Whoever said Portland was where young people moved to retire clearly never met Larry Crane. Along with his creative partners, he is a cottage industry who is 100% killing it at making a living doing things you love. He runs Jackpot! Recording Studio in Portland, Oregon, which was once Elliott Smith‘s studio of choice. He has been publishing Tape Op magazine with John Baccigallupi for decades. Tape Op has just launched a new podcast. And his and John’s third book, Making Music: Conversations with Record Producers, just came out on Akashic Books. We met with Larry at Jackpot! Recording Studio in August to chat about all things zine-related, recording, and other music. Interview and photographs by Gail O’Hara
chickfactor: I was reading an article about AI in the New Yorker earlier today. It made me think about my own inability or refusal to adapt to new technology.
Larry Crane: When I started the recording studio, even in the basement, it was all analog. It was at a point where people were moving to digital, like the ADATs, the digital recording tape systems. Talking to Elliott Smith, who was going to help me build the studio and work out of there, I was like, What do you want? And he was like, “I want analog two-inch 16-track. I don’t want the new stuff.”
Everyone we know is probably like that. That’s why we live in Portland! You launched your studio in 1997, and Elliott Smith was onstage at the Oscars a year later. That’s insane! You were an Oscar nominee within a year of launching a studio. That felt like a moment of our world opening up to a larger world. Tell us about the Elliott-related color scheme of the studio.
When we moved into 1925 SE Morrison, the first place we rented, we walked in and we were like, we gotta paint. it was really beat up. This guy was trying to turn it into a studio and that had failed, so we built a wall to separate the room so we could have a control room/live room situation, which you don’t have to do. When we were in the live room, we were like, why don’t we paint each wall a different color. So we’d know, “Move the mic toward the yellow wall.” We bought cans of paint, and that never happened—no one ever said, move it toward the green wall. But it kind of got this Romper Room effect, the kids preschool show, and I was really trying to avoid studios that look like dentist offices honestly. So Elliott helped pick out the colors. I believe my ex-wife Marila [Alvares] also helped pick out the colors. It’s hard to remember, it’s about 30 years ago. It was nice to do kind of light subdued primary colors. The name “Jackpot!” sounds fun. Elliott and Joanna (Bolme} and I came up with that one randomly via some Trivial Pursuit cards at Laurelthirst when we signed the lease. I think I stole that exclamation point from Avast! Recording Company in Seattle cause I’d been there watching the Walkabouts record before I moved to Portland.
So you probably attracted a lot of attention because of Elliott.
Yeah.
That’s a big part of your clientele. They find you that way.
I saw a thing on Instagram where someone said, “We just recorded this at Elliott Smith’s studio.” I’m like, it’s Larry Crane’s studio. You can say that if you want, I guess.
Do people come looking for that particular sound or are they just attracted because he was here?
I think the latter. The thing about his sound, a lot is just writing, arrangement and performance. If you can’t do the finger-picking like that, you can’t do your vocal arrangements that well, you’re not going to sound like him at all. Sometimes I get sent things to mix and it’s disturbingly on-the-nose, like specific songs. That’s a little unnerving. I have a policy where I won’t take any cold call clients who want to do Elliott Smith covers. I’m not going to become a tourist attraction. I don’t need strangers coming in asking me questions about him.
Back then, that quieter music—he toured with the Softies—was so challenging. In so many venues, you’re competing with a Friday night loud crowd of drinkers.
You can hear on those live tapes of Elliott, “Well, I guess you can keep talking if you want to if it’s that important. I’ll just play these songs.” You can’t really fight a crowd. I remember seeing Robyn Hitchcock at Berbati’s years ago and these people sitting at a table were just so fucking loud. And he’d be playing and looking over at the table and the manager was going over. You had to pay money to be in there but it was only $10.
That reminds me of when Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Madeleine Albright, and Vaclav Havel were talking at a John Zorn show at the Knitting Factory until he told them to “Shut the fuck up and listen to the music.”
My wife always tells me about this Elliott show that we were both at before we were dating. We were at a show at La Luna balcony and someone goes “we can’t see you” and he says, “well you can always sit on the floor” and everyone sits and he’s like Whoa, OK. Kinda blown away. He could quiet a room by that point around Either/Or. But a lot of times you don’t get that. I went to see Low when Mimi was still around at Mississippi Studios, and there were these tall, younger guys who wouldn’t stop talking. Finally I was like, you know, you can take it next door if you guys really need to talk. They’re just looking down at me like…
I love Mississippi Studios but it can be challenging because the back section is just yammering people. I love going to shows there but it can be hard.
