Timothy Powell

Timothy Powell of Metro Mobile Recording has been a music and gear fanatic his whole life. Walking into his main recording truck, M-48, is proof enough of that. I was amazed not only at the collection of outboard compressors, EQs and pres, but was also struck by the feel of it. When the door is shut you'd swear you were in a control room in some studio somewhere. There's no kitchen, no pool table and no video game console, but there is a comfortable area for the engineer and a nice couch and chairs in the back for clients or other guests. There's acoustic treatment on the walls, and the aforementioned racks of gear, more than I've seen in some studios! Once the door opens and you're back outside, it's just a large, nondescript white truck parked under the street level, next to the river. Wherever they have a gig, the trucks just roll up next to the venue in the alley or a side street — or, in this case, on the service level of Dearborn Street — plug into the venue's power and FOH console and do their thing. Metro Mobile has two full-timers, including Tim, and a "posse" of freelancers who take care of the recordings. Tim was kind enough to speak with me just before Thanksgiving at the House of Blues in Chicago.

How long have you been doing this?

Twenty-five years. I graduated from college 25 years ago.

And how did you get into it? Did it start out as a hobby?

I started taping Dead shows in college and that was huge. In my college they had a deal where you could get into any concert for free if you would haul around gear and help out. You wouldn't get paid but you got to see all of these great shows for free. I worked at the radio station at school, too. I graduated from college with a degree in American Studies from Notre Dame. So at the end of college everyone was interviewing with companies and I didn't do any of that shit. I got home from school and did a year at Columbia College and took some recording, broadcasting and TV classes. After the second day I knew that I wanted to be a recording engineer. Then I had a job editing tapes from medical conventions. I had to go through and edit out all of the pops and clicks and "aaahhs" and bad jokes. From there I got a job at a cassette duplicator and they had a little studio there. They would prepare tapes for duplication. They would do some voice recording, training tapes and stuff like that. The whole time I was there was at the start of the whole punk thing. I graduated college in spring of 1977 and that's when punk hit Chicago. The week I got home from college there was a gay club on Halsted called La Mere Vipere and they had punk night on Sundays. The week I got home they switched over to punk seven days a week. I jumped right into that scene. I got out of the Dead thing and was going to all of the shows and hanging out. This friend of mine that I had met named "Bootleg" Bob, who was this famous collector of bootlegs — he didn't make them, just collected them — called me up and asked if I was going to see Devo at this place called Beginnings in Schaumberg. It was owned by one of the guys in the band Chicago and they had cool early punk shows there. They had The Ramones, Devo and all of these cool bands. So Bob asked if I was going to see Devo and if I could give a friend of his a ride. His name was Terry Nelson and he had a radio show on WZRD, which is Northeastern Illinois University's radio station. It was called The Sunday Morning Nightmare and he played punk rock. He started that in 1976 and I think he's the first guy to start what we know now as "college radio". One thing led to another and when punk bands came to Chicago he knew them all because he had traveled all over England and was just one of these guys that knew everybody and was in the scene. So these bands would come to the station after the shows late at night and get drunk and tape interviews and be obnoxious. Then some of them said, "Why don't you tape our show?" So he said to me, "Hey, you're a recording guy," and I started helping him tape these punk shows. So from, like, 1978 to 1981 we recorded every punk band that came to town: Buzzcocks, Gang of Four, Cramps, The Only Ones, Nick Cash and 999... just tons of bands.

Where did you do most of this?

P-Tuts, which used to be called The Quiet Night and was at Belmont and Sheffield. That was a great place. Schubas, which back then was called Gaspar's. We recorded Squeeze there. Their record Cool For Cats was number one at the time in England. They weren't punk, but were part of the scene. Their record is number one in England and they're here at Schuba's for only 200 people. We just had this little 4-track and cobbled together all of this gear. We'd borrow gear, kind of stole gear, brought it back. So I did this for a few years with him and then my friend Bob called me up and said the guy that does concerts for WXRT (he had a show called "The Sunday Night Un-Concert" because it was sponsored by 7-Up the "Un-cola") was looking for someone to tape the shows because the guy who had been doing it had a disagreement with the station and wasn't working for them anymore. So Bob told me to call them. I did and I got interviewed and they asked if I could do it and I told them about the Sunday Morning Nightmare and they knew about that and said they wanted to try me out with Rockpile, who was opening up for Blondie at the Park West. They asked if I had the gear and I lied and said, "Sure I have the gear," and borrowed it and did the show and did a little mix at the studio I was working at. So I got the gig. The same week I got that, I was at the cassette duplicator and heard about this job at a real studio in Des Plaines called Sound Impressions and also got that gig. That was a great week. So I worked during the day doing voiceovers, some music and a lot of industrials. Then at night and on the weekends I was still recording the punk shows for Terry but also doing shows for 'XRT. When you're young and stupid you can work 24 hours a day. I could never do that now. Then I bought some gear and would schlep it around in the trunk of my car and set up in a bathroom or a closet and I realized that was too much work. I read in some hi-fi magazine about this recording truck and it hit me like a ton of bricks. A truck! Duh! I realized that no one in Chicago had a truck and this was the second or third largest market in the United States, so I thought I [had] better get a truck out there quick. I bought this 1969 International Harvester van, which looks like a smaller version of a UPS truck, from this friend of mine's company and we rebuilt the inside. It was ugly as hell. We painted it green. I wanted a dark green, but it came out like bright acid green, like Linda Blair vomit- green, so it became known as The Vomit Comet — mostly because if you drove it too long you'd feel sick and want to throw up. I had a 4-track Tascam and three 8-channel Tascam boards, so we could patch together 24 channels for the 4-track. Then I got a Neotek 24- channel console, an 8-track recorder, then a bigger console, then a 1" Tascam 16-track. We got a new truck in '83 that we built, a real truck with a real console in there and the 16-track and then once I got a 2" 24-track, I quit the studio, where by that time I was chief engineer. I was much more experienced. So then I went full-time with the truck in '84 or '85. Then in '88 I got another 24- track, so I had two. We built this new truck in '97 and '98, and that's where we are now.

