Looking Back to Look Forward
Celebrating Jackpot! Recording Studio's past in order to move into the future. -by Larry Crane
A few weeks ago, Sam Coomes of Quasi dropped by the studio to pick up a tape I’d archived for the band. I’d found a song on the end of a reel that it looked like Joanna Bolme had tracked (it’s in her handwriting!), and I was working up a quick mix for Sam and his bandmate Janet Weiss to check out.
I was excited, as I’d never heard the song, so I said, “Hey Sam, come in; check this out.” I played about three seconds of vocals and Sam said, “No, I don’t want to hear it. It’s a failed song; leave it be.” I asked if he wanted a rough mix, and he replied, “No, I really don’t want to hear it again. I have lots of songs like that that didn’t make the cut. I want to move on and do new music.”
It made me stop and think about how I promote my studio and how people perceive it. A band or musical artist operates completely differently than a studio. With any recording studio, we base our business off of all the music that has been recorded here. Those records and such are the items that generally send people our way – by capturing music in a way that people appreciate we have proved that we have the ears to make the right choices, the equipment to make it sound decent, and rooms that allow people to perform together.
If you as a studio (and engineer/producer/whatever) is in the right place to work on music that other musicians get into, you’ve hit gold. But you can’t (usually) base a steady career around just one of these records or artists. My own studio and resume were definitely abetted by working with Elliott Smith, Quasi, The Go-Betweens, The Walkabouts, Richmond Fontaine, She & Him, and so many other artists that other musicians admire.
I remember handing Chris Eckman of The Walkabouts a cassette of my Go-Betweens rough mixes (in secret) and basically co-producing their next album (Ended up a Stranger) based on that.
Part of the reason I’ve been doing this Jackpot! Recording Studio Substack is to promote what we’ve done here in the past, hoping that people recognize the history we’ve built up since 1997.
If I was in a band or a busy solo artist, I would certainly agree with Sam, and want to constantly move forward with new music and find fresh things to do and say with my tunes. I would also hope to be proud of past accomplishments as well. But I would bet that every musician and songwriter out there would say the same thing. But running a studio business is a very different prospect, and we have to keep in mind that people never seem to read credits or know where records were made, and part of our job as a studio is to keep reminding people what happened here, so that more cool things can come in the door and make something new happen!
You two are on and on about sharks. I don't think I mentioned any sharks in my piece. But anyway, artists can invest in their archives or not, it's up to them. But studios have to promote their past to make money in the present. That's for sure.
So a bit of quasi-Quasi on that reel...I do wonder (but expect to never know) if it was still transferred. I would guess it had been already, but Coombes had no joy with it before and previously decided to let it go, so as to preserve the most precious attribute left to the working musician, his time. All the more prerogative to him, and for Jackpot!'s founder for also striving to move forward but at the same time realizing this and other stories is what makes his space attractive for others to record in, and choosing to share this with us.
I would say there's a certain profile of artists like sharks, but there's all sorts of sea (and land) life which allow the opportunity to exploit this simile a bit more. A more crustacean approach would have scraped it off and put it out as one of those box set filler tracks with demos and ideas, and that could still happen one day. Larger creatures would just stay submerged in the deeps, meaning the studio signs an NDA preserving their confidentiality, but to the detriment of those interested in the history of records and recordings. More skittish pescaria would find themselves in great numbers against the invariable trawler's net, working the laws of probability in their favor...preserving EVERYTHING on reels and DATS and cassettes...but needing great skill and lots and lots of that precious commodity again...TIME...on the part of the curator to distill what needs to be heard versus what...doesn't.