What were some of the first releases to come out of Avast!?
The first CD release that came out of Avast! was Christ on a Crutch's Crime Pays When Pigs Die with Nate Mendel [Sunny Day Real Estate, Foo Fighters] and Eric Akre [Treepeople, Citizens Utilities, Goodness]. Steve Fisk produced The Treepeople's Guilt, Regret, Embarrassment, as well the Jesse Bernstein record which was started while Jesse was still alive and finished after he died. I was very busy doing albums, 7 inches, & demos. The Screaming Trees did a round of demos here with Don Fleming for Sweet Oblivion. The Screaming Trees just have this sound, they're just always themselves. I asked Mark Lanegan jokingly as the session was concluding "why does Epic need to hear a demo of the new stuff? Couldn't you just send them one of your old tapes?" He laughed and said, "They just want to make sure we still sound exactly the same."
What are some of your favorite sessions or bands that you have worked with?
Some highlights? One of my favorites would be the Hater record. It was sort of a moment captured on tape. It's an informal pile of mistakes and jokes that comes out so musically. There are so many unplanned moments on that record that are just gems. The Jesse Bernstein album with Fisk, Jesse reading his poetry with Fisk doing the music. That will always stand out as a classic Avast! record. A recent highlight is Maktub. I keep playing their Subtle Ways CD for people and they are like, "What is this, where can I get one?" The Treepeople's Guilt, Regret, Embarrassment has a lot of depth and texture. A really quick record done in 5 days... tops. All the Built to Spill stuff. Doug [Martsch] has a fondness for recording here, he really goes out of his way to make sure that pieces of his records get recorded here. He consciously supports Avast! because he is a nice guy.
How did you end up in Evergreen's recording program?
If you knocked on Evergreen's door and said "Hey, I want to study recording, and be a recording engineer," they'd say, "Go to a vocational school." What they wanted to teach you was a fully rounded interdisciplinary liberal arts education. If you mentioned that you were interested in recording they would tell you to get lost. I wanted a full education, but still had to finagle my way in there. They had very few students in the department. There might be 10-15 students studying recording at one level or another at any one time. Evergreen's communications lab building was built in 1977 and it was fully outfitted with approximately the state of the art equipment at that time. It had an Ampex 2" 16-track tape machine; it had a fairly large API 2488 console, pretty good mic collection. Neumans, AKGs, RCAs, the standard good old mics of the day. Basically what's considered vintage now is what they had then. Besides the 16-track studio they had three 4-track studios with nice recording spaces attached to them. Because there was so much time, space, and gear you could actually get hours and hours... days and days of recording experience there. It was great.
It seems that it was a real vibrant time to be attending Evergreen?
At that time Olympia felt slightly like the center of the universe. Bruce Pavitt, who started Sub Pop, was there. Steve Fisk who was just leaving had made a real influence on the scene as a performer/engineer/producer. Calvin Johnson [#32] was making cassettes in his bedroom and selling them through little flyers and word of mouth as the genesis of K records. During school I bought a PA and started doing live sound for local bands. That included Nirvana, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees or touring bands like Fugazi. I felt slightly misplaced. I really wanted to do recording but here I was doing sound for punk rock shows. On the other hand, when I did eventually move up to Seattle I knew all the early Seattle rock bands. I was acquainted with them, friends with them. They knew me from doing live sound and they trusted me. When it came time for them to record they felt that I understood what they were trying to accomplish. One of my last concert events in Olympia was a punk rock show that Slim Moon from Kill Rock Stars would put on every summer out in the park. As the 1987 show approached, the bands he had originally scheduled to perform cancelled and he was stuck. He said, "I guess we'll have to call it off it unless we can find some other bands." I offered, "I can call some friends in Seattle, they're called Soundgarden." Slim excitedly goes, "You can get SOUNDGARDEN?!", "Whatever, It's just rock, waddaya want?" Slim replied, "No, no, those guys are great! I really want them to play!" So I got him connected. The band had never played Olympia so they were into it. Nirvana ended up opening followed by My Eye and Soundgarden. Nirvana was great and the show had some intensely memorable moments. After the set, Soundgarden came up to me and said, "We're going on the road in January. You have a van don't you? Would you like to come be our sound man?" We're just standing outside in the park as the sun is setting and I'm thinking about this in my head, driving my crappy van all over the US in January, to go to all these crummy bars, with smoke and beer and doing sound on these crap-ass PAs... "Sounds great, I'll go!" They were also promising that we would go to Europe in the Spring. I'll believe that when I see it I thought. It all kind of worked out though. That was kind of a highlight and turned into about three years of touring!
How did you end up assisting on Soundgarden's Louder Than Love?
I had done some 4-track recording for the band in '85 and they had loved the way it turned out. While we were recording I asked Kim [Thayil] how he wanted his guitar to sound. His answer was, "I want it to sound like Godzilla knocking over buildings." So I put the mic where I thought it might work, I turned the knobs and had him keep playing and within a few minutes I got a pretty crunchy and bold sound. Kim was pleased by how I translated his request into a taped sound that he had never actually gotten before. I brought something out of the band that other engineers had missed by trying to polish stuff up and basically wash them out. The other engineers would not respect the band's ideas. So when they were doing their first major label record with Terry Date they asked me to hang out and be a production assistant. I had no illusions that they should record with me in my living room in Olympia. I had no idea how to make a major label record and spend $80,000. They knew Terry but they didn't yet trust him. They were worried that they might get that same washed-out pop production they had gotten from other producers. They invited me along to keep an eye on him. The idea was that when I saw him do something wrong like gating the tom toms or whatever to go pull the band aside and warn 'em. I didn't have much to tell 'em though! Terry did a really great job of producing that record. In the end it was a little slicker than I think the band had wanted, but it's a pretty fun record to listen to still. There is so much texture in it.
