Jan 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Chris Michie

The Complete Mark Pinske Interview
by Chris Michie

DAY THREE

[Pleasantries.]
Pinske: Unfortunately, what Zappa got in the habit of doing is mix-and-matching so many things on a record. He would do a record of some old stuff, and then he would just all of a sudden throw a couple new songs on there. He never had--like I told you about "Thing-Fish." "Thing-Fish" was actually a really neat, slick, and trim kind of a show when we first did it. And then he kind of got into stretching it out by throwing in all those new versions of--different lyrics to some of the songs that were on YAWYI. Just making up stuff to kind of stretch it out. And I found that kind of being--not just as I look back on it, but as we were doing a lot of the projects, sometimes we would have like a really, really good two-sided album. And we'd end up making a double album out of it. And this is what Bennett Glotzer, which is his personal manager, always accused us of. We were always making double albums. And Frank, a lot of times, wanted to give his fans their money's worth. But like in the case of "Drowning Witch," for instance, it ended up being a lot better single album.

Mix: Did he assemble it as a double album, and then cut it back?
Pinske: No. Not on "Drowning Witch." As a matter of fact, we were doing "Crush All Boxes," that one album I was telling you about, [as] a double album, and then his manager said the record company only wanted a single album. So we kind of just shifted over and did "Ship Arriving Too Late" then.

Mix: Now I'm confused, because I thought "Crush All Boxes" was somehow connected to "Tinsel Town Rebellion."
Pinske: No, not at all. "Tinsel Town Rebellion" was a collection of all kinds of recordings from pretty much--a lot of them were before my time. We took recordings like--see, I overdubbed on a lot of them. I overdubbed all these vocals on top of them, like "Fine Girl" and a lot of pieces like that. We had backstage tapes from George Douglas, which was basically just the machine in the dressing room. I noticed when I was looking through all the albums that they credited George like on some of the original guitar albums. The guitar album that came out later, I did. But all the original "Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar" albums were collaborations of different tapes, just like "Tinsel Town Rebellion" sort of was. Which was really just a tape recorder in a dressing room that we rolled in every time during the show. And that was a whole different setup than the UMRK remote. So, when they say "UMRK remote," it wasn't really the UMRK remote then.

Mix: Zappa makes references to the guitar solos on "Joe's Garage," which he says were recorded on a 2-track Nagra, which only had guitar on it, and somebody would just turn it on for solos and then turn it off again.
Pinske: I think Claus Wiedemann had something to do with that. That was before my time, as well, when they were doing a lot of the Nagra stuff.

Mix: Then you had a 4-track out of the console, and then an 8-track out of console.
Pinske: Not necessarily out of the console. We did do some 4-tracks out of the console, but we ended up getting them away from the console, and putting some of them backstage. Claus Wiedemann originally took an 8-track, and then George Douglas kind of took over the 8-track.

Mix: And they were doing separate mixes, or they were taking submixes from you?
Pinske: It was a little bit of a combination of both. It was kind of like the baby--like the birth of how we ended up doing things on a much more elaborate scale later. In the experimental stage, we were experimenting how to do it. The problem we had was, number one, we didn't have a remote truck, so we were really in a machine, so we were splitting off the signals in multiple ways. They might take a mix, for instance, a left and right mix of all the drums, and then they would take their own kick drum, and their own snare, and their own hi-hat. And I would give them a stereo pair of tom-toms, all the tom-toms, and a stereo pair of overhead cymbals. For a while, we even had the hi-hat in the stereo pair of cymbals. And then they would combine those down to just one stereo pair on the 8-track. So we were at the mercy at however well the blend was. What happened is, the monitoring conditions kind of got out of hand. We would stick a tape machine--say for instance we would be in a civic center or something--and there'd be a tape machine back in the dressing room. And then you set up a couple of portable speakers. Well, the monitoring conditions obviously weren't very controlled. So you would get variables between show to show, because there was not really a consistency of even where we were listening, into the stuff. But we would do the best we can. A lot of the times, Frank mainly wanted to get the solos and stuff like that. That's what he started out with with the Nagra. The Nagra kind of started out, in "Baby Snakes" movie--I don't know if you've ever seen the "Baby Snakes" movie . . .

Mix: I never have, no.
Pinske: Well, Adrian Belew's wearing a wax suit on it, and he goes backstage. And he talks through a mic that's on a portable Nagra, that was running this SMPTE time code on it, and he talks right in and goes something like, "I don't know why I'm doing this. I don't know how I ever got talked into doing this." And it was really kind of interesting, because you had to take the audience mics, you had to go backstage and take the Nagra recording of him talking into it and kind of have the audience sound in the background, like you're going backstage in an auditorium. So it was quite interesting. Frank got into that kind of stuff a lot. Like we did the airport tapes, and things like that. He'd have me record at an airport. I would record in motel rooms. We would set up a little portable--sometimes even a cassette.

Mix: Just any tape machine with a stereo mic, and you kind of wander around with it?
Pinske: Yeah. As a matter of fact, the first time I did the girl that we used on "The Torture Never Stops," I think we did it in mono, and then he had me rig his motel room in stereo, to do a better job the second time. [Laughs.] It was pretty funny. We got into some funny stuff. But what I'm basically getting at is, a lot of the recording techniques, and the amount of money we were spending and everything else, kind of evolved into saying, "Look, we just gotta do a better job at all this. We want better quality recordings, because we're missing some really good live performances here." And Frank's whole theory was, the band's never as psyched-up--what he didn't like is going out and doing a tour, then bringing the musicians into the studio. He claimed they were never as psyched-up as they were when they were on tour in front of an audience. And they would play these songs for three months on the road, and they come back and they just wouldn't have the pizzazz they did. They wouldn't play it as well.

Mix: As far as I can tell, "Tinsel Town Rebellion" and other stuff is done from tapes made out specifically, like a four-night stand at the Hammersmith Odeon, and a night at the Berkeley theater, and a night at Santa Monica.
Pinske: The Santa Monica Civic, we took a 24-track in on that one.

Mix: Right. So there's a lot of tracks that turn up with those recording dates on them.
Pinske: Tower Theater in Philadelphia, Santa Monica Civic, if I remember correctly. And those tapes were done, actually pretty darn good, because we had a more elaborate miking setup on stage.

Mix: That was a real live-recording date, like "Live at the Roxy" or in New York. You had a remote truck and splits and all that, right?
Pinske: No, we didn't have the remote truck. No, not on those gigs. They were done in the Santa Monica dressing room, the auditorium concert in 1980. We didn't have our own truck until 1981. At the Roxy in New York, and at one of the other shows in New York, we did rent a truck. We had the Record Plant truck one year. I'm trying to remember what other truck we used. We used the Record Plant mobile one year, that Allen Sides helped out with. And there was a couple of times in there where we had the truck. But when we did the Santa Monica Civic, we didn't have the truck. We had a 24-track back in the dressing room. You'll see reference to that. There's kind of a mistake on a couple of the credits that were done later, I noticed when I looked on the Internet. Where they just said "George Douglas, UMRK mobile." It was no UMRK mobile. If you search deeper, you find it was on mobile equipment, but we moved it around and put it where we wanted. It was no actual facility. And they were pretty good recordings, some of those. They came out rather well. But keep in mind now, that "Tinsel Town" was the first real album that came out of the studio, so we took the live albums and then we sweetened some of them up, like in "Fine Girl," we added the vocals. We did one whole studio cut there, too, on that. In my opinion, "Tinsel Town" was kind of a conglomerate. It was a great album. It was kind of a potpourri of things. Kind of like what the cover looked like.

