Sidecar | TapeOp

Last issue there was a brief mention of Sidecar in the interview we did with Quasi, wherein Quasi questioned Sidecar's choice of studios and use of 2 inch tape. Curious about Sidecar's perspective on the matter, I chatted with them and discovered their phobia of studios and an amazing history full of all sorts of different experiences in the recording realm. No, you won't find any micing tips here, but I would hope that in reading these tales other bands might take heed and avoid some of the same situations. By the way, Sidecar are a great band and their cover of Blondie's "Union City Blues" on the Tiger Stripes Forever compilation (Undercover Records) is a treat to hear.

The very first Sidecar recording session?

Mike Wu (guitar, vox): The very first one was in California, what was that town called?

Eric Diaz (analog synths): Did you go to the same place that we went to? It's a suburb of San Francisco.

Daly City?

M: No. I don't know. We did it with this guy named Jim Day.

E: 8 track.

M: It was all one room, a garage. We didn't know what we were doing. We went in with the drummer from Samiam [Dave Ayer], who did another recording with us later on. It was just Claire, me and him. We just did four songs.

Joe Fitzgibbon (drums): Was that the tape you guys gave me?

M: Yeah. He [Jim Day] had no idea...

E: He didn't know much.

M: He played weddings. He liked real slick production. He was really happy to have us in there but he didn't know anything...

How much was it per hour?

E: It was like $8, $10, $14?

M: Something like that.

What kind of deck were you recording on?

E: 8 track?

M: We're not gonna have any specifics about recording!

This is good. Was it on a cassette? Reels?

E: It was on a reel-to-reel and it was mixed down to a DAT.

And you'd record in this guy's garage?

M: It looked okay but there was no separation.

Between the control area and the band?

M: Right, and we didn't put the guitar in another room or anything.

J: It sounded okay. I was happily surprised.

M: The circumstances were funny.

What did you find difficult about it?

M: I think that we just didn't know what we were doing and Claire came down, from Seattle, just to do that and she was real freaked out. It was the first time she'd ever recorded. It was just kinda weird. I hate recording.

What's wrong with recording? 'Cause it's different from live?

M: Everything about it.

J: With recording in general you realize just how much practicing you need to do.

M: And how much you let slide when you're playing live. It's like you're paying for every minute and you got to get it right and someone does it wrong and you've got to do it over.

E: You never have enough time either.

How did you feel about the sound of what you ended up with?

M: It was very flat, unflattering and hard to listen to. We didn't know what we were doing and he didn't know anything about our [kind of] music.

What was your next recording session? Was it in Portland?

M: It was here. That was pretty easy; it was no stress.

[To Joe] Are you on that one?

J: Yeah.

M: Joe was drumming with us.

J: It was probably the same set up. The 8 track was right there in the same room. It was pretty low budget.

M: Extremely! It was a friend of ours [Ben].

J: The first time we did it we just bought him a six-pack of beer.

M: We were the first thing he did. It sounded better than our first tape.

E: That was recorded on Quarterflash's old 8 track!

M: The quality is already there! We just had fun with it; as much fun as we possibly could. We didn't waste that much time. We just did it. Some songs came out okay but some weren't that good. It was probably the least stressful [session] ever.

Was that in his house?

M: In his basement. He carpeted every section of the room. We helped him put it up. I guess that was part of the payment. It turned out as fine as it could be, I guess. We did six songs.

Was that the tape that you had for sale?

M: It sold real well til we stopped making copies. I don't even know where the master is. I hear that it's being played in Alaska.

What more can you ask?

J: For some Eskimos up there.

M: Some guy said, "I have a friend who's a DJ in Alaska and he has your tape and he plays it all the time."

So what happened after that?

J: There was one more at Ben's. That was right when I was still in, right before I quit.

E: You were thrown out.

J: Oh, that's right. There were just 3 songs.

M: We didn't do anything with them; we didn't put vocals on them. So then, a little while later we changed drummers. At the time our friend in San Francisco, who did our first tape, Dave Ayer (who drummed for Samiam and Porch) called up and said I'm gonna come visit you guys and you guys should record. He suggested that it should be something worth putting out and it should be this, this, this and this. So we're, "Uhh, okay." We ended up giving him the list of all the studios in town and he called them all. He found Red Carpet Treatment. It's one of the only places in Oregon with a 2 inch [16 track] deck. So we set up a time there, it was $25 an hour, and we planned it out for 3 days, so many songs, in and out. I went and checked it out before we actually went in there. It's really a cool studio, a whole basement. The control room is one room and all the recording is done in a converted garage and it's all carpeted. There's a shower-type thing that's all cemented and that's where they put the bass. He had great equipment, great mics. So Dave flew up, with all his drums, and we practiced the songs the night before we went in (another big mistake.) Eight songs he had never heard before. We went in there and it was immediately tense. This guy [the engineer] had never done anything remotely close to rock. He did ballad-type country music. He played us a little of it and it was all pristine sounding. At one point, after we had been recording, he so much as admitted that, "It's all alien to me. I don't know what you guys want" and backed away from the board. That was after lots of other stuff. So we went in there the first day and that was all tense and weird 'cause it always is. Laying down the tracks for 8 songs, trying to get them right, everyone's getting on each other's nerves. We spent the next day doing vocals and mixing and the third day we were mixing. It sounded okay but we couldn't quite get what we wanted.

