The end of an era!  In a previous piece I wrote a review of the sensational 2013 Randy Bachman concert at the Complex.  Speaking of Bachman, I heard in the news last year that the famous Vancouver recording facility Mushroom Studios, where bands like Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Heart made classic albums, closed its doors for good.  This announcement had some personal meaning for me.  When I was a teenager growing up in Powell River I loved hard rock music and dreamed of becoming an audio engineer and recording albums for rock bands and, while my dream never did come true, I actually did have the opportunity of recording a group at Mushroom Studios once.

For me, the drive to become involved in the music business was all about hard rock and to this day I still remember the exact two instances when I first heard the two crucial albums that got me hooked on the music genre.  Allow me to explain how I got involved in the peripheries of the music industry and came to do a recording project at Vancouver’s famed Mushroom Studios and how hard rock music led the way.

In Grade 8 in 1980 at Oceanview Junior High School, fourteen years old and as inexperienced as a tadpole, I made friends with a gangly, affable classmate named Troy Jaggard who lived with his mom in a house that was located on Nootka Street right next to the school.  One day Troy invited me over to his house for lunch when his mom wasn’t home.  It was on that day that Troy introduced me to two things that have stayed with me for the rest of my life.

One of those things was Tater Gems, those crispy little French fry-like potato nuggets that you bake in the oven that taste wonderful.  I remember the first time I went over to his place he cooked a bag of Tater Gems and then grabbed some Ketchup and salt and sat down and said, “I’ll show you how to eat these things.”  He then squirted a massive pool of Ketchup onto his plate and poured a big pile of salt right next to the Ketchup.  Then he took his fork and stabbed a Tater Gem and dunked it thoroughly in Ketchup and took that red, Ketchup-drenched Gem and rolled it in salt until it was completely white and stuffed it in his mouth.  No wonder he had such a bad complexion!  I followed his lead and ate one exactly the same way he did and he was right, it tasted totally delicious and I’ve loved Tater Gems ever since.

The other indelible thing that Troy introduced me to that day was hard rock at its finest.  On that Tater Gem-eating lunchtime visit, after we’d finished our food, Troy took me into his living room to listen to a new album he’d picked up, AC/DC’s 1980 masterpiece of heavy metal, Back In Black.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really much interested in hearing it.  Another friend of mine, Dan Lopez, had already played me AC/DC’s previous album Highway To Hell and to me the band simply sounded brash and evil, thus I wasn’t too overly excited about hearing more of their music.  Nonetheless, I kept my mouth shut and Troy put the record on the turntable and turned up the volume and I sat there listening, not expecting to like it.  But then something totally unexpected happened:  I found myself really digging it!  I had an instinctive, visceral reaction to the multilayered guitar grooves of the brothers Young, Angus and Malcolm, not to mention the magic vocals of the band’s new lead singer Brian Johnson, and by the time it got to cut three, “What Do You Do For Money Honey,” I was totally sucked in.  I was genuinely surprised at how much I liked it.

Unfortunately, song number three was as far as we got that day because by that time lunch hour was almost over and we had to get back to school.  But I’d heard enough and a little while later I went to the record store on Marine Avenue next to the Bank of Montreal and picked up the album on cassette for myself.

And at about the same time as Troy introduced me to Back In Black, another friend who lived in Campbell River introduced me to the legendary American hard rock band Van Halen.

I was visiting our family friends the Herrings in Campbell River and one of the sons, Peter, told me he had Van Halen’s 1978 self-titled debut album on cassette.  He asked me if I wanted to hear it and I said yeah.  I remember we had to listen to it secretly at low volume on his portable ghetto blaster in the garage because his parents found it objectionable and wouldn’t allow it to be played in the house.  It was almost as if we’d decided to look at a dirty magazine.

Anyway, we went into the garage and he slid the tape into the cassette deck and hit play and we had a listen.  Oh my god!  Needless to say, I was spellbound as soon as I heard Eddie Van Halen’s thunderous opening guitar riff and David Lee Roth’s lion-like roar in “Runnin’ With The Devil” and when we got to “Jamie’s Cryin’” and “Feel Your Love Tonight” on side two, a couple of glam rock marvels specifically designed to lure in gullible rock virgins like myself, I’d become an instant hard rock disciple for life.  And to top it off, when I expressed how impressed I was with the album, Peter was actually kind enough to give me the cassette.  It was a delightful gift and I wore the oxide down on the tape from playing it over and over so many times back home in Powell River.

