jello [Biafra, Dead Kennedys] way back.
I was in The Healers. Not concurrently with Jello, but Jello was my friend. He was with The Healers, and a newfound punk rock god, but the guy who co-wrote "California Über Alles," John Greenway, he's The Healers.
He's the main focus of that?
Yeah. I was a friend of his too, and Jello goes, "Get him out of his basement! He won't get out of his basement."
Oh, like playing shows and stuff?
Yeah. I did, and he writes brilliant stuff; rock operas. We did instrumentals mostly.
That sounds fun. Was that out of Boulder, Colorado?
Yeah, Boulder.
Were you living in Boulder at the time?
I was probably living here at that time. I remember practicing around town with them too. They had a B&O turntable, a giant Crown amp, and two big Klipsch PA speakers. I'd play albums as loud as possible.
People were saying that you were doing a lot of photography and recording live shows early on, right?
Yep. I was mostly skewed to photography. The live shows came because of my interest. I got into cassettes real early; I got a really early cassette deck. It was a little console from Japan, through the military. This was before cassettes even started coming here. It actually took a year before I could even get cassettes. I would record live radio shows for myself. As it turned out, I was one of the only people who had a record of those kinds of things, on normal-biased cassettes, from '71.
So no one...
Tommy Bolin recordings, and stuff like that. Then as time went on, I was a photographer and I hung out with people. I'd always collect board tapes from sound guys and get board tapes that I'd listen to. I was really obsessed. I was really into live recordings – quality live recordings. Especially when artists in that time did things that weren't so calculated, or timed to click tracks or whatever, like they do now.
Do you feel like that's carried over into other fields, into helping people to make records?
We're talking about the '70s. '70s records are amazing, like Queen and The Beatles, anything that sounded like that. I love garage bands and stuff, especially some '60s ones, and all the big hits that you've heard in the past that are garage bands, I loved that too. But I was into prog music. So, Gentle Giant, and The Strawbs, or folk prog more, too. I was into European folk, and I loved the ways those records sounded, and I liked the way that people made records and layered them. Pink Floyd didn't make a record where they were necessarily just sitting there consciously saying, "Oh, we can't do this, because we can't play this live! They just made records."
"We'll figure that out later." [laughs] No, that's true. I love Yes, and you hear that stuff and are just like, "How did they build that?"
Well, if you're a Yes fan, I can tell you the funny thing. The first time I saw them, they were the opening act for The Allman Brothers, so you can imagine. I think they actually won the crowd over, despite the capes and the knee-high gold boots. They could play. I think that everybody in the audience recognized, "These guys can rip!"
So you continued to play in bands in the area, but what led you to recording?
4-track cassette, when that popped up. I got my first 4-track in '81, a Studiomaster, so I had a 6-channel mixer on it, where you could patch any of the channels.
Is that the rack mount one?
Yeah, it's a rack one.
My friend bought one of those at the same time. He was obsessed, and he was a coke dealer or something, so he had some extra money.
I was a geophysicist at the time. There was a big boom in the oil industry.
What did you start recording?
My bands at the time. I've actually got a whole stack of CDs and stuff for you. Here's a CD of a band that I was in during the '80s that was recorded on 4-track cassette.
Where were you working out of?
That 4-track cassette was recorded in that room in there.
Really, in your basement?
Yeah. I remember when we recorded the drums for one session of that on the 4-track cassette. A friend of mine, the drummer, had a big house with a huge room in it. We set up in there for a couple weeks and just did all the basic tracks. I would get another Yamaha mixer in line with the six-track mixer, and I would do a sub-mix of the drums on tracks 1 and 2, in stereo, and then the bass, or guitar and keyboards, whatever drove the song. So I'd make a stereo mix of the drums, guitar and bass, and while I bounced it to the two tracks, me and the other guitar player would play live to the bounce. That basically was the music, and then we'd have two tracks for solos or vocals.
Did you run into the typical catastrophes of the bounce not holding up once you got further down?
I was pretty lucky.
Careful?
Yeah.
I always felt like that was so dangerous. I was doing a lot of that too.
Well, I could always go back. I had the original, so the only thing that would be a problem was the drum mix that I initially did in stereo from like five or six mics.
What kind of mics were you amassing at that time?
Shures.
Did you start working with other people once they heard the results of your 4-track stuff?
Yeah. Punk rock bands; the local crews. A couple of those albums even came out later. Revolver distributes them. If you know any of the Revolver guys, one of them was the guy who runs Revolver, his band in the eighties.
Bob [McDonald]?
Yeah, I know Bob from the Bay Area when he moved out there. Who was he singing for?
It was a band called Bum Kon. The album came out, so it was 4-track recordings.
I met Bob when he moved out there, because I had friends that worked at Systematic Distribution before that.
