On the value of endless curiosity

Larry Crane is the founder and editor of Tape Op magazine and co-editor of the book Making Music: Conversations with Record Producers. He’s also a recording engineer, producer, and the owner of Jackpot! Recording Studio in Portland, Oregon. He plays bass, has been in bands since the 1980s (including Vomit Launch), and serves as archivist for the estate of Elliott Smith.

John Baccigaluppi is the publisher and graphic designer of Tape Op magazine and the co-editor of Making Music: Conversations with Record Producers. He is also a recording engineer, producer, studio owner, ex-skateboarder, and a beginner surfer.

Tape Op’s been around for a few decades now. How do you keep a project that’s been going for that long creatively exciting?

Larry Crane: I think the thing that really works about doing this magazine, and doing it this long, is that I’ll simply never know everything there is to know about making records. Between John and me, we know a lot, but we still meet people all the time who know things we don’t. I think that’s why there have only been a few times over the years where I’ve felt burned out on it, or less inspired.

I run a studio, I do recording sessions, I’m mixing, I’ve always been very involved in the things I write about. I don’t want to disparage the magazines about making music that came before us, but they were usually more technical, talking about new gear and stuff, and a lot of times they weren’t as actively involved in making albums as John and I are. For me, those things feed into each other. The art of making records is always changing, and keeping up with that, meeting new artists, learning about new ways that people are producing their work—that’s what I will always care about. Even though we’re now guys in our sixties, the most important part of it is still the artists and the records, so continuing to learn is what keeps things exciting.

John Baccigaluppi: Especially now, you’ve got so many younger people coming into music with a completely different perspective from what we grew up with. Back when we started, getting access to make a record was difficult. There was a serious degree of gatekeeping by labels and studios. Now anyone can make a record on their phone. We’ve had to change how we run our studios and interact with artists to adapt to that. You could complain about it, but why would you? It is what it is. I think it’s great! I really embrace it. It’s exciting to work with younger artists who have a completely different perspective from what we grew up with.

Also, I think the collaboration aspect of it is a huge reason it stays exciting. Larry and I have been working together for more than 30 years, and I still really enjoy working with him. If we didn’t like each other, I doubt this thing would still be going.

How does being so close to the creative side of making music change the way you approach an interview?

Larry: Running recording sessions is directly helpful in how I approach interviews. The other day I was editing an interview John had done, and there was a moment where the musician mentioned something about tracking, and I thought, “Oh my god, I can so relate!” I’d had almost the exact same conversation with a client just the day before. For me, it really helps to be not only an interested party but also a practitioner. I couldn’t imagine doing Tape Op without also producing and recording musicians myself. I mean, I’m not a journalist, I’m not trained in it. But I definitely know what matters to the people who make records, because I make them myself.

John: A lot of the people we interview are colleagues and friends we’ve worked with on music. Sometimes I’ve known someone for years, in and out of my studio, before I feel comfortable enough to say, “Hey, you want to chat for Tape Op?” I guess it’s a little awkward. You’ve had a real world relationship with this person, and now it’s like, “OK, we’re rolling tape.” But it gives us a pretty different perspective than an interview done cold, over the phone, with someone we don’t really know and are just talking to because they have a new record out.

We both try to do interviews in person as much as we can. These days we’re on Google Meet and Zoom a lot, but a lot of what we do is still in person, and I think that makes a big difference. Seeing someone in person, in their own space, tells you things you can’t get out of a cold conversation. There’s a guy I interviewed in L.A. who I later realized had worked in my studio without my knowing it. It was amazing to go to his place and see him working on cartoon soundtracks, playing with synthesizers, in this messy, fun space that matched exactly how his head worked. It gave me way more questions to ask than I’d have had otherwise.

What do people misunderstand about the role of a producer?

Larry: Oh boy. Everything! And that’s because producing can mean so many things. If you run through a list of some of the world’s most well-known producers, you’ll see that the role can mean almost anything. People put too much weight on what a producer does. But they also put too little! The truth is somewhere in between. I have my own definition for how I approach it, I guess, which is more or less about being the person responsible for helping an artist make a record.

John: I think that’s exactly why this is still fun and interesting to do after 30 years. There’s so much possibility and variance in the subject matter. Yeah, at a high level we’re still publishing pieces about the same thing, but it’s also not the same thing at all as it was back then.

As you’ve been talking, I keep thinking about how producing a record and shaping a good interview have a fair amount of things in common.

Larry: I agree. Doing an interesting interview and producing a record have a lot in common, actually. People have told me after an interview, “You totally produced that.” I think of an interview like capturing basic tracks: you get the raw material, and the whole time you’re clocking what needs more. What you need to circle back to, what to overdub. By the end, the person’s like, “You made these ideas flow.” Sometimes people are guarded and you’re trying to find a way to get real detail out of them without pushing past what they’re comfortable with. And sometimes people are the opposite. Too open, treating the interview like it’s supposed to be their memoir, when really it’s just a few pages in a magazine. Guiding things so they strike the right balance reminds me a lot of producing a record.

John: Both with producing and interviewing, it comes down a lot to just getting to know people and making editorial calls about how to get to the best version of the thing. With producing, you’re spending time talking and listening to music with them before you’re ever in the studio together, so you already have a sense of where the boundaries are. It’s changed with digital recording, of course. On tape, if there were no tracks left, you had to erase something to try another idea. Now you can give people almost infinite room to experiment and meander, and the tradeoff is you’re left wading through all those ideas afterward. I think a lot of a producer’s job now is encouraging people to let their mistakes go. We’re at a point where it’s so easy to make a technically perfect recording with zero flaws, but the results can often be pretty boring. Half of a producer’s job is saying, “No, that vocal is good. Don’t fix it, because it won’t be better.” I’ve had sessions where an artist keeps pushing me to tune their vocal and I’m like, “Nah, this take feels real, a couple of bum notes doesn’t matter.”

