True Anon Truth Feed - Keep the Dream Alive Part 1: The Dream Is Over
Aired: 2022-02-02
Duration: 01:08:02


=== Last Day Of Tiny Telephone (01:54) ===

[00:00:07]  It's me.
[00:00:08]  It's early on whatever day it is.
[00:00:12]  And this is the last day of the studio.
[00:00:15]  It closed yesterday.
[00:00:16]  So we're going to decommission the studio today.
[00:00:20]  It's going to be chaotic so but I'm just Kind of giving you like the atlas of my Complicated emotional life People ask me how it feels to break down the studio, and I think that I really processed the studio closing maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago.
[00:00:41]  And it was really sad.
[00:00:42]  I mean, it kind of fucked me up.
[00:00:44]  This was my life for 22 years.
[00:00:48]  That was the voice of John Vandersleis, recorded in 2020, as he prepared to permanently close Tiny Telephone San Francisco, the recording studio he had owned for more than two decades.
[00:00:59]  Founded in 1997, Tiny Telephone developed a reputation as a home for creativity and classic analog techniques.
[00:01:07]  It also became a musical mecca for bands like Spoon, The Mountain Goats, Death Cab for Cutie, The Magnetic Fields, Deerhoof, Slater Kinney, and many more.
[00:01:19]  Over the next few hours, we're going to hear from the people who were there to learn how Tiny Telephone was born, what made it so special, and how it came to an end.
[00:01:28]  I'm Young Chomsky, and this is Keep the Dream Alive.
[00:01:32]  Keep the Dream Alive.
[00:01:39]  Keep the Dream Alive.
[00:01:42]  My name is John Vandersleis.
[00:01:45]  I own Tiny Telephone Recording, and I put out records under my name and under Orange Purple Beach.
[00:01:53]  I grew up in Florida, in northern rural Florida, like Gainesville and Williston, Suwannee River, Jacksonville.

=== First Boombox Experience (02:58) ===

[00:02:01]  And I grew up in a house without any music at all.
[00:02:07]  There was no stereo.
[00:02:08]  There wasn't really any media or culture.
[00:02:13]  And actually, I began to think that years later that this was actually like a really good thing.
[00:02:18]  But the first time I heard music, my babysitter brought over a boombox and played the Who's Tommy.
[00:02:31]  By the way, I had a huge crush on this babysitter.
[00:02:33]  And it wasn't the Who's, it wasn't like the actual record Tommy.
[00:02:38]  It was the film soundtrack of Tommy, which is like many levels down in quality from the actual album.
[00:02:47]  And she put on this record and it just felt like the most unknowable, confusing shit I've ever heard.
[00:02:54]  But it was incredibly important for me to understand it because it would make me closer to my babysitter.
[00:03:02]  I mean, I remember the day.
[00:03:04]  I remember the feeling.
[00:03:06]  I think about that all the time.
[00:03:07]  And then the next thing that happened that really changed my life is that I was at a friend's house when I was in seventh grade.
[00:03:17]  And that's right when I first started smoking weed, which, yes, is way too young, but what are you going to do?
[00:03:23]  And my friend played me Yes, Fragile and Dark Side of the Moon and also a Kinks record.
[00:03:34]  And I remember flipping the back of the record over and seeing Ray Davies from the Kinks leaning over a Neve console in their studio, which was called Kunk.
[00:03:46]  And I didn't understand what Neve meant or Konk meant, or really I didn't understand the music either.
[00:03:53]  But I knew that my friend, who was in eighth grade and was on the football team, and he was a leveled up person.
[00:04:00]  First off, for me to hang out with someone on the football team was really notable.
[00:04:06]  And for me to smoke weed, listening to Yes and Pink Floyd and the Kinks completely changed my mind.
[00:04:13]  But that photo was baked into the whole experience and it stuck with me.
[00:04:19]  Also, I think that Kinks record was a bootleg that he got from Yesterday and Today Records, which was a kind of a really radical and much-loved record store, which does not exist anymore.
[00:04:31]  And that's when I first, I mean, I think it would be weird for a 12-year-old to think about owning a business, but I first started thinking that recording studios were potentially very, very important to artists.
[00:04:44]  And that was the beginning.

=== College Years and Beyond (02:46) ===

[00:05:00]  So I did grow up in Florida.
[00:05:02]  And by the way, I think that the way that I grew up is kind of important because I grew up really unsupervised.
[00:05:08]  I had a single mom who was busy with two pre-juvenile delinquent children.
[00:05:16]  And I grew up in open space, unsupervised, barefoot, no shirt.
[00:05:23]  And I grew up in the country.
[00:05:24]  So that wildness and that access to nature, it's me now.
[00:05:30]  I went to college when I was 17.
[00:05:33]  And during college, I fell in love with a woman named Susan Anderson Osborne, who was definitely top-level art human, very, very smart, like excellent music taste.
[00:05:45]  And I had so much gratitude that she loved me and I learned everything in that summer, really.
[00:05:51]  I mean, I'm the same person from that summer.
[00:05:54]  So we were in love.
[00:05:55]  We were in love.
[00:05:56]  I was an asshole.
[00:05:57]  I cheated on her and then she moved to San Francisco.
[00:06:00]  I graduated college and I spent years trying to get her back.
[00:06:04]  And the last kind of Hail Mary was I moved to San Francisco to talk her into being with me.
[00:06:11]  I'm really good at talking people into things, but it did not work.
[00:06:15]  And I ended up staying in San Francisco.
[00:06:17]  The weirdest, most subversive, most left-wing, gayest, most freewheeling, and really loving place that you could end up.
[00:06:28]  And if you think that you're crazy and you move to San Francisco in 1989, you're like, oh, I'm safe.
[00:06:33]  I'm definitely not crazy.
[00:06:34]  I'm fine.
[00:06:36]  So, I loved that place then, deeply.
[00:06:50]  So I was 21 when I moved to San Francisco, and it was kind of a magic time because I started playing in my first band when I was 24.
[00:07:01]  I'd never been in a band before.
[00:07:03]  So I was working in restaurants.
[00:07:06]  I had a rehearsal place with a bunch of friends.
[00:07:09]  I was in bands that absolutely were definitely objectively terrible.
[00:07:14]  But, you know, you got to learn somewhere.
[00:07:16]  The first one was called The Id, which I still fondly look back at.
[00:07:22]  And then I was in a band called Cylinder.
[00:07:24]  And then eventually I was in a band called MK Ultra.
[00:07:33]  Now, when you grow up without access to kind of like cultural heroes or art and media, I didn't have any role models, nor think it was a possible life route to actually play music as a career.

