Zero Return For Man or Astroman?: Jim Marrer of Zero Return Studio and Brian Teasley of Man or Astroman?

Brian Teasley, better known to most of the civilized world as either Man or Astroman?'s "Birdstuff" or Servotron's "Z4OBX", has bandied the idea back and forth with me of doing an interview with him and Jim Marrer from the Zero Return Studio in Alabama for Tape Op for almost a year. And seeing as how I just love spending countless hours transcribing, I said "sure." For an explanation of why Man or Astroman? s recording career is worthy to Tape Op readers, please do the following: Listen to a copy of MOA? s first full length Is It... alongside a recording of their newest release Made from Technetium. Even to my untrained ear, the amount of recording knowledge that has been accumulated and implemented by the band and Jim has grown exponentially in the five years they have been working together. On top of this, when you consider that their recordings have all been done within the four walls of a hundred year old house (rented for the unheard of price of $75/mo) at the end of a dirt road, right off the train tracks, 2 miles down from Raper Prison (yes, a real prison), and well outside the Montgomery, Alabama, city limits; Zero Return automatically leaves the parameters of "Yet Another (Boring) Studio Profile" and enters the realm of "Deliverance Meets Sci-Fi Geeks Head On In A Blender." Really quite fascinating. The timing of this interview could not have landed at a more opportune point in their respective lives, either. With the help of Man or Astroman?, Jim will have moved Zero Return within the Atlanta city limits by the time you read this. It will be Jim's first time living outside of Alabama in almost 30 years. Jim was visiting Brian at his home in the Georgia outback when we all decided to sit down and do an interview proper.

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]

JM: But the first thing you see on the back porch is the two sections of the board from the Neve console with parts and pieces just lying around. Speakers are hanging on a wall, and when you walk in the house there's two huge boxes full of electronic parts. I don't even have any closet space. My closets are like those cartoon closets. Seriously! Where you open them up and it doesn't fall out, but it could easily. Just from the floor to the ceiling it's electronic junk.

[in gruff Fred Sanford voice]

Lamont! Don't touch it!

BT: It's really awe inspiring to go out to Jim's. The first time we ever went out there, Jim gave me directions on the phone. We were about ten to fifteen minutes outside of Montgomery. At the point he said "Then you hit the dirt road..." I knew we were in for something special. There's all these spare crates filled with undefined electrical components everywhere on the porch. Jim showed up at the door with the sweet tea on the oven. Jim makes the world's finest and sweetest tea.

JM: They come to record, but they stay for the tea.

BT:  Exactly right. What I love about the whole situation is that any band that has ever come up there [intending] to record in your typical modern dentist office type environment where everything is state of the art and is totally into getting that kind of vibe, don't last fifteen minutes out there if they're just not used to having just anything and everything goes. And the thing is, Jim's amassed some really amazing stuff with the Neve console and the Neve mic preamps. Stuff you can't find in modern studios, especially around Alabama.

JM: Everywhere else is either ADAT or Mackie. I'm pretty much a non-computer person. I don't have any MIDI stuff. No computers. I got a rotary phone. I'm ate up with it.

Brian has told me about all of this really sophisticated equipment you've acquired through some guy who did a Depeche Mode movie?

JM: That actually started before MOA?. I started getting some nice microphones which I think are the key to any recording. I started collecting them and basically never threw anything away. I guess that was my motto. I never really had a lot of money to spend, but whatever money I did have, I'd buy one piece of equipment, like one microphone. The first good microphones I bought were a pair of RCA 77 VX's which are really nice old ribbon microphones. But when I bought the 77's, they also had a Neumann U47 tube microphone [in the shop] and it looked really neat. Big phallic looking mic. I asked how much it was and they said $500. I thought that was just way too much to spend on a microphone so I bought two 77's. Now if you can find a 47 for $4000, it's great. Most people try to get $6500 for them. That was the one that got away.

But from what I've gathered from Brian, it's almost like there's an arsenal of microphones.

BT: I think it's mainly come of Jim's ability to spot a good deal and amass stuff over the years since there's a lot of weird sources for stuff in Alabama. It might be more different now, but there's always some weird studio that's shutting down or some old guy who doesn't know what he has. The bulletin board down there has been the provider of many finds.

