Last time I talked to you I think you said you were building a studio.
Well, I've been looking at places around [Los Angeles]. I've been trying to find an old room. L.A.'s the perfect place 'cause there're so many failed studios here from like 1975. I've looked at some crazy old places.
Like a [Fleetwood Mac] Rumours-era type studio?
Actually, for [the Revolution Smile] record we tracked where they made Rumours, at Sound City. It's fantastic. It's in Van Nuys, in the middle of nowhere. It's one of the best sounding drum rooms on the planet. They haven't changed a thing since they built the thing in the early '70s. Nirvana tracked "Smells Like Teen Spirit" there, all the Tom Petty records were done there, Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick was done there, REO Speedwagon. It's crazy. It's not a hard sell to get people out there to record.
So what would you want to do if/when you get a room together? Would it just be a place where you could mess around, or would you want to do sessions there?
You've just gotta have a room. It's killing me. I had a room for almost 13 years in New York and it got torn down. You just need a place to go and have fun. Sometimes when you're making a record you just want to put the brakes on, give everyone a chance to go regroup. Or the singer can't sing, he's freaking out. You know, when you're locked down in all these expensive studios, the clock's ticking. I had a classic situation the other day. I was working on a record and the singer was complaining. Usually I try to make the studio feel like it's your bedroom — I'll spend like a day just tricking it out so that it feels like a fun place to be. I hate going into a studio that feels like a dentist's office. But with this singer it was the first time I've ever been confronted with someone who was like, "It feels like a bedroom, man. I want it to feel like a studio."
Was there any kind of defining moment that made you decide to get deeper into recording?
I was playing in all these bands that were touring and going to "recording studios" to make recordings. My second band, we saved up all our money to go make a recording. And I just remember fighting with the engineer, saying, "Take the reverb off the snare, it sounds weird. It's not what we want," and him just saying, "Shut up, kid, you don't know what you're talking about." At that point, I kind of promised myself that I'd never go back into a studio until I knew how to operate everything myself. That was kind of a defining moment for me.
Would you say that recording the Barkmarket stuff is how you really learned to engineer?
Sort of. I was the house engineer at Harold Dessau in New York. I was their house engineer for about 5 or 6 years. It was kind of like an 8 and 16-track place, but they had a Neumann 87 and a couple good compressors, a Teletronix LA-3A, and a good wood room, which was kind of the key. So I always went in there with the approach that we were making a record, even if somebody thought we were making a demo. And I eventually wound up bringing a lot of people in there to make records, but it was not a professional studio. I didn't even know what a second engineer was until I had one assisting me. I was laughing hysterically. 'Cause you record your own music your whole life and then go to a professional studio and suddenly have this Second doing everything for you — it's so easy. I was like, "I don't have to plug the mic in? This is awesome." One of my first "professional" jobs was when I was hired to mix a record by this band Trouble, this kind of wild heavy metal band that sounded like Sweet or something. They flew me out to California and I had to ask a friend of mine, Greg Gordon, how to align a tape machine. I remember sitting in the hotel on the phone with him writing down how to align a tape machine, 'cause I had no idea how to do it. Still to this today I don't know how. You can probably tell if you listen to any Barkmarket records.
Working on the Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute is kind of what took you to a whole new level as an engineer. You met the producer of that record [and owner of American Recordings] Rick Rubin, when he signed Barkmarket. But how did you come to start engineering records for him?
Rick is really talented at picking out people who can make records. He heard the records that I made on my own and was like, "Why don't you make records with me?"
What did he hear that you'd done?
[The Barkmarket album] Vegas Throat. Rick just has mad skills. It's ridiculous. He's got the ears of a 13 year-old boy. He hears everything the way you would hear it if you were hearing it for the first time, every time. He's amazing like that. He's usually doing three or four albums simultaneously, just jumping from studio to studio, from the second he wakes up until 4:00 in the morning.
When you were working with Rubin, did he give you a lot of latitude as an engineer?
