Howard Johnson

Howard Johnston is the co-owner and chief engineer of Different Fur Studio, tucked away in the once ignored, now ultra hip dot-com Inner Mission of San Francisco. In business for over 25 years, Howard has worked with a dizzying array of musicians including The Residents, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Bill Frisell, Brian Eno [Tape Op #85] and David Byrne [#79] (on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts), Devo, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock (on the classic Headhunters), Too $hort, Sir Douglas Quintet and Snakefinger. He's even done movie soundtracks, including Apocalypse Now. We talked to Howard between afternoon and evening sessions on a hot Friday, discussing when to offer the benefit of one's experience, "best time" and avoiding dinosaur-hood.

Howard Johnston is the co-owner and chief engineer of Different Fur Studio, tucked away in the once ignored, now ultra hip dot-com Inner Mission of San Francisco. In business for over 25 years, Howard has worked with a dizzying array of musicians including The Residents, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Bill Frisell, Brian Eno [ Tape Op #85 ] and David Byrne [ #79 ] (on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts), Devo, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock (on the classic Headhunters), Too $hort, Sir Douglas Quintet and Snakefinger. He's even done movie soundtracks, including Apocalypse Now. We talked to Howard between afternoon and evening sessions on a hot Friday, discussing when to offer the benefit of one's experience, "best time" and avoiding dinosaur-hood.

What's it mean to be a good engineer?

We once had a guy in here who did disco mixes and he asked me if I'd rather be known as a good engineer or as a lucky engineer. At the time I was thinking I'd rather be known as a good engineer. His point of view was maybe being a lucky engineer is how you want to be known. People will work with you if they know that things go right, things happen and fall into place. Certainly chance favors the prepared mind. Everybody wants to be respected for their ability, but in certain situations the element of luck or chance comes forward. You can see it and go with it and fight everything else inside you that's saying, "That's not what you should be doing."

Are you lucky?

I come at music as a listener as opposed to be being a musician. I don't know if that changes how I look at things. My goal is to help people accomplish. I have specific things in mind, I have ideas, but I realize that without a musician there's nothing there for me to record. So I'm there to make things happen. I learned early on that if you can create an environment where people feel creative or feel good, they'll do better things and consequently you get congratulations. So, if you've created the environment where people can do better, feel comfortable and make better music, that's step one in good engineering.

Almost like you're a midwife...

In my way, that's very fair. Nowadays, when people come into the studio, everybody rolls up their sleeves and pitches in. If you've seen enough music you start to have opinions about things. Everybody gets very collaborative now. But the midwife scenario works better for how it was when I started. I've seen a lot of engineers who were frustrated musicians who couldn't isolate the fact that it was somebody else's project. They were always trying to take it over musically. I don't see that today. There's a lot of musicians who are engineers but I'm always clearly aware whose project it is. Fundamentally, when the musician goes home there's no pressure on them, no expectations and nobody's telling them anything. And they sit down and listen to what they've done... they have to feel good with it. And you've won if that's what happens.

Has the popularity of home recording altered the way you work?

Oh yeah. I like that. We get everybody's best time now. Like there was a time when a group came in and they had a month lockout. The first three days, they just got drum sounds. The session drummer didn't even sit down at the drums till Wednesday evening. The first days were tuning. It's ridiculous, it's almost unbelievable, to think that somebody would come in and for three days just listen to drums. That the actual session drummer wouldn't even sit down till the end of the third day. That's just tuning, picking toms and stuff like that. So, we get people's best time now and people bring us stuff and it's more final, it's in more finished shape.

What do you mean by "best time"?

There's a lot of decision making, a lot of musical crises people go through deciding what they're going to play, how they're going to play it, what idea works, and I always enjoyed being part of that. But when I say people's best time... we're looking more now at the end of the process than the beginning or middle. I personally miss some of that. When I started out we'd start a project and finish it. Now we do a lot of finishing of projects. We'll get projects in the middle, or we'll even start projects and they'll move on to somewhere else. We do a lot of acoustic recording where we'll actually do it from start to finish. But a lot of people will start it, take it home and bring it back and finish it. But there aren't enough studios in the world to accommodate all the music that's being made. So, instead of looking at it like well, "people are working at home, they're not working in studios and that's terrible," I look at it the other way. It's wonderful, the amount of music that's being made, and that there aren't enough studios in the world to accommodate it. So I'm fine, I like it.

Do you prefer the old-style start to finish recording method?

It was totally enjoyable. I look at those days as being good days. But Different Fur looks at itself as a full- service studio. [In those days] people came in, we found the musicians, we would find the instruments, we would find the people, we would record the basics, we would do the overdubs, we would do the mixes and when people needed to reference their records when they got them back we would let them come back and play their reference disk in the studio and compare them against the tapes. We considered ourselves "cover to cover." We got great pleasure out of that. Susan, my business partner, would find things. All of the sudden in the middle of a session people would need something and she got great pleasure finding what they needed. Somebody needed a Mellotron and she would go find them one or she'd be arranging places for people to stay...

