Archive for the ‘personal’ Category

There were these two guys.  Ed Stasium and Paul Hamingson.  Ed was a little crazy and Paul was little sane.  Yin and yang.  Ed had a bit of of an Alfred E. Newman grin and Paul had a wandering eye and a Weird Al Yankovich vibe.  Ed was the producer and Paul was the engineer.  Some of the most pleasant times I ever spent in a control room were with these guys.

I liked them, very much.  I learned a shitload from them both.  They both had a quiet methodical discipline and a humor just as subtle.

I learned the art of a good flange using just an AMS off the sync head.  Monitoring quietly through anything cheap.  Bringing something to read to a session with Pauly and Ed was important because they didn’t want me bouncing around the control room with nothing to do.

Both of them, good old friends of Mark Harvey.

They weren’t just two guys.  I’m proud to count them as friends.  I hope it’s not too presumptuous to hope they feel at least somewhat the same about me.  Actually, I think can be confident Pauly does.  We’ve been corresponding a little lately.

They had a system, a major component of which was zero drama.  They did their thing without angst, urgency or anger.  No eighteen hour days or at least as few as were absolutely necessary.  Methodology gorgeous.  They would have preferred Geetus as their assistant but they weren’t unhappy with me, I hope.  I think.  Paul supervised me.  He made sure I documented and took care of the things that were important to both he and Ed.

As a second engineer, the job is to make the engineers job easier and to be “wood” in the eyes of the producer.  I was never an expert at either.  It’s true I have kind of a big personality and it got me in trouble more than once.  Ed and Paul never seemed to mind much.  They were as egoless as I would ever encounter in a control room.

Understand that Ed Stasium was as luminous and accomplished as anyone I would have the privilege to work with.  From the Chambers Brothers to Sha Na Na.  The Ramones, The Talking Heads, Soul Asylum, Living Colour and Mick Jagger.  The Smithereens seminal album “11”, Motorhead and the Reverend Horton Heat.  I don’t think I ever tracked with Ed and Paul, but it was a pleasure to assist them both on the mixes I did with them.  They knew what they were doing and the vibe was focused but relaxed.  They made clear what they expected of me and it was relatively minimal.

It occurs to me now, they didn’t really need an assistant at all, much less me.  Pauly was on it.  I was perhaps the shittiest assistant at A&M studios, save for maybe Randy Wine.  Wine was way smarter and more capable, he just gave far less of a shit.  That says a lot.

Fred Stadium and Pauly.  Always a sweet gig I was happy to have whenever the Geetus wasn’t available.  “Did ya prick her ya prick ya?” was a question Ed was fond of asking for no reason at all.  Ed was a friendly goof and not a little bit of a dirty old man.  Forgive me for mentioning his tremendous talent last.

I was in The Mix Room once with Gggarth and Joe Barresi working on an L7 record and Biohazard was directly across the hall in Studio D with Ed and Paul.  Understand that I thought these Biohazard guys were consummate dickheads.  About the time cell phones first came out and these Jersey retards wandered the halls all day trying to get a signal with bricks pressed to their empty, wannabe heads in a recording studio designed to reject all manner of radio or electromagnetic frequency.  Evan Seinfeld was the singer.  Later to have a gig on “OZ”, the HBO series and even later to marry Tera Patrick, the world’s most beautiful porn star.  As far as I know now, Evan is still her suitcase pimp.

He was and I’m sure still is, an idiot.

As fate would have it, Evan and I would cross paths again some ten years later.  First in a titty bar in Vegas and then in the form of a potential business deal involving his beautiful wife and the company I was then second in command at.  Much comedy was had there at Evan’s expense.  I’m still in awe at the idea of this beautiful and elegant woman allowing such a meathead to speak for her, let alone entering into matrimony with such a clueless fucktard.  We clowned him around the office for at least a year.  He somehow got the idea that it was me standing in the way of his wife’s deal with Phallix as my good friend Rick, owner of the company, had passed the buck to me, just to shake his stupid ass and annoyingly self aggrandizing phone calls.

If Evan ever reads this, he’ll be pissed and scrambling for a dictionary.

The truth is, they were asking an astronomical sum for a simple day’s work.  We sought to hire Tera as a catalog model and perhaps develop and market a signature toy with a share of the gross profit.  It was Evan who was relentlessly hard charging for such an exorbitant fee from our relatively small company.  It’s my belief this was because he’s as stupid as I estimated him to be.

I simply wouldn’t take his calls.

It didn’t take long at all for the girls in L7 to understand what kind of brain trust was across the hall.  They were a comic strip.  A cartoon.

The catalyst was their bullshit, macho Jersey swagger.

Wannabe Jewish goombahs.  At least Evan was.  A clown.

There is perhaps nothing I loathe more than those who wrongfully assume they are smarter than they are.

The girls, or rather, women of L7 were a fairly streetwise and savvy bunch.  Jennifer Finch and I forged a bond a little beyond what typically developed between artist and second engineer.  Somehow, she reminded me of my sister.  It was her humor and resolute intelligence.  They were very cool chicks in general.  They would put me in “love jail”.  It involved surrounding me with chaste kisses and aggressive hugs I wouldn’t be able to escape unless I resorted to a degree of violence or brutality that would’ve been completely out of context.

Obviously, I succumbed.  I adored them.  Some of the coolest “artists” with whom I ever had the pleasure.  Very self aware.  Very funny and very real.  At that point in my career, such qualities had begun to stand out.

My future partner, Alex Reed and I were instrumental in getting Jennifer’s next band “Other Star People” a record deal by doing their demos pro bono at A&M studios less than a week after we were both officially released from our employ by A&M recording studios.  Al & I sat in the middle of the cavernous live room of studio A early one morning after we’d completed three songs with that band, burned a candle and drank a fifth of Jim Beam.  It was our wake.  Our Ode to almost two decades between us in that place.

The Other Star People record went nowhere, we were never asked to participate on any level and the other half of the band, a douchebag friend of Alex’s named Xander Smith, hit on my girlfriend hard one night while she was on a layover in Vegas.  I had the pleasure of letting him know on the phone that I knew what he’d done and was secure in the knowledge that I could have broken him in half.

What a prick after what I’d done for him for free.

Welcome to pro audio as my good friend and master tech Gary Myerberg used to say.

But I digress.

Between the two of us, Jennifer and I, we began to foment a good natured plan to  fuck with the dickheads across the hall.  It blossomed one night with Joe and Garth complicit.  Garth was never afraid to stir a little shit.  We sent a runner to a newsstand in Hollywood to buy as many gay porn magazines as possible with what was available in petty cash and waited for the goombahs to leave for the day.

We spent at least an hour cutting out every erect penis we could find and taping them to every surface or moving part there was in the control room of Studio D.  Open the DAT machine and a penis leapt out.  Cassette decks were popping with cocks.  Every multi-track had phalluses ready to spin.  We were thorough and Garth was happy to be the default ring leader, mentoring the circus and directing the placement of elaborate faggotry.

I’ll never forget Joe going around the room and picking up the scraps, so careful not to leave a mess.  A class act was Joe.  Joe, Ed, Paul and Garth were among the best men I ever worked with.  Serious talent and excellent human beings.

At first, it was all in good fun.  The escalation involved both camps barricading each inside their respective studios with furniture from our lounges and the abundant equipment that always lined the back hall.  It didn’t take long for the whole thing to turn ugly, however.  Stupid testosterone resulted in trapping the estrogen in the Studio D lounge against their will with a microphone patched into the complex wide PA system and the the girl’s subsequent panic was broadcast throughout the halls of A&M.

It ended badly.  I was embarrassed for my role in it.

I certainly wasn’t guiltless in playing both ends against the middle, but good clean fun was all I had in mind.  It ended up going way too far and the Biohazard guys remain boneheads in my memory.  I never liked them.  Lowbrow misogynist jerks.  I always loathed bands that thought they were on top of the world just because they’d gotten a record deal and were in our hallowed halls.  Dumb enough to not realize that the hard part begins with a record deal.

I doubt they’ll ever be candidates for the rock & roll hall of fame.  I recall the record they were making then doing pretty well.  No doubt because of Ed & Paul but most subsequent efforts went double balsa.  They are a rock & roll asterisk.

A few years later, Al and I were making the Phenobarbidolls record in Studio C and the phone on the console rang.  I answered it and whoever the receptionist was at the time told me it was Paul Hamingson calling for me.  Put it through I said, I asked Pauly to give me a minute and put it hold so I could take it in the machine room.  I shut both sliding glass doors behind me and lit a Marlboro.  I picked up the phone and said something like Pauly, to what do I owe the pleasure?  He told me he was calling to thank me.  I wondered for what.  He said he was calling to thank me for making his favorite record of the year.

I was more than taken aback.  I have to paraphrase, but the gist of what he said was that the Everclear record I’d done, Sparkle & Fade, was his favorite new record and that it gave him joy to listen to it.  I was beside myself.  It is a singular moment in my music career that I will never, ever forget.  I can’t help but well up a little as I write this.  A professional for whom I had so much admiration and fondness, took it upon himself to call me and congratulate me, for what he estimated to be a job well done, a magnanimous gesture that left me speechless other than to thank him for calling……….

Tears leaked involuntarily as I hung up the phone.  I took my smoke out behind the studios and finished it while I gathered myself.  The enormity of it at that moment is beyond words.  Thanks again Pauly.  That was huge to me.  The confidence and inspiration you handed me that day is no doubt far beyond your humble intentions.  A simple sincere gesture on your part filled my heart.  Thank you my friend.  Thank you.

Drinks for my friends.

Let’s talk a little more about Barncard.  Barney.  SQB.  Stephen Quinn Barncard.  Resident Genius.

Barney designed and implemented so much crazy cool shit at A&M studios, it’s safe to say he was taken for granted by almost all of us.  What it must have been like for a man so bright, to serve at the discretion of men so much dimmer, is completely outside my ability to fathom.  When I think about it, I’m a little embarrassed.

Understand, it’s not a scenario that was exclusive to him, there were many great minds in that place.  Ultimately, as well as I knew him, he stands out, a little more of an enigma than the rest.

Friendly, gregarious even, and never patronizing.  Undeniably odd though.  A little crazy even.

He seemed happy and was so goddamn smart, pretty much above reproach.  Nobody ever really fucked with Barney.  Not as far as I know.  Sometimes he’d say something he clearly thought was funny, he had a laugh not unlike a little kid’s, kinda gleeful and unselfconscious; a little shrill for a man in possession of such a rich baritone.  About a third of the the time I’d smile and chuckle, not having any idea what he’d said or meant.

It sounded to me like, “A little like folding soup on hot summer day inside an igloo, eh?”

The Star Trek door leading to the control room in Studio A.  Push of a button and the the heavy airlock door whisked aside.  Kind of a pain in the ass sometimes but cool as shit nonetheless.

Tape copy.  A hundred plus Tascam 122MKIII cassette decks controlled and completely synchronized by a primitive late eighties Mac.  A listening system that allowed for the operator to hear a few seconds from each individual deck and thus be able to pull a bad copy in the process.  Oscilloscopes to see phase in case you couldn’t hear it.  I loved the dance of the cathode ray tube.  An integral step in teaching potential engineers how to listen and develop an attention span.

“They had good three motor transports and three heads, and were easier to align that other prosumer decks. But the deal making feature for me was that the decks could be operated by a direct connection rather than by infrared. That allowed the use of simple transistor circuits to drive the remote control inputs of the decks. At the end there were over 135 decks in the room; it was built for 156. There were 13 decks in each rack because that’s all that would fit. It would have been nicer digitally to have 16 decks in a rack.” -SQB
The FM radio station complete with Orban Optimod brick wall limiters.  You could listen to your mix on your own car radio in the parking lot, or a fully restored candy apple red ’57 Chevy sitting out back.  What the FCC didn’t know, didn’t hurt them.

Then there was Echo Central.  The Inner Sanctum.  Barney’s office.  A windowless room in the upper regions of A&M studios behind the second floor Studio A and B lounges that housed backup hard drives for the four computerized automated consoles in studios B, D, Mix and eventually A, once the legendary Neve was retrofitted with Massenburg flying faders.  The epicenter of research and development for A&M studios.

It was among the quietest and most peaceful places to sleep in the wee hours.  There was a back room, sort of a sepulcher, most didn’t know about.  I thought of it as a secret sarcophagus.  I enjoyed many a nap back there.  I might be imagining this but I seem to remember a way through the ceiling to the ancient catwalks above.  A few ceiling tiles pushed aside and you were in the era of Perry Mason.  It was filmed there, in that space, decades before.  You could see into the B lounge from up there.  A window that from the lounge looked on nothing, or so people thought.

Barney had devised a technology where all of the studio’s five live chambers and some 13 or 15 EMT plates could be assigned to any individual studio patch bay via ELCO connectors and then show up on a television channel so that each of the five control rooms could see which echo units were assigned to each room and which ones were available.

Red room, white room etc.

A live chamber is essentially a small, highly reflective room with two transducers.  A speaker and a microphone.  Pump signal through the speaker and it’s reflections are available via microphone.  I believe the White Room was a coincident or XY stereo pair, whereas the Red Room was mono.  There were three smaller chambers above C as well.

Roland The Headless Thompson and I experimented recording various acoustic guitars, nylon and steel string, in those live chambers with mixed, but always interesting results.

EMT plates are archaic technology as well.  Again, two transducers.  A small speaker at one end of a huge metal plate and a “pickup” at the other end of said plate, all housed in a wooden box about the size of a grand piano.  We had something like fifteen of them, all hanging in a two story brick building behind the studio.

In both cases, simple methodology and crude technology to create very unique echo on recordings before digital was even a word in pro audio.  Think Beatles, Stones and Elvis.  By the time I became a sorcerer’s apprentice, live chambers and EMT plates were a luxury very few studios in the world could afford real estate for, much less the logistics.  We were spoiled.

To switch or reassign any of them meant  trekking up to the Inner Sanctum, walking through a blue haze of quality pot smoke and physically moving the the ELCO connector  from one patch bay to another.  Barncard may or may not have acknowledged the interloper, depending on what he was working on.  It would then instantaneously appear on the television screen showing the patch point it could be accessed from in any given control room.

The only thing the Inner Sanctum lacked was test tubes and Bunsen burners.

Genius.

I confess, as a runner/janitor at A&M studios, I had keys to just about everything, including Barney’s Inner Sanctum.  Later on, I had legitimate reason to enter, but before that, under the auspices of emptying the trash……. you see where I’m going with this.

Barney could usually be counted on to at least leave a roach or two in an ashtray and we came to learn he kept his stash in empty quarter or half inch reel boxes back in the sepulcher.

Air conditioning is a very big deal in recording studios because the equipment generates an amazing amount of heat.  The temperature in a control room would go from 65 degrees to 95 or a 100 in fifteen or twenty minutes when the air went down.  This, in turn, effects the audio gear as well as musical instruments in a hurry.  Guitars go out of tune, drum heads go flaccid etc.

Just so happens, the Inner Sanctum shared ducting with the control rooms of both A and B.  Whenever we did bong rips in Echo Central, the Inner Sanctum, the inhabitants of both control rooms could smell it.  It was obvious, like green pungent gas.  Barney didn’t seem to care, he didn’t have to.  We did.  So upon locating his cache, we’d often take it to a safer place, like the Secret Pizza Lounge also known as Berg’s Green Retreat, far higher up in the building and the only other way to access the the weird upper regions of this recording complex built inside the the antiquated shell of the original Chaplin sound stage.  Far above and behind the tech shop, the speaker loft and removed from the elaborate air conditioning system.  Hot as fuck in the summer but the monotony was broken by getting high.

