Audio Technology - Issue 17

Me, Mark and Tiny Tim It's Sunday morning a couple of months ago, and I'm out on the street under my car fixing some intermittent I problem with the motor. Nothing new here, just me being as far away from the studio business as I can get on a Sunday. Anyway, the mobile rings and speaks the words: "Rick I've got some sad news for you. Mark Thomas died last night...". "How?" 'Apparent suicide at home." We exchange some chitchat and the voice disappears, continuing on with its morbid task of ringing around. Meanwhile, I'm left out on the bitumen in front of my house, my car in 26 bits, trying to pick up the pieces of my day.

I wish it was unusual for me to get that kind of phone calls. I really wish it was a unique occurrence, but many of my friends have died short of their 'prescribed' 77 years - way short, way too often. On last count there's been 22 people I have worked with face to face in the last seven years who are no longer with us and five by their own hand. This side of the business is a real heavy drag. I didn't start counting numbers until I had lost count of the people I went to high school with who have been reported passed away.

For those of you who didn't know Mark he was the house recording engineer at Festival for 17 years - the long hair guy who'd been there forever He was one of the good guys. Mark and I started at Festival within months of each other in the last of the old school recording regimes. It was back in the days when the equipment cost so much money you had to have a major label deal to put out records. Back in the days when record companies had the studios and studios had engineering staff - old guys with huge experience who passed it onto the young guys, so the young guys could pass it on to the next lot. In the case of Festival, that model pretty much stopped with Mark and me. There are some others around, but, in concept, Mark and I were the last of our kind at Festival. We were turned into men together inside those studios in every sense of the word.

In case you haven't heard, Festival Studios has closed down, and along with them a rich tapestry of Australian recorded history, Unfortunately, because of the Australian cultural cringe, the last 20 years are not considered culturally significant... yet. So, the talk around town is of the good old days of Festival Studios - of Johnny O'Keefe , Sherbet, and Richard Clapton - but, in my living memory, with Mark Thomas on staff, Festival Studios recorded Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Billy Brag, Cold Chisel, Jackson Brown, silverchair , Youthu Yindi, Hunters & Collectors Midnight Oil, Leo Sayer, The Angels, The Choirboys, The Mark Thomas Models, The Reels, Rumastone, The Whitlams, Mick Fleetwood, Dweezil Zappa, Tina Turner, Oliva Newton John... and that's without even making a phone call to check on the ones I wasn't around for. It is important to me to put a face to the closing of Festival Studios and I figure as Mark was never one to volunteer for anything, I'd nominate him.

I don't want to hear talk of Johnny O'Keefe and the great big Neve console - Johnny hated the Neve and wanted an automated MCI - think of Mark Thomas and the great big Neve, because he put more hours behind it then all of the other engineers put together. Mark made that studio his life. And, it's no mere coincidence that after the last few executive managements had run Festival Records into a sand bank (and decided that a studio is of no use to a record company) that within two days their longest serving recording engineer was dead. It's a sad day when your friends die.

Mark and I had a working synergy developed out of the last 17 years. We didn't always see eye to eye and were often seen as internally competitive, but when Mark and I were alone on a session, we had communication refined down to glance. I assisted many sessions he engineered, he engineered many session I produced, I mastered records he produced, he mixed albums I engineered, I mixed records he engineers, etc etc. In short, we worked together a lot. I must state that anybody who really knew Mark, knew there was a weird unspoken undercurrent inside him and many, many times he just disappeared off the planet in the middle of a session for several days at a time without any kind of trace. I am not the only one to have spent many hours covering his tracks and I am not the only one who did it time after time, unquestioningly. Festival Studios developed a camaraderie and a loyalty within it that I haven't seen since or expect to see again. I miss that sensation more then anything about that place.

The last record I produced at Festival was the Celibate Rifles last album, Midstream of Consciousness. Mark started that album but, for reasons we will never know, he disappeared without letting us know. At one stage, as a joke, we were going to call the album Missing the Mark, I thank the heavens we didn't. Mark rang me two days before he died and said to me that in retrospect he was quite surprised how well that record turned out. I laughed because I thought is was a big dumb Detroit rock record and Triple JJJ called it a landmark in Australian music. We joked about how you could never be sure if you were recording history or complete garbage, and how time reveals all...