So you're running two trucks now.

Yeah, we took all the gear out of the other truck in '97 and '98 and placed it in this truck, so the other truck was empty. Meanwhile, I had built this porta rig, this flight case system, that was built around a little 8- bus Soundtracks Topaz desk and a stack of DA-88s and we stuck that stuff in the old truck just to do more gigs. The weekends are really popular for live recording and I was turning down gigs on Saturdays. So I got a friend involved and one thing led to another and now we've recently rebuilt that other truck so it's nice and we can use it. The reason I had to get a new truck was that the chassis on the old truck was shot and it was too small. At one point we took the box from the old truck and put it on a newer chassis. This truck is called M-48 because it's 48 tracks and the other truck has 48 tracks but we call it M-40. M-48 is a little more extensive. As you can see, we have quite a bit of outboard gear and the other truck has a little less, but is still very powerful.

And now you're recording to DA-78s?

Right. In this truck I have two 48-track stacks of DA- 78s. We'll frequently double record at 24 bit because I don't want any dropouts, so I have a simultaneous safety copy. The other truck is an 88 and five 38s.

Do you run a backup at the same time for that, too?

We can. A lot of times that truck will be a 24-track gig so we just double record on that 48-track rig, but I have other tape machines floating around that we can patch in there. We still have a porta rig, which is 48 channels of PreSonus Digimax LT mic pres, and go straight to the tape machines and then monitor with a Behringer 3216 desk. Just to monitor and do rough mixes on.

Are you doing a 2-track safety as well?

Two CDs and 2 DATs.

Wow. So you are backed up.

Oh yeah. Today we're doing two things. We're recording the Wallflowers concert tonight, for WXRT Sunday Night Concerts, and also we are recording the sound check and one of the DJs is doing a little interview for one of the other shows.

A lot of the jobs are last minute?

Yeah. I got a call yesterday for a show with my other truck today, a gospel gig. I'm really better at this.

So you're running a snake and bringing your own mics? You're not just taking a feed from the board?

It depends on the show. On a gospel gig that's what we do. Mics, cables, stands, headphones and glass for the drums and split the feed for the PA. In a gig like this they have all of their own mics and we're just tapping into each of their microphones, but I have my own control so I'm not getting their mix and we add crowd mics to their thing. A gig like the Eminem gig that we did, which was five acts in one day, they're basically just giving me a split, but if we're doing a gig at like Schuba's, where a band has hired me, then I put up my own mics. Sometimes I'll do a show and maybe I don't like the stage mic they have, so sometimes I can influence their selection, or if I hate what they have, guitar or overheads, then I might double-mic it. But it just depends. Like at the Chicago Jazz Fest, I'm good friends with the sound company and have been broadcasting that for WBEZ for years, so I get to pick the mics for that — some of theirs, some of mine. I never get to change a vocal mic, but nowadays bigger acts are bringing really nice mics out on tour, anyway. Like, I know on the jazz thing, what works great for recording might not be good for the PA. It might create too much feedback or something. So there's a balance there. I have my own processing, though — pres, compressors, EQs, everything you'd have in a studio.

Who are your clients, primarily? Labels? Radio stations?