Mix: You said he spent 3.5 million on building the studio, which brings up the question, "how did he finance it?" As far as I know, Warners pretty much had him tied up. He must have had some of his royalties tied up.
Pinske: Most of that was all paid for before I got there. As you know, Frank was like a record machine. He put out products, one way or the other, whether it was through the companies. He had two bad experiences that he talked to me about a number of times, and I won't get into a whole lot of detail about them, with Bizarre and DiscReet Records. By the way, some of that harmonica playing you asked me about last time was actually Captain Beefheart. When I thought about it later, I realized what it was you were talking about. He started those those companies, and did a certain amount of investment in some other artists as well, Captain Beefheart being one of them, and both those companies pretty much went under.

Mix: Or disappeared along with Herb Cohen.
Pinske: Right. So by the time I got there, he had already made up his mind that he was going to do it differently. He was going to pay for his records, but cut deals with record labels to where the record labels would buy the product. And most of the deals we did, we were with Phonogram/Mercury when I started out with him, and we'd gone through Capitol Records and MCA. We did a big long stint with a number of different labels. CBS, obviously. CBS was so weird, because we did CBS--it was like two separate companies when you talk about internationally and when you talk about domestically. We weren't treated the same at all. But he would do a deal to where we would pay for the record, they'd reimburse him for all the recording expenses, but they basically would do distribution, and then he would give the record company 15 percent. So Frank ended up making, in those days, like $2.25 off each record sold. And that's unheard of. It was unheard of compared to what somebody like Dylan--we talked about him last time--would make 18 cents a copy. And Frank would always say, "You know how many albums you gotta sell to make the same amount of money? I could sell 400,000 albums, and you'd have to sell 3 million to make the same amount of money." That kind of thing. The logic was that Frank knew business really well. So what I'm saying is, he kind of set a precedent in a way. He kind of started something that almost set an example to original artists all around the world. By having that kind control, he was able to take more money in, and not have to have all Platinum albums. Because he knew his music was off-the-wall enough, and wouldn't be played on radios and stuff like that, that he couldn't get that kind of volume. So he set up his business accordingly. He was very clever about it. He also--don't get me wrong--he made a lot of the money from a lot of the first albums, even before the lawsuits ever started. How he collected all his money, and how he saved it all up, and how he finally got enough money together to finance the studio, I don't know all the details of that, but I know is was just about paid for when it was built. And then when we got the settlement, of course, everything was paid for.

Mix: Three-and-a-half million for a studio, you'd have to make 35 albums at $100,000 in cost an album, to amortize that off.
Pinske: Well, the bulk of his money still came from live performances. He got paid well for performing, and also, he sold a heck of a lot of memorabilia. That whole Barfko Swill stuff, and Barking Pumpkin Records. Joe's Garage warehouse out there was just a regular--whatever you could put in the mail. T-shirts, you name it.

Mix: That came a little later, though, didn't it?
Pinske: Well, it came later in a bigger swing, but they were doing it all along in kind of a smaller scale. Most all the stuff was at a smaller scale, and we just got better at it as we went.

Mix: Do you know what led to him ending his relationship with Bennett Glotzer, who I think had had something to do with helping him out of his Warners troubles? Or maybe he was just a hired gun.
Pinske: That part I don't know. Bennett was pretty much his personal manager most of the time I was with him. Frank pretty much controlled the business. Let's be straight about that. But I know that Frank also had a big change of heart near the end, when he started getting a lot more sick. He cut a deal with Rhino Records, I think he got $22.2 million, or something like that, for the whole library. On top of the other money he had. Because he wanted to take care of the family and everything. And I think there was fall-outs as far as just the way they wanted to do business. Bennett, a lot of the times, got into things, and a lot of it really wasn't my business, but I would be there sometimes when they talked about it. Like I know Bennett got his percentage right off the gross. And the exception to that was, when we--the recording costs, and money we would spend recording--so when I built the recording truck, Bennett was quite upset. Because that money came off the gross, and then his 15 percent was lower because we were spending the money on the recording. I know for instance--like he would call me up--because it was just me and Frank a lot of the time, in the control room. A lot of times there was nobody else there--and Bennett would go--I think we had like $125- or $130,000 budget we set aside to do the "Drowning Witch" album, for instance, right? And I remember Bennett called me up, and we were over budget when we decided to do that extra song, "Valley Girl," which I told you about last time. He says, "You gotta hold Frank down. We're over budget. You guys already spent $130,000. You're on you're way to 140,000," when he looked at the money we were spending for the extra musicians singing, the union scales and all that kind of stuff. And I told Bennett, I said, "What do you suggest that I do? You got a guy that owns his own studio." It wasn't really me in control, he was just venting. So even though he vented that, he never vented about the $2.5 million that "Valley Girl" made. You know what I'm saying? I never heard about that. So, what I'm saying is, when you had a windfall like that, with something that was that big of a hit, all of a sudden, his percentage turned into a larger-than-life deal.

Mix: You said you actually had a budget for "Drowning Witch."
Pinske: We tried to budget, yeah.

Mix: Is that all real expenditure, or was there a paper cost of studio time that you charged against--
Pinske: It was everything. I would keep, try to keep track, of accurate logs. Like for instance, if I went down to KenDun Recorders or Capitol Records or anywhere, we would have bills for all the mastering, all the time. I would have to sign off the receipts because I was the one there. Frank sent me on his behalf. So I had to keep track of all that. Sometimes we would get the bill, even though I would sign at the end of every session, sometimes we would get the bill, and the bill would be larger than the ones I signed off. So I kept track of all that stuff, and we added it all up. The price of the tape, the price of hours, how many hours everybody put in, the union scales, the basic things all had to--we kind of had to keep our hands on just to approximate where we were at there. It wasn't like it was a life-or-death thing, it was just that we would say, look, we don't want to spend any more than this on making this album. And that was always hard to keep down, because we would be working on multiple projects at the same time.

Mix: And then you would deliver acetates, or production master tapes to the record company, which would then actually give you--
Pinske: No, no, no. We never gave them the tapes. No. I would go cut, in the case of--depending on what era you're talking about, but I would go cut 27 sets of lacquers, is what we would do. Twenty-six or 27 sets of lacquers, and we would mail them all out to the different pressing plants. Like Belgium, we'd mail them to Belgium. We mailed them to South America. Whichever pressing plants we were doing.

Mix: And part of this is keeping control, and part of this is because you'd do the job better than they would?
Pinske: Well, he would never let anybody have his tapes. As a matter of fact, we would air freight the lacquers because, if the lacquers--you probably know that after 24 hours they start expanding and contracting. So you wanted to get them nickel plated as soon as you possibly could. Which was a problem when you're sending them around the world. And if they took too long getting there, they would expand and contract, and then you would have all this pre-echo, where the song starts before it actually starts. That kind of stuff would all come from the expansion and contraction of the lacquers. Later on, we moved into doing things at Sheffield, because we could just cut the metal masters right there ourselves, and we did all the metal parts ourselves. We'd send out mothers for stampers. And that way we had better control. And I think we--London Symphony was like--the better albums were pretty much like that. "Them Or Us," I think, was one of them. I'm pretty sure "Them Or Us" was somewhere around that time. When we started doing John Matousek. Isn't he the one who mastered that? Anything we did with John Matousek at Hitsville, we would take the masters, and I would go cut the metal parts over at Sheffield. And they would do what's called "groove sculpturing." When you had dust particles and things like that, that set up on there, they would shave them off, instead of just scrubbing them off with a brush. And you would have a lot less rumble and stuff. We took a lot of care, a lot of tender loving care to how we made the metal parts. And he paid for all that himself.

Mix: That was how he was able to go to the companies and just literally give them a distribution deal. Say, "Look, I've got a complete master, right down to the mothers."
Pinske: Right. And they basically had no expense in it. All they had to do was take 15 percent for distributing it, and they would get their money out of it. Providing it would sell enough. In a way, he kind of invented some of the ways of dealing with some of these companies, as a result of all the business things he had through. He learned a lot.

