MARCO: There's two things, recording equipment and playing equipment. I do still play music! From a recording standpoint, I think that analog, 24-track analog still has the rich fidelity. You don't have to search for it. What you send to it, it sends back to you. And anybody involved in engineering or producing, that's the ideal—that you don't have to search for the goods. And it also makes my job a heck of a lot easier. There's a lot to be said for that!

I mean, I love analog automated consoles, the Neve, and SSL's....Essentially, I think of a console as an instrument, a keyboard. Once you play through, it remembers that, exactly like a player piano, and it plays it back just the way you want it. Which allows you to really fine tune. It's like painting with an airbrush or painting on a computer screen, you can go back and erase. Like Corel Draw.

I'm a guitarist, I have a Strat, my first wife. It's older than my wife! I think old vintage Strats—at least 50 percent of what we do is rock bands and they bring tons of guitars and stuff and are trying to get sounds and what have you. And very occasionally I say, "You know, this is part of the arsenal here, feel free..." I keep it right there—it's insured. I kinda hope somebody does take off with it! It's selfish, because I want the record to sound good, and it sounds great—it's a great-sounding guitar. But guitars are kind of a taste thing and I know that guitarists spend a lot of time getting their sound just right. So invariably, they end up using it only for certain things, because it has a specific sound, a classic Stratocaster sound. But if they're looking for the classic Stratocaster sound, I find that more and more as the sessions progress, they end up leaning more and more towards it. Because it's just instant classic Stratocaster sound. The more recent ones that have been made don't quite have that sound. They try to recreate it; well, this is it. And it's also lovely to play.

So they eventually do gravitate there, but I'm careful not to impose it, because I'm a guitar player and there's a love affair that goes on...

If that's the sound they're looking for, it does make my job easier. They pick it up, it sounds great right away, it stays in tune, it saves hours of time. Studio tuning is a different animal than live tuning. Live tuning, the acceptance level is far greater for variation in tuning. It's here and it's gone. Whereas on record, you hear it over and over and over again. So even though a bad tuning may not kill you the first time you hear it, maybe by the second or third listen, you're wondering, "OK, this is starting to annoy me." You may not know why it annoys you; it's just not quite right. Whereas live, there's the adrenaline and everything. On record, tuning has become worse. You listen to old vintage records of the Beatles or Rolling Stones—omigod, they were god awfully out of tune, compared to today's standards. Vocals and things like that. They're great records, they still sound wonderful, because the energy is there and that's what matters. But the tuning, things like that, was really bad. And yet now the standard is so precise, especially since we've at least gone through at least two cycles of techno music, so listeners' ears have gotten adjusted to hearing things EXACTLY in tune, because techno is exactly in tune. Even in grunge days, you still had to tow that line. So tuning has become much more of a deal.

It's almost like when we do something and someone says, "OK, I want it to be a little out of tune," it's almost used as an effect now. You purposefully make it out of tune. We have devices up here like this guy over here that tunes the vocals. So if you sing out of tune...they've now come out with these new devices that literally takes it, synthesizes it into a different note, and it sounds like you sang it.

I use it very gingerly, because it can take away the heart of some music. It's great if you've got a beautiful take and there's just that one stinking note in the middle of it that just way out. So you can go in and punch in that one note, and use it as a fixer. If you start using it as your wholesale, just go and sing it doesn't matter, we'll just run it through that sucker...[laughs]

Cher used it to great effect on her last recording. I've had more musicians say, "Can you do that Cher thing?" I've reached a point: No, I refuse to do that Cher thing.

The great danger in recording and production is that people are aware that there's a time lapse that occurs. They're aware of what's going on right now. They listen to the radio on the way here. "Hey, that's very cool." But they're working on projects that won't be out for months, sometimes a year, that won't be part of the public conscience for a year or two. I just put out one record recently that won a bunch of awards. To a lot of people this is a new record. Well, we were working on that record two years ago. I remember work started summer two years ago. And now people are calling me up, "Oh, I just got this record, it's great." If we'd used the values of what was going on two years ago, right now the record would be irrelevant. That's the great danger. OK, the Cher thing is very cool. Now. By the time your record comes out a year from now, the public perception of it, it's such an old deal. It's so dated.

I don't smoke. A lot of musicians smoke, but we're located in such a way that they can go right outside. We have a little patio set up with chairs. They can comfortably sit there and watch the sunrise and smoke.

