I can't believe we've never met.
I was thinking about that. I can't believe it either. Didn't John Baccigaluppi used to write for Tape Op?
He actually co-owns Tape Op and is my partner in it!
He's still in! Give him my best, will you?
Certainly. I worked out of his Sacramento, California, home studio in his basement in the later '80s, and then at his Enharmonik Studios. Later that was The Hangar, and your pal Henry Robinett was working out of there.
Yeah. I recorded there once with Henry. I was doing pop and John was doing punk. I did one punk record [laughter] in 1979; the first record I ever produced. Do you know Rick Daprato? He had a record store called Esoteric Records and he had a band called Labial Fricative. Two drummers, two electric guitar players.
Right, that’s in your book! As I was reading it, you mentioned Pleasant Valley Road in Penn Valley. That’s the road we lived on when I was a kid.
Get out! That's amazing.
I used to work at Englebright Reservoir on the Yuba River there.
When I was a little kid, my dad, uncles, and aunts used to [water] ski at Englebright a lot. That was one of the places that we spent a lot of weekends at.
It was right between where we were both living.
I’m so grateful for growing up in that area. I was just talking to a friend the other day, and we were reminiscing about what a great time it was in music in Northern California to grow up in. I hope that comes across in the book, as a tribute to that.
I think Northern California and the music scene back then always gets strangely overlooked. Everyone talks about the “summer of love” and that era. By the time we hit 1980, I always felt there was a media block against anything the rest of us did for the next 10 years or something.
Yeah, I think so too. There was a little bit surrounding the Mabuhay Gardens, in terms of punk and new wave. There were massive hit records being made at The Automatt and at Tarpan Studios in San Rafael with Narda Michael Walden. And yeah, those didn’t get a lot of press either. There was a lot going on. Then there was sort of the next punk movement, which was huge in Northern California. Of course, there was a lot of R&B, soul, and hip-hop being done as well.
A lot of great Oakland music!
I guess people just moved on to whatever the next big story was. I don't think there were galvanizing characters, like Bill Graham, who were so magnetized to draw people to the story. During the ‘60s, there were a lot of alliances between Clive Davis, David Rubinson, and Bill Graham.
And Tom Donahue.
Yeah, exactly. There were just a lot of strategic alliances between New York, San Francisco, and L.A. that kept people paying attention to the cities.
Especially as radio consolidated the scenes got worse.
Yeah. I knew the history of it. Even when I moved to Nashville, I had a record company president who used his imprimatur to get me a $100,000 dollar loan to build my first studio out here. I went to Dan Alexander [Tape Op #143] immediately, because I knew he was the steward of the Coast Recorders gear. When I wanted to get my first vintage mic, an [AKG] C12, I went to him – in ‘89 or ’90 – and I paid $5,000, which was a lot of money for a single microphone. I used it on hundreds of albums until one day I woke up, and I just didn't hear the C12 anymore!
Really?
I could do a mic shootout, and I would pick the C12 every time for 20 years. Suddenly, I just stopped hearing it. I always thought that was just indicative of not so much me, but how we have these shifts in culture where we hear sound differently. We want to hear EQ slightly differently. There’s maybe this tacit understanding amongst all the engineers and musicians that, “Hey, we're moving in a slightly different direction now.” We're going to have less high-end. Or we're going to heighten the mids. But if you listen to 70 years of pop music, you get this whole story about equalization, as well as the microphones that were used.
It's true.
I was always grateful for Dan that he was there, and this was a very early serial number. My fantasy was always that Tony Bennett had sung on it or something. [laughter] I think it was 1957 or ‘58 when it was made.
You always wonder!
Yeah. I want some names!
I was at ANALOGr in L.A., and they had Tom Dowd's Neumann U 67, I think it was. “Oh, this was used on Aretha Franklin.”
Yeah.
A producer had borrowed it. He’d taken that to the client, “Aretha sang on this.” Okay, great. Good enough!
Exactly. All of a sudden, everything you do sounds great. I've used that trick before, especially with younger, insecure singers. It’s just a little encouragement. “Hey, you're singing on the same microphone that Al Green used.”
At the end of the day, the recording equipment's always secondary to the performance.