=== Marilyn's Warehouse (03:19) ===

[00:07:47]  That seemed completely ridiculous to me at the time.
[00:07:50]  So I was playing in bands mostly for fun and because it seemed like this is something that you should do in your 20s.
[00:07:58]  And at the same time, I was taking classes at UC Berkeley to eventually apply to Berkeley to get a master's in English so I could teach English in high school.
[00:08:06]  I had no like real outsized fantasies about what my life was going to be.
[00:08:12]  I don't think I was very happy.
[00:08:13]  I think that I was fairly depressed most of the time and I didn't really have the language or the ability to recognize that or think that that wasn't the way that you should actually exist.
[00:08:26]  And I eventually decided that I needed to get a warehouse with my friends and make it like a rehearsal place.
[00:08:47]  So we looked at this place that was in the southeast corner of the mission, and it was 20, 30 yards from the 101.
[00:08:55]  I mean, you could like reach up and touch the off-ramp of the 101 onto Cesar Chavez Boulevard.
[00:09:03]  And I met this like genial Sonoma County, lovely, you know, art grandma landlord named Marilyn Goode.
[00:09:13]  And she immediately was like, listen, I think I've just rented this space.
[00:09:17]  And I'm sorry that you came out here, but, you know, at least you can see what is possible in the mission for the money.
[00:09:24]  It was basically like, I don't know, 40 cents a square foot, which seemed like a lot of money to me at the time.
[00:09:31]  And I said, who did you rent it to?
[00:09:34]  She said, well, I rented it to someone who's going to park classic cars here.
[00:09:38]  And I said, this is a very uncreative thing.
[00:09:42]  This is a very uncreative person to rent your space to.
[00:09:45]  Like, I am going to make something important and valuable here.
[00:09:49]  And I was probably saying this not like as pompous as that sounds.
[00:09:52]  I mean, I'm pretty good at reading the room and she's a really sweet person.
[00:09:56]  And so I asked her if I could write her a letter.
[00:09:59]  She didn't seem very moved by what I was saying, by the way.
[00:10:02]  She gave me her address, which seems insane to me in hindsight.
[00:10:06]  So I got home and I wrote her a very long letter, mailed it to the city of Sonoma, which is a lovely place.
[00:10:13]  I basically said that art is sacred.
[00:10:17]  Art is vulnerable.
[00:10:19]  And art needs patrons.
[00:10:21]  And those who own capital are really in a position to be really the only people that can help artists.
[00:10:27]  Unfortunately, that's where we're at.
[00:10:30]  I don't think it was that elegant or that well thought out, but it was probably like a lot of words meant to manipulate someone.
[00:10:38]  And I included a CD of my band, MKUltra, our first record, which she definitely didn't listen to the music, but she read my letter and she called me.
[00:10:51]  And she said, I've decided to rent you the space.
[00:10:53]  Well, that was like, if you give me like an open door, I'm in.
[00:10:56]  I'm fucking there.
[00:10:57]  I'm not stupid.
[00:10:59]  So when Marilyn agreed to rent us the space, that was like one of the greatest days of my life.
[00:11:04]  I think about it still.
[00:11:05]  We got the keys.