I remember when I was with Capitol [Records] and we did our recording at the Power Station and we were smoking like chimneys. It was nuts. There were ashtrays on the console. A few other things, too. First of all, the equipment is bloody expensive and it definitely, definitely impacts the equipment. A lot of the big studios it's just part of their overhead. They assume they have to replace these things. There's a reason why studios are so expensive—$150-$200 an hour, back in 1981 to get in the Power Station. So they had plenty of overhead money if they needed to replace a console for $1,000. I think that was built into it. It had to be, because [smoke] is terribly corrosive on the equipment. It's bad enough for 24-track analog. It's REALLY bad for a console.

Smoke is the kind of dust that doesn't just come down, because that you can deal with. The heavy dust that comes down is not a problem. It's the smoke kinda dust that is so light that it rises up. So it gets into and up into all these little pieces. And in very short order you've got gook, tar, inside. You're moving the faders and [makes horrible tarry gook noise].

I used to work out of another studio out in Maryland, which will be unnamed, where there was heavy smoking that went on. And after a couple years, the console was virtually unusable. Literally, you could feel [the gook].

So there's that dynamic. And now with all the new digital systems, computers and smoke have never gotten along—ever. We're not computer-based, but we do have hard-drive systems. My new favorite toy, back to the first question, is a 200-track hard-drive system which I have synched up to the 24-track. It enables us to do a lot of editing and MIDI devices. Kinda opens a whole new world. Kind of a cyborg system, I call it. But it has no tolerance for smoke. It will eat up that hard drive in no time. Microphones hate it. God knows why smoke was ever allowed in a studio when you think about it. It's really bad!

My favorite smoke are guitar players who make their guitars smoke.

What kind of drums do you play and what pets do you own?

MARCO: [RE: Getting a good drum sound] Devolution is a good way of putting it, because it went through an evolution of people trying to get the best out of drum sounds. Then around the '80s, they just kind of said, "Aw, the heck with it." And everyone went to a Linn Drum. And it just cut to the chase. A fair amount records came out back then—Peter Gabriel did a lot of that. They were just using automatic drums. Now we had this perfect timing and we had this perfect sound all the way through. And after a couple years, they started realizing, "OK, this has got zero soul. There is no artistic expression whatsoever." As much as I love those records, I hated the rhythm tracks. I think Peter Gabriel is phenomenal and I just love the music of it. And I started really liking Peter Gabriel when he came out with "Biko," that song about Steven Biko he came out with back in 1988, where he went back to using real drums, because of the South African [influence]. And all of a sudden, he had so much more life for me. It was like why did you ever ever go to a Linn Drum?

I remember the frustration. Back when we were on Capitol, they were trying to get it to be these perfect drums. And we were basically this rock, punk, funk, new wave punk band. And the producer would sit there and tell the drummer, "OK, play just verses. Now play just choruses. Now play just bridges." And he'd send us out for lunch and we'd come back and there would be all these pieces of tape on the wall. And little labels saying, "Verse 1," "Verse 2," "Verse 3"....He'd gone through and taken all the best verses and then he'd put it all back together again and, "OK, go play your bass line over that perfect drum line."

And we had a pretty good drummer. It wasn't like it sucked. Yes, it varied, but... You could sense that whole movement toward techno that eventually did take on in the early '80s and became techno. I don't know how they got from punk to techno, but whatever. And I think it led directly to the grunge revolution. All of a sudden people were like, "Bollocks! We're not going to spend a huge amount of money." Because you realize it cost $150 an hour at a time to go through that. Each drum track was thousands of dollars. It was obscene. Aside from the financial impact, I think artistically, which is more importantly, it had no more soul. A good drummer but keeps decent meter but varies his tempo from part to part is a desirable thing.

I think with the big advent of grunge music, the guitars were still rather synthesized but the drums had a lot of feel to them. Bass did, too. And now, by the mid-'90s, there was a kind of this evolution back towards the perfect drum sound. Every time I heard a drum using samples and triggers and what have you, it was exactly the same from song to song.

At one point, I thought, It sounds like the same person mixing. And you know what? In a lot of cases it was! That freaked me out. I went through the jackets and if it wasn't mixed by Steve Lillywhite or Tom Lord Algee or Bob Clearmountain, then it wasn't mixed. And they're great, but there was an incredible amount of sameness from song to song.

And the labels would come down and say, "We like what you did with that last record. Here's $10,000 to make it sound the same way." Well, sure, I can do that. I know how to do that. I just did it, so I'll do it again. There's nothing easier for an engineer or producer than to redo what you just did. The harder thing is to try and make something that hasn't happened yet.

