SPENCER CHRISLU
Spencer Chrislu worked as a recording engineer, mixer, and
editor for Frank Zappa from 1991 until his passing – then continued to work for
the family until 1998. During this period, he was involved in digitally
remastering The Perfect Stranger
(1992), The Man From Utopia (1993), We’re Only In It For The Money (1995), Läther (1996), Tinsel Town Rebellion (1998) and You Are What You Is (1998); sequencing and editing Frank Zappa Plays The Music Of Frank Zappa
(1996) and Everything Is Healing Nicely
(1999); remixing You Can’t Do That On
Stage Anymore volumes 5 & 6 (1992) and Playground Psychotics (1992); recording The Yellow Shark (1993); remixing The Lost Episodes (1996), Have
I Offended Someone? (1997) and Trance-Fusion
(2006); and mixing Civilization Phaze III
(1994) and FZ:OZ (released in 2002).
Today he works for MQA, providing ‘master quality audio in a file that’s small
enough to stream or download.’ He has lived in the UK for the last five years,
so Corné van Hooijdonk of the Nether regions suggested I seek him out.
How did you come to work
with Frank?
Through my association with Todd Yvega.
Todd and I met within the first six months of me living in Los Angeles. I had
moved to the Enterprise Studios and Todd was in the first session that I worked
on over at Enterprise.
Where are you originally
from?
I’m originally from Chicago. I had just
gotten out of the University of Illinois. And then I was actually living in
Nashville for a couple of years after school. Then I came up from Nashville to
California to seek my fame and fortune!
So Todd introduced you…?
Well Todd and I had worked together for years. I think we
met in 1986. We had known each other and had been working on and off on various
projects. And then, in the summer of 1991, the Ensemble Modern had just visited
Frank’s house. At the time, I was working at a different studio, and Todd had
come to me and asked if I wanted to come in and interview for Frank. He and his
engineer had parted ways, and there was an opening.
And I said, “No!” [laughs]. I couldn’t imagine taking the position as I had
heard of Frank’s reputation for being a taskmaster. I knew of stories where
he’d stop a concert in the middle of a song because someone had made a mistake.
I think Todd and David Dondorf
between them had done the recordings when the Ensemble was there for the first
rehearsals, and Todd asked me if I wanted to come up. He went over it and told
me how great it was working for Frank – how he wasn’t anything like the person
people thought and what a great person he was to work with. Todd also related
that they had just installed a new console there which he thought might suit
me. So I took him up on his offer and went up to meet Frank and, yeah, we went
from there.
And what was the first
project you worked on for him?
As you’re probably aware, Frank never
worked on one thing at a time. During our interview, he asked me what I knew
about the new console and what could I do with it. He seemed completely
uninterested when I said yes to his various questions, but his ears pricked up
when he asked another question and I said, “Oh,
I don’t know that.” He thought that was more interesting than the things I
did know. I felt that was kind of strange, and I didn’t know what to make of
it.
He then asked me if I could build a
digital reverb that sounded like the back of the live room. It’s a strange
space with hard parallel walls, a wooden floor and a huge 25 or 30 foot
ceiling. I said, “Sure, I’ll give it a
try,” and that seemed to please him.
After the interview, he said to come
back and he’d give me a try out.
The first thing he did was put on a
recording of one of the eighties bands – one of the big bands: I think it was
the 84 band. I walked in, and he told me to “pan
this guy left, this guy right, put my guitars here” and then he said he had
to go to the doctors and he’d be back in a couple of hours. I opened the manual
and started mixing. He came back a few hours later and said, “Hmm, you seem to know what you’re doing.”
So that was the first thing.
Besides the 80s band project (that
became one of the YCDTOSA albums), he
was mixing the first Ensemble Modern rehearsal, which then became part of the Everything Is Healing Nicely album.
I was gonna say, weren’t
you responsible for compiling that?
