How did you end up in Springfield, Queen City of the Ozarks?
I majored in real estate. I was in bands, but I never ever thought that bands would be my deal. I hadn't been educated in that realm. I was going to take a job, get married, and have a family. I interviewed for a job with a nationwide real estate firm that was headquartered in Springfield, Missouri. I came here and took a job. Then I subsequently became myself. I had no interest in the job, but I wanted to find out about all the bands. This was a very musical town, for a lot of reasons. The Ozark Jubilee [country music television show] had been here, and there was a lot going on in this town. There were publishing companies. Si Siman was a publisher; Ronnie Self, the songwriter, had been here.
Was that mostly because of the Ozark Jubilee?
Absolutely. This town got put on the map. Visionary guys like Si Siman and Ralph Foster got the Ozark Jubilee to come to Springfield, which meant that a nationwide network television show was broadcast every week from Springfield for several years. That's a big deal. As a kid, I watched the Ozark Jubilee. I remember watching Johnny Cash on there, and a young Willie Nelson. It was star after star. Wayne Carson Thompson, the guy who wrote "The Letter" lived here. He's my hero. He also wrote "Neon Rainbow" and "Always on My Mind." You can't even count the number of songs he wrote by himself. Big hits. He had a little studio called Top Talent at the end of Elm Street and Glenstone Avenue. There's an insurance agency in there now. I had met Wayne one time before, so it didn't take me long to find my way in there. It also didn't take me very long to find my way into disfavor with the management of the company that I had chosen to work for. I was terminated for lack of interest in corporate real estate.
How old were you?
Twenty-seven. It took me six years to get out of college. I still had a healthy interest in playing. I noticed right away that there were some good players here, like Lloyd Hicks, D. Clinton Thompson, and Wayne Carson. There was a nucleus of these players who rose above it all. They wrote their own songs and had the benefit of being in Springfield. Si Siman, by virtue of his hookup with the Ozark Jubilee, met big dogs in other cities. There he learned about music publishing, royalties, and ownership of copyrights. He got into the publishing business and provided a home for people who were creative enough to come up with a song; he also offered them criticism and help. He'd say, "Hmm, you might be a little deprecating on your bad girlfriend there. People don't want to hear that." I'd sit there and listen to him; it'd go in one ear, out the other, then back in, but everything that the guy told me turned out to be spot-on. He was Wayne Carson's publisher and manager, and they owned the studio together. I started hanging around with these guys, as well as different people in the Springfield crowd. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils came from here; they were one of the first bands to bust out in the early '70s, writing their own songs.
And you were married at this point?
I got divorced and married again, to Maralie. She was a keyboard player and we played together over the years. Springfield was always home. We were on the road, off around the country playing; but even if the address in Springfield happened to be a storage bin for several months, most of the time we had a residence here. Finally we came back to Springfield and stayed for a while. Then I started forming solid relationships with guys like D. Clinton Thompson and Lloyd Hicks. We had similar musical interests and humorous-type personalities. We made fun of the same stuff. I'm sure other people made fun of us in reverse. Being a guy who plays bass, you get in between guys like Lloyd Hicks and Donnie Thompson and you look pretty good. We started a milieu of bands over the years.
That was the genesis of what obviously became The Skeletons and The Morells.
Prior to that, I got really interested in the songwriting thing.
When did you become a recording engineer and producer?
Well, I had a gift for organizational skills, I think. I could talk to the bartender, I could talk to the bar manager, and I could get the job. In college I had gone to a recording studio that was very minimal. I liked recorders, and I was interested. I was always the guy who would look at a record and wonder, "What is BMI? What is any of this?" I slowly learned by absorbing it. I really got my interest in recording while watching Wayne Carson do his thing. I would hang around the studio and I'd watch Wayne write a song. The songs he came up with would impress me. I got interested in writing songs and pitching them. I even got some recorded and published, back in 1970. I got more into the playing side of it, playing bass, booking the band. PA responsibilities started to fall to me. I would sit around at home during the day with a couple of Webcor and Sony recorders. I would sit and play some rhythm part, or some Eddie Cochran-y thing on one machine. Then I'd dub over onto the next machine playing some drums by beating with my hands on a cardboard box or something. Then I'd play it back and record a bass part. I'd go back and sing, and then sing a background part. I'd mess around on my own, making demos. Then, up around Fort Leonard Wood, in the waning days of Vietnam, we were playing at a bar. There was a recording studio; this guy had a 4-track Ampex. His name was Del Mac. He was a pretty good old R&B-type singer. Donnie [D. Clinton] Thompson, Maralie, a drummer from Phoenix, and I played up there, and we got Del to sing with us. Then I'd go to the studio and monkey around with gear at night. I learned a little bit more there on the 4-track. I wrote some songs, made some demos, and came back to Springfield. I mostly spent the next few years improving the bands we were in. We'd get a house gig up in the country and play at one bar for 18 months straight. Brewer & Shipley lived up there. They really liked Donnie's playing, so they took Donnie out on the road with them. Donnie was out there watching the big- time. His idea was that wasn't impossible to have a band that could generate interest beyond a cocktail lounge or a bar. So we expanded upon that and started forming some bands that had some material with originality. We took it from there.
