Who do you credit with keeping you engaged on so many fronts, and in so many disciplines? You've had a very successful music career, but you've led a life that's full of all these other things related to the music space.
I'm groping my way through the business, honestly, trying to figure out what to do next. Around the early 2000s or so I got this notion that it was driving me a little bit crazy that the main focus of my life was essentially being in a band, getting up in the morning, and going to work coming up with songs or ideas. I decided that I would treat my band a little more part-time, and I'd already been doing other things like producing records. I started branching out, for my own sanity, into things related to music. I wasn't having to sweat Cracker or Camper Van Beethoven eight or ten hours a day, six days a week. Part of it was branching out and away from my bands. For instance, I could go and work on somebody else's record for three or four months. We had the studio complex in Richmond, Virginia [Sound of Music Studios]. Before the crash of the digital age, that had grown to be quite big. It was basically two main tracking rooms and a couple of side rooms in this four-story building in downtown Richmond. We'd sometimes have three or four different groups in there recording at a time. Doing these other things related to music was important to me. It kept my head in the game and let me look at what other people were doing, how other people were approaching music, how they lived their life, how they approached creativity, what they did for songwriting, and stuff like that. It helped me get outside of my own head.
Were you involved with most of the bands that were coming through there?
No, because we had some pretty good house engineers; producers like John Morand [Tape Op #140], Alan Weatherhead [#157], and Rich Hasal, before he moved to Europe. There were a ton of people that came through there over the years. Lamb of God did one of their big records there. I was usually producing four or five things a year. A lot of indie projects.
Can you talk a little bit about the economics of running a big commercial studio? When you and I were making records in the '90s, you remember studios like Toast and Hyde Street and a bunch in the East Bay.
Yeah, we had Fantasy and…
Studio D.
Yeah, It was an incredible scene there. I think for Sound of Music in Richmond, we were already an off market. There's a point, where it's like, "Oh, do we buy the quarter of a million dollar board?" We were like, "No," because that's not who our clientele was. We had started out with an MCI board; a pretty small board. We bought a studio that existed there and a Studer tape deck, 16-track, 2-inch. We were a little more down-market. And at some point we upgraded to the Sony MCI board from the MCI 428. That was all we ever did. We went through a couple of different tape machines, and eventually we got into [IZ Technology] RADAR instead of [Digidesign] Pro Tools for a long time. We tried to keep a place so that we didn't have a big note on the equipment in the studio and spend our money on outboard gear and microphones. It's gone through a lot of changes since I left, but it stayed in business for a lot longer than other studios that had a much higher overhead. It was something we had to do, because our market was largely indie bands, a lot of punk, a lot of metal, and a fair amount of Americana. It wasn't big money stuff.
You've said in lieu of writing an autobiography you made this album, Father, Sons and Brothers, a 28-song offering. I felt like I was reading a book and it made me feel I knew you a little bit better in a way that I don't always get when I'm listening to records. A song like the first single, "I Wrote a Song Called Take the Skinheads Bowling," is the answer to, "How did you get your start"?
Exactly. And how random it was and such. Yeah, so "I Wrote a Song Called Take the Skinheads Bowling" actually started because I was at a Cracker soundcheck somewhere, and I think Bryan [Howard, bass] and Coco [Carlton Owens, drums] were playing the heartbeat groove, mid-tempo, and then I started playing the "Take the Skinheads Bowling" groove. Instead of singing "Take the Skinheads Bowling," I started playing around with it. I'd been in the middle of doing these autobiographical things, and even though this didn't end up being the music that we used or anything like that, I was like, "Oh, I should probably tell the Camper Van Beethoven origin story by explaining this song, right?" And it's really short, I don't know if you noticed that.
It's real short.
