Could you talk a little bit about Playtime?
Playtime was an idea I had for a recording studio many, many years ago when I first got into recording. You want to be a singer/songwriter, and you just go buy a tape machine to start recording what you're trying to do, and the next thing you know, in your free time, you record somebody else. And therein lays a whole new joy — in helping people get their ideas on tape. I moved to Portland, Maine for a year and rented out the first floor of a house. I got permission to use this room in the basement, which was directly underneath my living room, and it was big enough to put a live band in. So for a year I recorded basically every new wave or punk band in Portland, Maine. Right about the time I'd kind of worked with everybody that was pretty cool and kind of happening in Portland, some of the things that I'd been working on were starting to get noticed in Boston. So it was recommended that I get down there as quickly as possible and form a band. At this point I'd moved up to a 1/2" 8-track machine, so we had quite a bit of flexibility and fidelity for the time. So I moved to Boston and basically just jumped in. I worked for a little while selling recording equipment, managing a stage in a rock club. The next thing I knew I got asked to go out on my very first tour as a soundman and tour manager. I think it was about 1989. I moved in with a girl I was seeing who lived in a loft down in South Boston, and it immediately hit me that this was the place to set up a real studio — in other words, have two rooms and really have a control room for a change, as opposed to a phenomenon where we all sit together amidst the gear. I had that for almost fifteen years. Towards the end Playtime was really pretty developed; the technology was coming along, the first computer happened in the latter part of the '90s and digital interfaces . . . And then unfortunately the building was sold-I had to move out at the end of 2003.So I lost a great deal of my investment. I had built out in this building for my recording studio, and it was just impossible to take everything with me — hardwood floors that had been refinished, all the drywall, etc. But we pulled what we could and much of it is here at Hi- N-Dry now: the sliding glass doors that you see separating the tracking room from the offices came from my studio; the drum risers came from my studio — so part of Playtime kind of lives on here at Hi-N-Dry.
What have you been recording recently?