Exactly. I've always said that it's great to have the best gear, but there's no replacement for astonishing ideas. The same goes for performances. When you take a great singer, it doesn't matter whether it's a [Shure SM]57 or a U 67, it's still going to sound great. You're not going to be disappointed!
Yeah. The early years for you, in the late ‘70s we were starting to see smaller multitrack tape decks that you could own, as well as ways of taking the recording process into your own hands as opposed to having to always go to a studio.
Yeah. I was in high school when I started. I used lawn mowing money and bought my first two 2-track machines on which I did sound on sound. Bouncing, changing reels, flipping the reels back around, and learning to overdub that way. There's no punching in, because you're giving a solid performance. Play the bass part one time, or play it all again. I think there's a certain discipline that comes from that, or maybe a different way of hearing or anticipating. I'm about to make a mistake. How do I recover from it before I do it? These sorts of mental exchanges that you have with yourself in a performance. Having that primitive gear helped with that. The next stage for me was to use a TEAC 4-track. That was much simpler instead of flipping reels back and forth between these 2-track machines. And I could punch in. They actually had a foot pedal for that too, but I didn't have one of those.
Too fancy!
Yeah. All of that was me playing drums, bass, super-primitive guitar and piano, and singing and writing my first songs. Once I went to Sacramento, I had saved up some money and my wife's grandmother had given me a gift of some money. It was my first paying session. I believe it was 1977. That was at Moon Studios in Sacramento, and Steve Holsapple engineered that. After the session, he said, “Hey, I want to work with you, if you'd like to do that. You don't need to pay anymore.” That was a real gift. Steve and I became songwriting partners, and I was a session musician at Moon. I played on tons of records, jingles, and anything else that I could play on. That's really how I learned; that first early phase at Moon. I think it went from 8 to 16 to 24 tracks while I was there!
That was all happening so fast.
It was. I remember when Brent Bourgeois got the first TASCAM cassette 4-track. People started using those, and that was also at the advent of the earliest drum machines, like the [Roland TR-series] 808, 707, and 606. Brent and I, between us, had all of those! When I started working with David Kahne at The Automatt, that was the first time that I saw the Linn Drum. He had an LM-1 prototype from Roger Linn in early 1980. I think we used a version that had Prairie Prince's drums in it.
A great drummer.
Yeah. That was an interesting time. As I said in the book, I told one story about playing at Berkeley Square in Berkeley. Buddy and Julie Miller [Tape Op #34] were living in San Francisco at the time. There was this new software that had come out that you could run on your [Apple] Mac. I was reading up about it. I remember one time I was flying to Europe for a couple of weeks of concerts, and I stopped off at a music store in Marin County in order to look at this Passport Designs 8-bit and 12-bit digital recording device. I would always tell people in the studio, “Wouldn't it be cool if we could shrink down really small, go inside the tape, and move stuff around?”
Window edits.
I was already there. Buddy and I have known each other a long time now, and it's just funny to me that the king of Americana was one of the pioneers of digital recording. [laughter] I mean, he has analog machines too. I wasn't the purist that he was. I was eager to sell my 24-track, but I kept it for years.
I've still got a 16-, 24-, and 2-track all ready to go.
I wish I had a 2-track right now because there are some tapes I want to listen to.
It’s nice to have that for archiving.
It is. We're in the middle of a big archive project with our family right now. Everything from documents to music and whatnot.
Oh, I know what archiving is like. I went back and listened to your first record [Lie Down in the Grass] from 1983. I was working at KCSC in Chico, and I remember that record coming in and playing it on the air. It is on the cutting edge of some of the technology, like overdubbing real drums on drum machines.
I didn't know it at the time, but I wanted to do hybrid stuff. Later, when I moved to Nashville, we had this whole big programming period. A lot of the music was programmed. Then we did hybrid sessions. But in ‘83 and ‘84 we were already thinking, “I really love that we're locking the beat up with the kick and snare, but let's do the hat and the toms live.” We didn't really have the sample length. If you were doing gated toms, then playing them through an [E-mu] SP-12 or a LinnDrum made sense. But if you really wanted the tom to ring, we didn't have that sample length. To have a [memory] chip that would allow you to let a tom ring that long was like $100,000!
I remember how the cymbals on digital drums would die off really fast.
