Studio Reminiscences Part 1

Way back in 1984, I was keyboardist in a band called "PG13" - and back then, the rating was brand new, so it wasn't quite so stupid of a name. We did covers and originals... My gear included a Rhodes Chroma Polaris and a Juno 106.

We did the high school dance circuit... well, actually just our schools, and a few parties. But we were liked. So we decided to make a cassette.

We decided on 4 songs: 3 originals, and 1 cover. And it would get us gigs and lots of love. I cannot recall exactly how we wound up at "Custom Recording Studio" - an 8 track studio in the basement of a suburban house outside of Minneapolis, but there we were.

In retrospect I should have known there would be issues... he had some gorgeous microphones (more on this later), but his only effect available was a spring reverb. NO effects - no delay, no verb. And a very dry, well insulated basement.

Enter our drummer, with a Simmons SDSV kit, which the guy had never seen, and had no idea of how to record. He ran the kit direct to the board, dry as a bone. The mighty "Pssssh" of a Simmons reduced to the sound of a finger tapping on paper.

Recording went predictably - the whole affair was done in an afternoon. Midway through tracking vocals, our good friend and evil nemesis Tom Baxter walked in, surveyed the situation, and decided to take his finger and tap-tap-tap on the Neumann U87 microphone - and the engineer actually began screaming at him. Tom was a band buddy, but was not a musician - he just came to gigs and smoked backstage and pestered people on our behalf (he really was annoying - my sister tried to push him out of a moving car once).

Tom tried to pull a "what's with this guy" routine as the engineer screamed, but we knew, he had done a bad thing. Tom had to leave. We never invited him to a studio session again.

In the end, the recording was extremely two dimensional and crispy - everything was eventually fed through his one spring reverb, to add some minor ambience...

Did the tape get us gigs? Not so much. But the Engineer did pass the tape along to a friend who had a public access radio show, and we got played on the radio exactly once - as "James Reee-ay and his Band". On a public school station.

And that's the first PG-13 recording story. Still to come - the second cassette, the LP, and the "side Project".