A happy sweat at three A.M.

We’d climb down the catwalks and ladders, consciousness altered enough to afford patience for clean up after rock bands, washing their dishes and schlepping their trash.

At the pleasure of judge and jury, a quick anecdote:

One Saturday afternoon, not too long into my time at A&M recording studios, I was working the front office phones when a battery of fire trucks arrived in front of the main gate on La Brea, sirens blazing.  The front guard shack called to say there was a fire alarm going off full tilt inside the studio somewhere.  Let them in I said.  What could I do?

Seconds later, eight or ten anxious firemen stood before me in heavy uniform while their captain explained that a smoke alarm was going off in the building and they couldn’t leave until they verified the location of the alarm wasn’t actually on fire.

What could I do?

Somehow, they were able to pinpoint the specific location of the alarm.  Echo Central.  The Inner Sanctum.  Fuck me.  I called up and there was no answer.  Anybody sitting up there blazing away on a Saturday wasn’t gonna answer the phone.  I knew that, but I had to try.  I stalled by paging another runner to cover the phones before I escorted them up.

I guy we called Foo Paux answered the page and I explained the situation to him and told him to keep ringing Echo Central.  Meantime, I led the phalanx of firefighters behind me up the back way explaining how we couldn’t interrupt the recording sessions in in either A or B…….trying to buy time.

We started down the back hallway to Echo Central and we could all smell it.  What the hell I figured, it’s not like they’re cops.  They began to giggle and chuckle behind me.  Still, I was nervous because I couldn’t know what we’d find upon my unlocking that door.

At any given time, this place could erupt into a carnival/circus with naked chicks, drugs and mayhem from hell to breakfast.  It was an insane place to work.  On weekends, the runners were expected to mitigate the inevitable craziness or at least keep it from spilling on to the streets of Hollywood.

Any reputable recording studio of that era served simultaneously as a creative environment for artists and a sanctuary for rockstars to indulge themselves without concern for the outside world and mere pedestrian consequences.  Our job was to encourage and foment the idea that within our walls, they were not subject to society’s rules, judgements or persecutions.

An unspoken but concrete ethic.

Early on you become sensitive to sound, if you’re serious at all about making a living at manipulating it.  The heavy feet of so many battle outfitted men behind me coming to such an abrupt stop startled me.  Two or three at least carried axes.

Silence.  The provenance of any real recording studio.

The sound of the keys in my hand was like a chandelier crashing on concrete.  I unlocked and opened the door.

Slow motion in real time.

There sat Randy Wine, a fat hog leg of a joint in his hand.  The atmosphere blue green from smoke, his feet up on a workbench, slit eyes like road maps and a shit eating grin on his face.

The troops behind me began to laugh out loud.  “Ain’t no fire here man”, he said while exhaling another thick blue cloud.  Behind me they began to  lose it.  I stood for a second, not sure what to do.  Randy gave me a what the fuck gesture with both hands and I shut the door and turned around.  They were laughing so hard they couldn’t look at me.

I asked if they could find the way out.  They assured me they could.

On top of it all, Barney was a shit hot engineer.  His acoustic guitar sounds were crazy good.  His legacy stretches from Crosby, Stills and Nash, to Nilsson, New Riders of The Purple Sage and The Grateful Dead.
Barney would eventually hire me to engineer in his stead.  No greater compliment.  I was paid handsomely, put up in a nice suite in Ann Arbor Michigan and did well enough to be asked back a few times.  The artist afforded me room service and an open tab at the hotel bar as well as room service.  Nothing ever came of it.  The material wasn’t bad but it wasn’t timely.  I had a swell time and did a good job.  My acoustic guitar sounds weren’t as good as Barney’s but I held my own.  They were bright and shiny.

Drinks for my friends.

There I was, actually engineering on a KISS record.  Garth as head engineer and Eddie Kramer of Hendrix fame producing.  So what if I was flying in explosions and applause, eventually I recorded Paul’s lead vocal for Detroit Rock City.  I used an SM58 and encouraged Mr. Stanley to go handheld in an effort to preserve context and vibe.  KISS Alive III………see, there’s no such thing as live records anymore.

KISS records had long since become low budget productions in the interest of maximizing profit.  Gene and Paul may very well be rock icons, but they are businessmen first and foremost and they never pretend to apologize for that.  Therefore, respect.

Real live records were pretty much before my time and probably yours.  Johnny Cash, “Live in Folsom Prison” circa 1968.

I ran into Paul Stanley a few months ago at the 7-11.  It’s right next door you know.  He looked at me while we stood in line and I told him quietly that I’d engineered some of his vocals for Kiss Alive III, he smiled and said something about there being no such thing as live records anymore.  I wished him a goodnight.  Nice guy.

The clerk behind the counter had no idea.

Eddie Kramer is an entirely different story.  I’ll do my best to be succinct; as I typed that, I knew it to be a lie.

His ego was a blimp.  His talent was a cherry tomato water balloon fashioned from an extra small prophylactic.  His integrity was larval and his personality was heartburn.  A loathsome man who kept whispering in my ear about mixing unreleased Hendrix tracks.  I can just imagine him doing the same thing to every up and coming engineer he’d ever been in a control room with over the last two decades.  A sociopath with tendencies latent I can only guess at.  An egomaniacal asshole.  A man I’d swing on today if he said hello to me in a mall.

I’d like to put a very fine point on this.  Eddie Kramer is, if he’s still alive, a shitty, stupid and callow human.  The kind of man my father would call a “shitass” and then find reason to beat the crap out of.  A miserable and misanthropic little prick with no idea what everyone in his life thinks of him because he can’t be bothered.  He had no business inside a studio like A&M.  He, of all people I encountered in that environment for over eight years, had the shallowest of reasons to be inside that place.  A bullshit legacy that was far more about luck than talent.  Right place at the right time and absent a modicum of ability nonetheless.

From the guy who took care of the giant saltwater aquarium to Buddy the piano tuner.  From the runners to Shelly Yakus, no single person ever entered that monolithic front door with less integrity, less character or less credibility than Eddie Kramer, music’s most odoriferous charlatan.

The scene:

Here I am engineering for Garth and Eddie on a goddamn live KISS record.  I lied to Paul Stanley before we did the Detroit Rock City vocal by telling him I couldn’t remember the lyrics.   In order to “punch” or drop in and out of record by the millisecond for a vocal on an analog machine, you had to know the lyrics and melody or at least have a map because you did it live and in the moment.  Not at all like today.  He graciously wrote them out for me.  Somewhere I still have them.  Yep Sean, they’re still yours unless I end up homeless.

By the way, Gene and Paul, exceptionally nice guys.  Bright, clever, very funny and about as anti-asshole as  rockstars can be.  I thoroughly enjoyed working with them.  That it was fun, is no understatement.

I knew what sort of animal Eddie was by that point.  We learned far more than engineering in a place like A&M.  He was hapless without knowing it.  No skill, no acumen, no ear and completely clueless about the then contemporary technology.  His assistants and engineers spent considerable time each day after he left cleaning up his boneheaded mistakes and fixing his retarded, ill advised contributions to whatever project he had a hand in.  The comedy is that his ears were of such cheap and tawdry tin, he’d arrive the next day and never hear the difference.  He never suspected a thing.  Talk about an ego.

Eddi Kramer made his living taking credit for what everyone around him did to keep him from looking the fool he was.  Look under narcissist in the dictionary.  Guess who’s pictured.

I was smart enough to play along.  I curried favor, did the best job I could and even pretended to be excited about mixing his lost Hendrix tracks with him.  I knew he was a douchebag of the highest possible order.  In a place like A&M, you became accustomed to wizards and sorcerers.  The best of the best.  Eddie Kramer could not qualify for girl scout in that arena.

Look under hack.

I’d come to the studio on one of my precious days off to ensure the transfer of tapes, notes, documentation and gear from Studio C to the Mix Room went smoothly.  I was there to answer any questions and assist in any way I could.  I had done this for one reason.  Garth Richardson.

After a few hours and double and triple checking that all track sheets and documentation were in the right boxes and everything was as organized and idiot proof as I could make it……..dark clouds eclipsed the sun.

Luther Vandross and his engineer Ray Bardani were doing vocals and mixing across the hall in Studio D.  For some reason they were there in The Mix Room that afternoon.  Luther was a very nice and gentle man and so was his Engineer/producer Ray.  I had huge respect for Ray, he was a wizard.  Luther always brought a couple real video arcade games with him.  Runners and techs played them until dawn.  More often than not drunk or high or both.

I have stories about Luther but that’s another day.

Of course, Gene and Paul were there too.

I was about to leave when Eddie asked me to throw up a quarter inch reel on an ATR and find something he remembered as being funny.  All humor and light, he was attempting to entertain the assembled.  I wasn’t familiar with the reel he was asking for but more than happy to do my part for Eddie’s burlesque.

It took me a minute but I located the reel he was asking for and threaded it.  The map in the box wasn’t very clear and I wondered if he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.  A few minutes of trying to locate what he wanted and I started to sweat.

He started by saying things like there was a rookie in the room.  He laughed and suggested I read the label on the front of the box.  He went on to announce there was an idiot at the controls.  He wondered aloud what was to be expected from a simple “teaboy”.

I told him I wasn’t sure what he was looking for and it didn’t appear to be on this reel.

It was then he abruptly shoved me aside spitting words like asshole and fucker.

For the record, I’m not a violent guy.  I haven’t been in a fistfight since my early twenties.

I stood behind him with no choice but to feel and look foolish.  He began to stab at the controls maniacally, cursing and yelling ever louder.  A child’s tantrum building.  He started to stomp and scream.  Somewhere in the course of his volcano erupting, I saw that he’d reset the tape counter in the middle of the reel.  The sketchy map was now useless.  He pounded the machine in shrill frustration, stepped back and demanded I find what he was looking for all while calling me names and insulting me.

The room was silent.  Nobody looking anywhere but down.  Like an elevator after someone had farted.  Without saying anything and realizing what he’d done, I stepped to the machine and began to rewind the reel to the top so I could reset the counter.  It was then he exploded.

“It’s not at the beginning you fucking amateur!”

To be honest, I don’t remember what he said or rather, screamed after that.  It’s all a blur.  I can tell you it was the absolute worst, most invective, vituperative vitriol that had ever been directed at me in my entire life.

Stunned.

Surreal.

I was looking around for who he was talking to.  This pathetically ponytailed halitosis of a human was looking and screaming at me.  Ferocious indignation swarmed in my chest like furious bees.  My fists balled into hammers.  A career ending paroxysm was coming like a locomotive.  Fight or flight and my brain had seized on pounding this little limey shit in front of me into bloody unconsciousness.

I was going to hit him.  I was going to bash his fucking brains in.  I was going to kick his petite and lifeless body over and over.

And there was a hand on my shoulder.  “Mikey”, he said softly.  I turned slowly and there stood Garth.  He wrinkled his nose a little and pushed his glasses up.  “Mikey”, he said again and tilted his head to the left, towards the door to the hall.  He followed me out and I turned to him.  I was beside myself with anger and humiliation.  I tried to talk but there were no words.  With his hands at his sides he said to me, “Forget it, you didn’t do anything wrong.  Don’t worry about it.  Go back to Studio C and wait for me.”

I waived my arms and my mouth was open.  “Go”, he said.

Not a short walk between Mix and C and a lot longer on that day.  I sat in the rolling chair behind the console and shook with rage while my eyes leaked tears.  No one had ever spoken to me like that in my life.  I’d never been so embarrassed.  I’d nearly shit myself in desperate confusion.

I had my head in my hands, elbows on the console when I heard Garth enter the machine room behind me.  He asked if I was okay.  I don’t think I answered.  The entire time he spoke to me, I don’t believe I said a word.  I have to paraphrase what he said.  He assured me it was no big deal.  He told me an idiot like Eddie Kramer would never go to my superiors and make trouble for me because he was far too spineless and had a chronic reputation for the kind of behavior I’d just been on the receiving end of.  He told me that in the unlikely event Kramer attempted any such thing, that he, Garth, would intervene on my behalf and promised I had nothing to worry about.

His advice to me was to go home, or maybe a bar, and forget it ever happened.  The only thing anyone in that room anyone would remember about today he said, was just how big of an asshole and a child Eddie Kramer was.  You are a pro he said.  You didn’t hit him.  Walk it off.

Twice his size, I could have killed him before anyone pulled me away.

Mark Harvey joked with me about it the next day.  Told me no one else needed to know about it and reminded me that Eddie Kramer’s reputation proceeded him.  And that was pretty much it.

When Eddie and I passed each other in the hall in the days and weeks following, he wouldn’t even look at me.  Coward.

Thank you Garth.  You were and still are I’m sure, one of the best ones.  A good man indeed.

Drinks for my friends.

Meet Garth Richardson.

Garth was the senior Canadian.

A viciously competitive ping pong virtuoso with a devastating serve, a pronounced paunch and male pattern baldness.  Glasses and a baseball cap with some hockey logo.  I don’t believe I ever saw him lose.  He sure cleaned my clock whenever I was bored enough to have my ass handed to me.  I grew up with a ping pong table.  I was lucky to return his goddamn knuckle ball serve.

Talented, a big heart, funny, friendly and smart.  He was quite good to me.  You’ll see.

An immensely accomplished record producer and engineer who managed to eclipse his legendary father, Jack Richardson of Nimbus 9, The Guess Who and “These Eyes”, in the universe of recording arts.  He produced the first Rage Against The Machine record, arguably their best.  Good enough for me.  Always on the curve and usually ahead of it.  A class act and a good guy.

Years later, while I was mixing a project at the the deceased Frank Zappa’s house, Dweezil Zappa revealed to me how Tom Morello managed the signature  rhythm riff on “Killing In The Name”.  The second half of it was a full octave lower in the same key.  I’d always assumed it was a punch after he’d tuned down, but Morello did it with an octave pedal.  Duh.

Garth looked at me on the morning of the first day of the first gig I ever did with him and said in all seriousness, “Mikey, if you do nothing else on this session, I want you to set it up so that every time I hit rewind or stop on the multitracks, the audio from the hockey game comes up.”

I ran a noisegate off the sync head from the smpte time code track on 24, consistent amplitude and frequency.  The sync head gave me fifty five milliseconds of lead time before the playback head.  Enough to drive a truck through.  I patched into the trigger of a Drawmer gate, set it to duck, and brought it up on a fader at the end of the console near the patch bay so I could have access to it.  I ran the hockey audio through the gate, then I strapped another gate across the insert to close while the mix was playing with the same trigger off a mult.  Kinda the same chain but in reverse.  I still took care to mute it when we were printing.

Took me about five minutes to figure out and implement.

Garth smiled and asked for it in stereo.

I fucked up a lot but I think Garth and his engineer Joe liked me after that very first gig.  These guys were self sufficient.  They didn’t need a genius, just somebody to change the linens and help flip the mattress.

What I learned from Garth was largely by example.  Etiquette and politics.  He was a producer and I was an assistant to his engineer, Joe Barresi.  Joe has become a star in his own right: The Melvins, Queens of The Stoneage, Kyuss, Tool and Bad Religion.  Joe was a soft spoken and understated funny motherfucker.  At one point I was dating a redhead and showed him a picture.  His eyes lit up and he smiled.  “Firepie” he said softly through a slight grin. I’m grateful to have known and worked with him.  We were born on the exact same day, 02/07/65.  Technique and chops I stole from Joe.  Class and manners too.

Garth always had an exceptional ear for good engineers.  Stan Katayama and Joe Barresi for example.

