Don Dixon: of REM/Smithereens Fame

Don Dixon is probably best known for his work with REM on murmur and Reckoning  but his other production credits include such great albums and artists as the smithereens( Green Thoughts being the best, in my opinion), let's active, Marti Jones and his own critically lauded solo albums.  We got to meet him when he came into our studio to do some tape transfers and such and we were immediately struck by how friendly and open he was. He was very giving of information and very tolerant of our questions. In other words, for a guy who's recorded all over the world, got gold records, and almost ended up producing Nevermind he was super cool. So anyway, we collared him to do an interview a couple of weeks ago and needless to say, open and very forthcoming with anecdotes AND recording/production insights, including what is probably the first in-depth discussion of the recording techniques used during the making of REM's seminal first album, "murmur". We also talked about some of his recent projects including  a great sounding solo record by the lead singer of the Smithereens, Pat Dinizio. Some of which was recorded in don's home studio. We got to hear some of the tracks and they really sounded amazing. And we're not just saying that...

Let's talk about how you got into this, and why. I mean, because obviously you started out as a musician...

Well, I still am.  I don't think of myself as a producer, that's like way down the list of things that I think about.

Well how did even fall into knowing how to even run a tape machine?

Oh, just always interested as a kid, just like a lot of people are, you know.  I bought a little Pintron tape recorder, it was before cassettes had been invented, so it was like one of these little tape recorders with tiny little reels, and make little tapes.  I always loved to sing.  I went out to California between my junior and senior years in high school, worked on a wildlife refuge, and made a bunch of money, like $2.70 and hour which was a lot back then!  This was in the summer of '68.  I came home with all the money I'd saved up and bought a Panasonic sound-on-sound tape recorder.  When I was in junior high school, I chose to play bass because of the control that it offered.  I played a little guitar; played a lot of things by ear.  There was the coolest band in town, where the organ player played bass on pedals, and I knew they needed a bass player.  I like the fact that, if somebody's playing a C-chord, and I'm playing an A, it was an A minor seven.  That's something that I figured out on piano.  I like the compositional control of the bass.  I bought a bass, one of those great Danelectro Silvertones, and I wish I had it back.  From Sears for $79.  Then a few months later I really liked upright, so I found an old upright in a church in Charlotte, and just was sort of self-taught on those things, but I could read music. 

     I began doing some sessions, there was a jazz guy named Louis McGloughn in Charlotte, which was the closest big town to where I grew up.  He had seen our band and he was always looking for a young guy who could play upright to do sessions and stuff so I started doing sessions with him.  That was sort of my introduction, when I was 15 or 16, to the studio.  And I was interested in recording, so I'd sit around and make up my own Jimi Hendrix songs in funny tunings, and record that stuff on my old Pintron that I had bought for $30, and then I saved up and bought that nice Panasonic... So I was always just interested in the sound of things, and was working on sessions and doing things....

So you were around studio stuff....

Yeah, there were a couple of decent studios in Charlotte.  Charlotte had been in the 30's like a little Nashville, with a lot of bluegrass and blues recorded there in the 30's.  And then there was a guy named Arthur Smith who had a really nice studio, a real professional studio there in Charlotte, which is where I did most of my recording.

What kind of stuff are we talking about?

Well, you know, he probably had a Scully eight track...

Which was quarter-inch or half-inch?

Oh no, the Scully would have been a one-inch.  The formats went this way: everything was on one-inch, those one-inch four tracks that were used for all the Beatles records, and then the four track standard in the United States was half-inch, and then they did the one-inch eight.  Later the two-inch technology was really picked up from the two-inch video transport technology, the MM1000 Ampex machines, which were basically a whole bunch of 440 electronics on this bed that had been made as a video transport.  Because video went from two-inch to one-inch pretty fast, less than probably five years, they used those old two-inch transports to build their sixteen track machines.  It all kind of happened real fast and then it just stopped there.  I mean, they tried to come out with a three-inch machine for a while, and that Stevens guy came out with that 40 track two-inch machine, which was a nightmare for alignment.  The Stevens electronics actually sound pretty good because they're very simple.  You can't do much to it, but you can put something on tape that's got a lot of juice to it.

So he [Smith] probably had some U-47's or something?