This was probably '77 or '78 and was the first iteration of The Skeletons?
Well, first was a band called The Symptoms. The Ozark Daredevils went to England and cut their record, but Donnie and I were living up in Raleigh, Missouri. Once a week we'd make a trip to Peaches [Records & Tapes]. Whole albums cost $3.49, and I was making a couple hundred a week in a bar. I could go up there and spend $50 on records. The new wave thing hit in England, and all these little picture discs showed up at the cash register with Wreckless Eric and Nick Lowe — British pub-rock — and we got interested in that.
The first wave of punk, like the Sex Pistols?
Well, it'd be pre-Pistols. This was an offshoot of the pub- rock in England.
Was this post-Dictators?
The Dictators were going about this time too, in '75. That was pre-Ramones. I've got to say, if there had been no Ramones, you and I wouldn't even be sitting here. They started it all. The Ramones went to England and changed the face of the world, as far as music was concerned. The Sex Pistols saw the Ramones and they were fashion plates. They saw that you don't have to be Genesis to be a huge band. We bought records by Devo. We'd sit at home listening to Devo songs thinking about how crazy it would be if something got on the radio like that, thinking that it never would. Then, three or five years later, it's on the radio in the Top-10. We were buying anything that was left-of-center. Then the punk thing came out. We were ahead of the curve. These bands that came from England put out a lot of independent 45s — we would cover a lot of these songs and people thought we wrote them! We made a little bit of noise. But it's like hopping on a wagon really quick. We hopped on the wagon earlier than everybody else, but soon after that it became passé. The Symptoms broke up. We were still living in Springfield. Donnie, Lloyd, and I got together and we got the idea for The Skeletons. We got Randle Chowning, who was the lead singer for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and he was going to do it on the side. We explored the surf-a-billy side, digging up old songs. We mixed it up. It became popular, and we did quite well. Then Randle got a record deal of his own on A&M; he bailed out because he had to go do some work on that. Nick Sibley came in and played keyboards, guitar, and harmonica.
Does Nick still have his studio here?
Yeah, Ozark Sound/Nick Sibley Music. Still doing it. There's not much retirement in this business.
No, there's not. Is this about the time that The Morells started?
Well, the Symptoms ended. Then the Skeletons started, and then we disseminated the Skeletons a bit. Then Steve Forbert, a singer/songwriter and a great guy, came to Springfield with Bill Jones, a saxophone player, and Jon Goin, a guitarist. Wonderful guy. Jon and Bill had played on Steve's album [Jackrabbit Slim] that he'd recorded in Nashville and he was looking for a road band. Jon and Bill both said, "You might want to check out these guys." They came down; we were playing in the basement of a bowling alley on the south side of town, doing our surf-a-billy thing. Steve liked what he saw, or maybe he drank a little too much that night. Either way, Steve offered us a job! He already had a keyboard player, Paul Errico, in the band. We succumbed to the lure of $350 a week, so I took off and played with Steve for the better part of a year. After we came back from that, we were fishing around for what to do. Lloyd stayed with Steve, so Donnie and I started The Morells at that point in time. We got Ron Gremp for our drummer (now the full-time drummer for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils). We began The Morells. For whatever reason, probably our limited vocals, we pushed off into the crude rockabilly/roots rock thing. Donnie was an amazing guy at finding material to do, and he brought something in that was always a good idea. A significant segment of our songs were rockabilly.