It's two minutes, seven seconds or something like that. It has a lot of words in it. A lot of the songs on the album have a lot of words in them, where I'm trying to fit in the story, and I need to get in an extra sentence here or something like that. I have to do that in the song. Later, I thought about this… I'm doing what they're doing when people make musicals. You know how in musicals sometimes the plot being told in the words has to take precedence over the rhythm and the meter of the lyrics. In a pop song, you wouldn't do this. I'm doing that a lot on this record, and that's one of the songs where that really comes out. "He went on missions all around the world, while I toured around, meeting girls that like the song called 'Take the Skinheads Bowling.'" It was really hard to figure out how to do it, but it was fun.
You do talk about how you grew up in what might not be considered a "rock 'n' roll origin story." You grew up in a stable family. Your parents stayed married. I'm assuming you moved around a little bit because you were a military brat. One of the songs on this record, "How Does Your Sister Roller Skate?" feels cheeky, but it's also a really touching story.
I think one of the things is that if you have a disabled family member, sometimes your family essentially focuses… the family is built around the needs of that person. In some ways, you could see it as a hardship for the family. I'm sure it was, in some ways, a hardship. But, by the time we were in California in the early '70s, I was coming home from school, my mom would be at home, and there would be the after-school snack. My mom stayed home as the homemaker because she had to take my sister to various classes or therapy and generally had to be available to get her from school. So, while the rest of my neighborhood was emptying out as families fractured, and mothers began to work, I sort of had this perfect Leave it to Beaver, family household in this neighborhood. Everybody was always in our house…"Hey, what is your mom making today?" Even though my family was built around the needs of my sister in a lot of ways, it was also idyllic in a way. I had a childhood that I think a lot of other people didn't. I've always thought that that was a blessing of having my sister that way. But then again, as I say in the song, it was a less enlightened time. People were cruel and unkind. The harassment that my sister was subject to. It's kind of a story of persevering and having more or less a normal life. It's a very sweet song. It's very cheeky, though. It's based on the joke about "How does your sister roller skate?", which we don't have to go into right now.
When you have somebody who's disabled and the family focus is on them, the non-disabled sibling also perhaps has a little less parental oversight at times, which leads me to the song "Disneyland Jail", which I found highly entertaining.
"Disneyland Jail" is basically a true story of me and my friend Dale. You know, after we got our driver's licenses, we were in high school, and man, boys – when they're teenagers – your brain isn't totally formed. You take a lot of risks. There was one of those evenings they had at Disneyland at that time – I think you had to be over 16 – you would go to Disneyland, and it would be open all night for teenagers. I don't know exactly how that went.
All night?
We did. You had to get parental permission. So, we went. We drove in his car and we, of course, brought mushrooms and liquor with us and proceeded to get pretty wasted. What ends up happening is I maintained. As we would say back then, "Maintain, Maintain", but Dale was loopy as hell, he ended up attracting the attention of the plain-clothed security in Disneyland, and they took us down under Main Street to what is essentially Disneyland Jail. They have little holding areas for people who are acting up, doing bad things, or shoplifting. The story is of going to Disneyland Jail, but it's also a snapshot of that. At 17 years old you're doing all kinds of crazy shit, getting up to whatever it is you get up to when you're in high school, and you have your driver's license. I had a motorcycle. I can't believe my parents let me have the motorcycle! Just all the things that you get up to. I was thinking about that. By the time I wrote that song, I had two teenage boys, and it is literally my plea to them. "Please do not do the stuff that I did! If you're out somewhere and you're drunk or you're too high to drive or you're in a situation. No judgment, I will come and get you and not say anything about this. Anything bad that you did, you have complete amnesty, get out of jail free card from me." They never took me up on it, so…
Another great song is "Leaving Key Member Clause," which seems to be the Cracker origin story.
Yes.
It covers you going to your house, your gear has been stolen, and the only thing left is a crate of records, you sell them, and you buy some recording equipment.
True story. Yeah.
I love the Johnny Hickman [Cracker partner] anecdote.
