Flashback: It's the summer of 1986 and one of the omnipresent radio staples of the season is a bouncy little new wave number about nuclear holocaust. Timbuk 3's "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" was the feel-good downer of the summer. It was produced by a studio-guitarist-turned-producer from Mississippi named Dennis Herring. Fast forward to the summer of 2004: One of the most heard numbers blasting from radios is "Float On" by Modest Mouse, a bouncy little new wave number about life and death, another feel- good downer produced by Dennis Herring. In the last 20 years, Herring has come full circle — both musically and geographically.
Growing up in Saltillo, a tiny town just north of Elvis Presley's birthplace of Tupelo, Herring headed west upon graduation to make his way in the music business. "I moved to L.A. when I got out of high school to be a studio musician, and it worked," says Herring, now in his mid-40s. "I did that for about six years, I guess. I burned out and started playing around, recording things in my basement. And I ended up being a producer." These days, Herring is back in north Mississippi, settled into Oxford, a college town best known as the birthplace of author William Faulkner. There, he operates Sweet Tea Recording, which has played host to a wide range of artists that encompasses Modest Mouse, Buddy Guy, Elvis Costello, Jars of Clay, Garrison Starr, the Crimea, and Jimbo Mathus.
Initially reticent to leave Los Angeles, a stint in the Northwest convinced Herring that many artists might be willing to go elsewhere to record. "I went to Seattle and helped a friend of mine start a record label," Herring said. "I was afraid that, by being out of L.A., I wouldn't get producing work anymore. But I started calling these people, saying, "Would you mind coming to Seattle to work?" And people were more excited to go somewhere else to work than to come to L.A. and work. "That's what really started to open my eyes to the idea that I could live wherever I wanted to."
It was also about that time that Herring realized that he missed the land he couldn't wait to leave when he was younger. "I'd find myself thinking about how the South kind of has this thing, and how people all over the world long to have a thing," he said. "And the South actually has one, and I missed that. I missed it a lot in musical terms. I missed being more deep inside a thing." In time, Herring got serious about relocating and began searching for the proper place. "I'd been thinking about moving to a smaller town, but still with a high quality of life," he said. "So I went and stayed in some different places, sussing them out. I stayed in Austin. I went to Athens, I went to Chapel Hill, just wandering." Oxford was also on his list. Just before going there, Herring received a demo from a label of a band that consisted of mainstays Neilson Hubbard and Clay Jones (called Spoon at the time, they eventually changed their name to This Living Hand in deference to the Texas band with the same name). Not knowing the band's origins, Herring expressed an interest in working with them. "So I called the label and told them, 'Hey, I really love this thing.' And they said, 'Yeah, it's these two guys in Oxford, Mississippi. One guy does all the music and stuff, and the other guy's the singer.' So I go, 'Hmm, that music guy's pretty good,'" Herring said, referring to Jones, who today works with Herring at Sweet Tea and is a burgeoning producer in his own right.
That prescient visit to Herring's homeland yielded one moment that sold him on his ultimate destination. On his last day in town, Herring had breakfast at Smitty's, a local institution on the Square then operated by an elderly matron, Ms. Louise, who was working the cash register on this particular morning. Herring's dad, who'd driven over from Saltillo, struck up a conversation with Ms. Louise, pointing out that his son was considering a move to Oxford. As a bit of parting advice, she told the Herrings, "I can tell you something about Oxford: We don't suffer fools, but we tolerate our eccentrics." "
That pretty much sealed it for me," Herring said. Not long after Herring settled in Oxford, Geffen Records approached him about producing Garrison Starr's debut album with the caveat that there was already a producer on board, so he'd have to share credit with that producer, who wound up being Jones. That project paved the way for Herring and Jones' other collaborations. While Jones is beginning to get notice as a producer for his work with Starr, Hubbard, Trent Dabbs and Tywana Jo Baskette, his role at Sweet Tea is a good deal more flexible.
"My role has evolved to kind of an all-purpose floater," Jones said. "In recent times, I've been doing a lot of engineering and stuff like that, and I've ended up doing a lot of Pro Tools, kind of becoming the person who can sit around and do the Pro Tools stuff that needs to be done."
According to Herring, "On the second Buddy Guy record we did, Clay was the photographer. They did a cover based on one of his photos, and he was hired as the photographer for the project. And on the Elvis Costello record we just finished, Clay and Chris [Sheppard] and I mixed the record. Clay had as much of a role as Chris or I."
Located a stone's throw from downtown Oxford, Sweet Tea's building consists of two main rooms. While they are ostensibly considered "tracking" and "control" rooms, both are used extensively for recording. The control room is huge, with bookshelves and a bar that runs down the middle of the space, separating the Neve console and considerable stacks of outboard gear (much of it built by local gear whiz Frank Lacy) from the "opium pit," a comfortable sitting area furnished with vintage furniture. A drum kit surrounded by makeshift baffles constructed from antique doors belies the multipurpose nature of the space. The tracking room is only slightly smaller, with the same tall ceilings and retro decorating as the room on the other side of the glass.