=== Wow, This Guy's Got A Lot Going On (15:09) ===

[00:11:07]  We went down 1458 San Bruno Avenue.
[00:11:10]  Look it up on Google Maps.
[00:11:11]  It's actually very entertaining.
[00:11:12]  And that will not be there for long.
[00:11:15]  Whatever you see, it might not even be there anymore.
[00:11:18]  Who knows?
[00:11:19]  I haven't checked in a few months.
[00:11:21]  But our neighbors, our direct neighbors across from us, maybe 20 yards away, was this anarchist kind of like robot builder collective called Survival Research Laboratories, SRL for short.
[00:11:34]  They were legendary.
[00:11:35]  They were very, very famous at that time.
[00:11:53]  My name is John Darniel.
[00:11:54]  I'm the singer from the Mountain Goats.
[00:11:56]  The best ever death metal band out of denton.
[00:11:59]  Real in time both outputs and outlived you.
[00:12:03]  Hail Satan.
[00:12:05]  SRL, dude.
[00:12:07]  So here's the thing.
[00:12:08]  I'm 53, right?
[00:12:10]  When I was a teenager, totally different media landscape.
[00:12:14]  You heard about stuff that you maybe never actually got to see or hear, right?
[00:12:18]  And that was part of your aesthetic vocabulary was like, you know, I haven't heard it, but I know about it.
[00:12:22]  This was true for a lot of early Velvet Underground records for several years.
[00:12:25]  You couldn't find them.
[00:12:28]  If you didn't live in New York City or a major metropolitan area, you know, you knew there was this one record with a 17-minute song called Sister Ray, and you were going to hear it.
[00:12:34]  And then you'd find it within six months or so.
[00:12:36]  But there would be spans of time where you didn't know.
[00:12:40]  You just knew what you needed to go out and learn about, right?
[00:12:43]  SRL, Survival Research Laboratories, was a sort of goth industrial adjacent art project of these guys who made their own machines, right?
[00:12:53]  Robotic machines, but mechanical machines, right?
[00:12:56]  I don't think any of them had, if they had digital programming, it was super early crude digital programming.
[00:13:02]  And they would just fight each other.
[00:13:03]  And they would have names, and one of them would be like, you know, a giant jaw whose job was literally to chew bones, you know?
[00:13:12]  And they would have these exhibitions, but they were very adjacent to bands like Throbbing Gristle and SPK and Test Department and stuff like that.
[00:13:21]  These industrial bands, right?
[00:13:23]  Bands and artists who were thinking about the effect of technology on our world and on our inner worlds, on the way we conceive of things, the way we understand ourselves to be, right?
[00:13:35]  And they had a, you would see SRL videos in video stores, usually not for rent, and it would be like a $60 VHS with these badass pictures on the front of these machines going at each other.
[00:13:46]  Main dude was named Mark Pauline, and he had actually, he had two fingers.
[00:13:50]  There's a visual for this.
[00:13:52]  Two fingers that were like fused together because he'd gotten them burned.
[00:13:56]  He had tithed like his hand to his craft, right?
[00:14:03]  It was dangerous shit they were doing.
[00:14:04]  A lot of flamethrowers.
[00:14:05]  And so I get there to tiny, I think the first or second time I see the sign.
[00:14:09]  It just is very plain, very industrial.
[00:14:11]  These are industrial-minded guys, so it was not like a tricky tech logo.
[00:14:15]  It was three letters clearly hewn from wood.
[00:14:17]  It's SRL.
[00:14:19]  I went, holy sh.
[00:14:22]  This is a guy who, as a child, I'd hope to someday see the videos, you know.
[00:14:35]  They were so famous that I knew about them when I was living in Rockville, Maryland, because I'd seen videotapes of their performances.
[00:14:44]  And in their performances, which would take place in Tokyo or Amsterdam, or Brussels, or somewhere that you wanted to be, they would have robots seemingly either fight each other or they were involved in some kind of weird display, some kind of like theatrical pantomime.
[00:15:05]  Like you didn't quite know what was happening.
[00:15:07]  And they bought like a decommissioned V1 rocket from Germany, from West Germany, and converted it into a flamethrower.
[00:15:14]  And this thing was so fucking crazy that someone would use like an eight-foot ladder at the back of it, stand on the top of the ladder with gas containers and pour in real time gasoline into the flamethrower as it was like spewing out 30, 40 feet of flame from the front, from their like the rocket.
[00:15:36]  So it looked crazy.
[00:15:37]  It sounded insane.
[00:15:38]  Every car alarm, you know, and that was a time when everyone had that intruder alert room, the really annoying one that would cycle through all those sounds.
[00:15:49]  And so you would just hear the entire mission would be chattering with all this nonsense that was like out of sync from everyone's car alarm.
[00:15:57]  They had a machine that shot two by fours at a velocity that would just go through walls and cars.
[00:16:04]  And they did that by accident sometimes.
[00:16:06]  I mean, it was very violent and chaotic.
[00:16:10]  And if they tested machines, there would often be cops and fire engines down there.
[00:16:14]  And to be around that was, one, it was very inspiring.
[00:16:18]  And then two, it was also really difficult to navigate, you know, a quiet environment when they would be testing out like a hovercraft that they made, like a handmade hovercraft that could have four or five people on it.
[00:16:32]  Because when you're recording a band and the band's like, oh, that sounds too distorted.
[00:16:38]  Or is that too dissonant?
[00:16:41]  And then you go outside and Mark Pauline, the leader, has like basically thumbs have been sewn onto his hand because he blew off his hand wiring some fucking explosive device.
[00:16:52]  And then you realize like, ah, you know, music could stand a little bit of this, to be honest.
[00:17:06]  So I rented the space, $660, ended up being like $43 each a month, plus utilities.
[00:17:13]  I immediately called PG ⁇ E and said that we were a residence.
[00:17:17]  And then PG ⁇ E, which is the electrical company in Northern California, said, no, you're zoned as commercial.
[00:17:24]  So I said, no, you should come by, send an inspector.
[00:17:27]  And so we just like invented this fake living room with like a blow-up mattress and borrowed racks of clothes, like hanging racks from costumer friends that we had.
[00:17:41]  By the way, this seems like a small detail and it probably saved us $20,000 or $30,000.
[00:17:47]  So we basically did this crazy theater mirage and we got zoned as a residence.
[00:17:55]  So we had cheap rent, we had cheap electricity.
[00:17:59]  And keep in mind that I kept the lease on this place for 26 years.
[00:18:03]  So it actually really mattered how fucking crooked our electricity situation was, especially at the end, we were paying about $1,000 a month.
[00:18:11]  And I imagine we would have been paying like $3,000 a month because I had taken over so much space in that building.
[00:18:18]  So I'm just a rat.
[00:18:20]  So I'm just going to do anything to survive.
[00:18:23]  This is art.
[00:18:24]  And you're at the bottom.
[00:18:27]  You are scum.
[00:18:29]  And this is part of the reason why we survived.
[00:18:32]  So we slowly started building rehearsal infrastructure.
[00:18:37]  And at the same time, Scott Britton, who was like a genius contractor, and Mark Gordon, who was my best friend at the time, they were like, hey, why don't we start to also build a control room and, you know, like non-parallel walls because maybe this could be like some kind of recording environment.
[00:18:54]  I mean, they're the ones that saw that.
[00:18:56]  I didn't see that.
[00:18:58]  And so we slowly started building the infrastructure of a recording studio.
[00:19:02]  So it was like very, very organic process.
[00:19:05]  Two years later, it looked like a recording studio.
[00:19:08]  It didn't look like a nice recording studio, but the infrastructure was there.
[00:19:27]  Recording studios are deeply problematic because they bring traffic and what people unfairly think is unstable traffic.
[00:19:36]  They create noise and yet they require their neighbors to be quiet.
[00:19:40]  So just think of how annoying like that is if you're a landlord.
[00:19:45]  I mean, literally, we would complain if people were having conversations on the other side of the wall and then there would be like sleep or deer hoof playing the same song for like four hours.
[00:20:01]  The one thing that happened though, which was kind of born out of panic, there were nine people in the co-op and then I remember very quickly a couple bands broke up and people started saying like, hey, we're going to give notice.
[00:20:14]  We're going to leave this space.
[00:20:16]  We're moving out of town.
[00:20:17]  We're doing other shit.
[00:20:19]  And so at that same time, there was a real like mentor hero of mine.
[00:20:25]  His name was Greg Freeman.
[00:20:26]  He was a recording engineer in San Francisco.
[00:20:28]  And he recorded like all, if a band was on SST or Matador, he did their records.
[00:20:34]  If they played at the chameleon, he did their records.
[00:20:37]  So he was just recording every interesting, weird, cool band in the city.
[00:20:42]  And my band, MKUltra, had done a couple recordings with him.
[00:20:46]  And I really liked him.
[00:20:48]  And I trusted him.
[00:20:49]  I trusted him as a producer and as an engineer.
[00:20:52]  And at the same time that this kind of coalition of people, this co-op was breaking up, I heard that he was getting eminent domain out of his studio, which was called Lowdown, because it was in left field for the Giants stadium, the San Francisco Giants, the baseball team.
[00:21:11]  What's now AT ⁇ T Park?
[00:21:12]  He was in the left field.
[00:21:13]  He got an eminent domain letter.
[00:21:15]  And someone had told me that it was like he got offered like a thousand bucks, or I don't know, maybe it was less than that.
[00:21:21]  And I remember thinking, that's fucked.
[00:21:23]  Like art spaces are delicate and super vulnerable.
[00:21:27]  And then I thought, oh, fuck, I can meet him, talk to him, and pitch him coming in as a partner.
[00:21:33]  And maybe we could figure out something together.
[00:21:37]  So I go to the next Thinking Fellers local Union 282 show, which I think was at the chameleon in the mission on Valencia Street, Legendary Club.
[00:21:47]  And I knew that I would run into him there.
[00:21:49]  So I went to the show, saw him.
[00:21:51]  I was very nervous.
[00:21:53]  And I told him about the space and saying, hey, if you're getting pushed out, what do you think about bringing your gear into the studio?
[00:21:59]  And maybe I can manage you.
[00:22:01]  I'll manage the space.
[00:22:03]  I'll keep it clean.
[00:22:04]  I'll keep everything working.
[00:22:06]  And I'll take on the liability.
[00:22:08]  And then I can like get you bookings.
[00:22:10]  And then I can also provide you with some kind of support so you don't have to think about confirming sessions or opening.
[00:22:18]  You know, I could be there before the band gets there and clean up.
[00:22:21]  He went for it.
[00:22:40]  So my name is Greg Freeman, and I'm a recording engineer slash producer slash musician.
[00:22:48]  And I've been active for quite a while.
[00:22:50]  And for a lot of that time period, I worked at Tiny Telephone off and on, pretty seriously for about three years or so.
[00:22:56]  I had a recording studio in San Francisco that I started in 1986 or so.
[00:23:03]  And so John had a band that came in and did a session with me at my old studio, Lowdown.
[00:23:10]  It was really bare bones, and I didn't charge much money.
[00:23:14]  But I had lots of work because I was cheap and decent.
[00:23:18]  So when I first met John, he struck me as someone who just had a ton of ideas, a lot of energy, was very positive about what he was doing.
[00:23:29]  He was very positive about what I was doing.
[00:23:31]  He really enjoyed the studio environment, I could tell.
[00:23:36]  And you could tell he was a super smart guy, for one thing.
[00:23:39]  I was a parent.
[00:23:40]  He had all kinds of interesting stories about history and people or whatever and conspiracy theories, whatever.
[00:23:50]  As someone who's a very passive person with very little ambition, I was like, wow, this guy's got a lot going on.
[00:23:55]  I was like, wow, this guy's got a lot going on.
[00:24:16]  Yeah, the early Tiny Telephone vibe, it was, I think it never really went away, I don't think.
[00:24:22]  Like it was always handmade, everything, you know, just thrift store couches and just the very creative aesthetic.
[00:24:31]  The way things were built was really just, we're going to make a clubhouse.
[00:24:35]  We're going to, we're going to go in the dumpster and find stuff and tack it on the walls.
[00:24:40]  And that was kind of my aesthetic as well when I had my studio because I had no money.
[00:24:44]  Like at that time in the 90s, you still could scrape by and do that kind of thing.
[00:24:49]  So yeah, the vibe was, it was always super comfortable, except for that chair.
[00:24:57]  The chair in the control room at the console was just god-awful.
[00:25:02]  Like I just remember thinking, Jesus, this chair has got to go.
[00:25:06]  And it finally did.
[00:25:08]  Because I've worked in a lot of studios and other ones that were similarly, you know, funky or legally put together by creative people and some that were very corporate and could have come out of the 1970s from New York City or something, just really sterile environments.
[00:25:25]  And so Tiny Telephone was all, you could always tell there was like this kind of collective behind it.
[00:25:31]  John had an army of like devoted assistants and eventually, you know, engineers and people who worked on the place and built it up and stuff.
[00:25:42]  And so that was different.
[00:25:44]  Like that you didn't see.
[00:25:46]  That was special.
[00:25:47]  I don't want to say cult leader, but, you know, I did not have that.
[00:25:55]  But at the same time, like anybody, if anybody has money, they can buy a studio.
[00:25:59]  It's just, it's just not going to make any money, right?
[00:26:02]  It's not going to survive.
[00:26:04]  Like John was able to thrive with being available for people from the scene here and people from all over the country and the world.