Do you know the Peaches song, “Fuck the Pain Away”? I think about it a lot, because the released version, which ended up becoming pretty iconic, was from a live performance, not long after she’d written it. It was recorded on cassette off a soundboard at a club, and she bought the tape off the person who recorded it for five or 10 bucks just to have a demo of it. You can hear crowd noise faintly in the background. It’s electronic music, so it could easily have been tuned into oblivion and sounded completely different, but the track is perfect because of the spontaneity and “human-ness” in it.

John: Totally. There’s a real danger with music becoming sterile. A lot of the beauty is in where it’s mucked up a bit. I always keep that in mind when I’m working with musicians. In fact, I did a record recently where we ran an MPC’s drum programming into a live room and recorded the room sound along with it, just so it wouldn’t feel like it was plugged straight into a DI box.

What’s harder, and what’s easier, for artists coming up today compared to when you two were starting out?

John: The recording part is genuinely easier now. I don’t get calls for cheap studio demos the way I did in the ’90s, when a band needed something just good enough to get a gig. Almost anyone has access to something good enough to capture the raw idea. So when people do come into the studio now, there’s usually a more focused intent behind it. But the harder part is that artists have to manage themselves more. They become their own producers by necessity, for better or worse, and that’s sometimes a great opportunity and sometimes just too much to handle.

A lot of the artists I work with are great at making and recording music, but they’re frustrated by the marketing side. Having to be on social media constantly, documenting the process because it’s expected of them now. One of my favorite records right now was made by a friend who helps me garden, a guy in his 50s who was a touring musician years ago and just made an amazing record on his iPhone with one microphone. But yeah, he’s just not someone who’s gonna spend a lot of time on social media promoting it.

Larry: If I look at my own life, I was putting out cassettes of my own music at 18, trading them for a few bucks in the mail. I started playing in a band in ‘85, and within less than a year we’d been to a studio, put out a cassette, then a 7-inch, then an EP, then an LP. There was always a clear and obvious next step. I can’t see a path that clear for artists right now. People finish a mix and ask me, “What do we do with it?” And honestly, I don’t know. There was a lot more gatekeeping in the ’80s just to get access to a multitrack studio. That’s gone. But now the gatekeeping has moved: it’s easy to put your music on Bandcamp or the streaming services, but it’s much harder to get anyone to actually notice it.

John: I’d say it’s easier than ever to make a really good-sounding recording. It’s still very difficult to make a great, timeless one. A producer can help with that to some extent, but it mostly has to come from the artist.

How do you think about the tension between making art purely for its own sake and making something meant to reach an audience?

Larry: A lot of our readers are people who’d make music for themselves even without an audience in mind. If I made music right now, or John did, we’d be making it for ourselves. I wouldn’t be anticipating some kind of audience that cared. I don’t think it’s weird at all when people I mix for aren’t trying to play into the marketplace. This is something they believe in, and the marketplace of money and fame is close to an impossible goal if that’s the only thing you’re chasing.

At the same time, I recently worked on a single for a band who’s out on the road, playing with Foo Fighters, they’ve got a label behind them, and it looks like the old-school path, but it’s also come after years of them building a following and delivering incredible live shows. I see both things happening and I’m fine with either. I just love helping people make their art.

John: But I also think one of the points of making music is to communicate—to reach as many people as you can without compromising your communication. I really enjoy the act of making music, and I sometimes get completely lost in it. I had a head injury a few years back, and while I was recovering and working on some music, I realized how focused I was, and how much fun I was having. That part of the process comes from a very pure place. But it’s hard to put in huge, huge amounts of time on a record with someone if they’re not planning to take it anywhere at all.

I was at an event in L.A. last year talking to someone about the modular synth world, and he pointed out that a lot of people in that scene have no intention of making “music.” They just enjoy the process of creating and listening to sound. I found that really interesting. There’s a whole group of people doing it purely for fun, with zero audience in mind.

Is there a moment from a Tape Op interview that’s stuck with you over the years?

Larry: There’s a line from Jim Dickinson, who produced a bunch of amazing records, Big Star among them, that I didn’t believe at first. He said you have to steal the record from the artist. I thought, what a strange, almost rude thing to say. Jim was a straightforward, really fun, nice guy. I didn’t understand the comment at the time. Then a few years later I caught myself doing exactly that in a session. Nudging someone, saying “just try it this way real quick,” because I knew we needed to focus on a part, and I thought, Jim was totally right. So I think the lesson is: if someone tells you a way of working that sounds preposterous, keep an open mind, because you might not be ready yet to understand it.

I’ve had interviews where someone assumes I’m just a journalist, not really involved in the process, and then once we start talking, they start asking me questions back. “Wait, you have a studio? What have you worked on?” I was interviewing Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens once, and that conversation led to me engineering the Go-Betweens’ comeback record, because he found out I’d recorded Sleater-Kinney. People think of doing these interviews as a one-way thing—all about the artist—but relationships form inside that process, and they’ve enriched both our lives.

John: There’s a weariness some artists have about the whole publicity machine. I remember interviewing one half of a well-known duo, and I’d been told, “You’ve got fifteen minutes.” I went backstage, and the other person started to leave, assuming I only wanted to talk to the more famous one. I said, “No, no, we really want to talk to you, too.” We ended up talking for an hour, and they invited me to the show. They just weren’t expecting that. They were expecting the standard transactional, outsider-journalist thing. I think people have come to see Tape Op as something different, like an opportunity to talk to someone who actually understands what you’re doing.