klickitat band camp

I was new to Portland, but I had a good friend, Kathleen Wilson, who was just beginning her career writing music reviews for the local weekly paper, The Willamette Week, and later The Stranger in Seattle. It seemed like Kathleen knew every touring musician in the United States, every record label and A&R bigwig, and I knew literally no one. Worse than that, just graduating, I had short hair and must have looked like a conservative zig when everyone else was zagging. Kathleen introduced Jenny and me to the members of Portland's Sweaty Nipples, plus JR from Drunk at Abbeys, and we started going out a lot at night to check out the local club scene at places like Satyricon, Pine Street Theater (later La Luna), Belmont, and other venues.

One night out, I put $5 in a video poker machine and hit a Royal Flush. It paid $500, and I bought a drum machine. That was the start of the Antfarm. Within a year, Jenny helped me scrape up enough money to buy a 1/2" 16 track open reel tape deck and the newest and greatest sampling keyboard from Emu - the Emulator EIIIxs. My first decent condenser mic was an Audio Technica 4050, which I still have and use all the time - it's a great, affordable mic! And then I had a Mac SE running a pirated version of Performer so Midi keyboards could churn along automated with the tape running. I mixed to a tape deck, and later a DAT machine. I only had a few mics, and I used them on everything.

I did two records in the Antfarm under the name NKS, all solo stuff, and none of it is very good. The first record I called LMNO, and the second Gravity Lake, which is a road sign I misread while driving to Seattle. The sign said Gravelly Lake. When I had the CDs mastered at Super Digital, the engineer (who has a gold record on the wall for mastering Kenny G's recordings!) liked my stuff but said I should move the mic further away from the high hats. My songs must not have been that bad, because I was programming a drum machine and he thought it was a live kit mic'd up. For Gravity Lake, my buddy Greg Naylor from Lime Green drove up from Arizona and tracked drums to many of the songs with me, and I built them up from there.

By this time, I was playing guitar and singing, even though piano was my forte. A defining moment for me was when Dave Merrick, keyboardist for Sweaty, walked into the Antfarm and heard me playing guitar. He said, "what is that sound?" And I said, "what sound?" And he said, "is that a guitar?" And I said, "yeah, the amp is on the shelf." He said, "do you like that sound?" And I said, "well, yeah." And he said, "more power to you," very sarcastically. Dave was complaining because I was playing through a solid state Fender amp, and it sounded like crap. Of course, he was right. I immediately sold it, and ever since, I've stuck with all tube amps by Marshall, Vox, Supro, and Fender. That was a good move! But the conversation and Dave's perplexed face is frozen in my mind - "how could anyone ever have liked that tone!?"

In 1996, I had this artist, Sean Tejaratchi, who started this super cool magazine of scrap art, Craphound, write up an ad for me searching for musicians. Through the ad I met bass player Ed Andrews and a whole host of other musicians. We formed Endora, after Agnes Moorhead in Bewitched, and I moved the studio into the second floor of a 20,000 square foot building in the Pearl District in NW Portland. It overlooked the Park Blocks across the street from the Daisy Kingdom. The ceilings were 17 feet high, and we could be as loud as we wanted. I built a wall separating about 900 square feet from the remaining 9,000 square feet of open space, installed some heaters and an AC unit, and began putting a more formal studio together. The space was amazing, industrial, much like a loft, and there were all kinds of rolls of carpet and old toys lying around, because the first floor was a Montessori preschool, and the school only stored materials on the second floor. We had lots of new found toy instruments, and tons of carpet and other materials to use as makeshift sound proofing. Satyricon was three blocks away, so we would always break from rehearsal and go grab some rice and beans at its adjoining restaurant, Fellini's.

Endora played a dozen or so shows. Larry Crane from Jackpot! recording studio and editor of Tape Op recently e-mailed me saying he remembered that I had "a ton of gear on stage." I guess he was right. I played through a Marshall plexi half stack and a Leslie, and had several guitars all in odd tunings. I was really into Swervedriver at the time, Rocket from the Crypt, and distorting the crap out of organs and electric pianos. I still am into whacking out my keyboards. It was a lot of fun playing with Endora, and my friend Scott Macdonald moved down from Seattle to play keyboards and sing back up. The problem, though, was primarily me. I have never aspired to "make it" as a singer in a band, nor to be a rock star, nor to get any sort of notoriety whatsoever, and so booking shows and playing out did very little for me personally. My thing is recording, and producing song-after-song. I knew tons of musicians who were hell bent to make it in the music industry, and jaded for the disappointment if things didn't pan out, but not me. Give me a reel of tape and leave me alone. And so after a dozen or so shows, we dissolved. Our drummer went off with Everclear to play percussion, and Ed joined Herkemer.