Garth has a fairly pronounced stutter that seemed to come and go at random.  In my mind’s eye I see him jolly and hardworking.  Very funny and somewhat paternal, even to Randy and Bill.  He liked being Dad.  On holidays there was always whiskey for your coffee.

We pulled an all-nighter in B once, we were firing and printing snare samples and kept having phase problems between the original and the sample.  I remember looking at the the scope and seeing it 180 degrees out on one hit and almost phase locked on the next.  Frustrating.  We could hear it plain as day.

Around midnight Garth ordered roasted garlic pizza from this place up in Laurel Canyon.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  As soon as the pie arrived, he said with a smirk, “Mikey, I apologize in advance”.  It was delicious.  For a solid five hours we carpet bombed the control room with a prodigious volume of pungent garlic flatulence that had the runners entering with Lysol and makeshift face masks to clean up.  We joked about the air changing from blue to green.  We didn’t dare light a match for fear of combustion of the copious amount of methane.  An air locked control room and there were complaints from the hallways.  We  giggled with adolescent glee and morbid satisfaction.

His production credit often reads “GGGarth Richardson, a self deprecating nod at his stutter.

There was a young woman named Patricia Sullivan with a speech impediment somewhat more severe than Garth’s.  I called her Miss Ricia.  She was a mastering apprentice.  A different kind of engineering sorcery that suited her demeanor better than the testosterone fueled boys club of wanna be console jockeys.  Beautiful inside and out, she possessed a serenity and wisdom that I often wondered at.  She was calm and peace in an absolute maelstrom.

My point is this, an incidental thing like a stammer becomes pretty much invisible in the presence of of such genuine humanity.  It wasn’t until I remembered Garth’s affliction that I was reminded of Miss Ricia’s.  I was only reminded of Garth’s when I remembered his album credits.  When I hear his voice in my head today, I don’t hear the stutter.

I’m not sure by what authority, but Garth made me an honorary Canadian at one point.  He teased me that my assistant engineer credit on an the L7 record, “Hungry For Stink” would be either Demo King or Donut King.  I dared him and was a little disappointed to see my actual name spelled correctly when it was released.

These guys, these Canadians, Randy, Garth and Bill, all still inhale and exhale music, engineering and the production thereof everyday.  Garth has a school with producing legend Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”), Nimbus School of Recording Arts.  Randy and Bill have very successful careers and are making God Thumping good sound as you read this.

I have much more to say about Garth, but this chapter is done.

Next up is the story of how Garth was able to prevent me from beating the shit out of Eddie Kramer in front of Luther Vandross, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons while I was actually engineering on a KISS record.

Drinks for my friends.

Meet Randy Staub.

I called him Rusty Stub.

Randy Staub, while still a crazy as fuck Canadian, was the polar opposite in demeanor to Bill.  Val Kilmer’s Iceman to Bill’s larger than life cartoon monster.  I learned so much by watching him rather than being taken by the hand, he was talented and I owe him.  Stoic and soft spoken.  Disciplined like a scientist, a Canadian hallmark, he effortlessly made things sound giant.  Rode his bike back and forth from Sunset & La Brea to Van Nuys on a few hours sleep.  Ten miles at least with serious hills in between.  Every night.

The guy was good, I courted him like I was gay.

Every now and then he’d wait for me to acquit myself of all things janitorial because he was too tired to ride home.  I became his hag, but he wasn’t a fag.

He had focus.  You’d think he was arrogant.  Nope.  Focused.  Generous and ridiculously smart.  Kinda dark, definitely more than meets the eye.  A quiet charisma with rockstar good looks.  Still he had a degree of innocence and sincere humility. He’s a celestial body in his own right these days.  Google him.  Randy Staub.  He became a wizard.  I like to believe I witnessed the final stages of that transformation.

Didn’t take long at all for him to be picked up by producer Bob Rock as his engineer  (Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Cher, The Cult, David Lee Roth, Skid Row, The Offspring, 311, The Tragically Hip……).  I did everything but wear a dress and paint my face for this guy.  I took his tapes up to the library every night.  I stole his ridiculous bike shoes, filled them with cocoa mix and duct taped them to the ceiling of the mix room.

I wanted his attention.

Late one night after U2 wrapped, he asked with an eggplant stained wine grin if I knew where my car was.  He’d stolen it.  My shit box ’69 Superbeetle.  Told me my keys were at the front desk, but wouldn’t tell me where it was.  Pay back for the shoes on the ceiling thing.  Took me and Randy Wine hours to find it.

“Slow but steady ay?”  Him letting me know he wasn’t impressed yet.

There’s more.

He mentioned to me late one night in his quiet way that he hadn’t tracked a band in a while.  Too long he said.  He’d been in The Mix Room for months.  He was asking me to find a band, an open room and to assist him.  Keys to the universe.

I don’t remember if Cameron De Palma, nephew to Brian De Palma, was still working as a runner at A&M at that point, but we had become good friends.  His was one of the best bands I never got to record.  Studio D was open the following Sunday, Randy’s only day off.  I set it up with The Harvinator.

Staub needed rest so we didn’t start until early evening.  They were not anything like a heavy or hard band, but that’s what Randy managed to extract from them.  Although it took hours it seemed to happen in minutes.  The biggest and most aggressive Cameron’s band had ever sounded and probably ever would.  Before I knew it the main monitors were cracked wide open and the band was sounding like I’d never heard them.  The song we tracked was political, “Surgical Strikes”.  It was the very first time I’d witnessed an engineer make it bloom huge so easily.

The experience still looms large in my mind.  I have a peculiar recall for the way things sound.  It was unlike anything I’d ever heard at that point.  I was floored and excited.  My head swam and my heart raced.  My ears were on fire.  Fucking awesome.  I was inspired.  One of just a handful of times that proved I’d ended up in the right place.

He had made this band who’s music I adored, explode with what I saw as the simple ease of an expert and adept craftsman.  Arguably not what they were supposed to sound like but that didn’t matter.  He wielded his power to bend them into what he wanted to hear.  He smiled at me just once, when he saw on my face that I understood what he’d done.

A wizard.

Late in the morning, after the band had left, all the cables wound and I had taken all the mics and auxiliary outboard gear back to the shop, I found Randy neatly arranging all the mic stands along the wall by their triangular bases;  a simple puzzle.  All arms facing the same direction like a company of soldiers.  There was to be a string date the next day.  A thirty or forty piece orchestra.  The powers that were would never even see the condition we left the room in and that was really beside the point in his mind.

Good engineers cannot afford dominance from the right hemisphere.  They rely heavily on the left side.  I’m good with my left brain but it’s no face card in a poker game.  Most interesting occupations require good dancing between the two.  Rusty Stub had it nailed.  That means he wasn’t normal.  None of us were or are.  At one point or another, you breathe that shit or you don’t.

You may be in it longer than you’re feeling it, but you don’t last unless you breathe it.

Anyway, then Staub gets married and there’s this huge rock & roll wedding down in Newport Beach at the Four Seasons I think.  He sent a Limo for Bill Kennedy and Scott Humphries and I was invited along by both Bill and Randy.  It had a push button liquor dispenser.  I shit you not.  Like ‘B’ for burbon and ‘V’ for vodka…….all the way to Newport Beach.

There were girls with us, I think one was named Jeanne and she was the hot one.  None of us banged either of them.  The Wedding and reception were classy and chaotic.  There was a dinner of some sort where I seem to remember Bill causing some controversey with his blue dick.  Humphries sneered at my jeans but I had a shirt and jacket.  Half the dudes at the ceremony were in jeans including all the guys from Little Ceasar.  Did I tell you Humphries was a dick?

I remember the party we had in the beautiful suite provided by the Randy and Janice consortium.  An ocean view and the honeymoon suite kept sending tubs of beer and hard liquor.  Literally every fifteen or twenty minutes room service was at the door with a galvanized tub full of Coronas or bottles of Jack or Tanqueray.  Not buckets.  Tubs.

There was this girl named Carol but I’d been drinking for twelve hours and I just couldn’t make that work.  She was hotness.  Red hair, excellent rack, a clever mind……….. the Maid of Honor I believe.  I don’t blame her for never taking me seriously after that.  Great smile.  Cool woman.

Woke up the next morning with Bill Kennedy yelling and spanking my forehead.  I opened my eyes.  Ocean View.  Bright Ocean View.  “Beer!”, he was yelling.  With one hand he was smacking my face and with the other he was holding a bottle of Miller too close for me to focus on.  At least it blocked out the sun.

I was into photography at the time and I took the most brilliant black and white portrait of bill that morning.  In his robe and sunglasses, smoking a camel and drinking a beer.  I gotta find it.  Roland the Headless Thompson helped me develop the film and make some 8×10’s

We went whale watching.  There were drinks on the boat.  The seas were rough that day.  There was a group of us but I don’t remember who.  That group got to watch me end up on the shoes of tourists a few times.  I’m not a puker so I don’t think I puked.

Next thing I remember we’re on our way back to Hollywood in the Limo with the push button liquor dispenser.  I think the girls were with us.  We smoked a lot of pot.

It took me three days to feel normal.

The whole experience was very valuable to me.  I learned some very important life lessons.

The first one is, make sure you don’t get so hammered you can’t seal the deal.  Sheezus.  Rookie move.  The the second is, try not to get so hammered you black out sporadically and eventually realize that huge chunks of a very good time are missing.  Been pretty good at those things since.

Also, don’t go to places you’re likely to fall down if you’ve been drinking.

I remember running into Randy outside of Tower Records on Ventura one night.  It was summer and his eyes were clear but the look on his face I wasn’t used to.  He’d just finished some ridiculous ordeal that was a Bob Rock production.  Twelve to eighteen hour days for months on end.  It may have been Metallica’s Black album.  Probably because it was done at A&M.

He’d been sleeping for the last few days.  He told me I was the first person he’d seen that he knew outside of the record he’d been on for months.  He told me he was over sleeping and needed to get out and about.  He was raw.  Almost confused.  I honestly think he suddenly saw himself in my eyes and grinned a little at it.

“Slow but steady ay?”  He said.

Drinks for my friends.

“The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.” -1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life.”

It’s a trite understatement to say he lived a full and long life.  My first memories of Walter Cronkite are from a handsome cherry wood Zenith console television, the smell of hot vacuum tubes and visions of astronaut endeavors in black and white.  The Columbia Broadcast System was the only channel with reliable reception on the outskirts of a very small town.

Rabbit ears but no foil.  We were a class act.  Roger Mudd.  Eric Sevareid.  Walter Cronkite.

CBS, NBC and ABC.

CBS.

The great improviser, who declared the Vietnam war unwinnable, after seeing it himself.  Pretty much ending the presidency of LBJ.  Legitimately speechless when Neil Armstrong declared one small step for man.  Yep, he paused when announcing the death of JFK.  Maybe teared up a little.  Unafraid to cover America’s civil rights struggle.  Back then there was the newspaper and the evening news.  The evening news was Walter Cronkite.  An icon who managed to eclipse Edward R. Murrow as America’s pre-eminent journalist.

Comforting that he wasn’t felled early like Murrow, Jennings or Russert.

But oh, what he must have thought of contemporary journalism.  The bar he hoisted so high, disgraced, disregarded and ultimately ignored.   Charlatans like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh et al. Infotainment and Fox News.   Rampant unfounded celebrity worship.

He came from an era when network bosses weren’t sure if America would tolerate a half an hour of hard news as opposed to fifteen minutes.  They did.  They craved it.   To then witness our attention span shrink and atrophy.  Popular culture force fed to America and the rest of the world, a phenomena that eventually rendered actual news not entertaining enough, no matter it’s truth or content.  Mr. Cronkite was already on the sidelines.  Retired.  How this felt to him must have been devastating.

One could argue that America has gone to shit since Cronkite retired.  Sure seems like the time we really began to lose our way.  I’m thinking Reagan era.  Could have used him then.

His own truthful ideal obsolete.  Forced to witness it decline from there.

Graceful and honest.  A surrogate for the people’s necessary information.  He chose to color outside the lines but once or twice.  When he did, he did so with the best intentions and the result sent magnificent waves through all of America.  He affected change by telling HIS truth.  Otherwise, he did a little bit less.  He told us THE truth.

We ended up with Nixon.

He told us what we needed to know as best he could.

Yes, I’m old enough to remember him quite fondly.  The smells of my father’s aftershave and dinner in the kitchen, waiting for Mr. Cronkite to finish with the day’s events.

Good luck old man.

My hope is that you went gentle into that goodnight.

Drinks for my friends.

My experience with the Canadians is a book in itself.  I’m thinking these bastards deserve at least a couple three chapters.

Meet Bill Kennedy.

I’ll never forget my first time.  Neither would you.  Kurt Gibson hits the heroic home run in game one of the World Series against Oakland in ’88.  Randy Staub calls, we’d just seen the same thing, he was pumped and his buddy Bill was with him.  We all thought drinks.  I wash my hands and brush my teeth.  Change my shirt.  The doorbell rings and there’s this ugly little fucker with brilliant blue eyes and long red hair standing there.  Tight black pants, Beatle boots, a CBGB t-shirt and a black leather jacket.  Teeth like a donkey.

My first thought was The Tasmanian Devil.

I stick out my hand and he grabs my balls and says, “Nice ta meet ya motherfucker.”  Then he laughs all throaty and mocking but like a fucking witch.  Kinda spooked me.

Staub hangs back with a half grin looking me right in the eyes.

Can’t remember what the deal was but neither one of them could drive legally in the States.  We headed into Hollywood in my shitbox ’69 Superbeetle.  They rode in the back like I was the chauffer and took turns covering my eyes and sticking fingers in my mouth.  They bought my drinks, Staub got shut down by some betty in fishnets while me and the Tasmanian Devil got shit hammered.  We drove back under the same conditions.  Except for alcohol and drugs part, it was a virtual re-enactment.

I don’t even remember where we went.

For what it’s worth, I don’t do that anymore.

Bill Kennedy or Kill Bennedy, his alter ego after too much Jagermeister, was and probably still is, a crazy bastard with a big heart.  He was to help and teach me a lot.  Sometimes his own worst enemy, he’d monitor and mix so loud his clients would be driven from the room.  His maxim was to “make a racket” and he always did.  Hard drinker.  We all were.  Truth is, he drank harder than most of us and that’s saying something.  Not as hard as the rest of us and that’s saying something too.

I was furious with him for using forty seven microphones on a drum kit when I was producing/engineering my very first record for Down By Law.  Even in a studio like A&M, that amount of excess taxed resources.  A day to sort out phase alone.  Ridiculous.  Over compensation for a tiny penis.  He was doing Demos for Motley Crue in D and I was trying to make a record in C.  Prick.

Once upon a time, he had like eight Marshall stacks and six Ampeg cabinets going full tilt in D, so loud it was leaking into the live echo chambers above C, I had one patched into a mix I was doing in B.  Had to go to an EMT plate.  Bill Kennedy was an abhorrent gear and amplitude slut.  Louder was better.  He sometimes missed the point.  Subtlety was never his Devil’s advocate.  It never occurred to him.

Bill Kennedy was a dick.  I don’t know what he is these days but if he’s any less of a dick I might like him more than I remember.

We became good friends and I miss him.  Standard greeting was, “Hey fucker”.  He taught me a shitload, particularly in matters of outside the box thinking and extreme approaches to standard engineering gospel.  I learned to push all the ratio buttons in on an Urei 1176 with the input and output all the way up at once.  Gorgeously unpredictable distortion.  Child’s play. Bill would patch six of them together, turn the line amps to eleven, push the fader to the top, mute the console, turn the master gain all the way up and deselect the mute button for the adolescent pleasure of making the NS10’s smoke and spark.