But I've noticed the whole rap feel thing has sort of devolved away from the perfect drum sound. You get that just by using a loop. Now I'm starting to see a lot more of, "OK, we have the loop feel, and then we have the drum feel." And the loop feel is perfect, or is perfect every time it loops. So now let's have a drum part during the rest of the song that is not perfect. Create contrast and interest. Better than Ezra does that a lot. You're starting to see more and more of that.

Personally, I like a real drum sound. Start off with a nice, big, fat drum sound. But each drummer has his own characteristics. I have a studio kit, but I don't leave it up. I like drummers to bring in their own kit. Because they have a specific sound they go for. They fine-tune their drums, and it sounds better.

I like drums that jump off the tape, that are very dynamic. That goes counter to using—I can use and have in the past, triggers and samples, but they don't have the same feel. You can recreate that by using gates and compression and so on where there's a very steady dynamic—and now I'm getting very techno, which is BORING! [Laughs]

You can still create the same sensation of attack by using things like compression. Rather than using triggers, which a quick and easy way of doing it. I'd rather take the real, original sound off the snare and use that snare and make it so that it has dynamic impact. It has artistic expression, but you can control the dynamic impact by using compression. It's a little more complicated, but I think the results are a lot more palatable.

[How much time should be spent getting the drum sound?]

I think an hour. I don't do much finagling of the sound before it goes to tape. Yes, I'll do a few things here and there, but very lightly. It's more mic placement.

The fun part is not listening to other people's records and saying, "I'm going to copy the same thing." Develop your own sound! That's where the interest is. If not, then you're not being artistic. You're just being a reporter. Different art. But call it what it is. Either you're trying to find new sounds or you're tying to duplicate sounds.

But I think it's all mic placement. The fun thing is to look at a drum set—and every drum set has a their own characteristics and now two are alike—and eventually you can see, I can take advantage of this aspect of it. He's very heavy on certain cymbals. You see the colors he's painting with, so you take those colors and make them stronger. For lack of a better example, OK this guy paints with a lot of reds. Let's make it dark red. Just emphasize the sounds. By that I mean, if he's got a really big kick drum, I want to take advantage of that and bring out the fatness of it. So maybe I'll put the mic at a different angle than I would if it were a smaller kick drum. He's got big cymbals, well, then maybe I'll use the overheads at a slightly different spread to take advantage of that—rather than try to negate it, that's the key thing.

Rather than saying I've got a set drum sound I look for and I try to make all the drum sets fit that drum sound. I've found that many years ago, when I was doing dumb things—I'm not now, but I definitely was then—rather than trying to conform it to a set thing that I had in mind, I eventually learned to take advantage of what they were presenting to me. "This is the kind of sound I'm going for"—then I'm going to try and enhance it, rather than trying negate it. As soon as you try to negate something that an artist is presenting you—first of all, you're going against his or her art. And secondly, you're not doing anything that will be distinctive, because you're just trying to take that dark red and make it light red. Then every record starts to sound the same.

I love when people say, "Send me examples of what you've done." Because I'll send them a couple CDs, and they'll say, "Well, that drum sound sounds like this, and this drum sounds totally different." And I know I've succeeded. Because each one of those drummers was happy. You can't sit there and attribute any particular sound to me, and that is my sound. I look at what you do as an artist and try to enhance it.

Again, I like fat snares, but some guy comes in with a piccolo snare, what am I going to do by making it fat? I'm going to kill his sound. Then, I take the piccolo and enhance it and make it REALLY ring. Make it really slam you across the eyeballs, if you will. And then when he expresses himself, he doesn't have to over-express. I'm just helping him express himself more.

If I got a guy come in with a big, fat snare and I try to make it sound like a piccolo, because I happen to like that sound that week, you know what I'm saying.

I have a cat that's been around for 16 years. And she's the most ornery, nasty animal I've ever had. And we just don't have the heart to get rid of it. It's funny, I like cats—I like dogs—and I've always wanted to have a studio cat, but there are a lot of people who are allergic to cats. Surprisingly. I have a pet spider. I keep on top of the rafters 30 feet up there and it keeps the bad bugs from being around.

What's your favorite D.C. hangout and your favorite automobile?

MARCO: Favorite automobiles tend to be the ones I can't have. Ferrari. I've always wanted an old Mercedes coup. See, I have three kids now, so any idea of a sports car is a pure pipe dream. If you can't fit them all into one vehicle, what's the point? Maybe that is the point! [Laughs] Maybe that's why it's become more of a pipe dream.

