The singles "Totally Wired" by the Fall, "Nag Nag Nag" by Cabaret Voltaire, and "Fairytale in the Supermarket" by the Raincoats share more than their importance in the history of British punk. They share the same producer, Mayo Thompson, who a decade earlier had created such psychedelic-era classics as the Red Crayola's "Parable of Arable Land" and his solo record "Corky's Debt to His Father." One of the few people involved in underground rock through virtually its entire history, he continues to make relevant music with the Red Krayola today. I talked to Mayo during his Chicago visit last fall, between an afternoon in-store at Reckless Records and a concert that night at the Empty Bottle.
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."
"I wish I could remember the name of that studio where we mixed Kangaroo? - same place where we mixed Blood's album. They were doing a lot of funk music in there so it was very up-to-date. Good tech, expensive. Right by the British Museum. I forgot the name."
"Mastering records for me was like the final step, and the key to the thing. I always worked with Porky, Porky Primecut. And Porky had this little pair of brass scissors and a pair of really plain vanilla bland little speakers. You would get in there and you knew that's what it really sounds like right there. No matter what anybody's system worldwide, this is objectively the problem, right here. So, what's the last thing we can do? Always aspiring in the studios to get everything to be able to take it into a master room and cut it flat, because you couldn't be there every time. But Porky was great to work with. And for me, that's the only room I'm kind of interested in, someplace where if it sounds good in there, it's gonna sound fine anywhere. That's the thing that always struck me also about high-class recording, really good technical recordings. You listen to a record like Thriller, Thriller sounds great on every system. The important stuff comes through on every system. It's been recorded correctly. Every picobel is just perfect. By contrast you take a lot of these independent records and you put 'em on one stereo and they sound like something and you put 'em on another stereo and they sound like it's busted, something's wrong with it. The big meat and potatoes is in between the busted sound and the high end sound."
"I don't have any problems with noise. Some people don't like noise, I don't care — doesn't bother me. Tape noise, hiss. It can be distracting if it's the first thing you notice, that there's a lot of crackling. On the whole, my game has been to try to make the most out of what little there is."
"In England, in the industry, a lot of places you would go into, they would have an Allison board, or something like that — that would be the range you could rise to. Or they would have some kind of Craftsman board. Or a Soundcraft board — Soundcraft were very popular in UK studios. I recorded in a 16-track state-of-the-art Auratone studio, that's where we did [Red Krayola single "Days of Future Pilots"] for example. Which was completely strange sound. We're now going to the small box to record this record. They had some big Auratones. It was a completely strange setup. They had big Auratones and little. It was a unified Auratone system. I'd never heard anything like it. Auratone speakers, you'd find them in every studio, it's like here every studio you find [Yamaha] NS- 10s. And then in England, you would find NS-10s, and sitting next to them was a couple of Auratone boxes. And this was sort of like a worst-case scenario, here's what it could sound like."
"I suppose my experience of recording has been largely, like everybody else's, shaped by the technological developments. What does this mean to me, what does that represent a way that I've got all of this potential? Trying to learn how to use it, trying to find out if there's something that it can do that could teach me something I don't already know but that I might also be able to learn how to integrate."
"I'm one of those guys who, if they said to me, 'Can you record de, de, de in here?', I'm more than likely, even if the place is fucked, gonna say yeah, because I don't care. I mean if I had my way, I have some equipment of my own that I've bought, I have ways of working. But one is always operating within material constraints as well, no question about it."
"Blackwing was a great studio. Vince Clark was a partner with Eric [Radcliffe], and by that time they were even starting a label and Vince liked it. Daniel Miller, I've known him since the days of the Normal and Rough Trade and stuff. It was through him that I got asked to work there. I did two records there."