The Morells got quite popular, and you guyshadarecordthatgota4or5star review in Rolling Stone.
We were lucky during that period. There was a band that became acclaimed worldwide that was doing a lot of rockabilly; the Stray Cats. We rode their coattails. Rockabilly became incredibly popular; if you did even one or two songs, you became a rockabilly band. The rockabilly thing didn't hurt us. The record [Shake and Push] was great. We recorded that in Springfield, not on this board but that 2-inch machine.
This was at Column One Recording?
Column One. Done by a gentleman named Jim Martin, who died a couple years ago; he was a good friend of mine. He'd had some publishing success with Boxcar Willie and he started this recording studio. He traveled with us and would play saxophone.
He was the engineer at Column One?
No, he wasn't. There was another engineer, Jim Rhodes. Jim was an accomplished engineer from the east part of the state and had experience with Nashville, but he was an old-school guy. We recorded our record and we butted heads a little bit; but we finished it and it came out. Jim left the studio, so there was a vacuum there. This was in '84. The Skeletons were winding down, because we hadn't made it to the next level like The Morells. We had an offer from Universal, and I was even called out to New York. We really got close. We had some management offers, but it didn't pan out. We couldn't make it go to the next level, so it was time to hang it up. At that point I was interested in studios. I was going to Column One, hanging out, assisting Jim with what I could. They had a session coming up, doing demos for the publishing company, and we were going with The Morells to Lincoln, Nebraska, to play the Zoo Bar. I took the manual for that Harrison 32x32 [console] with me on the three-day weekend we played at the Zoo Bar. I studied that thing, then I came back and called Jim. I said, "Jim, I think I can do that session for you." So, I did it. That was how I started. About that time I was going through a divorce and everything, so I was a single guy and I delved into recording. That was a time that I was also living alone, so I spent my nights in the studio with my feet up on the console. I had a kick drum going through a [URIE] 1176, seeing what attack and release did, what 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, 10:1 were, and how it affected a vocal — the nuts and bolts of it. I acquired a Lexicon 224x, and I tried to make records. I'm so glad that you'll never find any of those. They were really heavy into the publishing thing; my job was to produce and record. Jim did a lot of the production. But I did all of the engineering and some of the producing, making demos for the Nashville market for songwriters that were in the publishing company. You'd hear a song and find a drummer, a bassist, and I was the engineer.
How did the Del-Lords sessions come about?
The Morells gained favor in the New York market; we'd been out there a few times and I'd met the Del-Lords guys. They were putting their band together, from the pieces of The Dictators. We all became great friends. We'd come hang out with them and bring them back to the Midwest to do shows. The Del-Lords started getting pretty serious and gaining notoriety. They needed a demo, so I said, "I can run this thing." I wish you could see the van they brought down here. They came rattling into the studio and we spent a week cutting songs and demos. We rocked, we rolled, we went out to eat, and we went to Red's. Then they wanted me to come up to New York after they got funding for a record. We picked A&R Studios to record. I was ostensibly going to produce it; but it was produced, of course, by the band. They were tight and they had good songs. They got signed in the middle of that record to EMI. Right away record label dudes started showing up. We got the record finished and we went to Nashville. We mixed it in Memphis with Terry Manning [Tape Op #58], a very well-known engineer. The record came out and bubbled under the Hot-200. After that I did a Charlie Burton record, a band out of Omaha.
I know you were producing a lot of local music.
Oh yeah.
In 1986 you made a record that I loved, Eric "Roscoe" Ambel's Roscoe's Gang record. That was Roscoe, as well as pieces of The Morells and The Skeletons?
It was us. It was Ron from The Morells, myself, Donnie Thompson, and Joe Terry who joined The Morells in the last half of the band — that was Roscoe's Gang. We cut a couple songs and brought in some guest artists. You'd almost have to have been there, but it was a scene. We were nuts! We were crazy. We were single; we were doing the best we could with what we had, thinking that we knew everything.
A little later you did the Jonathan Richman record, Jonathan Goes Country.
It was a good little record. That was on Rounder Records. I met Jonathan on the road, and we built up a fast friendship. He wanted to come and record a record; Donnie Thompson and I both produced that together. We did that here, utilizing our crew in the studio.
Around this time I slid into working at Column One. I think I hung out a lot.