=== Unique Studio Success (08:53) ===

[00:26:16]  And that you can't just buy that.
[00:26:18]  You can't just open up a box and stick a million dollars worth of recording gear in there and just and then make the same thing happen, right?
[00:26:25]  So that was what was unique about timing.
[00:26:40]  I've had all kinds of sessions where people freak out, like where bands break up in front of your eyes.
[00:26:46]  You know, I'm sure that stuff happened there too, but I was fortunate.
[00:26:48]  I didn't see anything like that.
[00:26:50]  Because, yeah, recording studio, it's like a pressure cooker.
[00:26:52]  It's like there's so many moving parts to it that it can get out of control.
[00:26:58]  But it never, I never saw that happen there.
[00:27:01]  And he was a huge part of why that was so easy because he really took it upon himself to make bands comfortable, to make engineers comfortable.
[00:27:11]  The vibe is always so good.
[00:27:13]  Again, I've done lots of sessions in places where that was not the case, where you're kind of like left to twist in the wind on your own while stuff was going to hell, you know, and like, why is this thing not working?
[00:27:27]  So that was really cool.
[00:27:29]  That was special.
[00:27:46]  So Greg said yes.
[00:27:48]  It allowed me to keep the space, and he brought in crazy ass gear, like shit that I had really only read about.
[00:27:56]  And the first booking was the Thinking Fellers Local Union 282, which was a wildly creative five-piece.
[00:28:09]  They reminded me a lot of like Polvo or like Sonic Youth with these detuned guitars and like really anti-musical underpinning and like art punks, true art punks.
[00:28:23]  And so they booked 30 days at Tiny Telephone.
[00:28:25]  It wasn't called Tiny Telephone.
[00:28:27]  I mean, I think it was called Tiny Telephone like a day before that session started because I didn't have a name.
[00:28:32]  And literally every name I came up with was just shot down by my friends.
[00:28:36]  They were like, no, no, no.
[00:28:38]  And they booked 30 days at $100 a day because of the studio.
[00:28:43]  That's how, listen, let's be honest, this place was really fucking modest for many, many years.
[00:28:47]  And it was $100 a day.
[00:28:49]  So it was like basically drywall and a tape machine and an unbalanced piece of shit RCA out Task Cam console.
[00:28:57]  But they gave me a check for $3,000 before the session.
[00:29:01]  That was so much money.
[00:29:03]  My rent was still $660.
[00:29:05]  I remember thinking, I can do this.
[00:29:07]  This can actually be a business.
[00:29:09]  This can work.
[00:29:10]  And a couple days before that session, I was looking at a catalog.
[00:29:15]  It was really a pre-internet for gear.
[00:29:17]  And I was looking at a catalog, and I needed to buy quarter-inch and small TT connectors, right, for the Patch Bay.
[00:29:24]  And in this catalog, TT connectors were listed as tiny telephone connectors.
[00:29:29]  And so I asked a tech friend of mine, and they were like, oh, yeah, this is the old switchboard format.
[00:29:33]  So if you're watching His Girl Friday or some Hitchcock movie or something, and someone's patching in a call on a switchboard, it's probably going to be TT connectors.
[00:29:43]  And I thought, Tiny Telephone, that's cute.
[00:29:45]  Like, I was like, that's really adorable.
[00:29:47]  And I remember every male friend I had really didn't like the name.
[00:29:51]  They thought it made the place feel unserious.
[00:29:53]  And I thought, okay, this is a good name if they don't like it.
[00:29:57]  so that's how we got the name so one really important kind of moment in the history of tiny telephone there was a local band named grand flume bus who actually had a lot going on in europe but in in the u.s really didn't have much going on
[00:30:25]  They were just a really beautiful, weird, surreal, kind of like country roots-ish band, maybe.
[00:30:34]  I mean, I hate using words like that, but we got to land somewhere.
[00:30:39]  And I got obsessed with the first Neutral Milk Hotel record called On Avery Island, and I gave it to Greg Freeman and a couple of the people in the band.
[00:30:51]  And I was like, this is an interesting way to think about lyrics and music.
[00:30:56]  And I loved the use of, like, the really dedicated use of distortion on that record.
[00:31:08]  And so the next Grand Falloon Bus record that came out was, like, kind of, it was, like, their most experimental, it was pretty fragmented and fucked up sounding record for singing narrative, you know.
[00:31:22]  country influence songs.
[00:31:24]  It was pretty out there.
[00:31:26]  And I remember thinking that it was by far the best record that had ever been made there, conceptually and also like sonically, it sounded very good.
[00:31:35]  And it gave me like a new feeling, which was like, oh, this can be an important place.
[00:31:41]  Like we can just keep getting better.
[00:31:43]  And also I knew we had redone all the wiring.
[00:31:46]  We had done the acoustics.
[00:31:47]  Like we had done a lot of work on the studio.
[00:31:50]  And for the first time, I really heard it in a record.
[00:31:53]  And I knew that all that like craft obsession was making a difference.
[00:31:58]  You know, it's often it's the last couple percentage points that really matter, and those are the most difficult things to do.
[00:32:04]  And so that record, you know, I listened to it hundreds of times and I felt so proud that it was done in the studio.
[00:32:11]  And that was, and I felt very connected to the music in that way.
[00:32:16]  Where like I felt, I felt that there was a whole, I had a real holistic approach to music now.
[00:32:22]  It's not just the players, it's not the engineer producer, it's not the moment or the influences or the studio.
[00:32:31]  It's everything acting in some very stranded, super complicated way that was reactive.
[00:32:37]  And all of that stuff was really, really important.
[00:32:57]  We did a bunch of Grand Flume Bus records there.
[00:33:00]  It was great because you could just, you just kind of turn Tiny Telephone into your own private clubhouse, and that was super fun.
[00:33:08]  I remember we were tracking the drums in that big live room, and they're like in the ceiling, there was like this kind of open ventilation port from when it was like a warehouse.
[00:33:21]  So you can, the sound comes in from that hole in the roof, right?
[00:33:25]  And so we were recording one of the weekend days during Fleet Week in San Francisco, which, if you're familiar with, is the day when basically you're constantly hearing jet fighters flying over at like very fast speeds right over the city and through the neighborhoods.
[00:33:44]  And some people really like it and some people, you know, get kind of annoyed.
[00:33:49]  Anyway, so that was happening.
[00:33:50]  So we were tracking this song and it was a song that referenced World War II and like there was a drum break, everything stopped and there is a sustained and like right then these fighter jets went right over the studio.
[00:34:10]  And so we were like, whoa, you couldn't believe the synchronicity.
[00:34:15]  And so in the mix, I turned up the overheads at that point to kind of emphasize, and you can hear it on the record, right?
[00:34:21]  so that was that was super cool so we're going to hear borders which is it's maybe not the most out crazy thing you've ever heard It just reads as a song, but the record in total is like a wonder.
[00:34:42]  But the thing that I, that's really notable about this is how good the lyrics are always.
[00:34:48]  Like he's a great lyricist and the production and the kind of tonal palette serves the narrative in a way that I always wanted, that was like always a goal at Tiny Telephone was like addressing and complimenting lyrical content when it was there and when it needed to be.