Mix: It seems there's always a good reason for what he did, and there's also some story as to what happened to him in the past that made him decide he needed a better way of doing it.
Pinske: One of the short stories he told me about DiscReet and Bizarre, which is like why people like the Grateful Dead and everybody else were struggling with these kind of things, was he would send records out. He tried to do his own distribution when you had your own record company. Let's say you send records out to, oh what, 2,000 record stores across the United States, and they take ten of your albums or twenty of your albums and they sell them, but they don't pay your bill. They pay Warner Bros. first because they want to get the next Doobie Brothers album, or whatever. His story was basically along the lines, Do you realize how many different laws there are, and how many different states, and how much it'd cost to get lawyers in every different state to just try to collect your money? It's a nightmare. So he learned from Bizarre and DiscReet that being your independent label isn't cool. It's insane. You don't get the proper distribution, really. There's mainly only three or five main distributors. In Belgium, the same pressing plant's used by Warner Bros. and CBS. Phonogram/Mercury, of course, is one of the big boys, so what he started doing is, he started playing cards with the big boys. And decided that he would go ahead and take his production so far, but when it came to distribution, he needed to get one of the big companies to do a distribution deal. And that all evolved off the lessons of the past that happened--a lot of them well before I came there, but he kind of talked to me about them sometimes when we were sitting around having pizza or something. And he would just give me why he does things a certain way. And it was kind of just teaching me a lesson. Which I found fascinating. Fascinating.

Mix: I'm curious about the old masters. I know there were three sets, and you worked on all of them.
Pinske: I transferred all of them originally.

Mix: This is all very confusing history, because the first question is, I take it that the stuff on Verve and MGM had gone out of print, but how come he didn't have those masters? Were they tied up in the Warner's suit?
Pinske: Yes. They were all tied up in the Warner's suit. Every one of them. There was, I don't know, some--the first 13 albums or something. I can't remember. Sixteen or so. All of them were tied up. "Ruben and the Jets," "Freak Out!" All of those were all tied up in the Warner Bros.' suit.

Mix: So until that was settled, he didn't get them back.
Pinske: He didn't have access to them.

Mix: And then you finally got them back, and discovered that, whether or not they were original stereo masters, many of them were unplayable, right?
Pinske: Well, "Freak Out!" was.

Mix: "Freak Out!" was . . . ?
Pinske: "Freak Out!" was stored where some air conditioner blew on it, and the oxide fell off. I used to keep logs of the different types of tape from 3M and whoever. Just about everybody, you always heard that Agfa or somebody had a bad brand of tape. Almost all the companies had tape of one sort or another that wouldn't store very long. And if it's stored with air conditioning blowing right on it or something like that, it would dry out too much and the particles would just kind of fall off. That was one of the cases with the "Freak Out!" album, which led us to getting the 12-track--most of them were 12-track, 1-inch masters.

Mix: So you had to reconstruct "Freak Out!" from the masters?
Pinske: I took all the original masters, as a matter of fact, for all the box-set stuff. Even though we had 2-track masters, I took the multitracks and striped them across onto the digital machines.

Mix: So this was after 1984.
Pinske: It was a very long process. And I was doing this--the whole time, when we got the stuff back, Frank was just--he really wanted to preserve the stuff the best way we could. And the best way we could preserve it was to put it into a medium, and preferably a digital storage medium, that wouldn't go south and wouldn't spoil. So my main first chore was to archive everything, and transfer it onto digital, take the original tapes, of course, and put them away, and play them as few times as I could. And then we would mix from the stuff we transferred. And then I did digital backups. This is another thing a lot of people don't know. Chris Stone down at Record Plant had some of the Sony 3324 machines as well. And we used to do each other favors and stuff like that. I took his machine, I would let him use our machine. What we did was, we put together--he had a pair of them, so I would use his machine, sometimes I would let him use our machine, so he could just put a digital ribbon from one to the other, and make an exact digital backup. So when I striped the original, the 1/2-inch tape, on 14-inch reels, that runs at 30 ips on the Sony, when I striped the original ones, instead of us editing and rerecording and punching in and doing things on the originals, I made digital-to-digital backups of the originals, and the originals just got put away in the vault and they were never played. And then the backup of the original, which is basically a digital clone, so there was no generation loss, is what we would use to do all our work on. We did the same thing with the London Symphony Orchestra. It pretty much became the standard. We would take literally 200 reels, and I would digitally backup the original masters.

Mix: So you were working in digital on this restoration project long before you took digital on the road? Because in '82 you were still doing 24-track analog live recordings.
Pinske: Oh, yeah. All analog in '82. The digital machine didn't come along 'til '83.

Mix: And that's when this whole old-masters project started, more or less?
Pinske: Well, we had played with different versions of it. I had put some of it across on the Studer, I'd put some of it across on analog. But once we did the London Symphony, which was really what broke us into the digital, and once we compared the simultaneous analog recordings along with the digital recordings, we pretty much were ready to just throw analog out. As a matter of fact, you know what Frank said? He made us take the two Ampex machines out of the control room, and he said, "Out with the Dark Ages." [Laughs.] That's exactly what he said. "Out with the Dark Ages." So when he made the decision to switch over, that's the way he was. He always was wanting to move forward. Once he decided it was good enough.

Mix: From that period on, anything that was on an analog source was copied over to digital, and then you'd work from there?
Pinske: Right. And a lot of times what I did is I tried to spice it up. Like I would noise gate it. We had 85 different noise gates in the truck, and we'd move some of the gates in the studio. I would gate out the noise, I would try to make the balance cleaner, so that we didn't have to deal with a whole bunch of junk after the balance was done. Because I figured, well, if I'm going to bounce this anyway, like a vocal, for instance, there's no reason for me to track across the hiss the whole time the vocal's not singing. So I would put everything through gates, and do a real, real careful, careful bounce to 'em. I would also match--do optimum levels, and things like that, because a lot of times the tracks wouldn't be at optimum levels. And I would try to balance things out so that what we'd end up with is basically a master tape that was a lot easier to work with.

Mix: The masters you were working from, were they more or less assembled in terms of were there lots of edits in the multitrack, or were they discrete pieces that then Frank would assemble into the resulting albums?
Pinske: No. Depending which we're talking about now. If you're talking about the old archive stuff, those were mostly all continuous reels. The live stuff, however, we razor-blade edited over to 2-inches.

Mix: No, I'm still thinking about the first three or four album reconstruction projects, like "Freak Out!" through "Lumpy Gravy."
Pinske: For me, you must realize, that's a lot later in my career, because I'd already had three or four years under my belt with Frank. So we kind of went back in time, and by that time we had had so many more recording techniques down, and we had improved so much in everything we were doing, that it was almost a good thing. But when we did get those tapes back from Warner Bros., they were all continuous reels. We didn't razor-blade edit those. We didn't dare screw around with those. We tried a couple 2-tracks, but they were too delicate.

Mix: Once you had the multitrack on digital and you could mix it any way you wanted, did you then reference the original albums and try and recreate the original mixes, or did you just mix it the best way that you thought?
Pinske: We did both. We would do both. As an example, I always liked the Mothers live at Fillmore. Remember, with Howie, and Flo and Eddie. Frank couldn't even remember where he got all the edits from to put that together. He had edited that thing silly. So when we tried to reconstruct that album, it was damn near impossible, because he couldn't even remember where he got what cut from. He edited together at the time, but when we played the different shows, it wasn't--it didn't fit. Certain parts and certain things they said didn't fit. So we'd have to hunt around and say, "Jesus, where's this next section?" [Laughs.] You're kind of right. In a way, we did get into a puzzle sometimes trying to find some of the missing elements when we tried to recreate stuff. And sometimes we just didn't find them. We were on the hunt for that thing in "Baby Snakes" for years. I think we finally found it at random, some little white tape in a box that was a Nagra tape. And sometimes the missing elements wouldn't just always be there, and Frank had to a lot of times go by memory.