"[One] thing I learned from Eric which was very good, working at Blackwing, was to go to mono. Which was something I had kind of lost track of. When we first started recording, we recorded mono, because of sound from the Phil Spector recording. He reminded me of that mono. It was after working with him I got to the point where I would take all the records and at a certain moment I would take a mix and just put it in mono and listen to it for awhile, just to see what was going on and make sure the frequencies were organized right. That was the other thing I learned progressively more and more about was mixing by frequencies, and the master of that for me was Conny [Plank]. His whole technique was built around frequency mixing, which was perfect for me, because my criteria in mixing alternative music and punk music was to make sure that you could hear everything. My imagination was digital was going to be the perfect mode to make punk records in, because you would have the technical presence of all frequencies but they would not be competing with each other. They would just be there and you could really jack it up and you get a lot of color out of it. Even though it would be cold sound, it wouldn't matter. I have tried it; I was wrong. There are no rules about that. There are no easy algorithms that run along the lines of, 'Oh, this is a perfect format for this.' Maybe it depends on the tune."
"Conny was really fun to work with, although he had this strange way of talking about things in terms of pictures all the time. 'I'm trying to get the picture of this mix, let me see.' 'I've almost got the picture together.' This figurative use, is he talking Lichtenstein to me, is he talking about some picture theory representation? What is going on here? I didn't know quite what he meant. It was coherent in the way that he did it. He had a real ear for experimentation, will to experiment. And a love of music in general, that didn't mean that he felt like he was wasting his time if it was something that was not going to make a million dollars — he was still interested. Met a lot of strange characters there — met [Holger] Czukay, met Jaki Leibzeit, met Rene Tinner."
"Worked in Can's studio, that's another studio that's quite an interesting studio. I did some advertising music in that place, and I tried to make a couple of singles in that place, one with Robert Gorl from DAF mixing, producing. Failure. But wonderful sound, wonderful room, an old cinema with canvas stuck on the walls, and it's kind of set off by baffles here and there. You can draw the curtains around, but it's just like a big, open quiet room. Of course, because they're German hippies, there are stars painted all over everything. They're strange. Rene Tinner is a Swiss. He's the tech man behind all the Can records. I wouldn't exactly describe him as a hippie. He likes to drive his Porsche 928 at 160 miles an hour."
Part of Three Songs on a Trip to the United States was recorded live by Plank. "He brought his mobile out, and set it up outside this place, and recorded the gig. On great big reels, not 2" reels, but the next size, the ones, 'There's a machine that takes these things?' They're like wheels of trains. The 3 songs themselves were done in his studio but not with him, they were done with the engineer of Einsturzende Neubaten, their producer [Jon Caffery]." Thompson attributes the drum sound of those songs to the room at Conny's studio. "It was a funny setup. There was a room that was about the same size as the control room and [also] kind of a half-room, but there was no wall [between them]. And there was a big rest of the room and there was a grand piano and an organ. It was like a synthesizer museum, he saved everything he ever had. The drums, just set 'em on a rug in this thing, and there was a wall with these baffles behind it, and you could open these things or close them. You'd get a hard reflection off the back or you could open the baffles and get absorbed."
With Pere Ubu, "I was like the guitar player on those records. The unhappy guitar player on Song of the Bailing Man. By that time the really miserable guitar player. I kept thinking to myself, when Anton Fier was saying to me, here's this little thing [sings baroque line]. As I understand it, all I need to do is get one of them right and you could fly it on to the whole session. Why don't you play it? It was that kind of a session. And we need some more tunes. Why doesn't someone just write some more tunes? I was ready to go home; I was pissed off. They hated me and I hated them by that time — it was just a miserable mess. Ravenstine doesn't talk to me still. But wonderful guys, great band. Fun to work with in a strange sort of [way]. They were operating at a higher niveau than I'd ever worked at before. Going on tours with bands, big-time managers making lots of money as well — we did Ubu well. I learned a lot working with them. Painesville studio [Suma Recording Studio], for me, it was, it already had a lot of problems. When I lived in England, I worked in shoestring operations, improvising. Let's win the war, that kind of insane mentality attached to it. And then coming back to a comfortable studio in an old barn, with carefully chosen old pieces of wood here and there, and a fireplace, and a perfect piano. And over there the kitchen. It just reeked to me of this American riches and fat-ass luxury for no fucking good reason. I hated it at some level. At the same time, Ken and Paul [Hamann] were salt of the earth greatest guys, no pretense. They're just doing it because this is the best way to do it. Nothing against that studio."
