This is an excerpt from an unfinished and as yet incomplete interview with Stephen Barncard conducted by Matt Greenwald in 1998. Parts One, Two and Three of the interview can be found at the Barncard site.

This excerpt picks up where Barncard is answering a question about his 6 month residence in LA in 1968.

A: Sunset Sound was about four blocks away, and we were about two blocks down from Heider’s on Cahuenga. Had I known, I would have been knocking on the doors and just asked for a job, but I didn’t know where to start. There was a demand for someone like me in independent recording and they needed people, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Q: This must have been around the time CSN were recording their first album, right?

A: Yeah, right around that time they were doing their first record with Bill Halverson but I didn’t know that, and I was a bit unsure about LA, anyway. When my girlfriend, Ellen Burke came out to join me for Christmas, we got fearful of earthquakes and decided to go back to Kansas City by way of San Francisco. When we got up there, it was really more of what I was looking for. The air was cleaner, the musical atmosphere better—What a city!

During this trip, I saw The Grateful Dead for the first time on New Year s eve—(December 31, 1968) at The Fillmore. I had never liked their records very much. Seeing them live, I went “Woah! Who’s that groovy guy with the beard singing ‘St. Stephen’ and ‘Dark Star’?” It was great. I actually taped it. I had a little Norelco tape recorder with an SM 57. I guess I was one of the first tapers, it just wasn’t a big deal back then, nobody minded. I wish I still had the tape; it was either stolen or lost. Anyway, the show left an impression on me. So did San Francisco. My girlfriend and I went back to Kansas City for a little while, I went back to KUDL/KCJC-FM and then that first CSN record came out.

Q: This is mid-1969, right?

A: Right. And I heard those voices and said, “My god, they got a 16 track!”. I could tell that they doubled or tripled the voices…plus the guitars, plus the bass, etc. So after 6 months in Kansas City, I decided that if I wanted to make records, I had to get back to the West Coast. I had to make a choice: East Coast, Woodstock, or West Coast, Bill Graham’s ‘Wild West.’ I blew off Woodstock, flew to San Francisco, stayed with some friends, grabbed a phone book and opened it up to ‘recording studios’, and I saw Wally Heider’s listed and thought, ‘okay, this is only a few blocks away.’ I went over there and talked to a very nice guy named Mel Tanner who was the general manager, and he gave me a tour of the place. They had one studio operating, which was Studio C. Studios A and D were still under construction.

Q: What projects were going on there at the time?

A: The Jefferson Airplane had just finished “Volunteers”. They were probably the first clients and they had stayed for months. I think Eric Jacobson was doing work there too. As it turned out it was the only real world class studio in San Francisco at the time.
So I asked Mel what I should do about working there, and he told me to write Wally Heider directly. So I wrote Wally a rambling four page letter, basically the technical story of my life. By then I had moved back to LA for a little while, and stayed with Tommy Oliver, who was by this time one of the people building the Village Recorder and he gave me a job wiring there.
After about two months of working at The Village, I finally got a call there from Wally. “Ah-ah-ah-can-n you come over here right now?!” (laughter) He stuttered a lot. He was really intense, like a speed freak. But a good guy. If you ever want to know what Wally was like, see ‘Monterey Pop’. Wally was the rather large guy running up during The Who’s finale, trying grab his microphones before the band destroyed them . Between them and Hendrix, it’s amazing that he didn’t have a seizure right there! (laughter) That was Wally. A hard guy to work for but I owe him a lot, may he rest in peace.

Q: Didn’t he start out as sort of a field recordist?

A: He was a lawyer from Seattle who’s hobby was making recordings of big bands, like Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. He would record them live, two-track, with an Ampex portable mixer and four mics. That’s what started his remote business, ‘cause he was always a remote guy. Then when independent recording studios became popular he got a storefront and a studio business going; he was a really shrewd businessman. He was the guy who invented real service in the independent recording business. If someone wanted the latest 3M 16 track recorders, he would get them 2. When someone wanted fifteen dancing girls, he would get them thirty dancing girls.

Q: I understand that he had his consoles custom built…

A: He had hired this guy named Frank DeMedio to build these wonderful consoles made out of UREI solid-state pre-amps and Switchcraft telephone quality switches and relays and Gotham faders. Balanced everything. Transformers, transformers, everywhere. As designed, they would work great. If somebody tried to modify the design though, they could get into trouble.
Frank designed quality consoles that always worked. They were like battleships. As built, they were amazing. They only had one pre-amp per channel, one amplifier stage, and they would use that same pre-amp for mic and line. He just used resistive pads to take down the line level signal going into the preamp.

