When were you born?
In 1951. I was born in L.A. and the family moved to Orange County when I was about five. I had an uncle up in L.A., and when I was ten years old, I went up to spend time in the [San Fernando] Valley with him for a couple of weeks. He had a Voice of Music stereo tape recorder. I say he was my uncle, but he was only two years older than me.
More like a brother?
Yeah. He was friends with a bunch of guys from school who played music. We went over to one of these guys' houses and these boys were sitting around playing music. My uncle said, "Let's go get the tape recorder and record what they're doing." So, we went to get it and the mics it came with. I didn't know what to do, because I was ten years old, but we recorded a bunch and it sounded pretty good! Over the two weeks that I was there staying with my uncle, this is what we did almost every day. I loved it. I knew nothing, but it was fun! I went back down to Orange County, and I explained to my mother that it was necessary for me to have a tape recorder.
Necessary.
Necessary! [laughter] My neighbor had almost the exact same Voice of Music recorder, and they didn't use it. They said, "You can't have it, but take it and use it." My brother played drums. He was five years older than me, and he was playing in bands. He would practice. I said, "Mike, can we go in your bedroom and record?" I fell in love with the idea of recording.
Did you end up setting up some sort of studio at home?
I became hungry for technology. I wanted more. In the apartment building where my grandmother lived was a guy named Charlie Weber. He was a professional sound engineer who worked mostly for Disney. I would visit my grandmother and go upstairs to the apartment he lived in. He gave me a foundation on how all this nonsense worked. He taught me about microphones and signal path. I even helped him record the organ at the newly-built Angel Stadium. Within a week or so after that, my uncle called me up and said, "You know those guys that you recorded last summer? They're making a record at a studio called Western. Would you like to come along?"
Wow!
I mean, forget school. Forget life! I was gone. Somebody drove me up there. I was in Western One, which is a great studio. I remember I walked in just totally blown away by the whole scene, and I talked the ear off the engineer. I must have driven him crazy. But the weird thing was, because of the time I'd spent with Charlie, I asked questions as this 11-year-old kid, like, "So, that's the new [Ampex] AG-440?" They had an AG-440 4-track. He said, "Yeah." I said, "Yeah, I've only used the [Ampex] 350." He replied, "What?!"
“Who is this kid?”
Yeah! I spent a couple of days with these guys, watching what was going on, and then I went and talked to the studio manager. I said, "I'd really like to learn about this," and he said, "You're welcome anytime." That's kind of what happened. I don't want to give the impression that I was going to Western every day after school. It didn't work that way.
Well, you didn't live that close!
Instead, what happened is they introduced me to a guy who had a secondhand sound recording business. Jerry Cubbage owned Coast Recording Equipment Supply. The idea was that I should have a recording setup, we should work out how much it was going to cost, and then I’d go out and earn the money to do it. The decision was an Ampex 600 recorder and a couple of mics, one Ampex MX-35 mixer, and a speaker. All of this equipment would cost $500 or $600. For an 11-year-old kid, it might as well have been a million dollars. I needed to get the money! So, I'm Jewish, and the center of our social life in Orange County happened to be the synagogue. I go to the rabbi, and I said, "Do you think any of the people that are getting bar mitzvah-ed would want a recording of their ceremony?" He said, "Yeah, probably." So, I ended up with a business. I was charging $150 per event! I was recording weddings, bar mitzvahs, and speeches at the Kiwanis Club and at the Lions Club. I was at the Anaheim Convention Center, recording conferences, and I was 11 years old! So, it didn't take very long before I had two MX-35s and a bunch of mics. I really didn't know what I was doing, but I had Charlie upstairs from my grandmother. Once every month or two, I would find myself up at Western. I built this portfolio, and that got me money, which allowed me to buy equipment, which allowed me to record bands. Then Western decided to open up a studio in Orange County. I turned up one day just to see what was going on. They said, "Good! An extra pair of hands." For two or three weeks, I was there helping them get the gear in and wiring it up. There was some guy named [Bill] Putnam there doing bits and pieces, although I never had a chance to speak to him in any meaningful way. Now, on top of kind of knowing vaguely how to do things in a recording studio, I got an insight into how the studios were actually put together. I tried to emulate, in my bedroom studio, what I had seen. Interestingly enough, the quality of the recordings went way up!
