The Red Crayola first recorded a single for a label run by "Keith Stefek, a local man in Houston who had made some money, and he was investing making records. He backed us up to make a single, but it didn't work out," and the single never came out. When Lelan Rogers of International Artists agreed to release their debut album, The Parable of Arable Land, they returned to Walt Andrus's studio where they'd recorded the single.
Andrus was "Houston's most famous recording engineer. He had recorded everything. He had worked at a studio on Broadway, which was modeled on Gold Star Hollywood. He had a first class engineers ticket. He had worked in the first TV stations. He really knew his onions. He had a wonderful studio."
"He did everything. He did the [13th Floor] Elevators' albums. He did us. Lost and Found album was done there. He worked with Euphoria — a guy named Wesley [Watt] had a power trio, one of the first power trios in the mid '60s, before anybody else started doing this kind of stuff. First class sessions were being done in that studio all the time."
The Parable of Arable Land alternates conventionally structured songs with noise segments that share the title "Free Form Freak-out." "We had started off as a group and there were 5 of us. And then one night we got another person that was playing and it seemed like we'd be the 6. So Steve [Cunningham] and Rick [Barthelme] and I decided we didn't want to be a band in that sense, we wanted to do something else. So we took it back to the 3 of us. But the Familiar Ugly were these people who still came along to all the gigs, and they got to be quite a sizable bunch, of variable size. So when we were playing at the battle of the bands where Lelan [Rogers] discovered us, playing in this mall, he heard this music and he came to us and he said, 'You know those crazy guys, you know, you could mix that all up.' And we said, 'Yes, that's what we're thinking.' So we went in the studio and it was just, was very straightforward, because he had an idea, he understood, we understood. Everybody knew, we agreed that we were gonna try to do it this way. It was coherent. It was the right way of dealing with the stuff. Wanting to make a point there that the difference between a song and this other stuff — song sounds like this, this sounds like this, but it's the same stuff, the same material."
"We did all the freak-outs in one session, in one evening, in two halves. We exhausted one master tape and took a break, and put another one on and went back and did another session for 30 minutes like that. So we had an hour's worth of freak-out material, the free form material, with the Familiar Ugly. A guy was riding down the street on his motorbike and there were 50, 60 people standing outside the recording studio, and he's going, 'What're you all doing?' 'Well we're going to go in here and make a record in a minute.' 'Really, no kidding. That's interesting. Y'all are in a band, that's a lot of people.' 'No, these are our friends and... you wanna come in and bring your motorbike in?' 'Oh really? That's cool.' So this guy brought his chopper in. We said, 'Okay here's how it's gonna start. Ricky's gonna start the chopper, and when he starts it, everybody hits it. When you hear that thing kick in, everybody jump on it.' And there it went. Then you just filled up the tape and then somebody walked out and said, 'Okay, tape stopped,' and it's over. Everybody went out and had a cigarette and then came back in and tried it again 30 minutes later."
"The Familiar Ugly stuff was done 50 people down to 8 tracks. There were 8 microphones set up and all that down onto one channel. So it mixed itself, its organic self. That was all happened. We went back and pieced it together so that it would have a flow to it and all the while we were naïve. We went in the studio, if we'd had our druthers, we would have multitracked the free form stuff, because we could have done more of our own thing. As it was, it was just frozen. It was a documentary relation, documenting the recording."
"And then over the next couple of days we went in and did the backing tracks — we played them live," with few overdubs. Vocal tracks on some songs, such as "War Sucks," were also recorded live. "When we had the backing tracks, Roky [Erickson, of the 13th Floor Elevators,] was invited in to play the organ part on 'Hurricane Fighter Plane' and played the mouth organ part on 'Transparent Radiation.'"
Andrus's studio "had a beautiful room, you could get a really lovely sound in it. He had Ampex gear, and [used] good old-fashioned Neumann microphones for the vocals. Had a real echo chamber, a concrete floor, and a microphone and a speaker in it. Change the echo length by going in there and moving the microphone."
"Our first album was recorded mono. [The simulated stereo mix] is Walt Andrus's studio wizardry. We made the mono version and then like two days later I was around the studio, and they said, 'Come here, what about this for a stereo album?' And I sat there and listened to it and I said, 'Sounds okay to me, crazy, but sounds okay.'