For the next year, 1997-1998, I continued to record solo material with different drummers and practice law during the day. The balance of law and music can be nerve wracking, but it's super when things are in check. They are so opposite. At the time, I was really into the idea of recording songs quickly and not getting bogged down in the production. My demos became the songs, and the sound I was into was lo fi. When I would go back and try and improve on the production, I would lose the vibe. They call this Demo Love, and if you're reading this and you record, you know what I'm talking about. By 1999 I had finished a new record called Friends of the Friendless, aptly named because I had over 20 of my friends track different parts on the songs. I still love those recordings. All I did was explore different ways of recording common instruments in odd ways, and I learned a lot. I also had a lot of starts and stops engineering songs for other local bands, The Daylights, The Secludes, Black Angel, Starter Kit, Mach Jockeys, Nicotine, Millionaire Stuntman, a bunch of solo artists, and others.

In 1999, I closed up the studio in the Pearl District and took the freight elevator to the street level for the last time. Man, that was a cool space! I moved the studio into the main floor of our house near Mt. Tabor and started a new collection of recordings, only this time more piano and acoustic guitar based. In 2000, I heard Pink Floyd for the first time. Sure, I knew Money and a few other hits from high school, but I never really "listened" to Floyd, and my eyes opened. After a short stint playing guitar and keyboards in Starter Kit, I decided that enough was enough of the live band thing. I knew what I loved to do - record, and I would concentrate on that. Around this time, I had started to collect quite an assorted ot cool recording equipment and instruments - a killer Gretsch drum set from the late 1970s, nice guitars, oddball tube mic preamps, and enough microphones to record live bands.

Probably the biggest defining moment for me in terms of recording came when I met three fixtures in the Portland music scene. Tom Robinson, a hands down genius, sound engineer, photographer, photo historian, and the owner of most of the club P.A. systems in town; Marc Trunz, local photographer known for shooting Nirvana and a host of other bands for Capital Records; and Thor Lindsay, founder of TK Records, who initially signed Everclear and The Dandy Warhols. Tom had a collection of the most amazing recording and live sound equipment I had ever seen in his house and warehouse. Marc Trunz taught me to figure out what you love to do, get up early, and make sure and relax before you start your day. And Thor is a musical island all on his own. His garage was filled with boxes of inventory for TK artists, and he knew everyone in the music industry imagineable. The stories those three tell.

Between Tom, Marc, and Thor, I discovered that I was doing it all wrong. To make great recordings, you need the best equipment in the world. And they knew what that gear was - tube mics, tube preamps, and tube limiters from the 1950s and 1960s, select gear from the 1970s and 1980s, giant tape machines, and grounded, independent electrical circuits. Tom recommended that I buy a building for half a million dollars and fill the walls with sand, but I opted for the gear first.

I sold most of what I owned and started buying what Tom told me to - 40 channel mixing console, Otari 2 inch tape decks, Neve and api preamps, and big old tube limiters. My first year with those big old tube limiters was interesting. I smashed the crap out of about everything I put though them, but I learned a lot - that less is more, and sometimes more is not enough! Tom also taught me that there are Neumann microphones and "everything else." I started buying Neumann mics as well, including a rare 1950s u47, long body tube mic that sounds like heaven. After the first 2 inch tape deck arrived and I had it calibrated, everything started to change - for the better. My studio started resembling a NASA control room, and I loved it. Six foot battleship grey equipment racks started lining the walls, and every track started sounding amazing. Thank you, Tom! He told me what to buy, piece by piece, and you can't buy any of it at the Guitar Center. Instead, you find it in remote parts of the country, and buy it one item at a time. Some people call this gear lust, but when Tom heard my recordings he doved me "competent" - the highest compliment I have ever heard Tom give anyone!