Oh yeah. I think the first E-mu SP-12 that I had came with 2.5 megabytes of memory. [laughter] We were always trimming our sounds. Like every time we added another sound then we'd be like, “Oh, I don't have any memory left.” I'd like truncate more of the sounds. That's one of the reasons why the drums are just so choppy. But can you imagine Prince without that sound? There were certain kinds of music back then that sounded right by having those clip like that and making it funkier.
A lot of English pop music that we were hearing was produced that way.
Oh, for sure. When I made Lie Down in the Grass, I was listening to a lot of Aztec Camera. Remember Roddy Frame? I really loved what he was doing. I loved the Eurythmics too, as well as Thomas Dolby [Tape Op #119], and Prefab Sprout. There was a lot of well-done musical songwriting. I was very, very influenced by Prefab Sprout during that time, and I wanted to make a record that fit within that sort of storyline.
There was a lot of taking away the idea of live performance. “Let's strip it down and rebuild the song.”
It wasn't a lot different than George Martin and The Beatles. It was just that it was the first wave of this new technology. Instead of live performances, the musicianship was more in the realm of the songwriting and the mixture of the live instruments. You might have live guitars, but then one might take a guitar sample, manipulate it, and put it in the drum machine to make it a part of the pattern. There was a lot of experimentation. I was telling somebody the other day that we'd take all day on drum sounds. They said, “Are you serious?” I was explaining to them, “You have to understand that so much new technology happened all at once. We were hearing new sounds.” Like let's take the sound of the AMS reverb from the UK. No one in Sacramento had an AMS reverb. We’re hearing this sound come across the pond, and now we have to figure out how to get that. I’d take my dbx and gate the reverb. That's cool, but it's still not that sound. There was a lot of time spent experimenting. Sometimes experimenting for a day on something and realizing we couldn't nail it. “We've got an approximation. Let's keep moving.” When I first went to England to work as a producer and an artist, I was like, “Well, there it is right there. Just a preset in this digital reverb.” That was simple enough, but you have to live long enough and have the experiences to encounter these things. “What can this thing do?” And making dumb mistakes! I remember Brent and I working with a PPG [Wave] that had a sampling component to it, and we were like, “It sounds just like a soprano saxophone!”
Oh, yeah. Uh oh.
A month later, we're like, “Oh my gosh, we've made such a mistake.” We had to learn that these tools had an ideology of their own. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a sampler, everything looks like an opportunity to sample. [laughter] We had to learn, over time, that none of this is a replacement for artistry. We had to keep concentrating on the ideas and our motivations, and not let the technology play us. We were part of the generation that learned on the clock; on our own dime, and other people's dimes. There are some cool records from the ‘80s and there are some really bad records that had great songs that got ruined by overusing technology.
I remember I’d get some artist's first record and love it. Then the next record wasn’t done the same way and was more “produced.” Now it's drum machines and overdubs. But maybe it's a movement forward?
I think it's a function of the producer, too. I just got done reading The Bangles’ book [Eternal Flame by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike]. I'm good friends with [producer] David Kahne. I've known him for years, and he was my first real producer. I have tremendous admiration for him and everything he's accomplished. They hated working with David. They absolutely hated it because he was a process thinker, and he trusted the process. In many ways, I became similar to that. I could defer the pleasure of finishing something for a long, long time, while the artists would be completely impatient. To me, we were on a mission of discovery. I wanted to make something that, when people heard it, they’d say, “I haven't heard that before.” We still had to deal with radio and much of the medium of radio was to create contrast. It had to be enough like the tonality of radio at the time, but it had to sit against someone else's song and had to say to the listener, “Keep listening to me. See how different I am from the thing that came before, and how much better and cooler I am?”
It's true.
I would say a lot of the heavy-handed production was more design oriented. I love bands. I love that sound where it can't happen any other way, because there's design to it. You can get caught in between, where you just don't have the design. You have this great garage band thing of four people making something together. So unique, so incredible. Then there’s this big gulf of pop music. You have these producers who really know how to design in enough unique elements and enough similar elements that the listener is interested in. And so, in retrospect, The Bangles are like, “Yeah, I guess that ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ was pretty good.” If you'd been in L.A. during their early club days, and you were like, “This doesn't sound anything like when I heard them at The Roxy,” I get all that. I've had everybody complain to me about everything. But, at the same time, it's like, “Hey, you had a hit record. Do you know how many people get to have a hit record?” Here we are 40 years later, and they have a book that just came out, and people still talk about them. So, let's give David Kahne a hand!