JM: Yeah, the bulletin board. You find somebody selling a 1954 Stratocaster, you go look at it, and it's got like a 3-bolt neck and the guy's saying "Yeah, my granddaddy got that for me way back in the 70's."

BT: What do you think is the strangest piece of studio equipment, be it microphone or preamp or outboard unit, that you've actually gotten through a source like that?

JM: Probably not a real valuable thing, but a real great piece of gear, a mid-50's GE tube compressor that this TV station just gave to me. They were just going to throw it out. It's a great sounding compressor. Also, I bought an Altec 639 microphone which looks like a giant birdcage. It's a pretty neat microphone. I got it from somebody for next to nothing. They actually sound pretty good sometimes.

BT: I think there's a weird concept in places that aren't part of a large metropolis area like Alabama. A lot of times, a studio in Alabama will be trying to keep up with the latest, most insane piece of technology they can get their hands on. There's studios out there that have spent tens of thousands of dollars on the latest digital crap. And as far as really cool tube and analog stuff, they ignore it and it's really opened up a lot of outlets. Like maybe if you were in Chicago or some place where people would jump on that stuff, but a lot of times, it leaves things open.

So do you thank the digital revolution for Zero Return's arsenal of equipment?

JM: In that aspect, digital's great. People said "Oh, we don't need this old stuff..."

Good!

JM: A friend of mine from Chicago told me "Never buy new." As soon as you buy it, it's worth half the money. Go out and buy something old.  Go ahead and wait and buy something of really good quality instead of buying something with a lot of whistles and bells on it.

BT: We often talk about a lot of those old tube compressors. What's so great about them is that they're built so durable and there will be two knobs on it so you can't fuck anything up.

JM: The GE compressor I was telling you about, all it is is a two or three rack space box with an on/off switch and a big red light right in the middle of it. You just plug into it and it sounds great. You can't fuck with it. The new stuff has fifty buttons, and has so many parameters and functions, and layers and you can never figure out what's goin' on in it.

BT: It's so far removed from the original signal.

JM: The best guitar amps have "volume" and "tone."  They have a sound and that's it. All these new amps have 20 knobs across them.

BT: I think the biggest improvements on music in general hasn't made anything sound better. It's made things be quicker or more convenient or you can have more options with something, but none of the advancements have been technically superior to anything from the 50's or 60's.

JM: I try to recreate that sound from the 50's and 60's. I'm using a lot of the same equipment. I don't know what it is, but people really knew what they were doing. I think a big part of how well things sounded then was due in large part to the people who were involved. It still sounds too new to me sometimes.

BT: Bands don't take that into consideration when doing a recording project. There's a whole mentality out there that everything can be fixed or made to sound different or manipulated in the studio. Very few bands I've been involved with outside of the ones I've recorded get into the studio and hear that the guitar sounds a little weird or timid, and will get in there and just play it harder or just....

Now for the tech-heads, what's the equipment you use now? What's the board, the tape machine, all of that?

JM: The tape machine is a 1971 3M M56 with a 2 inch 16 track, all transistor. Pretty much stone age type stuff. We then mix down to a ?" MCI machine that is somewhat more modern. I think that it's early 80's. The board is not what would be called a vintage Neve. It's a broadcast console from the early 80's. Weighs about 700 pounds. About eighteen channels. It's a nice board. It definitely has that Neve bottom end sound that Neve has been famous for. I pretty much use the board for monitor and mixing. Everything else we record right into Telefunken and RCA preamps. I do have some Neve 1066 preamps which are great. API preamps, Altec stuff. Various microphones, RCAs and Neumanns. I just noticed that I don't even have a Shure SM57 anymore. When it comes to guitar sound, you can get just as good a guitar sound out of a $4000 mic, where a $90 mic gets a better sound some times. Guitars are funny. Mics are funny. It's like a tool.

It's only as competent as the person who's using it.

BT: Or the luck therein.

Which ain't much of a stretch.

BT: We've had some great success with equipment working out or doing weird stuff. Some of our coolest, strangest space warbles have been like one track acting up, and we go back and listen to a pre-mix and we say "What the hell? Who put a Moog on here?" And it'll be mysterious Track Ten. Actually, the single we did for Drug Racer, at the beginning of the Pylon song, that's one of those tracks.

