VWMusic

All images courtesy of Ron Nevison

Though his extensive production credits span over a near-fifty-year career and will forever remain rooted in the annals of rock history, Ron Nevison continues to leave his mark on the music industry.

Nevison, whose early introduction to music included singing in Philadelphia subways and street corners in a Doo-Wop style band called the Dellords, would eventually find his calling in the late 1960s. Finally landing a steady job at a glorified head shop called The 13th Street Conspiracy, Nevison quickly established a rapport with the owner, together embarking on an endeavor that would ultimately alter the course of Nevison’s career.

Rather than contend with Philadelphia’s prominent music venues, the pair opted to put on a Vanilla Fudge concert in Allentown, PA. As fate would have it, Nevison, who hired a sound company called The Festival Group, was subsequently hired to work for the sound company following the show. Soon regarded as a riser in the industry, Nevison fully committed to the music business by the end of the decade. The rest, as they say, is history.

Nevison’s initial breakthrough culminated from engineering a trio of quintessential Rock albums between 1973-74, including Quadrophenia, Bad Company, and Physical Graffiti. Nevison then parlayed his first production credit, Thin Lizzy’s Nightlife, into a wave of success to close out the decade, including the beloved Lights Out, Obsession, and Strangers in the Night albums from UFO.

By the 1980s, Nevison was arguably the most sought-after producer of his genre, predominantly fueled by the platinum-selling self-titled album from Heart. Some of Nevison’s other certified platinum production credits from the era include Vital Signs (Survivor), Ultimate Sin (Ozzy Osbourne), Crazy Nights (Kiss), and Bad Animals (Heart).

Due to his longstanding tradition of excellence, Nevison has been recognized as Billboard Magazine’s Top-5 Producer of the Year on four occasions.

I recently sat down with Ron to discuss some of the many chapters of his storied career in music.

Andrew:
Ron, I appreciate you taking the time. As a fellow Philadelphia native, what was the music scene like around the city in the 1960s, and what led you to the music business?

Ron:
The Beatles changed everything for everybody, I think. The late 60s in Philly was a pretty cool, little hippy music scene. I kind of floated around from job to job in those days. I finally got a job at a place called The 13th Street Conspiracy, which was basically a head shop. Sold bell bottoms, mostly clothing. Of course, bell-bottoms were pretty hip in those days. The owner, Ivan, and I became very friendly, and at some point, we decided to hold a concert. We couldn’t do it right in Philly because the Electric Factory concerts had that whole area pretty locked out. So, we decided to head to Allentown; we did a Vanilla Fudge concert there. I did all the work, he put up the money, and we broke even on it.

But the reason that this is significant in my story is that, during that concert, I had hired a sound company — the Festival Group — that the Spivack brothers had owned. I met a guy named Dave Hadler, another Philly guy, who when the concert was over, he hired me to work with him at the sound company. So, by hiring them to do the sound – I had to do that because the writer attached to the band’s contract from New York had said that I had to hire a sound company. So, that all worked out great for me, and that was the summer of ’68, I think. By the summer of ’69, we were doing really big tours, and of course, the summer of ’69 was Woodstock, Atlantic City Pub Festival, New Orleans Pub Festival, and a bunch of other ones. The year of ’68 and 69’ is where I got into the music business full-time.

Andrew:
Your early engineering credits include Quadrophenia [The Who], Bad Company’s self-titled debut, and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. In regards to the latter, were there any notable challenges you encountered during the recording process?

Ron:
They had these things pretty well-rehearsed. There wasn’t a lot of trial and error; they came in ready to rock. All you just mentioned, Quadrophenia [Who], Bad Company, and Physical Graffiti – all of which I did in 1973 and ’74, were all well-rehearsed by the bands and all produced by the bands. Pete Townsend produced Quadrophenia, the whole band produced the Bad Company album, and [Jimmy] Page produced Physical Graffiti. So, I was just the engineer. Being an engineer when you have the band as the producer is actually a much bigger job than a normal engineer with a producer sitting next to you because I had to be that person on the other side of the microphone there, letting them know what was going on. But I can’t say there were any challenges other than just lay it down and get the best takes we could.

