How did your first album come about?
Jon Auer: We made Failure in my house that I lived in while I was in high school — my father's house. My father was a musician and into recording, and I was very fortunate that he had me as a child. He dropped a lot of coin at one point, buying [at that time] some serious home recording equipment. I think it was a Tapco C-12 board, and a Tascam 80-8 with the dbx cards. He also had a friend who was somewhat of a high-end dealer, who dealt gear out of his house. This was all pre-eBay and the whole Internet thing, so you'd have to find people who had the connections to actually physically acquire this stuff.
Kind of like a drug dealer.
JA: Exactly. So, I got hooked on [recording gear] really, really young. I was twelve or thirteen when I had an 8-track studio in my house. Then meeting Ken, he and I [would] work on all sorts of things together, basically just hang out in the studio and do our thing. Eventually, we came around to the concept of doing The Posies from just being really into pop songs and wanting to make a real pop record. We just said, "Fuck it. We're going to do it ourselves." I play drums well enough and we both could play bass and guitar, so Ken and I set about making the record. We did it in a very odd way — I actually did the drums to a click track, but there were no instruments playing. I don't know why we didn't lay down a scratch track of a guitar or vocal or anything, but I literally played all of the drum parts singing the songs and the arrangements in my head. Ken would [also] be singing along in the control room and he'd hit the talkback and say, "Okay, I think the bridge is coming here." It was a really minimal set-up. The Tapco C-12 is a great, cool sounding console, honestly. The preamps maybe were noisy, but they actually sounded pretty good. Beyond that, I actually had one of the first sidecars they made that was a companion to the C-12. It was an eight-channel sidecar that you connected with this cable in the back. That became the playback side. I'd use the rest for effects and for preamps for recording. I had some small JBL speakers — I can't remember what exactly. I had a Lexicon PCM 42, a [Yamaha] Rev 7. We mostly used one compressor, which was an old Symetrix — I think a 150 or a CL-150 — a fast RMS compressor. That was really the sound of the heavily compressed vocals on that record. I also had a pair of Electro-Voice — I think they were 4500s. They were the mono spring reverbs with the long and short spring in them. That's really the sound of that record.
Awesome.
JA: The other thing about that record is that we needed more than eight tracks. So, we did the thing of mixing the instruments down to two tracks. But the way I did it, I had a cassette deck that had dbx on it — a Pioneer cassette deck. Since we needed eight tracks and we didn't have room to leave two tracks open, I actually mixed all the instruments down to this cassette deck, put [that sub-mix] back on the 8- track, and then we did six tracks of vocals for songs, then mixed it back to that cassette deck again, and that's what the CD is made from.
Oh my god.
JA: It's made from a cassette master. There were no DAT machines. We had a 2-track Revox, but it was broken. The mixing of that record was what I thought would be the most daunting task, although since I had already done sub-mixes of all the instruments, I didn't have many options left as far as that. One night I just said, "Screw it" and I stayed up from midnight until six in the morning and mixed the whole record in six hours — and that was that. I handed it to Ken and I said, "Hey, I just kind of got inspired to go ahead and do this." I think I mixed it on headphones. Then we made cassettes from that cassette and sold about eight hundred of them out of our backpacks in Bellingham and Seattle, where Ken was going to college before I moved down there. Without getting too maudlin or cliché, I really gotta put a shout out in there to my dad, because I don't think The Posies would have been born at all. Or they might have been born, but they wouldn't have had what essentially became a great demo tape for us — that became a record — that became what got us our deal with Geffen... so thanks Dad!
For Dear 23, I seem to remember Jon telling me years ago that you all had to put together the studio, basically. The studio had some gear, but you had to bring more gear in or something like that.
Ken Stringfellow: We worked with an existing studio, which at the time was called Crow Recording. It's now the same space, but not the same gear — called Jupiter Studios. We liked the space, but John Leckie said basically, "I'm gonna rent every piece of gear that I'm gonna use, and I'm not going to use anything that's here except the tape machine." And all of a sudden there was an API board brought in.
