Mark Nevers | TapeOp

Mark Nevers is a man behind the scenes...literally. As the 11th member of the twelve (or sometimes more)-musicianed Lambchop you'll likely know him as "fifth head from the left" way back in the shadows where he elegantly butters his space guitar riffs over the expansive popping corn of plucked and blown notes. As a producer of their records he's one- third troop leader, one-third mirror and one-third alchemist... sculpting the chaos, emphasizing strengths, turning clarinetists into back-up singers, doing whatever it takes to make a soft spoken poet into a Curtis Mayfield, or a trash talking potty mouth into an angelic heart throb. It's all in a very long days work. As a 15-year veteran in "country Music City USA," he's spent endless hours as the second-engineer bridesmaid to Nashville's ultra- successful music-row star-maker machine. It's where he learned his craft and later learned how to walk away from it. But that's a story for later. Last summer when he agreed to help me record several songs at Beech Street, the at-home studio, where he lives with his wife Joy and their two girls Iris and Lilly, I had the opportunity to step behind the curtain into the shadows myself.

How did you first get interested in music?

Oh, I don't know. I guess I first got infatuated with tape machines before I did anything. This was probably when I was about 6. My dad was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. That was back before cell phones and so we would make reel-to-reel tapes and say, "Hi daddy" and all that stuff. It was cool but when I heard my voice back and it didn't sound like me so I was like, "Who the fuck is that?" and from that point on I was real infatuated with tape machines and recordings. It was quite some time after that that I ever picked up an instrument. I was into recording before I was interested in being a musician.

So how did you start recording?

I started recording on a jam box that had a cassette player and a TV. I saw this thing in a store and I bussed tables all summer and finally got it and at that time period I had begun playing guitar. So I always said that that was my first studio... my "Mobile TV" studio.

And what came out of those sessions?

Oh, just more fascination with trying to figure out how to make better sounds. I was also making my own tapes of records and I was amazed that they sounded better than the tapes that you could buy at the store. So one of the first things I learned was that mass recorded music wasn't very good... at least on tape.

So what was the first stuff you started recording.

That would be me, noises around the house, dogs. I recorded The Monkees straight off the TV. I loved the Monkees... "Day Dream Believer" ...that used to break my heart.

Then what happened?

I got into being in punk rock bands and I was still recording on my TV Mobile Unit. Then I got a hold of an X15, one of the first [Fostex] 4-track cassettes, and I got introduced to the idea of multi-tracking through that shitty cassette recorder which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. After that I decided that I wanted to go to Full Sail recording school. Not a very good name but pretty good school. It's funny because a bunch of my friends talked me into going to school with them to become an engineer and none of them are doing it now. Most of them interned and hated it. The reason that they went was to be involved in the rock and roll studios but once you get involved it's all tedious bullshit for the first few years so none of them lasted. It was a 9-month program of 12-16 hour days. I guess I learned some shit but I still didn't know how to align a tape machine when I got my first internship. I had to fake my way through it.

Where was your first internship?

At the Castle Recording in Franklin, TN. It was a nice recording studio. I got my first gig because an intern before me snapped a tape and broke the master in half so I got a foot in the door. It was with the 3M digital recorders. The first ones that came out had a really weird mechanism. It was like film the way you loaded the tape. It weaved in and out of all these different heads. So this intern had finally gotten on a session. It was his first session and he put it in there wrong and he snapped the tape right in the middle of the song. So he just left a note saying, "Well I guess I'm fired."...and he never returned. So when I showed up they were real paranoid about me. I faked my way through the first couple of years. So that got me my first internship and I just stayed until they started paying me.

What kind of work did you do at The Castle?

When I first started it was doing god-awful cataloging. I was taking reel to reels and cataloging them on DATs. I did that to thousands of shitty songs that no one was ever going to record. I did that for about a year. I did that until the main engineer got a better job and I moved up to his.

What kind of music were you recording?

Mainly country music. Hank Williams Junior, some cool stuff, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, but a lot of really bad shit as well. There is so much bad stuff I don't know where to begin.

You've spent such a long time as an engineer working on other producer's projects. What's the difference between those two roles... engineer and producer.

I did learn a lot throughout the years from working with different producers like Berry Beckett, who was a great producer who came from the whole Muscle Shoals/James Brown era back when they had a great scene going on down there. I learned a lot of things about "feel" from him. I also worked with a lot of producers where I learned what not to do. What shit went bad.