My favorite D.C. hangouts—I like ethnic foods, so I like to wander about. The Ethiopian restaurants in Adams Morgan are kinda fun. Bars I particularly like: Iota. It's informality—hopefully, that will continue. I live in Arlington, so I'm very happy with what's going on in Arlington. Man. It's wonderful. I live four blocks from Clarendon and so I just walk there. I can go and get drunk and walk home. Waddle home. I found that a lot of the bars in D.C., I like the clubs, but there's an investment in time and energy to get to some of them. I have so little time that for me to go out and see a band play, to have this one-hour or two-hour opportunity....It's a three-children thing, I'm afraid. So it's hard for me to go all the way into town and find a parking space, which is usually hard to do. Hopefully the car is still there when I get back—which has happened a few times. My brother got assaulted in Adams Morgan recently. So that makes you think twice. "Well, I can go see them play over at Madam's Organ, or I can wait a week and see them at Iota! Or Clarendon Grill. I think I'll just wait."

But I love living in the city. I loved living in D.C. when I did live there, but it's fortuitous that I've got neighborhood bars now that I can go to. Georgetown I haven't been to in a long time.

What's the worst place you've crashed and the worst haircut?

MARCO: Thank god, I've never crashed [in the studio]. I make it a point, after 11, 12 o'clock at night I'm spent. Music to me is a function of energy. The amount of people I've talked to who did sessions until 3, 4 o'clock in the morning and ended up trashing it all far outweigh those who end up using it. There are a few who are successful and actually able to use it—drank enough coffee or snorted enough sugar. But generally speaking there are more stories of people telling me they worked until the wee hours and ended up not using any of it.

Because that's more likely the case. You have to be fresh, you have to be on top of it. Your ears stop working, stop functioning properly after a while. There's nothing that is that urgent that can't wait until the next day.

[How many times can you listen to the same track over and over?]

MARCO: Well, that doesn't bother me. I guess I'm used to it hearing it over and over again, and I'm listening for certain things, sonic detail. I'm not listening to the whole song. It's MUCH more difficult on the artist. Because they, every time they hear the song they see the whole picture. The full impact is hitting them. The emotional impact is hitting them over and over again. They're like an old washcloth by the time the session's over.

We're around the corner from a bunch of movie theaters, and I tell them, go see a movie. Come back in an hour and a half and give me your fresh ears. No sense you sitting here listening to me gate drums. Or compress bass.

Musicians strive so much for technical perfection. Singers strive for expression perfection. And they know when they've sung it the best that they can, more often than the players do. Players all will say they can do it better. Horn players, particularly. Because they work at their craft so much. They're so into it.

Worst place I've ever crashed—it's been so long. I've been married for 16 years and I haven't crashed anywhere! I think back when we were touring, the whole band ended up crashing at one person's house on one bed. Nothing funny happened, no funny business. Very little sleep was had by anybody. That was one of those, I wish I had a camera. All these guys draped around this bed that's one of those mattress on the floor type deals. I think there was a female involved somewhere in there, who was very disappointed that we were actually sleeping. I think it was in Albany, too. That might have been the worst.

Worst haircut? I think back in the punk days I once had a banana cut. Remember those things? Short on the side with this big thing coming up the front. This French hairdresser said, "I will make you a banana!" OK! We had a big tour with Psychedelic Furs coming up and he wanted to make me this banana. So he made me a banana. And it was a very fine looking banana. And the band looked at me like, "No way!"

And we were a very avant-garde New York band. So I had a reverse banana. Thank god, the keyboard player was a hairdreser and he gave me a reverse banana. All of a sudden I felt like a little devil with these horns coming out. That was probably the second-worst haircut. After that, I didn't cut my hair for quite some time.

Worst roommate and best audience?

MARCO: Best studio customer is one who has a strong feel for what their vision is, but has a strong instinct for allowing serendipity to happen. And, has a good sense of humor. That's key. Those three things. If you come in with a pretty strong vision of how you like things to be, coupled with an open mind to serendipity—not an open mind to having other people tell you what you should do. Because that would go counter to the strong vision. But allowing for serendipity. You get a great musician coming in—let 'em play. And allow for them to do something even greater to your music. Knowing that eventually the producer will not make you lose control. Because you should never lose control as an artist.

That's part of the producer's job, to always make you feel as if you always have artistic grip on what is going on. If not, he's not doing his job. But if you allow for serendipity, wonderful things can happen. Wonderful things. If not, then your vision will be restrained strictly to what you are capable of. And wonderful things rarely happen.

Those make the best records. People who come in who have a strong vision, are open to karmic serendipity, as I call it, and have a good time making records. Those are by far the best records I've done. I've never made a great record that didn't have those three things.