He had great mics.  Everybody back then always had great mics.

Well you could probably go buy a Neumann for about $200 at that point or something?

But again, people worked all day in a factory for about $30, so that was still a lot of money by any standards.

But it just seems like everyone had them back then.

There were no budget microphones.  The budget microphones were CB/Turner mics, and then the good microphones were good microphones.  You bought Telefunkens or Neumanns.  AKG was not even really in the big-time ballgame here in the United States.  They were in Europe.

EV to an extent at that point, right?

Well, EV was good, I mean EV had the RE 20 which was a great mic.  Shure had a couple of good mics...

Like the 545, was that one of the early ones?

Yeah, and the RCA 77DX.

And they had the 44, which was a smaller version of that. So, um, you're at that point, you're a teenager, you're out of high school at this point, then...

I went to college in Chapel Hill, and we got a band together, that turned into Arrogance, and we learned allof the first Black Sabbath album, which was an import only.  That kind of metal, they really invented it.  And then we would do most of the Beatles' Abbey Road.  An interesting combination of stuff.  And lots of heavy blues songs, like a few Ten Years After versions of songs.

So that would have been when?

About '69.  And we recorded out first single...at a pretty nice studio in Greensboro that was another real place, they had a lathe and everything, where you could cut the actual acetate.  That came out as Arrogance, it was a single called "Black Death," it was anti-war, [sings]: "Dressed in crimson shadows, caught in shades of dark despair."  [laughs]  So that was cool, we had a great guitar player who didn't stay in the band very long.

What were you playing bass-wise at this point?

I played an EBO with red, white, and blue tapewound strings...

Oh man! What kind of a stage rig did you have?

Four giant cabinets, each with one 15" [speaker] in it, but each cabinet was like as big as this room, and two Sunn 200's.  The Sunn 200's aren't really that loud, but I loved the way they sounded, I'd love to get any of that.  A little-known fact about Sunn: one of my heroes when I was growing up Norm Sundlum, who was the bass player for the Kingsmen, the bass player on "Louie Louie," and he played an EBO, so I bought and EBO.  And he and his brother went on to start the company Sunn amps, right there out of Portland.  And I didn't know that till a few years ago, otherwise I would have tried to find him.  The Sunn amps were great...

OK so you're cutting and this point and you release the first single as Arrogance...

Yeah, we released "Black Death"... I kind of ended up producing that, it was a little four track thing, but we did three songs.

What was the board at this point?

I don't remember what they had in there.  It was probably a Neotek, but that is a very filtered memory.

Are we talking four inputs? Eight?

I don't know, it was a pretty big console.  This guy knew what was going on, I mean he had a lathe in his place.

Oh, I forgot it's like 1969. I forgot that by that point things had jumped ahead pretty fast.

Well, the Reflection console was a homemade one, but it was a pretty good one.  It had some Fairchild EQ's and it was a pretty clean console.  The records we made on that original console sound pretty good now.

Were you working with any outside bands at this time? Anyone other than yourself?

Not really, I mean I was just some dumb-ass draft-dodging freshman in college.  And I was playing in several bands, still playing jazz with some people.  I did audition my sophomore year for Buddy Rich, and he wasn't real happy about my hair.  They offered me a job but I was going to have to lose a whole semester in college and everybody warned me that I would probably get fired and left in Belgium, you know, that he went through bass players really fast.  But there were a lot of things still going on, and I didn't want to leave the band.  In a nutshell, that band turned into more of an acoustic version with me and the other guy who did most of the singing and writing.  We'd just play and sing.  It was mostly designed to write these new songs and work out vocal stuff.  We did an album with that version of the band, the acoustic version.  We have an album called Give Us A Break that came out in '72, that was the acoustic version where we had a conga player, and guitar, bass, and piano.  Then that band did another independent record like that, more of that odd kind of blend of acoustic-y Beatles things.

So you were learning more about the studio as all this was happening?

