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.
