Oh, Fuck! : A conversation with Kyle Statham of the San Francisco combo known as Fuck.

Fuck. Okay, here's the story. I saw Fuck play a show a while before this interview. I was unimpressed, but several people said they loved their records and that the show was great after "getting into" said records. "Okay," I said, and filed that away. Not much later, Pardon My French, a new CD on Matador, arrives at Tape Op world headquarters and it's pretty damn great. The big bonus is that Kyle Statham, drummer, etc. for Fuck, owns a recording studio and has recorded all the Fuck material plus some other fine bands (like Snowmen). And, as it turns out, Fuck began as a recording project, and still build all their songs in the studio. A definite Tape Op kind of band. I cornered Kyle before a recent show in Portland where they played with the magnificent Two Dollar Guitar and put on a show themselves that I was much more "into". Rock on!

So, your studio's name is Black-Eyed Pig. How did it come about that you were recording bands?

Probably the same way a lot of people get started.  I played in bands for a while and had a little cassette four track pretty early on.  Then I got a couple of these ¼" Dokorder reel to reel machines.  I had two of those and was recording whatever band I was in and started recording some other friends.  I was moving out of an apartment in the Mission into North Beach and both tape decks were stolen out of the car.  I had renter's insurance, which covered them!  They were both made in the mid-seventies, I would guess, and when they were made they were very expensive; a couple of thousand dollars.  The clause they had was for replacement costs, so they take how much they were worth then and they increase it by the cost-of-living index for twenty years. 

So you decided you'd better buy some real equipment then.

Right!  The option is that you can take cash for them for the depreciated value of the objects, which meant the decks were worth $25 each, or I could go out and buy something new, up to a certain level.  The problem was that I had to buy something brand new and I couldn't go over this limit.  It put me in an awkward position, machine wise.  I ended up getting a machine that I don't like.  I got a ¼" Tascam that I do like-it's a BR 20 — that I do like. 

Eight track?

No, it's just a ¼" 2 track.  I got a mixdown deck first 'cause I knew I wanted one of those.  Then I got a ½" 16 track that I don't like at all.  It's also a Tascam.  It's the DBX which is the problem.  The narrow format you just can't run without noise reduction and the noise reduction doesn't sound very good. 

It's got that sorta weird compression on it.

It just kills the high end.  I think those machines were originally made to do post-production, dialog for movies and such, so to actually do music on them you gotta really battle them.  This was all pre-ADAT and all that stuff. 

I don't know if you're better off one way or the other with that.

It's hard to say.  It'd be nice to have been able to kick in some of my own money and get something decent.

You couldn't buy anything used? You should have worked out a deal with a friend at a music store... buy something and bring it right back. So when was that?

That would have been seven years ago. 

So you had that stuff...

Yeah, and a crappy, old piece-of-shit mixer, one reverb and two mics.  So I had a brand new 16 track, a brand new 2 track, and 2 microphones.  I was in the process of moving into this little place in North Beach, it was this little cottage behind a Victorian, and it had been built after the earthquake as temporary housing and they never tore it down.  The place had no foundation, it was just sitting on pilings, and you could go under the house and you could see that there were just beams sitting on stacks of bricks.  Over the years the thing had settled so much you couldn't open any of the doors or the windows.  We would always look for tables with three legs, 'cause those would stand.  Anything with four legs; no way.  It was this little-bitty four room place.  It had a kitchen and every other room was all about the same size, 9 by 12.  I lived in one and turned one into a control room and one into a studio.  It was so cramped.  We made a lot of records there. 

Did you ever have a noise problem there?

Yeah, but I tried to do mostly quiet stuff.  Sometimes on the weekend we'd have one loud band track. 

What bands did you work with there?

There's this woman, Sonya Hunter; kind of a singer-songwriter and we did a lot of her stuff.  Lots of local bands demos.  A friend of mine had a studio that went out of business and he wanted to do some recording after that and instead of him paying me I took it all in gear.  I got a whole bunch of good mics, some decent outboard gear and a ton of mic stands.  Then we were rolling.  Then I got the Mackie board.  A 24 by 8 bus. I've got a 32 by 8 and it's kind of a luxury to have so many channels. I don't use mine for in-line tracking very often.  There's lots of good things about the board but if you do it in-line there's no mutes on the mix-B path.

I've only used that for a couple of headphone mixes.