Call a tech, the monitors are toast.

I learned compression and distortion, concepts rarely mutually exclusive, from Bill.

The strip joint across the the street, Crazy Girls, was known as Bill’s office.  Canadian for strippers is “peelers”.

A story about Canadians including Bill:

Randy Staub had found himself a lovely bride named Janice from the other lot so we had a bachelor party.  Events are soupy blurry but I remember spraying Bill in the face with air freshener I’d discovered in the glove compartment of a taxi and helping to toss his ass from said taxi while it was still moving.  He rolled end over end.  Ass over teakettle.

Kadump kadump.

Not sure if it was before or after we got thrown out of a mud wrestling place on Western called The Tropicana.

What happened next is unclear. We were drinking and spilling and yelling.   Staub was good to go.  He was in some sort of a diaper.  Down there on the stage.  We’d all put up hundreds of dollars.  Not me, but all the other Canucks.  Next thing, we’re on the sidewalk under the neon and there’s a handful of bouncers with their arms folded, saliva ran from their snarling lips.

Proud shithoused Canadians.

I think it was before.  The cab thing.

I had wisdom enough to discourage an actual fistfight.  Been there, done that.  No win situation.  Bad idea.

That was my genius.

What I remember next is Bill falling from his second story balcony trying to break into his own apartment after losing his keys. I think I heard his his ribs crack.  We  got in and Bill was the first to lose consciousness, maybe because his ribs were cracked.  Pain and alcohol being a formidable force multiplier.  Yes Mother, there were drugs too.

It was Staub’s idea was to paint his dick blue with one of those jumbo Sharpies.  So that’s what we did.  Painted Bill’s flaccid, unconscious penis a deep inky blue.  Bill was so pleased, he whipped it out at even the slightest provocation for any member of the wedding party and probably a few tourists.  I remember some old folks being offended.  I don’t remember what his dick looks like.  Maybe I blocked it out.  There’s a chance it never happened.

He complained to me once that it wasn’t coming off.  Soap wasn’t doing the job.  I reminded him that Sharpies were alcohol based and the answer was contained therein.  He said to me, “Fuck, I’ll just leave it.”

A Kill Bennedy catchphrase:  “Take a long, slow suck on my runny scrotum you stinking cunt.”  There was something else about eggs in a swamp and elaborate theories regarding stale semen buildup or “SSBU”.

I just knew the crazy little fucker would never supply me with cause to question his integrity.  Were I to drop the ball, it would be on me.  Bill Kennedy would never throw me under the bus with alibi or malice in mind, however.  Kind of a miserable prick but he treated me well.  Fiercely loyal.  Big heart.

Much love to you Bill.

Drinks for my friends.

Belated happy Independence weekend wishes to you all.

I do hope it was at least as good as mine.  At least as interesting.  I hope as warm.

“I try to use positive association……anytime anything good happens to me, I stick something up my ass.”  -Margaret Cho

I spent the day at a family barbecue.  Not my family, my girlfriend’s.  Extraordinarily pleasant and I hope to show you how interesting.

I always bring wine because I’m flush with wine and  that’s what I want to drink in the afternoon.  Hard liquor in the afternoon is uncivilized when women and children are present.  Family barbecue.  Zins and pinots for everyone.

Except the pinot had gone bad.  Cork came out way too easy.  No pop.  Tasted like ass.  Poured it out for fear it would get drunk and come back on me.

Very nice people.  Pleasant and warm and sincere.  I was under some degree of scrutiny.  You see, I was with my girlfriend, at a holiday barbecue, with her people.  Not mine.  Her relatives and very close friends and all manner of folks who’ve known her since she was a child as well as people who’ve never not known her.  They were checking me out.  I caught nobody staring.

I learned to slap some bones. I hope I got that right.  Dominos.  I was monitored during this activity as well.  Two charismatic women at the end of our table lent tacit approval while my girlfriend showed me the game.  They kept a close eye and nodded in approval when I made a play.  I’m not sure why.

Food.  Pork ribs,  meat sliding from the bone with juiciness and justice for all.  Homemade mac & cheese of creamy texture and richness.  Baked beans with excellent consistency under tooth with all the peppery and  flavorful.  Sublime deviled eggs made me greedy.  So many other things to taste but it’s conspicuously rude to fill your plate and not finish it.  It was just so nice.  My family does it too.  They set up a spread and pretty much welcome whoever walks through the door like an old friend as long as you’re with someone they know.

I haven’t often understood how swell it feels to be the stranger on a day like today.  Warm.  It’s warm when the woman you’re with affords you the benefit of the doubt in such a large gathering of people you’ve never seen before.

We ate and drank and the roosters sat four at a time at the domino table by the pool and talked the most hysterical shit you can imagine.  Brutal but always funny.  That was the line; say whatever you like but it better not be mean and it better be funny.  Nothing personal.  Inside those rules and the rules of the game, they played and played.  Loudly.  Roosters.  Peacocks.  Awesome.

I was one of two white people there.  There was me and one other honky in attendance.  I’m not here to make a big deal about that but it is germane to the story.  I’m sorry, I adore the word honky.  The word honky is goddamn funny.  Even funnier in italics.  Honky.

Picture George Jefferson or Fred Sanford.  Honky

So here are all my cards.

Cracker.

I moved from Carson City Nevada to Atlanta Georgia when I was nineteen years old.  I want to say this as simply as possible.  I grew up with white people.  The handful of people with different skin pigmentation were few and far between.  My parents were non judgmental,  open minded, freedom loving Democrats.  Not Hippies but progressive hicks.  I really never had a chance to develop a bias and I was never really exposed to much.

Honkies.

Atlanta Georgia hit me right in the mouth with it’s polite but overt racial divide.  First person I talked to fresh off the boat used the word nigger in his first sentence to me.  Southern comfort.  It was Atlanta when black women began to ask me what I was mixed with.  It was mostly women.  The better I knew them the harder they laughed.  I really didn’t think too much about it.  They were teasing me or flirting.  Still,  ‘Honey, what’re you mixed with?’  is something I’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Through my years as a recording engineer I did everything from hip hop to gospel.  Punk to metal.  I remember being asked that question one way or another, over and over.

My Girlfriend and I ended up at Magic Johnson’s TGI Fridays in the not too recent past.  We drove away and it occurred to me  I was the only white guy in there.  Almost as soon as I brought it up she told me nobody else noticed because most probably assumed I was black.

I’m no idiot.  I understand that it’s almost mathematically impossible for me to be exclusively Caucasian.  I’m Scottish and German.  I  also understand I’m a descendent of Custer.  I’m pretty white.  Not pretty, but white.  Blue eyes, fair skin, blond hair…..curly to nappy and I’m all torso.  Broad shoulders, barrel chest and an oversized head.  Short but powerful hindquarters.  I’d make an excellent backwards digging rodent.

Today I met a white black man.  It was his house I was at.  Very nice man.  We shook hands.  He was white.  His sister saw me from afar and mistook me for him.  She and I had never met until today.   A rooster at the domino table.  His other sister observed me for a time and summoned my girlfriend from across the swimming pool.  She had a question.  The family half African American and Half German.  Grew up in Compton.

“What is he mixed with?”

It wasn’t just her question, other people wanted to know.  The thing is this.  My epiphany was thus.  All this time, the question was not whether I was black or not, it was assumed I was black.   The question was what else was I mixed with.

Not how black, but how white.

I contemplated all this this while driving in silence with her along the freeway.  Sitting in her driveway and the gorgeous cacophony of fireworks bouncing and echoing through a hilly neighborhood of beautiful houses.  Turned on the radio.  Frampton came alive and Journey sealed the deal.  Technicolor bursts  as we sped through dusk on the 60 and the 405.

I’m an agnostic.  Whatever.  If there is a sensible idea, it’s that we’re all supposed to be equal.  We’re all supposed to procreate to the point where we have no reason to discriminate based on pigmentation, sexual preference, orientation or gender, religion philosophy or fashion sense.

All along, these folks assumed I was black.  I think that’s kinda cool.

Drinks for my friends.

Michael Jackson.  I’m a fan.  Brilliant pop composer.  Tragic.  Bona fide ElvisBelushiAnnaNicoleChrisFarley syndrome.  I don’t believe he was a pedophile but he sure did some stupid shit.  I can’t but think his persecution and prosecution for child molestation tore at his most human fibers.  It really was his proverbial straw.  It was then  he began to fold.

I’d always kinda liked the music, but only in the periphery.  He sealed the deal with me when he let  Eddie Van Halen tear it up on what would be one of his biggest songs.  Brilliant move.  Gave all us naive white boys an open door.  Brave if you acks me.

He was damaged and Papa Joe is clearly a sociopath.  The face is of evil.  I see an asshole.  What disturbs me the most is the inevitable slow but hot coal lambaste by the media.  Sheezus.  Randi Rhodes and Tom Hartman were all over it on Air America today.  When it gets that deep, it’s because they hafta.

His star was likely the biggest ever seen by earthlings, despite some rather advanced oxidation.

In death as in life, more than anything else, the world’s most accomplished and beleaguered defendant of celebrity obsession.

It’s true that I am of fan, but I’m not overly sympathetic.  At the end of the day, he was the leading architect of his own demise.  I ultimately believe anyone with the aforementioned syndrome knows exactly enough of what they do to understand just exactly what they’re doing.  Add Kurt Cobain to the list.  No piss mocking of the burden of celebrity.  Fame flat out fucks with most people who end up in the light.  It fucked with Michael Jackson as early as five years old.  This end as predictable as always for people with this syndrome.

His affliction was chronic and acute.  You know what they say about walking in a man’s shoes.  Truism.

And yet, the tragedy.  There is family, friends and fans.

In other news, Samuel Wurzelbacher, in his current role as Joe The Plumber, graced us with his prowess for history today by reminding us that our founding father’s knew full well that Socialism and Communism were not at all efficacious.  Kinda hard to figure how he can say that with such conviction as neither concept was to be born for another half century.  He went on to suggest with the certitude of round headed jackass that Senator Chris Dodd should be lynched.  More than once.  Every time I see this nimrod on television I flash back to projectile vomiting as a kid with the flu.  Specifically the aftertaste of a partially digested dinner and the corrosive agents of digestion in my windpipe.

Having said that, I owe Joe.  He’s a bit player in the neoconservative production that caused me to vomit so often that I’m no longer traumatized by it.  Now it’s pretty much ‘Oh Liz Cheney is on, pardon me while I paint this hedge with the contents of my upper gastrointestinal tract’.  He’s a goddamn plebian narcissist.  And a fucking fool for thinking he has something to say.

“The Tennessee stud was long and lean
The color of the sun and his eyes were green
He had the nerve and he had the blood
And there never was a hoss like the Tennessee stud” -Tennessee Ernie Ford

I’m sticking to the current events thing.  This just in from an old friend:

Hey Mike,

I’m writing you in confidence, just to let you know what kind of trouble my ex is.

she asked me if I had ever heard of the Powerhouse. I said “NO”,

she then told me that you had told her that I was there the night the bar tender showed you her oral talents. And that we both got service on the bar.

And then she told me that you once had a cocaine problem and it’s back again.

She said that you contacted her directly by email and that Misty is also still in contact with her.

I went and looked at your blog and put two and two together.  = trouble with Capital T

later

****

I respond:

Sheezus Crap!  How’d you end up with this kinda crazy?  I’m spooked.  My stalker and you’re stalker activate their wonder twin powers.  I don’t believe I was ever at the Powerhouse with you.  Blow was never my thing.  It’s merely the wrong direction for me.  Pot and booze are my elective poisons.  I don’t mind a little xanax or vicodin.  This woman is crapping in public nuts.  Obviously when I first engaged her, I had no idea who she was.  I want nothing to do with this.  We are longtime friends ****, let me know what I can do and/or keep me out of it.

Tell the bitch we were complete blow hounds and routinely got our stingers moistened on the bar, in front of the juke, in the bathroom, the alley……..

Take care

Then there’s this:

I was in another medical marijuana dispensary today, the terminal I’d brought acted like it hadn’t been downloaded.  My name was on the box as well as that of the business.  Still had to download it twice, adjust the time and date and finally ended upon a conference call with our technology partner.  Got it done while the staff did bong rips in the back office.  I like stoned folks more than drunk folks, but even the stoned ones are a pain in the ass.  To be fair, I like these people quite a bit.

My one pair of Kenneth Cole dress shoes were fucking killing me.  My feet ached ached to my knees.  What should have taken ten minutes took two hours.  This on top of the dance I’d done with my superiors a few hours earlier to deposit funds in my girlfriends account so she can pay her state bar license, among other things, after she helped me with my rent.  This and a just now phone call telling me she’s still $400 short.  If I had a gun, I’d be tasting steel.

Anybody want Spiderman #22, X-men #94 or an original A/DA flanger?

Drinks for my friends.

After almost too long, I needed to step up to the plate again.  I lobbied the powers that were, Mark Harvey, and got a gig in the mix room with Ggggarth Richardson, he stutters, and Joe Barresi on an L7 mix.  Garth producing.

I knew Joe and Garth pretty well.  Garth called me the demo king and later the donut king.  He insisted that would be my credit and I dared him to do it.  Joe and Garth brought consistent business to A&M and Garth was part of the Canadian contingent.  There always seemed to be a disproportionate number of Canucks in music production but I liked them all.  Randy Staub and Bill Kennedy both mentored me.  Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd, The Wall) is a Canadian and he is one brilliant man.  Google him, you’ll see.  Garth did the first Rage Against The Machine record, arguably their best.

Joe became the shit.  Queens of The Stone Age.  Tool.  Google the talented bastard.  We were born on the exact same day you know.

The Canadians made great engineers and producers.  Google Bob Rock.

Garth looked at me on the morning of the first day and said with unmistakable seriousness, “Mikey, if you do nothing else on this session, I want you to set it up so that every time I hit rewind or stop on the multitracks, the audio from the hockey game comes up.”  The finals were already on the television mounted between the massive monitors.

I ran a mult, from SMPTE  time code always on track 24, from the sync head to a gate,  some fifty five milliseconds before the playback head.  Gave me a five one hundredths of a second advantage.  Trigger to open on rewind and stop, but duck on playback when the gate saw signal of a certain amplitude.   SMPTE time code was of a very consistent amplitude..  A mere threshold issue.  I brought it up on a fader.  In the interest of thorough, I strapped another gate across the insert to close while the mix was playing.  Kinda the same chain but in reverse.  I still took care to mute it when we were printing mixes.

I think they were impressed.  Didn’t think a rookie like me had the chops.  It took me about five minutes; I’d been stealth engineering on my own for some time but hadn’t ever been responsible for maintaining lock on two analog multitracks.  Ahead of the curve and behind it.  Story of my life.  Bane of my existence .

There was only one Canadian I could never muster any affection for.  Scott Humphrey.  Pro Tools hack and  pompous asshole.  His wikipedia page has him as an “American  record producer/mix engineer”.  Wore his money and privilege on his forehead.  Maybe he is an American.  That would make sense.  I’m an honorary Canadian.  This prick did nothing but look down his nose at me.  I never saw him touch a fader much less mix, engineer or produce a single note.  An expectorate absent any acuity with phase coherency.  He was a dick.

A band of Jersey Goombas was across the hall in studio D.  Biohazard.  Dipshits.  Evan Seinfeld is a consumate douchebag and  now he’s married to Tera Patrick.  One of these things is not like the other.  My buddy Rick and I had the good fortune to clown his clueless ass about a decade later.