Like so many other teenagers at that time, as soon as I heard Eddie Van Halen play I convinced my wonderful mom Beatrice to buy me an electric guitar at which point I set about learning the basics of the instrument.  I even formed a band with my good friends Chris Jones and John Maxwell on vocals and bass respectively.  Our crowning achievement was playing on the stage at Sea Fair the summer of ’84.

And it was that same year that I went to my first concerts -- back-to-back Van Halen and Scorpions shows at the Pacific Coliseum, attended with my buds Hubert Van Dijen and Mike Mesic.  Man, that Van Halen show was an extraordinary event and is still the best show I’ve ever been to, ruining me for all other live concerts for the rest of my life.  In fact, this one drop-dead gorgeous blonde named Dana who normally wouldn’t have ever said a word to me asked me about it when I wore the concert T-shirt to school a few days after the show, that’s how hot Van Halen was at that time.

It was around this time period that I also became a devoted listener of rock radio.  On a clear day in the summertime in Powell River you could pick up the Seattle rock stations KISW and KZOK and these stations were like beacons beckoning me to enlist as a solider in the rock ’n’ roll army.  They were playing an addictive mix of ’70s classics like Zeppelin and the Stones and early Rush in addition to new stuff and since I wasn’t that familiar with much of the music of the ’70s I was able to get a crash course in classic rock by listening to those stations.  And as well, the Los Angeles-based heavy metal scene was catching on big time and both stations had weekly heavy metal shows that played bands like Krokus and Dokken and TNT, exactly the same way Dee Snider’s syndicated “House Of Hair” radio program does today.  Not all of these bands actually came from or recorded in LA, but they all had an alluringly distinctive, slick, polished sound that was associated with that California Mecca of heavy metal.

Prior to that time I’d only purchased movie soundtracks, the masterful John Williams being the most prominent composer in my collection.  To this day my favorite soundtrack is from the movie Jaws which to me is a work of sheer ultimate perfection.  In my mind John Williams is the unsung superstar of the movie industry.  No one actor or director has been involved in as many hit movies as John Williams.  Just take a look at the movies he’s composed soundtracks for and see how many mega-blockbusters he’s been involved with.  Films like Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark and E.T.  He did the music for all the big movies of the ’70s and ’80s.  He must have been one of the most powerful players in Hollywood back then.  He truly is the greatest.  However, after getting into Back In Black and Van Halen’s self-titled debut, I set film scores aside and started buying hard rock music.  And there were a couple of things I noticed about the music I was buying right away.

The first thing I noticed was that none of the subsequent hard rock albums I purchased were as good as those two gateway albums which had been my initiation into the world of hard rock.  There were some that came close, Mötley Crüe’s Shout At The Devil and Ratt’s Out Of The Cellar come to mind immediately, but none were as good as those perfectly-made AC/DC and Van Halen albums.  Even other albums by AC/DC and Van Halen weren’t as good as those two.

The other thing I noticed was that there were these personnel called producers and engineers who worked with bands in recording studios to make the albums.  I’d always been a credit-listing geek, I’d been into horror movies since I was a little boy and I was accustomed to reviewing film credits to see which actors were in films as well as who was responsible for making them.  So when I came across an album I liked I always took note of who produced it and if the same producer was listed on another hard rock album chances are I’d check that album out too.  The top producers had developed formulas that pretty well guaranteed they could make any band sound good and it soon got to the point where I was following heavy metal producers as much as I was following the bands themselves.

When high school was coming to an end and it was time to think about a career, I was such a heavy metal fanatic that I decided to go to school to learn to become an audio engineer, the technicians who worked with producers in the studio to make albums.  This wasn’t as outlandish a career avenue to pursue as it might sound, not at that time anyway.  I looked into it and discovered that you could actually study to become a sound man at recording schools and, music being so big back then in the mid ’80s, there were at least three recording schools operating in Vancouver at the time.

So in 1985, thanks to the generous financial support of my kind-hearted mom who paid my tuition, I enrolled in one of the Vancouver recording schools, an operation called the Institute of Recording Arts (ICA), and learned how to operate a professional mixing console and do 24-track recording and after graduating I did manage to find some work at recording facilities such as Ocean Sound, Grapevine Recording Studios and Fiasco Bros. Recording Studios, among others.  Len Osanic, the owner of Fiasco Bros., is a real character.  He actually resided in the rear of his busy New Westminster recording studio and I remember he had a hot tub installed around back and he invited anyone using the studio to bring their swimming trunks with them and hop in if they wanted to.  Fiasco Bros. was a terrific place to do a recording project.  It had an unbeatably relaxed atmosphere that made it a really fun place to work.