According to Herring, his facility is an ever- evolving work in progress. "When I was a studio musician in L.A., I worked for a lot of 'real producers' and 'real engineers' in 'real studios.' People started coming to me, wanting me to produce things when I was in my early 20s, so I went to some of the studios I was working in and asked them what it would take for me to come in at two in the morning to work on something. And usually, people would just give me free time, and sometimes engineers would volunteer themselves."
"The thing I found, working in studios like that, was that I could never quite get comfortable, coming from a producing point of view," Herring continued. "I couldn't really get things to sound the way I thought they wanted to sound, and I didn't really know how to do it myself. There's that pressure that, 'We've gotta be out of here by five in the morning, or so-and-so's coming in at noon, so we've gotta leave.'"
One project Herring worked on eventually landed a major label deal. When the corporate giant decided against hiring the upstart to produce the project, they paid Herring off for his previous work. "I took that money and bought a bunch of recording stuff and put it in the basement of my house, and that always just worked better for me," he recalled. "This was in the early '80s when people really didn't have home studios so much, but to me that just seemed more like the way you'd do it."
It didn't take long for that basement setup to produce results, and soon a recording Herring produced for Timbuk 3 ended up on the desk of IRS Records president Miles Copeland. "Well, the next thing you know, I do this record for IRS, and it had a hit on it," Herring said. "I'd done all this on my little Fostex 8-track down in my basement. So I was thinking, 'Golly, I better figure this out, because now I'm going to have to do other records, and I can't just sit here and do them on a Fostex 8-track.'"
When he moved to Oxford, Herring planned to set up a studio that was geared toward overdubbing. "If you knew what you were doing, you could say we need two weeks or ten days or whatever to track a record, and you could usually do that. It's sort of the same thing for mixing a record," he explained. "But this whole thing of overdubbing is more amorphous. Sometimes they'd take a week; sometimes they'd take six months. And it should be that way if it wants to. I like it when it can stretch out when it wants to or you can tighten it up if you want to."
Starting with a 2" Ampex tape machine, a few mics and a "shitty" console, Herring went to work. "You could always cut tracks anywhere, you could always mix anywhere, but you could bring the tapes to my studio and play," he said. "That would be the workshop. You could just sit with a singer and really figure out how to do a song. I wanted to work with bands that I thought were really cool, but they usually didn't have any budget. But this was a way they could make records that were just as good as the major label records, because you could have more time. And I could do that by underwriting the costs of overdubs a lot."
In time, though, Herring realized he needed to be able to do entire projects on site. The purchase of his Neve console was, as he calls it, "the missing piece of the puzzle."
Although Herring has continued to travel when necessary (Virginia to work with Cracker or to California to work with Counting Crows, for example), the vast majority of his work now takes place at Sweet Tea. It's an excellent workplace, put together to suit Herring's unique tastes. "This doesn't have to be a studio that caters to everybody," Herring said. "You don't have to convince 50 different producers to bring their projects here. As long as I can get it to kind of work and we can do the kind of records we want to make and we can do our best... If something seems like a hindrance, we try to spend some money and fix it."
Herring's long experience in various studios contributed to his vision for his own space,. "I've never really liked real treated rooms, like these real official recording studio spaces," he explained. "It's like when you really have fun listening to music, where are you? You're usually in your living room, or you're in your car, or in some club. Those are the places where music really sounds good and the idea of music sounding better than that somewhere only for 90 percent of people to hear it in their boat or in the bathtub. That never really made a lot of sense to me.
"I'd also done a record at Kingsway in New Orleans, Daniel Lanois' studio. He was going on the road, and he was kinda inviting people to come down and do records, so I came down and did an Innocence Mission record there. That was really eye-opening, because there was no tracking room or control room. If you didn't sit right up next to the near-field monitors, it just sounded crazy. If you sat three feet back, it sounded like there was reverb on everything. At first, you were going, 'How do you make records like this?' But within a week I was like, 'Yeah, this is how you should make records.' This is just more environmental."
Gesturing to the plush, comfortable couch and chairs arranged around a coffee table in the back of the control room, Herring said, "I really like the idea of the 'opium pit.' When you're the guy who sits at the console all the time, the band needs to be in the room, the artists need to be near the music, and you need them reacting to stuff because that helps. At the same time, they're not going to just sit and listen and shut up. They're going to talk, or they're going to have friends over, or they're going to be having their dinner or something.
"That's always been difficult to me, in the studio, when you have that couch right behind you and everybody sits on that couch and you have to listen to the music really loud at the console, or you can't tell what's going on. I like the idea that you can extend the control room and make a sitting area back here, where everybody can still hear the music. But if we're sitting here talking and somebody's at the console working, they can still work, and they wouldn't have to monitor that loud to avoid us being a distraction. You suddenly have two spaces when you do it like that."
The size and layout of the control room allows Herring and Jones to record plenty of music in that one room. "We did these two records with Buddy Guy, and the idea for the second one was to be all acoustic. Some of the songs had a rhythm section — a drummer with brushes and an upright bass, two acoustic guitars and vocals. I thought about it, and it just made sense to set everything up in a circle in here," he said of the back of the control room. "When we started, the drums were too loud, so we ran outside and got these two old doors and turned them into baffles. They sounded really good, and it seemed neat to have a drum set up in here.