=== Unbelievably Big Opportunity (14:49) ===

[00:35:10]  I don't want help.
[00:35:12]  We'll be right back.
[00:35:33]  That, I believe, is the answer.
[00:35:40]  So I don't have a tear for that.
[00:35:45]  But I'm glad you have so many.
[00:35:53]  You pay while I run.
[00:36:14]  So I was in a pretty small band in San Francisco called MK Ultra, and we had been putting out records for five years.
[00:36:22]  I mean, my entire identity by that point was wrapped up in that band.
[00:36:28]  I thought I would die playing in that band.
[00:36:31]  I thought it was the most I knew how small we were, but it was like very important to me.
[00:36:36]  And so one day my bandmates who are lovely, lovely people who I'm all friends with now, they like said, hey, let's have a band meeting.
[00:36:46]  We need to talk.
[00:36:47]  So I remember we sat down in Dan Carr's kitchen and I just thought it was going to be like, oh, what's the schedule for playing the night break or who's going to take turns getting rejected by the local booking agents for a show this week?
[00:37:03]  Everything was like a phone call.
[00:37:05]  You couldn't even like email them to get rejected.
[00:37:07]  You'd have to call in between one and two on a Tuesday and it would alter your day, whether they said call next week or don't bother me.
[00:37:14]  And so they sat me down and they were like, hey, listen, we're getting offers from other bands.
[00:37:18]  We're going to leave the band and we just think you should just dissolve the band.
[00:37:22]  And I just started crying.
[00:37:24]  I cried like pure, pure tears, like true, it was true sadness for me.
[00:37:32]  And I just couldn't imagine my life continuing on from that point.
[00:37:39]  And so I remember the next couple days trying to, I was like trying to like reassemble my personality.
[00:37:47]  It's all funny now to me, but it's like, first off, you need to torch things.
[00:37:52]  I just think you should like, you're probably your life should be like flamethrowered like every year, probably, because that shit's so good for you, you know.
[00:38:00]  But at the time, I was so sentimental and just like, I don't know.
[00:38:03]  So, we're gonna hear Dream Is Over, which is a song that I wrote a couple days after my bandmates told me they had better options.
[00:38:10]  And by the way, they had better options, so there was nothing fake about that.
[00:38:16]  And it just, it's funny because I play this song like once a year or so, and I just hear the most self-involved punk.
[00:38:23]  Like, I hear a little bitch is what I hear when I hear this song.
[00:38:28]  But I also really like the melody.
[00:38:30]  And, you know, this song got some mileage years later.
[00:38:33]  I mean, Death Cab for Cutie covered it tons of times and, like, fucking stadiums, so I'll take it.
[00:38:59]  The dream is over.
[00:39:06]  It's unbelievably sad, unbelievably sad.
[00:39:15]  What I didn't expect, I was released as a broken sleeve.
[00:39:27]  So I was really, really sad.
[00:39:28]  And probably it didn't last long because I remember maybe a couple weeks later, I went to Aquarius Records and they had a free kind of like CD bin at the counter.
[00:39:42]  And they had a promo from this new band on Matador called Spoon.
[00:39:49]  And the record was called Telefono.
[00:39:55]  And I loved the graphic on the cover.
[00:39:59]  And I just took the record, I took it home, and I became totally obsessed with it.
[00:40:06]  And I did some digging, and I found out the engineer who recorded it was named John Croslin.
[00:40:13]  And then a little bit later, maybe a month later, this EP, a spoon EP, came out, which is a real masterpiece called Soft Effects, came out.
[00:40:22]  It's five songs, I believe.
[00:40:31]  I bought the vinyl, and it's great because the EP is the same on both sides.
[00:40:36]  So A and B side are exactly the same, which to me felt crazy at the time.
[00:40:40]  Like, I remember thinking, this is crazy.
[00:40:43]  And so I couldn't find John Croslin in the phone book.
[00:40:48]  And so I called up like Austin, Texas directory, and I tried to find Britt Daniel or Jim Eno.
[00:40:58]  And I could only find Jim Eno.
[00:41:01]  And Jim Eno, the drummer of Spoon, answered his phone.
[00:41:05]  And I was like, hey, I live in San Francisco.
[00:41:07]  I'm a huge fan.
[00:41:08]  And I want to see if I can get your engineer's phone number.
[00:41:13]  He gave it to me.
[00:41:15]  This actually started a very, very long friendship with Jim.
[00:41:18]  So it's kind of a beautiful story to me.
[00:41:21]  And then I called John Croslin and I asked him if he ever traveled to record.
[00:41:29]  And he said he did.
[00:41:30]  So then all of a sudden I was like, I'm going to make a solo record with this genius.
[00:41:35]  That was just all I wanted to do in my life at that point.
[00:41:38]  And this record didn't end up becoming my first solo record, Mass Suicide, Cult Figurines.
[00:41:50]  And so John flew to San Francisco.
[00:41:52]  He stayed with me.
[00:41:54]  We recorded.
[00:41:55]  He changed my life.
[00:41:57]  And during that session, I asked him if he wanted to come aboard.
[00:42:02]  I was just like, hey, like, how connected are you to Austin?
[00:42:05]  Like, would you ever move here and be my partner?
[00:42:10]  And you can bring in bands and I'll give you bands.
[00:42:13]  I'll take care of all the details.
[00:42:15]  And he said, yes.
[00:42:17]  So he came.
[00:42:18]  So we've got Greg.
[00:42:19]  We've got John.
[00:42:20]  like mentors, straight up mentors.
[00:42:35]  I'm John Crossland.
[00:42:36]  I worked at Tiny Telephone from, I think, 99 to 2001, 2002.
[00:42:45]  And yeah, I worked as an engineer, kind of slash producer, depending on what the situation required.
[00:42:53]  And I live in Austin, Texas now.
[00:42:56]  John makes a great impression when you first meet him.
[00:43:00]  He's just full of energy, a great talker.
[00:43:04]  He called me.
[00:43:05]  I remember the call.
[00:43:06]  He said he really liked the sound of the record, which, you know, I thought was great.
[00:43:12]  We recorded that on an eight-track one-inch machine I had in my garage.
[00:43:16]  And we were really proud of it and really excited about it.
[00:43:19]  So I came out and recorded his record.
[00:43:23]  So Tiny, you know, when I first started working there, it was pretty rough.
[00:43:32]  It was definitely, you know, the space was very rough.
[00:43:36]  So for someone who had never been in a studio, I would probably, if I were a client coming in, I'd never been in the studio, I'd probably be worried when I walked in because it just didn't look like high fidelity audio was going to be generated there.
[00:43:56]  But it had it where it counted.
[00:43:58]  He had a good tight machine.
[00:44:01]  He was an analog nut.
[00:44:02]  That was something we bonded about early on.
[00:44:04]  Still is, I guess.
[00:44:05]  But, you know, he very much wanted a warm sound.
[00:44:10]  And digital at the time was not nearly as good as it is now.
[00:44:14]  So there was a reason for wanting to do things analog.
[00:44:19]  But so, again, as a client, you'd walk in and you'd be worried probably.
[00:44:26]  But then once you spent some time there, it just felt very homey, very living room-like, kind of just the right size.
[00:44:36]  Like, not intimidating, but also not super tiny.
[00:44:42]  I think John did a lot of work in the background, kind of vetting people.
[00:44:47]  Like, I don't know that he turned a lot of people away, but I think he also pursued people that he liked.
[00:44:55]  I kind of expected it to be closing at any minute, you know, from the moment I stepped foot in there because that's just such a, it just looked like not only the situation was kind of tenuous, but the building looked like it would fall apart at any moment too, or burn down or something.
[00:45:14]  You know, it always seemed to be hanging off the edge of a cliff.
[00:45:19]  And John always just kind of amazed me at how he kept it going for so long and flourished, you know.
[00:45:26]  I think that's a credit to his just energy and making it happen.
[00:45:50]  I was making a record with John Croslin that was eventually going to be Mass Suicide Cult Figurines.
[00:45:56]  And I was asked by Noise Pop, which is like a local San Francisco festival, which was pretty big at the time.
[00:46:04]  I mean, it's big now, but it was pretty big for me to be asked.
[00:46:08]  And I realized that if I said yes, that in a really probably important way, it would force me to get my shit together and that I would have to find bandmates and I would have to figure out how to play new songs.
[00:46:24]  And it felt very, very scary and risky.
[00:46:27]  And I think that that's when you go towards something, right?
[00:46:30]  So I said yes, and I got a show at Bimbo's 365, which was hella huge for me at the time.
[00:46:37]  It's like 800 people, 1,000 people.
[00:46:39]  I don't know what the cap is, but it was huge.
[00:46:41]  And so the show got announced, and I was opening up.
[00:46:46]  I think I was first of four bands.
[00:46:48]  And I want to say it was Thingy, which was Rob Crowe's band, who I loved.
[00:46:52]  I was a huge Rob Crow fan.
[00:46:54]  He had done a record called Optagonally Yours, which was a record he made entirely using this like weird kind of like vinyl keyboard thing called an optagon.
[00:47:06]  And the Mountain Goats were the second, third band.
[00:47:10]  Now, I was, that was right after Coroner's Gambit came out.
[00:47:15]  And that record changed my life.
[00:47:17]  And really, even the first line of that record changed my life.
[00:47:21]  I was having visions of sugared pastry.
[00:47:25]  Cooked up in clarified butter.
[00:47:28]  I mean, by the end of that first song, I was like, this is the only thing that matters to me is this music.
[00:47:34]  And so I was like, fuck, Rob Crow, then Mountain Goats.
[00:47:39]  And then I think that Magnetic Fields was headlining.
[00:47:47]  And what's crazy is that Magnetic Fields and Mountain Goats ended up working in the studio.
[00:47:54]  And I remember being super bummed that we could never get Rob Crow there.
[00:48:00]  And so that show became really important to me because first off, I'm sure I sucked.
[00:48:04]  Like I really genuinely think I was probably pretty bad.
[00:48:07]  I had a promo copy of Mass Suicide Occult Figurines, which was printed to look like a fake Windows installation disc because there was a song on it called Bill Gates Must Die.
[00:48:25]  Which by the way, he actually must die.
[00:48:28]  Still, maybe even worse than he did before.
[00:48:31]  He's the third largest landholder in the world.
[00:48:34]  I don't think he's doing that for fun.
[00:48:36]  So I played the show and then after the show, Darnell came up to me from Mountain Goats and he was like, hey, that was really good.
[00:48:43]  And I just thought he was being nice because that's what bands say to each other.
[00:48:47]  And I don't think it's fake.
[00:48:48]  Honestly, I think it's really kind when you suck and someone says that was a good set.
[00:48:53]  I will break with the cynicism of my peers.
[00:48:56]  It feels way better than having someone like let you know that you were not good without saying it.
[00:49:02]  And so I gave him one of these installation discs.
[00:49:06]  He thought it was funny.
[00:49:07]  And then he emailed me after like a week later and was like, hey, this record's really good.
[00:49:14]  Super good.
[00:49:14]  Here's my phone number.
[00:49:16]  So we started actually corresponding and like talking and becoming friends, which was a huge deal for me.
[00:49:22]  I didn't have mentors like that.
[00:49:24]  And then shortly after that, I made my second record, which was definitely like a much better record than the first one.
[00:49:30]  And in many ways, it was the first record that had any kind of unique style to what I wanted.
[00:49:36]  You know, it's like the first thing that was like realized in any way and that had kind of a style that could be said was like unique to me.
[00:49:42]  And that record was called Time Travel is Lonely.
[00:49:49]  And I sent him the like a burned CDR of it.
[00:49:52]  And then he was like, okay, this is really good.
[00:49:55]  Let's go on tour.
[00:49:57]  And that started my entire career.