It's not tricky to me. That was when people were finding out about things like phasing vocal sounds and all these kinds of strange devices, gimmickry. We were not making electronic music, we were using rock n roll instruments, but sometimes the music was related to electronic stuff."
"Walt's studio had these baffled walls. And also buckets of sand distributed here and there. Strange. Is that for fire, or for cigarettes? Or is that for acoustic reasons, or what is that? That's where the line, 'On the shelf I have six buckets and they are for you,' that's where this comes from. I can remember I'm standing there playing that song, I'm thinking to myself, I just thought, "On the shelf I have six buckets and they are..." You don't know what they're for, I don't know what they're for, but they're for you." He never found out the purpose of the buckets. "I like mysteries sometimes."
For Coconut Hotel, they returned to Andrus's studio. It "was done in a slightly more leisurely way, but we recorded all live in stereo, a pair of matched condenser microphones. They were set up in stereo in this room. It had a lot of space, it had a lot of natural acoustic depth and space, so you don't need a lot of reverb. The first piece, the idea is that we want to play these keyboards. There's no plan, we're gonna play 'em, we're gonna play 'em for awhile until we get tired and see what this piece does and see how long it goes on. The development of it is not in the usual musical way — there's not a melodic development, there's not a rhythmic development, there's not an intensifying of the dynamic strategy or anything. It's just always more or less the same. And then the next piece was built around the idea of an improvisation which had some kind of "kitschy" poetic elements. Like clarinets and playing into the water. It had a lot of atmospheric, koto going 'wunnh', strange, exotic instruments. And also the agreement on being abstract. The decision was taken to make an album that was obviously 180 degrees out from Parable of Arable Land. No drums, no songs, no rock, no rhythm. A hard-ass record, an experimental record in the sense of is there anything possible? Is there anything left to play? Is there anything to do with pop music at the time? Yeah. 'Hey man, peace and love feeling' — is there anything more than this going on in this music? Does it have more of a role in life than, 'Yeah, you're a good guy, you like good music. Doesn't that make you feel good? Yeah, that makes me feel good.' It makes me want to puke. Hippie positivism is really repulsive. Not because they were repulsive, it was a pleasant sentiment. It was a kind of sentiment. At the time it was a really highly charged atmosphere, because of the politics of the '60s, people claiming that they knew what to do. How could you know, I don't know. I don't believe you know. Coconut was a real effort to push the topic."
"Live 1967 is what we were doing around that time. When we'd go to play live, it was not with the purpose of making terror — it was with the purpose of the artist as the agenda. This is on the menu tonight, what do you think of that. When we were in California, we borrowed a machine, a 3M stereo portable machine that was really cheap. [We used] that kind of bronzy colored, real thin tape, and recorded on both sides. And just did it very primitively — had a couple of microphones and just put 'em there, and let the frequencies sort themselves. We learned that that would happen by doing Parable. We knew that we would be alright. We were satisfied also with the sound, it just worked out. We dragged this tape recorder with us for the 3 or 4 or 5 days that we were there and recorded everything."
"The only thing that happened bad on that trip was we recorded with [John] Fahey in Sierra Sound, we went and did like 2 hours worth of 16-track recording of the same kind of stuff, of him doing our thing. He knew what we were doing, it was his thing — he was doing the same thing. We came to California and we were asked, 'Who do you want to meet?' and we said John Fahey, he's the only one. And they said 'John Fahey, that's interesting.' So happened that the guy we were staying with knew him, so we were able to meet him, and have John sit in with us, but those tapes were lost, alas. They were done 16-track [at] Sierra Sound. I don't know what kind of stuff he had at the time, very early 16- track. All that West Coast bunch were friends of John's, we didn't know anybody."