Joe Pope [Systematic's owner, member of Angst]. He's one of my best friends.
I haven't seen him for decades. I think the last time I saw him was at a party at Systematic in like '85 or something. And Jello was there.
Well, they were friends too.
Where they from out here?
I forgot all about that. This is dredging up my past too. When did you move into sessions where you went to an outside studio?
I went all the time when I was doing that, even in the '80s, to 8-track or even 16-track studios that were in town. I'd go with other people, usually as help. Like the first Fluid album [Punch N Judy], they got me to sort of coordinate the recording. I found the studio for them, and we went into an 8-track studio and recorded their first album.
Were you officially like a producer or something at that point? What would you call your role?
Associate engineer, or associate producer – if there's anything in the middle! So as an engineer, I could say, "Turn that knob." Or as a producer, sit there and say, "That needs to be turned! We need the engineer." I don't know.
Did you feel like you sort of gradually pulled the skills together that let you step into a studio, or take over a session producing?
Definitely. Yeah. But I guess throughout this whole time – starting with that band – I've had unbelievable misfortune when it comes to corporate people.
Well, I think we all have! In what ways?
Well, that band was lined up to be signed on Geffen, and somehow the bottom fell out of that. That was more from egos in the band. Later on, it was 16 Horsepower, when they were signed with A&M, and A&M was like, "Who's this wildcard?" The stories just go on and on! It always circulates around some major thing, so I never involved myself with that whatsoever. That's why I've always been self-contained.
You've moved to other places too, but you're seen regionally as someone who's been in and helped a lot of these bands progress.
Yeah, I've done restoration, engineering, mastering, producing, and mixing. I just mixed an album for some guy in Canada. The tracks were recorded well, so I mixed this whole album.
You said you feel like you have this opposition with the corporate world. Was it something that just sort of randomly happened that way?
Maybe it's my indecision with the corporate world in general, and that's just a little harsher than the music world, with what they're judging, especially with what they're putting out now. That's the only benefit for guys like you and I – them putting out such crap.
The worse the mainstream is...
A guy like M. Ward can really rise among these ashes to become a prominent artist.
It's true. Remember how the '80s were? There was a lot of crap on the surface, but then there was a lot of amazing stuff in the early '80s that there was just no chance in hell of getting on the radio. But it was good music.
Yeah, a lot of good music!
Describe the evolution of your space and the house here.
Well, the 4-track, and then the next thing that came along was that I had to go to the next realm outside of that. That was to get out of going to 8- and 16-track studios. I wanted to do that here, so I went into 8-track. Tascam made a great thing. When I saw the unit, I said I'm getting it. It was a built-in, 1/4-inch, 8-track with dbx.
The 388?
The 388? Is that what it's called?
The 388, with a little mixer.
Yeah. So I bought it, and I got a couple more mics and a couple compressors.
At the time, what kinds of studios were open?
8-track and 16-track studios with, I was almost going to say Trident boards, but I think that might have been excessive. I can't even tell you what kind of board. Now, it wouldn't be the same, because you can buy a Trident for $1,000 now.
Yeah, exactly!
But that was what it seemed like. This was pre-Mackie. When Mackie first put out their mixers, to me, that changed everything. To be able to get a desk like that...
Yeah. I had the 32x8.
Yeah, the 32x8. That's what I got.
No polarity buttons! The worst thing in the world. How long did you work with the Mackie?
I had that one here for a couple years. I went to 16-track. The 8-track ended abruptly, and I sold everything for a girl. I moved to Seattle in '90 and '91, and particularly two or three albums I had recorded on that 8-track, they were playing the fuck out of them on the radio in Seattle. I'm sitting here working in a kitchen! I was an outsider, so the only job I could get was as a prep cook in a kitchen. I jammed with a couple people, and that was sort of fun, but nothing. So like the Human Head Transplant stuff that I did, the Boyd Rice album that I did, I did Crash Worship here on 8-track...
Was that done here?
Yeah, that was done here on 8-track, and they were playing it there on the radio every time I got into the car. The Boyd Rice album came out while I was living there, and they played it every hour for three months.
Crash Worship was really big for a while. What gear do you have now?
That's a further evolution. I have a laptop, and I've been experimenting with that. I got the PreSonus. I tried to find 16-channels of input for the Mac, and I wanted it to be small.
You're using Soundscape [DAW]. That's far more well known in Europe for recording stuff.
Yeah, it's SSL now.
What drew you to that?