JM: It also happens on one of the songs on Experiment Zero.

BT: There's one song where we had tape, and the test tones start one of the songs off 1000X "100 Individual Magnets". We just left it on there and let it fly with the track.

JM: I've had to do sessions where I had to have the top of the transport jacked up and had a big stick wedged down into the bowels of the electronics. Then I have to go over and wiggle the stick. Remember the old Warner Brothers cartoon where Foghorn Leghorn had the clown head on a stick and he'd go wake up the dog? That's my level of expertise basically. A clown head on a stick.

BT: There's nothing better than being in a session and getting close to the end of mixing a pretty important song and something will sound a little weird or there's a little whizzing noise in the machine. Jim has a very Fonzie-like approach to maintenance. Jim will get kind of pensive, think about it for a second and then flip open the hood of the machine and give it a nice blow in there, or stick a vacuum cleaner nozzle in there, spray a little cleaner in there, and next thing you know we're rollin' again. I don't think we've ever had a set back that's ever cost us more than an hour or so.

JM: Nah, an hour's really pushing it. I really start sweatin' it if it's down an hour. Amazingly enough, it's never really burned up a part, it's always like a wire breaks loose and starts arcing off the frame. Those 3M machines, they take a lot of physical abuse, and this one's taken a lot of verbal abuse.

BT: I think one of the amazing things, outside of the actual equipment, is the big change that happened when we started recording drums in the foyer of the house.

JM: Yeah, it's like recording in a big wooden box. It has a 12 foot ceiling. You would think that a perfectly square room wouldn't sound that good, but back then when they built those houses, they're all out of square. The door to the drum room looks like one of those things you see in the Midwest where water runs uphill. The room's all cock-sided one way, but the door swings shut the other way so it looks like the door is swinging shut up hill. People come from miles around just to see the door shut.

Maybe the building was actually designed 100 years ago to be a modern studio. They definitely had foresight.

JM: You open up the door to the drum room and there's a toilet right there.

BT: You have to go through the bathroom to get anywhere. So if you've got to do a Mr. Dookie, you're in bad news because there will be some traffic coming through.

JM: [During the Experiment Zero session] Steve [Albini] went to the bathroom. I do have a sign up that says "Steve shat here." But he came back and sat down and started recording again and said "Jim, you didn't have any toilet paper." I said "What did you do?" He said "Ben Grimm.' I said "Who's Ben Grimm."

BT: The Comic Book Hall of Fame?

JM: He was the guy in the Fantastic Four who was just piles of rock. That gets my respect. Anybody who can walk out of a bathroom after something like that and not wipe, that's a man's man right there.

BT: Then there's when the plate moved from the kitchen to the foyer.

JM: Plate reverbs weigh 4-500 pounds. Big wooden box. Servotron came over to record one day and I said "Hey, would y'all like to try the plate on this recording?" They said "Yeah, let's do it." All we had to do was move it.

BT: We didn't know what we were suckered in to. A lot of times Jim says "Yeah, you guys should record a new seven inch" just so he can get his equipment shifted around.

JM: Yeah, we had to knock all of the partitions out of the drum room to get the plate through the doorway.

Brian, did Jim have anything to do with your mastery of production?

JM: We used a method that works pretty well. I just ball park everything and get the levels up and...

BT: Then we ruin it.

JM: It's kinda like tag team wrestling. I'll wrassle with the board, then I'll slap Brian's hand and...

BT: I'll get on the top rope. It's more like a Texas Chain Death Match.

But you didn't walk into Zero Return the first time and know what to do.

BT: We've been really lucky... we started off as these stupid sci-fi geeks coming over from Auburn to record with Jim. In the band, we always had a decent musical vocabulary as far as knowing what we wanted to do, but we were always at a handicap technically.  Which is why it was always amazing to have Jim there holding our hand when we knew what we wanted to do, but didn't know technically how to patch it in. It's all been a learning process. Even recording backward stuff, and flipping the tape over. I'm counting the tracks on my hand to make sure we don't record over something. We've learned everything there and luckily with what knowledge we do have, Jim's been really helpful. Zero Return is totally the kind of environment where Jim wants you to learn what's going on. He wants you to experiment with the EQ's. A lot of times Jim will get the most excited when we have a stupid idea that doesn't really make sense. There was one song "Junk Satellite" and I bumped the left fader down with my elbow. I realized after about two bars what I had done, and kicked it back up.  We decided that it sounded pretty cool, and we didn't go back in there, which was technically pretty stupid.