And it's unfortunate that that tends to be the minority. And I understand that. As an artist, it's hard to let go of certain things. But it's pretty close to half and half. This area has a lot of very creative artists. It's the only reason I came back down from New York. Whether or not they are successful at making popular music is one thing. But they certainly are successful at being creative artists.

To them, this is like walking into a candy factory. How's your job? I'm the head candy man. What's not to like?

And those who come in with that attitude of "I've got serious art that I want to put forth but let's have some fun doing it and let's see what happens make great records. I've had some people come in who are just not the best, they were not blessed with god-given talent. They're intelligent, wonderful people. But they're not blessed with great voices or what have you. And some of my best records have been records with those people. I've gotten more acclaim from, because they came in with those three elements. We've made some darn fun records. They've sold a lot of records. They may not say, well, this is the next coming of Sheryl Crow, or whoever. This is not the next great superstar, but this is a great record and I enjoy listening to it. It's got a good place in my record collection.

Those are my best clients.

Worst roommate, well again since I'm married, going on 16 years now....thankfully, it's been a long time since I've had a roommate. I once had a Filipino roommate up in New York who made these concoctions. And I love Filipino food, but his cooking was not the best. My present wife used to come visit me in New York and she'd stay with us. And some very strange smells used to emanate from the kitchen. But he was a very nice guy.

Oh, I know one—the worst one I ever had was a guy who, before he moved in with us (this is back when I was living in Queens), and after he moved out, was a homeless guy living on 42nd Street. We didn't know that at the time. Until some of his habits—I have nothing against homeless people, but his habits were such that I can see why nobody wanted to live with him to start with. Or after that apparently. He was well-placed on 42nd Street.

Explain your band name and define your sound.

MARCO: The main band that I was associated with when I was with Capitol was a band called the Electrics. That was after the punk band. I moved to New York. And that was a function of the music was very electrifying, if you will. Very energetic. God, we were young. Jumping up and down that stage like it was Madness. Sweating bullets after the first song. I used to look at people standing still and I couldn't understand it. Thus, I understand now why we were called the Electrics.

Defining my sound as a producer again is difficult, because I don't associate myself with a particular sound. If I have a sound it's that I strive to, as much as possible, not to have a sound. I want the individual artist's sound to be as unique as possible from record to record.

I know I naturally tend to gravitate to warm sounds. I like a very three-dimensional type of sound. I like drums that have a lot of depth to them. I like acoustic guitars that have an enveloping quality. I like electric guitars that have a lot of rich low tones. I've always been a big fan of low end. And that probably comes from my years working with Basehead, thus the name. I attribute that I stole that from Mike Ivey. I give him full credit for influencing me that way. I really like low tones. I learned to appreciate them.

But those are my natural tendencies, stuff that I listen to on the radio. Stuff in my record collection has those characteristics. But working with artists I try to, again, not apply my personal taste. Though I'm sure you can't help it to a certain extent. But eventually, I want to do something that I think is best for the music, and I look to them to say, "Yeah, I like what you've done with it." Or, "No, I don't." And one of the things we immediately try to work out, from the beginning, I will go ahead and feel free to give you my ideas and put forth my taste, only in as much as you feel free to say, "I don't like it." If I start to sense that you are afraid to say you don't like it, I'm going to start to be afraid to put forth my ideas.

Because the only chance of making a successful record is that it is uniquely as possible your taste. It's a very interesting balancing act. And I state it pretty much like that to everybody. You have to reach that point of communication where you can go, "Yuck! I hate it."

I think it's important, as part of my job, to make [clients] not feel intimidated. Thus, the informal environment. It's on purpose that I have an informal environment here. The structure of the place is exactly how studios are made, but we use low-key carpeting and furniture and so on. Because I don't want them walking in and feeling, "Oh! Now what do I do?"

But I go out of my way to make sure they're not intimidated by the equipment, because it's not about the equipment. They spend a lot of time in the other room. I tend to keep the lights low and the trappings of the electronica out of sight and out of mind. I try to make it more like a stage, if you will. It's more of a stage environment, which they're used to for the most part. When you get people who want that [hi-tech] studio environment, they're terribly disappointed, because it's more of a stage. But most musicians prefer a stage environment, or a basement environment. They come in and light candles and stuff. Anything to not make them think they're under this microscope.