I'd moved to Seattle, and then I came back here, and I was just here for a few months, and I moved to Cairo. My friend said, "Nothing costs anything; we can live like kings," so I went there for a year, and yeah, I didn't do anything. When I came back to Denver, that was the beginning of this studio as it is. The day I came back, I went and saw 16 Horsepower play. It was shocking how original and good they were. I actually sort of knew those guys, and I went and said, "Man, this is the best thing I've ever heard." They said, "We need a keyboard player. Do you want to play in the band?" I was going, "Okay, well, I'll play some bits." So I was in 16 Horsepower the day I got back from Cairo. Then we started doing some stuff.
Had they recorded at that point?
Yeah, they had a demo. I'll tell you the story. They had an 8 track cassette, and a live cassette, which is fantastic. Later I re- mastered all of that stuff, and it's an album called Olden now. We made a demo tape with the band and me on a 24-track at a big pro studio that just seemed to make demo tapes or something. Mercury Records was jumping on it, and I had done this thing where I had committed to a tour to go to Europe with this band, before I was in 16 Horsepower. I had all these people, Karl Blake, and these brothers who played percussion. It was kind of like a Crash Worship style of band, but we were set up to go on a four-month tour of Europe. I went on that tour, and I kept checking in to see what's going on. "Oh, Mercury's really interested." I came back up and got back in the band again. We hooked up with Morphine. They saw us play. We played our first shows with Morphine.
That makes total sense.
We got really friendly with Morphine. Then the Mercury thing didn't happen, and then this guy I knew who worked at Slash Records came and visited here. He went, "Oh, I'm really interested in your band." I had the demo tape – when I came back they had mixed the new demo tape, and it was awful. I re-EQ'd it and ran it through a BBE and did all sorts of crap to do something to it. Later I found out that they made it sound really bad on purpose, because if the label was interested in them, they'd see through that. The drummer told me that they had this idea that if it were too polished, the label wouldn't be interested.
[laughs] I don't know if that always works!
Yeah. But I made this tape, and I played it for him, and he said, "This tape hit my desk six months ago and I threw it in the trash can. This is fucking amazing!" He goes home the next day, and an A&R guy from A&M calls me up and says, "When are you playing next?" I tell him that we're playing tomorrow, and he says, "Well, what about after that?" A few days later, A&M flew out and saw us, and bam – we're on the label. Just like that. And then I'm out of the band.
What year was that?
That would have been '94.
Why were you out of the band?
Corporate. When the band got together the day before we flew out to see A&M they were like, "Let's get our interests in order. What do we want from this label?" "Okay, we want to get an equipment budget. We want the recording budget. We want to find producers." Everybody was barely working on minimum wage with their other job, if they had another job, and the singer had a child that needed dental work really bad, and we were barely getting by. So my suggestion was, "This is a multinational corporation, and they have interests in bomb factories in South Africa. Let's get health insurance, and pay for unemployment insurance, and make sure." So we came and met, and we sat down, and they were like, "Okay, what do you want to do?" We said, "Let's talk about producers." They said, "We'll get T Bone Burnett [Tape Op #67]." I go, "Well, I know Steve Fisk [Tape Op #3]." They say, "Oh, no, we'll get somebody bigger than Steve Fisk." I go, "I know him, and he's a great producer." "No, we'll get you Dan Lanois [Tape Op #37]." So that's where it went. Then it came down to healthcare, and they were like, "What?" They flipped on that, the same way the rednecks at the Tea Party flipped on it. We were like, "It's just a suggestion." And that was my suggestion. I wasn't the one who was like, "T Bone Burnett? Really? You're just going to call him up and get him in the studio to produce us, just like that?"
The whole budget's going to go away.
They dropped $250,000 on their first record. And then they shelved it – $250,000 on the record, $100,000 on the video that the Brothers Quay did. MTV passed on the video, and that was the end of their interest in the band. They didn't even promote the album.
Everybody else gets paid. Not the artist.
Yeah. The band technically owes A&M millions of dollars, and A&M released them.
So they just let them go? But the record was in the can – did it ever come out?
They made a second record, and they had an option for a third album. The whole shit hit the fan when A&M got bought up. The head of A&M, Al [Cafaro], used to drive a Porsche and wear black karate outfits. He was a huge fan of the band, because he actually saw them play live. He always let the A&R guys do the work. He'd never listen to bands. So if his A&R guy said you're great, he'd trust them. But he actually went and saw the CD release show for the first album, and the band blew him away. They're a fantastic live band. They had an option for a third album, and that got picked up, despite the fact that they owed A&M over a million dollars. They had an option that they were to be paid $50,000 if they weren't able to do their third album. So then their contract got sold, but he picked up the option before he got fired. So he signed off on the option, he got fired, Universal, or whoever, took the label over, looked at the contract, dismissed the $2 million or whatever they owed them, and gave them the $50,000, because of that option. So then we had $50,000, and they came to me, and they recorded their best record [Secret South]. And it's their best-selling record.
And you weren't involved in the records before that at all?