Yeah, we're recording these records in Reflection, we had a production deal with them.  Recording there and releasing them on our own little independent label.  Meanwhile, we're getting a really good following in Chapel Hill, and creating sort of an environment that is receptive to original music.  So we're sort of helping to create this; there are clubs popping up and we're filling them up, we're playing a lot, like 150 nights a year.  We're doing this for a living.  And then we get a lot of interest for this woman at Elektra, by now the PBS station is doing a special on us, we can fill up the big clubs, we do a special for a big theater there.  And this woman comes and sees us, and then she quits her Elektra job and ends up at Vanguard.  We signed with Vanguard, went and made a record in New York, lived in the Chelsea Hotel, and we made this record with a guy named John Anthony who had produced Ace.  He was a coke freak, nice guy, but he made a bad record with us.  And we tried, and I learned a lot during our first record.  I did my first string writing, and got to record it with real New York guys, which was a little nerve-wracking.

How big a place are we talking studio-wise?

The Vanguard studios were really nice.  We were working days and Elvin Jones was making a record at night, so we had to break down and setup every day during a week and a half of that record.  It was huge, giant, not like your typical New York studios.  Most New York studios aren't that big, because space is a premium there.  These old places were big, still one big room.  Most of these rooms were big because they were doing a lot of soundstage stuff in New York in the 30's and 40's.  They needed to put the whole orchestra in and do radio shows at these places.  It was a giant room.

You always see pictures of places in the 60's with about a thousand gobos there! It's like, let's reduce this room a little, it's rock and roll!

Well they need all the gobos to do the radio shows.  And since everything was live, they needed to create little dead areas for the vocalists, dead areas for the percussion.

So that was probably the biggest place you'd worked in?

Up to that point.  It was a big room, I mean you gotta remember, the room in Charlotte was gigantic, the Arthur Smith room was huge.  And Reflection was more your typical kind of Memphis size, the original version was a nice, small little place.  But it was still a real studio, they went to a lot of trouble to make round things that they saw.  The guy who owned Reflection had played on hits for Ernest Tubb, he was a troubadour, so he'd played on "Sweet Thing" and stuff like that and he'd been in Nashville for years.  I mean he knew what the stuff looked like, he knew that they had round things, there were no real signs like "This will help break up standing waves." [laughter]  And it did.

Were you intimidated going in there at all? Were you the producer at this point?

I was just trying to be a guy in the band.  By then I had already produced a few things, but again the producing stuff was all by accident.  The first thing, in 1972, was this package record deal.  They would come through Reflection.  There was this guy named Toby King, who had his own band, and he bought the typical thing, which is four hours of time, and you get 500 singles for $500, which we'd send out in about three weeks.  That was kind of the deal.  People would really respond to those deals, they think they don't have to do anything, like some Crackerjack surprise in the mail.  They did a lot of gospel records, a lot of things under these packages.  And then they would just work out a deal with the local guys to print, do the mastering, all that shit.  And this [Toby King] thing kind of had potential, it was a song called "Operator", and I was just sort of there helping engineer.  After they'd spent a couple of hours, the band kind of sucked, but the singer was really good and the song had some potential.  We took him in the back and said, "Look, we'll put some more time and money and effort into this if you sign on the dotted line."  Well, I didn't have anything to do with that, I still got my $25.  So I went back in and replayed a lot of the stuff after the band left.  We kept the vocals, and there was a girl singer, and she and I came up with a background vocal.  It got picked up by Delight or one of those labels at the time.  And it did OK.  And that was the first thing I kind of co-produced.  That was '72.  The reason we did Give Me A Break was... I sat up in bed one night and said, you know, these assholes [gospel producers] come with $1500 and put out a thousand records — why don't we do that?  So that's why we started doing our independent records.  We'd collect $200 from five friends, pitch in the other $500 ourselves, and split the money out when we sold them.  We never tried to make a big deal out of those records, never sold more than a couple thousand of them, we just wanted them to perpetuate what was going on until we could get a real deal.

So you weren't looking for national distribution?

No, which is where we made a mistake, because we didn't know... and I also didn't want to become a business man.

Well, I find it very interesting, because I think a lot of us think that the independent records scene has been relatively new, like it started in the 80's or something. This has been going on since rock and roll started.