Well give me an example of those.

With Berry Beckett, he was always focused in on the groove of the way things felt. He was that way all the way through mixing to where he'd be slowing the machines down or speeding them up even after he thought he had it to where he wanted it. He was just constantly obsessed with the way the track feels. I'm sure now days he's probably driving himself mad with Pro Tools. Then there are other producers where feel wasn't even a consideration. They would just call the musicians and let them produce the record by themselves. They were just sort of the coordinators. Which is fine. I mean the musicians are paying for the record so they should have a say in how it sounds. They should have a whack at it until you start telling them what to do. I'm sort of in-between those two schools. I usually don't say anything unless a) I have an idea or b) they are fucking up to where they aren't getting by. I usually add all my shit later. The way I engineer I become the 5th musician. I work the sounds so that they are more musical. The way Brian Eno worked with the Talking Heads' records.

How does that work when you don't know the musicians that well?

Well it's harder, you kinda just have to let it happen. Sometimes you'll figure out after it's been done... "Well I should've done this or that."

For example?

Well, just having the wrong drummer or having a guitar player and asking him to do something that he's not very good at. Maybe later on you'll do a song a different way and he'll be brilliant and you'll realize he should have been playing that way all along. It's a learning process. It's taken me two records now before I even got comfortable with Lambchop. The first record I just sort of let the tape roll. Which was fine. They had never really done a studio record where everybody played at the same time. But at the same time... when I first worked with them there were so many people playing I didn't know who was doing what. Who was playing good, who was fucking up. So I'd have to say if you go to work with a band that has 12 members and you don't know a lot about that band you are in for a lot of surprises in the studio.

It seems to me that you are pretty interested in the surprises, particularly after working with people who are "so-called" professionals. You told me a story earlier tonight about session singers coming in to do back-ups on a record and wanting to sing in a way that they could do the minimum singing and still save their voices for a later session. So it wasn't about making the best record it was about getting through and on to the next session. I know so many people who record and so few of them that work in a world where you would call up and hire professional singers.

It's definitely like the Ford Motor Company in Nashville. Music Row is very much like that. You bring in your carburetor from here... You have steel players that play a certain style. You need that sound you call them up. There's so many musicians here that you can cover any base as long as you've been here long enough to know who to call to do what. There's a guy in town named Brent Mason who does all this "chicken picking" shit and everybody always tries to get that sound through other guitar players and nobody else can do it as well as him. So you end up with real lame versions of it on a whole lot of other records because you know who they are trying to emulate. But there has always been a big strain in Nashville that is about emulation. In Nashville the emulation is all based around what is selling. They want "that producer", "that engineer", "those musicians", "those songwriters" ...whoever was involved but only after their hit. Everyone does the same thing to try to be successful until they burn that out. Then they are back to looking for the new hot thing to copy. Nashville has really lost its tradition. There used to be a real insiders club here. For example, they didn't let hippies play. In the '70s if you had long hair they didn't let you play sessions. It was very close knit — they didn't like outsiders so they didn't teach the craft to many people. So the ones who knew it died off and stopped playing. Most of the folks you get here now are failed NY and LA pop artists and musicians who came here and, I believe, destroyed the genre. They killed it.

Well, tell me about that. I know you've worked on a bunch of very successful country records. Tell me your two best and worst experiences.

Oh, shit... I don't know what to say about the best. The best thing is just being around certain people. People like Pig Rollins who was the original piano player on a lot of early country hits, like Patsy Cline's "Crazy". He's been around that long... and he's still playing. Keith Stegall uses him a lot on Alan Jackson records. He's just phenomenal. The guy is country music. Nobody uses him on any of the modern records but Keith. It's a terrible shame. It's just that he's looked upon as "too old-style" but he's really the deal. Meanwhile you've got all these younger players with all the hip gear who can do a lot of different crappy shit and they get all the gigs. You know Pig doesn't show up with anything. He just plays the piano that's there in the studio. That probably hinders him but he's got a "feel" thing that is far superior to everybody else in town. Worst? Well there are so many bad stories. I mean I've worked on three to four hundred records and maybe only a dozen that I'm proud to have worked on. A lot of it is just radio fodder. Written by committee for a label deciding what's on what. "Your look is more important than your singing ability." This sentiment has really ruined this town.

Well, let's talk about your final straw.

