True Anon Truth Feed - [PREVIEW] Keep the Dream Alive Part 3: How the West Was Won Aired: 2022-02-09 Duration: 04:52 === Studio Breakdown (04:25) === [00:00:00] Previously on Keep the Dream Alive. [00:00:02] So my first tour was opening up for the Mountain Goats and that for me was just like mind-blowing. [00:00:10] We would all share a hotel room. [00:00:12] You're really stressed. [00:00:13] I mean, honestly, I've never been more stressed in my life than when I've been on tour in a van. [00:00:19] And you're just, you know, just so you can make like a $250 show. [00:00:23] And it's like an unsustainable kind of like emotional tension. [00:00:28] And the studio is breaking down. [00:00:31] So touring almost like mimics this manic depressive cycle, this mental health emergency cycle. [00:00:38] And honestly, I would have, I would have fucking murdered a child at that point to keep touring. [00:00:43] 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. [00:00:54] There is no more busted model for a business than a recording studio. [00:00:58] 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 current tenants there. [00:01:11] I'm actually kind of surprised that it made it as long as it did. [00:01:15] 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. [00:01:24] And depending on your perspective, that makes John an incredibly dumb person or one of the most generous people that you could ever know. [00:01:36] All that we fucking have in the end is just personal interaction. [00:01:39] That's it. [00:01:40] It's all you're left with. [00:01:41] So, you know, what are you going to do with that? [00:01:43] You're going to be a prick or are you going to be fun to hang out with? [00:01:47] Keep the dream alive. [00:01:54] Keep the dream alive. [00:01:58] Hi, this is John Vandersleis, owner of Tiny Telephone Recording and musician. [00:02:03] So it's 2004, 2005, and the studio had really grown into something that was, I don't know, it was kind of beyond like a business or even an arts business where we had people just showing up like unannounced, like kind of like tourists, which was really wild and definitely super annoying because you can't like walk in on a session and bands would be super freaked out. [00:02:30] And sometimes those bands would be like micro bands and then other times they would be really big. [00:02:36] And so that was kind of wild. [00:02:38] But the good part about that is that as the studio got culty, it just was permanently booked. [00:02:45] I'd spent a lot of time making policies that were, on one hand, respectful to bands, but also punitive in a way that we were really cheap. [00:02:56] And, you know, the studio at this point was $250 a day, and engineers, I think, were $200 a day. [00:03:02] We were under market, but we kind of highly valued that people would book days in the studio and then keep their time. [00:03:10] I mean, we were really targeting working-class bands that were on our touring schedule that would come back and then book two weeks, 10 days, three weeks a month to make a record and then just immediately go back on tour. [00:03:25] And I think around this time, too, we hit a record of continuous days booked. [00:03:33] I think it was in 2009 that we, it was like somewhere on 450 days in a row sold out. [00:03:40] And that includes, of course, like Thanksgiving and Christmas and whatever holidays. [00:03:46] And I don't know, these things were, they were kind of really important to me because I think that running an arts business, first off, when you start an arts business, people root for you for sure. [00:04:00] But I mean, I remember my bandmates feeling sorry for me because I was like so revved up about starting a studio and they just thought that it was like sad, you know? [00:04:10] And I, I mean, I actually, I totally get this now because I do think that if I had put whatever energy I put into building the studio and like literally anything else, it would have been like successful. === Valued but Vulnerable (00:26) === [00:04:26] You know what I mean? [00:04:27] I think it's like you're animating a corpse on a certain level. [00:04:31] But those markers of being in demand and also being like valuable and valued. [00:04:37] And again, it's this fucked up trick of we're forced to play this capitalism game. [00:04:43] We adhere to like the market. [00:04:46] And there was something really funny to me about running a business that was completely unpermitted.