Nobody hears a studio. What a listener hears is a set of decisions taken inside one, by people whose names are printed in four point type on the back of a sleeve, and in the Bay Area between 1984 and 1989 those decisions were remarkably consistent from record to record. Dry. Close. Separated. Almost no reverb on the snare, each guitar pushed to its own side, the low end held under control instead of left to swell. That is a house sound, and a house sound comes from a small number of rooms and a smaller number of engineers.
Two buildings carry most of it, and neither is what anybody would have predicted. One was a chicken farm forty miles north of San Francisco. The other was built by a record company out of the profits from a band that had already broken up.
A chicken farm in Cotati
Prairie Sun began in 1978 as an operation run by Mark Rennick, known universally as Mooka, with his co-owner Clifton Buck-Kauffman, and in 1981 it moved onto ten acres of former chicken farm outside Cotati in Sonoma County. That is not a metaphor and not a joke about the acoustics. It was an agricultural property with outbuildings, converted piece by piece, an hour north of the city and a long way from anyone who might complain about the volume.
Its importance to this music rests on two records made a year apart. Exodus cut Bonded By Blood there in July 1984, produced by their manager Mark Whitaker, and Possessed cut Seven Churches there in a single week in the spring of 1985 with Randy Burns producing, released by Combat that November. Between them those two albums fix the entire template: the riff arriving as a row of separate blows rather than a smear, the snare forward and unadorned, no room tone to soften anything. Nothing on either record is hiding.
Isolation did the rest of the work. A band that drives an hour out of town and stays there is a band that has stopped watching the clock, and the difference between a studio you visit and a studio you live in shows up in the takes. Prairie Sun went on to become a residential complex that took in Tom Waits, Primus and Faith No More, which tells you the room was always better than the budgets that first found it.
The house that Creedence built
Fantasy Studios sat at Tenth and Parker in the industrial west end of Berkeley, four rooms put up in 1971 as a private facility for artists on the Fantasy label and paid for, as everybody in the building enjoyed pointing out, by Creedence Clearwater Revival. It opened to the public in 1980, which is the year that matters here, because it put a genuinely professional Bay Area studio within a few miles of every thrash band in the county at the exact moment those bands started needing one.
Death Angel made Frolic Through The Park there in 1988, and Testament went in for Practice What You Preach the following year. Fantasy is the reason the local records of the late 1980s sound better made than the local records of 1985 without sounding any less severe: the same aesthetic, executed with a proper live room and a desk that could hold it. The building closed for good on 15 September 2018.
The men at the desk
Four names cover most of the discography, and their fingerprints are easier to hear than the studios'.
Mark Whitaker managed Exodus and produced them, which in 1984 meant the same job done twice. Randy Burns did Seven Churches and then went on to work with Megadeth, Kreator and half of the extreme metal of the decade, and his signature is a kind of controlled filth, everything audible without anything sounding tidy. John Cuniberti produced Vio-lence's Eternal Nightmare and, with Doug Caldwell, Forbidden's Forbidden Evil, both in 1988, both across San Francisco and Cotati, and they share a snare sound so dry it is almost hostile. Alex Perialas was not local at all and matters anyway, which is the awkward part of this story.
The Bay Area house sound was frequently captured three thousand miles from the Bay.
Recorded three thousand miles from home
Here is the fact that spoils every neat account of a regional sound. Testament's The Legacy, one of the definitive Bay Area records, was made at Pyramid Sound in Ithaca, New York, with Perialas producing, and released in April 1987. Perialas was also the producer Anthrax and Overkill used, in the same room, in the same years. Metallica had already gone further, to Sweet Silence in Copenhagen, and came back with Flemming Rasmussen's deeper and wider version of the same clarity.
So the geography does not hold, and it should not be forced to. What travelled was not a building or an engineer. It was a set of preferences carried by the bands themselves: this is how loud the snare goes, this is how far apart the guitars sit, this is how much room tone we will tolerate, which is none. A band that had rehearsed for three years in a garage in El Cerrito walked into a studio in upstate New York and asked for the sound it already had in its head, and got it, because it knew precisely what it wanted before the tape rolled.
| Studio | Where | Record | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prairie Sun | Cotati, California | Exodus, Bonded By Blood | 1984 |
| Prairie Sun | Cotati, California | Possessed, Seven Churches | 1985 |
| Banquet Sound | Santa Rosa, California | Death Angel, The Ultra-Violence | 1986 |
| Pyramid Sound | Ithaca, New York | Testament, The Legacy | 1987 |
| San Francisco and Cotati | California | Forbidden, Forbidden Evil | 1988 |
| Fantasy Studios | Berkeley, California | Death Angel, Frolic Through The Park | 1988 |
| Fantasy Studios | Berkeley, California | Testament, Practice What You Preach | 1989 |
| Sweet Silence | Copenhagen, Denmark | Metallica, Ride The Lightning | 1984 |
Why it had to be dry
The production choice follows straight from the writing, and it is not a matter of taste. A Bay Area song is built out of five or six distinct riffs arranged like paragraphs, with tempo changes the whole band has to hit on a single beat. Put reverb on that and it turns to porridge: the tail of one chord smears into the attack of the next, the palm mutes lose their edge, and the listener can no longer take the riff apart while it is still playing. Which is the entire point of the exercise.
The German bands of the same years chose the opposite and chose it deliberately. Kreator made Pleasure To Kill at Musiclab in Berlin in 1986 with Harris Johns, and what comes off that tape is room, weight and mass, a wall rather than a diagram. Neither answer is better. They are answers to different questions about whether a listener is supposed to follow the argument or be flattened by it.
What the Bay Area's engineers actually did, in a converted farm building and an industrial shed in Berkeley and a room in upstate New York, was to make a set of arrangements legible at speed. Everything the bands had drilled in those rehearsal rooms survives onto the record intact, which is exactly what the chapter this belongs to is about. The bands who never got near these studios, and who are good anyway, are Heathen, Blind Illusion, Laaz Rockit and the Rest.