I want to interject here something that takes me from 1968 and ’69 into the studio. I was touring a tour with Traffic, Steve Winwood’s band – I’d done a couple of tours with them — and I was riding with Chris Blackwell, who’s the owner of Island Records and was their manager at the time. I was telling him how tired out I was, that it was rough being on the road and keeping these hours, and packing up all the gear, and then driving three or four hours and getting five hours of sleep and doing the whole thing over again. And I told him I didn’t know how long I wanted to do this. He said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I told him that I wanted to go into the studio, take what I’d learned from live mixing, and take it into the studio. So, he offered me a job at Island Studios in London. That fall, I picked up and moved to London, and by 1970 or ’71, I was working at Island Studios. I had a huge advantage with somebody that had just started out in the studio as an intern because I had a lot of knowledge of microphones and pre-amps and EQ and all of that kind of stuff. I just didn’t know how it related to recording. Also, I had a lot of amazing contacts; I had done tours with Jefferson Airplane; I mixed their sound at Woodstock. I had done tours with Steve Winwood; I was the sound man for Derek and the Domino’s Layla album. So, I came to England and had to go back into the studio to learn the craft. I came at it with a different perspective; I came at recording with much more of a live recording perspective.

Andrew:
Interestingly you mention the live perspective, which leads to my next question. UFO’s Strangers in the Night remains one of the greatest live albums of all time. How difficult was that to pull off, and what are your thoughts on the re-issues?

Ron:
Well, it just got re-issued last year — again — with all the outtakes. All I can say is, I refuse to listen to that.

The recording of the album, to my recollection, I think we recorded in five or six places in the Midwest – Kenosha, Chicago, Youngstown, Columbus; those kinds of places. I used most of the takes from one or two. I remember, I didn’t use anything from Chicago, although I used the crowd noise from Chicago, because it was a bigger amphitheater; it was the biggest venue. I ended up doing two songs in the studio. You have to appreciate that live albums in those days were tough to do, especially if you had 13-minute songs like “Rock Bottom” or something like that. When you only have 20 minutes a side on vinyl, you couldn’t do the set as you would do it – you had to figure out how you could fit 20 minutes per side. And realizing after 40 minutes that you needed another 20 or 30 minutes, you’d have to do a double record, which is what we did. So, I actually took the band into the Record Plant in L.A. and recorded two songs. You can’t really tell which two; I know which two. [Laughs]. We used the same mics and same everything; just mixed them all in.

My feeling on the re-issues, especially the newest ones where they took all of the outtakes – why do that? I don’t wanna get into that. There’s a reason why I synthesized it down and the reason it’s so good. If it hadn’t been such a famous live album, they wouldn’t have done what they did.

Andrew:
I can’t imagine you get asked about this particular album or band very often, but you produced Survivor’s platinum-selling album Vital Signs in 1984, the first with singer Jimi Jamison. How big of an adjustment was it for you compared to 1980’s self-titled debut, which featured Dave Bickler on vocals?

Ron:
It wasn’t a big adjustment at all. Bickler was a really good singer. Jimi Jamison was, I think, a notch better; he had a better range. I don’t remember what went wrong – I left the first project and my assistant Mike Clink finished it. He was my assistant engineer in those days. Because of that, they liked him once I was gone. He did “Eye of the Tiger,” which is an amazing thing that I didn’t get to do. But I had a big fight with John Kalodner, the A&R guy, who was a great A&R guy and later made up with him, and we collaborated on other things, but not the kind of A&R guy that I like to deal with. I think the A&R guys should create marriages and then stay out of the marriage. Get everybody together, and then fuck off. He used to send me notes like, “Remove the cymbal bell.” Like, “Okay, John. You want me to redo the whole drum kit to get rid of the bell on that?” Nowadays, I could probably filter it out with these amazing fill-ins, but I couldn’t do it whenever that was.

So, they wanted to work with me again when they changed labels to Scotti Bros. They called me up to do “The Moment of Truth” from The Karate Kid soundtrack. I went to Chicago to do that, and that led to doing Vital Signs and then When Seconds Count, the album after that. Vital Signs had three hit singles right off the top and was a platinum record. But the bands like Survivor and those kinds of faceless bands in those days, they didn’t get much attention. No one talks about Survivor, but it was a platinum record; it had lots of great hit singles. No one talks about it. Jim Peterik [keyboards], one of the great songwriters of all time and in cohorts with the guitar player, Frankie Sullivan, came up with some great stuff. A classic example of great rock songwriting, like Paul Rodgers and Mick Ralphs; Paul being more of the keyboard writer and Mick the guitar guy.