That’s when they had a wall between, a glass wall, and they would close it. It’s like, go back there and talk, man. It was crazy. It depends what the situation is. Some bands you go and it’s different, punk bands and stuff, but Low? Come on. They were pretty quiet. Even when Elliott was playing an acoustic guitar, people were like, really? The Heatmiser guy’s going to play quiet? Everything had to be so loud in that stupid post-grunge era. I think grunge is really … no good band ever said “we’re grunge” first of all. That was just a nasty era. We were going back and forth to Seattle all the time to play gigs and it just kept getting worse because of grunge. So much male posturing and bullshit. That’s exactly what I was so tired of. People were like, what were you listening to back then? How come you didn’t like Smashing Pumpkins and the Stone Temple Pilots? I was still listening to Lush and the Cocteau Twins and Flipper. Plenty of other music to listen to. Jesus, it was crazy.
What do you think has changed in Portland, music scene-wise? A lot of the same people are here but how does it feel?
It morphs. There’s more artists than ever for sure because you can record yourself, it’s easier than ever to have a presence. Put something on Bandcamp or make Instagram posts or whatever people do. But the thing I started to notice, even 15, 20 years ago, is the quality of musicians is getting better. People were moving here who were hot shots. Even though they were playing indie music or whatever, they were better quality musicians than I’d seen before. That’s kind of cool, that’s like a nice resource to have.
Or even having the Go-Betweens come out here to record with you.
That was kinda crazy. That was because of Tape Op and because of Sleater-Kinney. We all love those records. I went and interviewed Robert Forster at the Crocodile in Seattle and he asked me “what else do you do?” because he’s waiting to play. I said, I just did this Sleater-Kinney record with John Goodmanson. Oh, we love that band. They go down to the Great American Music Hall in SF and Sleater-Kinney’s backstage. Janet goes “I’ll play drums.” They were like, I think we’ve got it sorted out now, we’re going to do a record with Larry. It was crazy and so nice and so special. Last time I saw Robert they were getting the box set together [G Stands For Go-Betweens Volume Three], the third and final box set of the chronological years of the band, and he’s like, we’re putting all your rough mixes in it. I’m like, OK. It’s really an honor. That all came out of my Tape Op interview with Robert.
You definitely helped put the Pacific NW on the map, though it was already very fertile and busy. I didn’t start coming here till the ’90s but everyone had a label, everyone was in a band, etc.
Thankfully everything I’ve done with Tape Op and Jackpot! was really good timing. John Moen said to me before I started Jackpot!, we need a studio like this. There was Mike Lastra’s studio, he was doing some good things. I always felt like I was stepping on his toes. I don’t think he was trying to be as busy as I got. There wasn’t really an underground, alternative, indie rock kinda studio maybe. After we started, Type Foundry started, my friend Adam Selzer started that. We shared very similar clientele. Now there’s a lot of people doing lots of things. It was a little bit empty then.
What were you into as a kid?
My mom is Texan and when she was in high school, she was dating one of Roy Orbison’s guys before he was famous. So she used to hang out with Roy, so that was music we had at home. We also had her late high school/college music, which was Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole. Really good singers. We listened to that. My mom also had Dylan, the Beatles, Buffy Sainte Marie, I’ve got all those records at my house now. My parents were friends with Doug Clifford from Creedence Clearwater Revival, so he would drop off those records when I was a little kid in Oakland. The Bay Area was very fun then. I still have all the Creedence records. That’s a really good education. Great, clear recordings.
What about punk?
I was in high school in the late ’70s. So in high school punk started to show up. I remember the Sex Pistols being on the TV news. We were three hours from the Bay Area so we could get KPFA, Maximum Rocknroll radio show, it would be like Flipper, the Soft Boys. In Nevada City, where I grew up, there’s KVMR. I forced a bunch of us to get radio licenses. We used to sit in on radio shows there and they were playing Lou Reed’s Berlin, Krautrock, Residents, Snakefinger, all kinds of weird music. I didn’t really draw a line, like this is weird music and this is normal. I heard Gang of Four and David Bowie.