My final straw originated in a saying by Joseph Campbell. He has a saying, "follow your bliss". Well, I ended up following my bliss right out that door at lunchtime and never coming back. It's sort of a shame because I worked with so many assholes in this town... I really should have walked out a whole lot earlier. Instead I waited until I got a job I really liked and I was working with people who were my friends but the music was just unbearable. Finally one day it just got to me. I don't know, I just had an out of body experience. I was sitting there in the studio and "the little man in the speaker" was getting to me. It actually happened to be a woman at the time... and she was just killing me.

What? You just hated her music?

Yeah, I hated the music and suddenly one minute it was just more than I could take and I never went back after lunch.

So then you began working out of the Beech House studio in your home?

Well I've had that studio for years. Actually, there have been different incarnations. I began with a 4-track cassette to a 8-track 1/2" and then when I started to make good money doing the country music "concentration camp" shit, I was able to afford to buy the 16-track to begin to make really good sounding records. That's my whole deal... everybody in the whole "do-it- yourself" scene was making these records with great ideas but that often were horrible sonically. They were kind of into that. I mean 8- track does have it's sound, but I just got to a place where I really believed I'd taken it as far as I thought I was going to be able to take it. I just wanted to start making some really big and plush records that were three- dimensional... records that sounded great when you turned them up. Nobody seems to like 16 tracks anymore so there are a lot of them on the market so you can get these "one time" 30 thousand dollar machines for just a couple of grand now. I took a chance and bought one.

Tell me about this room. Before I came down here to record everyone kept telling me how great the room sounded. I was surprised when I got there because the room is tiny! It does sound great though. Why do you think it works so well?

Maybe because I've been in it for 10 or 15 years just moving things around. The size is also part of the deal. I mean, since you are so close together you don't have to play that loud. The drummer can play loud and get a great sound without that much bleed on things and there is no drum bleed into the guitars and stuff. It's got wood floors and plaster walls and it's a really old early thirties building. I don't know, it's a real room in a real bungalow. Studios just don't sound that good. Engineers over-think the process, they suck all the sound out of studios — they put all those baffles up. Some guy with his little graph got in there and decided that this had too much of a frequency and they deadened it all. So I was always amazed even back when I had my cassette 4-track. I was like, "Man this drum sound is way better than anything I could do in the studio." Basically, I just got it to the way I liked it so you can just walk in and rock.

I really appreciated how together you were as an engineer. I never worried about a thing.

Well that's the whole deal too though. If you are doing a session and you don't have your shit together and people show up and you're burning their money trying to get your shit together because nothing sounds right, then you look just like an idiot. I learned that from the beginning. A lot of the engineers 10 years ago would start setting up the night before to make sure all the technical crap is figured out. Before that folks wouldcomeinat6AMtotrytobereadyforthe 10 PM down beat. If shit would go wrong you'd have all these musicians burning the clock making 300 bucks an hour just for being there and sweating' and fucking up more and more. I mean you can really ruin an entire day that way. So it's much easier to try to scam studio time the night before and set it up and get it all right so the musicians don't have to suffer through all that crap. You know they just come in and they play with no waiting because the waiting is not very cool. It really creates the anxiety and all sorts of shit that hinders the performance.

I think a lot of "artist-run" studios have that problem because the person who is running the studio sees him or herself as the artist as much as they see themselves as the provider of a service. It's funny... so much of this stuff is psychological. It's so important to be able to create peace in a chaotic environment.

Now I like chaos. I love it, but at the same time I like to be able to work with it not to have it kick me in the balls.

What about Pro Tools? How do you feel about the digital vs. analog debate? I know you are not afraid to use Pro Tools, which is very new school, but you also do tape slap back the old fashioned way.