For God Bless the Red Krayola, "we had some tunes. When I came back from California to make that, we'd fallen out with IA over the stuff with John Fahey, and then they got in touch with me because Parable had done business and they really wanted to go on. They said, 'Would you like to make another album? Please come back.' So I went back to Texas, but they wanted to know what the songs were, and I didn't want to tell them everything. So I had some tunes, I played some tunes for them. Went in and made a demo at Walt Andrus's with Frank Davis, but luckily Frank Davis is out there. On the day that I went in there making the demo, he had an idea that we were going to make an experiment using slapback. So the demo is just, I wish I had this demo — it's insane. I was trying to play with the gaps and the delays and so on like that, to demo these songs which are on God Bless. It was insane. When [IA] heard it, they just went kind of like, 'Oh oh oh oh okay. Just go to the studio and do it.' So a lot of it was written on the fly, on the feet. Pieces were improvised and made up. Go home at night, and 'I got an idea.' A lot of that stuff is sorted out in the studio, raised in the studio. It took us about a month to make that — we had a little time to make that. Engineer was Jim Duff. One time, when we were recording "Victory Garden", he suddenly lit up. He like woke up. Suddenly he started doing some things and then all of a sudden we had this classic sound. Hey, that's it, what is that? It sounds like real country and western music, you know? He started talking about his own songwriting. He had written some like 250 songs for his wife"
"That was back in that studio that had been modeled on Gold Star, where Doug Sahm had cut 'She's About a Mover'. That was a real recording studio in the grand style. It was modeled on Gold Star. It had like the little Gold Star room and then it had the big Gold Star room. So it was okay, the gear was a bit primitive. IA had bought [the studio]. They got tired of, they thought, 'We're not gonna pay Walt anymore, we're gonna have our own studio. God Bless was recorded like 7-track. Mostly we recorded 4-track, but when we needed extra tracks we could fly in 3 outboard tracks from submixing stuff. The other thing that was going on there was we were in this, for us, kind of technical wonderland. We eschewed all technical embellishment. EQ was all set flat. We recorded flat. No reverb on that record until the very last tune. 'Night Song', it drifts, the reverb is jacked up, very obviously, but before that there is no reverb. All you hear is just the acoustics of the room."
"Then I fell out with IA again after that was over. I went back and started working with Walt and made my solo album, [Corky's Debt to His Father], at Walt's place. By that time it had gone up to Ampex 8-track. He had just beautiful gear. He had some really high-class speakers. They looked, funny cabinets, they had this kind of decorative stuff on them. They didn't look like this technological aesthetic — they looked more domestic and had beautiful sound. The board was good, rooms had good sound, mixing room had a good sound to it. That took 3 1/2 months to make. Frank [Davis] said, 'I don't think we should crash this record, I think we should take our time on it.' So it took us 3 1/2 months, some hours a day for 4 days a week, and then we would take 2 or 3 days off to think about it. The other difference was that I had written all the tunes before we got there. Like 90% of 'em I had the tunes there. I talked to an arranger about what I wanted to do. Lined up the musicians, and we recorded it with different ensembles — the idea being to have variety of ensembles but unity of sound."
For the Saddlesore single, he returned to the "same studio, but then the studio was starting to fall apart. We were working around, piecing it together. [Walt Andrus] had started Gulf Pacific Records, he was like a week away from being a very rich and powerful fellow, and then it kind of like all collapsed. He had a soul singer, a white soul singer, who was signed to CBS contract so he was doing things that were making a lot of money. He had fun doing other kinds of things like doing stuff with us. He had a plan, a really wonderful plan, to record music really fast, topical music, and he liked working with me probably because I could work fast. [He wanted to make] music based on the news. Make it one week, press it and bring it on the street. In the next week you're selling out of the back of the truck. That was his idea, way ahead of the times. But we had to kind of put the studio back together in order to make the Saddlesore single. That was another one of those things that sat on the WEA A&R table for a couple of weeks. They were tempted, almost bit, almost liked it, didn't like it. Frank sang because people didn't like my voice on my solo album. Some people either loved the solo album or hated it. The reason most people hated it was because they didn't like my singing. The way we'll get around that, we'll have Frank sing. Frank had been a hero to me — I learned a lot from him. There's a lot in common we had in terms of the vocal sound and the pitching and all that sort of stuff, just attack. And so he [sang], and then that didn't go. So I just quit for a while. I stopped. I just thought I must be misunderstanding something because I had been under the impression that the idea was to get into the game and push the envelope, try to do interesting things with it. Turned out that people want you to get in there and deliver known goods, that seemed to be the point — still is. I understand that, but I still play the game. Feed a few familiarities but put 'em in a funny shape, because I'm still looking to see, is there anything else? How many ideas are there?"
