I see my job, when working as the producer, as the person who helps the musicians realize their artistic potential.  In the case of the latest Rags & Bones EP, this started with a conversation between Rags, Joe Garcia and myself. 

Rags called Joe and I over to his remote Joshua Tree compound to discuss the next three songs he wanted to record.  He explained to Joe and I that he wanted to complete this project before he was obligated to move from the compound; Rags and his wife, Catherine, were putting the compound up for sale.  The conversation revolved around how important a role his residence had played in the development of his songs.  He recorded all the demos in a small office type studio on the grounds.  The little office had wood floors and a warm sound.  There was a small window looking out onto the open desert.  Rags dog, Steinbeck, was always either sleeping on the floor, or the couch when Rags let him get up there.  Although the three songs slated for the EP all dealt with memories of Rag's father and Rag's own Southern California upbringing, the Joshua Tree compound and it's little studio was just as present in the music, even if that wasn't reflected in the lyrics of the songs.  Perhaps it was the solitude at Rag's compound that encouraged the reflective period in Rags life that produced these songs?

Rags told Joe and I about the three songs slated for the album.  He mentioned the sentimentality he was feeling about potentially moving from the compound.  Rags initial plan was to do all of the tracking at my Solar Powered Cabin.  But after hearing both the stories behind California Bound, Drive and Foothill Boulevard as well as Rag's feelings about putting the compound up for sale, Joe and I both had the same reaction.  We both said to Rags, "You should do the tracking right here, in your studio."  I told Rags that the room had a sound. And then I pointed out how nice it would be to hear that sound on these songs.  It would always remind him of the compound. 

Rags was surprised but he agreed that it was a great idea.  The initial plan was to try and track basics of acoustic guitar, vocal and upright bass live.  But that plan quickly morphed into the method Rags is more accustomed to working; we first tracked Rags acoustic guitar to a click, and then we added a lead vocal track over that.  Bass was sent out to Baba Elefante in Los Angeles.  He sent his tracks to me through the web.  Bobby Furgo and Lisa Mednick Powell came way out to my Solar Powered Cabin for violin and accordion overdubs. Tim Chinnock also came out to the cabin for some drums and percussion overdubs.  Tim, Faith Chinnock and Atermis all recorded backing vocals with Rags over at his studio.  And Gar Robertson recorded pedal steel down at his Morongo Valley studio, Red Barn Recorders.  I did the mixing at my Solar Powered Cabin and Dennis Moody handled the mastering.  This was the second project I got to work on with Dennis, The Resolectrics being the first. 

I'm very happy with the vibe we achieved on these three songs.  Rags voice sounds intimate and clear.  I can hear Rags place in these tracks.  I hear the desert and I hear a good friend expressing beautiful sentiments in these three songs. As a producer, this hit the bullseye for me.  Joe Garcia deserves a special mention too as he helped water the original seed. 

Take a listen.  Come visit the desert by giving yourself up to these songs.
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5S2RsR46c9eLtSyv3Bx2sW

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FQSGHG9

We moved in full time to our homestead cabin in the Mojave Desert in May of 2017.  I was up and running quickly and in June 2017, I mixed Feel Alright's album, In Bad Faith.  It was my first album length project with the new set up.  Working without a mixing console was taking some getting used to.  I figured out how to use my analog compressors in the mix live without the mixer and I was beginning to enjoy my latest setup, both it's limitations and it's new possibilities.  But there was a new factor in the set up that I was still getting used to: the fact that I was my own power station.  Our cabin made it's own electricity on an ancient solar set up.  It was both outdated and under powered.  It was a twelve volt system.

But there were positives. The inverter for the set up was old as well, but it did a pretty good job of mimicking a sine wave.  My equipment ran really quiet.  There was plentiful sun.  If I worked during the day, I had enough electricity to run... most of the time.