Making Music has a really good and diverse cross section of interviewees. It’s more fun than I expected a book about recording to be, not that your interviews aren’t fun in general but I imagine the bulk of your audience is like other recording nerds, right?
Yeah, and musicians for sure. Musicians love talking about this stuff, about going into the studio and writing songs. That’s a huge readership. They’re digging in a little deeper. I went to see the Psychedelic Furs last year. I didn’t go with anyone. I started talking to some guy who’s a little younger than me but not much. You realize that these people don’t know more than like two or three songs by the Psychedelic Furs. I’m like, What? I want to hear “India,” I want to hear “Into You Like a Train” and the back catalog. I want to hear “President Gas,” and they played “President Gas,” which made a lot of sense in this current climate. And he’s like, “I just know ‘Pretty in Pink,’ ‘Heaven’ maybe.” I was kind of amazed. I’m like, it’s a big enough draw to draw people out to pay $40 a ticket at the Crystal but they still don’t have that… Here I am with a shovel digging deeper, pulling out b-sides and knowing who was in the band.
The new book feels quite mainstream in a way.
The first book, when John Baccigaluppi (“kiss of the wolf”) joined up to help me do Tape Op, I’d been going for two and a half years. He joined up to be half of Tape Op basically and at that point I’d done 10 issues on my own independently. So I worked out a deal with Adam Parfrey at Feral House Books, that stuff became the first book mostly. Then we did a second volume of the next couple years. We were going to try to serialize it and put out collections but then the internet kind of changed everything.
That was another thing about 1997: the internet changed everything.
We didn’t have a website when Jackpot opened or when Tape Op started.
People barely had email of their own. If they did, they had dial-up.
I had a dial-up email address. That was all I had for the magazine. The fact that there’s bigger names in there is indicative that you’re pulling from 30 years of interviews, and that’s 173 issues by the point we were putting this together. That’s an insane amount of content.
Akashic is punk. They didn’t tell you what to put in it, right? Was that your decision?
I didn’t sign an NDA. No, it was pretty great. There were suggestions. There was editing stuff that I really don’t agree with but it’s so minor. It’s just me as an editor going, OK fine.
So like a copy editor or a content editor?
Copy, style stuff. I’ve got 30 years of doing things a certain way. My wife, Jenna Zine, did a ton of proofreading editing on it after I worked on it to bring it up to date. Then I wrote new intros. I did a lot of work. Then they go, when it’s the Beatles, the T won’t be capitalized. That doesn’t look right to me. I go to the websites, I go look at the albums. The Beach Boys didn’t capitalize it, the Rolling Stones didn’t. The Beatles did. Just trying to be respectful. People write about Jackpot! all the time and don’t put the exclamation point on it or they call it Jackpot Studios and that’s not it’s name: It’s Jackpot! Recording Studio. There’s only one studio. I’m just kinda picky. In the end, when I thumbed through and read it, it reads great, it looks great, the layout of the text is great.
When I read your interviews, one thing I think about is that bands need guidance. What qualities are key if you want to do this kind of work? It’s probably like part psychologist, part manager, etc.
It’s a lot of hats. I was lucky. I talk about becoming a producer at the end of this book. The first time I went into a studio was 1985, and this guy was just recording us and drinking Bartles and James, and losing my vocal tracks and stuff. In that little journey, I realized I always had my eye on the prize of putting the music together the way I heard it. But that session was kind of a run-through. Our band Vomit Launch had only been around like 6 months. The next sessions we did besides demoing things was with Greg Freeman in San Francisco, he had been in the Call, then he joined Pell Mell, who were oddly enough from Portland. They were a cool instrumental band. We did two records with Greg, but he was also our friend, he lived in the BraveEar magazine house. He would come and hang out and watch us play. When he built a studio, we were like, we’re going to record at Greg’s. It was great because it was someone who knew our music and our personalities really well. He knew to slow me down and not let me dominate the proceedings and let the gals have their space. He knew to let our drummer do his thing. He really managed the people well. He knew what our music should sound like and turned us on to more music like the Clean, Mission of Burma, and the Go-Betweens, which is crazy that I’d end up recording them years later. But Greg was really calming.
Bands probably also appreciate someone who can be decisive and opinionated and honest and also tactful. Navigating a band’s ego.