Q: How did you actually get the job with Wally?

A: Well, when I finally got my meeting with the guy, he checked me out. He goes, (loud, stuttering voice) “Wha-wh-wa..can you go get a phono pick-up in..ahh-ahhh-Santa Monica?!!...here’s the keys to my T-Bird and $50.00.” So I did this errand, and gave him the change. That was part of my audition, to make sure that I gave him all of the change. So I guess he thought I was competent and honest, and seemed to like me. A day later I was back working at The Village, and he called me again and asked me to go up to San Francisco with him. We took a plane up there that day, and he showed me the different rooms at the San Francisco facility, which I had seen already…I think he wanted to give me the official tour. He said, “Whadda ya think, you wanna work here?” and I said, “My god, are you kidding?”
He needed me to be an assistant, and there was no other assistants there. There was an engineer, Russ Gary. But he was mainly a first engineer.

Q: Was this right before “Deja Vu”?

A: Right. Part of Wally’s mission in going up there was to get an assistant for Bill Halverson on an upcoming CSN&Y session, which turned out to be “Deja Vu”. I think Wally wanted a second that looked like he fit in. I was not only qualified, I also had the look, with my John Lennon glasses and long hair, to make the clients feel at ease. Most of my engineering colleagues at the time were pretty geeky pocket-protector types. Like I said, Wally was a shrewd studio owner. He had forward attitudes for 1969.

Q: Wow, this happened pretty quickly…

A: Yeah, and I only had two weeks to get ready and to learn the rooms. I learned the patch bay in a few minutes, it was pretty simple. Setting up mics running a tape machine and handling tape was something I already knew, the tape was just bigger. By the time CSNY got in there I had it pretty well figured out and was ready to do the dates.

Q: Could you describe Wally Heider’s studio at the time?

A: The room was smaller than control rooms are today, but it had pretty much the same layout. The console was on a little six inch rise, with a ramp to get the machines up to the back….there was a speaker soffet over the window, a little couch in front of the console, a big gray rack next to the right of it for the power amplifiers, and another rack at right angles next to the console to put the small amount of outboard gear that was there.
The console was a Demedio 24 position 8 bus with 8 meters, one for each buss or track coming back from the tape. If you wanted to monitor more than 8 tracks, you had to look back at the machine. A lot of people today think that console was tube, but actually, everything in the room except for a Pultec and the monitor amps was transistor based.
The monitor section was kind of strange, but typical of the time. You’d have 8 knobs, and the speaker that each one would feed was fixed. Because of the traditions of the time, there were four monitor speakers, big ones—Altec 604Es, one next to each other. Maybe that was a hold over from the days of four track, so that you could send a track to each speaker rather than worry about mixing it. But that meant maintaining four separate speaker systems and amps. The soffet was just a big hole above the window, and they had made each speaker cabinets out of a single piece of plywood; the dimensions were dictated by the stock size of a piece of plywood rather than any science.
But in spite of that, the 604Es, when they were set up right, sounded pretty good. They had the high frequency knob right up there, so anyone could turn it and change it. We’d put a little grease pencil mark to remember where we set it (laughs). So consequently, there was no real standard, no reference. The concept of speaker fatigue was not understood, so the same speakers would stay in until they blew out, and they would change over time. You just had to play something you knew before a date.
Channels 1 and 2 from the 8 track would feed the first speaker, 3 and 4 would feed the second speaker, and so on. So playbacks would be pretty intense because you’d have four speakers rockin’. But it made you lay it out so that your basic tracks would be on the first eight, and then for overdubs you’d have to switch over to another mode. It was tedious to switch from one to the other without zeroing your basic tracking setup, but that’s the way we did it.
The console had two cue systems with the eight monitor returns from the machine. There was relay switching so that you could select if it was coming back from the machine or the busses, and that a master selector would also feed the monitor and the two sets of cues. There was a way you could connect the two cues together to get 16 tracks back. Sometimes I even used that cue system as a monitor so if I had to monitor 16 tracks I could sort of do it there, but more likely, what you’d do is do your basic tracks and stay with the 8 original busses then you’d bring everything down and use the faders for monitoring, becasue it sounded better through the mix section anyway.

Q: What about monitoring in stereo?

