By Jason Songe
For all you Pixies, Frank Black, and Breeders fans out there, here’s a portion of the interview that focused exclusively on those bands and Mumphrey’s work with them
BM: You’d asked me about “Fields of Marigold.” It’s not one of my favorite songs on my end, though I like the song a lot. That whole record was done in a rehearsal hall that sounded like garbage, so it was a constant fight to get the distant sound of the drums out of every other microphone. We had been doing the Black Letter Days stuff in a loft in Little Tokyo in downtown L.A., and it was really comfortable, like a real nice apartment, and we were able to get fairly decent sounds. We basically got kicked out. They didn’t realize, I guess, that we were recording actual records in there. The landlord comes by and says, “You can’t have these drums anymore.” Charles is like, “Ok, we’ll be out in six hours.” He calls me up and he’s like, “We’re moving out. I have an idea. See if you can make it work.” The idea was that the band (The Catholics) set up and record in 3rd Encore’s showcasing room (seen in Pixies film loudQUIETloud). Charles’ attitude was, “Fuck the landlord and loft, we’ll be set up and recording somewhere else tomorrow.” And we were. It just happened to be somewhere sortof sucky. It was this huge, square, awful-sounding room with a really high drop ceiling, like a warehouse. If you listen, you can hear how cavernous it is on Devil’s Workshop. “Out of State” is probably the best-sounding one on it. If you’re a fan, and you don’t give a shit about the ultimate mix, then yeah, “Fields of Marigold” is a rockin’ tune. But, it’s my job to try and deliver some fat shit. I like Sabbath records, crankin’ Sabbath.
AG: What would you have done differently with “Fields of Marigold?”
BM: It’s all about the drums. I would just like it to be fatter sounding and less like—when you’re in a large room and everyone’s playing live and there’s no isolation—like, we have real sound barriers here, but they didn’t there. They had these office dividers, but being a new engineer and wanting to prove that I could handle whatever challenge he had for me I was willing to go with what we had.
AG: Yeah, you didn’t question it.
BM: Yeah, so what? My name is on a record that I don’t think sounds amazing. That one I didn’t get to [re]mix.
AG: Because you were mixing it live.
BM: On “Velvety,” he’s like, “Would you mind playing maraccas on this song?” So, on “Velvety,” I was recording, mixing, and playing maraccas at the same time. [Laughs]
AG: You’re keeping a rhythm as you’re turning knobs. Didn’t you work on Mountain Battles?
BM: The only track on the record I did was the song “Mountain Battles,” but I did a ton of recording with them and tons of pre-production and a lot of studio recording as well, but they ended up going to so many different places and re-doing it so many times, it was hard to know what got used from where.
AG: That came out of the Pixies reunion.
BM: Yeah, I knew Kim from the Pixies stuff. It was actually because of Katrina that I worked with them. I was on tour with The Pixies in Europe when the hurricane hit. I couldn’t fly back to New Orleans. I was sort of just moping around, and I ran into Kim and Kelley at a Starbucks, sat down with them and they were like, “What are you gonna do, man?” ‘Cause it was all in the papers. And I was like, “I don’t know.” Kim said, “I have a house that I don’t even use. You can stay there. I have a little studio in the basement, too.” I was like, “Shit, I’ll take you up on that.” I made arrangements and went there, and basically just did a ton of demos with them. They basically wrote a lot of that record in that basement. It was another case where the demo versions are better.
[He plays the demo version of “Here No More” and, sure enough, with the voices more prominent it sounds more transcendent, spiritual. and rawer.]
BM: All the demos were done on a Pro Tools rig on my laptop. She used to make me run everything through her 4-track recorder first. And it wasn’t a nice one or anything. She was so suspicious of digital recording, she insisted we at least try and get it as lo-fi as possible.
AG: She comes from that punk world too.
BM: She hates the digital thing. She’ll talk to you [ad nauseum] about how bad it is. Here’s another version of “Mountain Battles.”
