True Anon Truth Feed - Keep the Dream Alive Part 2: Damage Control
Aired: 2022-02-02
Duration: 01:04:07


=== John Playing (15:21) ===

[00:00:00]  Previously on Keep the Dream Alive.
[00:00:04]  I was at a friend's house when I was in seventh grade and my friend played me a kinks record.
[00:00:12]  I remember flipping the back of the record over and seeing Ray Davies from the Kinks leaning over a Neve console.
[00:00:21]  That's when I first started thinking that recording studios were potentially very, very important to artists.
[00:00:29]  And that was the beginning for me.
[00:00:32]  I started playing in my first band when I was 24.
[00:00:35]  I'd never been in a band before.
[00:00:37]  So I was working in restaurants and I eventually decided that I needed to get a warehouse with my friends and make it like a rehearsal place.
[00:00:49]  I basically said that art is sacred and art needs patrons.
[00:00:55]  And she said, I've decided to rent you the space.
[00:00:58]  Well, that was like, if you give me like an open door, I'm in.
[00:01:01]  I'm fucking there.
[00:01:02]  And so we slowly started building the infrastructure of a recording studio.
[00:01:07]  I remember thinking, I can do this.
[00:01:09]  This can actually be a business.
[00:01:11]  I was asked by a Noise Pop, which is like a local San Francisco festival.
[00:01:16]  So I said yes.
[00:01:17]  And the Mountain Goats were the third band.
[00:01:21]  I had a promo copy of Mass Suicide Occult Victorines.
[00:01:24]  There was a song on it called Bill Gates Must Die, which by the way, he actually must die.
[00:01:29]  After the show, Darnell came up to me from Mountain Goats and he was like, hey, that was really good.
[00:01:33]  He said, hi, this is John Vandersley in San Francisco.
[00:01:36]  I said, okay, look, that is not your real name.
[00:01:40]  But that was the beginning.
[00:01:42]  But yeah, so we went out on a pretty punishing tour.
[00:01:45]  and those punishing tours are places where people bond.
[00:02:01]  Hi, this is John Vanderslice, owner of Tiny Telephone Recording and Musician.
[00:02:07]  So my first tour was opening up for the Mountain Goats.
[00:02:12]  And that, for me, was just like mind-blowing.
[00:02:16]  I mean, it was me and three bandmates in a van with John and playing in the Midwest.
[00:02:23]  He was living in Ames, Iowa at the time.
[00:02:25]  And he was like surprisingly big.
[00:02:28]  I mean, you'd roll up in some small town in Indiana and there would be 300 people there.
[00:02:32]  And so what was interesting was that during those tours, I was managing and running the studio at the same time.
[00:02:40]  So there would often be problems, issues, booking calls in the van.
[00:02:46]  There was no like dividing line between the two.
[00:02:48]  And I didn't want people to know that I was out of town.
[00:02:51]  So my voicemail and my cell phone, like as I was, I would never mention that I was in Florida or Maine because I wanted people to feel like it was like a real business, right?
[00:03:03]  Like actually there was some oversight to this studio.
[00:03:08]  But I was often just really for the first years of the studio, I was on tour six to eight months out of the year, constantly touring and then relying on my studio partners to really run the studio.
[00:03:21]  So the first tours that I did, we used my old Ford Acana line van, the one that's on the cover of the record Time Travel is Lonely.
[00:03:31]  And that van was like definitely beat to shit.
[00:03:34]  And we toured with four people.
[00:03:37]  And then with the Mountain Goats tours, John would be with us or sometimes he'd be in his own car.
[00:03:42]  We would all share a hotel room.
[00:03:44]  So there would usually be like five people in a room.
[00:03:48]  I would always just sleep on the floor.
[00:03:51]  I had the camping mat and a sleeping bag.
[00:03:54]  And it was a really big deal to sneak people in the room because we were staying at really shitty hotels and we'd have to basically sneak people into the back.
[00:04:06]  And these hotels were so busted that they had often have cameras in the back.
[00:04:11]  And I guess they were, they, you know, they monetized like whatever, $7 an extra person.
[00:04:17]  So you would get busted.
[00:04:18]  You know, you would be settling in the room thinking that you got away with it.
[00:04:22]  And then you'd hear this like stern knock on the door and you'd have to cough up whatever, $28 more dollars, which was a lot of money, actually.
[00:04:30]  I mean, sometimes you were making, you know, $50, $100, $150 a night.
[00:04:37]  And these early tours, which were always sharing one room, taking as much of the rider with you, having coolers, you know, really being self-sustaining, these early tours got me completely obsessed with hotels and gaming, the hotel system.
[00:04:57]  I became really, really good at scamming priceline and then eventually working my way into a company that manages Instagram influencers and getting really, really cheap hotels by pretending that I'm an Instagram influencer.
[00:05:18]  But that is, that's in the future from now.
[00:05:21]  I did not have that much intel.
[00:05:23]  So those tours were rough.
[00:05:25]  The shows were incredible.
[00:05:26]  You know, I was old at this time.
[00:05:28]  My first tour that I ever did was I was 34, you know, like a lot of my friends who were musicians had already peaked, you know, or they had careers or they had an ongoing dialogue with an audience.
[00:05:42]  And I was just starting out on this.
[00:05:45]  I was working full-time at Chez Panisse, you know, as a waiter and bartender.
[00:05:50]  And I felt like I was way too late to the party, you know?
[00:05:55]  So all of this had this like amazing feeling of, whoa, this is what I was missing.
[00:05:59]  And also, this is fucking hard to do and to sustain because I was solo.
[00:06:05]  I'm basically paying weekly wages to people.
[00:06:08]  And musicians are awesome.
[00:06:10]  They want to be part of something they believe in.
[00:06:13]  And, you know, I did my best to provide this culty, kind of amazing experience.
[00:06:19]  But it's chaos.
[00:06:20]  Touring is total chaos.
[00:06:22]  And you can have, you know, what would happen is that you might have like a run of shows opening up for Ockerville River or Spoon.
[00:06:32]  And then you have to tour back home.
[00:06:34]  So you'd go from like playing like three, 400, 500 people.
[00:06:37]  And then you'd hit markets on your own.
[00:06:40]  You're on a small indie label.
[00:06:41]  You've only put out two records.
[00:06:43]  You have barely any traction.
[00:06:44]  And there might be like 15 people at these shows.
[00:06:48]  I mean, at some point, your ego gets dissolved into like a cocaine-like powder that, but like at that point, you, you know, you're, you're not as resilient and it fucks your head up.
