American Music Club

From 1983 to 1995 one of the brightest musical legacies, critically if not commercially, from San Francisco was that wrought by American Music Club. After seven records and much frustration at the mechanics of the record industry and music biz, the band quit (on good terms, fortunately). Ten years on, drummer Tim Mooney called around to his former bandmates wondering if the time was right to work together again. Luckily they agreed. Vocalist/guitarist Mark Eitzel had a batch of new songs that became the core of the new album, Love Songs For Patriots, and his longtime musical foil Vudi (guitar) took time out from his bus-driving job. Bassist Dan Pearson had just released his solo CD, The Oblivion Seeker, which he recorded with Tim as well. Love Songs For Patriots is a darker, more desperate AMC than the band of the past — as if dreams of any mainstream acceptance went out the window during their hiatus and now they could just cut to the troubled core of their songs when recording. -LC

So let's talk about your new record.

Mark Eitzel: When we were first mixing "Patriot's Heart" with Monte [Vallier] he did a brilliant job. We edited it so that the bass was loose with the drums because it was played kind of weird. The piano was loose as well. This guy mixed it for us. We paid him. He took the bass and piano parts and put them exactly with the kick and snare. The kick and snare were not in time either but the track didn't work at all.

Tim Mooney: No, it didn't. It felt wrong and it took a while to figure out why.

M: I did a lot of the editing and I thought I had just done it wrong because he is so much better at that kind of stuff, but no.

I have seen that kind of thing a lot. That is the worst thing you can do is start using your eyes to mix songs.

T: For that song we were listening to old soul records. We were trying to find a groove.

M: Was that "Me and Mrs. Jones"?

T: It was "The Bitter Line Between Love and Hate".

M: Yeah, that was what it was. So when we mixed it again later with Matt Pence [at Echo Lab in Denton, Texas], we used an earlier version that didn't have the edits. It was no dis on Monte. I mean, he didn't know what to do. It was like a six-minute song with no variation. It has got the same groove. It has got out of time guitar playing. I thought it all worked really great — put the faders up and it's done. That is what Matt did.

I noticed how important it is to let the bass and kick just be out, the way they look, especially with a soul feel. The bass is just going to look late.

M: Yeah. Like with "Love Is". When I did the editing on the bass, I wouldn't use my eyes. It felt good. I would just take a piece. If it was ahead, I would just leave it ahead.

Do you guys end up doing a lot of editing on the record?

M: Well, we both did it. I mean, we would do a lot of stuff here, and then I would do stuff at home because I've got an MBox. We did all the editing before we took it to mix, and we printed everything, because he uses Nuendo and he didn't have Pro Tools.

Right. So you just printed the whole track out.

M: We just printed out all the tracks. And he didn't do much editing. Yeah, but we recorded the first ideas onto 24-track...

T: I think half the record was that.

M: Two-thirds of the record. And then we transferred it onto Pro Tools, mostly because I just knew with vocals, you got to comp them, and it took forever to comp them on analog. It's just a lot of fucking work. I thought we could save time and money. What a fool.

No, it's true. Pro Tools can be great for vocal comping.

M: And also with Vudi we didn't have very much time. We had Vudi only like five days total in the whole recording process. So, basically, we just have him do like, 'Okay, do another take,' and then we'd have to piece it together because he didn't have time. You know, he drives a bus.

Right. You got to be on schedule in that business.

M: He does. Yeah, so he gave us like two days every fifth or sixth week. It was really hard.

So did you do a lot of home recording since the last AMC record?

M: Yeah, I did my last record, Invisible Man, on Pro Tools.

Just by yourself?

M: Uh-huh. That's why it sounds like shit.

T: We beg to differ.

M: And I had Alex Oropeza mix it. And he was great. He taught me some stuff.

So did you just dive into it yourself?

M: Yeah, because I worked with Jason Carmer [Third Eye Blind], and for various reasons he could no longer work on the record, so I had to change. I didn't have enough money to work in a big studio. When you're working at Coast, I can't fucking pay the bill there. But I could afford to buy a G4 and Pro Tools. So that's what I did. And I only used three songs out of the ones he recorded. I did the rest myself. That's why I got a potbelly; I just sat there and I edited for weeks.

