Recording - March 2020 - 66

MARCH 2020
TAXI Road Rally 2018

Jonathan Cain, Lifetime Achievement Award
Keynote Interview, Part 2
Interviewed by Michael Laskow
When you were on your break from music and you
were selling stereos in the Valley...
It was Cal Stereo, and they would give me this
little blue-jean vest, and it said, "Musicians
clean the toilet at the end of the day." And I'm
like, "Oh no." You know, they wanted me to sell
these lousy speakers to people. They were made
in Mexico, and they weren't worth dirt. They
were terrible, so I wouldn't sell them. I'd say,
"You don't want those, look at these JBLs over
here, and there's a Marantz over here." I saved
people a lot of grief there, but the store owners
didn't like it because they made more money on
the junky ones.
What are your favorite monitors today?
Oh boy, I'm really diggin' the Genelecs. The
Genelec people have been really cool in
Nashville to us. I was a big Adam guy too. I like
the Adam line, but the Genelecs... And they're
getting better. They've really worked on it, and
they continue to evolve. We have these big monitors [in my studio in Nashville]; they're just
beautiful. If anybody wants to hear Genelecs,
come to Nashville and we'll give you a
playback...for free.
Some of your favorite outboard gear-vintage,
modern, whatever?
You know, I still like the EMT plates. We have
two EMT plates. I love the Lexicon 224X. It
sounds amazing. I like all the Bill Putnam stuff,
United Audio. I've got a bunch of Neve 1073s.
Trident A-Range now makes a module that's
amazing. The SSL compressor...on and on. And
you know, I have a 24-track machine that still
works. My MCI JH-24 with the Auto Locator I
from 1976. I actually recorded my single on it.
So this tape machine found its way from Torrance, California-it was at Quantum
Audio-went to Sausalito, where I bought it at
Harbor Sound.
You know what MCI stands for? I used to have

Jonathan Cain (left) told some great stories about his career, Journey, The Babies, and pitching songs while TAXI's Michael Laskow
and a packed ballroom hung on every word.

them for years. Munchy Crunchy Inside. At least
that was the console. Every time you hit a
button...
Yeah, the consoles weren't so great, but those
tape machines still sound good!
They were workhorses. And they did, they sounded
good!
Vince Gill came in to our studio and did his
Claim Jumpers recording there. He's got a bluegrass band, and they did a whole live recording
straight to 24-track, and it was amazing. They
did no overdubs. It sounded incredible.
I loved doing sessions like that. I lived for doing
sessions like that. The best.
Roll tape. There's something beautiful about
those old recordings. How many people in the
audience still like vinyl. Right? I mean, you put
on a vinyl disc you haven't heard for a while,
and you went, "Oh, it's supposed to sound like
that?" It's pretty amazing.
My wife just got me a turntable in September for
my birthday, and I've been taking out a bunch of
my old vinyl and listening to it, and it's visceral.
You know, I don't know that somebody who didn't
grow up with vinyl would have that same feeling.
But there is something about the surface noise on
a piece of vinyl that actually adds...
Well, the one thing I found out about vinyl is
that it faithfully reproduces frequencies between

the nooks and crannies, where digital will just
round off numbers. So 336 cycles becomes 338,
because it doesn't have 336. Well, a record plays
all the frequencies, so it's a real replica of the
original frequency, not an interpolation, as they
do with digital. But now we have 96k, so it's getting really good. In the digital world, it's like
going to 4k on TV. You say, wow, that's really
beautiful now. So we've come a long way in the
digital world, I have to say.
And just having all the memory and the automation has got to be great on the road-especially
for front of house on the road.
It's amazing what we are able to do, the consistency we get. We have a snapshot of our show,
you know, so no matter where we go, we are up
and running like that.
And if you're back to the same venue three years
later, you could hit recall and there it is!
It's there, yeah. We recently did a recording at
the Budokan in Tokyo. You know the Cheap
Trick album At Budokan? Well, Journey played
Escape & Frontiers at the Budokan, and we had
problems with the room mics. They were kind
of in the wrong place. So my friend got a sample of the Budokan room; it was a model of the
Budokan, and he just plugged it into the mix.
We had our ambience back, it was great-it
sounded just like it. So they can shoot a room
Continued on page 66
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