Andrew:
You were obviously on fire by the mid-1980s, spearheaded by the success of Heart, but how did you become affiliated with the Ozzy Osbourne camp?

Ron:
Well, I was pretty hot. Heart had just come out; I finished it up in late ’84, and it came out in early ’85. I got a call to do a few songs with [Joe] Cocker in London. I was a little apprehensive about doing that; I love Joe, but I had been his soundman on the Mad Dogs & Englishman Tour. This is like six or seven years later. I was afraid he’d remember me as like, “I thought we hired this hot producer Ron Nevison. This is my old soundman!” I didn’t think I’d get the kudos for that, so I was a little apprehensive. The same thing happened to me in 1979 when I got a call to do the Jefferson Starship. I had been their soundman on two tours of the US; I didn’t work with them, per se, but I had been the soundman on the tour. Luckily when I turned up for the interview, they didn’t remember me because I didn’t travel with the band; I traveled with a truck. [Laughs].

So, I went to London to do these three songs with Joe Cocker, and that’s when I got a call from Michael Lippman, “Would you like to do Ozzy?” So, I met with Sharon and Ozzy in London, probably in June of ’85. When I finished the three Cocker songs, I just stayed in London until the end of the year and did the Ozzy thing.

Andrew:
How would you compare the sound of Ultimate Sin to that of Blizzard of Ozz, Diary of a Madman, and Bark at the Moon, and how were you able to manage the different personalities in the studio?

Ron:
Well, he changed guitar players quite a lot. And, not being a fan of Ozzy, I can’t really tell you that I’ve ever listened to those other albums.

I pretty much remember all the recordings I’ve done, somewhat. As I’m now 76, it gets a little foggy. I remember recording at The Town House in London. One of the quirky things was that Jake E. Lee, the guitar player – and an album like that is 90 percent guitar and the rest vocals once the tracks are cut – he said to me, “Hey, Ron, you know, I really play way better at night. Can we work at night?” I said, “Well, yeah, okay. What time do you wanna start?” And he said, “Can we like start at midnight?” And I went, “No. We can’t do that. I can’t expect this staff at Townhouse Studios to totally turn their time all around.” I said, “I’ll tell ya what we’ll do – we’ll start at six o’clock at night and work from 6 PM ‘til two in the morning. That’s night to me.” And he was great; it’s not like he was into drugs or anything like that; he was into martial arts. We whipped through the guitars and had a good time doing it.

But then it came to Ozzy’s vocals, and that wasn’t so good because Ozzy didn’t turn up for his sessions. So, I went to his wife and said, “We’re gonna have to do something here.” I said, “I think it would be best if I took him somewhere and recorded, so I’d have a captive audience.” I said, “Where could we go?” She says, “Well, he hates France. You can take him there, and he’ll come back real quick,” or something like that. So, I got a studio in Paris for ten days and went over there — Ozzy, me, and this 10-foot tall minder — and we did his vocals. He wasn’t turning up; he was staying at home, getting drunk, just being Ozzy. There’s a little bit of a wobble there – one day, he disappeared. But I think we did like six days, I lost him for the seventh, and then I got him for the other three. So, we got it all done.

But I do remember a funny incident. I didn’t realize when I got to the studio, that it was on the other side of Paris from where we were staying. The traffic was so horrendous, on the first night, it took us an hour to get to the studio from the hotel. [Paris] is one of these cities that’s built like a wheel; to get from one side to the other, you almost have to go outside to a ring road to come back in. Anyway, we ended up taking the Metro, which is the subway. So, that’s how we got to the studio every day; we took the subway. It was only 15 minutes instead of an hour.

Andrew:
You briefly worked with Triumph on The Sport of Kings, but Mike Clink finished the album. What was the reasoning behind the disconnect?

Ron:
I’ll tell you what it was; we were just talking about Survivor having this faceless kind of band; that was Triumph, too. Triumph had, and this was something from the very get-go that I talked to them about when I interviewed for the job, but they had this band where they had Gil Moore singing from the drums, and they had Rik Emmett singing from the guitar. I just wanted to shift things to Rik Emmett, who is a much better singer. Since Gil was like the leader of the band, he didn’t want to give that up, but he agreed to do that when we were talking about this. So, they flew me to Toronto, we rehearsed the band, and we did not have Gil Moore singing any of the songs. Then I think I had them go to L.A. somewhere; maybe it was the Record Plant, I’m not quite sure. We recorded the basic tracks, and then they have their own studio in Toronto, so we flew back to Toronto to do the overdubs. And [Gil] started talking about singing a couple of these songs. I said, “That wasn’t the deal that we had here,” and I left. They couldn’t believe it. I remember they were signed to MCA, and Irving Azoff was the head of it, so I called up Irving and said, “I can’t stay here, man. I’m sorry.” So, again, Mike Clink filled in for me. He finished it off. That’s not the way I saw it, and they should have told me. Look, I’ve had a couple of things with Eddie Money, the same kind of thing, where they lie to you; they just figure you’ll turn it around. They don’t realize that I don’t get turned around.

