Studio Reminiscences Part 3 - the album

By early 1986, PG13 had decided to release an ALBUM. Vinyl baby. Whereas the first and second sessions were recordings of our established "live" repetoire, we set out to write songs just for the album. The pressure on the band was incredible - For a teenage cover band to write 5 new songs for an album, when we'd already written 10 originals, and all we ever got to play live was 90 minutes, and our covers were what people liked best... let's just say that these songs were entering re-tread territory, and we had pretty well exhausted the creative capabilities of a few of our band members.

Add to this that more than a few of us had begun playing with other bands "on the side"... there was a lessening concern for the quality of this work across the board. In addition, the few people who recall our band will vouch that our 'sound" was "everybody write a riff within the chord progression, and play it non stop".

We picked the same studio that our local idols "The Suburbs" had recorded at several years earlier. This was a "real" studio where you could do a "real album". This thing was budgeted 10x any of our previous efforts ($5000, versus $500 for each of the previous sessions). We were all there only one evening, to do basic tracking for drums - we played together only to help Jon play his drums. After that night, no more than 3 people from the band were together in the studio at any one time.

We were "remaking" several of our earlier "hits", and recording several new songs as well. Working with the instruments in isolation was a pretty grim experience - we heard every dropped beat, every flubbed note, every mistuned string. So we spent extra time polishing the turd.

Then it came time to mix it all. Now's the time to explain that the studio was owned by two men who were very very into their marijuana. I remember going upstairs to the restroom and being confronted by several ziploc freezer bags filled with "oregano". This meant they didn't really think too fast, and had a pretty laid back work ethic.

Add to this, they had their "studio process" down - we ran the snare track alone several times while we got the exact right reverb sound... then printed that. Then worked on the Kick. As we worked on the drums, we discovered that the drummers' simmons kit had been cross triggering all over the place. This had probably always been happening, but hell, we never heard it before, because we had never spent time listening to individual PARTs.

The engineers were about to get the drummer back in to rerecord all of his parts, when I had the idea to rent a Linndrum, gate the tracks, trigger new sounds... At the time, I was thrilled to have that tight Linn Kick going, but in retrospect that 20ms delay really made the tracks drag... We should have just washed it all out with extra reverb...

In the middle of this, I got a horrible Flu. But every night, every single person in the band called in with a very important excuse of some sort. So the whole album was basically mixed by me with a stuffed up head, and two engineers with a head full of zombie.

In the final analysis, the album sounded ok, but it lacked all of the spontaneity of our earlier efforts. We sold maybe a dozen of them TOTAL. We broke up not 6 months after this ordeal. The whole thing cost us $10,000, but it was all paid for by the drummer's dad, who wrote it all off as a business expense.

Several years later, I was at a St Vincent's De Paul store and found an entire box of the album for $.25. I sort of wish I had bought it, because I actually do not have that album anymore!