We've already started the process haven’t we, when we're making the record together?
That's right. There are always other voices in the mix that the public doesn't know anything about. If the artist has management, they may have an agenda. The A&R department may have an agenda. There may be an indebtedness that the artist has that, if they don't reconcile it, they won't be making any more records. Sometimes they will hire a person like me – or a hundred other record producers – as an insurance policy. No one ever said to me, “Go make a commercial piece of crap.”
I hope not! [laughter]
They would say, “Try your best to find out what the essence of this artist is. There's a reason we signed this artist, and we believe in this artist. But we're at a place with the artist that if we can't move ahead, sales-wise, we are going to have to let them go. We're not happy about that. So, if there's any way that you can pull something out of the artist that will draw more attention to their artistry, that will help us do that.” That's all anyone ever asked me to do. Nobody ever said, “If you don't have a hit, then we'll fire you,” or any of that! I’ve felt I have an obligation to artists to help them make the best record that they can. No healthy human begins any enterprise with the idea of failing.
In any aspect, commercial or artistic.
No, no, not at all. I was never a fully committed “company man.” I was always working a few agendas of my own; wanting to be true and helpful to the artist and be commercially successful. But also, to make something that I felt was artistically sustainable that people would like 20 years later.
And for anyone in the production seat, you also want to do things that point out your value. “Can everyone else notice so I can get the next job?”
Absolutely. When I first moved to Nashville, I saw that if my working on a record added 40,000 or 50,000 units sold, that got me in my next gig. People saw a demonstrably better record than their last one.
When did you decide, “I could be a producer”?
I think back to 1979 and that Labial Fricative punk record that Steve Holsapple and I produced together. I can't think of any reason why they asked me to do it. Steve, obviously, had been an engineer. Maybe I was a little tiny bit more well known than they were? I was mostly lost the whole time, trying to figure out what I was going to do.
“What's my role?”
If you don't know your role, you don't know your gifts and skillsets and how you hope to use them, and you don't know the artist well, and you have no experience, then you're just confronted. For me, it was just being confronted with a thousand problems I didn't know how to solve. So much of production is problem solving. What you're wanting to do is take all of the goodness and put it forward, and anything that seems too undeveloped or unusable, sweep that away so that you have the principal essence of the artist. You want them to sound like a person of their time as well, unless you're intentionally making vintage-sounding music. But, all of that takes developing disciplines in the mind and the heart of the producer, because you have to learn so much and then you have to be disciplined enough not use it all.
The bag of tricks can't be open all of the way.
Yeah, your record is not an opportunity for me to write string charts, but the next one might be. Or to be a co-writer. I think I learned that from David, because he was such a polymath in that way. I was definitely a developing polymath, so I related to that. It took me a few years to be disciplined enough to not put everything I knew in every record. That's not what's being asked of me. Later in my career, with my last, big hit records with The Civil Wars, that was the ultimate pinnacle of showing what I'd learned. Just barely touch it. Almost erasing more than I used.
Those records are a good example of restraint.
I did a lot of what I would probably call “distant harmonization” – there's stuff buried at -30 dB. I suppose if you had a listening environment that was acute enough, you could hear them. More that if I were to take them out, you'd feel it more than hear it. That was me playing with those production techniques that I had learned over the years. But again, I was being very soft handed and very, very minimal.
They basically broke up making…
…the second [self-titled] record, yeah.
You were left to wrap it up, which must have been a really unusual process.
I had their performances done, and I had a couple demos from Rick Rubin that they cut with him in Malibu at his place [Shangri-La]. I basically did all the overdubs by myself, with other musicians. I tried to stay in touch as much as they were willing to be, and I was certainly in touch with their management all the time. Each of them came by the studio once, to do some vocal overdubs or fixes. I learned a tremendous amount. It's interesting when you record acoustic live performances and you can't get the artists back, but you still have to deliver the record. They had just made this huge deal with Columbia Records. The pressure was on. This record was definitely going to come out. A lot of people were depending on it. I was fortunate to have, of course, great players. Some who had worked on Barton Hollow, the first record, and others who were new that time. They all knew that this was a come-in-and-play, Charlie's going to let us respond to the music, and then he's going to be editing. I’d say, “Don't fall in love with anything you play, because when you hear the record there might be two notes left.” Or I might have taken something that they played and made an ambient loop of it.
