Quasi's Featuring "Birds" is one of my favorite records I ever recorded or worked on, and I feel it cemented a trust in me with other musicians around Portland when it came out. I know I helped make it, but with songs and performances like these how could it have been a bad album? As of 2024, the band is out on tour playing this album live with Joanna Bolme on bass. In part one, I described how I'd become friends with Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss even though I wasn't in their new band. I'd interviewed them in 1996 for my magazine Tape Op. I was busy in Elephant Factory, where I played bass and sang, Dewey Mahood played guitar, and Marila Alvares (my ex-wife) played drums. I remember one of my first questions when we started this album was, "How do you keep a band going with your ex?" I guess I knew them well enough to ask something so personal, and I did get some candid thoughts about it from Janet.
By November 1997, Jackpot! Recording Studio was still less than a year old. I was still learning to be a recording engineer, so I'd try to track sounds cleanly and simply. Our tape deck was a 16-track 2-inch MCI JH-16; one of the very first 2-inch MCI tape decks from Florida and a very unstable beast. I don't think it even had a tape counter at this point, so I'd mark song starts on the back of the tape with a China pencil and a big squiggle so I could see it as it passed by in rewind.
A lot of Quasi's songs at this point were based around Sam's RMI [Rocky Mount Instruments] Rock-Si-Chord electronic organ, and he'd plug it into a distortion pedal and his Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus solid state amplifier – "Our Happiness Is Guaranteed" and "The Happy Prole" are good examples of this sound.
Some songs were electric guitar based, with his late-'70s brown Fender Stratocaster ("Ape Self Prevails in Me Still"). Others used small parlor acoustic guitars ("Please Do"), Elliott Smith's upright piano ("The Poisoned Well", "You Fucked Yourself"), or Yamaha keyboard with harpsichord sounds ("It's Hard to Turn Me On"). The band was well rehearsed, and I'd seen them play most of these songs live a bunch of times. When you went to a local Quasi show back then, the entire crowd was full of musicians; every band and player in town would be there watching intently as Janet spun out the coolest drum fills while singing harmonies and Sam regaled us with tales of loss, work, and woe while humping his keyboard.
I may have been trying to record simply and safely, but I did pop up with a few ideas. On "It's Hard to Turn Me On" we needed a bassline, but it also felt like we wanted something that would support the low end but stay out of the way. I came up with the idea of playing the bass pedals on Sean Croghan's Hammond L102 organ (one of the many "donated" instruments in Jackpot!), but recording through a gate triggered from the kick drum to turn the bass notes off and on, creating a hypnotic pulse. Sam sat on the floor as we tracked it, and we all loved this feel for the song. Sam had a tape loop on his Fostex reel-to-reel of some classical music, and we flew that in on the outro (after their recorder ensemble came in). In some ways I think we were making a prog rock album, and as Sam and I are both huge fans of early Yes this made a lot of sense. Even though Quasi was a live duo, nothing felt like "too much" in the studio. If it made the song better, it was in, and Sam and Janet's arrangement ideas were always spot on. Nothing ever felt like the wasted time and lack of direction I'd encounter with some bands in the future, and if an idea didn't work right away it'd be abandoned. All of us had made enough records by then as artists that we knew how to keep moving forward, and there was no worry about "how do we play this live?"
Joanna Bolme and Elliott Smith were in and out of the studio a lot, curious as to how it was going, as was Janet's awesome sister, Julie Weiss, and a number of friends. They all became "executive producers" in the credits, and it's funny to see them listed on sites like Discogs in this way. Ha ha.
Charlie Campbell, then of the Portland band Pond (not the current band that uses the name), came in to play guitar on Janet's sole song, "Tomorrow You'll Hide", and had this amazing technique of using a slide in a backwards way that blew me away. The tone becomes incredibly haunting, although it's hellish to keep in pitch! Janet's song is so beautiful, and it really added the wide variety of songs on this album.
We went a mastered this album with Tony Lash (who'd been in Heatmiser with Elliott Smith and is a great engineer/producer). During the process, Tony said something along the lines of, "You should really consider a producer for your next record." Janet and Sam both bristled at this and responded with, "But we're happy with the album." I didn't even think he was out of hand, as I still felt like a junior engineer. But I do still think this record sounds just like it should, and I did go one to record a majority of the following album, Field Studies, and I think that album sounds even better. I was learning, and Quasi helped push me in the studio and make me so much better.
After mastering, I got a nice call from John Golden as he was cutting lacquers for the vinyl version of this LP, informing me that the snare drum was out of phase with my overhead mics, and he was having to work extra hard to cut a good lacquer. He patiently explained how to fix this problem. I still had my initial Mackie 32x8 console that had no polarity switches on it. Almost all consoles do (in the real world), and this allows you to flip phase 180 degrees and solve problems like this. I learned more about phase and polarity, built some phase flip patch cables, and began looking for a better console.
We reconvened a few months later in 1998 to cut "Unto Itself" b​/​w "Kiss The Snowman" for Kill Rock Stars' Mailorder Freak 7" Singles Club, and these songs are even on the tail end of the 2-inch reels for Featuring "Birds". Seeing here handwriting on the track sheets, it looks like Joanna Bolme was helping track this one, though the single has no credits at all!
After Featuring "Birds" was released Elliott Smith was in Jackpot! tracking with me on one of his many return visits, and he asked me, "Who do you think that song 'The Poisoned Well' is about?" It was a harrowing question, and I had to painfully answer with what I assumed to be true, "You", even though Sam had never said anything directly to me about the song.
"You won't live long, but you may write the perfect song.
Please excuse those who choose to not play along."
Quasi, "The Poisoned Well"