Well, I shouldn’t say that I was completely
responsible…he was sick at the time, so I would put things together and then
we’d talk about them. He’d listen: he couldn’t be active at that time, but we
found ways to collaborate.
So we were working on that, and at
the same time he was still doing compositions for the Ensemble and we had the
Synclavier set up, and on any given day we would be working on whatever struck
him.
You were obviously aware
of his illness when you first met him?
Yeah, he made it clear the first day that
he was sick and had been sick. In fact, it was shortly after that that Dweezil
and those guys made the announcement.
At the Zappa’s Universe
shows?
That was literally the first week that I
was there. In fact, he wanted me to go up and record those concerts. And again,
Frank being Frank – he was amazing – he just decided that since I was on the
team, I could do anything.
He said to the show organisers, “You’ve got your engineers to do it, but they’re
doing it wrong and I’ve got my guy and he’s gonna tell you how it’s run.”
He explained to me that he’d already gone over the show with them and since
they didn’t have multiple machines, they didn’t know how to ensure they’d
capture everything. And he was like, “No,
I’m gonna send my guy.”
So you knew he was a
hard taskmaster, but were you familiar with his music at all?
No, I wasn’t. And in fact, I think he
enjoyed that a lot. He liked the fact that I didn’t come with pre-conceived visions
of what it was supposed to be or how it was supposed to be. I wasn’t idol
worshipping, and very quickly we both found out that we heard things the same
way – we heard details in the music the same way, we liked things set up the
same way. It became a very easy relationship.
I could easily understand what he was
going for, and he liked what I was going for. He didn’t really have to give me
a lot of feedback. On certain mixes, he could just leave me for hours and when
he came back, in general, he’d like it.
He would throw a lot of stuff at
me…the goal with Frank was just to stay super-flexible – to be ready. He could
be in the middle of a rock and roll thing and then he’d just decide that he
wanted to remix the Yellow Shark
sessions. You had to then figure out what was going on. I’d sit down with the
score for music that I hadn’t really known or been familiar with, and we’d sit
and talk and laugh about it.
This is a question from
my friend in the Netherlands who put me on to you. Does the UMRK have two
echo-chambers: one on the right side of the house/studio? If so, where is the
second located – and what was the difference in usage between the two?
There was the small chamber and the big
chamber. The big chamber was back of the studio – a square-shaped room where
the Bösendorfer grand was, 15 feet by 15 feet with a
hard wood floor, and hard walls. But it had probably a 25 or 30 foot high
ceiling. This was the room that he had me build in the digital reverb. It was
very narrow cubicle. The large chamber was accessed through a door in that room
that went down about 8 feet. It was a great sounding space.
And there was this other small
chamber – I think it was under the studio. Between Dave Dondorf and me, we
decided to resurrect those chambers – because when I started there, they
weren’t in working order: the speaker that was driving them had been blown, and
the microphones that were down there were old and were using tubed microphones
that had long given out.
We re-jigged it, set it up, created
this space and that became the source of a lot of the six channel reverb we
were using for his mixes.
Have you seen what the
studio looks like since Lady GaGa bought the house?
No, I haven’t. But I’d love to see it.
I know some of the
equipment was sold during the auction, but she talks about using the studio –
parts of the Star Is Born soundtrack
and her Chromatica album were
recorded there.
What was your proudest achievement,
working with Frank?
I think that was the attention that he got
for The Yellow Shark. In a lot of the
audiophile and serious classical magazines, he had gotten some attention, but
he’d really never gotten his due – kind of based on, “Oh, he’s a rock and roll guy.”
And the Jazz From Hell/Synclavier stuff they thought was interesting
compositions, but they were dry and super-technical. And the fact that he
himself had said that he doubted he would ever find an ensemble that could play
his music as well as a Synclavier could. And yet, he did.