=== Rolling for Initiative (15:47) ===

[00:49:59]  Just that fucking phone call right there.
[00:50:13]  Okay, there's a long story I'm going to proceed all that with, which is in 2005, maybe four, me and Peter Hughes are in a car on tour.
[00:50:25]  And I'm doing a bunch of phoner interviews, and they're local news, right?
[00:50:31]  Local papers.
[00:50:33]  And these are stringers who don't know who we are.
[00:50:34]  They've been assigned to cover, you know, to do a write-up for a club show, right?
[00:50:38]  Two paragraphs or whatever.
[00:50:40]  But on my end, that's 20 minutes of talking, usually to people who are like, I don't know who you are, but there's no, it's not really open discourse.
[00:50:47]  And then they ask a bunch of formulated questions.
[00:50:49]  It's clear they've never heard of us before, right?
[00:50:51]  And we were in Houston and we were trying to find the freeway and I'm riding shotgun with the phone, you know, like a top-up minutes cell phone, a virgin mobile cell phone to my ear, right?
[00:51:04]  And Peter's trying to find the freeway in these Houston clover leaves, right?
[00:51:07]  And the interviewer sounds, you know, 10 years older than me or so at the time.
[00:51:12]  And, you know, I was in my 30s.
[00:51:14]  Your new record is produced by Jan Vanderslice.
[00:51:17]  How did you meet?
[00:51:18]  And I was like, oh, man, I can't do this anymore.
[00:51:21]  I can't do this today.
[00:51:21]  I'm tired.
[00:51:22]  I'm hungover.
[00:51:22]  I'm trying to find the damn freeway.
[00:51:24]  So I said, you know, it's a funny story.
[00:51:26]  I was on this whale watching expedition and I just made up this whole thing, right?
[00:51:30]  And Peter was sitting there losing his shit, just like trying not to laugh.
[00:51:35]  And I just made up a story about how we sort of saw each other on this ship off the coast of Catalina looking for whales and seemed like like-minded people, you know.
[00:51:43]  So we exchanged numbers and I looked him up and then we wound up working together.
[00:51:47]  I forgot telling this story.
[00:51:48]  A week and a half later, we're in Mississippi, pulling into a Hampton Inn, and I buy the local paper and there's, oh, hey, there's a write-up about the Mountain Goat Show.
[00:51:57]  Sure enough, Whale-watching Expedition has entered the history.
[00:52:06]  But in point of fact, what happened was I was playing Noise Pop, which I feel like it had a different name at the time.
[00:52:16]  And...
[00:52:16]  And I was not trying to do this as a career.
[00:52:19]  And I looked askance at any and all careerist efforts in this business.
[00:52:25]  And the thing that's funny about that is like, this has now been my job for like 15 years, right?
[00:52:29]  But I still just ideologically, I don't renounce my former position.
[00:52:35]  I just land in any different place.
[00:52:37]  This is what happened.
[00:52:38]  This is what happens when you sell out to the band, right?
[00:52:41]  Where it's like, you know, well, now it's a whole gig.
[00:52:43]  So you have to play the game.
[00:52:44]  But then I really believed in keeping your day job and making your music something else that you did, right?
[00:52:50]  And tried to reach as many people as you could with.
[00:52:52]  And people would call me and ask to play.
[00:52:54]  I would get very ornery and go, I don't know, I'm busy.
[00:52:58]  And they called, they say, hey, one of the guys who's working with us in this festival is going to call you up.
[00:53:05]  He wants to talk to you, but you guys are playing on the same set, same stage together.
[00:53:09]  His name is John Vandersleis.
[00:53:10]  And I said, oh, it is not, right?
[00:53:12]  They said, what do you mean?
[00:53:13]  I said, that's a made-up name.
[00:53:16]  He said, no, no, well, whatever.
[00:53:18]  John's going to call you.
[00:53:19]  And then you guys will talk about the thing.
[00:53:22]  I was, okay, cool.
[00:53:23]  And he called.
[00:53:23]  So the first words I ever said to John Vandersleis, he said, hi, this is John Vandersleis in San Francisco.
[00:53:29]  I said, okay, look, that is not your real name.
[00:53:33]  This is sort of the person I was in the late 90s, sort of a chaos actor, indie guy, hoping that your encounter with me would make you say, what was that all about?
[00:53:57]  But that was the beginning.
[00:53:59]  And then it turned out we had the same booking agent, Adam, and Adam asked if we wanted to go on tour together, and we did.
[00:54:07]  And I was still quite hesitant about making touring my main gig in those days.
[00:54:13]  Rightly so.
[00:54:13]  It'll make you insane.
[00:54:15]  As you can hear, I now no longer know how to end a sentence, right?
[00:54:18]  I used to be a normal, I wasn't a normal person, but I was a little more functional than you become after you've been on tour for 15 years.
[00:54:27]  but yeah so we went out on on a pretty punishing tour uh and those punishing tours are places where people want i was going to san francisco for some reason or another and i needed to sequence all here west texas My albums prior to 4AD didn't get mixed at all, right?
[00:54:55]  They didn't require any mixing.
[00:54:57]  They were recorded directly to a boombox, and all they needed was EQing.
[00:55:02]  EQing is not nothing.
[00:55:04]  It's something, right?
[00:55:05]  It actually changes the texture and sound substantially, but not like mixing, where mixing, you can leave stuff out in mixing.
[00:55:14]  You do editing and mixing, you know.
[00:55:16]  Whereas my stuff, you take the boombox tape in, you sort of try to ride down the wheel grind to an acceptable level and bring up whatever frequencies are going to make it nice and warm.
[00:55:27]  So I needed to sequence my new record.
[00:55:29]  I had 19 songs that I had recorded and Tiny, somehow John must have, I mean, John was hustling in those days.
[00:55:36]  He'd be like, whatever you're doing, come do it at Tiny, right?
[00:55:38]  And so I wound up doing that instead of going to Claremont, where I usually did my sequencing with Bob Durkee.
[00:55:47]  But I went to John's, and I think Alex Newport was the guy who actually oversaw the transfer from cassette to reel-to-reel of the whole album and did the EQing.
[00:55:59]  And then I sent the reels off to Emperor Jones in Texas, who pressed the record.
[00:56:02]  I'm pretty sure that, in fact, I'm 100% sure, that JV asked whether I had any extra songs to put up on the Tiny Telephone website, which this is from a different internet era, right?
[00:56:17]  Like, you know, oh, give me, get some songs for my website, drive traffic to the website.
[00:56:21]  Even though traffic to the website, none of it was monetized.
[00:56:24]  There weren't ads, and so it was just like, get people to know you exist, right?
[00:56:28]  So I didn't have any feel for studios at the time.
[00:56:31]  You know, I was very suspicious.
[00:56:34]  And I feel like somewhere in that length of time is also when we tracked the first extra lens album, then called The Extra Glens, at Tiny Telephone.
[00:56:44]  And JV tells stories about like, they say, okay, JD, you have to sit very still in front of this microphone.
[00:56:50]  And me in those days, I would say, yeah, no, that's not going to happen.
[00:56:53]  So you're going to want to set up your mics in a way that doesn't create the problem you're referring to because I'm not going to bother trying to sit still.
[00:57:00]  And JV describes people.
[00:57:03]  I'll show you the JV pantomime he does with this, like following me around while I play, going like, but yeah, so I did that.
[00:57:14]  It's like, I did a bunch of every time I'd go to San Francisco, stopping in.
[00:57:17]  And we were becoming friends and hanging.
[00:57:19]  a good hang.
[00:57:32]  Well, I mean, John was committed to doing stuff in the analog realm and keeping his machines updated.
[00:57:38]  And that, when I say updated, like machines working.
[00:57:42]  And I actually have had the luxury of working with John in other settings.
[00:57:46]  And I know this is one of the things that would always drive John Scott nuts is like they'd go into another studio and the studio would say, well, we have this amazing Studer machine with Athlon mods or whatever.
[00:57:56]  And you'd go there and they'd go, oh, yeah, that machine doesn't work.
[00:57:58]  Did you want to use it?
[00:57:59]  We'd have to fix it.
[00:58:01]  And then they'd go, why is it on your website?
[00:58:04]  Why is it listed as one of the features of the studio?
[00:58:07]  Whereas at Tiny, the stuff works, right?
[00:58:10]  It's all, in this way, it's like electrical audio in Chicago, a real pride in the machines and a love of the technology, right?
