Versus and Jackpot! Recording Studio
How a home studio leads to a "real" studio, and how conversations with artists shapes a magazine. -by Larry Crane
Another out of town band that ended up visiting my Laundry Rules Recording home studio in 1996 was Versus, the core members of which had been in Saturnine with Jason Asnes in NYC; see my previous post. I had first seen them at the X-Ray Cafe opening for Tsunami, Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson’s awesome band.
Versus blew me away. There were definite Mission of Burma vibes to what they were doing, but with guitarist Richard Baluyut and bassist Fontaine Toups singing together in unison and harmony, and some perfect dynamics, they quickly grew to be one of my favorite bands. I’m not sure that I met them that show (how did that not happen?) but I swear Calvin Johnson introduced Richard and I at a Reed College show soon after. Soon, Mark Robinson called from TeenBeat Records, saying he needed a song from Versus and they were out on tour on the West Coast. I think I saw them play the previous night, chatted a bit, and then they came by my house the next day. There wasn’t really a song “finished” yet, but somehow Richard gained inspiration from a disturbing home and porch he had seen in Portland after waking up in the morning, coming up with the words for “White Power Porch” right before entering my basement studio. The track appears on TeenBeat 221, 1997 TeenBeat Sampler as the first track.
They’d drop by Jackpot! a couple of years later to record a song for their album Hurrah. Much of that album had been done in a crazy, early-digital fashion by Richard’s brother James Baluyut, but the song I tracked (I think it was “Frederick's of Hollywood”) was super long and had to be ensemble-played instead of sort of pieced together via overdubs and such like most of the album. The song rocks! Hurrah was on Merge Records, who I finally met many years later.
The story here is the continuity, especially when taken in context of my previous post. Many bands and artists, even if they live completely across the country, end up being a sort of through line for a studio. Versus didn’t do entire albums with me at either space, but every time they’d be playing in Portland we’d hang out. I remember Richard and I talking about Tape Op Magazine right as it started in 1996. I posited that the mag would only cover unique recording scenarios (home setups, etc.) and not “normal” sessions like the ones Versus had. Looking back, I’m not quite sure WTF I was talking about. Richard flipped that on its head, describing some crazy shit they’d done in the studio on their recent album. He was so right; creativity in the studio can come in many forms. Conversations like that one absolutely helped form the focus of Tape Op. I even roped Richard into sitting in on an interview with the late Martin Phillips of The Chills at Portland’s La Luna venue, and I gave him interviewer credit though he thought I was being silly. But he was there, and knowing all these people across the US (and the world) was what made Tape Op what it is today. -Larry Crane