Sacred Travels

BY ELI CREWS

On a beautiful day in early March, Oz Fritz showed up at the door of New, Improved Recording — a studio I co-own in Oakland, California. He had been hired by multi- instrumentalist/singer Mark Growden to co- produce and engineer Mark's new record Saint Judas. I was pretty nervous. This was the guy that recorded and mixed Tom Waits' Mule Variations, Blood Money and Alice, worked with Bill Laswell over two decades, and has worked with Wanda Jackson, Iggy Pop and the Ramones. The man that showed up on my doorstep that day surprised me — Oz Fritz is as unassuming as they come despite all the great things he has accomplished, and I was immediately at ease talking with him and helping him get set up. He walked into the control room with only his trusty Peavey Kosmos Pro and a very practical attitude towards the task at hand, which was to capture the sound of Mark's sextet performing their songs live. Luckily he had time to sit down with me one morning for breakfast to talk about Meat Loaf live albums, quantum physics, magical battles and recording music that can't be recorded.