Can you tell me a little bit about your early interest in music?
I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. The government was doing an experiment on our school system to try to integrate the schools, and they had a magnet school program. In middle school I went to a performing arts magnet called Kansas City Middle School of the Performing Arts, KCMSA. I'm dyslexic, and I always struggled in school. I did just about everything I could to get out of doing anything academic. I took classical guitar, was in an orchestra playing upright bass, played in the jazz band, and took recording studio class – all at a pretty young age. KCMSA had a Tascam 388, so that was what I learned on. It was there I met my still best friend, Jake Blanton, who's a great musician.
What music were you listening to?
Jake and I were both obsessed with The Beatles. This is before they released all the CDs in the '90s, so nobody in our class really knew who The Beatles were. Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer were popular. I guess I didn't totally realize that there were different generations of music. I'd go to school and they'd be like, "Check out Vanilla Ice!" And I'd say, "Check out The Beatles!" They'd say, "What are you talking about?"
Where were you getting information on The Beatles?
Those were the records that my parents had in the basement. Oldies 95 FM [KCMO] was my station. From a young age it was Motown, The Beatles, '70s rock, and music like that.
What do you think was the attraction for you?
You know, it's hard to say. Now I think, from the perspective of where I'm sitting now, I could rattle off, "Oh, it was a live band, or it's tape, or the recording process was different." It was just a connection to the music. It sounded good, and made me feel good.
At what point did you start dissecting it from a production and recording angle?
I think it was when Jake and I discovered the early Paul McCartney records and realized that he did everything himself. When we got access to the 388 it was mind-blowing. Jake was really good at playing all the instruments. I always tried to do that, but couldn't do it as well. The school would let us take the machine home over the summer, and that's when we started writing and recording our own music.
Did you have anyone to show you the recording ropes?
We were really lost. Kansas City, at the time, was not a very hip town. We had something like a [DigiTech GSP21] Legend effects processor, and were like, "What is this thing, and why does everything sound like shit?" We did recordings on the 388 with about three mics. We'd tape one mic to the ceiling so it was hanging down, like a little mono overhead, and then another one on the kick drum with a pillow in it. When we were a little bit older we got some money together to go record at a studio in Kansas City that we knew. We recorded to [Tascam] DA-88s through a pro Tascam console. I don't know how many mics the guys put up on the drums, but we did this whole recording and it was like, "Wow, this is terrible." I think that's when it finally snapped for me. There was something that we were doing before that worked better for what we were trying to do.
That's advanced thinking for that age.
Yeah, exactly. I think that's been something that's kind of followed me along.
You started your music career as a bass player.
I started young, working as an acoustic jazz bass player in Kansas City. I went down about a ten year "jazz guy" road where I didn't want to play electric bass. I wanted to play swing. I went to CalArts and studied with Charlie Haden, moved to New York for a short while trying to do the jazz thing, and then came back out here and decided I wanted to transition into a different style of music. At that time in jazz everybody was trying to be the more mathematical player. Play faster, play louder, make it more complicated, and write compositions that nobody can play or listen to. I got so burnt out. Even the jazz, I like it simple; the '50s and early-'60s. When it gets to the mid-'60s, jazz starts to lose me a little bit. I was out here trying to get a gig on bass. I had studied at CalArts with a couple different people who were trying to get me to play five and six string basses. One guy was trying to teach me how to comp and tap on six-string bass. At the time, I was listening to records like The Headhunters, Tower of Power, Chicago, Motown, and of course The Beatles. I bought this horrible six-string bass, and thought, "Why can't I sound like Motown?" I was literally looking at all these old albums and saw that in every picture of the band the bass player had a [Fender] P Bass. That's when I went, "Okay, I'm going to get an old P Bass." That was the beginning of the whole transition to where I am now. I bought a '72 P Bass, but it still didn't sound right. Then I heard about flatwound strings. I put them on and was like, "Oh, shit. Now I'm starting to sound like these bass players I've been listening to all this time." There was nobody there to tell me, "If you want to sound like the old guys, you put flatwound strings on an old bass and play through a tube amp." What I was being told was, "You need to learn how to tap and comp so you can play in a coffee shop." [laughs]
At CalArts were you just playing and studying bass?
