Jonathan Pines explained to me how you had a place here for rehearsals and storing your gear. During the Mermaid Avenue sessions, he set up a space to start working.
Yeah. Maybe we looked at it this way, because Mermaid Avenue was an advance from a record label we hadn't planned on. It was this side thing that ended up being sort of legitimate. The first Mermaid Avenue had been pretty successful. I think the general thought was that it would be money well spent for us to have a place to record ourselves. We did what we could with what we had financially. At that time, it was ADATs.
I saw a photo yesterday. Recording = VHS tape!
Yep, which Jay Bennett was comfortable with. Before he was in Wilco, he worked at a VCR repair shop.
No way!
Yeah. He felt like ADATs were the medium for him. He was excited about that. We did get a tape machine at some point. I basically bankrolled it with money that was coming in from my contracts. I never had much interest in putting it together. I wanted to have it be put together in a way that we could work. A couple of other engineers in town probably weighed in too. It was wired and set up in a way that prohibited almost anyone else from using it. Ridiculously complex. Even the order you were supposed to turn it on. I always thought that was like "job security." Jay wanted to be the guy who was engineering when we were up here. Nobody else could really work with it. But that became the plan going forward, which was not to spend so much money going to other people's places, but to basically use whatever advances we were getting to upgrade what we were able to use, and then have something to show for it going forward. Over time, it became this [The Loft].
Jonathan was like, "We had to build gobos, put all the cables in, and do all of this." It was like, "Here's a room."
Yeah. It's basically grown out of a glorified VCR.
After that you did Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in here, right? What was the timeline on all that?
Oh, it's blurry. From that point on, part of almost everything we've worked on has been up here. We had upgraded to tape from ADATs by the time Yankee was being worked on. We tried to mix at CRC [Chicago Recording Company]. We had transferred everything, all the ADATs to 2-inch reels, and went down there. We didn't get much out of that. Then I basically started working with Jim O'Rourke [Tape Op #16], just the two of us, at Soma [Electronic Music Studios], John McEntire's studio [#23]. It was the same tape machine Richard Swift [#120] had, that I ended up buying and then selling to him. We used that machine to go to Pro Tools, and then we'd mix to 1/2-inch. We'd mix up until the chorus, wipe the board, mix the chorus, and then splice it in. It was all tape edits. You could never reconstruct Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It would be impossible. Nobody even knows where all the different pieces are.
It's famously documented in the film as well [I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco]. There was a lot of creativity being thrown at this album.
The part of it that's not in the movie at all actually is the part where we were at Soma, where we basically ripped everything back down to the skeleton and started reconfiguring it. I think by that time, [director] Sam Jones had run out of money for his film. He had to prioritize, and he wanted to wrap it up in some other fashion, so he didn't film any of it.
Right. You mention a bit of that in your book, about how skewed it comes off. I never saw the movie until two weeks ago.
Oh, wow. Good for you!
I knew it was about people in the studio when there were arguments. I was like, "I don't know if I want to see this. I go through that all day." [laughs]
"I live this every day!"
Yeah! As soon as that camera's rolling, you know you're being documented. It's not a fly on the wall, like you said in your book.
Right. I feel like one of the most famous scenes, if you can call it that, is the argument between Jay and I in the studio. I don't think it would have gone on nearly as long if the cameras weren't there. But, that being said, that was also pretty typical of the types of arguments that were happening at the time. For some reason, a lot of the time I wasn't that disturbed by the cameras. I don't know if it looks like it in the movie, but I got used to, "Oh, they're just there." They were doing a pretty good job of keeping out of the way. I guess because the alternative to me was the experience we had had with Mermaid Avenue, when Billy Bragg brought in a camera crew. He had funded the documentary himself. I guess he ended up selling it to BBC, or something. I don't know. It became [Billy Bragg & Wilco:] Man in the Sand. That camera crew, and Billy's attitude towards it, were much different. He was actually asking me to have arguments with him again for the camera!
Hmm...
Like if we'd gotten into a dispute about something, he'd be like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a second. Can we get a camera in here?"
Holy shit. Well...
Sam Jones and his crew were like a breath of fresh air to me.