How did you do the tracking? Did you just have drummers come over?

M: No, I used drum loops. And I did piano myself. No one played on it. Well, except for the three that Jason recorded. And they actually sound the best because the man's a genius.

He's good at what he does.

M: He still has like 12 of those songs in a drive somewhere, and I wish I had them. But they'll never surface, I think. He's probably lost them.

T: Hopefully not.

So what did you learn from home recording? What from that experience did you bring to this, now that you're back in the studio?

M: I didn't bring much because it's a band — it's not me.

What about editing skills?

M: Well, when we first started talking about this, I pushed the computer on Tim. Take the whole time issue. If you don't have a band that rehearses all the time, things are going to be out of time a lot. And the only way to get them in time is to edit. And, you know, most bands rehearse for months, and they tour a lot. Well, we hadn't been together for ten years, and we didn't have time or we didn't have this concentration with people always playing. So the only way to get around that, I thought, was to put it in Pro Tools, and try to edit. But his idea, too, was to try to make California. [to Tim] Remember we talked about that?

T: At the beginning?

M: Yeah. And make it kind of a real-sounding record. So, basically, I didn't want to use granular synthesis or anything. You know what I mean? I wanted to make it real sounding.

T: I think Shuffler got used. M: Shuffler, yeah.

That's where you hatched the plan to record to tape and then transfer to Pro Tools?

T: Yeah, and we tried to get it on tape as soon as we had the idea, as quickly as it came to us while the song is fresh. And that worked pretty well.

M: It did. Like "Another Morning". I mean, that's the second take that they'd ever heard. They never heard the song before. We played it once. They got it.

And that song has this beautiful flow to it.

M: Yeah. I know.

It's very natural.

M: Yeah. And that's something that we never really did before. We hacked everything to death. We just rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.

T: Yeah, they were all a month of with the producer, or a month of hacking in the old days.

M: Right. We'd come in the studio sometimes and find the engineer surrounded by tiny, little pieces of tape, and he'd been up all night. And he'd just look at us with a dazed expression and go, "Now it's in fucking time."

T: So this may be the least edited.

M: It might, actually. It really might.

Did Matt mix your album in the computer?

T: No. It was through a board, a Neotek Elite. We used a hybrid of analog outboard gear and stuff in the computer. It worked really well. He totally got what we were on about. It is hard. This record is hard, because we couldn't mix it anymore. We had worked on it a long time and knew all the stuff was supposed to be there but couldn't figure out how to put it together. So it was good to have fresh ears and the right ears. He just took what was there and went farther with it.

What was the reason for the reunion?

M: It was time. We all kind of thought it was time. I started talking with Tim three years ago. And I had been talking with Danny and Vudi, briefly, about it. And Tim finally said, "Okay, fuckers, you know, I have a studio where we can record."

So was part of it just born out of the fact that you now have a studio where we don't have to pay $1000 a day?

T: I don't think it was born of that even. It was just because there were years of recovering from how the band ended before.

How did it end?

T: In that major label way. We didn't sell a million records, but Mark felt intently pressured to write the songs. Not that they said so even, really.

M: Yeah, I mean, when they're spending so much money. And then the whole thing with the last record. I remember the producer, the co-producer at the time had mixed the same song about 15 times in different studios. And I was like, "This is ridiculous. I mean, we're spending so much money." And he said, "Don't you care about your art?" When you're $75,000 over budget — that's why we should stop. I mean, this is wrong. This is bullshit, you know? And that same song was later mixed by Tom Lord-Alge and Bob Clearmountain [ Tape Op #84 & #129 ]. I bet I've got a DAT with 20 different mixes of that song.

What song is that?

M: "Wish the World Away". And it's a very appropriately named song. Because we just thought it would be a dumb-ass punk rock song.

And that's the one that the label decided...