The first band I ever recorded was the alternative group Odds which was a very good start.  They’d just formed, via the amalgamation of the insanely-talented musicians Steven Drake and Craig Northey, and I recorded them at two different facilities a few years before they broke big on the radio.  I saw them perform at the Roxy nightclub one night and decided to throw caution to the wind and introduce myself to Steven and offer the band free studio time.  I needed a band to record for my mandatory recording assignment at ICA and they agreed to participate.

I was extremely proud of my procurement and I remember there was a degree of amazement from some of the other students that I’d managed to get such a high-profile band for my project.  A little while later I brought the band into Ocean Sound where I’d accumulated studio time as payment for working as an assistant engineer and we did some more recording there.

One of the highlights of working with Odds was that in the first set of sessions I did with them their drummer was the musician who played drums on Bryan Adams’ Reckless album -- former Powell Riverite Pat Steward!

Steward had already done the Adams album when I worked with them and I must admit, I was totally awestruck that I was working with Bryan Adams’ drummer.  I actually had seen him in person once before -- at a Bryan Adams concert at the Pacific Coliseum along with fifteen thousand other concertgoers!  So, accordingly, meeting him and recording him in a studio was a huge thrill.  And believe me, Steward was just an incredible player; to this day he’s the best drummer I’ve ever recorded.  Basic, no frills, metronome-solid drumming that propelled the songs along beautifully and made everything sound utterly magnificent.  All engineers know there’s nothing better than having a killer drummer as the foundation of your basic recording tracks.  Just throw a little reverb on that snare drum and you’re all set.  In fact, all of the members of Odds were incredible players.  And the great thing about talented players like them is they make it super-easy for the engineer since everything they put to tape just automatically sounds fantastic with very little tweaking required.

Another highlight of that period was acting as the assistant engineer on a project at Ocean Sound being produced and engineered by renowned studio titan Mike “The Fraze That Pays” Fraser.

The front-desk lady who booked the studio time at Ocean mentioned to me that Fraser was coming in to do a project and when she did I begged her to schedule me in as his assistant.  Lucky for me she was kind enough to do so.  Fraser, who was engineering gigantic rock acts with mega-producer Bruce Fairbairn at Vancouver’s Little Mountain Sound Studios at the time, was a big-time hero of mine.  Permanent Vacation, Aerosmith’s comeback release on which Fraser had taken over the engineering duties from Bob Rock who’d left due to a dispute with Fairbairn regarding money, was one of the top rock releases in the world at that moment.  I remember the lead singer of the band being recorded commenting to him about how a remix of “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” was the hottest song in all the dance clubs he’d been to during a recent stay in Miami.  Fraser was a superstar engineer at the very top of his game.  I think everyone involved in those sessions was in awe of him.

The thing I remember most about Fraser was how quiet and laid back he was, which was in direct contrast to the intensity of a lot of the music he was involved with.  He would lean back in his chair and put his feet up on the mixing console in a relaxed manner and when he was pleased with something he’d simply give you a silent thumbs-up gesture to acknowledge his approval.  Another thing I remember was how on the first night of recording I was dressed a little on the preppy side and, although he didn’t say anything, I could sense that my dress was out of place and didn’t look right, that it should have been more low key and casual.  So the next night I just wore jeans and a T-shirt like everyone else and fit right in.  I learned that how you dress can matter and that sometimes it’s about dressing down, not up, especially with rockers.

One night in the studio lounge I asked him what he was currently working on over at Little Mountain and he told me he was engineering an album for a band featuring John Sykes (Whitesnake’s ex-lead guitarist who’d just left the band) with Bob Rock producing.  The name of the band was Blue Murder as was the album title too.  At this time Sykes was one of the hottest guitarists around (in metal circles anyway) as a result of his blistering fretwork on Whitesnake’s 1987 self-titled album.  If I remember correctly, the drum tracks for the band Fraser was producing at Ocean Sound had already been recorded at Little Mountain which was world famous for achieving the most incredible drum sounds in all of rockdom.  Incidentally, Fraser later worked with both of my early rock heroes, co-producing and engineering a series of albums for AC/DC as well as mixing Van Halen’s Balance album.

However, while Fraser ranked very near the top of my list of recording studio stars, my all-time idol back then was Metallica-producer Bob Rock.  He was my god.  Where an aspiring guitar player in those days might have wanted to be Eddie Van Halen, the person I most wanted to be was Bob Rock.  He was the coolest of all the hard rock producers.