Was there anyone of note that you recorded in your home studio?
I would love to say yes, but the truth of the matter is I recorded people who were on the fringe of “of note.” There was a very famous band that came out of Santa Ana High School called The Chantays, and they had a big hit with “Pipeline. " Lore associates me with that record, but I had nothing to do with it. I recorded people in that band, but not the band itself.
I think "Dick Dale" was what you told me once. Was he one of the guys that recorded with you?
Well, that is true. I guess he's of note!
I know there's a story about your bar mitzvah, and what you bought after it.
Here's what was happening: I upgraded everything. I went stereo after my bar mitzvah. Nobody gave me anything but money for my bar mitzvah, because they knew that I would go buy recording equipment with it. From Jerry Cubbage, I got a Neumann U 47 and a bunch of other stuff. I went from the mono 600 Ampex to a stereo one – the 601 mark 2.
Didn't you get a Fairchild limiter?
A Fairchild 660, yeah. The bands would then have a disc, and they could go to venues and say, "Hire our band to play. This is what we sound like." I had labels for the records that said, "Weinreich Custom Recording," and my home phone number. Other bands would go to these venues and say, "How can our band get hired?" The venue would say, "Oh, you've got to have one of these demo discs." The band would write down the phone number and call me. So, I started to charge for it. This was a commercial relationship. They wanted the demos.
I presume they were getting paid for the shows.
Yeah. I had some pretty good bands come in, and my profile got bigger and bigger. It was at that point that Western got pissed off at me.
Oh. You were taking their business away!
I guess… I don't think the Orange County studio that they built was doing very well. They said, "How about we give you a job and you close your studio?" I said, "Yeah. That sounds like a good deal." Well, they never gave me any work! Western said, "You've got to learn what you're doing." I replied, "But you're not doing anything to teach me." It did two things. It killed my garage recording business, and it completely soured my relationship with them. I just stopped going in. So, let's fast forward a couple of years. My brother was at UCLA. He called and said, "They have a little recording studio here where they record all the voices and the music for their cartoons, and they don't have an engineer. Why don't you come in and talk to them?" I did. They gave me a job.
How old were you at this point?
I became a house engineer at 17! But the cool thing was where they were. They were on the top floor of the building where The Village Recorders was.
Oh, hey!
So, purely by chance, I found myself in a relationship with The Village. It was similar, but healthier than the relationship that I had with Western. I was upstairs recording quirky cartoon music, sound effects, voiceovers, and all that. Stephen Bosustow ran the studio. It gave me an opportunity to go downstairs and hang out at The Village.
Did you end up working at The Village?
Kind of as a freelancer. They only had a couple of engineers. They would give me jobs that were befitting of someone of my limited experience. I'm not going to say I did scores of sessions. I did a few, and mostly what I did was stuff for the owner, Geordie Hormel. He was a really interesting guy. As you might gather from the name Hormel, he was related to that family – Hormel Foods. He went to Hollywood and composed some soundtracks. He did little films that needed sound recording, so I was around for a lot of that but I wasn't sitting in the hot seat.
But you got to observe some of those bigger sessions with engineers with more experience?
Oh yeah, for sure. The thing about those early days in Western is that the Beach Boys recorded there. Chuck Britz did that down in Studio 3. I never saw them once, but I saw a lot of bands like them come and go. There'd also be Sammy Davis Jr. working with a big orchestra, and Frank Sinatra before he started to record at Capitol. So, I was at university and working for Bosustow almost full time. One of the films that I worked on [Is It Always Right to Be Right?] just happened to win the Oscar in 1970 for the best short subject! I had no interest in film. It was something I fell into because I met Bosustow and started to work in his little animation studio. I happened to record Orson Welles, which is another story entirely and probably the reason this film won the Oscar. The guy that directed the film, [Lee Mishkin] went to England, called me up, and said, "You need to get on a plane and come to London." I said, "I'm at university…" Well, I dropped out and went to London! I worked on a bunch of stuff in a film capacity, and I ended up teaching sound at the London Film School. Why? I needed a visa. My girlfriend, at the time, was from London. She wanted to go to film school. So, I went along with her for the interview for the London Film School. By the way, I'm married to her now. I've been married to her for 50 years!