You did that, but you also went around and dug up projects too. You did a lot of maintenance for me. We would fix shit.
This was also about the time that Dave Alvin fell into the lap of The Skeletons and the crew here.
Dave was going to go out and he didn't have a band, but he'd been working with different people in Southern California. He had cut the Blue Blvd record and it was getting ready to be released; it was his first album on HighTone Records. We rehearsed and toured with him on that. We'd come out and do a set as The Skeletons, and then we'd back up Dave. That was a good show that summer.
You played South By Southwest.
And we got signed.
After I left for Nashville the studio had a major change and you decided to move.
Column One was owned by a husband and wife team who got into marital difficulties. The wife wound up with the studio; she asked me to stay on and run it, on a temporary basis. I said I could. She didn't have any real interest in it, so I put on a lot of hats. I was also trying to do publishing. A bunch of songwriters had songs that they thought were going to be Nashville hits, but I wouldn't know one if it bounced up and bit me. She then got a new husband, and they totally lost interest in the studio. I was working on paying the bills, but they wanted to sell it. I made them an offer, and they took it. I worked for a year and also made an offer on the building, but I couldn't get it through — they wouldn't take it. I said, "Okay. I'm loading it up, and I'm going downtown." I found this place downtown and originally rented the space. I talked to the owner and told him that I wanted it for a long time, because I wanted to renovate the place and do it right. He was very nice; he gave me a 10-year lease and an option to buy the building. In the summer of '94 I got it up and running. The first thing I realized was that it was too small, but I couldn't do anything about that! It worked. We got an acoustic architect from Drew University over here, the head of the architecture department. He designed it and got us a room that sounds good. A couple of years later I decided to exercise my option to buy it; I bought it with my real estate partner, Tom Whitlock, who wrote "Take My Breath Away" with Giorgio Moroder. He had played drums with us up in Raleigh when we were doing that house band. We had two drummers at one time, with him and Donnie Thompson. There's nothing in this world that's done by anybody just by themselves. At this point in time I've got Eric Schuchmann engineering. I've also got a guy named Dan Selim, the tech guy who wired this studio, who now has his own PA company. He goes out and does gigs for the likes of Maxwell and Drake. These guys are my backbone. It's a very small operation, but I'm pretty lucky.
I noticed you've done some more treatment to the control room.
Yeah. I had to kill some upper reflections.
It works. This room was pretty live.
It was. I didn't know shit about anything! I'd only been recording for a living since '85 — about 10 years — and all of a sudden I had my own joint. I had nobody to ask about shit, so I had to figure it out for myself. I got it up and running. Little by little I figured out the different things I had to do. I built a vocal booth, treated the room a little bit, and got a curtain — a little bit at a time until I got it tuned in. I didn't do it from pictures I'd seen in magazines. I just listened.
I think that's the ethos of what all of this is.
I'm pretty lucky. People had heard that there was going to be a recording studio, and this kid who was into audio, Greg Duffin, came over from MSU [Missouri State University]. I would pay him to help me with demolition. He was really interested, so I said, "Well, here's a chance for you to watch a studio go up." Then I met Dan Selim, he was a young kid who could wire stuff. He came and wired every bit of this place up. We knew you had to keep signals in phase. You've got to be balanced, and keep it straight. But we also learned about gold connectors, as well as what kind of cable to buy, and isolated ground transformers.
You guys have a big transformer down in the basement?
Absolutely. I have my own transformer. We tried to build it like a radio station, to really exacting industry standards. I figured, "Oh, I'll build this place right and then people will flock to me. It'll be like the Record Plant in New York." Shit. All they wanted to know was, "Are you digital? You got ADAT?" No, I didn't have an ADAT.
A lot of the gear that's here came from Column One Recording.
Yeah. I bought it. I'd helped them buy it originally.
You bought an original pair of Otari MTR-90s.
Series 1, MKII.
Around this time you bought a Sony PCM-3324?
DASH [Digital Audio Stationary Head]. I didn't go digital until I found digital that sounded good. That was '95 or '96, I guess. I've still got it. It needs some work, and someday I'll get it fixed.
Yeah. The ADAT was in full-force, and it sucked.