"Recording with Ubu was a different kind of thing. My job in there was to write tunes, to write guitar parts. Typically all I had to do was write a guitar part for David to take it over and use that as the vocal melody, and then I had to go and find another guitar part. That got to be a problem sometimes. I would get a guitar part and then that would be the structure of the tune. In the Red Krayola, that's the way Red Krayola tunes are built. With him, the voice goes down here and suddenly we're duplicating things. And my harmonies on my guitar are eating up harmonies that the voice needs to be heard properly. So I've got to go somewhere else in the mix."
"The Art of Walking [was] a really interesting session. It was done in the wintertime. It was kind of cobbled together. David has a very dramatic relation to production in general. He's an intense and very serious fellow, and so he's moody as well. He'd go up and down and you didn't know if you were getting it, was it good, what did it sound like. It came together, but I had no oversight. I was already in a difficult situation because in England, where I was playing, you had people like Paul Rambali saying that I was the guy who was killing Pere Ubu, because I had ruined their sound. I was making them arty. It was an ugly situation the whole thing, but it was kind of fun."
"The recording of [Song of] the Bailing Man was slightly different because it was really done in pieces. Adam [Kidron] would have somebody over from the office and they would sit there for a couple of hours and do something. It was not a band tracking in the usual sort of way. Sometimes we would be doing band tracking, and tracking is, like on Corky's Debt, the song "To You", which is the first song on side 2, it took us all day. We spent one day trying to record that. We made 30, 40, 50 takes of this tune, and still didn't get it. We walked out at the end of the night thinking we didn't have it. But with Ubu, there was not this kind of possibility. People would go nuts if you had to play it 50 times. So it was more, sort of a pretentious atmosphere I would say. And there's a tune on there I wrote the structure of, I can't remember what it was called [sings "Petrified"]. We played a version of it, and we were in the mixing room, and Adam had it all up. And then we came to this [sings heavy part], Anton was playing the toms, and he jacked up the volume. It sounded... to me it sounded fantastic. This was like the essence of pop music, that's the element we like, the cheesy bit. 'Yeah, push it up right there, that's the groovy bit, right?' That never happened. That mix didn't exist. It didn't go down on the record like that. It didn't go down with any color, life, or excitement. So I call that record the 'Song of the Boring Man'. It's a good record, it's just not something I listen to."
"The Chills record [Brave Words]. The record I'm dissed for my production on. Yes. I plead partially guilty on the grounds that I was working on an extremely strict budget. I was told we want to do 16 songs and we've got three days. I said, 'We're gonna track 16 songs, 3 days, no problem.' 'No, no, no, track and mix.' The last recording session was 20 hours long. My ears were bleeding at the end of the session for one thing. The other thing that happened was I didn't master that record. I handed over a tape that was balanced. In my opinion, it was ruined in the mastering room. In the sense that it became muffled, something technically happened there. Now the guy who was their manager, who organized it, apologized to me for that, and said it was not your fault. Martin [Phillips] seems to associate this, he makes it out to be my responsibility. I hope not, because I enjoyed working with him, very much. If I had been in a position to make a red hot commercial record, which is what they were talking about, I would have had to do a number of things. Number one I would have had to hire a drummer, because she couldn't play the tunes and hold the rhythms. She'd get playing and then she'd get tired and then they'd want to make another take. I'm saying, 'What we've got to do is we've got to make some takes and when we get a good drum take, then we've got to go back and build on this, because she ain't gonna make it. If she has to play long enough until you get a perfect guitar part, you're never gonna get there.' It was definitely a really interesting, strange studio in Victoriaville. It used to be a morgue. It was haunted and they had to perform an exorcism in this studio in order to be able to even get in there and record. We didn't get the good ghosts on our side, apparently, when we made that record. Although that record has got some chills in it, which is that it does have that effect — that physiological, epiphenomenal. I don't mind it at all. It maybe doesn't sound as good as it could. The thing would be nice to have the tapes and go re-master. I'm sure one could make a very acceptable piece out of it. Sold maybe 6000 copies, I made a little bit of change from that one, that was good."