Well, yeah, we did our first single in '69, we put it out and we sold some.  So it wasn't totally unprecedented for me to say, "Well, we can do this," because we'd already done it.  But we had been chasing the major label golden apple after that.  Well, actually, we hadn't really, we just tried to be able to make a living, open up the club scene, and have places to play.  And we succeeded.  And it was very hard, you know!  Well, anyway, after that experience with Vanguard, we asked to be released, because somebody at Elektra or Epic had expressed some interest in us, and there was this new manager guy hanging around, and it ended up taking quite a few years before we got another deal, but we ended up getting a deal with Warner Brothers through this guy.  Meanwhile I was recording other stuff, like that Sneakers EP which was done on my four track, or maybe Chris [Stamey]'s, in '75... we did the first half of that at Cat's Cradle but got kicked out because we were too loud for the dinner crowd, and had to finish it up at the bass player's girlfriend's apartment.  Which was a hell, the console on the bed.  I had this cool little Valvetech console, really nice with a compressor built in.

So were you aware of Big Star at that point?

Chris and Mitch [Easter] used to try and get me to give a shit about Big Star, and I just never could, still can't hardly.  I like Jody, and Alex is kind of an asshole, but personality aside, it never meant as much to me as it did to them.  I was listening to Mingus and stuff.  I went through periods, even in high school, of casting it all aside.  And for whatever reasons, what they were trying to do was a lot of what I felt like I never like about the Replacements, just too much unfinished ideas and debauched drunkery on tape.

Is part of it just because you considered it retro at the time?

It's very hard for me to put it back into context.  I remember Mitch and Chris coming over, and I remember them trying to get me to like them.

Did you genuinely like the Sneakers at the time?

I truly loved what they were doing.

Because it's not very far removed...

I understand, but there's a big difference when you're recording and when you're just listening to some finished thing.  And in knowing these guys since the eighth grade.  And there's a big difference between a freshman in college and a freshman in high school, so it took a long time for that to balance out, for me not to just be the old guy who knew everything or was an asshole or whatever.

See I guess a lot of people who know that history are kind of hoping that there's some secret Southern power-pop Mafia syndicate, that you all were interrelated, that you all knew everybody...

Well, I think the secret to a lot of those bands, a lot of those people still being interested in music, was the Winston-Salem [NC] Parks and Recreation department and the churches at the time being in collusion to keep the kids off the streets.  So they were trying to give the kids someplace to go.  Everybody was worried about kids taking acid and jumping off buildings... they didn't know they were taking acid and going to the church buildings.  Ask Peter Holsapple, he was coming to see Arrogance on acid at this church.  So when you've got places to play, we could go be a six-month old band and be gods to 300 kids in a church basement.  Every week!  One of the first gigs we ever played was in Winston-Salem, at a battle of the bands, where Mitch's band Sacred Irony also played, they let us use some equipment and stuff.

What a horrible name.

They had a hearse, we were dragging in our little crap amps.  But compared to these guys in the eighth grade, we were mean, loud and screaming... there was some serious energy being put out by this band.  So we got real popular, real known right away.  And then at Chapel Hill, that was the year of the Kent State killings, and all the colleges shut down, so we had lots of opportunities that spring to play outside.  The reason guys like Chris and Peter Holsapple, Mitch and Gene Holder and all those guys have stayed in the music business is that they had this early sense of success, and they had venues in which to become good.  Peter, out of attrition, has stayed in the music business, not because there's not other things he could be doing.

It's interesting though, that out of those guys, you're the only one who didn't like Big Star.

Well, it's not that I didn't like them- they were just not remotely an influence on me.

But it's interesting that you're connected with all those guys, you have a big part in the Southern power-pop history there, that mythical... but as you explained, you were older than these guys, they were kids.

I was a lot older, I had been exposed to jazz in a way that they weren't, from a very early age.  From the time I was fifteen and on, I was playing in bands that were doing Cole Porter, not really heavy stuff, but "Night and Day", "Take 5", some Dave Brubeck stuff.

Did you get into it as jazz got more out-there, like the Impulse stuff of the mid 60's?

The Impulse stuff was pretty good, but I was not a fusion fan, and still am not a fusion fan.  I was a big Miles Davis fan, a huge Cannonball Adderly fan.  I always loved Coltrane, even as he got more out.  I mean I like Sun Ra.  That's not fusion, see fusion was Chick Corea... chops for chops' sake that seemed to have missed the whole idea of what be-bop was about, which was *some* chops for chops' sake.  So I worked very hard at jazz, ignored the Beatles for a time and only later went back to them.  So I missed some stuff in there, and Big Star is just something that never meant anything to me.  I missed it first time around, and if you miss something like that the first time around, I think it's harder for it to have the same impact.