I have a plethora of tales about the Canadians, Biohazard and L7.  It gets better.  Stay with me.  It gets better.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve just discovered Oscar Mayer cheese dogs.  A big delish.  I eagerly anticipate test driving them with a variety of condiments including Claussen dill spears and of course, Big Bob’s Bleu.  Countdown to angioplasty.  Harbinger of heartburn and a guaranteed culinary delightful.  I need to buy an onion.  Excellent texture and authentic whang.  Got me plenty of ketchup and mustard.

Can’t always afford those smoked white turkey franks from Ballpark.  I’m a whore for good tasting nourishment.  Will need to explore cheap asian noodles again soon.  Another jar of peanut butter.

I’ll need a glass of Woolite, a glass of Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc.  The Crawford is the shit.  Very grapefruit with good acid.  Order salt & pepper calamari and the seared ahi appetizer at PF Changs.  If they don’t have the Crawford, throw a fit and opt for the Estancia pinot grigio.  Trust me, I know how to gamble.  Do this by yourself and bring a book.  Sit at the bar, it’s lovely.

I have an odd fascination with Ernest Borgnine.  I named a room in my house after him.  I like when he’s spooky, he has the creepiest grin.

Drove by Pink’s today.  Marveled at the line.  Romanced by the aroma.  Lovely perfume guaranteeing a gastrointestinal malaise.  I’ll suffer that but not the absurd volume of zombies waiting online.  I hate them.  Ordinary people.

My first and last hang in Hollywood, The Powerhouse.  On Highland just north of Hollywood blvd., on the east side of the street.

When my session ended before two am, you could find me there.  They were cool enough to put my records on the jukebox.

Bartenders were, SJ, Steve, Gary and Tracy.  I’ve long been a compulsive hand washer, so upon entering, I’d head straight to the bathroom to sate the sticky handed urge.  More often than not I’d emerge to find a giant, dry as the desert Bombay Sapphire martini, three olives up at least, in a punchbowl of a pina colada glass waiting for me.  I usually had something to read.

You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here,  shouted just before two, accompanied by a ringing bell.  I was exempt.  Once the door was locked, the onus was on me to make my own drinks.

Never cut to the guy getting pasted by the train at the end.  That’s chickenshit.

Old wooden bar on the left, red naugahyde booths on the right and shitty green shag underfoot.  Pinball and a juke at the back end.  Steve was a musician, Gary an aspiring comic, SJ a Republican from Texas and Tracy had amazing oral skills and a very nice rack.  I brought the Gotohells with me one night after a gig at Al’s Bar along with a journalist from Flipside and the six of us drank all night while the journalist conducted her interview.  Whiskey and pitchers of beer.  The bill was twenty four dollars.  Quid pro qou, I left a hundred on the bar.

Got my dick sucked on that bar with a nickel plated .38 snub nose above my head.  Tracy had mad skills and a gun.  It was her birthday and she wore some ridiculous hippie buckskin bra with feathers.  Ridiculous but it stirred my loins.  She locked the door and only her and I were left.  One thing led to another.  Paradise by the jukebox light.  Mad skills.

I actually got up and did a short set on drums with some band one night.  Gesticulating the best I could.  Killing myself softly.  I was a shitty drummer.  I’m lucky to have sucked because it informed my engineering and production skills.  My own suckage was positive stuff.  Invaluable.  A seriously penis whipped drink.

My goal is a deluxe apartment in the sky.

My Sharona is as close to a perfect pop song as it gets.  Great production.  The solo rips.  Fuckin slays me.

Listening to Primus lends me largesse in the form of gristle.

I visited the Powerhouse a few years back.  Despite the fact that Joe Power had finally  sold the place and it had been remodeled into strip mall austerity, I was with a lovely woman and had a swell time.

But it was absent vibe.  You can never go home again.  My heart sank a little.  My start yanked a little.  Nostalgic for the salad days.  I just remembered how much I like snowglobes.  My eyes have begun to fail me.  I need reading glasses.

I want to be Walter Matthau when I get old.  It’s a good goal.

Drinks for my friends.

I ain’t askin for much.

I always liked the word gendarme so I looked it up.  Big disappointment.

I’ve long since recognized the appeal of wealth.  I admit, I like shiny things.  Actually, I like handsome objects.  Artful globes to leviathan machinery.

Used to be I coveted wealth.  Then I made a little money and indulged myself a little.  Bought a nice car.  Developed a taste for caviar and champagne.  Good wine.  A ridiculously expensive stereo.  A house.  Vacations.

It all kinda fell apart, slow enough so the way down wasn’t crazy in my face but just enough to make me puke now and then.

There are magazines still reasonably popular, devoted to things most of us can’t afford or wouldn’t, even if we had the scratch.

I don’t covet the pretty things so much as the freedom.  A nice lunch.  Healthy food is more expensive.  I like tomatoes.  Sauces.  Appetizers and good wine.

I want a condo in the sky above the dirty streets.  My life’s trajectory has been odd at best.  One of the things we’re supposed to do here is distinguish ourselves.  I feel I’ve done that but would like to continue.  Cook up some pork maple sausages, dip them in Big Bob’s Bleu and you’re courting intestinal methane pressure.  The antithesis of fiber and nature’s broom but still an efficient evacuator of the colon with many a loud report.

My two biggest questions are why are we here?

And are we really here?

I often think one’s life is either a good mosaic or a bad one.  Subject to trends and popular opinion.  All of us beholding to what is vogue  What is not.

I’m trying to point to how closely we dance with chaos.  A true economic implosion would have families and entire clans grouping and sharing resources.  There’s a chance that’s not a bad idea.  It could just be the most important skill my mother can pass to me is how to grow and preserve produce.  Agriculture is about to become more important.  Dad taught me to shoot but I need a refresher.

Imagine a world without glutinous salad dressings.

I want to talk about bars now.

I feel obligated to start with the Whitehorse.  Dark and sinister.  Late eighties, early nineties.  Just north of Sunset on Western, east side of the street across from an OSH.

Pretty crazy neighborhood, rather insane clientele.  Pimps, prostitutes, trannies and drunks.  Drug dealers, criminals and musicians.  Not odd at all for a cockroach to skitter down the bar dodging the cheesy candlelit, white plastic net wrapped red glass candle holders.  I figured it was the light they feared, not the heat.  “There goes another cola nut”, I’d say.  Diane, the lovely but flawed bartendress who always wore rosewater perfume, would smile and bat her eyes while protesting she hadn’t seen it.  Had never in fact, seen a single bug on the bar or anywhere else ever.

D.S. Morey.  Adorable.  Lying to me for sport.

She was gorgeous.  Blue pools for eyes.  Voluptuous.  Serious tits and a Coop Girl frame.  Smart clever and vulnerable.  Gorgeous tattoos on pale skin.  Blond with a yellow tooth at the very front of her head.  She was a reformed meth addict from Traverse City, Michigan.  We got very close.  She put my records on the jukebox.  I believe we were afraid of each other.  She was fragile and I was timid.  We went on a few actual dates.  The first one, she watched me get drunk and I took her to Denny’s, the second I took her to see Naked Lunch and tried to kiss her.  She resisted my overture and politely insisted that I not embarrass myself.

I was crushed.

A few weeks later she took a lover and told me I just wasn’t mean enough.

I wondered a long time before I understood what she meant.  I drank cheap whiskey in those days.  Long neck Budweisers.  I recorded punk rock.

There was a framed picture on an end table in her apartment from her days as an addict.  She and another woman on a rooftop at dawn.  The sun breaking behind them as they celebrated how fucked up they were.  Her hair in braids and colorful ornaments.  Christmas on a summer morning.  Huge awesome smiles.  A light blue sky and clouds pink and orange.  I asked about it and she had nothing to say.  She was ashamed of it and that’s probably why it was there.

It was so very sublime to me.  Finally, I actually asked for it.  She told me no way could I have it.  Not long after, her apartment late at night, the photo in the same place but the glass was broken and the picture torn.

The Whitehorse was completely destroyed in the ’94 earthquake.  It had been my bar of choice because the bartender was lovely and fascinating and the bars in my neighborhood were no place for a big long haired white boy.

Oh Diane Morey.

Drinks for my friends.

I must tell you about the Magic Snot.

As  janitor King of the Fruit, I was accountable  for the appearance and cleanliness of the entire studio.  Tens of thousands of square feet.   King of the Fruit; the onus was on me more than anyone else.  Five bathrooms.  Two public restrooms inside the complex.  One for men and one for women.  Five bathrooms total, three with showers in the private lounges of studios A, B and D.

Lounge bathrooms were to be stocked with shampoo, conditioner, razors, shaving cream, toilet paper, soap, tampons, paper towels, tissues…….

All five control rooms required full dispensers of denatured alcohol, windex, tex wipes, Kim Wipes, a certain number of blue, red and black medium sharpies, grease pencils, sharpened pencils, ballpoints, splicing tape, canned air, red tape for reels stored head out and blue tape for reels stored tails out.  Red heads, blued tales.  At least two empty half inch, quarter inch and two inch reels.  Labels to fit any tape box size, track sheets, patch sheets for 72 channels and templates for documenting outboard gear of at least 50 different kinds filed alphabetically, blank cassettes and dats……

Of course the aforementioned pots of fresh coffee, decaf, cold water, hot water, and then tea, sugar, non dairy creamer, sweet & low, cocoa mix, honey, stir sticks, plastic spoons, forks and knives, paper plates, salt & pepper, napkins …….

Then ice chests with half & half, milk, ketchup, mustard and an identical accompaniment for each refrigerator in four lounges.  Fruit baskets etc…..

I did my best to ensure those bathrooms, control rooms and lounges appeared  clean and sanitary.  Sort of.  I didn’t take it any more seriously than I had to.  I was adept at maintaining appearances.  Randy Wine taught me to stoop and pick up imaginary flotsam when passing authority in the halls.  Greet them and smile while bending to retrieve imaginary refuse, then make your way to the nearest trash receptacle and out of their periphery.

We did mop the floors, clean the toilets and urinals, windexed the mirrors and took out the trash at least twice a day.

It was there and then I became a compulsive hand washer.

The day shift was a hump but it was only nine hours.  We ate when we could.

Years of my life were spent cleaning up after drunken , drug addled rock stars and don’t give a shit producers and engineers.

The night shift could be a grind.  Cleaning up after five, spoiled and self indulgent rock bands who ate their meals off real plates using real flatware.  All of which had to be transported down to the runners closet to be washed in a single sink that you couldn’t even see because of the shelving in your face if you were taller than five foot six.

It fucking sucked.

The worst part was the waiting.  Waiting for the rooms to go down in the early hours of the morning knowing the work that was waiting for you.  Work that would challenge my janitorial acumen.  My capacity for giving a fuck.  It sucked.

As a runner, I was exploited, taken advantage of, discounted and dismissed.  It was a goddamn nightmare.  I remember sitting in my piece of shit ’69 VW Bug outside some shop in South Central LA in the pouring rain to procure obscure vacuum tubes for the amp of a semi famous studio guitar player.  I was already wet and about to be soaking.  Sitting there, asking myself just what the fuck I was doing.  The wind making my bug rock and the rain drumming on it’s thin metal shell.  My hands and feet were freezing.

I would ask myself that a lot.  I was to be in that place over and over.

I drove that shitbox everywhere.  From Malibu to Oxnard, Beverly Hills to Manhattan Beach.  Before it was over I would drive Shelly’s cars back and forth between Tahoe and LA.

If you lasted in that place longer than six months you were probably at least a little crazy.  More than two years, you were for better or worse, a member of the asylum and it might be the best place for you.  I put in over eight years, which is easily twelve in human chronology.

I need to explain to you the Magic Snot.

There was a brass push plate on the door of the public men’s at the end of the first long hall.  Past studios B, C and A.  One day I glimpsed a curious thing.  I can’t be sure how long it took me to notice it.  Once I clocked it, I couldn’t be sure how long it had been there.

A smear of mucus on the upper right hand corner of the brass door plate to the bathroom inside the privileged and exalted environs of A&M recording studios.  It looked a little like Italy. Maybe a half an inch.  That was it’s shape.  Boot and all.

It seemed impossible for such an obvious anomaly to survive in an environment of turborcharged anal retentivity for very long.  For awhile there was a stunted black whisker lying flat, half inside and half outside it’s shape.

I could have eliminated in seconds with a variety of tools.  My thumbnail even.

Yet there it was.  A booger.

A Magical Mucus Smear.

Albeit a tiny one.  It’s edges blackened over time.  It became more disgusting.

But it was holy.  Sacred.

Hallowed by a singular audience.

I came to ascribe all manner of superstition and outrageous fear to the Magic Snot.

I grew to covet and admire it’s unlikely existence in the face of impossible odds.  It was my champion and I became it’s benefactor.

I protected it.  I preserved it.  After years, yep years, I came to regard it as the signpost of my future.  I never mentioned it’s existence to a single other person.  The Boot Shaped Booger came to represent not my hardship, but instead my survival.  My symbol.  My metaphor of eventual triumph..

It became my Mascot.  My Talisman.

I was even assigned the men’s room one weekend with nothing but a toothbrush.  With that mere toothbrush, I did my damndest to demonstrate my devotion to the institution that was A&M recording studios, yet I took care to preserve the Mystical Booger.

I couldn’t believe for all that time, no one noticed the sacred Italian Mucus Smear.

One day, in a sort of semi obsessive compulsive routine that had manifested itself over time, I saw the Magic Snot had vanished.  I was able to detect that it had been scraped off with what was likely a razor blade.

In my mind’s eye I pictured it’s abrupt removal.  Flaking away and wafting in the sun spilling before gravity claimed it’s feathery mass.

Razor blades were plentiful in recording studios in that day for the editing of analog tape.  The entire plate and been polished to it’s full sheen of brassy potential.  It glowed and I admit, it was beautiful as it shone beneath the morning rays streaming through the windows of the rear studio entrance.  My stomach flipped and my heart pounded in my ears.  Some over zealous runner had forever deleted my secret charm in the self interest of janitorial acuity.

I was reckless that day.  I got Marcus Miller’s Porsche up over eighty between two stop signs on the way to a car wash down De Longpre.   Got it up to a hundred down Highland ………

I had been asleep.  It was time.  I was to make happen what I heard in my head or fail.  Time to relinquish childish things.  I waded in up to my chest in a vicious current and started swimming against it.  Stand still, you die.

Stand still you die.

Drinks for my friends.

I like to have more gin than I can drink in one night on hand at all times.  Same goes with pot.  I don’t like to have to budget my recreational drug intake inside of  a 24 or even a 48 hour cycle.

This particular ideal is not necessarily a good one.  And that’s ok, because it’s an ideal I can rarely live up to.  What happens when I’m back in the saddle?  I don’t rightly know.  For now I manage to keep a steady supply of one or the other.

I get my brain to relax in the right way, manage to turn the noise down, and I’m golden.  Can I do that without a better living through chemistry mentality?  Maybe, but not consistently I fear.  Forgive me, it gets loud up in here.

Refreshments are welcome.  Maybe mandatory at this point.

There’s this great Mexican place across the street.  Nothing fancy but flavor perfect.  I’d put the cheese enchilada plate against any for the price.  Hard shell chicken tacos?  Say hello to my little friends.  The grease to freshness ratio is rudimentary culinary perfection.

I’ve grown to appreciate that frontal lobe burn brought on by just enough wasabi in your soy sauce.    And then a cold cold beer.  A little albacore and some salmon, some ginger here and there and you’ve got uncle who goes by Bob.

Ever notice the lack of cheese in any Asian cuisine?

The way white pills and cotton look inside bottles of apothecary brown or green glass soothes me.  Like the way an orange creamsicle tastes.

