How did you get into this whole recording thing that you're doing now?
Well, I play guitar. I've been playing since I was 7. I studied classical guitar for a while at the University of South Florida and they had a recording school, kind of a like a program for electronic music and I got into it. And because I played in bands and stuff I brought all the local bands I knew into the studio, and I'd record as much stuff as possible. Then the school did away with the classical guitar program so I ended up going down to the University of Miami for a while to study with this monster guitar player there. They also had a recording program. Kind of the same thing — I just brought in friends and got as much free studio time as I could possibly get. Probably the spark to everything though was through this friend of mine named Mike Little who was the "guitar guru" in the neighborhood when I was growing up. He turned me onto all the cool players and good music. His band would record and I would hang out at the sessions and watch. I sat around in the control room while they were jamming and I started helping the engineer and one thing led to another. Eventually I thought it was cooler being on the other side of the glass.
And then to the West coast!
Yeah. When I got out of Miami I had a friend that lived out here in LA that worked at Sound City, which to me, is still the greatest studio in the world. We got a place together when I moved out. I was repairing guitars at a music shop at night and worked as a tech at another studio during the day. Then my friend called me one day and said Sound City needed an assistant, so I jumped at it. I worked there as a freelance assistant because there wasn't a lot of work in the beginning. Actually I ended up working at five different studios as an assistant which was kind of cool because I got to learn a lot of different consoles and rooms and also dealt with several types of clients and music. That was the jump from being out of the studio to into the studio.
When was this around year-wise?
I moved to LA in December of '88, got a job two days later at a place called Cherokee, and worked there 'till March of '89 when I started assisting at Sound City.
That is in the valley. Van Nuys, correct?
Yeah. It's fucking tremendous. It's got two rooms. Two great old Neve consoles and the A room is just ridiculous. It's where they did Fleetwood Mac, Nirvana, Tool — Just tons of cool stuff. Allman Brothers, Badfinger, the first Rage Against The Machine record, Elton John, Tom Petty, Cheap Trick, Frank Black, Dio — thirty years of mega hits coming out of that room, and, it's such a comfortable place to record at.
What would have been the first gig that you had as an engineer proper?
Well, there were 2 guys that were really instrumental. One of them was Garth Richardson [Tape Op #28] (aka GGGarth) who worked at Sound City quite a bit. We did a butt-load of records together. He was in doing some demos for a band for three days and I think he was doing it for free and I just offered my assistance. We got along and it worked out well so he said, "Alright! I'm coming in with another record — do you want to record it?" So it all started from there. GGGarth has been a great friend. I've learned so much from working with him.
Who's record would that have been?
A band called Surgery. We mixed it at A&M. It was my first SSL mixing experience. And the other guy was Jason Corsaro, who I think is one of the greatest engineers in the world. He's done everything from Soundgarden's Superunknown, which to me is sonically light years above all their other stuff, to the first Power Station record. Also Madonna's "Like A Virgin" and Steve Winwood's Back in the Highlife -and all those old Duran Duran records — more recently he's done stuff with Corrosion of Conformity, Clutch, Kula Shaker, Catherine Wheel- just a sick amount of records that have a real unique sound to them. I assisted him on A Masters Of Reality record and we hit it off. We ended up doing some other mixes together too. Any time he would come to town to work he'd hire me to help him out so I would be his engineer in a way. Those are the two main guys to me. There have been a few others but those two take the chairs.
How did the Kyuss thing happen!?