When did you start working with Mitch Easter in the studio? Was he into recording as long as you knew him, or did you introduce him to that?

I think for a lot of these guys who were significantly younger than us, we were the first direct contact they'd had with people that were making a living at music.  They did things that we never had the balls to do.  They went with their tapes and had meetings with A & R guys in New York that I would never have dreamed of.  They sat around and made tapes that were real good.  I helped them with their first real recording, but they were doing some stuff before that....

Did you do any cool tricks when you were working with the Sneakers? Did you have them in the basement or the garage or whatever?

The first Sneakers records, there's no tricks to that.  It's live to two tracks [of a four track], mixed through a ten input console.  There was a drummer, percussionist, bass, guitar, some piano, then Mitch playing a gut-string guitar off in a bathroom somewhere.  Basically just trying to get a performance all the way through, because we really couldn't do much editing.  And nobody could really sing, because it would have been too much leakage.  And then we had two tracks to overdub a solo and do vocals.

Did you have a collection of mics at this point? Or were you borrowing some from Reflection?

No, there was nothing better than an SM57 on that.  Just whatever we had.  I think we had some AKG 57-style mics, some 57's, probably a couple of 635A's, which are great mics, you need to have one of those.

How old were these guys at this point?

They were freshman in college, 18 or so.

So was this the board that had the compressor in it?

Yeah, it was an Altec PA board that they made for a while that was just treble and bass control, an effects send, a monitor send.

Did you use any outboard stuff?

No, just straight through.  I might have had slap on the vocal in the mix, but things like inexpensive Lexicon boxes, that stuff didn't even exist.  There were no really good sounding digital things at all.  You had spring reverbs- I had a Fisher Space Expander I would use on things- and you'd use tape slap.  I don't think Loft had come out with one of those analog delay lines yet.  Those were expensive when they came out, like $400-$500.  The very first Lexicon delay line that would go all the way up to 120 ms was $1400.  Delta Digital, even Mount PCM60's were $1500.  And I bought them for that, and I still carry them around.

Who else were you working with at the time? Any more prominent names?

I would do guys who were big in the region, like Motorcross.  His records were relatively expensive, which meant you got to record them at Reflection, got to put real strings on it and stuff.

How were you recording strings at that point?

Well, you record them the same way you always record them, with mics over them.  [laughter]

OK, that was dumb, but I mean, you were doing them in stereo, so you'd put like two 47's up over them, or...? How many pieces are we talking here?

It depended on what kind of sound I was trying to get.  The biggest group of strings that I would typically try to record was about seven.  Which was usually about 3 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos.  Lots of times you would just record a quartet.  And I'd ask the players to bring their spare instruments, so they could switch when we doubled it, so it wouldn't glass up too much.  Because each of the instruments sounds slightly different. 

OK, so they're sitting down, are they in a circle?

In a curve, like at a recital.  Just a slight curve, so everybody can see each other.

Are you coming over their shoulders, on the far outside...? How high of a ceiling were you recording in?

About eighteen feet in Charlotte.  What I would sometimes do is a nice stereo pass and then a couple of mono passes.  It just depends on what you're trying to do.  If you want it to be real slick and glossy it needs to be a little more distant.

Are you compressing this stuff?

Typically not when you put in down, but that varies sometimes.  What kills string sounds more than anything is if you lose phase.  If you lose your phase field, it's just like drones.  I would be more specific if we were talking about a particular project...

See, I want to get more detailed with things, because that's the most frustrating thing, when I'm reading an interview with someone really interesting, and they just talk about stuff but they don't give any detail.

Well, OK, here's my theory that I use on anything.  When I making a record, when I'm recording the very first instrument, I'm thinking about the proscenium effect that I want this instrument to have.  I'm thinking about where it wants to be in the song, where it needs to be in the mix, so that I don't have to artificially put it there.  If I can record it there, with the microphones in the room.  You try to get the right mic, but many of my favorite sounds are because they took the treble control and turned it up twice, ran it through another one.

So you don't get hung up on it being just the microphone on the thing?