I tried to write a poem once about hot corn dogs and mustard, that greasy yellow glass on old popcorn makers and the colored lights of carnivals and gave up after six months.  Most poetry sucks because poetry is so damn hard to write.  Far more poetry in life than on paper.  Pick a flower.

Boxing is brutal poetry.  Ultimate fighting is brutality minus the poetry.

I’m sure people who wear sunglasses on cloudy days or inside are jackasses.

I do appreciate girls, but I adore women.

Kinda curious about Kentucky grilled chicken.  My first real job was at KFC you know.

Life is so goddamn slippery.  Rich or poor.  Black or white.  One day you’re the master of your destiny and the next day everything is whirring like a demonic gyroscope and completely outside of your grasp.

I hate that.  I like to have control of my shit.

We have a mutually beneficial relationship based on  individual prosperity that we share with each other.  Wonder twin powers are activated.  She thinks I’m Y chromosome impaired.  She’s wrong, of course.  I’m actually Y chromosome advantaged.

I really like chunky peanut butter.  I like the oily natural kind.

Music informs me.  it is my elixir.  It informs me.  A constant gift.  The power of music is unique among all of the artistic mediums.  There is no more immediate artform  than a single good song.

Man I lament stupidity and I hate willful ignorance.   Twin tragedies.  A friend of mine challenged my championing of Obama’s speech in Cairo the other day.  She called me out on facebook.  I invited her to bring it.  I didn’t hear back.  They never come at me.  I invite them but they don’t.  This woman is my friend.  I’m quite fond of her.  She’s smart and I want to know her mind on this.

What I get instead is wingnuts and whackjobs like Ralph and that asshole Trueblood from a year ago.  Nobody rational.  No big brains.  Where the hell are you who would engage me with intellectual honesty?  Retards like Ralph are entertaining but I tend to covet dialog more substantiative.

Lo, from Dandelionsalad, hasn’t posted anything of mine for at least a year.  My piece on Obama in Cairo she turned down because she is not an “Obama supporter”.  I wrote her back to say so what, it was a historic speech.

What I’m doing here is pissing, moaning and pining for responsible opponents.  I can’t be coming so correct as to intimidate legitimate contenders.  It does get lonely.  Talk to me.  I won’t bite, unless you’re  super dumb.

Somebody get Liz Cheney a ball gag.

Drinks for my friends.

I dove farther and harder into obscurity.

I was stung.  Once bitten twice shy.

I worked nights as a janitor.

The Todd on phones.  He played his Strat upside down and backwards like Hendrix.  I always liked Todd Montgomery, it would take years on up to today to fully appreciate him.  He rode Japanese steel.  Him and Symington.  The grunion run.  His wife was and still is a successful  comedienne.  Tall goofy guy with a ridiculous grin who made friends easily, but chose them carefully.

Easily underestimated.

I ran into him in Vegas a few years back, his wife was performing where I was staying.  He was gracious and sweet.  We had a quick drink.  I had some place to be but he was happy to walk with me to my room so we could talk.  He hung with me while I changed clothes, brushed my teeth and even walked with me and talked with me on my way back down.  He was happy with himself as well as his life and family.

He was sun through the clouds of the mission I was on.  My crew actually traveling with bodyguard.

A lung full of clean air in my toxic life.

We’re still in touch.

Otherwise, I did the best I could to land in studio C.

A little 32 input API.  The most rudimentary of the five rooms.  The redheaded step child of the entire complex.  If you were in there, you were probably assisting on a demo, as in not a record.  The engineer usually understood he was getting someone with training wheels attached.  Not quite live without a net.

It was the lowest profile gig to be had that still afforded an opportunity to learn.  My place to get the big picture on at my own pace.  So, I did just that.  I pushed hard for gigs in C.  I would divine the process and what was expected of me.  The room belonged to the record company, as opposed to the studio, from nine to five.

Bonus.  Sane hours.

Work hours in a recording studio, unless your role is administrative or clerical, have no thing to do with eight hours a day, five days a week.  Twelve hours a day, six days a week is pretty tame.  Hundred hour weeks were de rigueur.  I was to sleep there often.

Thing was, I would still be pushing someone out of a comfortable seat.  Scott Symington was studio C attending.  Symington wasn’t well liked and I never understood why.  At least not completely.  He seemed nice enough.  He had a smarmy cop mustache.  I think he might have shit talked me a few times but beyond that I didn’t think too hard about him.

No trouble there.

It didn’t take me long to displace Symington.  I got the idea he was on his way out.  I doubt he saw me coming.  I’m not sure he cared.

Joe Borja was really my first mentor.  A thick, short Filipino guy with an over sized head and the voice of a ten year old.  Joe didn’t have a car.  Once in a while, on a good pay day for Joe, I’d take him to his hotel in my shitbox and we’d stop on the way at Yamashiro’s for drinks and to do blow in the gardens.

I almost flattened him one day in a crosswalk.  Didn’t see him.

My first gig with Joe was tracking in C.  He assigned me one task.  We had a guitar amp in the machine room.  We were using it as an iso booth.  Two sliding glass doors between the control room and the machine room.  Joe asked me to make sure both doors were closed always before we were rolling.  Wax on wax off.  No shit.  He showed me how bad I could be at a very simple thing.  Then he showed me a microcosm of what I needed to pay attention to in the time I’d forgotten to make sure both doors were closed.

He wasn’t a dick about it, he just pointed it out.

I would assist Joe on and off for years and he did his best to teach me something.

Joe wasn’t always easy on me but he was good to me.  A solid engineer with a giant heart.  He taught me with patience.  Showed me how to hold the hammer.  He demonstrated what happened when it was swung with a good arc.

It occurred  to me I was to be a shitty assistant and Joe was in silent agreement.  He still did the best he could by me, even though he knew I sucked.  I could tell by the way he looked at me that his hopes weren’t high.  We both understood that I didn’t have the temperament or the patience.

Thanks Joe Borja, for all of it.

There were others.  John Bogosian helped me a lot.  Tall good looking guy with cool hair who smoked Marlboro Reds and used a Zippo.  Swagger.  Bogosian was a good friend to me and even went after chief tech Mikey Morongell on my behalf one morning.  Mikey was spewing his coach cleats schtick on me as the underling.  Leveraging the pecking order.  Bogosian called him on it.  Mikey walked away.  Pretty cool.

Mikey wasn’t a bad guy.  He was a somewhat volatile Italian prick threatened by a squad of insanely talented and capable techs beneath him.

John came to the deep Valley one night to get me after I’d fled my Koreatown apartment during the riots. His old man was a coach for the Seattle Seahawks.  He took me to a party with a band we were working with called Aristocratic Trash.  I got drunk and I got laid but I can’t remember how I got back to the valley.

John was kinda damaged and struggling to adhere to the twelve step thing.  Sometimes gracefully and sometimes not, he’d leave the control room.  I would take over.  It is the simplest explanation of how I won the trust of a band called Rat Bat Blue.  Thank you John, Dabro, Allen, Ace and Fraulein Sniffy.

Fraulein Sniffy was the drummer.  The roughly two women drummers I worked with were both excellent.

Here was a band that could play. Rat Bat Blue was to be be my ultimate pig guinea.  Along with bands named Wink, Undercity, Agnes Gooch and dozens of others and eventually some punk band named Down By Law.  I’m not sure how many songs we, Rat Bat Blue and me, completed over the years.  More than twenty is my guess.  Wonderful people, excellent band.  My chops began there as well as my understanding that the only benefit I would enjoy from being an assistant engineer was to learn to from others how to make things sound the way they sounded in my head.

The first time I did that, was with Rat Bat Blue.  I knew it immediately when it happened, it sounded like it did in my head.

It’s a story for another day.

I realized my future in pro audio would only be jeopardized by pursuing excellence as a second engineer.  I knew I needed to bypass this step as much as possible but realized I’d have to wade in as much as I could stand.  My only shot was to make it sound like it did in my head.

To be a good engineer.

Drinks for my friends.

I had a pretty swell day today.

I actually went to a barbecue.  I brought a couple good zinfandels, one was a Pejut.

I contributed in other ways.  I grilled some pineapple.  Quartered slabs of it.  I brushed one slab with teriyaki and another with a with a blackberry preserve based homemade bbq sauce.  I sprinkled garlic on both.

I like that both Deanna and Lisa don’t like to smoke in front of the kids.

Me, I don’t care.

I grilled red onions too.  I think my pineapple went over pretty well, it was gone fast, but I brought home some onions.

Extraordinarily nice people.

We watched the first half of the laker game and these women were on it.  I was the only adult male of ten people.  They sort of assumed I’d be some alpha male grill master.  We had ribs, hot links, chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers and I grilled pineapple and red onions.  The women and children were forced to cook the meat as my emasculation bloomed.

I supervised while I smoked a few of Deanna’s Marlboro Lights because they tasted interesting and I was drinking good zin.  They seemed to have a handle on it.

Anyway, shoulda heard the women talking the game.  Awesome.  Kinda bitchy but not missing a single thing.  I’m not a sports guy but I likes me an NBA playoff game.  I was sitting with at least three women that had been paying attention all season.  One told me the Lakers could for sure stop Cleveland.

There was too an enclosed porch on the second floor with widows on three sides.  As it got chillier it was a nice place to watch the sun sink and have a smoke.

Children were the stars of my day.  These little girls, sisters, were diamonds in platinum.  I tried not to smoke in front of them.  They sang to us on the way home.  I can’t put my finger on it.  Their obvious independence, their overt dependence on mother and whatever innocent sweetness they threw my way.  A rosy spotlight on them.

Two sixteen year old boys named Jonathan and a very pretty girl about the same age.  The young lady such a wide eyed doe.  All three literally teetering between adolescence and early adulthood.  I see it in their eyes and read it in their gestures.   Charismatic geeks and thank the powers that be.  Smart, funny and not thugs or idiots.  Good kids.

Then there’s me.  Huffing on Marlboros, drinking wine and soliciting the cooperation of any teen I can coerce into my onion and pineapple experiments.

It was an unconscionably pleasant day.

I brought a plate home.

It is Memorial  Day, a year and a half after the Thanksgiving I first and last met the Grandma.  No sooner did I enter the living room than she was pulling the thin tube for oxygen that ran across her cheek up so that I could kiss her there.  Not much can make you feel that welcome.

I hate war and I don’t believe in your God.  I am respectful of every single American that has served his or her country in any capacity that includes war.  It is a very big deal.  I have an uncle that served and he is damaged.  I’m an agnostic and a Democrat but I’m also an American.  I love this country, but  I’m not afraid to express my disappointment, disgust and dismay.

I am a patriot.

I take it very seriously.

Would any of you out there be willing and of a mind to come at me from there, I respectfully invite you to bring it.

My gratitude for every man woman and child who has defended these principles and this country.

Drinks for my friends.

I’d made it out alive but it cost me some time and I had two brand new enemies, Sheri and Bill.  A lovely couple, each swinging a bat far heavier than mine.

I didn’t like Bill for shit, but I wasn’t trying to throw him under the bus.  Wasn’t my fault he ended up under the wheels.

I was moving from under Bill to back under Sheri.

Straight to the night shift.  Six p.m. til whenever.

There was new talent down stairs. College boys. Frat boys. Sharma and Bamford. Fags both of them. One with wholesome looks and the other with sorta terrorist Tom Selleck charisma. They golfed and played lacrosse. They both had college degrees. I hated these pricks until I liked them. They turned out to be among the coolest and sharpest engineers ever hired as runners. They were actually overqualified.

Excellent drinking companions.

I had the good fortune to share misery with them and have them as my bitches for a short time.   I believe Bamford did a Weezer record recently and Sharma did a goddamn Stones record not long ago with Don fucking Was.   If either of you two are reading this, you were each my bitch for a time. Pricks.

You can imagine I was threatened back then.

I could feel it, palpable. I hadn’t engineered a thing and had barely assisted on a handful of sessions.  Mark Harvey, may he rest in peace, saw something that was before scared.  He began to move aggressively on my behalf by putting me as a second on high profile sessions. Pardon the misnomer, just about everything that happened there was high profile.

He threw me in the river.

I loved that man, at the very least because he believed in me. Tough but fair.  He saw me in a way I couldn’t yet see myself.

There was a schedule published everyday.  What act was in each of five rooms, start time, producer, engineer, assistant and second assistant.  On the same page were the runners times and mastering schedules. It was to be distributed before five p.m. to all departments and specific offices.

Night shift for runners started at six p.m. When I was on days, I called shotgun on the schedule delivery because I had to establish dominance and maintain my relations with my friends around the lot.

It seems like the first time I saw it was on the schedule. Where your name appeared on that schedule could mean months of misery. What you read there could make your heart sink or burst. What you saw there was your fate. Your rank, your potential. Updated every twenty four hours.

The Harvinator put me on a Guns N Roses tracking session in studio A.  The big room.  The most confusing console; a custom desk built by Rupert Neve for George Martin.  I was to be the second under Hedley Godot.   Ed Goodreau.

To not talk about Ed right here would be remiss,  yet I can’t think of what to say about him.  Smart guy, can’t speak for his engineering because I don’t remember any of it.  I was to see him in many situations beyond this drama.  I’m not sure if he was hard trying to be soft or soft trying to be hard.  I doubt he knows.

Mike Clink was producing and engineering.  The album was to be “Use Your Illusion” 1 & 2.  It would be a fascinating disaster for me.

The very first morning Clink was on my ass for how I draped the cable down the mic stand.  I asked him if he wanted ten pads on the 451’s.  He looked at me like I was an idiot.  No one uses a 451 without a pad on a hat or a ride. He did.  Years later I watched this guy struggle with a kick drum sound for an hour that I or just about any front office jockey could have nailed in five minutes.  Not like he couldn’t fire a sample.

Find the low middle and suck it out.  Somewhere between three and five hundred hertz.  It’s how you find the bottom of a kick drum, capture it all and subtract what’s ugly or messy.  Works on other instruments too.

What has Clink done since Guns & Roses?  Thompson and Barbiero mixed Appetite For Destruction.  His only noteworthy record after Appetite was “Use Your Illusion” 1 & 2.  I watched him ruin a band called I Mother Earth.  I have to tell you that Mike wasn’t a bad guy but he was simultaneously an arrogant prick with mediocre talent.

Hedley had me drive, which meant running the multitrack.  A very demanding job for someone who barely had any experience and a good move on Hedley’s part because I didn’t know the console or the patch bay.  Operating the remote for the tape machine on a tracking session requires a very long and focused attention span, particularly with an engineer like Clink who does dozens of takes for the sake of numerous variables and often edits on the spot.

Many engineers and all producers are loathe to drive the multitrack as it demands so much real time concentration, it limits the ability of an engineer to devote enough creative acumen to the big picture.  I was wood.  Best place for me was on that remote, even though I was tragically inexperienced.

The simple is thus, the recording engineer is analogous to the cinematographer and the record producer is not unlike the director on a film.  Financing can still happen from hell to breakfast.
Wide eyed and panicked but I handled it.  Barely.  I didn’t impress.
The band was a mess, Slash drinking a fifth of Jack a day and Duff doing similar damage to a bottle of Stoli.  I will tell you this, they could fucking play.  Matt Sorum had replaced Steven Adler on drums and he was not less than a goddamn freight train.  One of the best rhythm sections I would ever have anything to do with.  It was a thrill.

These guys could fucking play.

I remember Mike Clink being embarrassed when Slash pissed in a trash can.

Axle Rose was a self involved douchebag.  The band wanted nothing to do with him.  They left as he arrived each day if not before.