But that implies a big budget to be able to get whatever you need at the drop of a hat. Nowadays people don't require that kind of service and couldn't pay for it even if they did...

It is a different world now but that's the way it used to be done. In the '60s a lot of the great records were recorded live in gymnasiums and then the studio system got built. Going back to vinyl — if you wanted to make a record, you had to go to a mastering house. There was no other way of doing it. You would take an analog tape down to a mastering house, they would play it back and cut a lacquer. You take that lacquer and send it off and cut metal parts, they'd make a stamper and you'd have a record. There was basically no way to get around that path. Today, anybody can sit in their living room, make music, burn a reference CD, send it off and get it pressed. So you can completely avoid that [old] process. What I think is that you have to have expertise. You have to be needed. Back in the day you had to go through recording studios, you had to go though mastering houses. Today, you have to be needed. If you don't provide something that they can't find somewhere else, they won't come to you.

How do you go about being needed?

Reputation and word of mouth. Do you go to studios because of the equipment or because of the people? We've always thought you came to Different Fur because of the people. We thought we have a little pocket of expertise. What we've also found is that people can do almost anything they want anywhere now, but eventually people get tired of doing it all themselves. It weighs on you, mentally, to do it all yourself. So, at some point you realize it's better if all you have to do is worry about making the music. I don't know how the bees figure out where flowers are. You open up something sweet and you've got ants, I don't know how that works. If you know things and people say, "I went here and it went easy" then people come to you.

How has music making changed now that it's less of a collaborative studio process and more of a solo discipline?

Well, Van Morrison worked here and Van had a complete recording studio in his house. We asked him, "Why do you come here?" He said, "I have to leave my house to do it. It's not the same for me if I'm working at home." I'd say that's changed today. There's one of our clients that's set up a complete recording studio in his house and he would come and mix at our studio, and now's he's gradually swinging over to where he'll work his tunes out at home but he comes in here and does 90% of the recording now and all the mixing. There was a period of time when we did 100% of his projects. Then we only did the mixing. Now we're back to doing pretty much most of it.

Why did he come back?

I think there's people that would prefer to do it alone. But there's other people who say, "I miss the collaborative process." I know this person came back because he misses the collaborative process. We inched our way back by noticing that certain instruments sound better in a studio. But it's really whatever works well for musicians and the music.

Have you experienced working with someone where they pushed the barriers of the accepted process?

One thing I've learned is that you can be dead-on certain that something's not going to work and then find out that it does. You have to recalibrate your knowledge bank. Conversely, I've made other people learn that lesson too. Sometimes you start down roads and you get very focused on those roads. A lot of times musicians don't know what was the best performance. Many times people will go, "That wasn't very good" and they'll want to erase it and we'll go, "No, no, no, listen to this, I will not erase it until you listen to it" and they'll realize that, "Wow, that was good!"

So by working alone, they might miss something...

Yeah, but you have to learn when to butt in and when to butt out. I've been around enough that people come to me for what I do. But even so, you still have to know when it's best to butt out. Like when somebody is ready to take input or not. "Collaborative" can mean saying nothing.

Did you have an experience that taught you about butting in and out?

Early on I worked with a guy named Michael Brawer who was from New York. I was assisting for him and I thought, wow, this guy is Luther Vandross's engineer and he was coming here to do this project and it was like Big Time and I was really prepared, I was "before the one," I was ready... somebody needed a pencil it was in their hand. And I actually freaked him out. I would hear people talking about a patch and I would make the patch and they would turn to me and say, "Can you make the patch" and I would say, "Done." I was so on top of it. That turned out to be a negative experience.

In what way?

At one point at the end of the second day he talked to the studio manager and said, "I can't work with this guy." I now know that when you go to other studios you want to have control over the way things happen, you want things to happen at your pace. And they were here for about a week and there was no other engineer for them to work with so we had a little talk and I understood what was going on and everything worked its way out. I finished the project out and it was fine because we worked out the working relationship. But I wasn't doing anything different at the end of the session than I was doing at the beginning. It's not like I was doing anything wrong, it's that I didn't allow him to get comfortable in the studio.

So you didn't allow him to "give the orders," so to speak.

That's exactly right.

You could be called a psychic engineer, but have to be careful when to use that talent.

Exactly. He had to be able to come in and feel comfortable and he wanted things to happen when he wanted them to happen, at his own pace, which was actually a fast pace. It's just that, at the end, we were working like we were at day one and I was anticipating what he wanted but once he felt comfortable with me anticipating and he knew that I was anticipating the right thing then that was good. We were working fast and getting things done.

It sounds like the session was never compromised .

Yeah, and it's lucky there were no other engineers available. As it turned out, we became great friends. It was a valuable learning experience.

So just because you know what's needed doesn't necessarily mean you should do it.

Yeah, it's about letting people feel comfortable with the way it happens.