A good producer is going to know what they need to extract. Especially if they’ve had a chance to hear some of the songs, they know what to hide and what to put forward. It’s not about being opinionated but asking a lot of questions or making suggestions. Our second producer was John, my partner in Tape Op. In both cases it felt like they were really listening and trying to figure out how to embellish it, how to present it. It was great. Those are the best learning lessons. For me later, learning to interview people for Tape Op, I’d hear and understand things. Or watching Elliott Smith work with Rob [Schnapf] and Tom [Rothrock] on XO was interesting. Or I would have producers come and work with me, Oz Fritz or Luther Russell or JD Foster, Calvin Johnson, and see what their styles were. And John Goodmanson. It was good to see how they were facilitating the recording part and dealing with people too.
The moment we’re in right now, so many parts of culture, people are like, I don’t want to spend money on that. I’m going to do it myself and use whatever tools I can find. I find that with photography, people don’t hire photographers to do their band photos, they just take something on their phones.
I get these press releases with terrible photos.
Press releases too…
Poorly written.
I imagine things are similar in the recording world. People are just doing it at home like Finneas but they’re maybe not as good at it. Do you hear that a lot in modern music?
Yeah, and that’s fine. That’s been like Tape Op’s motto for ages: If you want to do it yourself, just do it. But if you want it to sound a different way, that might be more difficult. I started with home recording. I was doing cassette stuff in 1979, 1980, when I was a kid. I was trading tapes when I went to college.
That’s the one format everyone had then.
I’ve always thought home recording or musicians recording themselves was fine. But then I would talk to studio people who were more trained than me, and they were like, “Goddammit, this industry’s going to shit.” I’m like, I just had a client come and record two days of drums to take home and do overdubs on them, or I’m mixing. I mix things that are home recorded every week and it’s fun.
Yeah, when I think of Dump or Sentridoh, those are amazing.
East River Pipe.
I’ve had bands give me those kinds of recordings and it sounds better than the album that came out after that. I’m like, why did you change it? Not everyone has an ear for details.
When you think about wine tasting, being a sommelier is diligent work. You have to learn how to taste the wines and what they are and compare and contrast. To me, it’s like that. It’s not like, oh, Larry was born with perfect ears. But all through high school, I was like, WHY? Why does this record sound better than that record? Who worked on it? Tony Visconti, oh OK. I’d be like, why does their new album sound like shit and their first album was great, and I’d wonder. I’d ask questions and read things and try to figure out why. I think that curiosity and building those listening skills when I was young was really important. I’d be like I don’t want to hear cassette hiss and tape noise, I want to hear the music.
What are some strange recording locations you’re aware of?
Oh, Elliott’s Either/Or is like all over the place. My basement, JJ’s extra office space, his house, Joanna’s apartment, the Heatmiser house that they rented to make Mic City Sons, at Rob and Tom’s in Arcata. It’s recorded all over the place and some of the spaces are not perfect. He probably didn’t remember half the time where he was recording stuff cause he didn’t keep notes, I’ll tell you that. It’s kind of cool because if you’re a really good musician you have other kinds of listening skills. When he would record things, he’d go, that’s not quite right, and he’d do it again and fix it or remove something. I’ve seen that with other really good musicians or recording people that deliver really good work. They’ll stop and redo something to make it sound more appropriate. The musician’s instinct leads them to the right songs. Someone like Stephin Merritt, a really good arranger too. Even if you gave him 8 tracks, he would be putting things on there that mattered. And that’s what Elliott would certainly do. Everything was very arranged. There weren’t parallel multitracks full of garbage on every track. They would be like, this comes in here and does that. And Stephin certainly works the same way.
Some people record in places where the noise is bound to get in.
I’ve dealt with having people send me stuff to mix and I’m like, you must live right next to a bus line. They’re like, how’d you know? There’s a thing called spectral view where you can see all the frequencies and energy and time and high and low end and I can see buses drive by and slow down. You can visually see a representation of all this stuff. But when you think of a Daniel Johnston cassette back in the day, it’s good cause it’s so compelling. Any good album, something happened to make it that good. It could be the way four people play music together is just so good, you just record it live and that’s it, or someone just wrote something so good. It’s all those different things. That amazing part of an album has to come from somewhere. If your mind stays open to that, that could be amazing and done in an expensive studio but still be great but that doesn’t always make a great record. But also something poorly recorded like the mono cassette recorder sitting on the piano for Daniel would only work if your song is so good it overcomes the format. In the middle is the balance of all that. That’s a really good way to think about it. Plus it’s contrast. Maybe you’re recording and you put something that’s super high fidelity and then you put something against it that’s not. That makes things more interesting.