Mix: It's "Fillmore East" and "Just Another Band From L.A." that's basically the same band a few months apart. Were they multitracks, 16-track recordings, or were they 4-tracks?
Pinske: Let me see. I don't remember that one.

Mix: They're generally considered to be not that great in terms of technical recordings.
Pinske: A lot of that older stuff, some of the stuff we only had 2-tracks. And some of them we only had 4-track. Because it was a conglomerate of stuff. The whole thing about it is, I'd almost have to go back a reconstruct each album, which would take way too much time. But I'd almost have to go back a re-live it because, like I told you, there was one album that was a 10-track 1-inch. Which is the only 10-track 1-inch that was ever existed. And the 12-track 1-inches were fine, but we would have some stuff on 8-track, some stuff on 12-track, one of the albums was a 10-track 1-inch, "From Cucamonga." And then there was a variety of stuff that would be on a 4-track and/or 2-track tapes. And sometimes the 2-track tapes were all we had. If that was the case, then I would bounce the songs across the best that I could. And I even did, even the "Freak Out!" one that was falling apart, I bounced whatever was good on it. We did everything from bake tapes in the oven that were sticking together, to--it was a stressful, painful amount of work. I did everything I could the best I could, with what you had to work with.

Mix: Which of these albums did you know from growing up? Were you a teenager when Frank's stuff started coming out?
Pinske: I knew the "Mothers Live at The Fillmore," because I laughed at that album a lot. But in general, I wasn't actually a Frank fan. When I auditioned, I wasn't all that familiar with so much of his work. And I think, in a way, that's what really helped me, because he didn't want a fan. He wanted an objective opinion, and it helped me. You can't help but become a fan of his once you work with him. But I wasn't a fan when I auditioned and when I first got the job. I liked that one album, but I always thought his stuff was really bizarre and off-the-wall. Looking at it from a musician's standpoint or whatever.

Mix: So when you came to reassemble "Lumpy Gravy" or "Cruising With Ruben and the Jets," it wasn't like this was your favorite album from high school or anything.
Pinske: No, not at all. In fact, that got me in trouble on the "Mothers Live at the Fillmore," because I knew that album word for word, and when it wasn't right, it bothered me. Nonetheless, we got around to most of it. Frank got a kick out of the fact that I actually at least knew one of this albums that well. But then, I went back and listened, of course, the whole time I was working with him, so that I could do my job better, and I referenced to the stuff. It's your job. You want to pay respect to it. And of course the fans know every damn bit of it.

Mix: There's a whole section of the Web devoted to the differences between the vinyl and the CDs.
Pinske: It was a drastic difference, unfortunately.

Mix: Presumably there are differences between the original vinyl releases and the "Old Masters" final releases.
Pinske: I know. And as a matter of fact, some of the bootlegs of like "Freak Out!" and stuff that we got from Italy, some of those sounded really good. Frank and I spent one day trying to find this one company, not so much to chew them out, but to figure out where the hell they got their artwork, and how they got the record to sound so good. Because some of those bootlegs were done very well.

Mix: In this case, these bootlegs were just pirated versions of existing catalog albums?
Pinske: That was one of Frank's pet peeves. All the time the lawsuit was going on, the only thing the fans could buy were bootleg versions. And of course, everybody in Europe jumped on the bandwagon and made bootlegs all over the place. There were bootlegs coming out of the woodwork. And some people would think that, when they bought the record, that Frank was getting money for it, but he never got a penny of any of it. And it was a shame. We tried to estimate, one time, just how much money he'd lost over that whole period of time, and there was no way of saying. It was all just an educated guess. And I think that had a lot to do with why he got the size settlement he did. Even though Warner Bros. didn't necessarily collect the money, but some bootleggers did. Unfortunately Frank didn't.

Mix: On tour, Ike and Ray were the two lead singers, right?
Pinske: Yeah. They both played rhythm guitar and sang.

Mix: Can you talk a little bit about their voices, the differences?
Pinske: Sure. They had very, very obvious differences in their voice. Ray was like a power singer. Could sing that real high voice, high-range stuff. And he'd belt it out. He could belt out anything, like a good, traditional blues, or "Illinois Enema Bandit," the kind of things that he would do. Ike was more like a character voice. I like to think of Ike more like when he was doing "Outside Now," or--his voice had kind of a character to it. Not just the funny stuff that he did like with "Thing-Fish," but the songs that he would sing. Unfortunately, Ike pushed his voice real hard, and his would be the first one to go kind of hoarse, and get a little bit rasp. So a lot of our recordings would have his voice a little bit on the hoarse side. And Ray was always the power singer that always held up. But when it came to being harmony-wise, it's really kind of magical, because they kind of knew right where to fall in around Frank. And when the three of them sang together, it was just a blend of it's own that was just terrific.

Mix: For a while you had Bobby Martin also singing vocals, right?
Pinske: Right. Well, there was Bob Harris, who was a friend that I got in at "Fine Girl," and then Bobby Martin came in after Bob Harris. And Bob Harris did all these high falsetto things. We used to call--remember, he had Roy Estrada in the original Mothers, who did all the falsetto stuff, and Frank used to say he ate clothespins for breakfast, because his high falsetto was so nasal. He used to just make a comment like, "he at clothespins for breakfast." [Laughs.] Bob came in with a real pure falsetto, and a real pure high range, and when Bob came in and started mixing with Ike and Ray, it was just a wonderful three-way combo. And that's where we built almost all these vocal harmony blends that we did on YAWYI and a lot of albums after that. Napoleon Murphy Brock came in and out of there for a short spell, too. And he had an even different kind of blend with those guys. But then when we auditioned for Bobby Martin, we went through a whole bunch of people. Once Bob Harris decided not to do the European tour, we had to find somebody that could take his place. Now, Bob played trumpet, keyboards, and sang. So when we ended up getting Bobby Martin, he played saxophone, keyboards, and sang. And Bobby Martin pretty much became a permanent fixture after that.

Mix: I think he played right up to the end, didn't he?
Pinske: He did. And he was very loyal. Plus, he did things like, he was the band director for Bette Midler, whenever he was off the road with us. He did other things on the side. He was a health freak, he was always very healthy, so his voice was always there, you could always count on him. He was a good keyboard player, and a pretty accomplished sax player as well, so he filled a lot of roles, and added a lot of interesting aspects to the live sound. And of course, he sang a mean "Whippin' Post" from the Allman Brothers. [Laughs.] But I think the audition, originally he sang something like, oh, some American ballad or something. It was always based off of, though--getting back to what you were talking about--the vocal blend. And Ike and Ray were almost always a part, a key part of that element. Because they fit with Frank's voice. Frank had a real low voice, and kind of a different voice, and not everybody's voice would blend well with his. A lot of times he would take the baritone parts, when they were singing four- and five-part harmonies.