[00:07:01]  You know what I mean?
[00:07:02]  So it's like touring almost like mimics this manic depressive cycle, this mental health emergency cycle, you know, that can really stay with performers.
[00:07:13]  And for probably 10 years, I lived under this cycle.
[00:07:39]  I remember one really, really interesting moment in my life.
[00:07:44]  This was in 2002.
[00:07:46]  We basically did back-to-back tours with Beulah and Spoon.
[00:07:53]  And those tours overlapped and they brought us to the grog shop in Cleveland, maybe about three weeks away from each other.
[00:08:04]  And then the second time I went through grog shop, I was with Spoon.
[00:08:09]  And I remember seeing familiar faces.
[00:08:12]  And I remember people coming up to me before the show.
[00:08:15]  And they were like, hey, super happy you're here.
[00:08:18]  Can't wait.
[00:08:19]  Can you play this song?
[00:08:20]  And that was the first time in my life I was like, oh, fuck.
[00:08:23]  This is like clicking.
[00:08:25]  I mean, it's hard, right?
[00:08:27]  Like, this is intense, but this is clicking.
[00:08:30]  And I could tell that there was like this kind of baby momentum that was building.
[00:08:35]  And that was really, really exciting.
[00:08:37]  I mean, I so clearly remember that moment.
[00:08:41]  And then another thing I remember, this was 2003.
[00:08:45]  We were opening up for Beulah and we were driving over the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest and it was heading into winter and we were getting chain warnings and we didn't have chains with us.
[00:09:01]  We were usually pretty prepared and for some reason we just got caught without chains, which is a nightmare.
[00:09:06]  I mean, you can, you know, we had a trailer.
[00:09:08]  You can just get turned around and have to go back and cancel a show, et cetera.
[00:09:14]  You're really stressed.
[00:09:15]  I mean, honestly, I've never been more stressed in my life than when I've been on tour, you know, in a van and the weather's changing.
[00:09:25]  Like you're driving through Wyoming or Montana or Illinois and you are starting to like just white knuckle this like black ice scenario on the freeway.
[00:09:38]  And you're just, you know, just so you could make like a $250 show.
[00:09:42]  I mean, that's, that's fucked up, you know.
[00:09:44]  But that, that was happening this night.
[00:09:47]  We were driving over the Cascades.
[00:09:49]  I was driving and I kept getting a call from the studio on my phone and I was ignoring it because it was like really stressful to drive up this mountain.
[00:09:59]  And it kept coming in.
[00:10:01]  I picked it up and I remember clearly that it was like this sleet was turning into snow and I was thinking, we are so fucked going up this mountain.
[00:10:11]  Like there's no way like we're going to make this show.
[00:10:14]  Like who knows what happens, you know, like I just, you just feel like you're going to like just spin out into a ditch or something.
[00:10:21]  And I picked up the phone, which was dangerous because you're driving.
[00:10:27]  And it was the, an engineer from the studio and they were like, listen, we're having a flood.
[00:10:31]  We're having like record rains and all of this water is coming into the control room.
[00:10:36]  And I just remember thinking, I can't do this.
[00:10:39]  This is, this is unsustainable.
[00:10:41]  Like whatever's happening, this isn't like I can't, like, I can't answer to this.
[00:10:47]  I don't have any guidance or agency in this with both of these like parallel problems.
[00:10:55]  Like I just can't, I can't handle it.
[00:10:57]  So fast forward, like a lot of gear got damaged in this flood.
[00:11:01]  There was nothing that I could do about it because I was driving a van, you know, a couple thousand miles away.
[00:11:06]  And we actually did get over the Cascades and make it to the show.
[00:11:12]  We probably blew through the requirement to have chains by like 10 minutes or something because everyone was pulled over putting chains on their van.
[00:11:22]  we just like kept going and and made it to the show
[00:11:46]  there's so many skills that are you share between like being a touring musician and owning a studio with actually being a waiter I would say that if anything prepared me for my life as it unfolded, it was my time working in restaurants, which started at 15 and ended when I was 35 or 36.
[00:12:11]  And I think that what you learn in restaurants is that you kind of learn that like it's okay to enter into periods of pure chaos.
[00:12:25]  And there's some survival skills that you can, you know, you can kind of like stay fo, you can stay focused and you can prioritize simple actions.
[00:12:36]  And I think that it's a beautiful, beautiful thing to realize that like nothing actually breaks.
[00:12:47]  Like your brain feels like it's going to break, but like nothing breaks.
[00:12:51]  You just, you're like, okay, these three things have to happen in sequence and then I can like take a breath.
[00:12:58]  And that happens at a show.
[00:13:00]  I mean, I've played multiple shows when the power went out.
[00:13:04]  You know, like I, I, I remember we played Middle East in Boston with St. Vincent.
[00:13:13]  And the power went out for probably 30 minutes of our set and we just grabbed acoustic instruments and went into the middle of the crowd and played our set like in order, like whatever we were playing.
[00:13:24]  We just played it acoustic and then the power came back on.
[00:13:28]  And I honestly don't think that without crazy experience of being in the weeds for a decade as a waiter working brunches or selling frozen crab in a San Francisco tourist restaurant.
[00:13:43]  But I just don't think without that experience that I would have been able to be as flexible or really embracing chaos.
[00:13:53]  And I think that that really carries over to the studio because there are moments when you're producing a record and, you know, you have, listen, you have a personal life.
[00:14:05]  You know, of course, you might be having like a really intense fight with your partner and you're in the middle of producing a record for 20 days in a row and it's like an unsustainable kind of like emotional tension and the studio is is breaking down and punishing you for your sins,
[00:14:29]  you know, and your lack of like tech savvy or, you know, your future proofing of, you know, certain issues, like tech issues.
[00:14:41]  And I think that there were just moments where it was all way, way too much for me.
[00:14:48]  And I had this like experience where I always told people that like, I've never been more stressed in my life than when I was a waiter.
[00:15:11]  Once I was opening up for Mountain Goats on the Moon Colony Bloodbath Tour, and this was in Chicago, and it was in a really old theater.