Everything. We do a lot of work for the Tom Joyner radio show. He's a syndicated guy on ABC radio. He's based out of Dallas. Thirty Fridays a year he goes on the road and does a live broadcast. His audience is mostly 35-55 year-old African American listeners. So he does these shows featuring an old R & B, funk or disco artist. Kool and the Gang, Chic, George Clinton, War, Keith Sweat, that kind of stuff. They also raise money for his foundation, which provides scholarships for kids at historically black colleges. So it's a music thing and a community thing. He did thirty shows this year and we did 18 of them from Boston to Lawton, OK, to New York and back. We also do a lot for WXRT and NPR and we do shows for PBS on channel 11. We also cut a lot of gospel records. That's big because gospel is usually done live, rarely in the studio, because the genre is live. We did this Kirk Franklin record this year that went gold. It's number one on the gospel charts. We did the Commissioned Reunion record. There's a new Ringo Starr DVD that's out now that we did last year. We did the last night for Eminem for his last tour in Detroit in August. That's going to be a DVD. It was a big HD shoot and will have surround sound. We just did an HD shoot for New Found Glory at the Riv. So it's a big span.

When you're doing something that involves an HD shoot, who is doing the mixing, etc.?

When we do an HD thing there's a video truck that we park next to us and they do their video thing and we do our audio thing and someone, somewhere post- produces it. I don't mix the records. I don't have the time. It's more lucrative for me to be on location recording than to be a studio guy. The minute I would book a mix, I would probably get ten gigs for that same amount of time. The truck thing is better.

I wanted to ask you about the Busted At Oz record that you did.

We're going to reissue it. It will be re-mastered too. In conjunction with my friend Terry Nelson and this TV engineer from WGN, we had started a little label at that time called Autumn Records. We had the first two Effigies 12-inches on there, this band named Da and this Busted At Oz album, which was a live album that we cut at this punk club called Oz, which was actually in three different locations during its short but groovy span. It started out as a gay bar up on Greenleaf in Andersonville called the Greenleaf. They started doing punk night on Sunday night and it just got so popular and became punk all the time, so he just changed the name to Oz. I think the first weekend as Oz they had DOA play there, so we recorded that, and it was like the first gig I did with my truck and it was empty inside. He lost his lease there, so then he moved down to Hubbard street back when it was all strip clubs and leather bars. The Effigies played their debut show there, which was one of the most amazing performances I had ever seen. They just came out slamming. That lease there didn't last long, so the owner got another place on Broadway, just north of Addison. That was the Oz space for the longest time. It had this long bar and was really beat to hell. There was a music room in the back. So we got this idea to do the Oz album and it was two bands a night for three nights: Naked Raygun, Strike Under, the Effigies, Da, the Subverts and Silver Abuse. We did it on 4-track in the Vomit Comet and it was great. The reason it's called Busted At Oz is because the owner had to pay off the cops to stay in business, which was common with all the bars in those days. And Mayor Byrne had just gotten in and the owner wasn't making any money so the last night of the recordings he said he had good news and bad news. The bad news was it looks like he'd have to close because he was just running out of money to pay off the cops. The good news is someone got shot down the street so the cops will be dealing with that for the next couple of hours so it looks like we'll get these last two bands on tape. Right after that he got shut down and that's when we came up with the idea of calling it Busted At Oz. They actually nailed a closure notice on the door that still had Daley's name on it and someone came by and spray-painted "Closed by mayor and cops for being punk" and that's on the back cover of the record. We're reissuing it with blurbs from all the band members as extra liner notes. I worked with all of those bands in the studio. I did a couple Effigies records, Basement Screams by Naked Raygun, an EP for Silver Abuse and one for Strike Under, which happens to be Wax Trax 001. Strike Under was always my favorite. My buddy Bob was their drummer and my roommate. They were a hardcore band and not new wave-y like a lot of the other bands in Chicago at the time. Pierre Kedzy was the bass player in that band and left to join Naked Raygun and now is in Pegboy. There were elements of Joy Division and Stiff Little Fingers in that band, but with a Chicago sound. And that later was brought into Naked Raygun, which then was brought into Big Black, etc. That big Chicago guitar sound. There was a band from the era called the Interceptors that I did a record with that was never released. Santiago Durango [of Naked Raygun and Big Black] was in that band. There were other bands that were good, too. Then when everything became thrash or speed metal I just got bored. I did, like, three thrash records and thought that it had just become formulaic. I loved Naked Raygun and Silver Abuse because those guys were so wacky and different. I loved working with those guys. You never knew what they were going to come up with. So once the thrash thing became formulaic I moved on. The bands that are cool always take something, meld it with something else and make something new. Like when I was doing these things for Terry. One night we did the Slits and the next night it was the Cramps and then the Monochrome Set and those are all radically different bands. Then, like, in 1982, all these similar bands seemed to come out.

So you really do have a large taste.

Yeah. I haven't really produced that many records because I'm on the road all the time and now I'm a dad and most guys — when they want you to do a studio record for them — want you on a weeknight, and if I'm not on the road or on location I want to be home. I travel so much.