From Talking Heads to Production Whiz

Apr 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Paul Tingen

             

Just a couple of miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Sausalito rises picturesquely above San Francisco Bay. The idyllic Marin County town is popular not only with tourists but also with studio owners, and it sports two commercial studios — the Plant and Studio D — as well as numerous private facilities. One such facility is Sausalito Sound, owned by former Talking Heads keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison.

Harrison made his first musical splash in 1976 with Jonathan Richman's proto-art-punk band the Modern Lovers. But he is best known for his tenure with the Talking Heads, in which he played keyboards and guitar. He also cowrote and coproduced much of the band's output, ranging from their seminal debut, Talking Heads: 77 (Warner Brothers, 1977), to their magnum opus, Remain in Light (Warner Brothers, 1980), to their last album, Naked (Warner Brothers, 1988). The band split up toward the end of the '80s, and Harrison segued into a production career, working with the likes of Elliot Murphy, Violent Femmes, Fine Young Cannibals, and Live.

When Harrison is asked how he made the transition from musician to producer, he explains that his role has always been much the same. “I was always the person who helped people realize their visions, whether that was Jonathan [Richman] or David [Byrne], rather than someone who was creating things from the start,” he says. “That's one reason I was asked to produce Violent Femmes' The Blind Leading the Naked. People thought that I was able to handle creative people who might piss people off. They thought that Gordon [Gano, the band's leader] was an unusual guy, and indeed, I got on fine with him.”

Harrison also conducted a solo career, releasing three albums under his own name: The Red and the Black (Sire, 1981), Casual Gods (Sire, 1987), and Walk on Water (Sire, 1990). But, says the producer, “Once I had children, it became hard to maintain a solo career. And my wife and I decided that Manhattan was not a good place to raise three kids, so we moved to Marin County in the early '90s. One reason I came here was to be close to some kind of recording industry. So I rented a room at the Plant, where I had a board and all my equipment.”

Delightful Color

After his move to the West Coast, Harrison continued to score production successes with Crash Test Dummies, Black 47, the Verve Pipe, Elliot Murphy, Violent Femmes, and Live. Then in late 1999, Harrison decided that he wanted to have his own facility. “I had accumulated enough equipment to have my own studio,” he explains. “And when I'm working with young bands, it's often hard to predict how long the recordings will take. So in having my own place, I can more easily go overtime when needed. I thought it would be more convenient to have my own studio and that it would help me make better records. Also, the Plant wanted to turn my room into a mastering facility.”

FIG. 1: Sausalito Sound’s spacious control room was the live room in the studio’s previous incarnation.

For a brief while, Harrison didn't have a studio, until he heard that Sean Hopper, a former keyboard player of Huey Lewis & the News (also from the Bay Area), had a studio in Sausalito that he was eager to sell. “The studio had been there for a while under different names and it wasn't making enough money, so they were leaving no matter what,” says Harrison. “That made it a better deal for me. They took all their equipment with them, but the soundproofing had been done — it's a floating studio — and there was balanced electric power and troughs to run all the wiring in. We rewired everything and installed my equipment.

“We changed things around a lot. Mainly we reversed the functions of the control room and the recording area, because we wanted a really big control room [see Fig. 1]. So the original recording area became the control room, and vice versa. We figured that with all these great studios around here, if we needed a large live room to cut a band or have a live drum sound, we could just go there. The live room now is fine for recording guitars, vocals, or keyboards, and you can do drums in there. It just will sound tight — you won't get the massive sound that people are often after today. We recently did a horn section here, so we can make the recording room work for many different things.”

The equipment at Sausalito Sound centers on two upto-date Digidesign Pro Tools HD systems usually running at 96 kHz. One system runs on a dual—processor Apple Power Mac G5 with 4 GB of RAM and five Digidesign 192 interfaces (for a total of 72 analog outputs and 64 inputs). The other runs on a 933 MHz Apple Power Mac G4. Both systems have the same sets of plug-ins by Digidesign, MOTU, McDSP, Spectrasonics, Waves, and others. There's also a 16-fader Digidesign Pro Control controller and a wagonload of outboard gear, preamps, and microphones (see the sidebar “Gearing Up in Sausalito”).

“I have been friends with the people who run Digidesign almost from the moment they started,” says Harrison. “The company is perhaps 30 miles from here. So I worked my way up from the Emulator editor to SoundTools to Pro Tools. The convenience and editing power of digital recording was immediately convincing to me. Digital tools for fixing performances are so much better than what we used to have.”

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