I’m personally really proud of that
album, and the fact that we did it in a live situation, and some of those
pieces contain edits between different venues – in Frankfurt, Berlin and
Vienna: three highly different sounding halls. We had to meld them together and
make it all work. That was a lot of fun.
Well, it’s a wonderful
album.
You were also I think involved in
archiving video for Frank?
Some video. What I did mostly was I helped
out on some of the documentary things that were going on – I would lend a hand
to them, when he and Van Carlson[i] were putting together videos. And I also transcribed a lot
of video. He was fascinated with the LA riots in 1992. He had captured a lot of
them on VCR and he asked me to transcribe a lot of the silly things the
newscasters were making up on the fly. He found all of that social interaction
very interesting.
Alex Winter has just
wrapped up the Zappa movie and I
wondered if you were asked for help on that at all?
I was not.
Okay. What are your
reflections on Frank’s final recordings: Civilization
Phaze III and Varèse: The Rage And
The Fury?
The
Rage And The Fury was again a fantastic
session. I think in listening to all of the other Varèse recordings, even the
one the Ensemble themselves did afterwards,[ii] there is nothing like the performance and the sound.
We captured it in an entirely
different way. It was done on the Warner Brothers soundstage and so it is a
much more intimate and detailed recording. I think it is an amazing testament
to Varèse’s music, in a way that traditional recordings in traditional venues
don’t capture. It was the way Frank wanted to hear it. Gail said that a lot. He
was really, really pleased with that.
And Civilization Phaze III was just an ongoing project that went on for
years. It was another album that he was really pleased with. He spent hundreds
of hours editing and tweaking that album.
Yes, there was an early version that snuck out and he
obviously reordered it all as he got closer to his final days.
That was the way he always worked. He loved
to take things and figure out new ways to edit them and put them together.
Frank was one of the first to own a Sonic Solutions editing system. And we were
pushing that system…I think they were founded in 1990, and in 1991 we already
had it doing six channels discrete edits and crossfades. He loved the ability
to be able to reorder and cross-fade everything into everything else.
He did seem to leap on
new technology. There’s a book that’s just been published, Zappa Gear by a friend of mine, and it shows just how much he loved
to get new equipment and push it to extents that the people who had created it
hadn’t thought it would be used for.
Yes, that’s correct – that was always
something that turned him on. I’m not sure if it’s listed in your friend’s
book, but the Sony PCM-3324 24-track digital tape recorder that he owned I
believe was serial number 00008, and many of the circuit boards had not been
finished – they were hand-soldering wires connecting points where the circuit
board obviously had errors. He was on the bleeding edge of that kind of thing.
Yes, that’s in the book!
Talking about Everything Is Healing Nicely, tell me about some of the choices you
made for that.
Those mixes were done with the idea of showing the behind
the scenes of The Yellow Shark. Frank
loved those improv sessions and would play them for anyone who came into the
studio. As you can hear on the album, the letters to PFIQ made him laugh a lot.
And
there were other performances like Amnerika
that didn’t make the Yellow Shark
album. Frank wasn’t convinced there was a complete take or sections that could
be edited together enough to satisfy him. I took it upon myself to mix all the
pieces and assemble a complete performance, because I really loved the piece
and loved how they played it.
That album was just a number of those
things where it was just a matter of gluing these various bits together. It was
just kind of fun things, and the chance to show how his composing process
worked, and an insight into how he worked and interacted with the Ensemble.
You also did some
remixes for the Have I Offended Someone?
album.
That’s true! [laughs] Yeah, again it was
just every once in awhile he would throw me something, and I wouldn’t know what
album they would end up on. The Disco Boy
mix was a fun one because I
had never come across that. And he left me alone with it and I went kind of
Gonzo on it. And he looked at me and went, “What
have you done?!” [laughs] I kind of backed off on
some of my original over the top effects and brought it back to where it was.
But I thought that album was hilarious, an absolute blast.
I’d love to have heard
what you did with Disco Boy!