[00:58:19]  And, you know, and John was not an analog purist, but he believed that the most interesting sounds were being made in the analog realm and that that was still true.
[00:58:28]  I remember him always saying in those days, someday digital is going to be better than analog.
[00:58:32]  That day is probably going to come, almost certainly, but it's not there yet.
[00:58:36]  And there's no reason to start acting like it is or to get out ahead of it.
[00:58:38]  And we should be maximizing analog tech.
[00:58:41]  I was a big believer, and I still am in analog tech, although I don't have the kind of ears that I'm not listening to a 320 MP3 and going, oh, yeah, no, this still isn't a full-size file.
[00:58:51]  I don't know.
[00:58:54]  But yeah, it's like, so he had a bunch of cool machines and a good, and he's a good listener in that whenever you'd mention a good piece of tech to him, he would buy it immediately.
[00:59:06]  He'd be online in seconds going like, so what is that now?
[00:59:09]  Okay, cool.
[00:59:09]  And order one for the studio.
[00:59:12]  And a very service-oriented studio in that way, trying to have the stuff that the people coming in would want.
[00:59:18]  And there's a lot about studio life that is not really that comprehensible to people who don't work in studios.
[00:59:28]  So let's imagine you're like a software engineer, but you work, you travel for work.
[00:59:34]  You're going and fixing people's stuff, right?
[00:59:36]  You're one of those dudes who shows up and works for a week.
[00:59:39]  And those you show up and they say, okay, well, here's your station and here are our problems.
[00:59:44]  And you go, the terminal doesn't work.
[00:59:46]  There's no, I'm turning it on and there's no light.
[00:59:49]  And I'm not here to fix terminals.
[00:59:50]  I work on the software and they go, oh, yeah.
[00:59:53]  Yeah, no, that one, it usually doesn't work often in the morning.
[00:59:56]  If you slap it or something and you'd be like, I can't, I need a terminal to work at.
[01:00:01]  I need that, right?
[01:00:03]  Well, there's a lot of studios where you run into problems like these, right?
[01:00:06]  And because studio time is money, the studio time is very precious.
[01:00:11]  You need to make good use of it, even if half of it is like sort of trying to establish the vibe that you're going to go into.
[01:00:16]  There's a lot of mystical woo-woo energy that goes into recording and some of that is real.
[01:00:21]  You have to be comfortable and feeling expressive.
[01:00:26]  But a really important thing is functional equipment and engineers and management who care about that.
[01:00:34]  And it's the caring part that's really important because you can say, hey, look, man, this mic that was actually part of why we came here doesn't work.
[01:00:43]  I told you I was going to need X number of C14s or C24s, right?
[01:00:47]  And you only had half that, right?
[01:00:50]  Well, at a good studio, they go, oh, I'm sorry.
[01:00:52]  I didn't realize you're going to need all of our C24s, but I will have some for you by this afternoon.
[01:00:56]  And a bad studio will say, wait, you really need that many C24s?
[01:01:01]  Yes, I told you earlier.
[01:01:02]  And it said on your website.
[01:01:04]  At Tiny, there was always a very, I mean, this is like the sort of business mind that we on the left sort of don't like to think about because it does tie into a lot of the ugly realities of market capitalism and stuff.
[01:01:17]  But to be customer-oriented, if you're going to bother to engage in a capitalistic enterprise, right, one of the things you want to do is care about whether your customers are happy, right?
[01:01:27]  Not for the sake of the growth of your business, but for the sake of your business working like it's supposed to, right?
[01:01:32]  For pride in its own work, right?
[01:01:34]  And that's something that JV, I mean, politically, I know JV is way over on the left.
[01:01:38]  But if you're going to be in business, right, then you sort of, if you don't like to play Dungeons and Dragons, right, then don't play Dungeons and Dragons, but don't show up to the table and refuse to roll dice.
[01:01:50]  You have to roll dice.
[01:01:51]  It's one of the things you're going to do there, right?
[01:01:53]  You have to roll for initiative.
[01:01:55]  If you don't, oh, I don't believe in initiative.
[01:01:57]  Well, then you're playing the wrong game.
[01:02:00]  And so Tiny was a place where a bunch of people who sort of knew the system was all kind of messed up were still always focused on making the clientele.
[01:02:09]  And clients are what you're a client when you're in the studio.
[01:02:12]  Making the clientele very happy in the moment and comfortable and trying to keep the vibe.
[01:02:17]  Vibe is just massively important when you're making music.
[01:02:20]  You can't, you can, you can ride a shitty vibe if you have to.
[01:02:25]  You can go, okay, well, this sucks, and I hate everybody here, and I'm going to channel that energy.
[01:02:29]  But that is not your ideal situation.
[01:02:31]  Your ideal situation is you feel like you just showed up to be yourself and you're doing your thing.
[01:02:35]  And Tiny potentiated that in client after client.
[01:02:46]  You know, it's a very sentimental thing because of the things I did there.
[01:02:50]  All Hill West Texas was not a giant success at the time.
[01:02:53]  It did get a good review from Pitchfork, but Pitchfork wasn't that big a deal at the time, right?
[01:02:57]  It was a very small thing run out of a guy's bedroom in Minneapolis.
[01:03:00]  But for the most part, it disappeared without a trace.
[01:03:03]  We sent out these promos.
[01:03:05]  Craig, who ran Emperor Jones, got these maps of West Texas from an old, like from an antique store or something like that.
[01:03:12]  And he said, I was going to send you the book, but I thought, what if we tore out the pages and then wrapped the promos in the maps?
[01:03:19]  And it's only like 50 pages.
[01:03:21]  And I was like, that sounds great.
[01:03:23]  So like 50 people got them.
[01:03:26]  These were critics who got them.
[01:03:28]  So most everybody threw them away or sold them to thrift stores.
[01:03:31]  I think only one has ever been seen in the wild.
[01:03:35]  So that was the level of the game we were at at the time.
[01:03:38]  But then the mountain goats go on to become my life.
[01:03:42]  As I said, when I recorded Wahoo West Texas, I had a day job.
[01:03:45]  Four or five years later, I don't have a day job.
[01:03:47]  I'm just doing this.
[01:03:48]  This is who I am.
[01:03:49]  It's who I have become.
[01:03:52]  But All Hill West Texas sequenced at Tiny, over time, gathers, it finds its audience.
[01:03:57]  And it's the last album I made on the boombox, or the last until Plague Year when I made a cassette on the boombox.
[01:04:04]  But it was the end of that era for me.
[01:04:06]  The end of that era for me was the beginning of working with Tiny.
[01:04:10]  And so that was a doorway into a new epoch of my life and a huge new beginning for me.
[01:04:16]  And then I returned there many times.
[01:04:19]  The only time that my old backing vocalists, Rachel and Sarah, have sung on tape with me or on record with me since the early 90s was when I flew them up from LA to San Francisco at the end of the Heretic Pride recording sessions to get them on a couple tracks.
[01:04:34]  And then we met at Tiny and they laid down some backing vocals.
[01:04:37]  And that was a profound experience for me.
[01:04:41]  And the experiences you have in a studio, if it's a good studio, if its energy is catching the right glint, these are life-shaping experiences for you musicians.
[01:04:53]  These are peaks, right?
[01:04:55]  And they're private peaks.
[01:04:57]  You have a lot of other peaks on stage, right?
[01:04:59]  But these are very ego peaks.
[01:05:00]  These are peaks of sensation.
[01:05:03]  And they're real also.
[01:05:05]  They have depths, their own depths.
[01:05:06]  But the private depths of the studio are things you share with a small group of people, right?
[01:05:11]  Decisions you make that go on to shape the next couple years or decade or two decades of your life.
[01:05:18]  And these are decisions, right?
[01:05:19]  These are like, what are we going to put on this track?
[01:05:21]  What's this track like?
[01:05:22]  Small and large decisions about how things sound in the life of a musician are immense choices, even if you make tons of records like me.
[01:05:29]  Every choice matters a lot.
[01:05:32]  And I made some big choices in the rooms at Tiny, big ones.
[01:05:38]  What sequence to have all Hail West Texas in was decided half on the fly in that room.
[01:05:43]  I had a loose one, but then you decided where you're going, right?