If you run it in-line and use that for tape playback... sometimes it's hard.  So I had that place in North Beach for about three years and then I moved to an actual commercial work space down in the Tenderloin in S.F.  It has a store front at street level and then a basement of this apartment building.  It's about 2500 square feet or so.  It's pretty big.  It had been abandoned and was just a mess down there.  It was full of shit.  The landlord had owned a couple of other buildings and every time something broke, or didn't work, instead of paying to get rid of it he just threw it in the basement.  We cleaned it all up and soundproofed the room.  We put in some great big windows.  I didn't have any windows for the control room in my other place.  I still have some problems, leakage wise, with the bass cabinets, but everything else seems to be pretty contained. 

Are there people upstairs from where you record?

Yeah.  I'm in the basement and on the first floor there are offices.  Above that is where people live. 

But you don't rent the offices or stuff.

I have just one of them.  The other half is a lawyer's office but he's hardly ever there.  Almost all the work that we do is on weekends or the evening anyhow.  There's only one guy we ever get noise complaints from and he lives two floors up and he can't hear us but he sleeps on the floor and he can feel the bass. 

Did you ever think about buying him a futon?

I've thought about a lot of things...  He's wrecked a bunch of people's sessions. 

He's come down and said to stop?

Yeah, and I basically have to.  He's had some problems with other people in the building too.  One day two guys that live next door to him beat the shit out of him and there was an ambulance out front.  At the new place we've done a bunch of cool stuff.   We did a bunch of Snowmen stuff.  There's a record that is finished.  It's one of the favorite things I've ever worked on.  We did a deal for Richard Buckner that turned out really good.  He came in for a whole day and wanted to catalog his songs.  He did about 20 songs.  It was really fun. 

Are there any other CD releases you've worked on?

There's a woman, her name is Alice Beirhorst, and we did some records for her.  She plays a lot in San Francisco.  We did some more things for Sonya.  We did these Pat Thomas records that have been coming out in Germany.  Pat's an archive now.  He collects everything.  If Bob Dylan farts, Pat's got it on tape!  Rich [Avella] and I did something the other day that was really fun.  It was this Little Princess 7".  It's an 8 song 7". 

So how does it work out. I assume your rent is pretty low.

Yeah, it is. 

And you've got other people working out of there?

Rich has done some pretty cool stuff.  He did this Skypark 7" which is coming out on the Mod Lang label.  This guy, Rick Wilson, has done a lot of stuff. He's doing a new Sonya Hunter record down there right now. 

So the place is busy.

It stays pretty busy. 

What are your hourly rates?

Twenty-five bucks an hour.  We do daily lockouts for $200.  For Rick or Rich I charge them ten bucks an hour and they can charge whatever they want.  It's good for them 'cause they get some hands-on experience and they can get paid $15 an hour, which in San Francisco is pretty hard.  People take on studio apprenticeships where they don't get paid at all. 

So you like where it's at now?

Yeah, it got easier and easier and the truth is I don't have time to do it.  If someone else wasn't working down there I would have a hard time justifying keeping it open.  I'm only there less than six months a year.  This tour is 10 or 12 weeks but there's a week or two ahead of time just getting ready for it and already there's talk of it getting extended.  I actually start to feel guilty, sometimes, if I'm not using it enough.  It's a shame to have it all and not be cranking on it. 

But now you've got two people in there working. Are they watching the books and paying the bills while you're gone?

I do it from here.  I kind of have all my bills consolidated in a few places so I can just call up and say, "What do I owe you?"

What's Fuck's process of working in the studio?

Tim lives in New York, Ted and Geoff live in Oakland and I live in San Francisco.  Even Ted and Geoff; I don't see those guys until it's time to go out and tour or it's time to record.  Most of the songs; someone has the basic idea.  They have a boom-box tape of it or something that they recorded at home.  We'll swap tapes a couple of weeks before we're supposed to get together to record, listen to each other's stuff, assemble at my place, and compare notes.  First, we'll set up everything to record that we think we're gonna need.  Set up the drums and mic them up.  Mic up all the guitars... set up some keyboard and mic those up.  We'll pick the songs.  When we start playing we'll kind of jam through them a bit and as soon as it comes into a place we would be happy to work from we'll record it.  Sometimes it takes 10 or 20 minutes and sometimes it takes a couple of hours.  If anyone's got any specific ideas we'll go from there or we'll just say, "That's fine.  What's next?" 

Do you do overdubs right away while you're working on the song?

Guitar overdubs or backing vocals.  We usually do a lot of those in one session.  25 or 30.  Everyone will take those tapes home and we'll decide which ones are worth pursuing.  The first few records we put out ourselves so we really took our time.  Some of those, from the time a song was recorded to the time it came out, took a year.  Now we work a little faster.  We'll get back together the next time, maybe at the end of a tour.  We have all this stuff, and we'll focus on ten songs and these other two, where the song is right but we got bad versions so we need to re-record the basics.  We'll pick one, usually, and work it all the way to the end; mix it and everything.  Then we'll pick another song...