I have worked with Craig Fahner on at least four or five projects over the years starting with a Mandates album and some singles, and there was a country band in there somewhere to.  I can't recall the name, but that was a fun album to mix.  Craig is a talented recording engineer up in Calgary and I had mixed those projects for him in the past.  Feel Alright is his baby.  It was an honor to be asked to mix this album and I want to formally thank him here on my blog for his extra patience while I "mastered" my off the grid electric situation during the mixing for In Bad Faith.  In the end, we only suffered from a slower than expected work flow.  We figured it would take about four days to mix the record.  I believe we were at it for about a week.  This was because I expected to work the eight to ten hour days I was accustomed to before our move to the desert.  Due to our energy situation, the days were shortened to around 6 hours.  Those were good hours though!

Mixing is my favorite part of the recording process.  Feel Alright had excellent songs and recordings for me to dig my ears into. Craig's sessions were edited and ready to go and I could get through a first pass of a mix in less than three hours. I used real analog delays in the mix; a space echo and an Ibanez AD202.   A Distressor, 1176, two Chandler LTD2s and an AMEK/Neve 9098 were all used live in the mix as well.  I monitored on ADAM monitors through a 300 watt CROWN amplifier. Not bad for an under powered little twelve volt set up! 

Just a few months after mixing this album, we upgraded to a more robust, pure sine wave, 48 volt system.  But that's another story I hope to tell you sometime later.

Here's a review for In Bad Faith.  The album streams here too.
http://exclaim.ca/music/article/feel_alright-in_bad_faith_album_stream

Feel Alright on Bandcamp
https://feelalright.bandcamp.com/

The last days of PermaPress Recording were a blur.  Well, it was more than the last few days.  It was more like years.  I found myself perpetually juggling seven or eight different albums, all in various states of creation, at the same time.  Mixing these three, tracking these two, mastering one, tracking and mixing one at the same time, and in preproduction with one too.  While that was going on, people were coming in for one off days here and there to make demos, the occasional rapper or hip hop producer would rent the studio (I think just to take pictures with the mixing board), and I was sometimes running off to Northern California to work with Jerry Joseph at TRI.  With escalating cost of living in Portland, and running a business that barely makes the margins anyway, staying this busy was the best way to keep getting by.  The upside, I worked a lot.  That's alright.  I love to create music.  The downside, sometimes I was probably so burnt out, I didn't enjoy a record that I was working on like I really should have.

Back in June, my good pals from Calgary, Canada - The Mandates - began announcing that they had a new record coming out a little later in the year called Dead In The Face.  The cover, pictured above, is awesome!  I was totally jealous.  I had worked on a lot of records with this band over the years.  I love them!  It was their love of The Exploding Hearts that brought us together. 

I first worked with their guitar player, Brady, in the band The Fun Funs.  No joking with that name.  Lots of fun if you can find that record. They came to Portland and we kicked out a record in two or three days. Not much later, Brady brought me his new band, The Mandates.  I mixed their self-titled debut and then a single or two before they drove the van from Calgary to Portland, OR, to record their second album, In The Back Of Your Heart.  Now that was a memorable time.

We had so much fun recording that LP.  We worked hard and played hard.  Around then, the dive bars in Portland hadn't quite disappeared and we hit them every night after the sessions.  I think Wickens (The Mandate's other guitar) even stayed around for a few extra nights.  Was that around Halloween? 2013? We made a tough little rock record.  It was the reflection of us; a midnight gang of gutter club musicians. It rained a lot.  It was a perfect session. And you can listen to it!

So you can understand my jealousy when I found out about this brand new album coming out called Dead In The Face... with the killer album cover. I found out it was streaming on Exclaim! and I caved.  I had to listen.  I think I was just doing it because I wanted to make sure that the albums I had done with them sounded better. I hit play, first song starts shredding my little radio's speakers with ripping guitar. This sounds really good.  God damn...