Wow!
And, at a lull in the conversation, the woman doing the interview looked at me and said, "What do you do?" I said, "I work a little bit in sound and film," and she exclaimed, "Oh, sound? We are desperate for someone in our sound department." I said, "Well, I'm not really that qualified, except a film I did did win the Oscar last year." She said, "You're American, right? What are you doing about a visa?" I said, "I'm just here on a visitor's visa." She said, "We can get you a visa." She got me a visa, which allowed me to stay in England. I taught two days a week at the London Film School. A student, Roger Morris, called me up and said, "I'm doing a documentary. I'd like you to do the sound for it. I don't want one of the students to do it because it's really important. We're going to go down to Kent, and we're going to go interview a guitar player." We loaded up Roger's car and we drove down to Wadhurst, in Kent. We pulled into this big, stately home. It's overrun with cats, maybe thousands of cats. We introduced ourselves and a guy says, "He's in the garage." We go to the garage, and there in a pair of black jeans and a t-shirt covered in grease is Jeff Beck. He was working on one of his hot rods and he is pissed! I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "The fucking thing won't start!" I knew a little bit about engines. I left out the fact that part of my high school was spent wasted at the drag strip, and my parents happened to be in the car business.
There you go.
It was a small block Chevy, which I am not an expert in by any stretch of the imagination, but I did know that there was probability that if he'd taken the manifold off, and then he had to take the distributor out, the distributor was probably in 180 degrees out, which is a common thing. However, I suggested what to do, and that’s what was wrong. The only reason I knew is that I've done the same so many times myself. A few weeks later, after a conversation, I get a call. Jeff was producing a band called Up, and he was requesting that I come down to do some recording.
You made an impression!
Yeah. I had been doing some music recording anyway in London. I found a few bits and pieces. But he had no idea if I was a decent engineer. I think he just thought that it was cool that this California hot rod guy was around. So, we go into the session, we record some guitars, and I meet a couple of guys. They've got a band called Hummingbird. I get asked to do the Hummingbird album. The Hummingbird album happens to be the old Jeff Beck group. The drummer was Bernard Purdie. You might have heard of him! [laughter] Bobby Tench on vocals and Clive Chaman on bass. These guys also were tied up with another band, Family, which wasn't that big in the United States, but included Roger Chapman [on vocals] and they were a big British band. It was like this door opened. All of a sudden, I went from album to album with these people.
All because you went to this interview as the sound guy helping to film Jeff Beck, and you helped him fix his car?
Yes! That was probably the most important thing that ever happened to me. I did run into some visa problems, eventually. I came back [to the U.S.]; I was trying to get a visa to go back to England. Geordie called me and said, "Listen, we need an engineer. Can you come in?" I went in, and I did a few days with Joe Cocker. That was because I'd done this stuff in England. I realized, "Wait a minute. I've kind of broken through the door a little bit." I could have stayed in L.A. but the problem was I had a girlfriend in London.
Right. [laughter]
I went back to London and ended up being a house engineer at a studio called Scorpio Sound. It became a popular studio to overdub and mix in. It had a Cadac console. Cadacs aren't very well known in the United States, but they are hands-down the best sounding console I've ever worked on. The Trident [Studios] engineers were a bit frustrated, because their main studio was fantastic but their mix studio upstairs was not very good. The house engineers knew how to get good work out of it, but it was quirky. They had this amazing studio, but it was a commercial studio. If you were mixing they didn't want you in there; they wanted you upstairs. So, the engineers started to come over to Scorpio and work on the Cadac. One of the Trident engineers, Roy Thomas Baker, was producing Queen’s A Night at the Opera. He came into Scorpio after recording at Rockfield [Studios] to overdub and mix. As it happened, we had some tech problems at Scorpio and we didn't finish the album there.
So, you were involved in the mixing of that record?
Yeah. Overdubs and mix. There's a story I can tell about Queen. The mixing was running behind, and EMI, the record company, were getting agitated. They wanted product. In England, at this time, one of the greatest kickoffs for selling a record was to be able to get on the television show Top of the Pops. EMI, to force Queen to fucking finish something, got them on Top of the Pops. They said, "We've promised them your next single." Well, we didn’t have one ready! So, they did a rough mix of "Bohemian Rhapsody," and went in on a Sunday to a studio over by Wembley and did a little video for it.