I got an ADAT machine the day that it came out. The question that kept coming up was, "Are you digital?" I remember doing drums on ADAT and 2-inch. I played back the ADAT and then the 2-inch, and it was like, "Get this thing out of here!" I didn't want it. I'd get all the glitches, watching them sync up. There was no DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] at that point in time, so that was it for like four or five years. The Sony 3324 that I got was like the [Sony] PCM-3348, except that it was 24 track.
The hard part is finding tape.
If anybody needs digital tape, I've got a couple hundred reels of 3M 1/2-inch new old stock upstairs. I've got some 1-inch as well for Mitsubishi owners. I moved into digital then, but it didn't operate like a tape machine. Man, did it have some features. You could bounce tracks. I could sit here and comp a vocal track so fast that it would make your head spin.
You went through a period when you were doing a bunch of live to 2-track sessions.
At the old studio bands would come in who couldn't afford tape, but people wanted to record. So I'd bring them in and do it to 2-track, get the reverbs, compression, and everything working; then I'd mix it. We'd record it live to 2-track, 1/4-inch. I got an immense amount of pleasure out of that. They might have to do a song three times, but when they got it done, they were done. They could have five songs done and it'd sound like a million dollars. I had my money in my hand, it was all done, and we didn't have three weeks of bass parts to do. I did a lot of that. That helped me out a lot. Besides that's the way The Beatles did it.
I know No Doubt was one of these bands that came in.
That was a radio station series. There was a very active alternative radio station.
You did a song for Wilco's album Being There?
Right when I was building the studio, Uncle Tupelo broke up. They split into two factions: Jay [Farrar] had Son Volt and Jeff Tweedy had Wilco. I knew those guys because they used to come and see The Skeletons and The Morells.
One of the lessons I learned from you was how to deal with people.
If you feel comfortable with your gear, and you know it's working right, there's not much to sweat. Knowing when to quit is a big part of the deal. Sometimes you can't say no. How can you say no to somebody who's doing their own record, when they think that they can do something better than what they just did? Now you've got to "undo." If a principal [member] says it's great and it's done, it probably is. The principal can be anybody from you, the recordist, producer, whoever has a voice in the band, or the artist himself. If somebody signs off and says it's good, then it's good. The term "producer" gets thrown around a lot. I mean, what does it mean?
There are a million bands I'd love to record and make records with, but I have to say that I love the local bands that are interesting.
Fast is good. Local bands are great. I've had a couple chances to move, as well as an offer to go up to New York and re-settle in the Brooklyn area with some people who did pretty well. But I passed and I stayed here. Most of the people who come in here realize that it's very likely that this is the most important musical event they've ever done in their life. They're going to record. If you take that cavalierly, you're not doing anybody any justice. You can be confident in your skills, but my goal is to send everybody down the road, taking their first recording experience as the benchmark for the rest of the work they do. They'll remember this bald-headed guy in Springfield. Nashville's a media center. Springfield's not. You do bigger, interesting, and higher- level projects. I perform a recording service in a non-media center. I have a bunch of repeat clients who come back to see me year after year. There are a lot of very capable journeymen, professional musicians in the city who will come to me because they know that I can record a band. I like guitars, drums, bass, and singing, so they're not going to have any problems. If they've got some bad habits going on, I figure out how to phrase things so that I won't upset anybody but still get the point across. If there's an area in the song that worries me, then I suggest we go back and listen to a certain section that could be smoother. But I always have a remedy. Never complain without a remedy. If there's a remedy and I hear that the bass and guitar are arguing at the entrance to the bridge, I've gotta ask who's playing what and then figure out what's going on. I straighten that out. Then maybe the drummer's trying to do a fill that he only gets right once every five times. It's his idealized thing that he wants to do, when he could do something a whole lot easier that would sound fine. No one has ever been arrested for cutting a guitar solo in half, ever. Nobody's ever been arrested for leaving out a crash.
I remember you suggesting to me to count the crashes. It's a psychological deal, to figure how to get the drummer to see something.
They have to be a part of the process. Young bands come in and have a drummer doing all kinds of stuff. I try to reduce the song to its lowest common denominator. When I'm working with professionals, I don't run into that as much. You might a little bit, but if I have something to say, I have a reason for saying it. Then I have a way out. If you can take a band and mold them into something so that their record and performance is better than what they came in with, and they say they're a better band since they came to record — or that they look at songs differently — it's great.