Then it starts to sink in.  I know this song.  I look at the title; Baby, I'm an Outsider.  Yeah, I mixed this one once.  Did they redo it? I begin to read down the song list. Ramalama June, On the Run, Louder Than Before, In My Bed, and Hello T'Jane    I've mixed all of these songs before.  But this isn't either of the first two albums.  When did I do this? 

I began reading the article on Exclaim!  Yep, tracked by Craig Fahner and mixed by Pat Kearns.  It said it right there.  I laughed pretty hard at myself.  But I don't want to make a habit of this kind of thing happening.  I mean the forgetfulness, not the laughing.  Being able to laugh at yourself is a good thing. 

It's a goal of mine to get The Mandates down here to the desert.  I hear that Canadians like to come here.  Not much sun up there in the winter, I bet.

Stay tuned for more on Craig Fahner.  That guy is something special.

Listen to and buy Dead In The Face.
https://mandates.bandcamp.com/album/dead-in-the-face-5

I closed PermaPress Recording in Portland, OR in late April, 2017.  It took five days to break the studio down and pack it into a Penske Rental Truck.  Currently, much of the studio is living in a Yucca Valley storage unit, waiting for the next studio to be finished.  The studio's guts - some mic pres, outboard analog compression and my AD/DA convertors - are set up beside a picnic table in our 550 square foot cabin in Mojave Desert.  For a few months more, I'm mixing and mastering and doing some tracking in our little cabin.

One of the last records to be completed before shutting the doors to PermaPress was The Resolectrics' second album, Open Seas.  I recorded and mixed their first album, High Water, in 2011.  It was released in 2013.  Open Seas was recorded in late 2016 and early 2017.  Finishing the mixes to Open Seas was one of the last tasks to be completed at PermaPress. And if I have one regret about shuttering my Portland, Oregon, recording studio, it's this band.  I love them. I love working with them.  And I hope that moving a thousand miles away won't inhibit us working together again.

The songs on Open Seas are all A+ tunes.  Excellent tones are played by all the three Resolectrics.  This band is a perfect balance between the three core members; Tate Peterson on guitars, Bob Dunham on bass and John Becher on drums.  Tate and John split the lead vocals.  More than once, while mixing this band, somebody has knocked on my studio door asking,  "Who is this great band?"

The Mojave Desert makes a small appearance.  My pal out here, the amazing Dennis Moody, did the mastering.  This is the first project that Dennis and I have worked on together and I'm thrilled with his work. 

The Resolectrics rarely make it outside the Pacific Northwest.  Maybe someday, we can bring them down to the desert.

That Much Further West Podcast review of Open Seas

The Resolectics on iTunes (both albums!)

The Resolectrics website

After about eighteen months of living and working full time  off the electrical grid - powered by the sun, the first fruits of my labor out here in the desert are becoming available for your listening pleasure.  The Terry & Louie album, "... A Thousand Guitars," might be the most anticipated of the bunch and it's well worth the long, long wait.  The album is all killer, no filler; ten powerpop rockers as you should expect from Terry Six and King Louie Bankston - even if it took them a full fifteen years to follow up their old band, The Exploding Hearts' classic album - Guitar Romantic, it's well worth the wait. 

Terry Six tracked the album expertly in San Francisco and Oakland studios and then sent me the ProTools sessions to mix down here in my cabin.  We passed mixes back and forth sporadically for a few weeks before Terry took the drive out to the edge of civilization to finish the mixes with me here in the Mojave Desert this past April.  Ardavon Fatehi, the director of the upcoming official documentary about The Exploding Hearts, also joined us with a film crew to document the completion of the mixes.  I'm sure my face went pale when I saw the film crew's lights being set up in my studio apartment sized home and work space.  I was pretty sure, due to their size and the light's intensity, that the film lights would crash my power, but fortunately, it was all smooth sailing.

The title track is my pick for you to put on your stereo right now.  Make sure you crank it up to eleven! 

I'll be posting about a few other recent releases in which I'm involved later this week. 

