Who do you credit with keeping you engaged on so many fronts, and in so many disciplines? You've had a very successful music career, but you've led a life that's full of all these other things related to the music space.
I'm groping my way through the business, honestly, trying to figure out what to do next. Around the early 2000s or so I got this notion that it was driving me a little bit crazy that the main focus of my life was essentially being in a band, getting up in the morning, and going to work coming up with songs or ideas. I decided that I would treat my band a little more part-time, and I'd already been doing other things like producing records. I started branching out, for my own sanity, into things related to music. I wasn't having to sweat Cracker or Camper Van Beethoven eight or ten hours a day, six days a week. Part of it was branching out and away from my bands. For instance, I could go and work on somebody else's record for three or four months. We had the studio complex in Richmond, Virginia [Sound of Music Studios]. Before the crash of the digital age, that had grown to be quite big. It was basically two main tracking rooms and a couple of side rooms in this four-story building in downtown Richmond. We'd sometimes have three or four different groups in there recording at a time. Doing these other things related to music was important to me. It kept my head in the game and let me look at what other people were doing, how other people were approaching music, how they lived their life, how they approached creativity, what they did for songwriting, and stuff like that. It helped me get outside of my own head.
Were you involved with most of the bands that were coming through there?
No, because we had some pretty good house engineers; producers like John Morand [Tape Op #140], Alan Weatherhead [#157], and Rich Hasal, before he moved to Europe. There were a ton of people that came through there over the years. Lamb of God did one of their big records there. I was usually producing four or five things a year. A lot of indie projects.
Can you talk a little bit about the economics of running a big commercial studio? When you and I were making records in the '90s, you remember studios like Toast and Hyde Street and a bunch in the East Bay.
Yeah, we had Fantasy and…
Studio D.
Yeah, It was an incredible scene there. I think for Sound of Music in Richmond, we were already an off market. There's a point, where it's like, "Oh, do we buy the quarter of a million dollar board?" We were like, "No," because that's not who our clientele was. We had started out with an MCI board; a pretty small board. We bought a studio that existed there and a Studer tape deck, 16-track, 2-inch. We were a little more down-market. And at some point we upgraded to the Sony MCI board from the MCI 428. That was all we ever did. We went through a couple of different tape machines, and eventually we got into [IZ Technology] RADAR instead of [Digidesign] Pro Tools for a long time. We tried to keep a place so that we didn't have a big note on the equipment in the studio and spend our money on outboard gear and microphones. It's gone through a lot of changes since I left, but it stayed in business for a lot longer than other studios that had a much higher overhead. It was something we had to do, because our market was largely indie bands, a lot of punk, a lot of metal, and a fair amount of Americana. It wasn't big money stuff.
You've said in lieu of writing an autobiography you made this album, Father, Sons and Brothers, a 28-song offering. I felt like I was reading a book and it made me feel I knew you a little bit better in a way that I don't always get when I'm listening to records. A song like the first single, "I Wrote a Song Called Take the Skinheads Bowling," is the answer to, "How did you get your start"?
Exactly. And how random it was and such. Yeah, so "I Wrote a Song Called Take the Skinheads Bowling" actually started because I was at a Cracker soundcheck somewhere, and I think Bryan [Howard, bass] and Coco [Carlton Owens, drums] were playing the heartbeat groove, mid-tempo, and then I started playing the "Take the Skinheads Bowling" groove. Instead of singing "Take the Skinheads Bowling," I started playing around with it. I'd been in the middle of doing these autobiographical things, and even though this didn't end up being the music that we used or anything like that, I was like, "Oh, I should probably tell the Camper Van Beethoven origin story by explaining this song, right?" And it's really short, I don't know if you noticed that.
It's real short.