So it's much different than your typical studio assembly line process.

We kind of do it backwards in some sense. 

When you do this stuff are you doing a lot of the engineering?

We've never had anybody outside in.  It would be a trying process for someone.  It's actually boring to watch people write songs.  From an engineering standpoint, my least favorite sessions are when bands come in and are not prepared and do not know what they want to do.  When we record that's exactly how I'd describe it.  We have no idea.  For someone who's not in the band and doesn't have a vested interest... they would just be bored to tears.  We could probably chart a suicide rate here.  I've been doing most of the engineering.  If I need to do an overdub or something, I can tell one of those guys what to do.  As far as patching stuff in, loading reels, dialing up reverb programs and understanding parametric EQ... they aren't very interested I don't think.  They are at first but if you don't use what you've learned it kind of goes away. 

It seems like kind of a spontaneous band. It doesn't feel like things were labored over and played for two years.

A lot of us aren't very good musicians, and we knew that from the beginning, so there's no point trying to spend two days to try and get a guitar solo "perfect" because we never could.  The same thing with a vocal.  We understand what our limitations are and we try and spend our time wisely.  When I first met Tim and we first started working on this we'd been in bands before and neither of us liked to practice.  It seems like bands go through this cycle.  You get a bunch of people who are into something, you jam and rehearse through some stuff and learn some songs, six months later it's time for the first show, another half a year and then it's time to record... It's a long time to wait.  We said, "Well, we'll do it the opposite.  We won't rehearse and we won't play any shows... We'll just record."  He would come over one day a week to my house after we met.  He'd call in sick every Tuesday.  One of us would pick a song and we'd learn it, record it, overdub and mix it and it'd be done.  We did that for a few months until we had enough for a whole record.  We started thinking about playing live and that's when we got Ted to come be a part of it.  This idea of not really rehearsing and spending a lot of time deciding what we wanted to do... it's been like that from the beginning.  Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad.  Some stinker stuff gets done just because we don't do our homework. 

Stinky in a writing way?

Yeah.  There's some stuff where the basic song idea doesn't get the treatment it deserves.  Some where I think, "All the elements are here but we just fell down on the job."

Do you end up working stuff up differently live?

Definitely.  Also, when we record, everybody has different work schedules.  Usually Tim and I are always there but Ted and Geoff... sometimes they can make it and sometimes they can't.  So maybe on one song Tim and I play all the instruments and when we play it live some of the instrumentation might get dropped for something else.  We don't concentrate too hard on trying to reproduce the record live.  The decision we made not to practice and not to play too many shows... maybe it makes for some fresh recordings but it makes for some pretty beautiful live experiences.  The beginnings of our tours are not something you want to be a part of.  We never play together.  Ever.  We practice twice before a tour.  Hopefully by the 5th or 6th show it's getting close! 

Have you ever thought about recording your band live when you come off the end of a tour?

We did a press tour in May and June and we did a Peel session while we were there.  We played everything live; no overdubs.  It was mostly songs off the new record but the funny part is, except for one or two of them, we'd never played any of them before.  They were recorded in such a piecemeal way.  A lot of them, some people hadn't even played on yet.

It's funny. Pavement started out in a similar way.

That's what I've heard. 

And "big" bands seem to work that way, where they no longer tour the new, unrecorded, songs live but instead work them up in the studio.

You have to be careful.  Some of the stuff can be half-baked and you have to edit yourself very hard.   

I imagine with a process like that you're always gonna be throwing stuff out.

It's hard.  I can think of a couple of songs where it was as good as anything we've done but it's a bad version of it.  Usually the best ones get revisited.  That's a really hard decision to make when you really believe in the song but this isn't the right take and you know it's a gamble, "Well, if we don't put it on this record it may not get on another record." It's hard to edit yourself.

What kind of gear and mics have you been using at the studio?

I have an older pair of Sony C500's.  They look like giant ice cream cones!  It's a large diaphragm single pattern condenser mic.  There's a really hefty pad built into them and you can mic kick drums and floor toms.  It never craps out.  It's really good on really loud low-end stuff.  They're old mics so they need a lot of gain.  If you've got someone who's a quiet singer they're not very good.  If you've got someone with a lot of sibilance problems, like me, it's a good mic because it's not as detailed on top. 

Are they from the 70's?