So anyway, you continued to work for
the family after Frank’s passing. What nuggets did you unearth then?
Well, I was working with Joe Travers and
Dweezil, and what we were trying to do was get in direct touch with the fans
and say, “Okay, what have we missed? What
is everyone hoping for?”
Just before his passing, Frank had
signed a deal with Rykodisc who were also interested in doing something, and
that’s when I looked at some of the feedback Joe had collected and we decided
to do some pristine transfers of Apostrophe
(’) and One Size Fits All, which
became those audiophile Au20 gold discs.
The impetus for that really came from
the fans, who told us, “the digital transfer of those sounded awful and the vinyl so
much better – go back.” We used what were cutting edge A-to-D converters at
the time, we found the best source of tapes, we went
about baking tapes to make sure they would play back correctly. A lot of that
we did together.
After that, Joe would come back and
say there was this show, there was that show, there’s these things that we need
to unearth. And Läther
was one of those; in conjunction with Gail, we all felt that was an important
album and one that Frank had started but hadn’t finished.
Obviously one of the
things that the fans are still waiting for is The Rage And The Fury – we don’t know when or if that’s ever going
to finally come out.
Well I’m telling you it’s the best version
of Varèse you’ll ever hear! Hopefully, some day everyone will get a chance to
hear it.
You also worked on Dweezil’s
– well, Z’s album – Music For Pets. What was that like? That was right after
Frank’s passing, so not a great time for the boys.
You can never tell someone how they’re
supposed to feel – what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to
live. I tip my hat to them both. They’ve got a big reputation to live up to and
they want to make their own kind of music.
We were all just working on the album
and trying to make it the best it could be. Mike Keneally, Dweezil, Ahmet were
in the studio all the time working away.
It was good fun and a good
collaboration, but you could see that Dweezil wanted to go in a different
direction – he wanted to figure things out on his own. I think he was more
interested in a smaller kind of set-up that he could control himself.
He actually spent some of his time
with his own personal mix console in one of the drum booths. He would sit there
and go through takes and work on parts, and new guitar sounds, and start
piecing his own ideas together. He didn’t necessarily want to work in a big
studio and maybe have to rely on an engineer to get what he wanted. He wanted a
little more control. And again, I tip my hat to him
And did you work with
him on Frank Zappa Plays The Music Of
Frank Zappa: A Memorial Tribute?
Yes, but I only mixed the first track. The
rest were pulls from master tapes that Frank had mixed. I did the editing and
the mastering on that one.
For a second, I thought you were
referring to Dweezil’s big guitar record where he had all of the other guitar
players come in and I can’t remember the name of that one. Dweezil and I did a
lot of work on that one.
He’s still working on that – to be called What The Hell Was I
Thinking?!
Is he still working on it?
[laughs]
Yep! I’ve spoken to him
a couple of times about it. I interviewed him in 1991, and again in 2015: still
being worked on! It’ll come out one day I’m sure.
Okay.
How did you come to work
with the SEED Ensemble recently?
Well, I currently work at MQA, where we’re
carrying on a lot of the tradition that Frank and I both love, which is the
highest possible fidelity – the highest possible music quality.
After I left the Zappas,
I did some independent mastering until I found an opportunity at Warner Music.
I was with Warner for close to 15 years doing a lot of high-resolution
recording, mastering, mixing, surround sound, DVD-Audio and such.
And then in 2014 I started
collaborating with Bob Stuart (then with Meridian Audio) on a new technology he
was working on. Much like with Frank, Bob and I soon realised we were both
pursuing the same goals in music reproduction and that we heard things in very
much the same way.
The way MQA works is, we can take
super high-resolution recordings – we’re working at eight times the sample rate
of CD. And we can record at that rate, and then we can fold it down to
something that’s small enough to stream without any loss, which is something
Frank would have really enjoyed.
