So...1992, the band just started, how did you find Zero Return?
BT: Actually, it was kind of a strange story. There was a fellow who will remain nameless who promoted shows in Montgomery, and got us a cassette tape of all these terrible, but well recorded Montgomery bands called Offerings. Brian Causey [Starcrunch] and I were listening to this tape and commenting on how terrible a lot of the bands were. And then we were like "God, the drums sound really good on this stuff." And we were looking for a place to record what was going to be a self-produced record at the time that we were going to put out on what turned out to be our record label.
JM: You all wanted to put it out on 8 track cartridge.
BT: That was the start of many failed MOA? ideas for strange 78 or reel to reel formats. So I got in touch with Jim and he said "Sure, come on down. I got a couple different formats we can record on.' There's a funny story about the first recording we did about the 4 track thing. He didn't tell me this until a year ago.
JM: I had a Trashcam, or Tascam, 8 track that was always broke down. It was a piece of crap. Japanese junk. It broke down right before they showed up and I didn't tell them. So I pulled out the old Sculley ?" four track. In retrospect, I'm glad we did do it because track-for-track it's so much better. Half inch is 30 ips and pretty good sound quality.
BT: We didn't think anything of it.
JM: I looked at those guys and thought they'd never know the difference between four track and eight track. Besides, the four track is five times larger than the eight track so it looked a lot more impressive.
BT: So we were doing what was to be the first record that Estrus ended up putting out on four track from this Sculley machine and we did the majority of it live to two track, right and left. Then we did samples on track three and vocals on track four if we needed them.
JM: We did all the music live stereo to two track then whatever else we had to do we just did on the other two tracks.
BT: And ever since then, we've been bugging Jim and he's been adapting with us and obtaining new apparatus to give the illusion that we actually sound good.
JM: No, I think y'all sound good in spite of what I do. The next machine we got was an ancient one inch eight track which was dated 1968 which has to be real early for the Ampex 1000. It weighs about 600 pounds. It broke a red headed guitar player's arm, so it's got some good karma going there.
BT: I think on that machine we did most of Destroy All Astromen and some of Project Infinity on that one. Then we've been getting greedier and greedier and getting more and more tracks but I can't really see going past sixteen tracks. 16 tracks serves as a pretty nice natural editor. Like right when you're on the phone calling the string section, you say "Ah, we're out of tracks!"
JM: I had a brief stint with the digital thing before I realized it was a load of crap.
BT: We've done one or two things on ADAT and that's it.
What was your feeling about it?
JM: Um, I really didn't like it too much. I'm definitely what they call a "Loghead." I'm pretty much a digital hater. I can see some merits to it. They are cheap, and for people who can't deal with a 20-25 year old machine that's constantly catching fire, it's....
BT: The biggest problem I've had with recording on ADAT, is that the sound is just so flattened out. Every band that records on ADAT you can totally hear and perceive it was recorded on ADAT. And all those records tend to sound the same. So many pop punk bands have that clean sound but it's so ADAT. It has no characteristics. I think a lot of old analog machines had different tendencies in how they captured sound and the way things were laid to tape depending on what machine you were using. I think that gave records a lot more individual characteristics instead of everything sounding exactly the same. The main difference in a lot of things now is just stylistic differences and not recording techniques.
JM: I think the greatest thing about digital is that when it came out and everybody started buying into it hook, line and sinker, all this old analog equipment started dropping in price. Those are the great machines.
BT: Especially like eight track one inch machines.
JM: Those are great, they just sound so much better--the quality that went into them. There's no way with modern technology, and the way things cost now, that those machines could be built again without costing $100,000.
So lead me through this, you started on four track, went to eight and now are working with sixteen?
BT: Yeah, we started with four track.
Then lead me up to how things ended up the way they are today. It just seems like things have more of an air of credibility to it now. It's more of a "studio" studio.
JM: Yeah, it used to be more of a home/studio, now it's a studio/home. I've got some straw in some Kroger sacks over in the corner that I sleep on.
BT: It used to be a house, now it's a house with a lot of expensive stuff in it.
JM: I'm kind of like the Fred Sanford of the recording world. You walk into my house, on the back porch, the first thing you see is....
Lamont! [all laugh]
