Tom Dube

Tom Dube wears a lot of different hats. He has worked as a producer, engineer, mixer, tour manager, videographer, photographer and nanny. Tom has produced, co-produced and engineered records by Catie Curtis, Richard Thompson, David Bowie/Tin Machine, Morphine, Session Americana, Twinemen, Mark Sandman, Scarce, Reeves Gabrel, Martin Sexton, Juliana Hatfield and countless others. In addition, Tom has worked on many tours as a soundman, tour manager and live sound recordist, with artists such as Aimee Mann, Suzanne Vega, Buffalo Tom, Bettie Serveert, Ivy, Ben Kweller, the Blake Babies, Dar Williams, Catie Curtis, Patty Larkin and many others. Tom and I met up at Hi-N- Dry Studio in Cambridge, MA, a place revered for its warm sound, good vibes and the inspiring creative legacy left by the studio's late founder, Mark Sandman, of the Boston bands Treat Her Right and Morphine. Sandman created Hi-N-Dry in a spacious, open loft on the fifth floor of an otherwise nondescript brick industrial building in an urban neighborhood. Sandman's spirit and presence live on at Hi-N-Dry. A vibrant and flourishing community of artists, producers and engineers connected in some way to Sandman, whether as friends, band mates, collaborators or members of groups influenced by Morphine, has developed in and around Hi-N-Dry. Hi-N-Dry now includes a record label that releases recordings made at the studio, including a new collection of Sandman's solo recordings entitled Sandbox, gleaned from the vast body of work that he left behind. Tom Dube has become one of a small group of talented and laid back house engineers and producers who work here on a regular basis. In addition, Tom has his own studio called Playtime, where he does a lot of what he calls "pre-mixing." Tom and I happened to sit down to chat in the Hi-N-Dry kitchen on a day when former Morphine members Dana Colley and Billy Conway were working on a Twinemen recording, one of their many current musical projects.

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?

I've been doing live recording for quite a while, kind of starting with Richard Thompson. In about 1994 I started doing multitrack work on the road and began to amass an arsenal of remote recording gear, which includes splitters, where every element onstage, every microphone or direct box can be split between my recording system and the house PA. That way I have control over the individual elements in the same way you would in a recording studio. And beyond that I've amassed an array of mic preamps — I probably have about thirty mic pres that can go out on the road. And each would then apply itself to one of the elements onstage. There are various mediums for the road: the [AKG] D88s that I used to use are kind of in retirement now. I have an Alesis hard disk recorder that records 24 tracks quite well, an HD24 — and it's remarkably reliable. So lately I have been recording not only Richard Thompson, but I've also done live albums for Marc Cohn, Suzanne Vega, Juliana Hatfield, Dar Williams and Dennis Brennan. In terms of proper session work, I engineered and mixed a record for Cormac McCarthy, who is a fairly well-known local folkie. Via my work with Cormac, I got involved with Bill Morrissey's record, which was happening here at Hi-N-Dry, and I ended up engineering and then mixing a great deal of that record. I do a lot of work at Hi-N-Dry that is almost incidental. It used to be that a producer or an engineer would be employed for the project, but I find myself now coming over here and kind of pitching in on projects when they need a little bit of extra help. I've come in here and set up to record a band's basic tracking, and after a playback of the first tune if the band's happy with the sounds, they're happy to let me go and just punch their way through the rest of the afternoon. So I'll come in for a few hours and just get somebody going. A couple records that I've done here that I'm really proud of are the Session Americana and Rick Berlin records. Both were done 100% live in a room to multitrack, and then some mixing. But both of those records, because of their integrity and organic honesty, are a couple of favorites of mine. Those were recorded live at Hi-N-Dry, then pre-mixed back at Playtime and then finish-mixed at Hi-N-Dry.

Do you have any favorite recording projects you've worked on over the years?

