There could be a book about Bear Creek, your parents, and all that's happened.
Yeah. We keep adding chapters every week! My folks are in Mexico now. We were partners in a studio there for a while too. They're doing well. My wife, Maja, helps with the day-to-day operations, and even my son, Kai, helps with the yard work. That's a three-generation studio! But it is a big story; you're right. I think it's a pretty consistent story.
You're one of the few people I know who grew up with a studio right next to your home.
When I grew up, I would play with a reel-to-reel tape machine with sound-on-sound, using one of my dad's synths. I'd do all sorts of weird stuff when I was six.
Were you watching sessions or helping in any way?
Oh, yeah; I was the coffee guy. I would come in and clean up. I remember that I assisted on a session with Eric Clapton when I was 7. He didn't have an amp with him, so he was like, "Hey, can I borrow your amp?" I had a Fender Champ with the pull treble knob. I was like, "Sure!" It was a guitar solo on "Dancing on the Ceiling" by Lionel Richie. But I was around. I got to meet Heart, and I was always kind of running in and out of the studio. When I was 13 or 14, I wasn't antisocial, but I had a small circle of friends. I found that if you played music, you started to meet a lot of different kinds of people. In junior high school and early high school I was in bands. I got kicked out of public school, and I got put in private school for the last year. All of a sudden, I met all these guys with the polo shirts. My only friend was on the football team, a kid that I went to grade school with. I cut all ties with music. I thought it was boring. My parents did it. I wanted to wear a suit. I got my hair cut short. I wanted to do everything I could to not be a hippie musician. I didn't want to be a part of it. I went to WSU Business School, and I studied international business, and joined a fraternity. I didn't play in any bands. I listened to music, but I was like a "normal" person. Not "obsessed." I went through that for two years. My dad came to visit WSU for dads' weekend, and he's like, "What are you doing here? There's a bunch of people drinking beer, and you're not getting good grades in your economic classes." I moved out of the fraternity house, and then my dad called me up and said, "Ryan, I really don't think this school is appropriate for you. We'd like to give you the opportunity to go to another school abroad for six months so that you can think about everything."
Wow.
I went to school in London, and I studied advertising. Again, it's like, "I don't care about these Gatorade drinks we're supposed to market, or these candy bars." That shifted to sound for film and Foley work, because I somewhat already knew how to do that. I finished the program in London, and then I went to Evergreen [State College] and studied music production under Peter Randlette [head of electronic media]. Then I interned at Bear Creek.
Wait, you interned at your own parents' studio?
Yeah, I went with three guys. Don Farwell, who runs Earwig Studio in Seattle, was one. We helped build the big room at Bear Creek. My first real assisting session was the Foo Fighters' The Colour and the Shape. Dave [Grohl] even gave me engineering credit and became a good friend of mine in the early stages of the Foo Fighters. They were at the studio for a long time, and Gil Norton was producing it. Then I assisted Terry Date [Tape Op #123] with Team Sleep – Chino Moreno from Deftones side project – and that was my first Pro Tools record [Team Sleep]. Terry was like, "You better like this, because there's no reason to be doing this unless you love it, and you can't be doing anything else." Then The Black Heart Procession records, which I did shortly after that, [1, 2, Three] were kind of a phenomena. The Blonde Redhead records [Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Misery Is a Butterfly] are still the coolest things I think I've ever done.
Were those with Guy Picciotto [Fugazi, Tape Op #12]?
Yeah, Guy and I worked on them. That song "For the Damaged Coda" is one of the biggest memes of all time. That was from 22 years ago. We're talking about hundreds of billions of streams of that song on little TikTok and YouTube videos. It was on Rick and Morty. One of my son's friends was over, and he started playing it on my piano. I said, "What are you playing?" He looked at me and goes, "It's Blonde Redhead, 'For the Damaged Coda'." I thought, "How in the world does an 11-year-old know this song?" He said, "Oh, it's from the meme. It's Rick and Morty's bad vibes song."