Get Terry & Louie - ... A Thousand Guitars
https://itunes.apple.com/album/id1422744635?ls=1&app=itunes

Tuff Break - Terry & Louie's label

I'm preparing to leave the Mojave Desert in the next few days to head up to Oregon for shows in Cottage Grove and Portland this coming Thursday and Friday, October 4 and 5.  And I've just added this one back home in the desert in Joshua Tree.  I'll be playing music before the screening of Chritiane Cegaske's "Blood Tea & Red String" on the Up To Mischief Stage back by The Sun Alley Shops.  As of now, I don't know anything about the movie, but I did just watch the trailer below and it looks wonderfully creepy!  Cool soundtrack too.  All show details here.

I'm playing Cottage Grove and Portland on October 4th and 5th respectively!  Two great venues and both shows are with my pal, El Gringo Mariachi.  I'll have a full band behind me including my wife, Susan, on bass; Mark Breitenbach playing keys; and Chris from Rootjack on drums. Tickets available through the clubs' websites which you can find here.

We're hitting the road tomorrow for a few dates in Arizona and Colorado.  I think the Durango show is going to be something special.  Maybe we'll see you out there on the road.  All of our dates, still at the above link.

I have a handful of shows coming up.  Two in Kingman, Arizona.  One in Durango, Colorado...and possibly one or two more shows may shake their way out in between and I'll be sure to post them here.  For the September 18 Kingman show and the September 20 show in Durango, my wife, Susan Kearns will be playing upright bass.  Go here for the full calendar.

I'm a musician from Portland, Oregon.  I grew up there in the 1980's and started playing in bands and recording local groups in the mid-1990's.  Fred Cole and his band Dead Moon were omnipresent.  Even if you didn't attend their shows, if you lived in Portland during this time, you couldn't escape Fred's presence.  And that was a very good thing. 

Fred owned Tombstone Music, a guitar and amp shop, in the suburb of Clackamas.  He recorded his own band and pressed his own records.  He owned a record press.  Dead Moon toured the world. Fred Cole was a role model for Portland's early DIY culture. (For a more detailed history of Fred Cole's life in music, here's wikipedia.)

Fred's actions touched me directly in many ways that I wasn't aware of initially. Two stories come to mind immediately. 

Back in the mid 1980's, Fred employed a kid named Kelly Manahan at Tombstone Music. And that's where Kelly learned his guitar shop skills.  He also drew the famous Dead Moon logo. These days, Kelly is one of the owners of Centaur Guitar.  My old studio, PermaPress Recording, shared a lease with Centaur.  Tombstone is no longer running, but you sure can feel it's presence when you're in Centaur Guitar. In 2007, I needed to find a new location for my recording gear. I may not have survived that studio move without the building lease partnership I had with Centaur. It's not right on the surface, easy to see, but Fred deserves a little bit of credit in Centaur's and PermaPress's existence.  Centaur was their spawn....and I was the weird neighborhood kid that clung along.

The second story that comes to mind involves The Nice Boys.  They were the first post-Exploding Hearts band featuring Terry Six.  Their other guitar player, Gabe - was he still going by Amphetamine Blue - really wanted to have some Rickenbacker 12 string on their record which I was recording at my first little studio in SW Portland, Studio 13.  And Fred loaned one to us!  I heard some controversy later about the return of the guitar.....but that's an amazing person....A guy who owns a guitar shop and he loans a guitar to a neighborhood punk for a recording session.  That's truly, truly, truly beyond generous.

Of course, there's the music too....But I wanted to tell you a couple of around town stories I have of Fred.  If you can find them, ask any old Portlander about Dead Moon and most people will tell you an "in the bar" Loomis story.....But you'll also hear a lot of stories about Fred and his amazing heart.

Fred had that effect on lots of people.....that's why Los Angeles is paying him tribute.  It's an honor to get to play a tune on this special night.  I'm looking forward to hearing Toody, Fred's wife and Dead Moon's bassist, play too.