JM: It's the kind of thing that when I hear that, I think the machine is tore up.

BT: Jim's always tearing into us about balance and phase. I'm always pushing things on the edge of getting way out of balance.

JM: "Change the polarity!" That's the answer for all sci-fi problems.

BT: Even at Zero Return. But sometimes we'll get a nice little thump to the back of the head and Jim will point up to the meter. But it's a really great environment for us to have total access to. Plus, it's been a second home. I think last year I spent about two months of my year there. It's really been amazing. When we did Made From Technetium, it was every morning waking up at 9 and working until 3 AM. Eleven straight days like that.

JM: Was it eleven?

BT: Well, it probably felt like thirty. But yeah, we just have this system, somebody goes to get the ice, Jim makes tea and we make a record.  It's probably the most hi-fi of any of the records we've done so far. It's interesting because some tracks sound really hi-fi and large and spacious, and others like what Brian [Causey/Starcrunch] did through the Mr. Microphone sound really dirtied up.

JM: That kind of goes back to what I was saying about microphones on guitar amps. On "Structo" we used a Mr. Microphone on the guitar then picked it up on the Kenwood FM receiver. We were kind of disappointed that it sounded so good.

BT: We've had the weirdest experimentation with guitars. There's been some tracks that are with the bathroom door open and some sounded better with it closed. Depending on the track.

JM: And what was going on in the bathroom.

BT: I really enjoyed this record because we got to do anything we wanted to do.

But it's always like that, isn't it?

JM: This one and 1000X, they basically came in without any songs.

BT: We would totally have a certain portion we'd work on and see what would happen. We had a decent amount of material to fall back on, but some of the best stuff on the record was totally made up. Like "Lo Batt" was one of my favorites that was done that way.

JM: They pirated my talk back jargon on the last record. They got all this stuff I say back on the talk back system. They recorded it and then spliced it in as samples in a song. "Wait a minute, I think you're standing in cat piss."

BT: The cats do add a very interesting element to the studio and actually a lot of times we've had things spawn directly from the cats. That song being one thing, but there's no telling what you'll hear over the talk back mics. We actually got Jim to record some of the great sayings we do hear at Zero Return. I personally like the one "Can somebody go get ice at Doziers?" or "Wait a minute, something's not working" or "The machine's messin' up, hold on" or "Something's screwed up again."

JM: But that machine has been an absolute work horse. I have been in the middle of a session where the room's not very well lit and all of a sudden it looks like there's somebody arcwelding inside the machine. This blue light shines out from the cracks and crevices of the machine. It just keeps rolling.

So now you've signed off on some property in Atlanta with Rob [DelBueno/Coco] and Brian and Zero Return is moving out of Alabama. I guess this will lead to a much closer, tight-knit relationship with Brian and Rob?

JM: There better be because I definitely don't know anybody in Atlanta. I really am a country boy.

BT: I think in Atlanta, the biggest endeavor will be not to lose that environment that Jim has out there now. We're gonna be building two small brand new buildings that Rob has designed that will be designed specifically for the studio. The greatest thing is when Jim and Rob conversed on what the studio would be like, their ideas were extremely similar, and they came up with the same plan 200 miles apart.

JM: I just hope with the overhead, we'll still be able to record bands that don't have a lot of money and if a band wants to do a CD for $1000, we can do it. A lot of my favorite CDs I've done were recorded for $500-600. I like doing that kind of stuff.

BT: Most of the bands that are worth recording haven't gotten to that level of pretension or are bands without any money who come in and record. I know that's a lot of times why Steve takes on like the Page & Plant project. As crazy as that is, it allows the bands to come in and record really cheap. I think that's something we have to keep in mind, too. It needs to be affordable. Guys that are working ten hours a day at some crap job and are trying to make their band happen an hour or two a week need to have an outlet where they can record amazing records that don't cost much without having to go to ADAT.