=== Decisions Shaping Lives (02:15) ===

[01:05:46]  And so, yeah, so it was sort of the way you feel if you hear your elementary school is getting knocked down, you know, but more personal than that because you don't pick what elementary school you go to,
[01:06:01]  you do choose who you work with you know and uh and when a choice like that yields such fine fruit as i had working at tiny to hear their closing it was emotional for me so when tiny ceases to be there you know it takes a piece of an important place with it you know another piece of something already dismantled
[01:06:29]  But you want to, it's sad to see those pieces go.
[01:06:32]  You hope something even greater can be built, but you don't hold a lot of hope about that, right?
[01:06:39]  But it was because John was facing Rico charges, right?
[01:06:44]  The whale watching.
[01:06:46]  Well, yeah, because he was running a crab-catching sort of thing off of Bar Harbor, right?
[01:06:51]  And what if it turned out John had been banging GameStop really hard, right?
[01:06:56]  And made millions.
[01:06:58]  And then he opened like some studio that was like absolutely all digital, right?
[01:07:03]  No, like not even a proper tracking room at all, just like one of these all digital, everything takes place inside the machine things.
[01:07:10]  And he just called it telephone.
[01:07:11]  I think he should do that.
[01:07:15]  I'm gonna call John right now and go, John, if you get on it now, by the end of the podcast, you have your new studio to pitch, right?
[01:07:23]  And you go, and now the next chapter in John's life, big telephone.
[01:07:44]  This episode featured interviews with Greg Freeman, John Darniel, and John Crosland.
[01:07:49]  And music by MKUltra, Grand Faloon Bus, John Vanderslice, and me, Young Chomsky.
[01:07:55]  Now, until next time, remember to keep the dream alive.
[01:07:59]  Keep the dream alive.