=== Realized Stress In Theater (03:30) ===

[00:15:22]  And I think that there was about maybe 1,500 people there.
[00:15:24]  It was sold out.
[00:15:26]  And it was just John and I playing acoustic.
[00:15:29]  So those shows were fucking crazy.
[00:15:31]  I mean, they were intense, nerve-wracking.
[00:15:33]  I mean, you, before you step on the stage, you feel like you can actually barely breathe.
[00:15:38]  You know, you're so nervous because this is unmediated shit.
[00:15:43]  It's you and acoustic guitar for like an hour, you know?
[00:15:47]  And I remember I got on stage and we didn't have, we were late to the show because of routing.
[00:15:54]  And so we didn't have time to sound check.
[00:15:57]  And I started playing the first song and I realized that there was like this, I don't know, 120, 150 millisecond delay from when I would play a guitar chord.
[00:16:07]  It would kind of hit the back wall of this theater, which was way far, come back.
[00:16:12]  And then I realized like in a, in a heartbeat, I was like, fuck, I have to play to the tempo of this delay.
[00:16:19]  Like, like the whole set has to be fucking like, like at whatever, 11 beats per minute or whatever.
[00:16:27]  And it just like the math, you know, you're just like sweating bullets anyways.
[00:16:31]  And you're just like, oh my fucking God, how am I going to do this?
[00:16:35]  But you do it because again, I've never been more stressed than when I worked at Fingers Deli.
[00:16:41]  And I remember I was like making like steak subs or whatever.
[00:16:44]  Like, and I dropped this massive bowl of this like skirt steak or something on the ground.
[00:16:51]  And the owner, who was a complete and total tyrant, had his back to me and didn't quite hear what had happened.
[00:16:58]  And then the other line cook I was working with was just giving me this hand gesture of like, just scoop all the meat back into this bowl and throw it on the stove like as fast as you can.
[00:17:10]  So I just was prepared through food service and for being a rat in a fucking kitchen and a restaurant for so long that I could just like handle unbelievable amounts of stress.
[00:17:22]  Now, did this cause long-term mental health damage?
[00:17:26]  You better fucking believe it.
[00:17:38]  So in my emotional world at the time, as far as like relationships go, I was the for the first four years of starting to tour, I was in a relationship at home, which was absolutely incredible and grounding.
[00:17:53]  But, you know, I think it sucks.
[00:17:56]  It really fucking sucks to be the one that stays home.
[00:18:02]  And it's happened to me, you know, afterwards.
[00:18:06]  And, and I was like, man, is this how it feels?
[00:18:09]  This really sucks.
[00:18:10]  Like, I don't, you don't wish that on anyone, you know?
[00:18:13]  She was just like, listen, you know, I can't do this anymore.
[00:18:16]  You need to either stop touring or we can't be together.
[00:18:19]  And honestly, I would have, I would have fucking murdered a child at that point to keep touring.
[00:18:25]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:18:25]  Like, I think you're so deranged.
[00:18:28]  You know, people think I'm like very conspiratorial and my politics are, they're, they are pretty brutal on a certain level.
[00:18:35]  Like, I am, I just think this whole fucking thing should be burned down in a, in a heartbeat.
[00:18:40]  But because I have also had crazy ambition, I saw that side of me, that side of anyone that gets dragged into capitalism.

=== Capitalism's Ugly Side (07:29) ===

[00:18:53]  And man, let me tell you, there's nothing uglier than a fucking low-budget arts business with like a razor-thin profit margin, having to like pantomime capitalism.
[00:19:03]  It is really fucking crazy.
[00:19:05]  It's ugly and it, it absolutely poisons your mind.
[00:19:09]  It turns you into a psychopath.
[00:19:11]  You know, they say that like psychopaths, they're naturally drawn to be like CEOs and stuff.
[00:19:15]  I think it's worth it.
[00:19:16]  I actually think it takes like competitive, weird people and turns them into full-on psychopaths.
[00:19:24]  I mean, I think that that's what capitalism does.
[00:19:27]  And I, and I, and I saw it in myself, actually.
[00:19:31]  I mean, I knew that I had to lie and cheat and steal.
[00:19:36]  I remember once I was at a party and some studio was telling me, man, I just like paid taxes and I couldn't believe it.
[00:19:41]  And I was like, pay taxes?
[00:19:43]  You pay taxes?
[00:19:44]  Are you fucking crazy?
[00:19:45]  Like, how would you possibly like run an arts business and be honest about your income?
[00:19:51]  No way, man.
[00:19:53]  Like, there's no way you can survive.
[00:19:55]  And so I think that I've straddled two worlds in a way that I don't think it's good or bad, but I don't know how many people straddle worlds in a way that I straddled worlds in the early days of my touring and me running a business, like an impossible business.
[00:20:16]  There is no more busted, you know, model for a business than a recording studio.
[00:20:33]  I'm Joel Hamilton, and I'm the owner of Studio G Brooklyn here in Brooklyn, New York.
[00:20:42]  And it's where I work out of as an engineer producer.
[00:20:46]  I think I first met John Vandersleis through some pals in DC, like Jason Cadell from Dismemberment Plan at the time.
[00:20:59]  I don't even remember what year it is at all.
[00:21:01]  It's been a long time at this point.
[00:21:02]  But John and I just sort of figured out that we were in certain ways, at least studio ownership-wise, we were kind of the East and West Coast equivalents of each other as far as neither of us sort of, you know, had a billion dollars, but we figured out how to make it work and really sticking to our guns coming from sort of whatever you want to call it, the punk scene, the alternative scene, the underground music scene rather than just, you know, coming from like a pop background or whatever.
[00:21:30]  And we just kind of hit it off right off the bat.
[00:21:34]  I feel like studio ownership at this point in particular in time, it requires the recognition of the conditions, the paradigm that we enter into when we decide to open a recording studio.
[00:21:49]  It's, you know, the conditions that created the dinosaurs no longer exist, you know, and where there was once a rainforest, maybe there's a desert, but that doesn't mean that there's not 75 foot tall cacti standing somewhere.
[00:22:04]  And I recognized immediately that John was a 75-foot-tall cacti just like myself, even in the scarcity.
[00:22:12]  Coming from a place of scarcity, you understand how to use what resources there are available to you to create a community rather than to create, quote, a business that simply serves a community.
[00:22:26]  So, I mean, Tiny Telephone felt like a community, just like Studio G feels like a community.
[00:22:31]  There's a bunch of people that make it work, but with kind of a core idea or mission that lives in one person's heart, I suppose.
[00:22:56]  When I heard that Tiny Telephone had closed, I wasn't surprised.
[00:23:02]  I was sad, but I wasn't surprised.
[00:23:05]  I know firsthand how people want to pin the closing of the classic studios and the cool studios on things like, you know, Spotify or Napster or, you know, depending on what year it is, you know, LimeWire.
[00:23:22]  It doesn't matter.
[00:23:23]  You know, it's people want to pin it on that.
[00:23:25]  And in New York City, we watched the real estate market close more studios than Napster or any peer-to-peer or streaming service could ever hope to take out on the face of the earth because a 20-year lease ends or the neighborhood that we moved into that was scary when we got there, we helped make it cool.
[00:23:46]  And then all of a sudden it was a billion dollars.
[00:23:48]  Even if you own the building, it was a billion dollars in property taxes.
[00:23:52]  And you start looking at the business model and you're like, okay, well, this, you know, that's going to be 497 bookings don't fit in one year's worth of property taxes or rent.
[00:24:04]  And the model goes upside down and you simply have no other choice but to close the doors.
[00:24:19]  There are places that seem to just require a direct path from point A to point B because the day rate is so ridiculously prohibitively expensive that you have to just go in and do what you demoed out in a rehearsal room and get it done because you just don't have the luxury to experiment.
[00:24:40]  And all of a sudden there was this sort of next breed of studio like Tiny Telephone or my own where there was gear that was equivalent to these large classic corporate rooms.
[00:24:52]  So the quality level was right on par with anything else out there.
[00:24:57]  And yet the business model changed to accommodate some of the art.
[00:25:02]  Like it put a leg back over the fence in the fence between art and commerce.
[00:25:08]  And we wound up with a balance that allowed for creative records to sit right next to kind of formulaic records quality-wise, as far as their production value and the level of professional equipment they were using to achieve their goals.
[00:25:27]  And it's what I lamented the most when I heard that Tiny Telephone had closed was the fact that I just wasn't sure where else you could get that.
[00:25:37]  You know, where else can you get something so high level with someone as dedicated as John Vandersleis to keeping the doors open rather than looking at it as an opportunity to make money?
[00:25:48]  It's sort of the semantic flip between putting walls around what the scene is already doing and building a studio as a place to try to make money.
[00:25:59]  You know, you have a community and you wind up housing it.
[00:26:03]  It's that type of organic growth and conditions that create things like the Grand Canyon.
[00:26:11]  You can't just buy one.
[00:26:12]  You know, it takes years and particular conditions to have this organic set of circumstances create something that serves a community like that.

