Chapter 27

Recording around the World

It was June 2004 when I checked into Sing Sing Recording Studios in Melbourne. I had been asked to mix a record for an Australian indie / pop / rock band called Augie March. They were a really cool band and had great songs, and to date they’ve had two nominations for ARIA awards (Australian Record Industry Association) and have won an Australian Music Prize.

I convinced the band that if I wore tinfoil on my ears their mixes would be more dynamic. I’d heard a story that Brian Eno had done this during some of his mixes. Eno was always trying to push the envelope, whether turning the tape backward looking for new melodies or recording things at a fast tape speed and playing them back normal speed.

The guys in the band turned me on to eating kangaroo meat and told me I should take a drive down Great Ocean Road to see the Twelve Apostles, the enormous limestone rock formations that rise out of the ocean. I rented a car and took that long drive. The rental car had an icon that flashed on the dash every so often, a picture of a coffee cup with steam coming off it. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was. Perhaps it was picking up a signal that there was a coffee shop coming up. It turned out that people drove for hours and got tired, so the auto industry came up with a coffee-cup icon to let drivers know it was time to pull over.

When I finally reached the Twelve Apostles, I stopped to take some pictures. I noticed there were black-and-white birds on the beach. They were penguins, and I was ecstatic. When I felt like I’d had my experience, I headed back to Melbourne.

The record did well and was nominated for an ARIA award. After mixing Augie March, I spent a couple of days in Sydney at Bondi Beach before heading back to L.A.

When I landed in L.A., Sam Roberts’s record company called wanting me to go to Montreal to rework some of the songs we’d recorded. I stayed in L.A. about a week before heading there. It was late June in Montreal, and it felt great. The streets were full of people, the air was warm, and there were street festivals every night. In the studio, I reworked a couple of the songs, re-recording a bunch of the drums and replacing some guitars, and Sam redid a lot of the vocals. The record company wanted someone else to try some mixes on the record, so I left it in their hands to finish. The record was a mild hit for Sam but never won any awards.

From Montreal I headed back to L.A. to begin a new adventure. I bought a new Airstream trailer to use as my private apartment whenever I made records on location. Inside, the Airstream was like a modern New York City apartment. It had a polished aluminum interior with halogen inset lighting and was super modern, with solar panels on the roof. The Airstream was totally self-sustaining. Right off, I made a couple of records in California, one at Joshua Tree for Tim Easton, and then one in Malibu for a wealthy family, the Nortons. The father was a real-estate tycoon who’d sold one of the Enron buildings and developed resorts.

The Nortons had a son who had a serious immune deficiency disease, the sort that has caused some children to essentially live in “bubbles,” and he wasn’t allowed to leave the house because he could pick up germs and die. His last wish was to make a record, and he wanted me to produce it. I brought the studio to their house and parked my Airstream on their property. They had just moved into a huge modern house with a lap pool. The main living room had huge glass windows that overlooked the ocean, and that was where I set up the studio and recorded the album.

The son, Nathaniel, was a big fan of Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. I got Jim Keltner, a drummer who’d played on the album and had previously worked with some of the Beatles, and Tony Mangurian, who’d worked with Dylan playing drums and percussion, on the record. Daryl Johnson, who’d worked with the Neville Brothers, played bass, and Michael Chavez played guitar.

I cut the record in a week and then mixed it right away. The whole family was there during recording. The Nortons had two beautiful daughters; one was a yoga teacher and the other was a dancer. The mother was a singer, and she had the same disease as her son, so we all had to wear special shoes once we entered their house. After completing Nathaniel’s album, they published on their own label and Nathaniel recovered from his sickness 100 percent. My next stop was Mexico.

Once Dan caught wind of my mobile setup, he wanted to fund another recording venture in Todos Santos, near the tip of Baja California, Mexico. The next thing I knew, I was driving south of the border in my new Chevrolet Avalanche truck, with a new BMW HP2 mega dirt bike in the back of the truck, and pulling the Airstream behind it. I had had the studio assembled on the inside of the Airstream, and it turned out to have better sound than many huge studios.

