A CIRCUIT OF SHOWS AND CLUBS AND PARTIES. Parties in basement bars, on midtown rooftops, in Bushwick warehouses with water streaming down the walls. Me at the very center of it all, beckoned past the velvet rope, given the nod, the wristband, the drink tickets, the bump of coke. We cycled to Coney Island. We tripped on Chinese lab chemicals in Prospect Park. It seems absurd now that we had so much time to waste. I could make a coffee run and a round of record stores last all day.
Rich young people have usually been taught, either by their parents or bitter life experience, that certain things can be a barrier to forming relationships. Certain things being a euphemism for money. Carter hated to have it mentioned. One stray remark could end a conversation; he’d just turn his back and walk away. By the time we made the move to New York, I’d adopted a religious attitude towards the many benefits that came to me: bow your head, open your hands, silently give thanks. Money was Carter’s invisible helper, a friendly ghost making things happen in the background. Cars arrived, restaurant tabs got picked up. When it was time to change scenery, money dissolved the city into a beach or a ski lodge. The thing was never to point out that this was happening. Since I couldn’t work out how I came to be there, why I was Carter’s faithful squire instead of some other studio engineer, none of it seemed real. It was all illusion, red dust, shit turning up in FedEx boxes.
When Carter decided we were going to set up a recording studio, it just sprang into existence. He came into my room one day with the keys to a building by the water in Williamsburg. We cycled over and there it was. Contractors were already at work, installing soundproofing, building partition walls. The gear was magnificent, none of it new, always with a history, everything at least forty years old, tube amps and sixties fuzzboxes and a desk certified to have once been installed at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals. Vocals went through a pair of nineteen-fifties AKG C12’s that cost fifteen thousand dollars. When the remodeling was finished, we plugged in and started looking for business. Six months out of college and I was in New York, running a fucking studio. Carter had a very particular idea about what he wanted to do. We were billing ourselves as audio craftsmen, artisans of analog. We would even offer to record to quarter-inch tape, if that’s what the client wanted. He knew a place that could press from it, so we could make vinyl records of new music that hadn’t been digitized at any stage of production. Ye olde stereophonicke sounde. Step right up.
Carter cut off his dreads and began to dress as if the year was 1849 and he was heading west to pan for gold. He wasn’t alone. At that time Bedford Avenue was full of hobos and mountain men and Pony Express riders. They were our first clients, pioneers and gunfighters hunched over drum kits, tweaking guitar pedals. I gradually realized they weren’t nineteenth-century revivalists at all. They were sixties revivalists, revivalists of the western revival of the nineteen sixties. Their girlfriends wore ponchos and wide floppy hats and everyone photographed each other with olde-timey filters, sepia and bleached out yellow.
In his personal music taste Carter was hovering around 1950, in some Houston basement with Lightnin’ Hopkins singing through a guitar amp. That’s how he wanted everything to sound just then. Hollow, buzzing and raw. There was a song called “Black Cat Bone” that he’d play over and over. It sounded terrible, as if it had been recorded in a coffin. To him, it was the apogee of audio perfection. His record collecting had taken on a new level of seriousness. If he was beaten at an auction, he would scream at the screen. We spent evenings throwing down shots and doing lines on the coffee table while he told me how he needed such and such a record. How I would never understand (being Spock, the tin man, etcetera) the emotional gravity of his loss.
Meanwhile we began to lock into a production sound. This organ. That handclap. Put the guitar in a cave and the vocal raw and breathy, right up front. Add surface noise, a hint of needles plowing through static, throw the whole thing back in time. Rock bands loved us. We did a record with some punk chicks from LA who were fans of the sixties Detroit girl groups. Big hair and sailor tattoos, that whole deal. We blew up their harmonies into towering melodrama, sprayed on the fuzz and pressed onto pink vinyl. It sold out in a week. After that the internet began to pay attention and we got hired to do some tracks for an album by a big British band. I hated their music and the whole Rolling Stones junkie troubadour bullshit that went along with it, but it was an opportunity and we made sure we didn’t screw up. The present is dry, but add reverb and you can hear time reverse its flow, slipping on into the past, into echo and disaster. It’s a trick, usually, just clever technique, except when it’s not. Twenty years ago. Thirty years ago…Distance can create longing. It can open up the gap into which all must fall. When they heard what we’d done to their generic three-chord songs, the Brits were overjoyed. You made me sound amazing, the singer told us, in his nasal London drawl. Timeless. You made me sound like Skip James.
There are ways you can use a studio. Things you can do that open up impossible spaces in the mind. You can put the listener in a room that doesn’t exist, that couldn’t exist. You can put them in an impossible room.