Mix: On "Tinsel Town Rebellion", there are five guitarists listed. I guess that's 'cause there's two bands. For a while he had three other guitar players in the band with him. Steve Vai, Ray, and Ike. I wondered how you would mix for four guitars, or whether they arranged their parts so they weren't all playing on top of each other.
Pinske: Ray and Ike were always rhythm players. Ike was really a sparse type player. And Ray was kind of like the main rhythm player. You know how when you have a good rhythm guitarist, that holds the kind of body together. Ray a lot of times was responsible for playing the basic rhythm. The would give him an occasional solo, like in "Illinois Bandit" or something, I think he'd take a solo. Ike didn't usually solo. So Frank would normally solo, and then when we had Steve Vai, of course, he would normally solo, most of the time. So they weren't really conflicting with each other too much. The two rhythms were a little bit more sparse. We actually had a little bit more trouble with the multiple keyboards at some times. When we had Tommy Mars and Bobby Martin, for instance. And two rhythm guitars. Let's face it, a lot of this stuff would get real thick. That was one of the challenges about mixing any of Frank's stuff, is how do you keep the stuff separate? We tried to, a lot of the time, and you can notice this a lot on the vinyls. I'm not sure what Bob started doing on a lot of his remixing, but I know that on the original mixes that Frank and I did, we tried to create a more live feel. We would usually give a view of like the audience looking at the stage. Frank, for instance, would light the hi-hat on the right side because the audience looked at it from the stage. I had played drums in my life, younger, I always liked the hi-hat on the left side, like Chad Wackerman and most of the drummers would want it. But we would do our panorama, pretty much obviously the way Frank would want it. So we would build a panoramic view. Like the guitars may be on your left and the right, not all the way out, but somewhat panned in. The keyboards, of course, we would try to get as much of a stereo mix as we could on something like a string sound, fake brass or whatever, but we would do the keyboards in a kind of a pseudo-stereo. We got into doing this stereo-ising of just about everything. In other words, for instance, the bass guitar. We would use an 11-millisecond delay, or a 12-millisecond delay, a 9-millisecond delay, depending what key it was in. Then we would split the guitar--the bass up, so that it wouldn't pile up into the center. And that would keep the kick drum and stuff a lot clearer. So Frank would know--it was really ironic because--like if you were in the key of E, for instance, you may do 11 milliseconds, and some notes would cancel, because of the length of the sine wave. So you do one millisecond shorter, one millisecond less, it's have to be--depending what key you're in, you would set up the delay so that when they monitored them out, they wouldn't cancel each other out. So I would constantly do stereo referencing. And we would hit the Mono button--every time we did stereo separation like that, we would watch for two things. We would try not to be too far out of phase, because if you're too far out of phase, especially on low frequencies, the stylus would go nuts when you start cutting lacquers or whatever, and it would chew up the stylus, and you also didn't want to lose anything that would be in the mono image. Especially if you broadcast of FM radio, for instance. The multiplexes had a way of grabbing a hold of stuff, and what would happen is, the stereo multiplexes would take something that's too out of phase, and they would overreact, and you might listen to a song on the record and hear it on the radio and go, "Well, gee, what happened to the guitars?" The guitar levels would just about disappear. So we were constantly monitoring the phase correlation, and, of course, the relationship of delayed times. By doing this--say we would have a mono keyboard part. We could split the mono keyboard, with just a little bit of delay, put it at say, a panoramic view, like if you want to look at it at a clock, like nine o'clock to three o'clock, maybe put him at ten o'clock or two o'clock, and be able to get things out of the way, so that the lead vocal and the kick drum, and a few things that were total center image, would stay clear all the time. This is one of the tricks that we used with Frank all the time. Because he wanted his main voice to always be understood. We spent a lot of time trying to take--like what you said, a very thick sound--two rhythm guitars, two keyboards, almost always too much instrumentation, almost always very busy parts going on. A lot of clutter. And it was a real challenge. It was real frustrating from any engineering standpoint to try to keep all of that clear, and still have definition all that to survive. Especially considering the type of equipment and the [end of side.] . . . listen to him. He was kind of a percussionist at heart, you know. [End of side.]

Mix: I guess Aynsley Dunbar's possibly my favorite, and the stuff on "Waka Jawaka" and "Grand Wazoo" just sound brilliantly balanced to me. It's almost unlike most of his later work, in that it isn't very "in your face" in terms of the drums.
Pinske: No. In fact, we got a little too carried away with that. We got a little too "in your face," and I didn't argue with him about it. I just did what he wanted. We both did that. Both myself and Bob, depending who was doing the mixes.

Mix: There seems to be some reference in the newsgroups to the possibility that the kick drum on the Helsinki concerts was kind of sampled in or something.
Pinske: It was. It's called a Disco Boombox. It was made by dbx. It's a little thing called Disco Boombox. That's what the name of it was. You could spit into it and a kick drum would come out. [Laughs.] You could basically send anything you wanted into it and a kick drum would come out.

We did do some triggering with Synclavier and some stuff like that, try to do that. It kind of got a little bit overdone in some ways. But we did manufacture drums out of--what I did was, I would take the original drums on the Helsinki stuff--I sectioned off what was originally just a stereo pair, and then I would take a graphic equalizer, for instance, and find the snare. And EQ everything else out. And then we would use that ridiculously sounding EQ that would spit every time the snare played, and I would externally trigger, using a gate and an external trigger, we'd externally trigger maybe a sample of a good snare that we recorded in the studio. And we tried to make it sound a little bit more real. Because a lot of them sounded just horrible. A lot of them didn't have any drums on at all. They were just a ring-y room. And we tried to give them some definition. And it was real easy sometimes to get a little bit too carried away, and get the proportions a little too up front, or too far back. I think the ultimate drum sound that we ever had was on the "Man From Utopia" album.

Mix: Which is part live, part studio?
Pinske: No, that's all studio drums, pretty much, on that one. Like "Cocaine Decision's" an all-studio track.

Mix: And that's all Chad?
Pinske: Chad Wackerman, oh, yeah. That was when John Goode--we spent three days tuning the drums. And it was just wonderful. Just wonderful. We did get good drum sounds live, like on the "Them Or Us" album and stuff like that. One of the reasons why I like talking about some of the newer albums is because we made breakthroughs. We got better and better at the recording once we put the microphones inside the drums, and we had John Goode tuning them, the live recordings got tremendously better. After '81, '82 got better than '81. And '83 was better than '82. Every time we went out, we did some improvement.

Mix: Whose mics were you using inside the drums?
Pinske: All of our own. We had--depending which ones you want to talk about, but we used AKG 451s inside of the tom toms. We originally developed a Randy May system, which he made, that had SM57 capsules. But what I did is, I made a deal with Randy to mount them into a different location so we could put the longer condenser mics in there. And we had an endorsement with AKG, and I got like $38,000 worth of AKG microphones, that they gave them all--they supplied all those. We put an SM57 Shure inside the snare, on the top head and the bottom head. We had two capsules in that. All the other toms, we put AKG 451s and 452s, which had the roll-off and the 10- and 20dB capsules built in them, about three quarters of an inch underneath the top head, so we could get a good stick sound. But the head itself would filter out the leakage of the cymbals. And this allowed us to get a real nice percussive tone. And being as how it was in the drums, you would get the shell sound surrounding it automatically. And depending where you ended up placing it. We ended up placing it about two inches, two or three inches from the side of the shell, so that it wouldn't ring too much. And we experimented with the placement. This is what I'm saying. We experimented with the placement and the capsules, and the types of heads we used, even, over long periods of time, until we just got this really wonderful, kind of out-of-the-can tom sound, that sounded like something you might have miked up in the studio and spent two days tuning. So we ended up getting real good tom tom sounds that way. I would use AKG 414s on the overheads. Later on we went to the PZM--the Plexiglas--we had these Plexiglas dome mics that Ken Wahrenbrock made for us that we used on overheads. A variety of different hi-hat mics we went through. Normally we would use an AKG 452 on that. The 452's a really interesting capsule mic. It was one of the only mics in the world where you had the preamp in the canister, and you could unscrew the cartridge. And you could put different cartridges, different types of capsules on it. But the neatest thing about it is, you could put an elbow, a flexible elbow in there, and you could also put 10-, 20-, or 30dB pads, and because of this, you could pad the capsule, between the capsule and the preamp, so the preamp wasn't overloaded. As you know, most condenser mics have their pad after the preamp, which doesn't do you any good if the capsule's overloading the preamp. And in the case of something like a drum, that's real loud, you really kind of need to pad it between the capsule and the preamp. So this is one of the reasons why we were able to get away with an actual condenser mic in the toms. And then of course the benefits of it were--kind of speak for themselves, because you have that hi-fidelity tone that only a condenser mic can give you.