It's funny because Matt Swason, who plays in Lambchop, sent me this online debate shit that Henry Rollins was having with some fanzine editor. They were talking about Pro Tools and how evil it is and how computers are fucking everything up. I was reading this thinking, "Henry Rollins. Dude, all the computers in the fucking Pentagon can't make you suck any worse than you already do so don't fucking blame it on the computers." To me technology is like a gun. You can be Sgt. York and you can do amazing things with one gun and capture an entire German battalion or you can be Kurt Cobain and blow your fucking head off with it. It's just a tool. It doesn't do anything. You are the one that does it. There are certain things that I like about Pro Tools. The whole thing about making music "perfect" with it — I don't like that about it. It is cool though when something really sucks bad and you fix it and you make it fit into the mix. I mean, that's probably better than when it sucked really bad. Right? But it's still not as good as it would have been had you had a real performance. It's the same shit folks have been doing forever. George Martin was editing 50 million Beatles' takes together. That's the same thing that people do with Pro Tools. George was speeding and slowing down the tape so they could sing in pitch... which Pro Tools also does. It's the same concept it's just that it's a lot more detailed and easier. You really had to work back then in order to manipulate performances from an engineering standpoint. For example, take disco... In order to make the songs groove — to make the kick-drum "lay back" they would add a quarter inch of tape before each kick drum hit. So they'd be there all night slicing the fucking tape before they did the overdubs just to get the track to feel right and then they would overdub the stuff. You could probably do that in an hour on Pro Tools whereas back then they would probably spend days on it... but it's the SAME concept. I don't hate Pro Tools but I'm not in love with it. My only problem is the sound of digital more than what you are doing with it.

Do you use any tricks to make the digital sound less digital?

Well unfortunately you can't afford to avoid digital anymore and I'm never going to be happy because if I had a 32-track 4" machine instead of a 16-track 2" machine then maybe I could fit everything on it. As it is I need to go somewhere for the extra tracks so I end up on digital. Luckily I know some better sounding machines to put it on as opposed to the Sony 48 track which is a piece of shit that people use because it's convenient. They always talk about convenience they don't ever talk about the sound — they don't want to talk about that. I was working with an engineer when Sony first came out with the [digital] 48-track and the Studer 48 first came out. Not to name names but this fella is the head of Virgin Nashville now, figure that one out if you want. So he had both of these huge machines in a room and he was doing mixes to them to try to figure out which one sounded better. I remember him saying, "Yeah, I really like the sound of the Studer, but I get this wide screen TV if I go with the Sony." So of course he went with the Sony. What's worse, neither of those even compare to the 1" X850, which we were mixing your record onto so we could have more tracks. Like I said, over at Wedgetone we were kicking hard circa 1989. SSL E series with X850s. But a lot of people don't like SSLs because when they first came out there was a terrible digital tape machine called the X800 which is the predecessor to the 850 and it's a rotten piece of shit and a lot of the first digital records were done on that. So people were also using the SSL and they were blaming the SSL for ripping your head off and sounding thin and it was really the digital tape machine because the SSL is fine if you've got big fat analog. In fact it's more than fine, it's great. So it sort of got a bad rap. This is 10 years ago, people were creaming in their pants to get on this console and now they are on to something new, so it's like, "Oh, so were you wrong back then? Was it not cool back then?" It's like Monster Cable. Have you heard about Monster Cable? Nashville went through this period where everybody had to have Monster Cable. It was this gigantic, thick fucking cable and it was a nightmare. A couple of engineers in town got endorsements by them and so I would have to rewire the whole fucking studio with it out of the back of the tape machine into the patchbay. I got so tired of doing that shit that I would just throw the cable on the ground and make it look like I had rewired it. They would see the Monster Cable and they would go, "Oh boy, listen to that sound. Man that Monster Cable is really kicking hard." And I would just have it lying there looking like it was patched in watching them make idiots of themselves. It was so stupid. Now no one uses Monster Cable anymore but one time everybody had to have it. It was the most important thing.

Let's talk some more about working with so many name artists.

There used to be this thing about saying, "Keep it country". Once you got outside of that invisible line the old-time producers and artists would get freaked out. "Oh, that's not a country lick" or, "Oh, that's not a country sound." Of course nobody cares about that anymore. It's definitely a clique. They are good at what they do. They sell product and they put stuff together fast, it's just that they embrace new technologies so fast they lose a lot of the shit that was good. It's so funny because a lot of the engineers that I used to know that used to record on analog and used to use Dolby which wasn't that great but it got rid of tape hiss, their records sounded a lot better 10 years ago. Their records sound terrible now, they're really thin and small and nasally. It's the fuckin' 48 tracks and the straight to Pro Tools shit. It's so funny because when digital came out nobody claimed that it sounded better all they did was say that there is no hiss. So now they have decent tape that removes the hiss to some degree... there is still a little bit of it in there but its no big deal. Still nobody wants to go back to tape because it's a pain in the ass. You need to know how to align your tape machine and with digital you don't. It's always there — it's always aligned in its little zeros and ones world. It's a lot harder working with analog. I left country for a while and started traveling out of town doing black gospel music with this guy named Sanchez Harley and we would go to Chicago or a ghetto in Flint, Michigan, and do Albertina Walker and record her live. So that's how I learned how to record live music and build studios. We'd always have to build a studio there. We didn't have a truck or nothing so we'd just have to find who had what gear and piece it all together. Sometimes it would be in a church... sometimes wherever. That really taught me about how to build a studio on clothespins or whatever and it also taught me a lot about recording live sound. How cheaper microphones are better for live sound than some high quality mics.