Most projects are great fun because of the camaraderie, the people and the spirit involved in it. I've been blessed to be involved with projects where people are living happy, healthy lives and the music is an extension of that. You do projects with the tortured artists who are very miserable, and you're helping and nurturing them too and there's definitely some pleasure there. A favorite was Catie Curtis's last record, which I co-produced at the last Playtime studio proper. The record was recorded in eight days, top to bottom. And in the middle of that, Catie's first daughter arrived from Guatemala. She and her partner had adopted. We had recorded basics for three days, things were going great and then her first child arrived from Guatemala. So we gave her a day off to go bond with the new family member — I think we did a day of guitar overdubs. When she came back, she was as happy and exultant and glowing as any mom would be, just in time to sing and play her parts for the record. It was just an amazing time, to see an artist on top of the world, in the midst of making a great record and then the baby visited the studio and we all got a taste of how much fun that was. I think a lot of times the projects I look back on with the most pleasure are the ones that happen quickly and easily. I once did a record in my loft for a jazz project called Plunge, which came out on a local label, Accurate Records — Russ Gershon's label. A guy who played trombone and wrote these tunes and wanted to record with some players in a studio approached me. He brought in some of the most incredible players I've ever worked with, including Bob Moses on drums, Avishai Cohen, who now plays bass for Chick Corea and Marcus Rojas on tuba. Marcus played with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. They had never seen the material as written before, but they came in and Marcus and Avishai would decide who was going to play the bass part. It could be the tuba or it could be the double bass. There was a great deal of inspiration and improvisation going on there, and we basically recorded the entire album in a day and a half and then spent a couple more days with Bob Moses, just overdubbing percussion for free, because he was so knocked out by the tracks that were played live. So that's one of those records — great people making a great record quickly. But there are always great moments in any project. As a producer it's your job to make those moments happen — whatever it takes. Sometimes I'll have a bunch of little comedy bits at the ready in an iPod or in the computer, and I'll just send a little joke through the headphones in the middle of a session, crack people up, make 'em realize it's not rocket science, it's not life or death.

Could you tell me a little bit about the history of Hi-N-Dry and Mark Sandman's work here?

Sure. I used to mix this band called Treat Her Right when they would play at this club called the Conservatory. I would really get off on them because they were bluesy and kind of old school. Then they got signed to RCA and went on tour, and it was a logical move to go on the road and tour with them. And sometime later the band was dropped from RCA and kind of splintered off into different directions. Mark Sandman and Billy Conway formed Morphine. I had been recording Treat Her Right off and on for a couple of years, so when Mark wanted to go record [he had] me come in and engineer. A lot of the recordings that I did for Morphine occurred either at Fort Apache in Cambridge or the old Q Division in South Boston. That's when I really got to work on 24-track 2" tape. And I think about half of the first Morphine album, which was called Good, I recorded and co-produced. And during this time Mark was living on Binney Street, but at some point I heard he found this great loft. I had a chance to visit it, and of course it instantly struck me as one of the ideal home laboratories — it had space, it had equipment. Because Morphine was doing really well Mark was able to go out and really get a lot of nice gear to record with. He used to be real happy with just a cassette 8-track machine — the fidelity was good enough for him.

Like a Tascam?

Yeah, I think it was the 688. A lot of great recordings came off of that, but he wanted to get a little bit better sound, and he ended up getting a 1" 16-track, and then later on getting a pair of Tascam D88s. He got the Soundcraft board and all the Tube-Tech and Lexicon gear, mics — an AKG C12, which sounds amazing on any singer. Hi-N-Dry was pretty much Mark's personal home studio. Mark never failed to capture every rehearsal, every demo — every attempt to make a record, there was tape rolling. He left an enormous body of work. Subsequently, people like Billy [Conway, Morphine drummer] and Dana Colley [Morphine baritone sax player] have sifted through and organized it. A lot of people came up here at Mark's insistence and tried things out. I was in Maine when Mark passed away, and I rushed back to Boston and came to Hi-N-Dry. There were about sixty people sitting here [at Hi-N-Dry], just trying to make sense of what had happened. I think we all looked around the room and knew that this room would have to continue to be the hub of activity for this music. Mark's musicality was such an influence on so many people, on so many bands. It's impossible to work here and not think about Mark's presence a lot. If some would argue that there are some technical concessions here, I would counter by saying whatever those technical concessions are, in this modern age of technology, we can fix those things. But the spirit that you capture here is really something. That's Mark's legacy.