=== Indie Signing Milestone (06:47) ===

[00:26:22]  And I hope to see more from John Vanderslice.
[00:26:43]  Hi, I am Laura Dean, otherwise known as LD, which is actually a nickname that John Vanderslice, known as GV, first gave me.
[00:26:53]  I've been an engineer and producer in the Bay Area since 2007, and I worked at Tiny Telephone for a little over 10 years.
[00:27:04]  When I first started working at Tiny, I was actually living in the neighborhood, I want to say eight blocks from where Tiny Telephone was.
[00:27:15]  And at that time, the neighborhood was already being pretty heavily gentrified.
[00:27:20]  And so it was pretty challenging to see a lot of the people who had been living there for a long time being kicked out.
[00:27:28]  And it was also really difficult to see a lot of the musicians who were, you know, doing that work full-time, trying to survive as well.
[00:27:39]  And then just to see all of these old houses just being replaced by these lofts, just like plopped down in the middle of your neighborhood was just kind of disheartening.
[00:27:51]  Like I remember on the very street that I lived on, like I would walk to Tiny every morning, like to go to work.
[00:27:57]  And then just randomly at the end of the street, there was like just this giant loft that would replace like three houses.
[00:28:03]  And it was basically like a house that people could rent out.
[00:28:06]  And it was just for really wealthy people.
[00:28:09]  And only like one family would stay there at a time.
[00:28:27]  So I was signed to Barsouk Records in 2001.
[00:28:32]  And this really was a huge, huge thing for me.
[00:28:35]  I mean, I think that the landscape was quite a bit different than you didn't really have streaming platforms in the same way.
[00:28:42]  You just, you didn't, you just didn't have nearly as much control over what you were doing.
[00:28:48]  And being signed to an indie was like, it almost felt like, to me, the necessary like beginning point.
[00:28:58]  And it certainly was for me to get a booking agent and for, you know, me to have any leverage with like record stores, which were huge.
[00:29:07]  It was a really huge thing at that time to be able to do in-stores and promo tours and have like someone work college radio and NPR and stuff like that.
[00:29:20]  So and the reason why I got hooked up with Barsuk was that I, in my old band, MKUltra, we played a show in Bellingham opening up for Pinwheel, which was Jason and Ben's, you know, first band from Death Cap for Cutie.
[00:29:43]  So I met Chris Wall at the show and they liked my band at that time.
[00:29:50]  I loved Pinwheel.
[00:29:51]  I thought they were fucking amazing.
[00:29:53]  And I kept in touch with them.
[00:29:54]  And they eventually brought Barsuk when I played Seattle opening up for Spoon.
[00:30:01]  They eventually brought the Barsuk people to see me.
[00:30:05]  And then I started a dialogue with them.
[00:30:08]  And so that was like really important.
[00:30:12]  And with Death Cab came a lot more leverage, you know, as far as like distribution deals.
[00:30:16]  And, you know, all of a sudden we were allowed to print vinyl and, you know, we could get like a thousand records and 700 of them would immediately go out to record stores and those are not returnable.
[00:30:28]  That's like a huge thing.
[00:30:29]  And like all of a sudden people are out there buying your records and showing up at a show and asking you to sign them.
[00:30:35]  And that, that's a fucking trip.
[00:30:37]  You're like, whoa, this is actually working.
[00:30:41]  You know, this is some sort, it's like some delayed thing, but there is a circle here.
[00:30:46]  So for me, that really started, you know, there's two things.
[00:30:50]  One, it gives you confidence.
[00:30:52]  And like, you have to have confidence if you're going to, if you're going to stand up in front of a microphone.
[00:30:58]  It's funny because like people make fun of bands and I don't really feel that.
[00:31:03]  I don't think it's funny that people like or don't like Creed.
[00:31:07]  Think it's like just any anyone or like even there's meme accounts that are just like like making fun of you know Florida, whatever grindcore bands, or you know I, I don't.
[00:31:19]  That to me doesn't resonate, because I, if you're standing up in front of a microphone on a stage and there's one person in the audience, i'm sorry but that's, it's already impossible.
[00:31:30]  It's like you're already like this is like herculean, this is so hard, and so I just have infinite respect for anyone that does that.
[00:31:40]  But it it does take.
[00:31:42]  You just need a little bit of like outside.
[00:31:45]  Okay, like you should be doing.
[00:31:46]  This, and being signed to Barsouk was was really important for me because it, in some ways, it allowed me to see what I was doing as a potential full-time job.
[00:32:17]  My name is Ben Gibbard.
[00:32:19]  I...
[00:32:19]  I play guitar and sing in Death Cab for Cutie and I guess kind of the Postal Service too.
[00:32:29]  I first met John Vandersleis, I believe in 1996.
[00:32:34]  And when he was touring in MKUltra, I was playing in a band in Bellingham, Washington called Pinwheel.
[00:32:43]  And MK Ultra had booked a show at the 3B Tavern, which, you know, used to be the spot in town that any touring bands might come through.
[00:32:52]  And my first impressions of John are probably similar to most people's first impressions of John.
[00:32:58]  And that is that I don't think I'd ever met a more warm and inviting, engaging human in my life to that point.
[00:33:06]  And, you know, he just radiated positivity.

