You guys are obviously on tour.
Billy Bob Thornton (BBT): Yup; we're in a hotel room in Lowell, Massachusetts, right now.
Aren't you playing Pennsylvania tomorrow?
BBT: Yeah, we're performing in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. It's a place we play every year; one of our normal stops. It's always good to play those places. At least half to three quarters of the audience we've played for every year. It's a friendly town.
I know you both met making one of Billy's solo records [Beautiful Door], right? And J.D., you came in as an engineer. Is that correct?
J.D. Andrew (JD): Yeah.
What started the path to having your own studio space to do the records in?
BBT: Well, originally, before I knew J.D., in late '99 or early 2000 I bought Slash's house. Slash and I made the deal at The Whisky Bar at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, where I used to live in L.A. Slash and I used to hang out in the bar there with Billy Gibbons [ZZ Top] and all these guys. Slash said, "Dude, you've gotta buy this house. I don't want to sell it to some moron who's going to turn it into something else." He had the Snakepit, which is the studio where he did the Slash's Snakepit recordings. He had it before Guns N' Roses had parted ways for a while. They would do a lot of overdubs down in that studio. We called it The Cave, as it was a basement studio, which was pretty rare for California because of earthquakes. It was an amazing studio. It wasn't as big as the one we have now, but it was really good. It came with a Trident 80B board from the '70s that we still use. It had these big Tannoy speakers in the wall that were indestructible. Believe me, because we tried to destroy them. [laughter] It was not possible. My old engineer, before J.D., would mix at 2 or 3 o'clock on the dial, which was about 120 dB. He was used to mixing bands like Cinderella and Ratt.
Just blasting.
BBT: Yeah. At one point, we had some [Yamaha] NS-10s – which we still have. We had a switch to listen up on the big speakers, listen down on the NS-10s, and also some Genelecs. He thought that he had it on the big Tannoys. I watched him turn it on and it literally shot the cone out of an NS-10, and it was sparking. It caught on fire! I've never seen that before. It blew out!
I've got to try that. I hate those monitors.
JD: They're a necessary evil, I believe.
BBT: We had that studio for 13 years, and we made the early Boxmasters records there, once J.D. and I formed the band. Then we didn't have a studio for years, so we would record over at A&M [Henson Recording Studios] in Hollywood, which we loved. I'd been recording there since about '97 or '98. I even did a couple of movie scores there. We did that for a long time and made a lot of records there. Then my wife, Connie [Angland], was like, "I'm going to keep your ass at home!" She and my daughter, Bella, were determined that I was going to have another studio, so we bought a place out in Agoura Hills [California]. That's the studio that J.D. and I have now. It's a 2,200 square foot studio. It's world class. We bought it from Jason Wade from the band Lifehouse.
Oh, sure; yeah.
BBT: Really nice guy. He had a lot of gear in there. He said, "I'll sell some of this." Of course, everything J.D. and I wanted, he goes, "No way." But we had our whole studio from The Cave. When we left there, J.D. took the wiring out of the walls. He took everything.
JD: Yeah. A back doctor bought the house, and he was like, "I don't know what I'm going to use this place for. Maybe I'll put a screening room in, or maybe I'll make it a playroom for my kids." I thought, "Well, that means I'm going to take every single thing out of here." [laughter] It came in handy, because when we were putting the studio together I had all these multipair wires that we could re-use. We sent the console off to The Desk Doctor [Bruce Millett] and got that looked over. We've been up and running since last fall. We finished mixing a [new, upcoming] record two days before we started rehearsals in April. Honestly, [the console] sounds so good. It's like, "Wow, this has a little bit of extra sonic goodness."
How big is the live room?
BBT: It's pretty big.
JD: Yeah, a big chunk of it. It's a good third or half bigger than Studio B at Henson. It's three times bigger than what we had at The Cave. It's a spacious room. Everything is mic'd and ready to go. For us, being able to walk in and be ready is everything that I've ever wanted.
Just walk in and roll if you've got ideas.
BBT: Everything's wired just right, the way we want it. The live room is in an L shape, which is really interesting. It's like a long area, which is the main live room, and then it goes into an L. Over in the L part is where all the keyboards are. My drum kit is set up on a riser at the back of the main part of the live room. We've got this whole long distance there. The drums, if I walk in and play them in there, not recording them, they sound great already.
On your last album, Help…I'm Alive, "Focus on the One" has a great room sound, like John Bonham.
JD: That was over at Henson.
BBT: Yeah, "Focus on the One" was in Studio A, I believe.
JD: We used three different rooms there, whichever one they had available at the time. Help...I'm Alive and a Christmas record [Christmas in California] were the last sessions that we've done at Henson. The next release that we have scheduled for May [2023] is going to be the first one that's proper to the Peppertree Hill Studio.
