Joe Hadlock: Bear Creek's Early Years

Not far outside of Seattle, Washington, there's a converted old barn out in the woods named Bear Creek Studio. It's been there for well over 40 years, making it one of the oldest continuously running residential studios in the world. Joe and Manny Hadlock, with help from their friends, built this studio in 1978. Their son, Ryan Hadlock, has been engineering and producing from Bear Creek and all over the world for decades, with artists like Zach Bryan (including “Something Orange,” a Grammy-nominated single in 2023 for Best Country Solo Performance), The Lumineers, Brandi Carlile, Vance Joy, The Black Heart Procession, Blonde Redhead, The Afghan Whigs, Stephen Malkmus [ Tape Op #15 ], Gossip, and Ra Ra Riot.

How did you get into engineering and doing music?

JH: When I was 11, I got a HAM radio license. My brother and I used to build electronics stuff, like big amplifiers. When I was 14, I got a Hohner Pianet L with my paper route money and started playing in bands. I played all through junior high and high school. I went to the college music department and talked to the dean. I told him what I was interested in, and at the end of the conversation he said, "You're not going to fit into this department." I went to the psychology department – where the guys with the long hair were – and moved into a band house. That was my education. The singer in the band's father was an apple farmer, so we got to make some apple commercials. That was my first time in a studio. It was at American Recording in West Seattle. They had really wide tape – a 1/2-inch, 4-track Scully and a homemade board. I knew when I walked in there that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

What was it that clicked for you?

JH: The electronics, the music, and the reverb! I wanted to be an engineer so I could put reverb on everything. We made some commercials, we made some money, and it was really fun. I decided I wanted to do more. As it turned out, my wife Manny is a brilliant salesperson. She took some music I had written, and the commercials that we had made at American Recording and started getting more work. My dad said, "You're getting a purchase order from a bank to make a commercial. You should go to our bank, get a loan, and pay everybody cash at the session." I went to Sea-West Studios, I paid the musicians in cash, and I paid Rick Keefer, the owner of Sea-West. After doing that a few more times, I was his new best friend.

That's brilliant! [ laughter ]

JH: At the time, they had one of the tube Ampex 8-tracks; one of the big ones with the big meters on it. They also had a homemade Spectrasonics board, which sounded really good. I said, "I want a job." He said, "Why don't you buy in? You give me $5,000; I'll sell you some stock, and we'll buy the first 16-track in town." We got an [Ampex] MM 1100, and I learned how to be an engineer at Sea-West. The production company got a contract to do Rainier Beer commercials. We had fun and made good money. We worked on these 30 or 60 second pieces of music until they were unquestionably brilliant. It took a week or two to make each one! We won awards. In my third year, there were only three studios in Seattle that I could work in. They were just building Kaye-Smith [Studios], so there really weren't that many places. When they did get Kaye-Smith done, and I needed to do Rainier ads, Steve Miller was in Kaye-Smith, and Heart was booking Sea-West to do Dog & Butterfly . I knew we were going to need a studio in February for three months, and that's when we decided to tear the old barn down.

Had you already bought the property out there?

JH: We bought the property in '75, so we decided to build the studio in '77, because we needed a place and we had the business to sustain it. I had been going to my banker, and every time I went to him to get a little loan either to buy into Sea-West or to pay off an ad, I would say, "One of these days, I'm going to hit you up for the big one." I went in there and said, "I need money to build a studio." I had a good relationship with the bank, and it made total sense. There were tax incentives then to buy American-made equipment. We wanted to work on records, and we knew that if we worked really hard on the commercials for three months, the studio would basically be paid off for the year, and for the rest of the time we could have our friends come in. I'd done some work in L.A. and decided that I didn't want to move there. Record companies weren't paying much attention to groups from Seattle. In those days, if you wanted to be successful, you had to move to L.A. We didn't care. A bunch of friends, musicians, and hippies tore down the old barn and built a new one. I'd done some recording in L.A. and ended up buying a Quad-Eight board from the Village Recorder. MCI had just started making the JH-114 – one of the first 16-tracks. You had the JH-16, which was the predecessor.

It was a disaster! Hard to keep running.

JH: Mine was a pretty good machine.

I realized a while ago that the studio building had been expanded at one point.

RH: That was about 10 or 15 years down the road.

JH: When Soundgarden made Badmotorfinger here, we had none of this space. I think Alice in Chains came here once, and they couldn't even fit all their cases and drums in the room. We had to put the cases outside under plastic because it was raining. That’s when I said to Manny, "I think this grunge thing might go somewhere, and if it does, we need more space." [ laughter ] So, we built this room. When the Foo Fighters came for The Colour and The Shape , we had this room done. The control room was still in the old spot, but I had started that.

RH: No, we hadn't started that yet.

JH: No, I remember them rolling a bass amp in!

RH: We had started talking about putting the control room in… the plan was to put the control room in the new space. We talked about that, and I kept saying that we couldn't lose that room.

JH: It's too much fun having two big rooms!

Yeah. When did you move over from the Quad-Eight to the Trident TSM console?

JH: The world was just going to 24-track in '77, so I bought a 16-track with an upgrade. It was set up to add another drawer of electronics, as well as the extra meter bridge. We knew we needed more inputs. The Quad-Eight console was 20 x 8 with 16 monitor paths, and it wasn't enough. We were doing a lot of big bands with large brass sections and string sections, so I knew we needed more inputs. I went to England on a console-hunting trip. I saw some Trident A ranges and some Neves. Everybody was dumping the Neves then, because SSL had just started. I had my hands on a couple of Neves, but I went down to L.A. to look around. I'd also been up to Randy Bachman's studio to see his Trident A, which I thought was the coolest board I'd ever seen. I went into Cherokee Studios to see the TSM, and I thought that was also really cool. Everybody was buying those. A&M had just bought three, and a couple of studios in San Francisco had bought them. They had a ton of spares, so I bought it from Cherokee. That was about 1980 or '81. We really only had the Quad-Eight for three or four years.

RH: I remember when we pulled the Quad-Eight out of that room. I don't know how old I was, but I was really sad when it came out. It had a joystick on it, and when you did the bus assignments you could drag your finger across, and they would turn on and off. I cried, because I was thinking, "Oh, this is so cool, and now it's going to go away." I remember feeling bad!

JH: You were about nine years old.

RH: I remember everybody was having a party and celebrating, and I was sad. "That one had joysticks!" [ laughter ]

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