=== Europe And Studio Magic (15:11) ===

[00:33:10]  And, you know, he seemed a little spacey, like kind of, he seemed like a little bit of a space cadet, but a reliable kind of space cadet, you know.
[00:33:18]  Our first session at Tiny Telephone was in 1998.
[00:33:22]  And we were doing our first tour, the first tour we'd ever done in the fall of 98.
[00:33:29]  And this was a couple months after our first album, Something About Airplanes, had come out.
[00:33:33]  And we had recorded that entire record in our house in Bellingham.
[00:33:37]  We had never, to my recollection, been in a real studio before that wasn't the studio on the campus or going in to do a radio session for a station in town or something like that.
[00:33:50]  So he had this idea that because we were going on this 10-show run with Harvey Danger and we had a day off between Sacramento and Eugene, that we should just bop over to San Francisco and spend the day recording at Tiny Telephone.
[00:34:06]  So we had, at the time, a new song called Lowell M.A. that we had just put together.
[00:34:17]  And we thought, well, this would be kind of a cool way to spend the day recording the song.
[00:34:21]  And, you know, maybe we'll put it out on a seven-inch.
[00:34:23]  Maybe we'll just, maybe it'll be the first song for a new record.
[00:34:27]  And that was my first experience going to Tiny Telephone and being in that space.
[00:34:33]  Certainly the first time you go, you're just really taken aback as to what a wild environment it is.
[00:34:42]  Not only the studio itself, but just where the studio was in the city.
[00:34:47]  So when we pulled into Tiny, you pull off Cesar Chavez there and then we're pulling around this weird back alley and it just, you know, driving there for the first time.
[00:34:59]  I mean, this is the late 90s.
[00:35:01]  You know, we didn't have Google Maps on our phones.
[00:35:03]  We just have an Atlas and an address.
[00:35:05]  And we're pulling into this environment that seems like it looks like something out of Sanford and Sun.
[00:35:11]  And you've got the survival research laboratories next door and they're making these robots that look like they're built for the apocalypse.
[00:35:19]  And then, you know, you've got this little tiny door with just tiny telephone in magnetic letters on the door.
[00:35:25]  And we're like, I guess this is it.
[00:35:26]  And we kind of pushed the door open.
[00:35:28]  And it was just this wonderful experience of going into this space that was clearly handmade.
[00:35:35]  You know, this was clearly not a space that was built like what we thought a professional recording studio would look like or feel like.
[00:35:43]  It definitely felt like John had brought a bunch of equipment into a space that was in no way built for this and kind of built this space that had such ambiance and vibe to it that you couldn't not be taken with it.
[00:36:00]  It just felt like, yes, of course, this is what a recording studio in this part of San Cisco would look and feel like.
[00:36:20]  We had made the decision pretty early on that we wanted to record at least a large portion of transatlanticism at Tiny Telephone.
[00:36:31]  So what we did is we went down and recorded for a couple weeks.
[00:36:36]  We went on a tour out to South by Southwest.
[00:36:39]  And then we came back and did more recording at Tiny Telephone.
[00:36:45]  And for us at the time, Jason McGurr had just joined the band and we were really excited about what we could accomplish with him.
[00:36:54]  But it was also the first time we'd gone somewhere with the express intent of making a record.
[00:36:59]  We were staying at these hotels, hotel rooms down by the airport, and we would kind of meet every morning in the parking lot of this day's inn or whatever it was, hop in our van and then go to the studio to work.
[00:37:14]  San Francisco has always been my favorite city aside from the one that I live in.
[00:37:20]  And it's the only city in America that I've ever really truly considered moving to that I really wanted to live in.
[00:37:26]  So for me, being able to be working on this record that we were all really excited about while also spending all this time in San Francisco and going every day to the studio like it was our job, you know, it's weird to say it like this, but it kind of felt like this fantasy life that we were living.
[00:37:43]  Because at that point, we were making enough money that we didn't have to work jobs anymore, but we were really living pretty hand to mouth.
[00:37:49]  So this was kind of, at the time, felt like a glimpse of what our lives could maybe look like if we continued to kind of continue on this trajectory that we had been experiencing for a while.
[00:38:01]  And, you know, every couple of days, John would stop by and he would make sure like, you guys need anything?
[00:38:06]  You know, he'd bring burritos by.
[00:38:08]  You know, he was always present in the studio, but never in the way.
[00:38:11]  He always, he would come by.
[00:38:13]  He would help Chris out with any conundrums he might have been having with the gear or the patch bay or whatever.
[00:38:19]  And having now dealt with innumerable studio owners, they really run the gamut from, oh, yeah, I started recording studio because I like music and I want to be around musicians, even though they don't particularly want to be around me, to this is just purely a business venture for me.
[00:38:36]  And I'm not that interested in being a part of the day-to-day workings of the studio.
[00:38:42]  And John was on that spectrum in this really interesting place where, you know, he was an artist himself.
[00:38:49]  He is a phenomenal engineer and producer in his own right.
[00:38:53]  And he knew his way around his own studio better than anybody.
[00:38:57]  So when John came by, he was never hindering our ability to work.
[00:39:01]  He was actually really helping us because he would bring this positive energy that we've always known John to have.
[00:39:08]  We would play him stuff and he'd be like, oh, that sounds great.
[00:39:11]  Maybe try this or this and that.
[00:39:13]  He would offer suggestions without, in a way that didn't encroach on our feelings that we were making our own record.
[00:39:20]  And he also, you know, if I remember correctly, was giving Chris little tips about how to patch things through certain ways.
[00:39:26]  Like, you got to try this delay unit through that.
[00:39:28]  Compressor really sounds cool.
[00:39:29]  Usually you do it opposite, but do it this way.
[00:39:31]  It'll do this cool thing.
[00:39:33]  But it definitely, whenever John stopped by, we were always really excited to see him.
[00:39:37]  And he brought an energy that most studio owners don't bring or think that they're bringing.
[00:39:45]  And they're definitely not brilliant.