M: Was the hit. Well, it was the most like Nirvana.

T: That's what happened.

M: They wanted "It's Your Birthday" until they found out it was about a transvestite.

T: So all of that. There was just a lot of fallout from that.

I also think it's interesting how many records are born out of the opportunities that come that are so secondary. Like when bands make records because one of the members put the studio together. It seems secondary to the art but yet central at the same time.

M: And Tim's a great engineer, and that really helps too. He's quick and smart, and he kind of chooses his battles in a really good way. And that really helped too, because it's like, "Oh, this is easy." You know, "Oh, let's try this." And it's not five hours later — it's right now. And to my ears — which maybe I'm pig- ignorant — but everything sounded really good. But Closer does have hundreds of thousands of dollars of microphones and preamps. We know that hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on this state-of-the- art recording facility. [laughs]

T: Yeah, get the song while it's fresh, not five hours later when it's not a fresh song anymore.

Right. But, a lot of that had to do with the fact that you built the studio, so, of course, you're going to be able to get around in it quick.

T: But I just learned to be quick. I always thought how many times did you go to a recording studio, you only have two days, and that's it, and you would like to hear like a decent cassette of what you did. "Could I get a cassette of what we did?" "No!" or just, "Yeah, here. We'll put the faders up," and that's it.

M: I think there's a balance between allowing the artists to actually make their ideas happen and getting good sounds. Once I worked with this guy five hours to get this guitar sound. And I'm patient. I mean, five hours, he didn't stop working.

It is a fine line, though, chasing down some sort of sound or technical thing, and you burn out the creativity, you burn out the art.

M: Yeah, I'm not an engineer but I'm doing my little, stupid solo record at home. It's really the energy that matters, not the sound. It's really like how it feels... people don't care about perfection. I mean, but that Beatles' track, the way those guitars are perfectly in the pocket, that is something that drives me crazy, because it's so good sounding, and you don't notice it. You know, but we don't have that time and money or talent. But it doesn't matter, ultimately. And I think probably George Martin would be the first to tell you, it's really about the fact that people want to hear a piece of music. They want to hear something that's about their lives, something that's full of blood.

You want the mood to be consistent between the sounds and the lyrics and...

T: Yeah. And that's when you're succeeding, right? When the whole thing just comes out of the speakers at you, like this is a package that works. We would try that with these new tracks. As we were tracking, you know, try to get it to this sound that is working...

Get the sounds up while you're tracking, so that the mood is being put onto tape.

T: Yeah. You know, if we find a crazy effect that became part of the... like on "Patriot's Heart", this filter was just screwing with the phase on the cymbals so hard that it was just going nuts, and starting to almost feed back. It didn't make the track, but it helped a lot.

M: No, the singing made the track...

T: You know what I mean? From that point we're like, "Yeah, this is how we do the song," because it's all kind of pulsing together. It's making the lyrics breathe. That's how we know we're getting the take of something.

How does the recording of a song go down? How does it start?

M: To me, this record is really hard because a lot of the times when we were recording it, I would have constantly new shifting ideas about the lyrics. My big complaint of my lyrics that I hate is that they're so obtuse. No one can understand what the fuck they're about. And so I tried really hard to be clearer. I mean, just what I'm saying is I'm dumb, and I'm trying to be smarter with the lyrics, so it was really difficult. So we would record the track, and then I'd go back and I'd be in the studio singing, and suddenly like, "Oh, shit. I have to sing this other thing." And so poor Tim had to deal with that.

Then you have to go back and do some editing to make this other thing work?

M: No, not at all. We basically recorded everything with a scratch track and then finished it, and then I went and sang over that. But then I kept changing the lyrics, so...

How did you track the basics? You would play piano or acoustic, and then get them through the take kind of thing?

M: Right. I'd sing and play acoustic, get them through a take, and then replace the acoustic and replace the vocals.

T: Which worked all in one room. We had a good system going where he could actually even play acoustic and sing, and it wouldn't get in the other mics.

M: Yeah, but we had to replace the acoustic all the time.