Mix: What did you do with the kick?
Pinske: The kick drum we would use two mics. In fact, it was a double-miking technique that we actually developed with Jonathan Moffatt, that John Goode and I experimented with when--oh, geez, I don't know if it was when he was first getting ready with Madonna, or if it was the "Thriller" tour. We tried these combinations of a AKG, a D-112, and an SM57. And you put them out of phase from each other. The SM57 would get the center beater noise, so it was more centered. And the D-112 would be aimed toward the side of the shell, so that we would get the low frequencies off the shell.

Mix: Are they both inside the drum?
Pinske: Yeah. Both inside the drum. Mounted inside the drum. And what we would do is, you'd blend them together, to where, if the 57 cartridge out of phase with the AKG, you could blend them together to a certain point, where you would have a nice, solid low end and a real punchy high end at the same time, without cancellation. And you kind of lock it into that kind of position, and you almost had--it really worked well as far as gating and everything else was concerned, because it had--when you gated it, it would have the full low end and the full high end that you wanted. And it kind of started out already with such a good sound, that all you had to do was fine-tune the EQ a little bit. And we developed that system. I think Randy May started using it later. I think he sold his systems that way. I think he still does today, as a matter of fact. I think he still uses the--you know, when you buy a Randy May, if you have Randy May outfit your kick drum, he'll outfit it the same way that John and I did. So we fine-tuned. We started it off with Jonathon Moffatt, but we fine-tuned it with Chad Wackerman. And this gave us a real consistent kick-drum sound.

Mix: Going back again to YAWYI, which was the next album after "Tinsel Town Rebellion", right?
Pinske: That's the first studio album, mm-hmm. All studio album.

Mix: Even third movement from "Sinister Footwear?"
Pinske: We played all that in the studio. "Sinister Footwear" was put together on a thing we called "Squidget," which was a nickname for Midget, which was a big E-mu thing that we did. And we performed it all, yeah, we performed "Sinister Footwear" all in there.

Mix: Then the band went out and did bits of the album on stage live, because I know on one of the live YCDTOSA, there's "Society Pages," "I'm A Beautiful Guy," "Beauty Knows No Pain," "Charlie's Enormous Mouth," all in sequence.
Pinske: Oh, we did those tour after tour after tour.

Mix: Whereas Zappa made the point that they were put together with monstrous overdubs and crazy edits, and that was half the fun, was trying to get the band to do all the edits.
Pinske: Well, yeah, segues, basically. He would do that all the time. They weren't done necessarily in any of that kind of order. We did that particular tour, we paid a lot of attention to YAWYI. But after that tour, when we went into other tours, it was more like just kind of revisiting it. Like one night, one session, we would do two or three of the songs on there. We never actually did all of those songs together again, for the most part. He would have a habit sometimes of doing "Jumbo Go Away," and "Suicide Chump" or something, or "Charlie's Enormous Mouth," that he would kind of just want to stick in there in some kind of special segue.

Mix: That was the last album Arthur Barrow was on, I guess. I guess he shows up later with "Tink Walks Amok." But that was an old track.
Pinske: Tink, yeah. Tink was his nickname. "Tink Walks Amok" was--he would come in the studio and overdub. Artie was the one who overdubbed a lot of the forward bass parts on "Ya Hozna" and "Won Ton On." He would come in every so often and play a little bit in the studio for us. Him and--we even got Patrick O'Hearn coming in there and playing stand-up bass one time, which was a real thrill for me. It was a real thrill for me to get together with, when we got Jimmy Carl Black back in, and Motorhead. Just being able to record with those guys, that I hadn't recorded with before. When they came back in to do something, it was just a real thrill for me to be able to be a part of that.

Mix: I guess the three albums that Warners put out, after "Live in New York," "Sleep Dirt," "Studio Tan," "Orchestral Favorites," they only came back to you after the Warners suit was settled, right?
Pinske: No. I'm trying to remember those.

Mix: Because "Studio Tan," which was an instrumental album, wound up with Thana Harris, Bob Harris's wife, she's overdubbed on "Spider of Destiny,"--
Pinske: I know what you're talking about now. That was on "Sleep Dirt." What had happened is, Frank had never--we worked quite a bit with Lisa Popeil, tried to sing those songs. And Lisa kind of almost got it. Frank would always say, "Almost, but not quite Boy George." But he just never was totally sold on her voice. And he was really frustrated, because every once in a while, when we tried to work those recordings, because he always wanted to finish them, so we'd pull them out from time to time and get somebody to sing on them. Well, I made a suggestion to him that Bob Harris's wife sang really well. So Bob and Thana came up to the studio. I called them up and they came up and they sang a little duet for Frank, a cappella, and he recognized something in Thana's voice that he really liked. So we gave Thana a chance to sing on that stuff. And she was--Bob, of course read music perfectly, but Thana wasn't necessarily a music reader, so we let her take some of the tapes home, and then had Bob work with her on--because you know they were not exactly easy things to sing. And she came back in and we tracked them, and Frank just loved her voice. So we got her singing all that stuff. "Spider of Destiny." "Flambé." She did a great job on "Flambé." And I tracked her voice on all of that stuff, but we didn't necessarily mix it at that time, but we did have it in the can, so to speak. We had the tracks done. I think Bob did a lot of the remixing on that stuff, if I remember correctly. I mainly just tracked all the vocals and got a lot of it in the can. We did rough mixes and stuff.

Mix: Looking at the album cover, it says, "Copyright 1979 and 1991, Barking Pumpkin," so that kind of implies that it was--'79 was obviously the original release, and so it didn't come out again until '91.
Pinske: It didn't come out until '91, but we finished all that stuff in about, oh, that must have been '83, '84. When they got tired of Lisa, we tracked Thana. In fact, we did some mixes then, and put them in the vault along with the "Crush All Boxes" stuff that I never saw again. And I know that Chris, what's his name? Skip Clouseau? The engineer that they hired after both Bob and I were gone?
Mix: Spencer Chrislu?
Pinske: Spencer, yeah. His job was to take a lot of that stuff that we had in the vault and recompile a lot of that stuff. He would just take stuff that we had done with Frank over all these periods of time, and try to take a lot of the stuff that we meant to be released. Like they did that John Lennon tape on one of the albums. And Frank always said he was never going to release that. Because he always felt it was taking advantage of John. But I remember doing three or four mixes of the 16-tracks of "Baby, Please Don't Go." It was a great live moment. Except when Yoko would squawk in the background. We'd always joke about that. But John Lennon sitting in at the Fillmore, man. It was unbelievable.