And it's important to go out of your way to make them feel [comfortable]. I mean, this console, this is my instrument, just as much as that guitar or that keyboard or that drumset is your instrument. The reason you come here is that I play this instrument in a fashion that you like. So that's the first step. You hired me because I play this instrument the way you like, so I'm just going to sit in here and play this instrument and you go in there and play your instruments and we'll make great music. And the quicker you forget that there is all this going on around you, the better off you're going to be at making music. It's your job to just forget about it. To go in there and close your eyes and just emote. To feel what you're feeling. Why you go to all this trouble to be a musician.

As far as people coming in and tweaking knobs, I have no problem with people experimenting. Occasionally, I get somebody who says, "I want to see what this does." And, sure. To me this is our common easel, if you will, and we're all here throwing paint at it. It's rare, though, because again, I don't play dulcimer. And I wouldn't go to someone and say, "Hey, why don't you do this?" I'm more likely to try and explain to them, "I want something that makes me feel warm; play something warm." And they have the same approach. "Marco, that's too harsh." Because the permutations are enormous. The advantage of going to someone who does this for a living is that they can cut to the chase. It's like going to a lawyer and saying, "What are all the precedents as to why this law is on the books?" He can sit there and point you to his library and say, "Go ahead and read. My fee is $150 an hour, go for it. Fine by me."

Or you can ask me and I can tell you. That to me is an example I like to use because it's very much the truth. I've got hundreds of reverbs, you know? Which one works better for the drumset? Well, here are two or three that I think work the best. Which one do you like the best?

Communication is key to a relationship. Because I am, again, trying to put their art forward. They should speak as artists, as musicians, the way that they know how to speak. They shouldn't try to speak my engineering language. A producer's job is kind of in between the two.

There's a musician and there's a producer and there's an engineer, who just tweaks the knobs. And the producer is in between the two acting as a translator. The musician will speak their musician's language and the producer will translate that to the engineer's language. The musician will say, "I hear something that kinda goes Zeee-EEEEK!" The producer will say, "OK, that means raise it 10K."

So, rather than coming in here and trying to learn engineering, they very quickly realize that's a diminishing return. Just learn to express yourself in layman's terms what you're looking for. What feeling you're looking for, what kind of ambiance you'd like. And I'll bring dials up and you can choose the ambiance you prefer.

What clothes do you like to wear onstage and what do you eat on the road?

What are your influences and worst equipment experience?

MARCO: I wear slippers. Haven't put 'em on yet. Loose clothing. A lot of clients end up walking around barefoot. That's why there's a lot of carpeting in here. I think the control room and the anteroom needs to have that living-room aura. People are here for a long, long period of time. That's why I like couches and puffy chairs. The studio environment, where they actually play, I think has to have a more stage kind of feel. They go in there and the spot light is on. They come in here and they can hang out. The carpet's clean, but it's not Persian wool, so if they spill a Coke, nobody's gonna die. That's important.

As far as what we eat, unfortunately—I don't know why this is tradition—but pizza. Which means I no longer eat pizza. Unless it has anchovies. But we're lucky we have a lot of Asian restaurants around here, Asian supermarkets. I get a lot of salads and things like that.

[Muse and Blues] What are your influences and worst equipment experience?

MARCO: I've played in bands for, god, from the time I was 9 years old...a band contest back in seventh grade or whatever. I've always known that's what I want to do. The first time I heard the Beatles when I was in third grade, I was like, "That's it. This is what I want to do." I knew what I wanted to do. I'm very lucky that way. I started working toward my career since I was 7 years old. I knew this was what I wanted to do, very definitively. It wasn't even half way or something I might do. This. Is. It. See the influence John Lennon has? [Laughs] It just seemed like so much fun. What else could possibly top this?

And I did it for a very, very, very long time. And I always had a sense that I wanted to do as much of this as possible. But I knew I couldn't do it forever, at least I couldn't envision doing it forever. And now I just found out the Rolling Stones are, what? 70-years-old? Guess I coulda done it forever.

So I did a lot of it. Anytime I went to college, I always took classes Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday so that I would have full days I could spend eight hours just practicing my guitar. And I would just sit there for hours and hours and hours on end. I was crazy.

I moved to New York and did the whole touring thing for a long time. The one thing I found, though, was that in the studio was where, eventually, I had the most reward. Because stage has so many limitations. I had all these ideas and, first of all, we'd end up playing the same songs over and over again, and playing them in the same way pretty much. I couldn't all of a sudden bring in a violin or something like that. And after a while, the road became kind of a traveling salesman gig. And that got old. Much to my dismay. Because I'd always envisioned the road as being such a wonderful jolly thing. Suddenly, it was one hotel to another. One day we were in Albany and thought we were in Rhode Island.