The Shop Assistants' Will Anything Happen "was done in Scotland. That was when I was working with Geoff [Travis], and Geoff just said, 'Why don't you go to Scotland tomorrow and produce this album?' So I got on the train and went into Scotland and worked with that band. That was another one of those difficult bands because the guitar player wants to play his Les Paul, and he's playing one clean track, two fuzzy tracks, one dirty track, and one harmony track. He hears all this guitar stuff that's going on there. He's massing the guitar. I know how that works because that's how I built Primal Scream [Sonic Flower Grove]. There's no way to get Jim McGuinn 12 string guitar sound in 1987, anymore, it's just not there. For one thing the Rickenbacker 12 string doesn't have 3 pickups anymore, it's only got two. Technology has changed. Those sounds are gone. They just don't exist anymore. You can simulate 'em, that's what we had to do. Same thing with the Shop Assistants. It was a question of electronically, trying to keep the power of the guitar but without blowing out the delicacy of that woman's voice. Deal with various, diachronic relations of ability to play. Some can play and some can play less well. Shop Assistants were very nice people to work with. I enjoyed making that record, it was easy, and Scots have a real grasp of the pop syntax. I had a really strong feeling that I wanted to make a really interesting two record set with them, one which had a lot of power and punk and then some other tunes were unplugged acoustic, where the quality and delicacy of her voice would be allowed to shine. I tried [to get both on the album]. Tried to showcase a little bit, had a few fights."
"Some interesting mixing problems with Felt's Poem of the River. First mix I made of it, I had a true American pop record. I had Lawrence's voice out there like Frank Sinatra's. It was just right there. Freaked him out, he wouldn't have it. So we had to go back and try to remix the goddamn thing, to pull the voice down and still keep all the power relations. Upsetting to me to have to go back and remix that record. But I played it for [Alan] McGee [from Creation] and McGee said 'Yeah. I don't know if we'll convince Lawrence, we'll try to.' Lawrence wouldn't have it."
"The self-titled [Red Krayola album from 1994] was done here [Chicago]. That one was done at Albini ['s old house]. We tracked everything over there and mixed everything over there. The record where we started doing things ourselves was Amor. Amor and Language was the first record where we really started producing ourselves in a home — recording at home, taking it in the studio and finishing it off if necessary, doing the mix there. That EP, most of Hazel was recorded that way. Fingerpainting is more various because Fingerpainting represents some recordings from archival material from like '66. From gigs where we recorded, we had a stereo machine, and didn't have enough money and didn't have enough tape, so we'd record one night on one channel and then record the next night on another channel."
"When we record these days, I've got a digital 8-track, a D-88, Tom's got one, and Albert's got one. So we have 24-track capacity. We rent ourselves a Mackie, a bigger Mackie. I've got a Mackie at home, a little Mackie 8- channel which is good enough to do the basic track layouts and stuff. No reverbs, no graphic equalizers, no nothing. Just counting, straight empirical tests, that's what it sounds like. Is that OK? Yes? No? And then mixing it up, also using analog bits here and there. Some people don't like digital sound — I don't care. I know that analog is richer, and if you put on a vinyl record and you've got yourself some gold cable and [a] platinum stylus, and piece of little cedar there, you're bound to hear some real stuff. That's the ideal listening circumstances, where fidelity is a trivial issue, because then it's possible to strike the relationship between a high-fidelity and some other kind of fidelity. If I had lo-fidelity it doesn't mean that I can't afford it or I'm lousy, it just means I know I got that, I wanted it. I want that sound."
"If I had a lot of money I would buy myself a matched pair of AKG condenser mics; I might buy a good Neumann. I used to have a Sennheiser shotgun mic which is really a very nice mic, I had an AKG barrel mic, it's got a tube in it." Right now, he just has a Shure SM 57.