Tim, had you always been into recording all through the AMC years? What semi- sadistic bone in your body made you want to get into the studio business?

T: I've been in studios for 20 years now. I always liked being there. Even after the drums were done. I wasn't always doing it though. I had 4-tracks and stuff. Working with Mitchell [Froom] and Tchad [Blake] [ Tape Op #16 & #133 ] kind of made things click after a while.

What were they doing that inspired you?

T: Mitch was doing arrangement stuff that really made a lot of sense to me. Just clearing space — a lot of it in the bass. He knows a lot about R&B. So not only did it help AMC a lot because the music is pretty thick, but it made a lot of sense to me. So we spent a month with him doing that cleaning stuff. Then we went to L.A. and met Tchad and his whole thing. I think the first song we recorded is on the Mercury record. Tchad had never heard it before, but in setting up the mics one of the first things he did, besides putting up the Neumann [binaural] head, which was always there right in front, was like a bamboo pipe between the snare and a 57. Of course, it was perfect for the song. That's kind of giant, you know. I mean, how did he know that? Why was it perfect? It sounded like that from the first take. Maybe what I got from Tchad was just kind of put up mics in a way that seems like it is going to be good and hear how that sounds and then react to that. He was a lot less into moving mics around but rather using what is happening. He'll fuck with the EQ or the signal chain rather than the mics. So less is more mic'ing.

Tim, what was your first place like, the one before this one?

T: It was called Pig's Head. It was AMC's rehearsal space. At first it was ADATs and a little Allen and Heath board. Just that. But then you just start buying stuff...

What kind of other stuff goes on here at Closer?

T: All kinds of little stuff. I end up working a lot with singer-songwriter type people, which I like. You know, a lot of people without a band, really. So I end up playing on it and recording it. That's how I know if things are working, if I hear them coming back with the right feeling. When I play drums on it I kind of direct it, which I hope is not selfish of me. I haven't found myself working with a lot of bands, although that's really a lot more fun in a certain way. You know, it's a lot easier for me than playing and recording. Getting the sounds is a lot harder to do when you are the only drummer in the room.

What is the setup in here at this point?

T: We have a Trident 24 from the early '90s. We have an [Otari] MTR-90 Mark II 2" machine. It has given us no trouble. We have some outboard gear, all that we can afford at the moment. We have a Manley ELOP. The Avalon 737 mic pre, compressor thingy. A couple of Brent Averill Calrec modules with EQ, which I like a lot. I use them for overheads and guitars. We have some Scully mic pres. A stereo Tube-Tech compressor. I love recording studios. I'm sad that they're going away — it's so great to have a big recording studio. It's a great place to make records, in a studio where you can really spend time, and not have it cost a thousand dollars a day. That's where you can really collaborate and you can have ideas right there and do them. That, to me, is way better than sitting in your bedroom.

What do you think is going to happen to the recording industry and where do you think it's going to go?

T: I don't know. It's really downsizing. The price has to come down somehow, and people have to be able to afford to spend days in a studio, and find that sound, find the right guitar that makes the right sound for the song and stuff. There's got to be a way to do both, to have it both ways. It's a shame if it goes away.

How does Mark feel about doing vocals? Is it sort of 'track a bunch and comp' or 'punch'?

T: Kind of tracked several in, comp.

What mic do you use?

T: It was the Neumann U87 a lot. Some of the last vocals got done in Texas, and that was a Manley Cardioid Reference mic. It's beautiful sounding. He's a little bit hard to record.

He's very dynamic?

T: Yeah.

So how did you manage the range?

T: Two compressors a lot. We got to the Manley ELOP... maybe get bumped down a dB or two, just barely. And then to the Tube-Tech with a limiter, because within one song he can go from so quiet to very loud. So basically two compressors, one more as a limiter. And that worked good. You don't hear it as compression that much that way.

You had no producer on this record?

T: Yeah, we learned a lot of good things and a lot of things not to do. That was one of the first things we went into with this: "We can do this ourselves." It's kind of time that we did it.