I wasn’t killing it but I didn’t suck.

Maybe two weeks in, the last straw came.  Not exactly inspiring confidence in Clink and it felt more and more like Hedley was determined to deliver my first trial by fire by burning me.  Sink or swim.  He wanted for me to go under.  He was anxious to hand me a humility that would be the last thing I needed.  He was a dick.

He expected a pro when he knew he had an amateur.

Last order of the day was to make sure cassette copies of the day’s work were ready for the band before they left.  One morning Mike Clink pulled me into an iso booth to tell me that the stereo image on the cassettes from the day before was reversed.  Left was right and right was left.  He had already spoken to Mark Harvey and asked for me to be removed from the project.  I finished the day knowing it was to be my last.

Late that night after everyone was gone, Hedley brought me a bottle of whiskey and encouraged me to drink it.  I was to meet with Harvey  the next morning to determine my fate but I was off the session for sure.  His demeanor was an impossible dichotomy of smug and sympathy.  I drank most of that bottle.

The patch bay is a wig of wires like an old school telephone switchboard.  Complex signal flow that determined everything from where any part ended up on any track, to what gear was in the signal chain, to what effects appeared on the console and where.  If you were the only assistant on a gig, you covered both, otherwise one drove the machines and one handled the the patch bay.

The thing is this, I didn’t make that patch.  Hedley did.  It wasn’t my mistake.  I never said a thing.  I was sure it would sound like an empty excuse. I understand Ed’s version is disparate.  Ed, although you were to do a lot for me in the years to come, you are not forgiven,  you should apologize.

I was now in the river, whether I liked it or not.

This chapter is dedicated to Baumgartner, Aguto and Korengo. Old studio rats from back in the day. Ran into them on a sidewalk just yesterday.  Ten years at least. We talked for at least four hours and no one did anything but get up to piss. They were more peaceful than I remember so I hope I was too. They were just as bright and funny as I recall. Good times.

Drinks for my friends.

Time for my sentence in tape copy was at hand.

It was kind of an unwritten rule that runners did a stretch in “Post Production” in order to get time in the rooms. Post Production in a recording facility/record company, meant tape copy. Bill Lazerus ran the tape copy suite designed and implemented by Steve Barncard and the ridiculously smart and talented A&M tech squad.

Barncard killed it. By that I mean he nailed it. He designed that room so intuitively well, it was clear he saw the whole thing in his head. Barney is one of those guys that functions above the rest of us in ways we don’t quite grasp.

I was to be flattered to engineer for Barncard years later.  The artist, some crazy but sweet child psychiatrist, flew me to Detroit, put me in a suite and didn’t work me very hard.  Decent cake.  Good gig.

It was brilliant. There were one hundred black, rack mounted, Yamaha cassette machines stopped, started and synchronized entirely by a crude little MAC in the middle of the room. We had quarter and half inch ATR’s and Studers, DATs and U-matics. There was a headphone listening system that fed five or ten seconds of audio from each of the hundred cassette decks. You wore the cans to listen to the job while you typed the labels.

You were mandated to hear every project you did.  Not merely listen.  It was about the discipline of hearing. Not a bad gig on it’s face, as your job was to hear new, unreleased music all day or night.

I knew Paula Abdul had a hit with Straight Up before you did. Not my music but I knew.

You assembled the package by inserting the “J card” into the cassette shell, affixing labels to the tape itself, packing them in boxes of ten, all with the A&M logo.  There were jobs that ran into the thousands of copies and that was your day.  One song over and over.  The caveat here is you’re not working on that song.  You are copying it over and over, hearing it over and over, without the remotest power to affect it any way.

Some thought me lazy because I grabbed the small jobs and although that was true, I didn’t listen to the same shit all day either.

We learned to align analog two tracks and to listen, and really hear. You had a window of just a few seconds to identify a bad copy out of a hundred and pull it.  I used to touch the lid before I hit eject.  Sometimes I could feel it in the machine.

After that, 1/4″ and 1/2″ copies and transfers from one medium to another including the brand new and fabulously shitty sounding DAT format. Sixteen bit chaos.

CD burners were years away.  Mp3s?  I remember working in a vinyl record store when CD’s first arrived.  I kept blowing fuses on the store stereo with Pachelbel’s Canon.  I’d make it through the whole thing,  the first cannon would fold the fuses and the amp would die and then a faint gust of ozone.  Never figured out where the fuses were, so Tom always knew who and what the next morning.

I learned all I needed within a month or three.

What it was, was a factory with ears.

My plan was to do four to six months and exit Dodge.

I liked it at first.

Bill, my boss, a female deer……. an ugly but charismatic little man, did analog edits, the occasional voice over, smoked cigarettes and redlined unpredictably. I’ll put a finer point on that. He erupted like a dwarfish, silver haired, angry and frustrated man. Marriage to Sheri Lazerus must have been a fucking nightmare.

Copious amounts of hair and a round waist that was slipping. It was nearly a front butt.

He always wore sweaters and cheap cologne. He drank coffee like it was water and I’m sure did the rest of his drinking at home. His breath made me think amphibians.

He could cut two track tape like a bastard.

It didn’t work the way I thought it would. I was ready to go long before Bill was ready to let me go. The roster of runners had stagnated. None had quit or been fired for months. Weird. No slots for me to assume. Purgatory.

By then, the entirety of studio staff had begun to liken tape copy to Alcatraz, as in “Lazatraz”, named after it’s redfaced warden.  My boss.
I met nice people up their too. David Chow and Ron Rogers are two of nicest people to use air. Ron turned out to be this excellent artist and musician. He had this great band called the Bowling Ball Mechanics. A friendly Texas twang; he pronounced my name like “mahckul”.

My good friend Keith Woods was down the hall in the tape library and our friendship came into it’s own then. I had to go the library several times a day. Keith died some ten years ago of Mad Cow Disease. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. That’s another story, but may he rest in peace. It was so fast. There wasn’t then and there is not now, a single human who would or even could, disparage this man in any way.

He was an excellent and loyal friend to me.

I began to make friends in the A&R department and Bill Lazerus did not like that one bit. He was jealous. He told me it was a mistake to make friends and that it would only get me in trouble. He was wrong.

Bill spent the last three to five months kicking the shit out of me. His breath stank from coffee and cigarettes and he took great pride in being militaristic. He was a miserable bastard, but I have to tell you, I stumbled upon some James Taylor records he did and they are gorgeous. Beautiful recordings.

He had the gift.

I lost almost a year up there. Cheryl Engles, head of QC, became my Betty in shining armor by witnessing Bill meltdown on me. She was horrified enough to go right to Mark and Shelly. Meet Mark Harvey, aka The Harvinator, hard drinking intellectual and Studio Manager. Shelly Yakus, Giant Vagina, President of Recording, will entertain you much, later.

I think I was getting used to the abuse because her move confused me. I was further confused to have Mark and Shelly intervene on my behalf and bring me back downstairs into the lowest echelon of any recording studio’s gene pool.

I couldn’t wait to dive back into obscurity. I’d attracted too much attention.

Drinks for my friends.

Certain times of year, a full fat butter moon would billow up in the west over over the main gate and guard shack. A dish hanging over the ocean with even more drama than it did over Hollywood.  I saw it on the water. It was huge.  It kept place for the sun next afternoon.

Our star busted hard on those mornings and then withered reluctantly as did the moon at the end of my day. I worked nights. Six p.m. until whenever.

There to the left, day and night, was the A&M sign with the trumpet in the logo. Some nights in the fall, it’s luminous disc did harmony with a crescent moon.

A night for me and Jimhead to climb to the roof of the Chaplin stage and throw mustard bottles and leftover fruit at cars on La Brea.  Jimhead would suggest we “throw shit at cars”.  He had a well developed sense of chaos and a fine nose for the absurd. We were both fond of explosives.

We barely hit any. It was a good fifty feet up. Years later, we would have parties up there. Five or ten of us drinking and doing bong rips at three in the morning, striving merely to avoid the attention of the record company’s crack security. We failed at that over and over.

Remind me to tell you about The Secret Pizza Lounge.

Like a promise, said solar star heated those slate steps in front of the monolith door at A&M Recording to a point where you could feel it around your head when reaching for it’s enormous handle.   Twelve hours later, the giant moon would cool them again with equal parts sugar and mint.

The end of the Raygun Bush years, late eighties early nineties. Iran Contra and the first Gulf War. Homeless population way up. Crazies on my block.

For the eight and a half years I worked there, the studio barely ever, really closed.  There was almost always someone there.  If not, the respite was brief, a few minutes or barely a few hours.

For a decade, I had a key to that sixteen foot high front door. I may have it still.

I was to struggle for years.  Behind in an environment that challenged me in every way.  Worse, being surrounded by people at least as smart as me if not smarter.  Some of them a lot smarter.  I was overwhelmed by the confidence I encountered everywhere.

I was a a goddamn hick.

Nothing in life had prepared me for this.  I was always the brain.  The most capable.  The one everybody else looked to for leadership.

I got my ass handed to me every fucking day.

I laid low.  Did my job.  Sucked up.

I became ‘King of The Fruit’.  Seniority.  Everyone underneath me had either not been there as long or had been fired.  As King of The Fruit I had certain privileges.  Some control over my schedule and the ability to delegate responsibilities to other runners.  I had become an excellent runner.

Good news?

Nope.

I was to be sequestered, to serve time elsewhere, for nearly a year.

Drinks for my friends.

“Working in a recording studio because you like music is like working in a slaughter house because you like steak.” -Rick Plank

Characters named Eprom, Gunther, Jimhead, Hortense Chlamydia Hortenspinoza, Otis, Shemp, Foo Paux, Geetis, Roland The Headless Thompson-aka New Guy, Helmet, Chameleon Diploma, Schveihundt and a guy named Steve Kukoff Signature Series.  I was Dr. Douglass or Buck.

Then there was Joycee. A syrupy Jamaican accent so thick, it took me weeks to begin to understand her and months to appreciate her. First day on the job, I misunderstood her so completely that I walked into the women’s bathroom instead of the runner’s closet right next to it. Carol and Mrs. Lazerus were kind enough to not actually be excreting in any way at the time. They were applying makeup in anticipation of Eric Carmen’s arrival, or maybe Don Henley, thank Jesus.

“Wrong door honey”. Fuck me I was embarrassed.

I would clean that bathroom for years.

Joycee could be the difference between the success or failure of any runner or potential engineer. Don’t cross her, respect her and she could deliver you into good favor. If she didn’t like you, you just might be fucked. A sweet woman that could neither read or write. She worked her ass off and could save your ass or sink it. Middle fifties to early sixties is my guess.

Black don’t crack you know.

Sad eyes as we got our asses kicked. Sometimes glad. Once in a while she’d remind you that she could do in thirty seconds what took you five minutes. I miss her.

She ran the grill Friday afternoons out behind the studios. She walked the halls in a bright dress carrying fruit on her head and a smile. She chuckled a lot. We always shared what we found in the ashtrays.

A few years in we would test her by tossing the dishes from five lounges into the dumpster along with the trash before the sun rose instead of washing them. It really pissed her off and she knew we’d been raging all night. “Who work last night?” in a dialect so thick only we understood her. One of us would then drive her to a second hand store with money from petty cash enough for dishes and flatware to replace what we’d shitcanned the night before.

Joycee liked to go to the store. So did we. There was a place over on Western and Hollywood that sold everything.

She and I became friends once she decided I wasn’t a fool. It took a while, I was a fool. I loaned her money and drove her home in my shitbox VW Bug. One of three, blue, red and black in that order.

You couldn’t fool Joycee. Almost.

Her son Vanroy worked with us one summer. A giant sinewy black man that liked to joke with me about “pushing my face in”.

I remember being paged for a clean up in the D lounge one night. I can’t remember who the band was but Jimmy Iovine called the front desk himself to demand it in a squeaky voice.

Vanroy and I answered the call. We responded with the big truck. Cleaning supplies, bags and a cart to haul shit out. It was the only lounge with windows in the doors because it used to be part of the shop or a tape copy suite or something. When I knocked, I peered in the window. It’s Iovine, The Edge and other people of some degree of artsy stature.

The obvious approach is fast, thorough and inconspicuous. Two out of three you know. Vanroy was at least six three, probably taller. All activity ceased, we had assassinated the vibe. At one point, Jimmy Iovine looked right at me for a reason I can only guess at. A fairly urgent question in his eyes.

I did my best and introduced Vanroy, the large black man, as Joycee’s son. That seemed to be what he was looking for.

We made short work of it and on the way out Jimmy stopped me to ask me who Joycee was. It was sobering to me that this man had an office on the lot and in and out of this studio everyday…………

She was good to me. She retired and moved back to Jamaica to open a restaurant and that’s all I know. We had a party for her and she was gone. I wonder if she’s still alive.

I remember being high with her just after eight in the morning in Studio A. We’d found a good sized roach in an ashtray. I put on the Toni Childs record BV and Tokes had done back in the mix room. We bonded over it as we pretended to look busy so we could listen to the whole record.

Then I went to buy fruit.

Drinks for my friends.

Preface:

I need to issue a bit of a disclaimer here. This is a very big story of which I can only endeavor to tell a small part and that is because my part was very small. Inevitability conspires with the march of time to guarantee that details will be wrong or left out entirely. So many huge and profoundly unique personalities make it a sure bet that some will be neglected or even forgotten here. Rest assured that my nearly nine years inside this asylum masquerading as a recording studio is worth as much to me as any other experience in my life thus far.

I was first allowed in the door to provide janitorial services and walked out of it a multiplatinum recording engineer and producer. It would not have been remotely possible without the most amazing collection of brutal, ugly, inspiring, crazy, insane, magical, thoughtful, compassionate and even nurturing individuals that I can’t help but wonder could have existed in any other place in that space and time.

The art and science of sound is something I’ve had an appreciation for longer than I remember. Within in those walls, I learned almost everything I ever wanted to know on the subject as well as how to manipulate it in almost any way I ever dreamed of. For over ten years I was a kid in a candy store. I came back often after leaving it’s employ.

Sound has it’s own language and mindset. By the time I’d made my last record, I spoke it fluently and understood it intuitively. It was a magic castle I worked in.

I grew up the first time in Carson City Nevada.

I moved to Atlanta to study music and engineering. A kid from a small town in the desert. Culture shock and humidity. I worked very hard and never scored below 99% on anything I did. I blew the the curve consistently.

I came home for a summer before moving to Los Angeles to be a recording engineer. I spent that summer working in the only record store in town. I remember getting our first shipment of compact discs. That October, I packed up my shitbox VW and drove it to LA.

Somehow, I got this guy who went to the same school I did, to meet me at a pub called the Cat & Fiddle. He was the other best grauduate they’d ever seen. We had a few drinks and went to his car, a piece of shit mustard Monte Carlo, to smoke pot out of a quarter inch jack housing. He told me he’d put my resume in the right hands and that was all he could do for me. I would later understand that his makeshift pipe was the reason that no faucet at A&M Recording Studios ever had a screen in it.

His name was Bob Vogt. May he rest in peace. One of the smartest and funniest people I’ve ever met.

On January first, nineteen eighty eight, I began a job at A&M Recording Studios as a ‘runner’. I quit my job at the bookstore, the clothing store and the weird mug shop in the mall. I’d lived on my own in a galaxy far away but I was still fresh off the mothership. Your average dipshit.

Then I grew up again at A&M Studios. If can call myself a man, it was there that I became one.

Twenty one years old. The third or fifth time in my life I ever set foot in Hollywood was the day I started that job. One other day was for the interview. I had a perfect 4.0 and recieved an oustanding graduate award. The first time I walked through that monolithic wooden door and down those long halls I understood I had no business doing anything but taking out the trash in a place like this.