A: Buses 4 and 5 were the stereo bus. There was a switch that would take those two busses and spread them out to the far speakers 1 and 4, then you could do a stereo mix. It was a little weird, but it worked.
It didn’t really matter about tearing down the set-ups, because there were no lock-outs in those days. It had to come down anyway. Even with CSN&Y, we’d set it up, then tear it down again every night , because we had Creedence Clearwater during the daytime, so during “Deja Vu” I would stay until 2-3 in the morning, take all the mikes down, put them away, come back in the morning for Creedence by 11:00. It was crazy.

Q: You were doing both sessions?

A: Yeah, and one night I kinda wrapped around, because Stills sometimes stayed until 6:00am. (laughs) Wally came out and said, “ah-ah-ah..d-d-d double time after fourteen hours!!”. (laughter) I was like, “Fuck you! I don’t care…” I was so tired. He walked in at 7:00am, and I was like, “Oh, god, please go away!”. Fortunately Wally didn’t hang out too much in San Francisco because he had to run his business in LA. He used to make everybody nervous.
Anyway, back to the control room. They used these UTC O-10 [OH TEN] transformers everywhere. They would bridge the tape machine return or bus signal and feed it into the studio monitor, the cue, and second cue. Tape machines terminated at 600 ohms. Everything transformer isolated.
To the right towards the back of the console there was this rack that held all of the power amplifiers and it had its own patch bay, so you could re-arrange the speaker and the amp feeds. Heider’s used nothing but McIntosh amplifiers, two 275’s for the control room monitors, and two 240’s for the cues. Right next to the mixing position they had the outboard gear, and there were a couple of the blue-faced UREI 1176’s. Also, on the tape machine returns there was a whole patch area dedicated for the tape returns and the pads. Sixteen of these returns had UREI Passive EQ’s coming right off of the machine, because the EQ’s on the board itself were very limited. There was also a couple of Pultec EQ’s, but I’m not sure of the exact model. Oh, and there was a crappy little Altec 5 band graphic equalizer.

Q: Were you pleased with the McIntosh ?

A: Yeah, they sounded pretty good, although they could have had more power, but for the time it was loud enough. There were also a couple of Lang EQ’s, but they weren’t that good, except for bringing up a snare. They were very peaky and I hardly ever used one. That was about it for outboard gear.
We had some excellent live chambers; two or three. I think we had an EMT, and there was an echo central, a master patch in some room somewhere that we could assign it to the three rooms.

Q: How about the console?

A: The Demedio, yes. It was not constructed with module strips, it was one big plate and everything was mounted to it. No circuit boards. All of the switches and controls were really high quality, hot molded AB pots, Switchcraft lever switches and full size single TRS patch bays. The one-per-position UREI amplifier cards were in a cage accessible from the back. All of the rotary switches were ceramic wafer, high quality silver contacts. The faders weren’t that good, they were Gotham Audio, 2 dB per step sliders. They weren’t really sliders, they were a slider mechanism and dial cords attached to a rotary stepped attenuator. Those got replaced by real Gliss faders later…

Q: That must have been a challenge for you…

A: It was the finest thing I had ever worked on so it’s all how you look at it. If it was good enough for CSN&Y, it was good enough for me. This was what I used on “American Beauty” and Crosby’s solo record, too.

Q: For tracking and mixing?

A: Yeah. And a pay telephone on the wall (laughter). It was really funny when it rang. There was always someone looking for Jorma (Kaukonen). There were these clay acoustical tiles on the wall that people used to rotate to weird angles, and Wally used to get pissed off and try and straighten them out (laughs). Then the bands would randomize them again.

Q: What was the material on the walls?

A: I think it was just straight plaster…

Q: Wood and carpet?

A: There was carpet up to maybe chest height, and there were these clay blocks that I mentioned, that would break up the surface at least. The electronic systems were pretty good when I got there, but as time went on it got worse and worse as later techs made “improvements” (laughs). They later added, in place of the UREI EQ’s on the side, some 550’s, which was a nice addition in theory, but somebody got the gain structure wrong so it was crunching. That was a later time, like mid-1973.

Q: How about the recording room?

A: There was a little tiny booth, where you could put an acoustic guitar or vocalist, but CSN&Y didn’t use it much. I think we put the organ Leslie in there, to isolate it. Eric Burden sang/rapped his big hit ‘Spill the Wine’ live on acid in that booth. When CSNY did “Almost Cut My Hair”, though, the vocal was live in the studio. Live vocal, live everything. There isn’t one overdub on that song…

Q: Pretty cool…

A: Yeah, and that’s one reason why it’s so intense.