Yeah. The leaving key member clause… people don't know what that is. It's a weird clause that's in most record contracts whereby it's an option for the record label: If the key person leaves the band, and even though they still have the rest of the band, the band's name, and all that stuff. For instance, the record company could drop that band if the key member left, and they could retain the key member. If somebody they think is the key member leaves the band, they can also just say, "Okay, now you take the recording contract and everybody else, we're going to get rid of them." That's what happened with Camper Van Beethoven. The band breaks up. There's this period where they're like, "We're going to exercise our option for you to be our recording artist now. But we also want you, as part of the deal, to give us some demos. You have a year to give us a bunch of demos." This is telling the story of me getting back from the tour of Europe where Camper breaks up. I go back to my old apartment that's been sublet out. All my stuff is in storage. I go to the storage space, but all my stuff has been stolen. I don't even have my 4-track and aside from whatever gear I had with me on tour, I don't have the gear. I don't have anything. I'm trying to figure out what to do. I track down Johnny Hickman, who played in a number of bands that were very influential on me. After Camper broke up, I went looking for Johnny Hickman. He was actually in Bakersfield with his brother, and they were trying the country thing. I was like, "Hey, do you want to maybe write some songs?" I sold all my vinyl albums and I bought an 8-track recording all in one cassette 8-track recording things. I bought a few microphones, and I set about recording demos with Johnny Hickman there in the Hollywood Hills in my old apartment that I had sublet out. I was now sleeping on the couch. We were able to create some songs, and the songs were, I guess, attractive enough or seemed commercial enough for Virgin Records to give us a new major label contract, based on the old Camper band beta contract. The part about Johnny Hickman and the black eye is that once we recorded the demo, we decided to put together a live band and to play a few shows. The first day of rehearsal, Hickman comes in and he's got this huge shiner. He had gone to a gas station, given the guy $20 to fill up gas at the pump, and it was his last $20, and the guy gave him change for $10. He was refusing to leave, and he ended up getting in this fight with the guy at the Circle K. It was a strange, perhaps inauspicious, first moment for Cracker. But also, in a weird way we're fighters, we're going to make it somehow with our new record deal, and we're going to put out a record and our new band is going to be successful. So, maybe it wasn't inauspicious, right?
In addition to all your songwriting and recording, you've produced a bunch of albums for some great artists like Sparklehorse [Tape Op #12, #157] and Counting Crows. What's your approach to working with other artists?
I'm not an engineering-producer, and that's probably one of the reasons that I really don't do producing anymore. I'm more of an arranger-producer person. Play the bass and play the acoustic guitar on the song. I'm more of that type of producer. Nowadays, if you're a producer you're almost expected to be the engineer and have your own studio and such. I can do it, but I'm pretty slow compared to people who have better chops than me. I'm approaching it from the arrangement and tempo so that the voice sounds right. It's old fashioned shit. The Sparklehorse record [Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot], probably what's most interesting about that is Mark's stuff was more up-tempo, much, much more classic, harder, alternative rock. When I first was hanging out with him, he was Cracker's first guitar roadie. Mark Linkous had been in a number of bands, and a few things happened. He had this one down tempo song, and I was like, "Why don't you take it even more down tempo?" These were demos that we were recording with my 8-track recorder. The same one I bought in "Leaving Key Member…" I gifted that to him, and we were recording in his house out in the country. His wife had a fairly early morning job. Even though we were downstairs, and in the back of the house, we couldn't be really loud. We were trying to work out the words to this one song and Mark was singing it really soft. I was like, "Holy shit, man. That's your voice. That's how you should sing the song, let's move the keys around so you can do this on more of the songs." That's a classic example. It's like slow it down and a softer voice. There's some up tempo stuff on that first album, but it generally is a soft, quiet record and released in the height of grunge. It stands out in this weird way, and it's different than everybody else's. In a way, that's a good description of how I tend to produce records. I'm playing all kinds of instruments on that. Even with things like Counting Crows [This Desert Life], even though I'm not necessarily recording on those records a lot of times I have the guitar in my hand and I'm like, "No, do it like this" or I'm behind the drum set. "What about this tempo?"
How about band dynamics?
