How did it feel to move to the other side of the glass, so to speak?

It’s an identity thing. At first it was strange, but in the end, I think it’s why I keep so many clients. I really understand how musicians feel on the other side of the glass. If I punch them into the red and they start having problems, I understand how they’re feeling. Some of the worst situations I’ve encountered have been with engineers who have never played an instrument. They get really aggravated with the artists.

What led you to Fireside?

I had been working over at Masterfonics for about four or five years as a studio technician. There were four of us on the tech squad; we sat in on the sessions with the engineers and did all the safety and set-up. We took care of the reels of tape, made sure the mics worked – that sort of thing.

I decided to move over to Fireside when Masterfonics was bought out by Emerald Studios. I had been doing some morning sessions over there, and let me tell you: The place was a mess. The board would be smoking half of the time you were in there. Out of fifteen mic lines, maybe four would work. Of course there were some great mics – some of the old Neumann’s that Porter Wagoner had put in there himself – but only about half of them worked. They were all lying around on the floor, scattered here and there.

How did the place get so run down?

Nobody was taking care of it. They had a great engineer in there for about ten years a while back, named George Glenn, but he moved on. Then Fireside went through a series of engineers moving in and out of the place, so nobody had time to keep it in shape. It looked just like it did in the 1970’s when I first got there. The wiring was the same and they were using the same boards running through an old Urei speaker system. It sounded horrendous. But I came in, did a few sessions, and fell in love with the place just because of the cozy atmosphere. There was just something special about it. So when I left Masterfonics I made an agreement to work at Fireside, to come in and make some modifications.

We had some interesting sessions in the beginning, as you can imagine. One of our compressors blew up and filled the control room with smoke during a country song called ‘Red Hot Mamma’. Al Perkins was playing steel and I was just about to put him into the red, and right at the downbeat the compressor blew up. That was my first week there, and I just figured that the place was going to rock after that.

As I talked to the artists who came into the studio, I found out that a lot of people in Nashville really liked the aura around Fireside. The longer I worked here, the more I realized that the ‘aura’ was really about the quality of the music that was produced here. We only had three compressors, a crappy board, and some speakers that were so beat you couldn’t really understand what they were saying, but we did some great projects in there before we rebuilt it.

When did you rebuild it?

It must have been the middle of last year that we started to rebuild it. Right at the same time we started working with Billy Bob Thornton. We did it really fast.

Is the process complete?

We’ve got one more phase, which is the exterior, but the internal modifications are complete. We’ve got a DVD surround room and all kinds of goodies. To tell you the truth, it’s really one of those places that you need to see to understand. It’s outrageous. We kept the interior of the old room all the same. The main part of the studio is kind of like a barn, with high ceilings and wooden beams. Michael Cronin, a good friend of mine, helped me redesign it in order to keep everything looking the same while changing everything acoustically. So what we have is a rigged-up 1970’s studio. It’s politically incorrect.

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