It sounds like the engineer didn't help much in that department.

M: He's this nervous guy and he was always scratching his hair, coming in and fixing something and something would be going wrong with his board and he'd be behind it, switching stuff. I guess that's kind of normal but..

Not always...

M: He was stumped a lot of times. He didn't know what was wrong with his equipment and he'd get really mad. Dave was like, "I've never seen anyone that unprofessional before." He freaked us out. We mixed the last two songs while he just stood there. We moved the knobs and stuff. We got out of there and paid 750 dollars for the whole thing, not including the tape. In the end we got a CD made off the DAT and couldn't stand any of the songs on it. Finally I picked 4 that I sort of liked and when I transferred from the CD to tape I boosted the levels.

It livened it up a little?

M: Yeah. There were only four songs I could stand of the eight songs that we did. Everyone said it sounded fine. Joe thought it sounded great.

E: I didn't think it was that good.

M: I thought it was okay.

[To Claire] What do you think of it?

C: I was not happy with it at all and I think a lot of it was our fault. Just feeling a little rushed. We didn't have a chance to relax, which I think is really important.

M: I wish somebody else would pay for it!

That didn't sound like fun. What was the next recording session?

M: After that I hated recording so much that I wouldn't do it. We did something with Tony Lash[producer/musician with Heatmiser] for the Undercover record. We did that in a night.

C: That was good.

M: He knew what the hell he was doing!

He knows what a guitar-heavy rock band sounds like.

M: And I completely trusted him.

Where was that done at? The Heatmiser house?

M: I guess they rented a house...

Where they recorded their new album [Mic City Sons.]

M: We were one of the last things done there and then they tore it down. It [the recording] turned out fine.

E: The vocals took the longest.

Are those double tracked?

C: Yeah.

M: He [Tony] was great.

E: He's not very talkative!

M: We just did whatever he said. And we weren't paying for it.

C: You have to pay to talk to him!

M: We didn't have anything to do with the mixing either.

C: He did the whole thing. We just got a tape. They just said, "This is pretty much it."

J: But the record sounds better.

C: I was really scared. M: It was scary because the tape sounds different than the record. I think they worked on it more.

Plus, when they master the record they can EQ it and stuff. So the next session would be your most recent one.

M: Yeah, we just did a demo tape.

C: That was fun, wasn't it?

M: Yeah.

E: It was rushed again.

C: It wasn't that rushed.

E: If we had the opportunity, I would do it all over again. I wouldn't save any of it. It could all be better.

C: You can say that about anything...

M: I just remember it being very hot.

C: Yeah, well, it was hot.

M: It was in the basement and it should've been cooler but it felt hotter.

You're probably trapped in a room with the door shut.

M: Yeah.

J: We did it with Mark [Edwards] from [the band] Habitrail.

M: At Fresh Tracks. It's an okay studio.

E: He's a very nice guy.

J: We appreciate everything he did for us.

E: We don't have very much money.

M: That wasn't free. It was 10 or 12 bucks an hour and then we paid Mark.

For a 16 track? That's a really good deal. $12 will usually only get you an 8 track studio.

E: He kind of "donated" his time so there was only so much you could expect from him. I think we tortured him.

M: I think we did.

Does he talk to you guys still?

M: Oh yeah. We'd been friends with him long before we planned to do this recording. He was always offering. It turned out pretty good.

Is this something you're gonna use to shop around to labels?

M: We sent it off to Mercury records.

C: They called us.

M: I don't know why they called us.

E: Is that all we did was two songs? See, we didn't have much time.

M: Yeah we did.

E: We could've done more.

M: I think it was good that we just focused on two songs.

What sort of things about recording have bothered you the most?

M: I think we really need to work with someone who knows what they're doing. That takes away all the pressure.

It sounds like when you worked with Tony Lash you came in and did your thing and, boom, you were done.

M: And I just knew it was gonna be okay. It's fine if you want to do it yourself, you just need time.

E: It was nice to have Tony do it all but experimenting more would also be fun. That wasn't an option. Partly because of the song we were doing but also because he was doing a favor for us.

Any other comments on recording? You guys ever thought of buying a 4 track?

M: We have one.

Do you play around with that much?

C: No. Basically we don't know how to record. Those guys set it up so we just have a room mic for taping practices.

M: I could see how if you put it in the right place...

That place doesn't really exist.

J: I think we don't take the time to learn how to use the 4 track.

M: I think we want to concentrate more on writing songs than learning how to record them.