I think so.  I have one of those new Audio Technica 4050's that I like a lot.  There's one of those Groove Tube mics in the studio that I really enjoy.  They aren't very transparent but I really enjoy their character.  They have their own sound but everybody always likes them a lot.  Rick just got one of those Rode tube mics that sounds really good.  

What kind of outboard gear do you have? Do you have any mic pre's?

We use the board a lot.  I can't think of anything interesting, really.  We have an old Lexicon model 200 reverb.  Only one input works but it sounds pretty good!  We have one of those Ensoniq DP4's which is really fun to play with but it has kind of a steep learning curve. 

Some of that gear is too much. You don't have the time to learn all the tricks.

Not too much.  We have a ¼" 2 track which I really enjoy to mix to.  And then we go to DAT player and we have a Digidesign rig to do 2 track editing on the Macintosh.  And I have a CD burner.

No way.

It's helpful for a lot of reasons.  We can make the CD's that they'll actually send to the plant and master from.  What we use it for a lot, also, is like when we did the Snowmen record those guys had 30 songs or something.  How do you pick and then come up with an order.  So we make everybody a CD.  They can take it home and test it out.  They can just call each other up and say, "Try this:  11, 5, 9..."  We do that in Fuck a lot too.  We never have time to do the editing while everyone's together.  We finish the recording and all the mixing, hopefully, and we do all the other work over the phone.  At first it seemed like a luxury but now I don't know how I'd get a lot of the stuff done without it. 

I really wish I had one. I don't have any computer editing either. There's the stand-alone's but...

If you want to get a stand-alone get one that you can burn masters off of you an get these really cheap ones but you can't use the discs they produce for mastering.  It's a good safety of the DAT.  For important stuff I'll usually mix to º" and DAT at the same time.  Then I'll make a safety copy of the º" on DAT. 

What do you end up using for CD masters?

The analog, 2 track stuff. 

You like the sound of that?

Yeah.  Most of the stuff I record we really hit the machine hard.  I hit it a little too hard on this last Fuck record on a few songs.  Usually you can really nail it. 

How hard?

If the meters go all the way down and never go back up... I've recorded like that.  On some songs you get it where it's just moving an eighth of an inch off the peg.  I don't know but it sounds really good.  It's a Tascam of all things.  You can probably buy one of these things new for $1000.  It's a great machine.  The transport is solid.  If the ½" 16 track I have was half as good as the 2 track I sure would like it a lot more. 

Are you thinking of getting a new tape deck?

Yep.  I've been searching and searching.  I thought I had a 2" 16 track.  This guy has this studio and he switched over to 2" 24 track a long time ago and he kept this 16 track as a backup if the 24 track goes down.  Which doesn't make any sense.  He was gonna sell it and it was a pretty good deal, only a couple of thousand bucks, and it needed a couple of thousand in work.  It was a really solid machine and it had an interesting history.  They'd done some Neil Young records on it.  But at the last minute, he changed his mind.  It was an old Ampex MM1000. 

They sound great. Have you ever recorded on a 2" 16 track before?

I don't think I have.  I've heard a lot of stuff that was done on them and I've really got my heart set on one. 

Just the detail that it captures is so much more interesting. Have you ever had any weird studio experiences?

I've only had to ask one guy to leave.  It was a long-term project and he was nuts.  Even when he wasn't recording this guy was just bananas.  It was gonna be an 18 month project and after a few months I just said, "Look, this isn't gonna work."  I found another studio, brought him over, I paid to transfer all the tapes from my format to the format they were using at this place and then I said, "He's all yours."

What was he gonna do for 18 months?

He was putting together a record, one track at a time.  He would start off and record the bass, guitar, scratch vocal and drums and then He'd throw away everything but the drum track and he'd go and replace everything one-at-a-time. 

Was he sloppy but a perfectionist?

I don't know if perfectionist is right.  He didn't have any really solid ideas.  He would set click tracks so he could put down bass and guitar parts.  On this one song he couldn't tell if it was supposed to be 89 or 90 beats per minute.  So what he did was he played it both ways and he had his girlfriend dance to it and he watched her dance and he said, "89". 

It's hard to say "no" to work but when you're gonna lose your mind...

That's the best part about the studio getting established and taking off is being able to say "no" to stuff.  A lot of it is really horrible and it makes you not want to record anymore.  I tell people that I'm retired and I don't do it anymore.  "I just do it for fun."  That way if they bought some record I made I can say, "Those were just my friends."  It can be extra-depressing to have someone leave such a foul taste in your mouth that you don't want to do the one thing you love.

Black-Eyed Pig, 1124 Sutter St., San Francisco, CA 94109