When I finally decided in 1988, or whatever—I'd been doing a lot of producing and I worked for a lot of years with a partner, Steve Priest, who was the bass player and lead singer for Sweet. We worked together for about four years, after the Electrics broke up. We were at Capitol and Sweet was at Capitol and Sweet broke right up about the same time we broke up. He was a great guy and we got along well and wrote a lot of songs together and spent a lot of time together in the studio. I learned from him about what to do in the studio, because he was one of the main producer guys.

We had a band together and we played around New York and that was a lot of fun, because I was always a Sweet fan. So to all of a sudden be playing a couple Sweet songs was great. But it's kinda like after a while I got that out of my system. I started to realize after a few gigs, you know, been there, done that. And I've been doing this so long, it's been 20-plus years running around. He ended up having to move to California, because his wife was a label exec. So we parted ways. We still keep in touch with each other. But at that point I realized I'd had enough of this. I love music; I love the studio; I'm tired of the band thing. I'm not cutting down the band thing but I am tired of it. And I knew that in order to really really throw yourself into production, you have to get over that. Because you can't have one leg on one side and one side on the other. You can't be the recording artist and be the producer at the same time. That's why even the best recording artists still hire a producer. Because you need that objective ear. You need that advocate for the listener, a person who is going to be an advocate for the first-time listener. And you can't do that if you're still trying to espouse your own music.

And I finally got to the point, I got in the studio and started doing productions. And then we moved from New York down here and I hooked up with a couple studios and started doing records and I realized I am perfectly fine leaving that behind. Once in a blue moon I'll go out and do a gig. I did a gig with Janine Wilson last year in Baltimore and that was fun. Just to go out once a year and strap my guitar on is a lot of fun. But I have no regrets about the whole thing getting a band together and practicing and rehearsing and getting a show sounding right and going out and playing—I got that out of my system. So a studio to me was a natural evolution for me. First of all, there was no more limitations of live, the sensation of you can only to do this or that. You're really free to experiment and from one day to another it's different, different clients and different kinds of music and it's exciting.

And the one thing that's cool, is because I'd done so much [live playing] I really understand where they're coming from. There's no guesswork involved. When I see a look on their face, I know what they're thinking. We can cut to the chase. They don't have to educate me on how they feel. I know how they feel. I've been on that side of the glass for 20 years. I know. It's tough, and I have great respect for the position of the artist. It's a very very difficult job. My hat goes off to them. They're my heroes, quite frankly. I want them to be happy going out of here. No one client is a get-rich quick scheme. I have to pay for my time, that's natural, but they have to walk out of here happy. They need to not have a gun to their heads. If things don't quite work out right, I'll stop the session and say, "Let's come back another day." So, that's helped the transition, because I know you have to have that freedom of thought. 'Cause if something happened, your dog died, you don't feel like singing today.

Worst equipment experience? Oh, it's a long list. But the studio's a controlled environment. You can always stop the session. That's happened. All of a sudden, you know, that's gone, that's gone—we have to stop. In a live situation—again, my hat goes off to any musician—your amp goes kerblink, your adrenalin is coursing through you in a way that would never be duplicated in the studio. You can freak out because you know you have a client who is upset, but again, I don't have those kind of clients.

I remember playing a gig up in New York one time and right in the middle of the show my distortion pedal went out. And that sounds like a real small thing, but do you know what it's like for a lead guitar player for a distortion pedal to go out and you have to go to a solo? [mimicking rinky-dink plinking] Ding ding ding ding...

I think if you're going to rank it on a scale of mortification, that's the better one. That's probably my worst, my most mortifying experience—when a stupid little $50 distortion pedal in the middle of playing Irving Plaza. There you go. And all of a sudden you have to go plink-plink-plink when normally you'd go Zzzzhhhip and Zzzzhhhap is very disconcerting. The audience probably could give two hoots, but I was mortified. I reached over and slammed my amp up as loud as I could, in hopes it would duplicate some [decent sound], but I had this big old Boogie amp. And in those days you had to really hit it hard before you get some sound. All of a sudden the lead singer looks at me like I'm a blasting demon from Hell. So I have to turn it down. I just wasn't getting the same juice.

It wasn't as bad as when I saw Triggerfish play at the 9:30 Club a few weeks ago. We were working on their last record. And right in the middle of one of their better songs, Chris DeOrzio's amp went out altogether. And there he is jamming along getting nothing. Of course, there he's just getting nothing. At least he's not sounding wimpy.

What's your favorite tour memory and worst band squabble?