Lately we’ve been doing live
sessions, and finding ways to make it sound better. We were recording it at 192kHz/24-bit but then folding it down using MQA to
broadcast it in real time at 48K and 24 bits. When it gets to
a decoder at the other end and back to its full 192K resolution.
As part of this project we invite
various bands to come into the studio. I record them live using minimal mic
techniques and we broadcast them live to audiences all over the world. SEED
Ensemble was one of the bands we’ve worked with recently. I’d worked on one of
band leader Cassie Kinoshi’s offshoots, called KOKOROKO, at the Nice Jazz
Festival last year and I knew they were a great band for this project.
So was it coincidental,
because just before coronavirus hit, they were
preparing for a ‘Frank Zappa Songbook’ show in London.
Well, it was coincidental. But the funny
thing was that when we finally got together at the session, they were on a
break and Cassie was upstairs doing videos. I was talking to the band while
still setting microphones, and they all decided they would jump on different instruments
– so the bass player went over on the drums, the drummer went over on
keyboards, etc. At one point, the
keyboard player picked up the other guy’s bass, and he started playing a line I
knew I was familiar with. And one of the other musicians said, “Oh my gosh, you’re
playing Zappa!” And I said, “Frank
Zappa? What Zappa are you playing – The Black Page?” And he said, “I could try to play The Black Page, but I
know I couldn’t do it and close the deal.” Then I introduced myself, and
they all went “You worked with Frank
Zappa?!” And I went, “Yes, yes, yes –
long time ago.”
Anyway, Cassie came back, they
did the show, and I talked to her a day or two afterwards. She said, “I heard that you worked with Frank Zappa!
I’ve been telling everyone: the guy who worked with Frank Zappa just did our
live show!” She was very excited. Now I understand why they’re planning on
playing Frank Zappa. That’s awesome.
You’ve already mentioned
some of these guys, but your time with Frank coincided with the tenures of
Marqueson, Dave Dondorf, Todd Yvega and the late Harry Andronis. Tell me about
those guys.
It was just a great team. Dave Dondorf and
I became really close…I mean, all of us, we were just really close personal
friends. Those guys had all toured with Frank, and I was a touring rookie in
’92 and I didn’t know anything about anything – like how a live show was
supposed to go down, and the first show I ever did was broadcast live on TV,
which only added to the pressure. But they were great, they were fantastic and
supportive. We all kind of hung out together. Dave and I spent the most time
together because we were both in the studio. And Todd was there all the time.
And then Marque, he was off at the other facility.
At Joe’s Garage?
Yeah, he was running that, and we would
hear from him every once in a while. I think the other guys hung out with him
more. They were all great guys and it was tragic to hear of Harry’s passing.
I’m sure you’ve seen the video online that
he did with his niece, I think it was, where he’s going through a real
description of what ALS is and how it affects people; what it means and that he
knew that his time was coming to an end.
No, I haven’t seen that.
I did speak to Harry, because I wrote a book about Frank’s 88 tour and, just after it was published, I heard that he’d
passed away. It was really quite shocking because I didn’t know he was ill,
even.
Just do a Google search on ‘Harry Andronis
ALS’ and it’ll come up. It’s very touching, and very moving. He’s very matter
of fact about it. But he’s probably about 50lbs lighter in that video than he
was when I had known him – you can see the ravages of it.
Again, they were all just great guys,
long time relationship and everyone was of the same ethos. You’ve interviewed
enough people now to know what it was like working with Frank. It was always a
very inspiring and musical experience – he really, really cared about the
music. That was the one overriding thing: the creativity should never go stale
and the pursuit of technical perfection. The minute anybody started to get
complacent, he’d stand up and say, “No,
we’re turning left!” And that was the great thing about him. If there were
guys that hung around that had been around him for a long time, you knew that
they were guys who believed the same thing.
You left the Zappas’ employ in 1998 – was that just because you felt
your time there had run its course?