Corrected Slogans "took three years because we didn't have any money. It took awhile to finish it off. The political infighting in the organization, inside Art & Language, also meant that it had a certain kind of shape. Plus I was living in America and I was working mostly with people in England. Some of the basic tracks I recorded at home on a Nagra — set it up, limiter is off, really crash it, load the tape up with sound. Some music was recorded in a basement studio which later became, which is now Philip Glass's studio in New York on Greene Street. As I recall they did have a Neve board in there, some first class gear. So we recorded some of that stuff there, and then we finished off a lot of the stuff in England with the Art & Language. [We did] the vocals in Stonesfield in [a] studio where they were working on the prototype of the SSL desk. The first SSL desk."
"Every time we could think of how to use a gimmick, we used it. Some funny reverb or some funny delay or some funny this or that or the other stuff. It's hard to tell because it's pretty well integrated, synthesized in there as a gimmick, but it is also an index of gimmicks, studio gimmickry, made present as gimmicks, for novelty's sake. 'Hey, listen, here's a funny noise.'"
"And I guess then after that I started the band again. I started playing Red Krayola again. Jesse Chamberlain got a deal with Warner Brothers, with Radar Records which was financed by Warner Brothers."
About the same time, Thompson began to produce records, starting with the Monochrome Set. "What happened was Rough Trade was getting started and they said, 'Do you want to produce a record for us?' Sounds interesting. I never had really produced any records before myself, in the usual sense." He cites mixing as a central part of his role as a producer. "I didn't set up the microphones and run all the lines, but I mixed Stiff Little Fingers' first album. I mixed Raincoats' first album. It was hands on running the board, before boards got so sophisticated I couldn't run them anymore, or they wouldn't let me. I mixed some singles for The Fall, 'Fiery Jack', 'How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'', 'City Hobgoblins', 'Totally Wired', those singles."
"Different bands have different requirements. Stiff Little Fingers was a matter of setting it up, because they knew what they were doing. They were a bar band basically. They were a BAND that could just play that stuff in its sleep. So it was a question of just making sure to get everything straight up. Other times, like with Monochrome Set, it would be arguing a little bit about this or that part. Same thing with the Raincoats. I gave a suggestion to Vicky about the violin playing when I first heard them. So I was involved in all the stages of the development of the album there. Sitting in at rehearsals, talking to them about songs, talking about arrangements. Saying, 'The violin, have you ever heard of the Velvet Underground?' No, Vicky hadn't heard of them, did not know about John Cale and didn't know about Tony Conrad or LaMonte Young or any of that stuff. She was a trained classical fiddler, so she tried to familiarize herself with the aggression and evil that had been done with this instrument which was also interesting. The other thing that I think I brought to production was performances. If a musician trusts you, wants to work with you, they'll put out. You can help with it. Nobody held my hand in a studio when I first started, but people were very friendly. Always watching, so you learn bit by bit. It was that kind of a process. Try to do as little as possible — try not to interfere. I never had a Mayo Thompson sound. There is not a Mayo Thompson touch to all kinds of recordings that I've ever made. My criteria has always been to be true to the music that I record that the band has played, and to say something if I had an idea where I thought it was something off or wrong. At least to say 'Do you want it this way because here's what I could think. This could sound like a mistake to somebody.' Or 'What if we did this next?' those kind of things. But mostly hands off."
"I worked in Kingsway Studios, which was owned by Deep Purple. Did a lot of work in that studio, which had a very nice Trident board and a good Studer 24-track, fantastic machine. That's where we recorded the first [Raincoats] single and mixed some of their album, even though it had been recorded at another studio up in Cambridge. We also did Stiff Little Fingers. It was done in a really primitive basement recording studio setup. Primitive in the sense that it was clean, it was coherent, it was a good recording, it was a good tape to signal ratio, and all that other kind of stuff. It wasn't like fighting a battle to record with improper gear. It belonged to the days of punk. We got there, we went up to look at the studio, and arrived in the session before us, the Mekons were making that first single of theirs ['Where Were You']. It was a good place. [The Red Krayola single] 'Wives in Orbit' was recorded in Olympic Studios. It was an old church in St. John's Wood. It was just part of the Commonwealth, people knew of places to go."