BBT: Our studio's called Peppertree Hill because the driveway's lined with pepper trees. Also, it can't help to have a [Beatles] Sgt. Pepper's… subliminal message.
Oh, yeah, I didn't think of that!
BBT: The house that we live in is up the hill, so it's two separate buildings. That way when my wife kicks me out, I can go out to the studio and sleep on the couch. [laughs]
It's good if they're on the same property to have it be in a separate building. I'm sure that with The Cave that you'd hear sound upstairs, no matter what.
BBT: Totally, yeah.
JD: You'd hear drums and amps in the living room upstairs. Luckily there was still another floor above where the bedrooms were, so it wasn't quite as bad. Here, you can't even see the house when you're down at the studio. It's really isolated.
You recorded the album Speck with our late friend Geoff Emerick [Tape Op #57]. Was that really the last record he produced?
BBT: Yeah. It was his last fully-realized record.
JD: As far as I know. He was doing some work in Texas, in El Paso, but it was clinics.
Oh, at Sonic Ranch [Tape Op #94]?
JD: Yeah, exactly. Honestly, he was getting his way back into making records again. He said people forgot who he was. He wasn't getting the calls. He was hanging out at Henson one day, and he asked about us. We'd met him over the years. Billy had a call with him, and we were working on a record. Geoff was like, "If you need any help or anything, I can mix a song for you guys." We said, "Well, we're working on a record right now! Would you be interested in helping us out with it?" One night, I was off doing something else, and Billy and Geoff sat and listened to all the songs that we had and got some ideas. After that, we got into the studio and were cutting tracks and changing things.
BBT: We'd known Geoff for a long time. He was always a fan of the band. He used to say, "I'm glad to hear that somebody's still relying on a backbeat," and stuff like that. He really liked it. What was an honor was that he asked us if he could produce a record for us, as opposed to us asking him. We couldn't believe it. We were like, "Wait a minute, we're supposed to be begging you to do this!"
That's quite an honor! What did he bring to the table?
BBT: He was interesting. Geoff was so willing to tell us stories about the day George Harrison did this or that. He would tell us all kinds of Beatles stories, and different records he'd worked on. But when it came to J.D. asking him, "Exactly how did you do this?" he was pretty tight-lipped! He did do a few things with vocals, like the first song on that record ["I Wanna Go Where You Go"] has the thing that he used to do with John Lennon, which is the automatic doubling of the lead vocal. When we heard that first track, it was like, "Wow, that's that John Lennon sound! What did you do?" Geoff said, "I'm not going to tell you that!" [laughter] J.D. absorbed it a little bit to where he's gotten that together now. He had the assistants over at Henson go out to the dumpster one night and get some cardboard boxes of different shapes and sizes, and he had me with a mallet there playing these boxes. I've got a picture of me and Geoff. It's not a very good picture; it's fuzzy, but it's him standing over me like this [with his hands on his hips] listening to me try out cardboard boxes with a mallet. He wanted the song to be very simple, and to have a cardboard box as a kick drum.
Right!
BBT: He put the Coles 4038 [ribbon mic] on the drums for a couple of songs and all that. It was stuff that we had read about our whole lives, and all of a sudden he's doing it. He also told me I was the best tambourine player he ever heard.
Wow! A real compliment.
BBT: He said, "How do you keep time when you do that double-time on the tambourine like that?" He goes, "Ringo [Starr] couldn't do that!" I thought, "Okay!"
Was he doing all the mixes too?
JD: Yes, he mixed the whole record. He did that over at LAFX [Recording] Studio in North Hollywood on an old API console. It was a treat. First off, the first song got that Lennon treatment. Then other songs would have little things that reminded us of The Beatles, America, or Badfinger. If Geoff didn't like something, it was muted. He was not shy. It's like, "We don't need this. That needs to go away." Anything that cluttered the way of the vocal and the song, he got rid of. Rhythm guitars? "We don't need those." Cymbals? Hi-hats? Anything harsh and abrasive-sounding he got rid of. He focused the song at the core. Besides the vocal, what does this song need? He helped us see what the songs were, and it makes sense. We stuck to that, somewhat. We still like to put a lot of tracks on the record.
BBT: Of course, as a lead vocalist, I loved that! "Woohoo, let's put it up!" It's interesting how he did take out parts. On early Beatles records you wouldn't hear a lot of hi-hat and cymbals. In those days, you didn't hear the bass drum. When we first started listening to this record, the cymbals were either very pushed back or nonexistent. You're hearing a kick, a snare, and some toms most of the time. Just enough hi-hat to show I'm keeping time, and that was about it. He dumped a lot of rhythm guitars. Always dumped the organ.
Really?
BBT: He'd go, "It's just a noise in the middle there. We don't need that." If you listen to those Beatles records, once he took over, it's the same thing. If you listen to "Come Together," or any of those songs, you notice that Ringo's drums are mainly just the drums. There's not a heck of a lot of cymbals in those records.