Yes. But you could also see – and I want to
be fully respectful of Dweezil and the family – but Dweezil wanted to run the
ship, and to put it in his direction. And you could see that he wanted to go in
a different direction. He had different musical priorities and didn’t need me
in the same way that Frank needed me – he wasn’t sitting at the Synclavier
composing one day and we weren’t doing all of those kind of things – and it
just became clear that it was time to move on. And that’s what you do.
You then went to
Precision Mastering, where you offered to do mastering work for the ZFT should
the call ever come. I take it it didn’t?
There was some consulting work – they
wanted to know, “Hey, do you remember
this one?” “Can you help us with this
machine?” “Can you help us get this up and running?” “Do you know where the
tapes were for this?” “Did you guys ever finish that?” That sort of thing.
I helped out with one or two technical things. And then a good friend of ours –
John Polito from Audio Mechanics,[iii] who had worked with Frank – he came asking me some stuff.
When was the last time
you had contact with those guys?
I saw Gail when the LA Philharmonic
performed 200 Motels – The Suites at
the Walt Disney Concert Hall in October 2013. I was at that show, and that was
a lot of fun. I said hi to her. Dave Dondorf and I are in semi-regular contact,
and Todd and I talk probably once a month.
Okay. Finally, any
reflections on Frank you’d care to share?
I tell everyone that he wasn’t just a great
musician, he was really one of the greatest humans –
an empathetic, caring soul. A great guy who really cared about everyone. He
cared about the family a great deal and was really caring about the guys who
were around him. He always loved the music. I’ve seen it written that one of the
great qualities of people is the ability to make you feel like you were the
only person in the room: he was one of those.
And he did love to get people in a
room to see what can happen. I’ve seen one of those videos of the Friday night
salons, with everyone in the same room at the same time. I think that brought
him so much joy, just to see everyone there, everyone having a good time, and
this amazing collaboration of people. How many people can bring together the
Tuvan throat singers, The Chieftains and Tom Jones into the same room?
Yeah, I think I saw the
actor Peter Coyote there too.
Yes, Peter was there.
So that’s really my parting thought.
I want everyone to know just what a great human being he was. He cared about
everybody.
And funny as hell too.
Absolutely hilarious!
I’ll give you one anecdote. There was
one section in the original version of N-Lite on Civilization
Phaze III – which at one point was 28 minutes
long – there’s one little section, after it breaks down, where there’s a little
synthesizer/horn line that goes “Ba-ba-ba baba.” He would
always call that the ‘Matty told Hatty’
section. He would say, “Yeah, its right
after the Matty told Hatty
section!” [laughs]
It’s funny how these
little things would recur – Denny Walley would sing Wooly Bully on stage – and that’s one of the fascinating things
about Frank: the conceptual continuity.
There was one time, I was mixing something and he had me pull out one of the
solos from when they were in Memphis.[iv] And he’s just wailing away, and in the middle of it he puts
in a lick from Heartbreak Hotel – in the middle of this
complex solo there’s this lick, and I just started cracking up. I said, “Did you really do that?” He said, “Of course. It’s appropriate.”
Absolutely hilarious.
That’s the thing: I’ve
been listening to his music since I was 13 – since 1971 – and even now I hear
things I didn’t notice before. An amazing body of work.
Now I’m thinking of all the time I just
fell about laughing. There was one time
we were doing the Playground Psychotics
material, and it was the first time I’d heard the Flo & Eddie stuff. There
was one concert where for one of the encores they did Happy Together, but they did it absolutely note-for-note straight,
without any irony or any parody. It was one of the best versions I’d ever heard
them do, and they weren’t making fun of themselves. Of course that was the
hilarious part of it: after doing two hours of comedy and complexity, for the
encore they just played a Turtles song straight-up. And I laugh to this day
just remembering it.
[laughs]
Sorry!
That’s brilliant. Thanks
a lot for your time, Spence.
***
Photo
shows Spence with the SEED Ensemble at British Grove Studios, March 2020.