Give me an example of that.

Well, if you are recording a live choir then putting up [AKG]414s or [Neumann U]87s that pick up every fucking thing in the world will give you an awful sound. But if you use a [Shure SM]57 that just picks up right in front and doesn't pick up all this high end shit that's coming from everywhere you get a much better sound. Which is something that a lot of people have a hard time dealing with when you are working with a producer that doesn't know what's going on. You whip out 57s and they are like, "Aw shit man. Couldn't you get no 87s?" So you have to explain the deal to them and they never believe you until they hear it.

Could you give a couple of examples of engineer horror stories?

Well there are already too many musicians and artists and engineers out there... we really need more people going out into the world and figuring out why the oceans are dying. If the oceans die your drum micing technique won't fucking matter all that much. So I'm happy to do my part to dissuade folks from entering the world of music. Okay , here's a story. When I used to work in country music I used to have these terrible nightmares. My dream was that I was in the studio recording and I must have armed the wrong tracks. I was trying to arm the piano tracks and I armed the wrong tracks and I threw the tape machine into record, which then erased my arms. [laughter] Then of course without arms I couldn't get the tape machine out of record. I was pretty fucked. There is another one that is not a dream... it's a true story. I was an assistant for so long that I was generally better than many of the first engineers. A lot of the engineers had never interned so they only knew how to do the little trick they knew how to do. They would always come up to me and ask me, "What does this producer or that producer do?" Of course, I would always lie to them because I was like, "Look, I'm the one who's always suffering under these assholes. I'm not going to give away the shit that I've learned." Well one of the guys I was working with had me set up a listening room where he could listen to the mixes. Well every time we did a move... you know, ride up a cymbal crash in the third verse... he would make me make a cassette and he would go and listen to the whole song in the other listening room. So it dragged on and dragged on and dragged on and before we knew it the sun was coming up and we were still working on this song. I was so frustrated I went out back, at The Castle, and I was taking the patio furniture and throwing it out into the valley. So this producer came out back looking for me and he was like, "Hey Mark, can you help me move a patch?" And I'm throwing this furniture all over the place and I'm like, "Yeah, I'll be there in a minute." Later on I learned that when stuff was that stupid and the engineers were that ignorant and stuff sounded that crappy anyway I used to go down to the basement and I would flick the power on and off. We were so far out in the country I would just convince them that we were having brown outs and it was bad for the computers and we really needed to shut it down for the night and go home.

I think you need to give me one more. You've told a psychological horror story. You've told the persecution horror story. But I still think we need a fuck up horror story.

Oh, you mean like me fucking up? Oh yeah well... I did work on this band called Southern Pacific... a super group that never got that "super". They had some guys from the Doobie Brothers and shit. Well Scott, the engineer, was mixing all the stuff down to a 48-track digital machine to see if he liked it and I had all the mixes side by side on two tracks and two tracks and two tracks, etc. After the 6th remix on like the 7th day on this one fucking terrible song... somehow I erased over the master. I don't know what I did but it was gone. Anyway, I just digitally ping-ponged the lead vocal up and put it in the place of the master and gave that to them. Well they never knew. Even though they had nit-picked for 7 days and spent all that time "getting' it right!" Then when I gave them something that was completely jimmied they didn't notice a thing.

Well is that everything?

I want to tell the story about why this is the second incarnation of the studio.

You are sure you want to tell this story?

Yeah, Joy would like it. Well let's see... my studio went from cassette, to half inch and then before it went to 16-track...well... there was a transition. I had a child with Joy who later became my wife... we weren't married yet and we didn't know each other that well. I stayed out too late one night and came home in the morning. All my reel-to-reels we hanging like toilet paper in the trees. It was really quite beautiful and I knew I loved her at that moment. It was genius. And she destroyed the room but she made it better eventually!