"When I go into the studio with Albert, for example, I get concerned about vocals. It's always been a bugbear for me, because some people like the voice and some people don't like the voice. If you've heard the band live, you know that I'm expressive. On stage, I push it. But in a studio it's all cooled down, more abstracted, notated versions of a lot of the tunes. Albert, he doesn't like when I want to do too many vocal versions. This kind of perfectionism to get absorbed in, [he considers it] the wrong approach. At the same time, you don't want things to sound wrong. So you do just enough to get beyond that threshold, and then trust also the fact that even the best run in the world and 100% clarity of judgment still could make a mistake. 20 years from now I could hear something I don't like. I listen to Parable of Arable Land, 'and it's mine', I sing some kind of tone to the side at the end of 'Hurricane Fighter Plane'. 'And it's mine', a sort of strange kind of jazz interval, and I always thought, wow, people are not going to like that, it just doesn't sound right, because most people are not familiar with something that suspends like that, generally not in pop music anyway. I'm so glad I that I didn't cave to the cliché."
"The other thing is that instinct and intuition play a big role, and you trust yourself. If you hate it later, that's the way it goes. But not having any is bad. There's no record we've made that I'm ashamed of at all, nothing I'm embarrassed about. Black Snakes is a hard album for some people because it's a mean record. Did that in Blackwing, in London."
"Sometimes I go in the studio and mix, but I like to mix at home. The 'Chemistry' single of ours, that's mixed on a Trident board, in a 24- track studio. I can drive the Trident board so that it distorts. It's got a sweet distortion too. It's got a nice little funny little note in there. People tell me I mix funny. People tell me I have a funny ear. Fingerpainting, we did all the sessions and then handed the tapes over to Jim [O'Rourke] and he couldn't mix 'em, not to my satisfaction, so we had to take it back and mix it ourselves. Albert mixed the freak-outs. I mixed the tunes. I mixed parts of the freak-outs and then sent it over to Albert."
"I have two little Sony speakers that are [small]. It's got a little cardboard speaker, and that's what I mix it on. Foolproof, I check it with headphones just to make sure the balance is sometimes like that, and then I'll make a mix. And then I'll find out if I can trust it by taking it away and trying it in some other place."
"Marina Rosenfeld. She works in Austria but she's an American. She graduated Cal Arts. What she's doing for me is she's assisting me in an opera. The Art & Language/Red Krayola opera, which has been 20 years in the works now, it'll come out in 2001, next year. I'll have it ready more or less. She's trained, [can] sight-read. I write music but I can't sight-read worth a damn. I also wrote some of that stuff so long ago, I can sit there and laboriously work out what it is. The other thing is I can dictate to her more or less, I can sing, I can say I want it to go like [sings] and she can write it down. So it's gonna facilitate things a lot. She makes interesting music on her own. She does something similar to what we; do she comes from completely other side of the thing. She starts with fields and colors and harmonies and blocks of sound like that and builds up everything out of [them]. She rarefies or synthesizes some bits. I start at the other end, I start with the bits that I want and everything else follows from there. Because Miles Davis is my hero I suppose. I've learned a lot from Miles, the way he organizes sounds. I've learned a lot from just the idea of jazz also, of organizing from the top line down. She's more field oriented, a little more chromatic field, harmonic field. Plus the other thing with her music is she's using samples and presets."
"Helped mix [her record The forest the garden and the sea], did some mixing with it. I did produce, I recorded one of the sessions where some of the music was put down. I made a mix of it, she made another mix of it, and then she took that mix and did some trickery and put them together. There are some bits that I worked on that are in there but I didn't have overview of the whole time, it was her thing. She's doing really interesting things with turntables, and doing interesting things where she presses acetates, discrete numbers of records. Keeping alive the various stages of the history of the whole process, understanding that it's a very physical process. It's happening in real-time."
Thompson's plans for the near future include "making a boogie record. Got the follow- up to Fingerpainting sorted out more or less, got the structures in mind, in shape. We're beginning to process that. The record after that make a boogie record. I wanna make a solo album. I've got some soundtrack stuff I've been doing. I don't know. I'll keep you posted."
