Tape Op is about music recording in all kinds of scenarios. Ever since I started it, you've been in the back of my mind as the perfect interview.
Well, I do have my own methods; that's for sure! [laughter]
Exactly. I wanted to talk to you a bit about all of your various personal recording scenarios.
Sure.
It's well-known that a lot of home recording happened around the Tusk era, but did you have home recording setups before that, in the Buckingham/Nicks era, or in the Bay Area before that?
I did. When I was a late teenager and was in the band [Fritz] up in Northern California – that Stevie [Nicks] and I were both in, I was playing bass – I had an old commercial Sony 2-track. It had that sound-on-sound feature, where you could take one recording, say on the left channel, and then bounce it over to the right channel as you were recording something over it. I could begin to get a multitrack effect, one track at a time, which is pretty much the way that Les Paul [Tape Op #50] did it. That was his method and example that probably hit home with me. Then, a little bit later, probably about when I was 20 or 21, I acquired an Ampex AG-440 4-track, which obviously still had limitations. But hey, The Beatles cut Sgt. Pepper's… on those, so it opened up the whole idea. It gave me much more flexibility. I was already into what I would call that "painting process" as early as that point, where I was putting things down all by myself, and doing the architecture around a song.
Did that influence the way you arrange guitars? I've interviewed Ken Caillat [Tape Op #96] before about how you put little filigrees and figures in; sometimes they are very simple parts to build a whole.
Right. Well, so much of my function in Fleetwood Mac was to take raw material and fashion it into a sound. I had the vision to do that, and I apparently had the tools to do that. Much of that was based around having a ground-up familiarity with a self-sufficiency, if you will; doing it myself and then bringing that into a more communal arena, for sure. So yeah, absolutely.
Did you have a home setup around the time of the self-titled Fleetwood Mac album?
When we first joined Fleetwood Mac, all of Stevie's songs and my songs were already demoed out on my AG-440. That album only took a few months to do, and part of that was Keith Olsen [Tape Op #33] being in control of the engineering, as well as overseeing that things didn't get too – shall we say? – self-indulgent. There was a lot at stake for them, because they were almost ready to be booted by Warner [Bros.] before we joined. They'd had so many non sequitur albums. The ability to make that album so quickly was largely due to the fact that all of Stevie's and my material had been blocked out. What you hear on the record would be very close to what the demos were like, of course without John [McVie] and Mick [Fleetwood] as the rhythm section. I didn't get a 24-track until a bit later, until there was a little bit more money coming in. Somewhere in the middle of the Rumours process is when I probably got one.
Right. That must have been a big step. A 24-track tape deck is nothing without a console, and then you need speakers and something to mix to.
I first got a 24-track and the machine at my house, [the one] that I did most of the work on my songs that ended up on Tusk. I would start these tracks as paintings, and then discover and find something which was a little bit more to the left. Then I'd bring them in for the band to add to. What's funny is that I did not have a proper console at that time. I had enough channels to be able to play everything [back] at once, but it wasn't a large thing. It was more or less something you'd take on the road. I didn't get a proper console until maybe 1985 or '86, when I put one into my studio in my house up in Bel Air, and that's the console I still have.
Oh, really?
A Neotek. It still sounds great and still works great. That's what we cut Tango in the Night on. It took me a while to get there.
Your engineering chops obviously kept improving. A lot of this was necessity, but were you observing engineers in the studio?
Well, some of it was learning the specifics of EQ and understanding what that was. But so much of it, as with everything else I've done – like with my learning to play guitar – was all self-taught. It was intuitive. Yes, of course being around other engineers had some influence. But I think it was more that my method flourished. If you track the solo work, it seemed to unfold over time and the writing process became increasingly intertwined with the recording process. Unlike making an album with Fleetwood Mac, where I've gotta go in with more or less a complete idea, everything is more conscious and political, and getting from point A to point B has to be verbalized. It's probably a bit more like making a movie. What I was doing, as I say, was like painting. It's the one-on-one I get with the canvas. The better painter you become, the more it all starts to become one thing. The engineering skills fell into place as an aspect of everything else improving as I went along. Including my writing, hopefully.