[He plays the demo version of “Mountain Battles”— there’s less holding it together, but it is more powerful. You have to be very patient.]
AG: Was there one particular person who didn’t want to re-visit that sound [record another Pixies album]?
BM: Ah, you know…ultimately, I think Kim just didn’t want to do it. That was all there was to it. You can’t twist someone’s arm too long, and now Charles just figures, “We shouldn’t be touring without material.” I can see everyone’s point of view. I think Charles is right. It’s practically immoral to do these tours now, going back for thirds. They did their big thing and everyone loved it. They went back for seconds and everyone still loved it. Then, they went back for thirds and it was like, “You still don’t have any new material and it’s been going on for two, three years now.”
AG: Then it starts to look a little weird.
BM: Right. I can understand Kim’s point, too, in that you don’t want to just put something out. She thought the chances of it being a real, honest record were slim. I ultimately have to side with, “Don’t do it if you think it’s not going to be real or right.” Now, I will fault her for at least not wanting to at least give it a little bit of a shot. But she was suspicious that anything that got recorded would be released.
AG: Were you a fan of The Pixies before you worked with them?
BM: I was, but truth be told I was more of a Frank Black fan. I liked his first two solo records a lot, and I liked Surfer Rosa a lot, but that was the only record of theirs I was really into.
AG: So, working with The Pixies, it was nice, but it wasn’t like, “Oh, I can’t wait!”
BM: It was, because I had gotten to know Charles over a couple of years. He hadn’t talked to Kim in ten years. Didn’t keep up with her at all. Didn’t wonder what she was doing. I was basically at their second rehearsal. The first rehearsal was just the band meeting up at Kim’s practice space and she and Charles seeing each other for the first time. I was at the very first true practice, just me and them, and as soon as they played the first song it was totally obvious that this a band was meant to be together. Something about the way they gelled was right on. It was all the right levels of—the drummer is a little bit Neil Peart geeky, Joey is almost like a savant on guitar. Charles goes both ways. He claims he’s not really a guitarist or a musician, but he’s a killer guitarist. Kim isn’t like a shredder or anything, but she really knows how to play bass and sing really well. Just hearing them sing together was amazing, and a lot of that stuff sounded so much better to me live than how those old records sound. They were done in the worst era for recording. Something happened in 1982, when records all started sounding bad, and it lasted until about 1990 or ’91, when things started improving again.
AG: How did you meet Frank Black?
BM: I was working at a studio called Sound City in L.A. and one of the two rooms had closed. While the room was empty, one day he just showed up to see what was going on. He’d recorded a couple records there, and there was a complex that included some rehearsal spaces. He was wondering what the situation with the rehearsal space was because he’d just bought a new console and some gear and he wanted to know if he could do his live-to-two track records with his own equipment and no longer do it at Sound City, where he’d done Dog in the Sand and the first Catholics record and Pistolero. We basically set up his gear in the closed B room in Sound City. He shows up randomly one day, and I was a huge fan of his, and the manager asked if I could help him, like she didn’t want to deal with him, and I was like, “Hey man, I’ll help you do whatever you wanna do,” and he called me a couple hours later. It was real gradual, like, testing out his gear. The first song I did with him was “Valentine and Garuda.”
AG: I like that song.
BM: It’s a great song, but it wasn’t executed right by the band. I never felt like the groove had been nailed. I don’t like how the engineering sounds.
AG: What would you have done differently?
BM: I’m not crazy about the snare sound. The snare and kick drum I would have tried to make bigger. I say this because I did these demos of the whole record before we did the actual record, and we did the demos at Sound City. A real studio, with his gear set up, and all these great musicians playing with him—Tommy Stinson, Lyle Workman, Joey Santiago. All these guys that weren’t Catholics were coming by because Charles was inviting them over to test out his new gear.
This interview originally appeared in ANTIGRAVITY Vol.5 Issue 9 (July ’08).
