True Anon Truth Feed - [PREVIEW] Keep The Dream Alive Part 4: Gruesome Details
Aired: 2022-02-16
Duration: 04:51


=== Studio Cult Status (03:34) ===

[00:00:00]  Previously on Keep the Dream Alive.
[00:00:02]  As the studio got culty, it just was permanently booked.
[00:00:06]  It was like somewhere on 450 days in a row sold out.
[00:00:10]  At that time, San Francisco still had some weight as like a cultural center.
[00:00:15]  I do think recent years in San Francisco crossed a new kind of line.
[00:00:19]  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.
[00:00:30]  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.
[00:00:41]  My general feeling was that the bigger the band, the more of a pain in the ass they are.
[00:00:45]  Third Eye Blind asked me for four months of studio time.
[00:00:49]  And I was like, man, I don't know about this fucking crew.
[00:00:52]  So he sits next to me and he says, what are we going to do about this rate?
[00:00:56]  And then he turns around and he walks out of the room.
[00:01:00]  Most bands, when it comes down to it, are remarkably conservative and remarkably fearful.
[00:01:06]  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.
[00:01:15]  When you're in a recording class that is 95% male, everyone thinks you're the dumbest one in the room.
[00:01:23]  But I have felt that at other studios, definitely.
[00:01:26]  People who tour a lot, they're often, you know, they're often emotionally damaged people.
[00:01:31]  I met someone, she was fascinating.
[00:01:34]  I really fucking like this person.
[00:01:36]  And I asked her nervously if she wants to kiss me.
[00:01:40]  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.
[00:01:46]  And so that's what we did.
[00:01:47]  We got married and she was like, is this a mistake?
[00:01:51]  And I was honestly said, I have no fucking idea.
[00:02:06]  This is John Vanderslice of Tiny Telephone Recording.
[00:02:12]  And I would say that the really the middle of this story, the peak of Tiny Telephone was intoxicating.
[00:02:22]  We had this ironclad rule.
[00:02:24]  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.
[00:02:34]  And one of them was that we would never ever cancel a band because a bigger band kind of came through.
[00:02:44]  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.
[00:02:57]  Tornado flew around my room before you came.
[00:03:00]  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.
[00:03:13]  And I would talk to managers and they would just find this so irritating.
[00:03:17]  Like you could tell that this, they had really not had much resistance to someone clearing out the calendar before.
[00:03:25]  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?

=== Rates Unchanged (01:16) ===

[00:03:35]  Oh, and then we would get tons of basketball players too, because of like the Warriors.
[00:03:40]  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.
[00:03:50]  So I don't know.
[00:03:52]  It was, it's amazing.
[00:03:53]  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.
[00:04:05]  And we just didn't operate in that way.
[00:04:08]  The other rule that we had is we wouldn't change our rate no matter what.
[00:04:12]  So our rates were very undermarket and they wouldn't go up or they wouldn't go down.
[00:04:18]  So first off, what are you going to do?
[00:04:20]  Get like a forensic accountant to like inspect someone's 10-40s.
[00:04:23]  Like, you don't know who has money and who doesn't.
[00:04:26]  And first off, like indie rock people who are the richest, they look the poorest, right?
[00:04:31]  You know, it's like a put-on.
[00:04:32]  And the idea was that we just stayed out of all that.
[00:04:35]  We just had this like crazy low rate.
[00:04:39]  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.
[00:04:45]  And the people with leverage are the kind of winners of the cultural derby.