"The Fall, I met them in England. We worked with them up in Rochester, in a studio just outside of, a bit north of Manchester, toward where Mark lived, Mark Smith. They had been with IRS before — they'd made Dragnet and some other stuff. I had seen them, and they were riveting, really good. Mark was really good, and really knew what he was all about. I saw them play the Palladium one night and somebody doused him with a bucketful of water and he didn't say anything. He triumphed in this war. He was a fister, and a very smart guy and a hard guy. And then one day Geoff [Travis, head of Rough Trade] said, 'Oh, you're gonna do some stuff for The Fall.' Geoff and I had kind of like a little distribution of functions. Geoff also inspired confidence in bands when he was there because he was really committed to the stuff. He was behind you. So his presence was always conducive to a good atmosphere when I was recording things. He trusted me. I think the only thing, [it] kind of came to where he and I kind of had a parting of minds, it was on drum sounds. Because there came a moment where he was hearing music and thinking, well the drums are, they never did 'em very well. Which I don't think is true at all. I think we always were true to our drummers. I think our drummers were not always fantastic. But that was when it was getting into, that was venturing off into a domain where we were saying, 'We're going to have an ideal'. We're going to have an idea of what kind of sound we want. Rather than here's the sound the band has got, or here's the sound and let's see what we can do with it. Which takes you into the domain [where] this sound needs to have a syntactic quality to it. People recognize that this is modern because the drums are way up and really loud and big. And also it was making allowances for the fact that a lot of people who were recording music, they're going into Abbey Road but they can't sing technically. 20 years before the idea of going into Abbey Road and recording something would have been just like, 'You wanna go to the moon?' just as unlikely as that. But after [punk] then anybody could do it. It was proven. You had a really high quality sound of recording and some very poor performances in some cases, but rich in feeling frequently. Poor musical attributes maybe it's understood, but powerful nonetheless, really powerful."
"I did [James] Blood Ullmer's album [Are You Glad to Be in America?]. I'd met him in the same studio where Philip Glass later recorded in New York. I had met him because Ornette was recording Body-Meta in there. I was in New York, and belonged to RCA and supervised all the tracking sessions. I had been going to rehearsals every day, listening to the band, listening to the arrangements, learning the tunes, and knowing what was going on. Go to the RCA and we were going to cut 12 Blood Ullmer tunes in one day. Some of them were 8 [or] 9 players and some of them just 3 or 4. They're working with the tracking engineer, just making sure. Lost one bass drum track where the mic slipped and I missed it, I didn't catch it. I had to patch it."
"There was a Space Station reverb, [which] played a big role on that. We did lots and lots of layers of reverb with tiny delays behind them, makes them sound huge. The standards we were working to were, when they're talking about Blood, they were calling him Hendrix, was he gonna be the next Hendrix. There was a criteria on getting the guitar to be really powerful and big, so it was so big that all the other instruments fit beside it. Because he had a wonderful guitar sound, just a killer guitar sound, and we built it all around that whole thing, and then this voice occasionally."
"'Nag Nag Nag' [by Cabaret Voltaire], that was in, I can't remember the name of the studio. I did a lot of stuff in there. The Blue Orchids did their single ['The Flood'/'Disney Boys'] in there. The thing that's funny is when we recorded 'Wives in Orbit', Geoff was there, Edwin Pouncey was there, and [Steven Mallinder], and [Richard H. Kirk], and Chris [Watson] also. The one I got along with was [Mallinder] mostly, and wound up having a progressively kind of like a real difference of opinion with [Kirk]. He had a difference of opinion with me. I didn't even know we had fallen out — I found out eventually. But got to work on "Nag Nag Nag". It's the only time I ever worked with them, and I always say it was their best song. They made some great stuff. I have some cassette recordings and stuff from the '70s that nobody's ever heard. But "Nag Nag Nag" is a great tune. That was one of the first times working also with Adam Kidron engineering. Very good engineer, he was great to work with. In fact, it was through working with him that I stopped working so much with Geoff. I started kind of like moving in this direction. By the time we started making Kangaroo? I was absolutely trying to get away from this other position. Not get away from, but just change it."