MARCO: Favorite studio memory—there's a lot of 'em. So favorite's a tall order. And I hate to name names, because others will go, "What about ME?" I think my favorite was a singer—and I won't name names—who was a big bulky guy who you would never think would ever get upset about anything. And he had this incredible song, a very touching song about someone in his song who had passed away. And as we're finishing mixing the song, I look over and he is just balling. And that's not a happy thing. I wasn't happy making him sad. But he was just balling and he looks up and says, "Perfect." And you realize that as a producer, it doesn't get better than that. If you can reach somebody who is not liable to have those moments and all of a sudden you touch them in such a fashion that they are in tears, that might rank pretty much as my favorite. Not because I was happy because he was upset, but that we reached that zenith of emotional conveyance.

Which is what music is. It's an emotion conveying medium. And to be able to reach that point, where somebody who has heard the song a zillion times, when we finally finished the thing he's touched to the point where he's touched that way...wait 'til other people hear this! That may very well be my favorite.

Worst band squabble that I've seen in the studio? Literally was a fight. Some times the studio brings out the best and the worst in people. I think there was one guitar being thrown into a drum set. I ended up having to take them outside and telling them, settle this on your own. It had nothing to do with the process. It was just their own internal frustration and strife. That was the worst squabble, where they literally started throwing things at each other and rolling on the floor, and, OK, you're outta here.

Thankfully I'm a big enough guy I can carry my own. I just pushed 'em outside and said, "OK, this is where this happens, right next to the dumpster."

What's your transpo and what's the worst place you've ever dropped trou?

MARCO: See, this is the kind of question that you don't answer when you have a few kids. Oh, worst bathroom? CBGBs. Absolutely. Much as I love CBs...that was the worst one.

Transpo—that's tough, because we have no transportation. Oh, the transport on the tape deck. There you go.

What's the stupidest move your singer ever pulled?

MARCO: I've had people get naked [in the studio]. A lot of times people will darken the place when they sing. I put up a baffle so they're private. Most singers don't like to have people watching them. That's why it's dark in there. See, there's a booth I've created where they are totally separated and they have their own environment where they are a booth away from everything else around them. And sometimes they'll flat out turn the lights out, because they like the privacy and like to be able to emote and flail their arms and whatever.

And I was doing this band a few years ago and the manager was here and we were doing vocals. And at one point the manager says, "I want to see if [the singer] wants some water." And he goes in the other room, and all of a sudden I hear, "OMIGOD! YOU'RE NAKED!!!!"

Not what he expected to see, I suppose. So I get on the intercom and say, "Well, you can just stay in there for a while." And [the singer] says, "I plan to. I didn't think he was going to come in here."

He did some great vocals that day. Must have been like the Dennis Rodman of vocalists. It wasn't stupid, I thought that was rather intelligent.

I've never had anybody blow out any microphones. I get a lot of people who have done a lot of recording but have never made a record. That's probably what I get the most of. And that tends to be where I think I help people the most. Because that's my main thing, is OK, from top to bottom, let's make a record. Not a bunch of recordings that we slap together, but a comprehensive, cohesive record that we listen to from top to bottom. And enjoy from top to bottom, and that will have a statement, hopefully, of some sort.

Because the criterion is a little different on a record. It needs to meet certain standards—not just technically, but also performance-wise—that you can let go of on a demo. That's the main focus for me, is to have them stop thinking of trying to make just good recordings, but to make a record. A work of art. A piece of art from top to bottom that will communicate what they're trying to do as artists. Because doing this is a lot of trouble! It's a pain. It's a lot of trouble to go through all this. It's not hard to go out and buy a guitar, but it's a whole lot of trouble to learn how to play it. To learn how to sing, to then learn how to write music, to find it inside of you that you actually have something to say. And then go through the process of finding out that what you have to say is pertinent to other people, and writing songs—it's a decadeslong process. It's a lot of trouble.

I find that they have to have, generally, something that they want to say. For better or for worse, they have something that they want to express. And the vast majority aren't doing it for the money. You can tell. Those who are doing it for the money, first of all usually are the least of musicians. The really good musicians, they would be doing this for free. What's your favorite thing to do on a Friday night? Go out and play music.

Most musicians, it's very common, they'll say, "I'll pay you to play music." Why do they go out and play for a hundred bucks? "Because I'm thrilled to get paid. I'd pay $100 to go out and play. They're paying me. What's not to like?" The attitude is genial. And so they have to really make great sacrifices and they have to have a lot to say. And so the whole thing is to finally say at the end of the day, "This is your chance." Now let's put it all together and make a statement that people will walk away from as your stamp.

That's the difference between a bunch of recording and a record.