I remember Mark's first big session as an engineer. He was scared and I knew that because he asked me up from my mastering suite down the hall to assist him, "just in case, you know". He was scared for good reason. Mark's first big session was recording Tiny Tim - you know the guy, the one with the ukulele that sang Tiptoe Through the Tulips, the guy who got married on the Johnny Carson show in the '60s and got better ratings than the Beatles or the moon shot. Tiny Tim was coming in and we were under-prepared, to say the least.

Mark wasn't sure who Tiny was and, outside the obvious stuff, neither was I. But he was coming in with Martin Sharpe producing. We thought Martin was a record producer and would know what was needed. But it soon became apparent that he was nothing of the kind. Martin Sharpe was a very famous pop (as in Andy Warhol) artist. Martin was responsible for several Cream/Eric Clapton album covers in the '60s and, although very famous in the art world and aware of what studios looked like, really had no idea about anything he needed in the recording studio. When we asked him what kind of microphone Tiny liked on his ukulele Martin replied, "Yes, that is a question worth pondering"... and laughed. Boy, were we in deep. Martin was making a lifelong documentary on Tiny Tim and had basically adopted him as his muse - he painted pictures of him, created montages of him and, in the last 15 years of Tiny's life, nearly bankrupted himself trying to get Tiny the recognition Martin thought he deserved. Martin figured that a whole new generation of people would love Tiny if they were given a chance and he came up with the stupendous idea of Tiny recording AC/DC's Highway to Hell sung falsetto on ukulele. He booked Festival, booked a pick-up band, and away we went. The pick-up band, Her Majesty, was unique - imagine a geriatric Spinal Tap, remove any sense of humour and you're getting warm. The keyboard player had more Moog synths than Bob Moog's garage, the drummer and the bass player were older than Ayers rock, and the guitar player actually thought this was their big break - "lookout world here comes Her Majesty!". Mark said to me, "what are they called... A Travesty?".

Cut to the control room and there is Tiny Tim in all his glory. This guy was huge. He seemed seven feet tall and about 120 years old - possibility the ugliest thing I had ever seen. He was wearing the loudest suite ever made, yet he had a soft soothing voice. He talked in biblical phrases and addressed everybody as Mr. So & So. I soon became Mr. Rick, Mark was Mr. Thomas, and the band were Mr. Majesty. Mark escorted Tiny into the area set up for vocals. As he tried to get to the bottom of what mic to use on the ukulele, Tiny, in ecclesiastical tones, answered all of Mark's questions except what mic to use on the ukulele. Mark and I were in tears trying to hold in our laughter. This guy, this band, this session was nuts. When we finally got a sound check together and the band were doing a fair interpretation of Highway to Hell we started rolling tape. Tiny started singing Highway to Hell, the band were playing Highway to Hell, Martin was smiling, Mark and I were laughing, trying to mic up that ukulele was a waste of time because Tiny didn't know the chords, the timing was off as far as we could tell... we figured the man was clearly off his rocker.

Then, without notice, Tiny started singing Bon Jovi's You Give Love a Bad Name. After a few bars the band stopped and for the next 20 minutes Mark and I tried to get to the bottom of what had happened. Martin was busy filming his documentary, Tiny was preaching a sermon to the poster of Kylie Minogue on the wall, and between us all Mark and I had the only brain cells that were not entirely dead from decades of abuse. Eventually we figured out that Tiny wanted to do a medley of Highway to Hell, You Give Love a Bad Name, and some other track I can't remember. So we finally got the band to understand, Mark sends them into the recording room to figure out the chords, and Martin Sharpe tells me we have a problem... "Tiny needs to change his suit." "Why?" I ask. "Err, because it is bad luck to record the same song twice in the same suit." Then I'm told Tiny needs a shower facility because "it's unhygienic to not wash in between changes of clothes... especially in the tropics". So, in the middle of the night I sneak Tiny Tim around into the Managing Director's locked office (don't ask) so Tiny Tim can change, have a shower, put on a new fresh set of adult diapers and a new clown suit so we can do a medley of Highway to Hell etc for history's sake... Ah. those were the days. Hours after they left, Mark and I were still rolling around on the floor laughing. This job -this sound engineering thing - was not your average day job. Sometimes you make history, sometimes you make garbage, and sometime you just laugh a lot.

I figure it would be nice that when people lament the loss of Festival Studios they remember the people -equipment doesn't make records, people make records. Those people are you, me and our friends. I would like dedicate this column, and its intent, to our absent friends.

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