Mix: There's also a note on some of the Web sites to the effect that "Orchestral Favorites" wound up with the stereo image reversed between the LP and the CD. Do you know anything about that?
Pinske: There was some serious mistakes made on some of the mastering. I don't know if somebody just got too tired, or what happened on that. But I know when Bob ended up redoing some of those CDs, see he wasn't aware, because I had left, Chad and I had left, oh, what was it, in '87, and went to work with Men at Work. We went on tour with Men at Work, Chad Wackerman and myself. So Bob was kind of left to do a lot of that stuff for Rhino, and he wasn't really there when we did a lot of the original stuff, so he was just kind of flying by the seat of his pants, and just doing it whatever way he felt like doing it. Unfortunately, what they did do, I think, is I think--in his defense--I think they put him under a lot of pressure, and he had to come up with a big library really quick. And as you know, when you've got a library as big as Frank's, and you're just supposed to all of a sudden take all these masters and make CDs out of them, they probably ran a lot of them through what's kind of a normal compression setting, or something like that, and just kind of passed a lot of them through real quick. And that's what a lot of them sound like, too. They got mastered too quick, basically, with not necessarily all the best interests at heart. Which we had when we were doing each project originally. It was only that album we were thinking about. So I think when they started doing those CD releases, they kind of got--I think Frank used to use the term "homogenized." Or "cheese food." They ended up kind of sounding all too--thrown together in a way. Not to mention that, when we did have 2-track analog masters, we did so many different varieties, whether we had Telefunken C4D on some of them, not too many of them, and then we had Dolby encoded. And then we had half track masters that had no noise reduction, well all of those analog tape ones that weren't done on digital suffered from being stored so long. So I imagine that the original dynamic range, and the tone of the cymbals and everything else all suffered by the time he ended up trying to remaster some of it. Which is kind of a shame. Because some of that stuff should have been archived that wasn't, after I left, which is stuff I hadn't gotten to. Should have probably been put into a digital medium immediately, in its original shape. See, my theory was this: If you take the original tape, and you put it into a digital medium, as close as you can, as well preserved as you can, you can always crew with it later. But at least you have the original recording, the way it was. Preserved in the truest sense of the fashion of the way it was done originally. Because there's always something there that comes out. And if you screw with it too much when you do these transfers, you end up losing al lot of the essence of the original recording. So I always tried to transfer stuff in its purest form, and then just screw with it later when you mix it.

Mix: Got any stories about how Scott Thunes and Chad Wackerman wound up in the band?
Pinske: Chad auditioned. And we actually auditioned 31 drummers. We had auditioned him twice. We couldn't find a drummer to replace Vinnie Colaiuta. Scott, however, when we auditioned for him, Artie Barrow had left--actually, he came in, too, at the same time, we had Jeff Berlin in there for a short time. We never made it on tour with Jeff Berlin, but Jeff Berlin was in there playing with Vinnie Colaiuta. Both of them decided they wanted an enormous amount of money, and special treatment, and all this kind of stuff, which didn't kind of fit in to the book. And I think Vinnie, to Vinnie's defense, he also got a lot of contracts in town, playing on television shows, and film soundtracks, and that kind of thing. He was pretty much a hired gun around L.A. so he had some very good paying jobs with lots of royalties and stuff.

Mix: Did the band make money when they were working for Frank? They were paid sensibly, presumably, but were they paid--
Pinske: They were paid very well. They made money when we went on tour very well, and they made money when we did session work. But keep in mind, I was the only one on salary, so when we came off the road, a lot of the musicians'd have to go on unemployment or something. They didn't get salaried around the year. They only got salaried when we traveled, or when they did studio work, they got paid. So a lot of them really wanted to do studio work. Well, unfortunately, more of the live recordings we did meant that there would be less studio work. Because we would use a lot of the live tapes, and we might bring somebody like Chad in, or somebody to do some overdubbing, like Ed Mann, or Artie Barrow. But for the most part, most of the overdubbing was done for vocals with Ray and Ike and Bob Harris, or whoever. And of course, Steve Vai was the master of overdubs. He would just sit right next to me at the board, and we would invent guitar parts. [Laughs.] And he could play anything. It was unbelievable. That was a really joyous time on that. But the musicians got paid pretty well. Not millions of dollars, but thousands of dollars a week. Plus they got their per diem and their expenses all covered. It wasn't like they weren't paid well. But as you know, if you're making $2- or 3,000 a week on the road, and then all of a sudden you come off and you're getting nothing, it doesn't take long for that to just dissipate. And with guys like Bobby Martin, he would have another gig lined up. We'd come back, and he'd go out with Bette Midler. And some of the other guys. And Bob Harris went and did Warren Zevon, and some of these other people. So the real smart guys would go out and do some other tours. And of course, Chad Wackerman would play with Allan Holdsworth, I did one Alan Holdsworth album, "Road Games," with him. He would go out and play with Allan Holdsworth all the time. Not to mention different jazz gigs and stuff like that. So most of those musicians would keep themselves busy.

Mix: Scott Thunes, was his first thing doing the bass overdub on "Valley Girl?" Oh, no, you said already, it was Artie Barrow who did that, wasn't it?
Pinske: No, no, no. I think "Valley Girl," I think was Artie, wasn't it? Yeah, that was Artie Barrow. Yeah. Arthur Barrow played the bass on that album. No, Scott's first thing wasn't overdubbing. He came in about the same time Chad Wackerman came in, to do live bass, to do live gigs.

Mix: So in '81, it looks like.
Pinske: No. Scott would have been later than that. We went to the European leg, maybe. Let's see, when did Vinnie leave? I'm trying to remember, because--

Mix: Vinnie left and came back again, right? Because David Logeman started the tour in--
Pinske: Actually, as a matter of fact, you may be right, because what had happened is, '82 is more I think when Scott came in, because Scott did play on the "Drowning Witch" album, and that's where Artie Barrow kind of phased out. See, Artie went and worked with Giorgio Moroder, and Artie and I did a couple things together, too, by the way, on the side. When he was doing the "Flashdance" movie and that kind of stuff. And Artie went and played keyboards for Giorgio Moroder down at his studio, and he kind of got pulled away to do film soundtracks and stuff. He wasn't like quitting the band, or anything, he just had other stuff he was doing. So Scott kind of came in at the end of '81 and then '82. Right. That's when he came in. He came in pretty much right around when Chad did. Because I know we were making this joke about having three 21-year-olds in the band. Three 20-year-old and 21-year-old. Both Scott--you had Scott Thunes, you had Chad Wackerman, and you had Steve Vai, and they're all young guys.

Mix: How old were Ray and Ike? 20s?
Pinske: Now you got me. I think Ray was pretty much my age, and Ike was--Ike was young, too. Ike was young when he started with Frank, but Ike was a few years older. Like when I did the first tours with Ike, we were always kidding him, because he always wore a hat, and he was like the kid of the band. And then, of course, once Chad and--that was when we had Vinnie and Tommy Mars and everybody, and Ed Mann, but once we got off that European tour, and the other guys came in, well, Ike wasn't the kid anymore. So he was three or four years older than them. And then Ray, I think, was another three or four years older than Ike. Kind of between Frank and Ike. He didn't show his age, though. He wore his age very well.

Mix: How old are you?
Pinske: I was born in 1949.

Mix: So you're older than me.
Pinske: I'm older than you are, probably. And probably ten or twelve years younger than Frank. At that time, anyway, I was pretty much in my prime, but 51-year-old.

Mix: I know, it creeps up on you, doesn't it?
Pinske: Yeah. [Laughs.] I remember this stuff like it was yesterday, though. Because it was such--it was such a joyous job. I enjoy what I'm doing now. Now I'm general manager of two divisions here at Peavey. They're both professional divisions that do professional core products, and also professional digital DSP products.

