So what sort of things were you picking up at that time that you could use later? When did you get your hands on the board?

The board I got my hands on right away. They used to let me go in after hours. I’d take records in, LPs, and bring them up to the console and mess with EQ, fool around in the patch bay. There was an old harmonizer that I’d used to tape mono records and “stereo-ize” them, it made them really wide. [laughs] Or we’d go into the media rooms where they did only voiceovers and fool with tapes of speeches to make them say rude things. Really horrible stuff. But I loved it. I thought I was Phil Spector.

So you had the opportunity for a great deal of experimentation?

Yeah, I’d just go in and stay up all night playing with a drum machine. I was able to bring people in to record every now and then pretty much right away. There was a guy there named Sherman Keene, who eventually wrote a book that’s become a standard I think. He’d hold classes once a week and he’d talk about engineer stuff; fixing machines and things you needed to know for orchestra sessions like figuring out beats per minute. And studio etiquette. His big thing was studio etiquette. He thought that was about 60% - knowing how to make people feel at home.

What techniques did you learn?

Oh, knowing when to speak at the right times, having a studio that looked nice, make sure you have sharpened pencils. And it’s all true, that’s good stuff. It was a good atmosphere, and that’s important.

So how long were you there?

Only 3 years.

So how did you make the transition from that period into a real career as an engineer?

Wally Heider’s changed owners. He got really sick, and it was taken over by somebody who ran it into the ground. So I left and got a place called Mad Dog, which was a demo studio down in Santa Monica. Little 16-track demo studio, tiny little closet of a place. But it was another place where the owners were great, really creative. Anyway I worked for them for a while, did people’s demos for about a year. And then there was an opening at Sound Factory for an assistant engineer. Phil McConnel, who had been remote manager at Wally Heider’s was now the manager of this studio. And he remembered me from the Wally Heider days and asked me if I wanted to be an assistant for this engineer there who had just won a Grammy, David Leonard. He was doing really well and had just moved up from that middle area from assisting to engineering and needed an assistant. And I took the job because it was 4 blocks from my house. I’d just met my future wife, and it just all made sense. And I was there all through the ‘80s.

And what kinds of things were you recording?

Well [pause, low voice], some pretty bad stuff. I don’t remember a lot of it. Sheena Easton recorded there. Greg Mathison productions, he and Trevor Beech used to be in there a lot, and David Leonard did all of their records at the time.

So it sounds almost like you’re leading a double life with your fascination for unusual sounds on the one hand, and working on very conventional stuff on the other. At what point did those two worlds, the aesthetically-inclined and the “normal” work, meet?

Well, not for a long time. I started putting binaural sound effects behind some things. I was always into the English progressive scene of the ‘60s and early ‘70s - like King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator, Pink Floyd. And they were doing all that. But it didn’t really come together for a long time. I loved distortion and I loved things recorded through mechanical filters; putting up papers, trash cans, boxes. But it didn’t seem to fly with most music.

Probably not with Sheena Easton. [laughs] No. I used to play stuff that I’d do and get a few laughs, “Oh yeah, that’s cute.” It really wasn’t until I met Mitchell [Froom] that I started to use those techniques on commercial recordings. And even then we did a lot of conventional stuff for many years.

Did you work on the Del Fuegos records?

I did one record. He came in and did the first record and that’s when we met. And he asked me to do the music for a play for him, to engineer it - over the weekend. We were going to do all the music in one weekend. And he said I could do it any way I wanted to. So I got to do some of my “stuff”, you know. And he loved it. And the play went well. It was just a small hole-in-the-wall play, but it was fun to do. So that was our first work together, then he got Crowded House and they went through 3 engineers and fired them all. During the last 2 weeks of the album he asked if I could do it with him, just finish it up. It wasn’t any tracking, just overdubs: Vocals, some guitar, re-recorded some bass - which I did. And I got along with the guys really well and had a good time with Mitchell and discovered we had really similar musical tastes. And then he got the next Del Fuegos record he asked me to do it. And that was probably my first real record. That was how it all began with Mitchell and we’ve been working together almost exclusively ever since.