The technology was awesome. The studio itself was still under construction. I stole glimpses into the edges of the known universe as I walked down the hall to my interview with a man named Mark Harvey. What I’d seen intimidated me so much I’m sure I was a deer in the headlights by the time I sat in front of him for the interview.

That’s all I remember.

I was selected out of twenty plus candidates. I found out pretty fast that I was a janitor unless I was picking up some rockstar’s food, parts for their bathroom sink or taking the Porsche for a bath. I didn’t mind, I knew I was in over my head. I bought a Thomas Guide. Remember those? Before Computers?

I would concentrate on the job at hand. I would be an excellent runner.

The first year of my life was spent in fear of being fired. The culture was pure bootcamp. People, particularly runners, got fired every week. The guy who showed me the ropes the first day, I was his replacement. They called him G-Joe. Much later his cousin and I would partner up and make records together.

Within just a few weeks I got a call on a Saturday evening from this horror show of a woman in the front office telling me I was fired. Sherry Lazurus. Recording studios ran 24/7. I’d worked the front office phones that day and a guy named Paul Hewson called for Jimmy Iovine. Jimmy wasn’t in so I took a message and put it in his slot. I had no idea how important Jimmy Iovine was and no idea that Paul Hewson was actually Bono from U2. No way of knowing they were in negotiations for Jimmy to produce U2’s next record.

I didn’t understand the facility I was employed by was among the finest on the planet. Not yet anyway.

I survived, but that kinda shit hung over your head for a while.

It was awful. Every face you even looked at was your boss. Not only were we janitors but we worked for the janitors. Every morning starting at eight, the runners would brew some fifteen or sixteen pots of coffee, the same number of thermoses of both hot and icy water and deliver them all over the lot. Seven ice chests stocked with ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, half & half and milk plus whatever special requests the band or artist had. No refrigerators in control room to avoid the inevitable sixty cycle hum. Seven fruit baskets at least, with fresh fruit from the Mayfair market down the street purchased with money from petty cash. Five studios and two mastering suites.

Hand pick the fruit, get good stuff, if the grapes look good, get them, apples and oranges and make sure they’re ripe. Bananas. Green stems meant they’d last more than a day. Strawberries. Strawberries were very important. Select them one by one for at least seven baskets. Then there was a list of condiments etc. to gather. Eight bags of groceries in my ’69 Beetle.

It’s where my future partner met his wife, that Mayfair market. Her name is Xantipa. His is name is Alex.

As soon as that was done we began to fetch and deliver breakfast to the early arrivals and/or those needing a boozemop. We also had a concierge who showed up around nine. Her job was to tour the studios and lounges and find things for us to clean or fix or make better somehow.

I’m not sure if we ever had a decent concierge other than Nicole. There was a woman named Rita.

If you were adept at all, you stayed on the best side you could of the concierge. All but a handful were clueless women there to amuse the clients and make us miserable, thus amusing management. After a time, we organized and no bubble headed bleach blonde was able to last long against eight to ten testosterone leaking phalluses dangling between the legs of some pretty determined and competitive young Greeks. Geeks.

Before we were done we managed to get the bad ones fired fairly easily.

Drinks for my friends.

So I’m sitting here today in my monkey suit, getting ready to go to the bank to bang out a proposal with the Evil Lance. I’ve been chasing this merchant for months. It’s a comic book shop. His name is Cat.

I was in the middle of reading truthout.org and and the place went quiet. Everything blinked off. The bastards at DWP had cut off my power.

My girlfriend walks out of the bathroom to say “You paid the power bill?”

I break a sweat. This has never happened before.

It’s really ok. I have the money. I was just being stupid frugal and retarded reluctant to pay a bill. Being poor makes you brave. Still, it’s more than a little discomfitting. My first thought is about what a dick I am because I made mad cash this month.

I go to the bank and make a big deposit. Call up DWP and pay the bastards. Call the other department of DWP and give them the confirmation number and they say by five p.m., power restored.

Get me a a couple chili cheese dogs with mayonnaise, mustard and onions. This is why poor folks are fat. I blame society. I cut a check for my rent and drop it off. The manager is this cool guy named Antonio. He smiles and shakes my hand. First time I’ve paid rent on time in months.

I go to my bank, the Evil Lance and his wife, mother in law and daughter are there, along with my significant other, the new guy we will refer to as GQ Todd, the Lovely Linda and the hot new receptionist. Ken, the head fromage is nowhere. The Evil Lance has done my homework for me. I get a folder with the proposal, the original statement and a printout of the ACH statement for money I’m being paid on a previous deal that will hit my account on Monday.

It’s a sweet chunk of change.

I threaten the daughter of the Evil Lance with cannibalism. I tell her to bring me butter and pepper. I demand a giant fork and tell her that her ankles will be chewey. She is gorgeous and I am charmed.

I come home and there’s an ominous yellow notice on the door. Mine heart doth sink. I’ve just figured out how to buy enough gin for the weekend and I felt like I may have fooled the world once again.

I walk into a dark silent apartment. I go on the balcony for a smoke and to read the ominous yellow tag. Turns out I just need to go get my security gaurd buddy to open up the meter room so we can flip the switch. After all, I’m paid up. I, we, do that. He’s the same guy who gives me the stink eye through the peephole when my shit is way too loud.

So yeah, today worked out well.

Then the news from the State Supreme Court of Iowa.

What a swell little gem. In Iowa of all places, we get a State Supreme Court stocked with Republicans to pretty much vociferously defend marriage between anybody who really wants to. The decision respected and actually honored the the concept and spirit of civil rights.

Watershed.

Iowa. The one state in the union where you dare not sell a bong. Wow.

We are changing.

Just look at the world stage today. Barack Hussein Obama and First Lady Michelle. Europe sees Jackie and Jack. They are abroad doing the absolute best they can to represent the rest of us. They are proud because we are or should be. They are humble because Americans have walked face first into humility.

Although I worry, I’m sure the ratio of smart Americans vs. stupid is in our favor. If you had to repeat that sentence to yourself, you’re not one of us.

They begin to repair the damage. The Obama’s show up in front of the people who need and want to see them. They show up at every chance they are afforded to distill themselves and what America is instead of what Europe has seen for the last eight years. Our knuckles don’t drag.

Bill Maher scores an interview with Joe The Plumber. Oh me oh my. See what I’m saying?

Drinks for my friends.

Bill O’Reilly, who’s likeness appears along side the definitions of both ‘hypocrite’ and ‘blowhard’ in the most reputable dictionaries, said in an interview today that he boycotts any film in which Sean Penn appears because of his political views. In the words of Snoop Dogg, “Fuck Bill O’Reilly”. And, “He’s a motherfuckin’ prick”. And, “Suck my dick”. And, “so I can kick his motherfuckin ass when the show is over with”.

I don’t really have anything to add here.

In other news, I thought it was pretty cool to hear that the CEO of GM, Rick Wagoner, was walking away at the behest of the Obama administration. That is, until I read the greedy bastard could tip the fuck out the door with as much as $20 million. Excuse me, there seems to be some sort of canker on my penis. Does this look infected to you? It’s like deja vu all over again.

Also, thirty thousand pythons as long as twenty feet are threatening to go forth, multiply and overrun Florida and there’s a million pounds of pistachios out there that will kill you in your bed.

The world is an increasingly perilous place and I’m almost out of pot again. It’s legal here in California as long as one suffers from a serious and/or chronic malaise like ingrown toenail, sebaceous cysts on one’s genitalia or say, brewer’s droop from drinking beer.

A prescription costs between a hundred and a hundred fifty bucks. My fridge is broke.

I watched a comic tonight on Comedy Central. Josh Blue. Self deprecating, brave, honest and very funny. He suffers from cerebral palsy. Walk a mile in another man’s shoes but never forget about the man with no feet.

I’m an agnostic. My position has more to do with the abject silliness of just about every organized religion on the planet, as opposed to some sort of soaring epiphany. Honestly, I owe my stake more to the vacuum of logic that exists in every dogma fomented by people of faith on up to, but not exclusively, the goddamn Pope.

For example:
YAOUNDE, Cameroon (March 17) – Pope Benedict XVI said condoms are not the answer to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and can make the problem worse, setting off criticism Tuesday as he began a weeklong trip to the continent where some 22 million people are living with HIV. -AOL news

Don’t lose sight of the fact they boink all the little boys and girls they want.

Good luck with that crap you pointy hatted pontiff. I’m not sorry to tell you that Catholicism just may be the most egregious and archaic “faith” practiced in America certainly, and under the world’s proscenium without a doubt. I will be as blunt as possible here. Catholicism encourages me to root for Satan. Catholics are fools. So are Baptists, Mormons, Anglicans, Protestants, Muslims and especially Evangelicals and Born Agains.

They are all petty children in the eyes of the universe.

My sincerest apologies if I left any one out.

Buddhism occurs to me to be the only discipline that bothers to address the existential nature and uniqueness of the human condition. I just can’t help but appreciate a fat guy with a shit eating grin in the context of all the other tragic and sometimes stigmatically bleeding religious icons.

Most of it is about guilt and non intellectually curious blind shithouse faith. What I mean to say is it’s spectacularly dumb.

You gonna eat that?

Drinks for my friends.

I’m fourty four years old. Sometimes I think about that and it impresses me. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve done a lot.

I’ve seen a kid on a bike launched by a car doing sixty. I’ve seen people splattered and dying face down on warm asphalt. I’ve been rushed to the hospital bleeding in an ambulance. I’ve met governors and senators. I’ve seen comets and eclipses. Managed a Der Wienerschnitzel. I’ve rolled end over end off the side of mountain in a Subaru. I had a knife pulled on me. Been to a whorehouse and ridden miles above in a giant balloon. Lost my mind on hallucinogenic drugs. Got booked on a felony and made the front page of my hometown paper.

All by the time I was twenty one or twenty two.

I always wonder how many other people flirt with insanity as much as I do. I don’t think I’m going crazy or anything but I wonder about everyone else. Imagine working in a hospital. People with there shit hanging out or infected with insidious diseases. There are so many professions I’m automatically excluded from because of my prejudice for gore and human or animal excretions be they voluntary or not.

I am grateful to be an American. Despite her flaws, copious and profound, I’m happy I was born here and not anywhere else. They call India ‘the worlds largest democracy’, yet the caste system in India allows for a man’s only employment prospect to be diving in the crude sewage system to clear obstructions. These poor fucks have little beyond facemasks, gloves and snorkels. They climb out of manholes covered in shit.

Fuck me.

Welcome to Planet Earth.

“So, let us not be blind to our differences – but let us also direct attention to our common interests……For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” -JFK

He said that nearly a half century ago. How far have we come? We’ve elected our first bi-racial or racially mixed President. A very high watermark. To my dismay we are still coated in fear, willfull ignorance and graceless stupidity. Still so disasterously handicapped by institutions and insipid indoctrination. People actually lament the end of Dumbya’s dynasty. Millions still believe reproductive rights to be a priority beyond any other issue. Millions still have mullets and poor dental hygiene. They all listen to Rush Limbaugh.

We can’t ignore these bastards. They used to just be stupid. Now they’re mad. Not a welcome development. Seems like the only thing to do is marginalize them. Zeitgeist appears to endorse that notion. The pendulum is in motion and it’s arc seems to favor sensibility. I don’t trust these zealous fuckers, they may be mad now but they’ve always been insane, that’s how it all happened in the first place. It’s been welcome to the monkeyhouse for eight goddamn years.

“…..in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity….”

I just have to say this. As fucked as we are, these dipshits want to stand at every hole we attempt to fill stomping and screaming about how we shovel or what we use to fill the hole. The Republicans, after all this time pissing and moaning about the budget, finally produce a document we’ll have to call an alternative. We can’t call it a budget because there are no goddamn numbers in it. I haven’t read the whole and I refuse to. I have neither the time, the patience or the humor. It’s a joke.

And another thing, most of the people who manage to get a degree in this country end up owing an assload of money. In their early twenties they are desensitized to the idea of humongous debt. So, duh. No wonder so many are so confused. They were working and now they’re not. They had savings and now they don’t. They were living check to check and now they live hand to mouth. They lived in their cars and now they live on a sidewalk.

Another indicator of just how bad the shit is hitting the fan is conflagrations on our southern border. Juárez is occupied by the Mexican military. Thousands dying every year. Far more than our wars across the globe. It is blowing up. This shit is fucked up and it’s because of our senseless, pointless, compassionless and thoroughly ineffective ‘War On Drugs’.

Evil, draconian policy arriving home to roost. Hillary showed up, I don’t know what she did. People who buy pot, smoke pot or even sell pot should not be behind bars anymore than people who buy booze, drink booze or sell booze. It’s that simple. It’s that regoddamndiculous.

My cat Beddy likes to sit on my back while I take a dump. She let’s me know with her eyes and one of at least ten variations on the sound of a pigeon. She’s petite but I still need to lean forward a bit. She turns every direction of the compass. Otherwise she doesn’t approach me in the bathroom much. She’s transfixed by the water closet however. I call it that because of her. It’s a story for another day.

It’s just that we are still so plumbing the depths.

I no longer buy bottled water.

This is the strangest place I’ve ever been.

Drinks for my friends.

I was in a Popeyes Chicken the other day and there was a was paraplegic parked in front of the self serve soda fountain. A young dude inked up and seeming less than coherent. You never can tell.

We ordered the new chicken bowl. It sucked. Full of gristle and bone. I actually couldn’t finish it. I was disgusted. I have a slightly broken molar bottom left that has a jagged edge. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I discovered a giant wad of chicken cartilage lodged in it, so I spat it onto Vineland Avenue as I sped away.

We waited at an unwiped table for too long for a tiny shitty bowl of gruel. During that time the guy in the chair asked for my help in fastening his watch. I think he said, “Hey Bro, can you help me with this?” I didn’t mind. I helped him. It ended up on the inside of his wrist and I wondered if he wanted it turned around so it sat on top. He told me no.

I started thinking about him and imagined he was some sort of gangster who’d gotten lit up pretty messy.

I met a guy the other day that within just a few minutes was lifting his shirt to show me ugly scars from being stabbed by some guy on meth that owed him money.

People are strange wherever you go.

Today I sold a piece of audio equipment that was pretty close to my heart. The Cranesong STC8, was the most brilliant stereo buss compressor I’ve ever used. Last stage before the two track. I liked to plug the output of the console into it, the Cranesong, and then it into the half inch via XLRs. Nostalgically melancholy. Oh well, I’m up $2k.

Those of you I offered it to privately should be ashamed you didn’t bite. It went to a good home. A passionate engineer from Mexico who’s company is called Pigsound because he likes a fat sound. I left him in the lobby with the gear while I went back up to my apartment to get a business card. I let him know I trusted him so he knew he could trust me. I came back down with my card. Then he paid me.

We bonded a little. It was a lucky day for both of us. It is an exceptionally musical piece of gear that will now be making Latin music. I checked him out. He’s got talent. Cool studio. Nice gear. My advice to Fernando is more tubes. A certain amount of harmonic distortion is a good thing. Don’t forget that very bottom toggle switch, it’s key.

I told Fernando I’d call him to make sure he was happy. Maybe then I’ll ask him if he wants to know about distortion. He doesn’t need my input but I could show him a few things. Distortion can be anyone’s friend. It’s merely electric dissonance. Dissonance makes the heart grow fonder.

A beautiful woman has given me sincere advice that I have no idea what to do with.

For the first time in months, I have rent before it’s due. Cool.

Drinks for my friends.