Mix: When did you start at Peavey?
Pinske: I started at Peavey two years ago. Just a little over two years ago. I came up here and interviewed for a job. I had built a studio down in Florida, with some of the money I'd made with Frank and whatnot. The studio's still there, Skylab Studios. There's a link to it from my site. My ex-partner there is running the place now. I still have some equipment in it, but I'm pretty much not involved with the studio at all. I got soured out on doing all the studio stuff. Especially doing more amateur recording, you know what I mean? Building a studio out of the way in Florida was not the greatest idea I had. I went back out and did a lot of touring. I went out and toured even in 1995, with Terence Trent D'Arby. And I'd go out and do some tours every so often, just for fun. Steve brought me back out with David Lee Roth in between on one tour, the "Eat 'Em and Smile" tour. So every once in a while I'd go out and do some tours, but I was mainly doing studio work, and I just, to tell you the honest truth, I got so beaten up by recording so much. I lost track of how many albums I did. The last time I counted was somewhere around like 160, 184 albums. Not that I wouldn't want to take my name off the first 20. But I had done a lot of death-metal albums, a lot of rap albums, stuff like this that came through. Every so often some good stuff would come through. Like with Tico Torres from Bon Jovi came and recorded down there, on Al DiMeola's percussionist Gumby Ortiz's album. And every once in a while we'd do a good project. I got to do River Phoenix, before he died. I did all his recording for him. And I had spurts in there that were a lot of fun. But for the most part, I just got saturated with it. I started listening to talk radio, and I got real tired of the music business, and I decided I'm just not going to do any of this sound stuff any more. So at that point, I kind of went back to my other roots, that I talked to you before, when I worked at Quad-8 electronics out in California. And I ended up running a manufacturing line there, and I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with audio product, because audio products is what I been around all my life. The touring gear, speakers, amplifiers, processors, and of course being with somebody like Frank, you were always trying to stay on top of the latest, newest digital processors and stuff. So my knowledge of always working with the latest, greatest gizmos, that kind of started very seriously, and having a chance to experiment with the most expensive stuff, kind of brought me in to where I wanted to be able to help design some products, use my background, and see if I could help manufacturers bring some stuff out that's a little bit more hip. And a little bit better quality that the real, true engineer, or consultant, if you will, or contractor, would really appreciate. Being able to have stuff that might have a little bit better quality, a little bit finer tuning increments, things for doing time aligning, whatever. So I was able to get involved with Peavey because they had a couple new divisions that they were developing. Architectural Acoustics, and Mediamatrix. Well, Mediamatrix is pretty much well on its way. It does all the main stadiums, and the Olympics, and House of Representatives, and this kind of stuff. It's all digitally controlled routing systems. And it's got a pretty good reputation. But Architectural Acoustics needed some help, so I came in and helped them design some speakers to go after EAW. I designed some things, some different amplifiers, some new amplifiers that were very good amplifiers that would give you a lot more power for lower price. Things that would be competitive in the marketplace. I really kind of got my teeth into it, and things went well the first year and a half, so they kind of promoted me up. To where I was general manager of the whole architectural acoustics division, and then just recently, about two months ago, they put me in charge of the media matrix division as well, so now I'm over all the DSP development, as well as the regular analog core products. And this is really kind of a fun challenge for me. You could tell by talking to me that I'm able to use a lot of the chops that I did in the past and put it into a product that some other young engineer that's like me ten, twenty years ago that could probably blow my socks out of the water, may get some piece of equipment that I helped design or helped bring to them, and really appreciate it. I do little things, like, we got a DSP device we call the Digitool now, that's only going to start shipping in about another month, where you'll hear about it, you'll see it, we advertise it in all the magazines starting now, but it's a DSP device that isn't like a lot of them you buy. You know how you buy a multiprocessor, and it doesn't have the increments you want. You might have a reverb setting maybe 1.2-second delay or 800, you go, "I want something between this." And you go the lesser of two evils. The setting you want isn't really there. So I put out a device that does all of this stuff, where the equalization you can adjust one Hertz at a time. So if you have a ring at 1627 Hertz. No screwing around. And it isn't until somebody gets their hands on it and say, "Wow, somebody really thought of this. Somebody's giving me a tool now that I can use, that wasn't like this other thing I've always had to put up with. I can go to the exact settings on my compressor, on my noise gate, on my equalizer, on my delay." Delay, for instance, on this device, goes up to 5 seconds, increments of 1 millisecond at a time, and fine tuning at 999 milliseconds--microseconds. So if you want to time align a pair speakers, you can get right down to the exact microsecond. Now somebody won't appreciate that until they're actually doing it, and they'll say, "Oh, man, I don't have to jump 10ms up or 10ms down, I can actually set it exactly where it needs to be, to where the phase matches up." So I kind of was able to get those kind of things kind of off my chest. You know how you have that chip on your shoulder all those years, and now I'm able to put some of the things I learned into a device. And I find it very rewarding. They're giving me good support. Allowing me to do some things. You may say it's an overkill, or an off-the-wall, but when you're a professional, such as yourself, you know we have special needs, right? [Laughs.]

Mix: Now you're back in a management role--two divisions, and you're working with designers and manufacturing, marketing, and pricing.
Pinske: The whole cigar. Being the general manager, I'm over all of it. But I kind of get to go around assembly lines if I want to, and sit down with the engineers and knock out everything from the looks to the--this whole new device I'm telling you about, this Digitool is 8 in and 8 out, it's a device that had everything from noise gates to parametric EQs to compressors, and the whole thing's going to sell for 800 bucks. So we're talking about something that's revolutionary.

Mix: Are you going to debut it at NSCA, or before then?
Pinske: Oh, NSCA we're going to demonstrate four of them, in a big demo room. We're going to have it, and we have our own, I also developed a thing called the Freak Out, which is a feedback eliminator. But it's way more sophisticated than your typical Sabine product. If you put a whole bunch of filters in on Sabine product, and then you talk through it, your voice'll sound one way, and you hit the filters in and it sounds like somebody put a hand over it. What we did is we came up with some real sophisticated algorithms with 16 separate filters that only filter out the necessary marginal part. It's only 3 dB needs to be filtered out. Once you program it, you hit the filters, and you don't actually hear a difference in tone, and it works so fast you don't every really get a squeal. You get nothing more than a chirp, just sticking a microphone right in the speaker. So we had some of our best algorithm designers spend, oh, Lord, eight months alone just tweaking the algorithms on this thing. So we're real proud of it. It'll be a device you get for a couple hundred bucks. Some of those kind of things are going to be, hopefully become used a lot, and make a difference.

Mix: You stopped working for Frank in '87, because you moved on, or you got bored, or do you want to talk about it?
Pinske: A couple of different things. He wasn't really planning on doing any more touring, even though he ended up going and doing the '88 tour, he wasn't really--he started to get a little bit ill, but the main thing is that we just kept recycling a lot of the old tapes, which as you know went on for years even after I left, and releasing the same old songs, and the same old things. And I had a chance to make a considerable bit of more money, is what happened. I went and worked with Men at Work, and then I went and hooked up with Bobby Brown and Bel Biv Devoe.

Mix: As engineer, or live sound?
Pinske: I went and did live sound with those guys.

Mix: And you could make more money?
Pinske: It was great. They paid me a huge amount of money, and I just flew out and did the Budweiser fest with them. A friend of mine called me up and said they needed a paratrooper, they'd gone through something like five or six sound men. And the New Edition was having trouble, and they needed somebody that could go to these different shows and work different systems. Like I would go into a fair and there would be a Showco system, or Audio Analysts or Clair Bros. They didn't travel with their own sound--the systems were all waiting there for them.

Mix: This was for New Edition?
Pinske: Yeah. The first thing I did was, Chad and I went off on a little tour, we went down to Australia and worked with Men At Work. We did that for quite a while. And then right when I got off of that tour, I was down there like 12, 13, 14 weeks or something, we were down there, and then this production manager that I used to know on the road called me up and said that New Edition needed somebody to come out and do some stuff with them, and I went and did them off and on for the next two-and-a-half, three years. And I also went in the studio with them. I did some recording with them. And then I did--Bobby Brown was pretty much asked to leave the band, and then he did his own "King of Stage" album, so I went and did a "King of Stage" tour with Bobby Brown. And got to know those guys pretty well. Then what I did was, we were down in Florida, and I went back to Gainesville, Florida, which is where I went to college, originally, and I built a studio there out of some of the money I'd saved up, and kind of overspent building a studio, which is now called Skylab Studios down there in Florida. ...read rest of Day Three Pinski Interview

Pinski Interview Day One, Two, Three

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