Chapter 12

Casa Dracula

When I finished recording the Tragically Hip, I headed back to the Birdhouse. I arrived and found Wayne the Brain had all the gear packed up. I got an open trailer with a double set of wheels and attached it to the Ford Explorer. It took several trips to move the gear from the Birdhouse to Todos Santos’s Casa Dracula, which was located just outside the town center. You could walk through the palm grove to get to the beach, and it felt like walking through a jungle in Vietnam. There were miles and miles of empty beach, which left a person feeling like they were totally alone, like in Planet of the Apes. Todos Santos is a beautiful oasis town near the west coast’s best surfing beach, called Cerritos Beach.

I set up the studio in the main salon, a rustic room with a log beam and plaster ceiling and walls of peeling paint. All the floors were terra-cotta. French doors opened to a courtyard with a cement fountain surrounded by a mural of “birds” of paradise. The house had minimal furniture, just beds, a kitchen table, and chairs. I lived there with Wayne, and I set up Daniel on the top-floor penthouse over at the Hotel California.

Food was limited, with only three places to eat: Café Santa-Fé, Todos Santos Café, or a taco stand. The day the studio was up and running was the same day we went back to work, and we reviewed a lot of what we had done at the Birdhouse. I had spent a considerable amount of time at the Birdhouse treating drum tracks by Brian Blade. I would take Brian’s best grooves and loop them in an Eventide H3000, an ultra harmonizer that combines pitch, delay, modulation, and filtering. I had a system in which I’d send the drums to multiple different effects and then, using the mute buttons on the console, I would perform effects on top of the drum loops. There was one that Dan really loved and that we used for a track called “Jimmy Was.” It ended up being used later in Billy Bob Thornton’s film Sling Blade.

Casa Dracula (April 1994).

While working at Casa Dracula, we would drive out to an abandoned airfield in order to listen to our mixes in the car. It was the same airfield where drug planes landed from Colombia. There was a cool effect that would happen when you walked out on the tarmac: the heat vapors coming up from the pavement would make anything invisible from the ground up. If you walked along it, your body would disappear and your head would appear to be floating in the air.

One night we were out there with the doors of the car open, listening to our mixes, when out of the vapors a truck sped toward us. It was the Federales — the Mexican Federal Police. They pulled up, machine guns drawn, yelling.

I turned the stereo down. The truck was full of Federales and they surrounded us, likely assuming we were drug lords waiting for a plane full of cocaine to arrive. Wayne looked like a caveman with long hair, Dan had long hair and a headband, and I was dressed like a biker with jeans, cowboy boots, Harley shirt, chain wallet, and black Ray-Bans. We had Chia with us and she was wearing almost nothing because it was so hot. We probably fit the drug bill.

The Federales acted like they had just made an enormous bust. I tried to speak to them in English, but they acted like they didn’t understand. They searched the car and they found Dan’s bathroom bag, with a baggie of fennel seeds inside, which they thought were pot seeds. They kept saying, “La marihuana! ”

Things turned ugly. The police had Wayne on the ground, face down, with a machine gun at his head. Dan was on his knees with his hands on his head. I thought they might shoot them. Chia spoke fluent Spanish and tried to explain to the head officer that we were musicians from Canada and we were there recording music. I asked Chia to tell the police that we were working with Vicente Fernández. He is a singer, actor, and film producer nicknamed El Rey de la Música Ranchera.

The Federales yelled to all the other officers about Vicente Fernández, and they all laughed for a moment, but then suddenly stopped and started yelling again. Well, that backfired, I thought.

Chia then said to the Federales, “I have seen you before — you eat dinner at my mother’s restaurant, Café Santa-Fé.”

The officer’s face suddenly relaxed to a smile.

“Si. Paula es tu madre? ” which means, “Paula is your mother?”

“Si,” Chia responded.

The head officer was friends with Paula. Next thing we knew, we were all free to go. We had all been certain we were either going to die or go to prison.

The Mexican Federales are notorious for making people disappear. On the trip down from Tijuana, you pass through many spot checks and they show the drug busts on a big board, like photos of tanker trucks cut open to reveal cocaine. There are also fake Federales who pull people over and take all their money. I once got pulled over in Cabo San Lucas by the police and I paid them $50 and they let me go. You never know what can happen.

Soon after this, I left Wayne and Daniel in Todos Santos, as I had to fly to Montreal to mix the Tragically Hip’s record. Wayne stayed on, packed up the studio again, and shipped the gear back to California. He drove the car back to the United States by himself. I had made arrangements to send the gear to my friend Fred Drake’s house in Joshua Tree, which was the beginning of Rancho de la Luna Studio. Fred Drake and David Catching started the studio where bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal would later record. On the long list of acts who recorded there are Dave Grohl, Iggy Pop, Daniel Lanois, Foo Fighters with Joe Walsh, and the Mutants, plus many more.