[00:40:02]  So the studio would like help my touring and vice versa over and over and over again.
[00:40:07]  And it kind of created this like really interesting momentum.
[00:40:11]  And we need to talk about one really important thing, which was me taking out my first bank loan in 2001 and buying a Neeve console because that was really, really important for the studio because all of a sudden, you know, Neve is an English console maker.
[00:40:29]  I mentioned before on the back of that Kinks bootleg record.
[00:40:34]  These are legendary consoles.
[00:40:36]  They have their own, I don't know, like energy to them in many ways.
[00:40:41]  They're hard to find.
[00:40:43]  They're iconic.
[00:40:44]  And people started flying in to San Francisco to record at the studio really for the first time ever after we got this Neeve console.
[00:40:54]  And that happened in 2001.
[00:40:57]  And around that time, we had Dismemberment Plan record in the studio.
[00:41:02]  I lost my membership to the human race.
[00:41:06]  And Travis Morrison, then I went on tour with them.
[00:41:09]  And so this back and forth, you know, happened.
[00:41:13]  And then what's interesting about these early days is that it's almost like every tour opens up other possibilities.
[00:41:24]  I toured in 2002 with Dismemberment Plan, and this Japanese band called Karuli opened up.
[00:41:35]  And then Karuli signed me to their label in Japan and then took me to tour in Japan three times.
[00:41:41]  And that was like a huge deal for me starting to like open up Europe and Japanese touring because all of a sudden you have like another agent, you have another label, you start to look different to people.
[00:41:55]  And then Death Camp for Cutie actually did a lot of recording in the studio.
[00:42:00]  And that in many ways was probably the most helpful kind of like thing for us in those early days because they would often talk about it in interviews.
[00:42:13]  You know, some bands record at the studio and then it's like, you don't even know what happens.
[00:42:17]  Like it's just, it's invisible to them.
[00:42:20]  They don't talk about it.
[00:42:21]  They barely even credit you on the record.
[00:42:23]  I learned a long time ago, I don't take this personally, because sometimes bands just don't think about this stuff.
[00:42:32]  And then other times, I think bands, they want to devalue the kind of like moving parts in the, you know, whether it's an engineer, producer, because they want it to be the focus of the record is on the band and not on these like kind of external, ever-changing players.
[00:42:54]  And that's, that's fine.
[00:42:55]  I, I, I've just never took that stuff personally.
[00:42:58]  Um, but some bands make a thing of it and and some don't.
[00:43:04]  And so Death Cab were, they were big because they talked about it.
[00:43:08]  You know, they would, they would do like a KXP thing or like a World Cafe and they would talk about like, yeah, we were in Tiny Telephone for a month and we tracked Narrow Stairs or transatlanticism at Tiny Telephone, this studio in San Francisco.
[00:43:24]  So that's when things started really clicking.
[00:43:28]  And that's when it was just like guaranteed that we would be between two and four months booked ahead.
[00:43:38]  And that shit got crazy.
[00:43:57]  When I heard that Tiny Telephone was closing, I wasn't surprised in the least bit.
[00:44:03]  And not because John isn't a great studio owner, doesn't maintain his space and his gear to professional standards or anything like that.
[00:44:14]  It was just that as, you know, San Francisco kind of continued to just move outwards and just swallow neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood, there was just no way that this complex was going to survive.
[00:44:33]  And, you know, we are seeing that here in Seattle as well.
[00:44:36]  But in a city like San Francisco, as the mission was eaten and Northbeast was eaten, and it was just a matter of time before the people who owned that plot of land were going to realize that they could make a lot of money by not having the people, the current tenants there.
[00:45:00]  So I'm actually kind of surprised that it made it as long as it did.
[00:45:05]  It's a testament to John.
[00:45:06]  It's a testament to the reputation of the studio.
[00:45:09]  And it's a testament to the fact that it became a destination for so many bands and artists around the world, really.
[00:45:16]  You know, it's one of the things I've always admired about John is that he could have made so much more money with that recording studio than he did.
[00:45:29]  And from the very get-go, it was clear that his priority was making good recordings affordable to artists that otherwise would not be able to afford them.
[00:45:41]  And he kept his rates so much lower than every other studio in town.
[00:45:46]  I mean, I've recorded in other studios in San Francisco that were in far worse shape, that cost three times as much per day.
[00:45:55]  And depending on your perspective, that makes John an incredibly dumb person or one of the most generous people that you could ever know.
[00:46:07]  And I obviously think it's the latter.
[00:46:10]  But yeah, he left a lot of money on the table so that bands that were in the position that we were in in 2002, 2003 could come in and really make a record there, really spend the time to get it right.
[00:46:23]  And I'll forever be in debt to him for that, as I'm sure a lot of people you'll be speaking with will also be.
[00:46:56]  So I was in the studio when they were tracking the new year.
[00:47:03]  And I remember it clearly because they were talking to me at the time about opening up for them in Europe.
[00:47:15]  And I remember thinking, fuck, like, I'm going to be in Europe, like playing these theaters.
[00:47:22]  And, you know, you, you don't, these moments don't happen all the time when you're a musician.
[00:47:29]  Like you remember them.
[00:47:30]  You know, you, you, it's, first off, the ladder is fucking infinite, right?
[00:47:35]  You bait, you take baby steps up and then you fall down into mental illness, you know, quite often.
[00:47:42]  So these moments where you're like going up are important because remember what I was after was like, it's not like being noticed per se.
[00:47:53]  It's getting lev, it's having leverage.
[00:47:55]  It's like getting more of a recording budget.
[00:47:57]  So you can make a weirder fucking record.
[00:47:59]  It's like being able to headline shows instead of open up for bands.
[00:48:04]  It's being able to afford having like a, you know, a set, a front of house sound person.
[00:48:09]  Like these are huge, huge steps for any band to be able to start to have more control and to make like a more idiosyncratic and weird show out of it by controlling everything.