I call that panning for gold.
Exactly. We were working with our previous mix engineer, Richie Biggs, but we were also working with Tom Elmhirst on that record. Tom is fantastic, and I was counting on him to bring some special sauce to the mix as well, and he did. It was very “Tom Elmhirst,” but it was very minimal too.
Were you not giving him any tracks to sort through?
Oh gosh, no. In fact, he said, “I’ve got to tell you, I'm so appreciative of these tracks. Very few people send me tracks that are this clean.” I was like, “This is what I do.” I do all my sound design, and I print it. I commit. I'm not a wishy-washy choice maker. I don't second guess.
Well, that's how we had to start when it was all on tape.
Exactly. That's what I mean. I’m not fearful at all. If I make a mistake, I'll figure out a way to recover. If you get Pro Tools tracks from me, all my ideas will be embedded in the tracks. There won't be one plug-in in the session at all. You'll basically be looking at tracks as if they have been on a 24-track analog machine.
It's a smart way to work.
To me, the record's not done until I can listen to my session without any plug-ins on it. Maybe I'll put [iZotope] Ozone or an SSL [limiter] or something on the 2-mix and add a little bit of compression. But I have to feel, “Wow, this sounds really good. Imagine what it's going to sound like when Tom Elmhirst mixes it!”
This is something I try to explain to people that are newer at this. While you're in the process of doing the record, it's got to sound good.
I'm a big proponent of the freedom to make a mess, but then to also have the discipline to clean it up. In the process of working on a song or a record, I will definitely have days where I say to myself, “I know if I don't clean my room, my mom's coming in here and will tell me to clean it anyway.” So, I clean house. I commit to everything, I get rid of tracks, start a completely new session, and I clean out my audio bin. Maybe that's the time when the artist starts singing to what is, essentially, an almost-done recording. If I’m trying to put their artistry in the forefront, and we've got distracting elements, then I can see what needs to come out.
People ask, “How do you make a record?” I tell them, “Well, you’ve got to play me something first and then I'll tell you what to do.” I’ve got to listen and respond, just like playing music.
Yes, absolutely.
It's really hard to define a process before you're in it.
Yeah. And, after you've done a lot of records, you realize that it's a different process for different artists.
You've been through so many phases of doing your own music, producing, and running production companies, labels, and studios. What's your life like right now?
Well, this is the fifty year mark. I started as a working musician before I was 18. But I got married when I was 18. Andi [Ashworth], my wife, and I, will be married 50 years this year.
Congratulations on that!
Thank you so much. I also did a record this past year, in 2024, that I am proud of, called Every Kind of Uh-Oh. I feel like with the book, that record, us celebrating our anniversary, and 50 years of getting paid as a musician – I'm not drawing a line in the dirt and saying, “Hey, I'm not going to do it anymore.” But it's a year of being thankful, and I have several projects that I'm going to probably finish after the summer. Then, I've got tons of archive projects that I have planned. Whether they're remixes, remastering, or re-imagining songs, I've got so much material that I can continue to make things out of. We’re going through the archives through live recordings, trying to find the ones that are really good. Those will start coming out. It's part of the legacy, and estate planning for my kids and grandkids. I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon, and I've got a lot of dreams left. But I’m getting my house in order and making sure all my income streams are solid. I'm honored and grateful to have that incredible privilege, because you and I have known a lot of extremely gifted people who didn't get to make the whole trip. They didn't get to the end of the story. I want to honor that by being a good steward of all of what I have been able to make. The book was a way of saying thank you to a lot of people.
All the work that we do is about collaborating.
Exactly. My wife and I have been together since we were teenagers; 53 years. There's nothing wrong with having a public face to an endeavor, organization, or project. But to say that I would have the career that I've had without my wife is ridiculous. We're a team, and everything else goes out from there. Just start naming people, and we’ll say, “Well, that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't met that person.” And sometimes even meeting people and knowing that's what I don't want to be. There's no neutrality in any of it. It's all learning, and it's all having big eyes and ears to hear. It’s also about trying to soak up as much of life as one possibly can and learn from it. What you learn from it is what the music becomes. 