I arrived in Todos Santos in April 2005. I had made arrangements with Paula, the woman who owned the Café Santa-Fe in Todos Santos, to park the Airstream in her empty lot. However, once I got there, I discovered her lot had been damaged in a storm, and there was no electricity to plug into in order to run the studio. She told me that I could park the trailer at her friend’s house instead, as her friend had an empty lot with power next to her house. I went over to meet Susanna Acevedo, a lovely lady in her sixties, who lived alone and really enjoyed my company. She said that her ex-husband was a musician and she was used to having music around. It wasn’t until much later that she revealed who her ex-husband was: Neil Young. Susanna was Neil’s first wife and he had written the song “Oh Susanna” about her. That same month, I got a call from Emily O’Halloran, a woman I’d met at Sing Sing studios in Australia. She was a friend of the assistant who worked there. Although unknown, I thought Emily was a great writer and had the most incredible low voice, like Marianne Faithfull’s or Nico’s. I had mentioned to her if she was ever in L.A. she should look me up, and I would cut a tape. I was happy to hear from her, and she said that she was stopping in L.A. on her way to New York and wondered if I would still be up to cut a track. I told her it was good timing for me as I was between projects. I picked Emily up at the airport and told her she could stay with me for a couple of days because I had an extra room. We didn’t waste any time, and although she was a little jet lagged, we started recording the following day. One song turned into several. Emily had never made a record before or even played with a band. It started out as just me and her; I played the drums on a couple of tracks and she played guitar.

Recording Kaizers Orchestra, East Berlin (2005).

Before I knew what happened, we were going everywhere together, from cutting tracks in Jamaica to flying to London to using some of the biggest studios in L.A. It had turned into a full on rock ’n’ roll romance. The record took longer to make than expected due to the other records I was working on throughout. We would leave for Berlin for a month, then come back and do a little more. I finished mixing the record at Sonora Recorders in Los Feliz in L.A.

Emily ended up putting the record out on Tear Stain Records, and it received rave reviews from media sources like Mojo and Uncut, many giving her five stars, saying what a great writer she was, and comparing her to the Cowboy Junkies, Nico, and Marianne Faithfull.

It was during this time that I got an invitation to produce one of Norway’s biggest rock bands, Kaizers Orchestra. They wanted to make their album in Berlin. Actually, the place where they wanted to record was in the former East Berlin, at the DDR radio building. This building was built by Hitler for radio broadcasts, and it housed over more than 20,000 workers during Word War Two. There were many different rooms for recording, but the most impressive were the two orchestra rooms: each was the size of a New York City block. Between the two rooms was a control room bridge where the radio broadcast was done, so that while one orchestra played live to radio, the other waited, ready to start as the other finished. This way the musicians got breaks between performances.

The rooms were huge, with five-story ceilings and ornate wood carvings along the walls. The floors were in the shape of a horseshoe, with different levels where the orchestra players performed. At the back of the rooms were theater-style seating, where Hitler and his generals sat during performances.

Kaizers Orchestra was a unique setup, from the accordion to drums made from oil barrels. The drummer would play these huge oil barrels with crowbars — it was very industrial. I would take it to the next level by attaching guitar pickups to the oil barrels and then run them through distortion pedals and into Marshall stacks.

One of the rooms we worked in was a Foley room. Foley is when sound is made for films. For example, if someone in a film is punched in the face, the Foley artist records a fish being slapped on a table, and that sound is dubbed into the movie. There was a set of stairs in the room to record marching, and other rooms had sandboxes. It was like a typical studio with a glass window to look through. I tracked the band in there.

One day, the band was in the performance room when the assistant brought me a cup of tea. I went to set it on the console, but it slipped and spilled all over my shirt, so I took off my shirt and hung it over the lamp to dry.

The band was in the middle of a take when I looked behind me and found my shirt was on fire. I ran to grab it, but what the band saw through the glass was me running through the studio on fire. I put the flames out but the shirt was burned pretty badly, so I had to go shirtless for the rest of the session.

Schnitzel became a running joke for us — in Germany everyone loves it. Everything we ordered to eat came with a schnitzel on it. If we ordered a pizza, it came with a schnitzel; if we ordered Thai food, it came with a schnitzel; so the band bought me a shirt that read Schnitzel.

Kaizers Orchestra’s album did really well and they had a number one hit in Norway.