Andrew:
The KISS Crazy Nights album came out at the height of the 80s and has a distinct sound as a result. Talk about the onboarding process and any memory you have from the recording process, particularly centered around the late Eric Carr.

Ron:
Gosh, I don’t remember too much. Again, the drummers, you spend very little time with. You’re spending the time with the drummer, and the bass player, and the guitar players as a group, whereas you’re one-on-one with the singers and one-on-one with the guitar players doing all the overdubs and stuff: the drummers and bass players I rarely see. Unless the bass player is the singer, I rarely see those guys. So, I don’t remember anything specific from those sessions, except that this was 1987 I would think, and I was hot from working with Ozzy and Heart. I had interviewed with Paul in the late 70s when he was doing his solo record. I didn’t get the job – maybe I was too busy or he wanted somebody else – but he told me later he’d always wanted me to do it. So, I don’t remember why we didn’t get together. That happens a lot; where you interview for a job, and for one reason or another, your schedules don’t match up. For me to take on an album project in those days was like a three-month job; you only can do so many albums in a year.

But I do remember spending time with Paul. I had gone to Aspen in the summer of ’86 with my girlfriend for Labor Day. She was a model, and I was there for her modeling gig just to hang out. We decided to come back to Aspen for Christmas and New Year’s, so I got a house for ten days. We promptly broke up around Halloween, I guess, and I was talking to Paul a couple of weeks after that in November … “Hey, I’ve got this house in Aspen that I paid for.” And he said, “I’ll split it with you,” so we had a couple of weeks together in Aspen before we did the album, which was nice.

Paul was trying really, really hard to write clever stuff. He got Desmond Child and different writers, and he was trying to follow up with what Bon Jovi had done, not stylistically, of course, but as far as impact singles. I didn’t realize the power of the KISS Army. It reminded me of when [Bob] Dylan picked up an electric guitar; his fans went nuts. Add a synthesizer to KISS? Are you crazy!? Boy, I got a lot of feedback for that. Look, the 1980s were very specific if you wanted to score really big. You had to satisfy CHR, which was Contemporary Hit Radio. There were only 146 of those stations, but that was the key to success. If you had a No. 1 AOR hit, you were headed for gold; if you had a No. 1 CHR hit, you were headed for platinum. If you could do both, you were headed for more. It was the kind of thing where you had to comply with their format in order to get played, so you had to soften things up here and there. But the KISS record, I don’t remember specifically, except I had a great time with all of them. They were so professional.

Andrew:
I’m a massive Damn Yankees fan. I think the self-titled debut and Don’t Tread are absolutely brilliant. Don’t Tread should have reached platinum status. Which of the albums do you prefer and how did the Ted Nugent, Jack Blades, and Tommy Shaw collaboration transpire?

Ron:
Well, the first album had a collection of songs that were a notch above the second album, I thought. The song “High Enough” and “Coming of Age” were slam dunks. There’s a lot of great songs on both records, but I think that the first record had the 1-2 punch. There’s an interesting story that involves John Kalodner because, by this time, Kalodner is working at Geffen [Records]. You remember earlier in this conversation; I had said, “A great A&R guy puts together a marriage and then stays out of the way?” Well, Kalodner put this together at Geffen; Kalodner put together Nugent, Blades, and Shaw, and they did demos. In the end, Ed [Rosenblatt], the head of Geffen, didn’t want it, if you could believe that. Ed passed on it. Of course, Kalodner was exasperated, and Michael Ostin got ahold of it at Warner Bros., and he called me up … “Come and listen to this.” I said, “I’ll do it. That’s great.” So, that’s how that transpired.

We did some rehearsals at Jack’s house; I went to Michigan in the middle of the woods to Nugent’s place for a few days. I remember we were rehearsing at Jack Blades’ house in Santa Rosa during the earthquake. I was staying in Sausalito and driving up to Santa Rosa, and my room was trashed. So, that had to be around October ’89 when we were getting started on Damn Yankees.