What’s one song that has the perfect sound?
I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan. I really like the way those records sound. When I listen to them, it always feels very intentional. It’s hard to pick, maybe “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” on Wish You Were Here. It lures you in and does all these things. That’s kind of amazing to hold someone’s attention while being slightly glacial. I always put that album on and get lost in it and think wow. That’s a piece of good intuitive writing, great lyrics, and the musicians are all adding something unique to the feel of it.
When you do interviews, do you go and meet people where they are? What’s the weirdest place you’ve gone to?
Sometimes. The first interview [in the new book] is Snuff Garrett. For a while I was living in Bisbee, Arizona, and he lived nearby in Sonoita. So I went to his house three times. His passion was singing cowboys. He had an office full of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and paraphernalia on the ceiling. His office was like a museum. That was really fun. With T Bone Burnett, we met at some upscale hotel in New York and got given like a meeting room. It was kinda fancy, like being in a salon. Brian Eno had us come to his studio, where I think he does music upstairs but he never showed us. But he does painting downstairs.
So you’ve done at least 175 issues? I feel so inadequate, for having done so few.
When I started, I talked to Sean Tejaratchi, who did Crap Hound, he was a big influence. He helped do some of the early covers and stuff. I said, what are the guidelines you’d give me for doing a zine? He’s like, if you’re late, don’t apologize but try to be on time. Just stick to a schedule and get the magazine out. So that’s one of the things I’ve always tried to do. Early on it was four times a year.
That’s good advice. Not very zinelike though.
I was like, why apologize? Most people aren’t going to notice. There’s something to be said about that, like a band that takes 5 or 6 years to make one record or starts a band, 5, 6 years later, one record comes out, all their energy went into it, it didn’t do what they expected and they break up.
Oh my god, it’s classic.
Just do the Robert Pollard thing. Just put out a bunch of records. Don’t worry about it. It’s all gonna be part of your back catalog. It won’t matter.
Expectations are a big part of the musician experience.
Mostly they’re delusional. That’s the hardest part to manage. Cause people go, man, we put so much work into this, and then someone else puts it on and goes, “yeah, I don’t like it.” It’s the most easily dismissable art form in the world because someone tastewise doesn’t like it or they don’t have time for it. I was a music director for a while at a radio station and you’re inundated. Now I get all the download links, I can’t keep up.
Everything has a label that isn’t really accurate these days too.
“Post hardcore psych pop”… none of that makes any sense. The word lo-fi has been completely co-opted to mean something else. All sorts of weird things.
What else did you learn about interviewing people? For me it was kind of a way to bust out of being shy.
Don’t be too worried about having questions but do the research. If you interrupt and don’t ask a follow-up question, and ask a dumb newer question, that sucks balls. Don’t do that. I learned to just make sure to ask follow-up questions. When I interviewed Brian, he’s like, basically, this is boring and shifts gears.
You’re Brian Eno, you can talk about whatever you want. There is a temptation to fill the void of silence when someone is pausing and thinking about the question.
At the end I ask pointed questions to fill in the gaps. That kind of skill helps a lot. Keeping it conversational so it’s still pleasant to read. I won’t let the writers do email interviews. I’m like, no. I don’t do that. I like zoom more than phone interviews. But in person is so great. You get a much better read through body language.
What’s your favorite way to spend your day off? Do you listen to music at home?
I’m married to a drummer. We met through the music scene, we love music, our first hangout was at Satyricon at a Spinanes show. I come home and music’s on. It always brings me pleasure and I don’t analyze it all the time. Sometimes I take a quiet moment. I went to Clyde’s Prime Rib the other night. I like sitting in the bar side during happy hour. I like all the microbreweries around Montavilla or the Academy Theater. Go see movies, bands.
Records Larry cannot live without
“I am not much of a list person and what I listen to changes all the time.”
Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
Wire – 154
Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth
Brian Eno – Discreet Music
Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures
The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat
Scrawl – He’s Drunk
The Go-Betweens – 16 Lovers Lane
The Byrds – The Notorious Byrd Brothers
The Soft Boys – Underwater Moonlight