"For example, on the Modest Mouse thing, they told me ahead of time that they always wanted to record where they could have an electric setup and an acoustic setup. So we just set up an acoustic thing in here, so we could cut everything live and still keep our electric setup in the other room."
It's not every day that you see a studio control room with a wall partially covered in corrugated metal, let alone one entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, but Herring says he liked the aesthetic, down home quality of the mixed media, regardless of their inherent acoustical properties. "I've done an extensive study into studio design and I like to call it 'common sense.' You know, if it sounds too live, put some rugs on the floor," he said. "And you wouldn't want to set up the console so that the monitors faced the tin. That wouldn't be a good idea. A lot of glass isn't good, so let's put curtains on the windows. I had the idea to put these shelves here with these books on it, because books are real good for sound deadening."
As snazzy as their home base is, with its access to two-inch tape, Otari Radar digital formats, both Jones and Herring are excited about the possibilities of using Pro Tools — if nothing else, for its portability. ("I love the idea of an editing lab I can carry in my backpack," Herring said.) For instance, their recent collaboration on singer-songwriter Trent Dabbs' debut release for the Sweet Tea label was born at Jones' home on his PC. "That was mostly recorded at my house on Pro Tools, with no gear or anything, kinda sitting around building stuff," Jones said. "And then that culminated into this co-production extravaganza."
Said Herring: "Clay had started doing these things with Trent at his house, and he played 'em for me. I thought they were great, so I signed him to the label. Somewhere in there, Clay kinda melted down, so the record company stepped in and fired him, and took over the project. So we had the president of the label come in and decide he would finish the record, which was me. But then Clay got real motivated when I started working on it, so he and I both finished it." Of his contributions to the Dabbs project, Jones laughed and said, "Probably about two percent of the time, I worked with actual humans. Then the other 98 percent, I just worked with myself."
That same approach was used on the Tywana Jo Baskette record Jones produced for the in-house label. "You track a record with just guitar and vocal, and just build from there," he said. "It's a weird way to make a record, but it's really fun in some ways. There is something kind of backwards about it."
Herring jumped in on the conversation, theorizing, "It could be true that the cheaper gear gets, the more any concept of recording or making records really becomes a projection of ego. It's more connected to the id. If you would rather be sitting by yourself, then that's where you'll be. If you'd rather be around a bunch of people, that's where you'll be. These days, you can do it either way.
"You can make cool records all kinds of different ways. It used to be, you couldn't. You'd have guys with lab coats and stuff."
Still, despite his recent work, Jones admits, "I'm ready for some human interaction. I like working with bands. I'm ready to be the guy sitting there, saying, 'That's good,' or, 'That's not so good.'"
Herring laughed loudly, warning, "You're romanticizing it when you say that. I'm just thinking about the Elvis [Costello] record, where you're just hanging on to a rope! That concept of saying, 'That's good' or, 'That's not so good' quickly turns into, 'I'm losing grip on the rope!'" Jones says the Costello record was cut mostly live, with monitors instead of headphones. "The bleed was crazy," he recalled.
Another good example of Jones' input at Sweet Tea is the Modest Mouse single, "Float On". According to Herring, "We were into mixing, and we weren't sure what we wanted to do with the 'breakdown' section of the song. So we dumped it into Pro Tools, and Clay took it home and worked on it. The next day, he brought back five options of what we could do, and we chose the one where he just cut it in half."'
Asked to discuss the differences in their methods, Herring directed his comments to Jones, measuring his words, "I can see that you're sort of naturally more reflective with music, and I'm a little more naturally wanting it to blow up." "But it's only in degrees," Herring continued. "Clay can definitely make shit blow up, and I can be reflective about some things." Herring asked Jones if he agreed. "I think it's definitely accurate," Jones said, adding, "I think," causing another wave of laughter.
Still, the Sweet Tea experience has been an exciting one for Jones, who, in his early 30s, is some 14 years Herring's junior. "Being a person trying to be a producer, you almost can't quantify how much I've learned from being around records being made with Dennis," Jones said. "I don't work on everything [Herring produces], but I usually end up being involved one way or the other. It's just been amazing, having this place for a venue in which to learn how to make records."
Indeed, Sweet Tea's array of gear allows for much flexibility. For instance, the recent Elvis Costello record was recorded using a variety of formats. According to Jones, "It was tracked on the 2" machine, then dumped into the Radar and the overdubs were done [there]. We use that in tandem with Pro Tools. We transfer things to Pro Tools to work on them, then put them back in the Radar."
Herring has seen a lot of "hot" gear come and go over the past two decades, from his original Fostex 8-track to the modern digital media. He still clings to plenty of old equipment, including a Korg SDD first-generation digital delay he's had since his days as a studio musician. "It still gets used everyday," he said. Even so, Herring's completely enthused by modern possibilities.
"This is a really interesting era for recording," he surmised. "Stuff is so good that it's more fun than ever to record. It's ridiculous what you can do."