Damn Yankees was essentially Tommy and Jack’s studio albums and Ted’s roadshow. Ted kinda commandeered the roadshow when they went on the road, and Tommy and Jack were the main guys on the album. Ted had a couple of songs – he did a solo here and there – but I didn’t get the participation from Ted that I wanted. Tommy is a really underrated guitar player. You don’t think of Tommy as a classic guitarist, but he’s great. I didn’t know he wasn’t the main guitar player on Styx; JY [James Young] is considered the main guy on Styx. So, I figured I had a two-guitar band, and I loved that, like left and right playing off each other. But Nugent wanted to come to do all of his parts at the same time. He wanted to stay in Michigan and come to L.A. as little as possible, where Tommy lived in New York and just camped out in L.A. while we worked. Nugent wanted it to be like more of a film shoot, where you come in for the day. That pissed me off, so Tommy got to do way more guitar playing than I anticipated. Nugent did a rhythm track, and sometimes they were really important, like the rhythm track on “Coming of Age.” He came up with that lick; that was the hook of that song. I wish I’d had him more often. Not these days, though. I would not agree to do an album with them, as much as I would like to, these days.

Andrew:
You’ve produced a wide-ranging assortment of albums that will forever remain rooted in the annals of Rock history, but which album are you most proud of?

Ron:

I think Quadrophenia because it was my first full album of work from a major group that I kind of did all the recording and mixing. So, that’s probably my favorite. But other albums I take pride in because I maybe brought the missing links to them as a producer and not just as an engineer, like the Heart album, where I brought songs to the project, or Chicago, where I brought songs that were No. 1 hits to the project. There are a couple of different levels of satisfaction. One level is that you think it sounds great, personally. Another level is that the public loves it, and the third level is that you sell a lot. So, you can walk out of the studio thinking from one level how good it was, and then when the public doesn’t think it’s so good, it dampens it a bit.

Andrew:
You mentioned Heart and the songs that you provided. Seeing as those albums were instrumental to your career, tell us about those songs and the backstory behind them.

Ron:
The two No. 1 hits that they had, I found for them, which were “These Dreams” and “Alone.” “These Dreams,” Nancy had always sung one song on the other Heart records that they had done. She was looking really good, and this is the age of video; I wanted her to do two songs on this record. I got her to co-write a song with Holly Knight, and I found “These Dreams” for her, which was a song that I found on a cassette that Bernie Taupin had handed me. My manager, Michael Lippman, was also managing Bernie Taupin at the time, and he heard I was doing stuff, so he gave Michael a cassette to give to me. On that same cassette, was “We Built This City,” oddly enough. It was written by them, too. I thought, “This is a terrible song.” I couldn’t believe that Starship did that. I went, “You’re ruining your Rock cred just doing that song.”

But “These Dreams,” they loved it. It was perfect timing because it couldn’t have been a first single because Nancy was not the lead singer of that band. So, that wouldn’t have been good. But the way we positioned it, it came out as a third single, so that worked out well. And of course, “Alone,” after selling five million records, was the first one. I went to the writers [Tom Kelly, Billy Steinberg] – I got a bunch of songs from them, and I did more than one song on that record. “Alone” was the big hit, but there was also another song [I Want You So Bad] on Bad Animals that was by the same writers.

Andrew:
You’ve worked alongside some of the world’s most iconic musicians over the years, but is there a particular band or artist that you were routinely blown away by each day in the studio?

Ron:
UFO; you know, you talk about Strangers in the Night – that was a good live album – but I think Lights Out was way better. And Obsession, too. I brought them to L.A. for the Obsession album, and the studio burned down that I was gonna use, so I rented a remote truck from the Record Plant and did everything in an old post office building in Beverly Hills. And the two Baby’s albums I did; I rented houses and used remote trucks to record everything in and took it into the studio to mix. Same thing with Dave Mason’s Mariposa De Oro, the second album I did with them after a big first album. Whatever it is that you gotta do, and you try everything, the final act is intimidation. I don’t start there, but if it finally comes down to, “I’ll show you!” I’m sitting there thinking, “Well, that’s what I’ve been waiting for.” [Laughs].

Andrew:
If you were to reflect on your career, what would you consider to be your biggest regret?

