Jon Lupfer and Mike Denneen
Tell me how Q Division began.
M: We went to high school together, and we had always talked about starting a production company or something. When we got to Boston, we just decided to do it.
J: We didn't know what we were doing!
Tell me about your first location.
M: It was the 4th floor of an old building in the South End of Boston, on Albany Street. There were 16-foot ceilings, and nobody was paying much attention to the building. Young people could get in there to build a studio, and no one really noticed.
Did you have to do a lot of build-out?
M: Tons. It was an empty shell. We hired two of our friends, an ex-con and one real carpenter.
J: We're not the most talented carpenters in the world, but we got good at "guerilla wiring." We overbuilt it, which turned out to be a good thing, because we could grow into it. We got a lot of help from Michael Blackmer, who is sort of a mad genius studio designer. He's the son of David Blackmer, who started dbx [and Earthworks]. He did a really great job with it. We built a really nice control room, a good live room and it served us well for a long time. We'd swap studio time for work. We spent more time than money.
M: We were the "guerilla recording studio" then — it was basically us and Fort Apache, who started about a year and a half before we did with a similar concept of "musician guys start a studio." All the other studios were engineer-driven.
J: They were sterile, recording-is-a-science environments. We needed work all the time, but we were cheap so we had it!
M: We were $250 for an eight-hour session, and you would get either him or me. We also identified engineers and producers who worked with bands, and we offered them free time.
What was the original setup like?
J: It was a Soundtracks console that we bought from "the guitar store" in town, and a 16-track, 1-inch Tascam, both of which turned out to be much better than you might think. Our best compressor was a dbx 160x, and our best microphone was a [Neumann] U87...
M: ...that I literally dropped the first day we took it out, and the head snapped off. And we had a pair of [AKG] 414s. J: We did a lot of strange things in the early days. I would get a vocal sound with an [Electro-Voice] RE20 and a [Neumann] KM 84 combined, trying to imitate a much nicer mic. It's actually not a terrible sounding combination!
Was there a watershed moment that changed your business situation?
M: One of the first bands we recorded was called The Buddy System, who were on The Basement Tapes on MTV during the first fall we had opened! They were friends with the people in 'Til Tuesday, and that's sort of how we started to meet all these various people.
J: We got in with the synth-pop crowd. I know it's sort of hard to put yourself in that mindset now, but that was a really big crowd back then.
M: So in '87, 'Til Tuesday came in to do pre-production for their third record. They had done half their record, and were demoing the second half before they went to record in New York. They came in for three weeks, and I think that was our first high-profile thing. Then the Pixies came in to do their second record [Surfer Rosa] around Christmas of '87.
Were you able to charge a higher rate because there was a bit more money behind them?
J: No, I don't think we were that smart yet — though I remember when we told them how much it would cost they were sort of like, "What? That little?"
How did the Pixies stuff come about?
J: They had done Come On Pilgrim at Fort Apache. There was some sort of disagreement that happened with their second record, and Paul Kolderie [issue #22] told them they should go to Q Division. I was an assistant on that session, and I was very inexperienced in working with outside producers. I tried to help. I said, "Here, this is what I do with the guitars," and [engineer] Steve Albini said, "Um, you should go away now..." [laughter] I had such little experience with certain things — I wasn't able to be a great assistant.
What was he doing that was new for you?
J: I remember him spending a lot of time getting the room mics set up. Those 414s I mentioned earlier? That pair was the sound of the studio. To this day, if I hear that record I say, "He really got it." And he used a [Sennheiser] 421 for [Kim Deal's] "Gigantic" vocal. That's not what a lot of people were doing at the time.
M: He used these little Shure SM98 condenser mics on an alligator clip on a guitar cabinet, and he would move them maybe four centimeters, go into the other room and listen, then come back and move them again. And no compression.
J: No compression, no noise reduction and very low levels — he did not want to mess with the headroom. I remember thinking it was a very big sound, but that it was really quite noisy. After that I realized, "Don't worry about noise, worry about headroom." It's a much bigger problem a lot of the time, and it's rock music, so who the hell cares about a little bit of noise?
And at the time Albini didn't have the reputation he has now.
M: He was just some guy from Chicago who wore a leather jacket and tried to offend people as much as possible.