That's not the official video, is it?
It is. A one-day shoot. I wasn't involved in it, because Sundays were off. I think they went into Sarm East [Studios], did a rough mix, thinking, "That'll be okay." They gave that to Top of the Pops, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Did that end up being the mix?
Yes!
It’s a weird song for a single.
It certainly was! It got on Top of the Pops, and the next day people were beating down the doors of the record stores trying to buy it.
Wow.
One of the other guys that came in, was Ken Scott [Tape Op #52]. Ken and I really hit it off. We are still close friends. He's a great engineer. He had done The Beatles' White Album [The Beatles] and Magical Mystery Tour. He produced David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars]. He was one of the masters. He said, "Here, sit down. I'll tell you what to do." I became, in the true L.A. sense, his second. I wasn't a tape op; I was the other engineer in the control room. He was ex-Abbey Road, but he was totally non-technical. He just knew what it should sound like, and how we were going to get it. I would put up all of these weird mics for him, and he'd say, "Just put a [Neumann U] 67 up." "We're out of 67s." "Put up an [Neumann U] 87." That was it: A 67, an 87, and a [Neumann] KM 84 – he didn't want to know about anything else. I worked with him on an album with Stanley Clarke, an album with Billy Cobham, and a couple of albums with Supertramp. One of the albums was Crime of the Century. At that point in my life, that was the most exciting record I'd never worked on. There was so much creativity in the room. Up until then, there was a sense that what was on tape was sort of sacrosanct. God forbid you erased the bass – the world would come to an end. Not on this record. It was like, "We can do that bass part better." "We don't have a track." "Well, we'll go over the old bass."
Very cavalier for the times.
The mixes were glorious. Ken had this way of stacking the music. The perspective was deep. Ken didn't like pan pots. He thought, "It's in the left speaker, it's in the right speaker, or it's in the middle." That's how it's mixed. Sometimes Ken would need to be alone. In the politest possible way, he would tell everybody to go away, including me. He'd sit there, work stuff out, and play around. Sometimes we'd go home, come back in the morning, and we'd go, "That's perfect. What did you do?" He'd go, "I don't know. I just messed with the balance a little bit." He truly didn't know. He wasn't technical, but his ears were telling him what he wanted. It was the way the instruments laid against each other.
What was it like being an American in England? Does that play to your advantage?
Unquestionably. It was like, "There's this American engineer/producer you could work with." The truth of the matter is, is if you look at my credentials, they were pretty weak. I got a little bit here, then a few weeks later I got another little bit. Like picking fruit off the tree. It gave me a certain style. I never had one way of working; it was fragmented. Maybe that worked to my advantage, because if a band came in and I heard what they sounded like, I would go, "Oh, let's record them like this." Whereas the AIR [Studios] engineers all worked within a certain framework of the same.
There was a big divide between the sound of British and American records at that time. What do you contribute that sonic difference to?
I'm going to say a few things that might be controversial. I'm sure that somebody reading this will tell me I'm full of shit, which is fine. I've been told that many times! [laughter] I must have recorded a hundred Fender Twin and Fender Deluxe Reverb [guitar amps] before I set foot in England. I knew what those amps sounded like – they always sounded great. I went to England and the studios were full of Fender Twins. None of them sounded the way they sounded here [in the U.S.]. They all sounded cloudy; all top and bottom, and no detail in the middle. I have no idea why these amps sounded so bland. Here's what a tech, who I had a great deal of respect for, said, "When you have a tube in an amplifier, you have to have a choke. Chokes are frequency dependent. So, if you don't change the 60 Hz choke for a 50 Hz choke, the amp is going to sound different." I have no idea if that's the reason. But, let's go back to your original question. Yes, everything sounded different. The mixing consoles were completely different. The desks that I came across in the States were really good, but also very limited. All you usually had was a mic amp, a couple of sends, and a fader or a knob. No EQ or anything. Over on the side would be a rack with, nominally, four Pultec EQs. In terms of compression, there'd be a couple of Fairchilds or a couple of Teletronix. London studios were incredibly well-appointed. The desks were amazing. I'd put up a mic and you'd bring it up and it sounded musical. The quality of the control rooms was worse, though. The American control rooms were better-sounding rooms.