Ron:
Ah, boy. My biggest regret really is not pushing harder in the mid-late 90s to seek out new stuff. After the Grunge industry decimated my Classic Rock credentials like so many people, I didn’t adapt to that. I mean, I did try; I did an album with Candlebox. The whole Grunge thing was an anomaly, as far as I’m concerned. There wasn’t a whole lot of talent there, except for a couple of bands. It reminds me so much of the Beatles when the Beatles changed everybody’s life in those days. But, you know, Dave Clark Five did this. And some of the other stuff that came over from England reminded me of what happened with Grunge, where everybody ran to Seattle to sign every band and bands were selling CDs out of the back of their vans – and selling lots of ‘em. Mostly, the record companies didn’t know what to do with it. Record labels just hired the producers that did their demos because they didn’t know what to make of it. It’s almost like you have to be in the culture to do the culture. People have said to me, “How come you don’t do rap?” Well, I wouldn’t know what to do with it — it’s not a question of liking it. I don’t understand it; I don’t understand what people want. I’m not a fan of it. That’s maybe my biggest regret, that I just kind of let it go. I had enough money just to let it go. But looking back on it, I wish I was more productive in those years, I guess.

Andrew:
Ron, you drew interest from some of the most significant Rock acts of the 70s and 80s. What was it about your style that was so appealing?

Ron:
I don’t know about style, but I did bring that live performance thing. I always thought of doing these songs as picturing a stage and trying to lay out things like they were on the stage. I always thought of the performances in that manner, as opposed to a solo artist kind of thing. I don’t know if that’s a style or not, but that’s kind of the way I’ve always thought of it. I think that the success comes from being successful in terms of getting hits. Once you start getting hits, you get hired; and when you stop getting hits, you don’t get hired anymore. And that’s what happens to everybody. So, I had that good run from ’85-’90 – not that I didn’t have other good runs – look at my ’73-’85. But they weren’t the producer, hot-single runs. That’s wrong, I guess; I did have success with “Jane” with [Jefferson] Starship in ’79. I mean, I had some hit singles; we just disagree with Dave Mason; They weren’t No. 1’s, but they were big hits.

Andrew:
You’ve been a 4x Billboard Magazine Top Five Producer of the Year and have been nominated for several Grammys. Tell us about those nominations and where they rank on your list of accomplishments.

Ron:
I’ve never been nominated for a Grammy; I’ve had groups that were nominated for Grammys. I’ve never been nominated for a Grammy as a producer. I was talking in the mid-80s with Michael Lippman, my manager, and during that time, the Grammy people were voting for the artist-producers, like Stevie Wonder or George Michael. Those are the guys that are getting the Grammys, the artist-producers, just because of name-value, I think. But I don’t even remember to tell you the truth, Andrew, about the Grammy nominations. I was happier with the Top Five Billboard because it shows how many singles you chart each year. That was more fun than being amongst the Grammy people. I was never big on the Grammys; I still am not. I haven’t watched it in the last five years.

Andrew:
In closing, let’s talk about some of your latest endeavors. I understand you have a book in the works?

Ron:
Yeah, I do have a book that’s kind of a third finished. It’s at the point now where I need a publisher. I had somebody that wanted it, but they wanted to have half of everything after the book was finished, and I said no and haven’t heard back from them. I have a great writer from the Bay Area, and we’re gonna finish it off. It’s outlined; the whole thing is in sections. It’s like my early days that I talked about – the Electric Factory/Festival Group days out in Philly doing all the tours — then the moving to London days, and then moving to L.A. in ’75. The book is from ’67-’00; I haven’t really touched on anything after that. But yeah, that’s in the works. And because of so many artists that I’ve worked with that, I think it will find some interest – including [Barbara] Streisand to Ozzy. [Laughs]. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there, so I’m gonna finish it off when I get somebody further interested.

I’m mixing a lot in my house up here in the [Pacific] Northwest. I live out in the Columbia River Gorge; I’ve got a studio at my house. These days, it’s very easy, people send me files, and I mix them and send them back. They pay me on PayPal; it’s great; I do a couple of them. This year, I haven’t because of Covid, but usually, I travel and do 2-3 projects a year in L.A. or the Bay Area. I kind of stick to the West Coast, but I have no travel plans – yet.

Dig this article? Check out the full archives of Shredful Compositions, by Andrew DiCecco, here: https://vinylwritermusic.wordpress.com/shredful-compositions-archives/