No, I've been that way in my life, much to my regret.  But as I find out more about what's going on, the thing that matters is that it works.  The road you take to the Emerald City is less important than how well you get brushed up at the end before you see the wizard.  There are sounds you cannot get if you don't mic them correctly.  So if you're looking for something that has true front-to-back sound, you can fake that with boxes but it's not the same thing as if you record it.  A lot of the background vocals on Reckoning were recorded 25 feet away from the microphones.  If you go back and listen to the record, you can hear that Mike and Michael are kinda the same volume on a lot of things, particularly if you listen with headphones.  But that Mike is obviously standing behind Michael; he's not as present although he is just as loud.  And that's from these binaural recordings of him in the back of a room.  And I'll record organs that way, if I know it's going to be a wash instrument, I will pinpoint it, place it in a binaural field so that it's either slightly left or all the way left, well, "all the way" that you ever get in binaural, or behind you, or whatever, to try to find a place for it in the mix.  You have to have a sense of what it's job is when you're recording it, which is the great thing about recording live to two track, recording as many instruments at once as you can.  You get a chance to fine-tune those things.  One of the killer things for drum sounds, one of the things that messes up the sound when you're trying to create these multilayer prosceniums, is the phase.  You get like 30 mics on a drum set, you get little incremental phase things all over the place.  The thing that sounds so good about those Beatles albums, the reason the drums sound the way they do, is because there isn't any phase problem.  It's not so much that those EQ's are so great, it's that because of the basic technology available, there aren't phase problems.

Well, isn't it also true that those guys knew sound?

I don't really know, that's all relative.  You get taught this, you get taught that, but that's only apropos to what you're trying to create at the time.

Yeah, but their practice was as good as their theory.

I think more theory would help a lot of the sound of current records.  I think understanding how things work... the training is not particularly good and it never seems to be about the things that really matter.

What are some things that you don't particularly like about current record sounds?

Everything is kind of bright, has this artificial kind of crunch to it, and it's nothing to do with digital-schmigital.  The tape recorder, believe me, has less sound than anything else in the chain.  It's the least sound of the whole thing.  The sound of a guy's drum is much more important than the sound of your tape recorder.

How did you get involved working with REM?

Well, it wasn't that many years later.  Mitch and I had become friends because he had moved to Chapel Hill, and was going to school there.  We were hanging out, and I was interested in what he was doing.  I was selling these little consoles called Quantum, which was a California company started by a guy who had worked for JBL... I'd helped Mitch set up the Drive In studio.  I was recording bands there, it was cheap.  He had a 2-inch sixteen track 3M closed loop, whatever series that is, very good sounding tape recorder, and a two track version of that he'd bought someplace.  He had that Quantum console, then he outgrew it and got one of those nice Angels, which was a very good-sounding console made by Amek.  Very transparent, sounds a lot like the Sony 3000 series, which is a very clear console.  I was using the place a lot without him, and this guy who had gone to Chapel Hill brought REM up to do that stuff that turned into the first EP, Chronic Town.  They'd already recorded the Hibtone record, "Radio Free Europe" [a 7" single].  They did that down in Athens somewhere.  Mitch had made these first recordings, and we were talking about it.  He was saying the singer makes these great animal noises and he said, "I don't know what to do with them, they're kind of backwards... the bass player's all over the place."  So I listened to the tapes, helped him sort out the sounds.  I liked the music, thought they were pretty interesting.

You're not just saying that? [laughter]

No, that's probably my favorite stuff they ever did, that "Box Cars" or whatever it is.  In many ways I think that's the most unique, best stuff.

Did you think they were the savior of American rock and roll at that point?

Well, no, I still don't think they are.  I think it was very unique, and it has almost nothing to do with America.

Do you think that whole Southern thing is way-overstated? You know, everyone's trying to match that Southern Gothic, William Faulkner, sort of vibe...

There's nothing Faulkner-esque about his lyrics.  His lyrics are much more Rimbeau than Faulkner.

Well, you know they put that plant that overgrows everything in Mississippi, kudzu, on the cover [of Murmur] and all these critics from the East Coast were like, "this is American Southern Gothic!" But I mean, it wasn't just the lyrics, it was the music, it was the way you recorded it really! The way you recorded contributed to that.

Part two, with more on REM, will appear in Tape Op #9!