audio engineer, music producer, wire untangler
I was primarily a recording engineer and a producer. Every so often, during downtime, I made my own records under a name I got from a stranger. What follows is most of it, in order, with the datasheet for each era attached. If you read specifications for a living, you can skip the prose entirely and still get the whole story.
I have been moving signal from one place to another since middle school, when I started recording live jazz concerts. Nobody asked me to and nobody was ever going to hear them. It simply seemed important that the room be kept.
It escalated to a pair of 4560s and a DJ console, aimed at eardrums that had done nothing to deserve it. By my junior year I was collecting multitrack gear, and a band called Black 'N Blue was using my bedroom as a rehearsal room. The order of those two facts is not a coincidence.
After the engineering course at Recording Associates I was hired at Studio One in Vancouver as an assistant. If you were a country artist in the Northwest, Studio One was where you recorded. Then Ron Stephens, who was better at this than I was, moved on, and I became the head engineer.
I made a great deal of country music. Not all of it was country — we are the studio that gave the world the Z100 Christmas album, Portland's answer to Band Aid, and no one has apologized yet.
It is also where I cut a couple of novelty songs under a name I had been carrying around since 1978. One of them, Runny Meat, got considerably more regional airplay than a song called Runny Meat has any right to. The other was It Ain't Love, written by Rich Haugen, who did not yet know he was going to be my studio partner.
On the live side I was the full-time sound man for 99¢ Romance. We toured Los Angeles briefly, cut a few songs at Cozy Dog, put out a live album and broke up, in roughly that order.
A clerk at a 7-Eleven said it in 1978, while I was buying a burrito and a Big Gulp. Luke Warmwater. I knew immediately that it was perfect and had absolutely no idea what for. It took about six years to find out.
I have never performed live under it, which makes stage name the wrong term and the name on the records the right one. Everything released under it is going up, free, with a tip jar, as fast as the transfers will go — lukewarmwater.bandcamp.com.
After Studio One I started a small room called Signature Sound with Warren Dexter. Warren, Rich Haugen and I then built a 16-track studio in southwest Portland. We had got hold of the first DAT machine in Portland, so we called it DAT Sound, which at the time felt like naming a room after the future.
DAT Sound is where Portland's pre-grunge underground came to make records that sounded a step above the garage studios that were standard fare at the time. The Dubious Undertakings compilation is the best surviving picture of what went through that room.
Around then, studios started putting computers in the control room — automation, synchronisation, sequencing. I had taken computer science at PSU in '82, back when that meant punch cards and a dumb terminal, so I was already halfway there.
But automation struck me as the small version of the idea. What I wanted was to connect the rooms to each other. Thirteen of them, by modem, late at night when nobody needed the phone line: messages, forums, engineer bios, portfolios. That was Network 13, and it existed before the web did.
Everything else on this site came out of that decision. I did not leave audio for computers. I built a network because I was an engineer who wanted to patch studios together, and the patchbay you clicked to get here is not a metaphor.
Dang Hummers — Find OutPRODUCER / MUSICIAN
An eighties dance and horn band, cut at Desitrek during the Signature Sound period. Tom Lageson's bass switches from fretless to fretted across the verse and chorus transitions, which is the kind of thing only two of us will ever notice. That is my voice saying “gimme your money” at the top of Small Investment. The song has a trombone solo, so I will hear no complaints.
Various — Dubious Undertakings1988–92 · PRODUCER / ENGINEER
Post-big-hair, pre-grunge Portland, recorded entirely on analogue at DAT Sound. If you were in one of these bands and you think a track is missing, you are probably right, and I probably do not have the master.
Oily Bloodmen — rough mixesENGINEER
Long enough in a room with Rich Rosemus and the band that an engineer character based on me turns up in a film about them. I supplied some unreleased instrumental roughs for it and have still never seen it, so I do not know who played me.
The Blind Dogs of St. Dunsmiur — Too Ruff To Love1991 · PRODUCER / ENGINEER
Years of recording Todd Gang's Latin-influenced jazz, during which most serious sessions collapsed into comedic mayhem. We compiled the mayhem. Much of the instrumentation is Todd's voice run through guitar amps. Several tracks became bumper material on national radio, and several are still circulating online credited to Dr. Demento, which is flattering and wrong.
After DAT Sound closed, Rich went on to build what is arguably the best room in Oregon. I track at Supernatural whenever I can and mix at home, an arrangement that would have sounded like science fiction in 1989. Along the way: Nero's Rome, Nine Days Wonder, Renegade Saints, and a lot of John Shipe, much of it tracked by Bryan Nelson at the Epicenter in Eugene.
The DAT deck runs again. The transfers have started. This room is going to keep filling up.