So, you think that contributed to a certain tonality to records coming out of England? That they were listening in these less than ideal rooms?
I think two things happened. One is that they didn't do anything stupid, because they knew that if you were putting eight decibels of 100 Hz into the track that something's wrong. I think maybe, because the control rooms were of limited trust, they only did the minimum.
What about the way that engineers were working?
There were a lot more ribbon mics in L.A. England is the land of [Coles] 4038s, which everybody loves now, but I don't think I ever saw them on anything except a brass session. There was very little respect for ribbon microphones over there. There were lot of condenser mics. Most studios and engineers basically wanted U 87s, KM 84s, or [AKG C] 414s or their valve equivalents. L.A. had more moving coil mics, and dynamic mics were highly valued.
At some point you opened your own studio. How did that come about?
That's complicated. I was very lucky, in that a number of my clients, when I was an engineer, were keen to give me points. It gave me an impetus to participate at a higher level. So, I started to produce. I liked helping bands realize their vision. I'd spent so many years recording bands that I had a good toolbox for doing that. The ‘80s changed things. The bands disappeared; they became artists, and producers' roles started to change. It stopped being fun. Around that time, my wife – who is a film editor – had been asked to edit something on video. There were great limitations in editing on video for sound. There was no accepted workflow for doing an intricate sound edit on something that was being shot and post-produced on video.
When you say video, what do you mean exactly?
What I mean is that instead of shooting it on film, then going into a room using a Moviola or a Steenbeck [flatbed editors], and editing on that, video was shot on tape. The only way you could edit was by copying scenes and bits from one tape to another, and what you could do with sound was very limited. The technology was such a nightmare. I thought, "You know, we've got this fabulous technology that we're using in the music world. Let's see if we can build a facility to do sound for projects that are being post-produced on videotape, but use the technology that we have for music, not the technology that they have for film." We teamed up with an outfit up in Boston called BTX, and we created a synchronization system, which was based on multitracks and video and house clocks. I went to AMS Neve. I had a whole bunch of their [DMX] 15-80 samplers, which I used to use to trigger kick and snare samples. I said, "Can we create something that I can load some sound effects into that can be triggered at a specific time code?" They kicked it around a little bit and came up with a way of putting audio on a hard drive. They actually created what was the world's first DAW. They came up with AudioFile. It ran on two Apricot computers: a British version of an Apple. There were a bunch of sub boards coming off the computers going into sub boards on the DMX 15-80s that didn't have any lids on. It worked! It coincided with the opening of the fourth British television channel. Channel 4 was designed to cater to independent filmmakers. Where were they going to work? They worked with us! We had the right offering at exactly the right time. I remember the first week, we had post-produced every single show that was on Channel 4. We became the go-to place. Over the years, we evolved; we got bigger and added more channels.
What was the name of your place?
It was called Videosonics. We had three studios in one building in Camden Town, and then we started to grow. We decided it was time for us to go into film, and we built the first THX-certified film dubbing theater in England. Then we built another one and another one. At one point we had 45 people on staff, with seven dubbing theaters and 20 editing rooms. It was good. It was hard work. I had to stop mixing. There came a point where I stopped making records. I still was doing music videos, and I mixed a project for Michael Jackson. When he did the Bad world tour. I was sort of the sound director for that.
What are you up to now?
I'm reaching the end of my career, but I love the process of making records. A couple years ago I produced an album by Procol Harum [Novum]. I still get asked to mix for other legacy bands that are looking to find their mojo. For instance, the British band, Man, I mixed an album [Anachronism Tango] with them a little while ago. I'm doing very little recording. My wife used to say, "You got to work with everybody, either on the way up or on the way down. You very rarely got to work with people when they were at the top." [laughter] I think that that's great. I love it. I used to say to my bands, "The greatest gift you can have is to put out a whole bunch of records that only get to number three."
Why?
Because after you've had a record come out that got to number three, that's a hit in anybody's judgment. But the next record you make, you're going to try and make better. You're going to go, "How do we get to number two?" And then, "How do we get to number one?" But as soon as you've had a number one, then all you're doing is trying to do the same thing over again. So, I used to always say, "We’re going for number three." And goddamn it, we did it many, many times 