=== Live Studio Magic (04:20) ===

[00:48:22]  So that was huge.
[00:48:23]  And also for me, being able to tour Europe was massive because then I eventually got a label in Europe and a booking agent in Europe.
[00:48:32]  So I was there for the basic tracks of this song.
[00:48:36]  And then, you know, four months later, I'm opening up for them and we're in like Copenhagen or Stockholm and I'm hearing the new year.
[00:48:46]  And I'm thinking, fuck, like, this is cool.
[00:48:49]  This works.
[00:48:49]  Like, they're in a studio.
[00:48:51]  They're tracking a song and then it comes out on a record and they're touring the record and you're part of this cycle.
[00:48:57]  It felt very like holistic and like knowable.
[00:49:02]  And it was amazing for me to realize that I was there from the beginning of that record cycle.
[00:50:13]  So the thing that I love about this Ockerville River song is that they did a lot of stuff live in the studio.
[00:50:21]  They really wanted to retain this feeling of like a live ensemble, which they were a really good live band and, you know, not have it be like a suffocated, careful recording experience.
[00:50:37]  And you hear life in this song.
[00:50:40]  And I just, I love Will's like commitment to vocal performance.
[00:50:45]  He's a great lyricist and I hear him completely connected to the song and the band.
[00:50:52]  And the song's called It Ends With A Fall.
[00:51:06]  You Were My Fiji
[00:52:05]  was really, really important to me because it honestly felt like the first time that I had allowed myself to be truly reckless in recording.
[00:52:17]  I think that, you know, the history of recording is like crushing, I think, on engineers and on musicians.
[00:52:27]  Like it, it creates like this like hall of mirrors kind of thing where you can be very aware of what you're supposed to do.
[00:52:37]  I mean, it's really hard to just go off-roading when you're engineering.

=== Noisy Microphone Epiphany (02:34) ===

[00:52:42]  First off, you barely know what you're doing anyway.
[00:52:44]  So you have to, you know, it's like comforting to work inside of a template, but to really break the rules is impossible.
[00:52:53]  Maybe I had 1% of that when I recorded You Were My Fiji.
[00:52:58]  And part of it is that I had bought this Shur level lock compressor.
[00:53:03]  It's like a podium compressor from, I don't know, the 60s, 70s.
[00:53:07]  It's like this piece of shit limiter that basically like your principal used, you know, to like instill psycho bullshit into you when you're, you know, 12 years old about paying attention or whatever, you know.
[00:53:22]  And so I bought one of these because I think I read in a forum somewhere on the internet that like Chad Blake used it.
[00:53:30]  Or I don't know.
[00:53:30]  It was just like one of these like noisy, unruly, noisy, weird devices that you could misuse.
[00:53:36]  And the threshold for the compressor was like put into inches.
[00:53:40]  So it's like it was noting how far you were away from the microphone, you know, if you were speaking into a podium, which I loved because that was, that created chaos to me.
[00:53:50]  Cause I was just like, I don't know what the fuck, six inches, 12 inches?
[00:53:53]  Like, let's just click on these things and see what happens.
[00:53:56]  And it created this incredibly violent, distorted, compressed sound with an with a really, really slow release.
[00:54:07]  So I wrote this song basically, just like playing that live show with Mountain Goats in that echoey hall, that the tempo of this song was created by this compressor and that noise kind of like filling this void up over and over and over again, this kind of like white noise that rushes back into the song created this energy and this like mania that it was the first time where I was like, oh, I've developed like something that's maybe slightly original.
[00:54:36]  Like that was the first time in my life I was like, okay, this is some weird shit.
[00:54:41]  And this is maybe something that you figured out on your own.
[00:54:46]  And that was the first song recorded on Time Travel is Lonely.
[00:54:50]  And in many ways, it was the template for the next 10 years of recording for my life.
[00:54:56]  So it was like a major, major epiphany for me.

