John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Recording in San Francisco thrived for years, booked solid with acts like Third Eye Blind and Frank Ocean, yet struggled as rising costs and emotional burnout among touring musicians reshaped the scene. Despite NBA stars like Kevin Durant’s last-minute requests, Vanderslice upheld strict rules—no cancellations for smaller bands—and kept rates fixed to protect artists’ leverage. His chaotic yet creative studio culture, from impulsive marriages to non-hierarchical workflows, reflects a fading era where San Francisco’s artistic pulse still beats, but barely. [Automatically generated summary]
As the studio got culty, it just was permanently booked.
It was like somewhere on 450 days in a row sold out.
At that time, San Francisco still had some weight as like a cultural center.
I do think recent years in San Francisco crossed a new kind of line.
I watched countless artists leave this city and I watched the fragile scenario in which artists could stay in San Francisco and make their things become impossible.
Tiny Telephone made you feel like you were hanging out in a room and that everyone was behind you and you were making music the way people love to make music.
My general feeling was that the bigger the band, the more of a pain in the ass they are.
Third Eye Blind asked me for four months of studio time.
And I was like, man, I don't know about this fucking crew.
So he sits next to me and he says, what are we going to do about this rate?
And then he turns around and he walks out of the room.
Most bands, when it comes down to it, are remarkably conservative and remarkably fearful.
To really use the studio as an instrument, the only way it would work is if I had my own studio and I could go there after hours.
When you're in a recording class that is 95% male, everyone thinks you're the dumbest one in the room.
But I have felt that at other studios, definitely.
People who tour a lot, they're often, you know, they're often emotionally damaged people.
I met someone, she was fascinating.
I really fucking like this person.
And I asked her nervously if she wants to kiss me.
In France, there's a maxim that if you kiss on the steps of a church, then that means you're going to get married.
And so that's what we did.
We got married and she was like, is this a mistake?
And I was honestly said, I have no fucking idea.
This is John Vanderslice of Tiny Telephone Recording.
And I would say that the really the middle of this story, the peak of Tiny Telephone was intoxicating.
We had this ironclad rule.
First off, we had a lot of like strange and I thought very useful rules in place that a lot of other studios didn't adhere to.
And one of them was that we would never ever cancel a band because a bigger band kind of came through.
So at the peak of our like run, we were getting like crazy amounts of bands that would come in last minute, like Frank Ocean.
Tornado flew around my room before you came.
Islands of Montreux asking us for chunks of time and we wouldn't have them because, you know, we were often booked between like three and four months without a single day.
And I would talk to managers and they would just find this so irritating.
Like you could tell that this, they had really not had much resistance to someone clearing out the calendar before.
But we, we were, we were kind of adamant that, that, first off, it's a very, it's a non-hierarchical, creative, safe space, right?
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Oh, and then we would get tons of basketball players too, because of like the Warriors.
So, I mean, we had KD, Kevin Durant, and like, I don't know, like just tons of like some bench players and some like rotation players and some fucking ballers.
So I don't know.
It was, it's amazing.
It's also amazing that we've never, we, we got so many calls and we never had one NBA player in because they would like call about like tonight or tomorrow.
And we just didn't operate in that way.
The other rule that we had is we wouldn't change our rate no matter what.
So our rates were very undermarket and they wouldn't go up or they wouldn't go down.
So first off, what are you going to do?
Get like a forensic accountant to like inspect someone's 10-40s.
Like, you don't know who has money and who doesn't.
And first off, like indie rock people who are the richest, they look the poorest, right?
You know, it's like a put-on.
And the idea was that we just stayed out of all that.
We just had this like crazy low rate.
We didn't change it because first off, when you slide your rates, the people who have the leverage get you to have the lowest rate.
And the people with leverage are the kind of winners of the cultural derby.