DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Faced with another four years of the Bush administration — an administration that has been roundly denounced as the most environmentally destructive in the history of the nation — our correspondent asked: Where should environmentalists put their energies for the next four years?

It’s a good question, and I’m grateful to Grist Magazine for asking it.

Chuck forwarded a Mix Magazine article about the San Francisco recording scene in the 1990s. It takes only four sentences to note all the great facilities that went out of business during that decade — including Brilliant Studios, where JAR spent five days recording our debut CD, and Rocket Labs, where we mastered it.

The fact that JAR could even get studio time at Brilliant should suggest that their business was floundering. I think it wasn’t ever an A-list studio, like The Plant, but they definitely saw their share of bands people had actually heard of.

We mixed the album at Hyde Street Studios, which thanks to a long list of name-brand clients is still in business. We could only afford the swing shift; we arrived at 10pm or midnight armed with donuts and blank cassettes, mindful that anything we consumed that we hadn’t brought with us would end up on our final invoice. We couldn’t afford a “lock-out,” so we had to assume the board and all outboard gear would be reset during the day; this put pressure on us to complete anything we started within a single session, or risk having to start over the next night, potentially unable to recapture some amazing effects setting or vocal tone.

Hyde Street Studios is located in the Tenderloin, which in addition to their famous clients, great facility and staff explains how they survived the proliferation of digital recording tools — that is, their rent stayed sane. The Tenderloin is not a nice neighborhood, unless you’re looking for a crackwhore, in which case it’s perfect. In any case it’s not a place you want to hang around at night, e.g. from midnight to 8:00 AM. The first night, I rode my bicycle there and brought it inside the building. The next night I drove, but I parked five blocks away where I figured I’d have a chance of seeing the car again, whole, the next morning.

Our mixing engineer was Matt Kelley, who went on to fame and fortune (as noted in the Mix article) as a hip-hop engineer, due in no small part, I’m sure, to his credit on the JAR record. Ahem.

We mastered the record at Rocket Labs, which was located about 30 feet from my office window at the time. “I’m going to be across the street mastering my CD,” I wanted to announce haughtily to all my co-workers, but they were too engrossed in USENET or busy updating resumes… the programmer who sat nearest me was rumored to be running a private porn BBS off of his workstation. Needless to say, this company was even more doomed than all the recording studios listed by Mix Magazine. My brief absense was not remarkable.

Anyway, that’s my trip down spotty-memory lane.

I have three more weeks to get ready for my Thanksgiving recording session. Pictured is the new home studio, where I’m spending as much time as I can this month.

I’m using ProTools, running on my old Powerbook. The audio interface is a Digidesign DIGI-002 Rack, inside the case below the mixing board.

The 002 has four mic pres, which I’ve used for the main hats, aux hats, overhead L and R. It also has four direct inputs, which are fed from direct channel outs or sub outs on the mixing board: kick, snare, stereo tom submix. The kick and snare are routed through a dbx 266XL dual-mono compressor, which helps tame excessive volume transients.

The tom mics are Audix D2 and D4. The snare mic is a D1, which sounds better (more woody, less pangy) than my Beyerdynamic M422. The kick mic is an AKG D112. Overheads are AKG C1000S. The main hi-hat mic is an old Audio-Technica condenser, the ATM31.

The room has been a challenge. Freshly painted, it makes a poor candidate for mounting absorptive materials. I know that a room’s upper corners are the first and most important place to treat with sound damping foam, but I can’t actually do it without leaving adhesive scars on the walls or ceiling. So, the foam placement has been a compromise; in lieu of prioritizing corners or achieving even coverage, I’ve put it where I can attach it without damage.

I’ve gotten pretty decent tones so far. I have learned a lot about the mechanics of recording in the past week, as I’ve experimented with mic placement, compression, and EQ. There’s more to know, I’m sure. But if I had to cut final takes today, I wouldn’t be held back by my gear. That’s a good feeling.

Still to do: install new mic cables with right-angle XLR jacks, to keep the cables out of my way as I’m playing; set up two new mic stands to give better control over hi-hat mic placement (the mics are currently hanging from cymbal arms, because I ran out of stands); set overhead mic pickup pattern to hypercardioid to see if that captures less room sound; change tom heads and retune; possibly change snare head. Then, of course, I have to learn how to play these five songs (two of which I haven’t even heard yet). It sounds doable… but I think I’ll be eating take-out on Thanksgiving.

More…

Open letter to moveon.org:
Four years of work, multiple emails per day to supporters, dozens of print and television commercials created, and tens of millions of dollars spent, and this is the best you can do?

Open letter to John Kerry:
Just when I was getting ready to give up hope, you gave it up for me. Thanks a bunch.

Open letter to George W. Bush:
I must have missed whatever your party has been slipping into the water supply. Where do I go to become happy and docile and self-satisfied? Also, please send me one of those nifty Orange Alert signs so I can be ever-watchful in my own home of possible terrorist activity. PS. All that stuff about global warming is just hokum.

I used to consider myself apolitical. I was Republican by default, having been raised in a household where the word “Democrat” was frequently heard at dinner, immediately following the word “goddamn!” But I had an aversion to news. I didn’t educate myself about issues, and I felt strongly apathetic about the political process. I voted in the big elections, but only because that gave me the right to complain later.

George W. Bush changed all that. The past four years have provided a crash course in the danger of apathy.

For that, and only that, I thank President Bush. He made me realise what I care about. I have watched, and to a tiny degree documented the assaults on the environment by this administration, and I realized that what strikes me as common sense — “don’t poison yourself” — is remarkably uncommon in the White House.

I’ve paid a price for this education. To date, it’s cost me a sense of humor. And a couple hundred dollars in political contributions.

Last week, my senses hit overload. Whereas a few weeks ago I hung on every word, every fake smile, every grimace of the debates, now I can’t even bear to see a newspaper headline. I have pre-election anxiety. Every time someone mentions Diebold or Florida or the GOP, my stomach lurches. I feel like I’m sitting in the lobby of the oral surgeon’s office, waiting for my name to be called.

The Daily Show is getting lots of mileage from its Indecision 2004 joke. The Onion is running a piece on the Countdown to the Recount. Meanwhile, my stomach is doing (wait for it…) flip-flops.

I remember thinking, late in November 2000, that they should just give Bush the victory rather than dragging out the counterclaims. “It’s dangerous to not have a winner yet,” I thought, and “the rest of the world must think we’re incompetent. And anyway, how bad could he be?”