Q: Tape machines…

A: When I got there Heider’s SF had two 16 tracks. One was an MM1000, which The Jefferson Airplane had requested. Wally didn’t like them, but that’s what the RCA union guys used, so Wally got one for those guys. But Bill Halverson always used 3M’s. We used the M56 model, which I still think to this day was one of the best sounding 16 tracks ever made. It sounds great, it’s compact and was very reliable. Wally liked those too and used them is his remote trucks because they were small and reliable.
We had both 3M and Ampex 440b two-tracks. ‘Deja Vu’ wasn’t mixed in SF, it was mixed in LA. We didn’t use cassettes for client take home mixes at first, we’d put them on the 2 track and band members would play them on a 1/4 track machine and bring up the right channel because of the track positioning differences. So, that was the back wall machines.
There was one 24-input microphone panel in the recording room. The microphone selection was in keeping with Halverson and Heider’s experience, as it was originally a remote recording company. A lot of SM57’s. A workhorse for scratch vocals, instruments, just about everything. On overheads we’d use the C37i Sonys or the Neuman 87’s, or a couple of 67’s. My favorite condenser there was the AKG C-60, the predecessor to the 451 series.

Q: What was it like working with Bill Halverson?

A: I was real impressed with Bill, and he was the second guy that I assisted, after Russ Gary. When we started doing the sessions, there was a dispute between him and the band about production credit, I believe, so he wasn’t there for the first sessions I worked on. He didn’t record “Woodstock” and a couple of other tracks. Russ Gary did it, and received no credit. I later helped get him a long deserved credit on the box set. CSN didn’t want a producer, so Russ went it alone and did his best, and I although I thought his recordings sounded good, he just didn’t click with the band. I don’t think that he was responsive enough for them. They liked to roll a lot of tape—tape is cheap, time is not. He might have missed a couple of spontaneous things that happened. It was a full set up every night, we never knew what was going to happen. The band were staying at The Red Lantern Motel up the street…

Q: They call this the ‘Tenderloin’ district?

A: Right, the Tenderloin. Crappy neighborhood. It’s been the same way there for 50 years. But what I’ve noticed about really good band albums, is that if a band is forced to stay in the same area, and they have really nothing else to do and aren’t distracted and they are not in their usual home routine they make much better records…

Q: Focused…

A: More focused. And to have Neil there, focused, because he didn’t have anywhere else to go, he was far from his place in LA. Everybody was kind of stuck there. Graham didn’t have his Haight-Ashbury place yet, and David didn’t have boat in Sausalito then. I think that helped, the social compression factor.
Stills would stay up all night and do guitars, some of the bass parts, and work with Dallas. That “Everybody I Love You” thing, they would just work and work and work and Halverson would edit and edit. I finally fell asleep in the corner some nights. They would truly go till dawn.

Q: What kinds of sounds did Halverson get, for example drums and acoustic guitar, that you really learned from?

A: He got great drum sounds. It was an education, definitely. I never checked out his mic positioning, because I had my own theories, but I did watch how he squashed the shit out of the acoustic guitars with 1176’s and EQ’d it kinda bright, that was pretty cool. But he was more a teacher on how to deal with the social and production aspects of recording a band. Even though they didn’t give him credit as the producer, he certainly encouraged some great performances out of the guys and should have been credited as a producer.

Q: How would he be able to do that?

A: By flattering them; giving them good feedback by manipulating the situation in a way to get them to adapt to the technology, bringing them around to hearing things his way, in an almost ‘fawning’way of showering them with praise and encouragement.
He truly believed in the band, and really meant it. He turned to me one day and said, “You know, there’s nothing like working with talent.” And he was right! Also, he made Dallas Taylor, who was not the greatest drummer, sound really big. I was impressed with that. He did a lot of overdubing, a lot of editing, and a lot of punch-ins on the drum parts.

Q: I hear he was good with a razor blade…

A: Yeah, he was. And CSN trusted him to do the impossible and he would always pull it off.
This was an amazing recording, with magic all over the place…and a lot of angst too. David’s lady Christine had died a few weeks before, and he was very upset and on the edge. But that tension among all the players also drove a really dynamic record.

Q: Yeah, you listen to “Almost Cut My Hair”, and it’s scary.

A: That’s it, it’s scary…