=== Major Epiphany Moments (06:29) ===

[00:55:17]  You sold your furniture.
[00:55:20]  So we kissed on the carpet like a whaling ship is being under.
[00:55:31]  You know, next day you got us at sailing, you're 354.
[00:55:39]  But you, you were my VG.
[00:55:44]  Oh, believe me, those hours with you, they only expect of you.
[00:55:56]  You were my Fiji.
[00:56:01]  So I was definitely known as being like a very kind and approachable person.
[00:56:09]  And, you know, I think that like things like that are true and they're not true.
[00:56:15]  I will say this, that like if people interacted with me, however I responded was 100% genuine.
[00:56:23]  And I'll just say that there is a cultural thing that is very different about growing up in the rural South.
[00:56:30]  If I was not polite from like age two or three, I just would have been like smacked.
[00:56:36]  You know what I mean?
[00:56:37]  Like my grandma would have like, like, you know, it wasn't like abusive.
[00:56:44]  Like, I mean, maybe it was a little bit, but it's just, it's not tolerated.
[00:56:48]  I grew up in a culture where you just simply, it wasn't a put on.
[00:56:51]  Like every, first off, I'm going to defend Florida till the death forever.
[00:56:56]  And I'm also going to defend the South.
[00:56:58]  Yeah, it's fucking racist.
[00:56:59]  You think California isn't the most racist fucking place in the world?
[00:57:03]  Like, it's all racist.
[00:57:04]  Fuck all this shit, right?
[00:57:06]  But I see the value of that because that's all that we fucking have in the end is just personal interaction.
[00:57:11]  That's it.
[00:57:12]  It's all you're left with.
[00:57:13]  So, you know, what are you going to do with that?
[00:57:15]  You're going to be a prick or are you going to be fun to hang out with?
[00:57:18]  So that's one.
[00:57:18]  And then two, I have been depressed since I was like maybe 10 or 11 on and off my entire life.
[00:57:26]  It's been like the fucking battle of my, of my life.
[00:57:29]  I've had tremendous bouts of like blackout depression where I've just basically disappeared.
[00:57:35]  And I think that you can go two ways.
[00:57:38]  Like you can either become really bitter and lash out at people or you can just be become very, very soft and empathetic and kind of appreciative because you know how fucking bad it can be, you know?
[00:57:51]  So that's what depression did to me.
[00:57:53]  It made me less of a brat and less of a bitch, you know?
[00:57:57]  And then the other thing is that my mom was very, very democratic.
[00:58:04]  And I mean that she was like anti-hierarchical.
[00:58:07]  And I just adopted that.
[00:58:10]  I worshiped my mom.
[00:58:12]  I understood why she, you know, she was a single mom in the South.
[00:58:15]  Could you, can you imagine enduring this shit from men?
[00:58:19]  Are you fucking kidding me?
[00:58:20]  I mean, then in the 60s, come on.
[00:58:25]  She was the only one to go to college in her family.
[00:58:27]  Like she, you know, she was a baller.
[00:58:30]  So she was just very, very, very left wing, like extremely left wing.
[00:58:37]  I got a lot of my politics from her.
[00:58:39]  She was incredibly empathetic and very, very democratic.
[00:58:43]  Just if she had a sense that people were stratifying experience based on like what someone could do for them or she just really did not like that at all.
[00:58:55]  And so I adopted that.
[00:58:56]  And it's, that's kind of just like cooked into who I am.
[00:58:59]  And so I remember once I was in New York and I was at Brownies.
[00:59:05]  And this was, I want to say this was in 2002 or 2003.
[00:59:08]  And I was just starting to get a little bit of traction.
[00:59:11]  And I was sitting at the bar.
[00:59:13]  I guess it was Soundcheck.
[00:59:15]  Maybe it was CMJ.
[00:59:16]  I think it was CMJ.
[00:59:18]  And I was sitting next to this guy.
[00:59:21]  And I was just trying to talk to him because we're, it's like, there's nothing to do.
[00:59:25]  We're just sitting literally next to each other.
[00:59:27]  There's, it's dead quiet in there.
[00:59:29]  And this guy is like not wanting to talk to me at all.
[00:59:32]  And I don't understand that.
[00:59:34]  And then he asked me who I was.
[00:59:36]  I was like, oh, my name's John Vanderslice.
[00:59:38]  And he's like, oh, and then all of a sudden it completely changed because he owned a label and he was like, oh, this guy has some leverage.
[00:59:45]  Everything, his posture, the tone of voice.
[00:59:48]  And I was like, fuck this guy.
[00:59:49]  That's every fucking thing I hate right there.
[00:59:52]  Like, fuck you.
[00:59:53]  Like, who gives a shit who anyone is?
[00:59:55]  No one can do anything for you.
[00:59:57]  And everyone can do anything for you.
[01:00:00]  I mean, think about this, that I remember that moment.
[01:00:02]  I can picture us sitting there so, so clearly, you know, to me, that's where that vibe came from was not only as a kind of a nod and appreciation from my grandma and my mom, who were both my heroes, but like the opposite of that vibe of that kindness and approachability is this fucking predatory, what the fuck can you do for me thing?
[01:00:25]  No thanks.
[01:00:26]  I'm out.
[01:00:26]  So I think in the end i'm like i'm cynical about like State Power Authority, like very, very cynical.
[01:00:56]  But But in terms of like interpersonal stuff, I feel like like a kid, like a newborn.
[01:01:04]  Like I, I, I, I think that people are so often not disappointing.
[01:01:11]  They're so often so kind and loving and generous.
[01:01:17]  And I just, I just am really often blown away at how supportive people are to each other.
[01:01:26]  I mean, I, I've owned a business for a long time and you're, you're up against some, you know, you're, you have like crazy interactions with people.
[01:01:35]  Like people just like ghosts, they book a session and they never show up.
[01:01:38]  Or I remember once this, this kid who was like a really good promoter, he booked a day and he called me on his cell phone.

=== Missing Promises (02:20) ===

[01:01:47]  He's like, hey, man, I'm a couple blocks away from the studio.
[01:01:50]  I'll be there in like, you know, 10 minutes.
[01:01:53]  Well, this guy never showed up.
[01:01:55]  Like he was like a friend of mine.
[01:01:58]  And so I kept calling his cell phone.
[01:02:01]  He never showed up.
[01:02:01]  And it was like incredible.
[01:02:02]  Like we set up everything, you know, we set up the gear.
[01:02:05]  Like Laura, the engineer was waiting there.
[01:02:07]  I was waiting there.
[01:02:09]  He never showed up.
[01:02:10]  And then like, I kept calling his cell phone.
[01:02:13]  And a couple days later, his girlfriend answered his cell phone and was like, oh yeah, he was like on his bike.
[01:02:21]  Yeah, he was in the mission, but he was like buying heroin.
[01:02:23]  He wasn't going to the studio.
[01:02:25]  And I was like, why the fuck did he call us?
[01:02:28]  And she said, oh, like he felt guilty.
[01:02:30]  And then I was like, well, why are you picking up his cell phone?
[01:02:33]  And she was like, this isn't his cell phone.
[01:02:35]  This is my cell phone.
[01:02:36]  And then I was like, okay.
[01:02:39]  But those things were so rare.
[01:02:43]  You know, that was like, that's like one out of a thousand experiences.
[01:02:49]  Mostly bands were so respectful and so amazing.
[01:02:53]  And I think that I really think for me, the key to not being cynical is that you assume that everything is going to work out and that people are like amazing.
[01:03:02]  And then it really, that's, that's what you get back.
[01:03:05]  I mean, I do believe that.
[01:03:34]  This episode featured interviews with Joel Hamilton, Laura Dean, and Ben Gibbard, and music by Death Cab for Cutie, Ockerville River, John Vanderslice, and me, Young Chomsky.
[01:03:43]  Now, until next time, remember to keep the dream alive.
[01:03:47]  Please keep the dream alive.
[01:03:57]  Keep the dream alive.
[01:04:04]  Keep the dream alive.