Yeah, that's crazy stuff. That's part, I think of being a good producer. Sparklehorse, for instance, was largely one person with a couple other extra musicians. Later, it became his brother and his sister-in-law in the band. That's complicated. Think about being in a band with a lot of people that already have a lot of band dynamics and then start producing stuff where some of the band members are siblings. You can get really complicated. When I'm talking to my students about producing, I give them this list of the responsibilities of the producer and it's basically everything. It's anything that can possibly happen. "Sorry man, that's your job!" I have literally acted as relationship counselor, marriage counselor, and I have helped somebody pick out a new car. I have booked travel for people, cooked for them, and selected wine. It's whatever needs to be done to get the record done, because you're usually walking into a dynamic that is established and cannot be changed. Sometimes the way you've got to fit in is to figure out how to become part of the dynamic at a level where you have some authority, and you're looking for little niches. Where you can establish some sort of – I'm not saying to hot dog people – but where you're establishing yourself as a trusted counselor, or perhaps with some authority over how the project goes. It feels like the type of thing that you would learn in the CIA.
You've been involved with what I consider to be the underbelly of the music business, and you've either done research on and written papers on all of these various subjects. Let me throw out some topics, and you can either give me a one word answer or dig into the topic a little bit if you like. Record labels…
Record labels are banks. They're venture capital. They'll provide you advice for your business and financing. They can't make you famous.
Artists rights and public policy.
Oddly, a lot of our royalties that we are paid as musicians are determined by federal statute and regulations. Never would I have thought that these two things are intertwined. Never would I have imagined, when I was a kid, that these two things were intertwined, but it's super important to understand that.
Digital technology and copyright.
What's the problem? I mean, honestly, if you respect artists' rights. If the relationship's based on consent, it's not just that they could coexist, it's actually symbiotic if you ad consent into the equation.
Quantitative finance.
In a lot of ways, running a record label, being a songwriter, or being a producer is like quantitative finance whereby you're acquiring a lot of small bets that rarely pay off, but when they do, they make up for all the other losses. It's the same business.
Application of concepts from derivatives volatility trading to the music business.
Basically, how do you survive in a business that is the business of essentially acquiring a lot of lottery tickets? I have a ton of records that I produced, but only a handful of them paid out. I wrote a ton of songs; maybe it's getting closer to 350 or something now. Most of those are lottery tickets that didn't pay out; about ten of them did. When you're a musician, a songwriter, or producer, you're in a what's called a black swan business, except black swans are a good thing. Your hits are black swans. They're a deviation from the normal most of the time. When you write most songs and make most recordings, your expectation is they're going to fail, and then every once in a while you're surprised. You have a black swan and it's a hit. It's a totally different mindset. It's a completely different mindset than having a real estate developer, developing an apartment complex, and hoping it makes a profit. Most of the time you're going to make a profit. This is a business where everything you do is a failure, except for every once in a while something's a big hit and it pays for all the failures. Warps your brain, but in a good way.
If the expectation is failure and you're doing it for the love of art and self-satisfaction, it certainly changes the equation.
That's exactly what I'm getting at. Once you adjust to all of that, you're actually in a pretty healthy place. I have a friend that started Reverb.com, the used gear trading site. He's done a number of other companies that have gone public. His take on why he liked musicians – he was a musician himself – was that in the finance business they would tend to hire people who came out of Ivy League schools and these are people that have been winners their whole life. The first time they went into something difficult, they have no idea how to deal with failure. Of course, he liked hiring musicians because they are used to failing all the time and proceeding from there.
Yeah, it's like baseball.
Yes, it's more like baseball than it is like football.
Commercial relationships between file sharing sites, web hosting sites, and transnational criminals.
I have got nastygrams from two different Russian oligarchs at various times, which is a pretty weird thing for me to have run into in my life. But yeah, there was a huge nexus between a lot of the unlicensed file sharing sites, music sites, lyrics, unlicensed music sites, and what's appears to be a real overlap with sanctioned Eastern European oligarchs.
Well, let's leave it there! It's great to see and catch up with you and hope we can do it again.
Good catching up with you, and I look forward to when this comes out. 
