Strippers, Cocaine, & Parties

0:00 I had one actor who could not say birthday, he would say birthday. And you don't want to call somebody out and, you know, make them feel stupid or whatever, but I was like, okay, can we try birthday again? And he'd go, yeah, okay, so we were talking, and it happened to be my birthday, and I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I'm Jake Jacobs, and you're listening to What The Fuck. My special guest today, Rob, was the head of the audio department at the Art Institute in Nashville. And I met Rob not as a 18 -year -old, 19 -year -old student, but as a 45 -year -old man going back to school for the first time in a long time. Rob was very influential on my career in the audio industry. Not in a way that you might think, though, because the one class...

0:58 that Rob taught that I was able to attend dealing with dialogue and editing dialogue and cleaning it up. I learned a lot from that. And a couple of years after I graduated, after not really making it with the music stuff, now I'm doing podcasts and I'm editing audio the way Rob taught me how to do it. That's awesome. A big what the fuck welcome to my friend and mentor, Rob. How the hell are you, sir? I'm awesome, Jake. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Oh, you're welcome. And thank you for those nice words. To be honest, it was a class about audio post -production, which involved sound for film and commercials. Yeah. And then audio books, too, because a lot of people didn't realize that that's actually a career. Yes. Editing audio books. And then podcasting wasn't really a big thing at that point. Nah. But the whole technique of editing dialogue, making sure the dialogue is clear, pacing it the right way, all that stuff, that all applies across the board to all the post -production. work i used to get a lot of really amazing what the fuck blank stares in my class because a lot of the students were like i don't want to know about i don't care about this i want to make some beats and whatever yeah i can't tell you how gratifying it is to hear you say that you got something out of the class like that because as a teacher, you try and do a good job and reach people and you know you're not going to get to most people. But I think it was because you were older and you actually had a little bit more of an open mind than some of the younger students and more life experience.

2:29 You were one of the few people that you could tell the light kind of went on in your head a little bit. It was like, yeah, I'll pay attention to this. Maybe this might be helpful sometime. I wasn't sitting there on my phone playing Farmville on Facebook. It was an interesting time. The three years that I was there learned a lot. I want to go back a little further because before the Art Institute, you did some really cool stuff. And one of the things I wanted to touch on was your involvement with Warner Brothers and archiving some of the iconic audio from the Bugs Bunny era and that kind of thing. What can you tell us? Well, I was living in Los Angeles. A friend of mine had called and said, hey, I have this.

3:09 friend in Chicago who's moving to LA. He's a new film composer and he just got a gig recreating some of the cartoons for like Daffy Duck, some of the older Daffy Duck cartoons and stuff. And he needs somebody to come over and set up his studio. Would you be able to go and do that? I had a lot of experience with synchronization. And at the time we were using video machines and at the beginning of starting to use computers for sequencing and that kind of thing and analog. tape machines so i was really good at synchronizing all those things together so you know they all were running at the right time and blah blah blah blah so i got him set up got his whole studio rigged up and he goes hey have you ever done sound effects for cartoons before and this was a what the fuck moment i paused a second i said oh yeah sure i had complete lie i had watched Warner Brothers cartoons since I was a little kid, and I loved them, especially Roadrunner stuff and everything. Oh, yeah. And he goes, oh, cool. I'm supposed to recreate the music, but we also need to recreate the sound effects for all this. And I was like, oh, cool. Okay, yeah. And so he goes, when can you start? Can you start next week? And I'm like, yeah, sure.

4:25 So I went home over the weekend and sweated. Dragged out all my VHS tapes of Warner Brothers cartoons and started watching everything and really, really paying attention to the sound effects and the whoop and the blang and all that kind of stuff. I understood the recording process. I understood how to create, record stuff. But the challenge was to try and get these sound effects to sound like the original ones. Yeah. And they were recorded in a certain way in a certain space where it was hard to recreate that. Just even the sound of the room, like the reverb tail you hear on certain things. Yeah. It was hard to recreate that kind of thing. So we started working on it, and I'm kind of stumbling through.

5:10 trying to get some stuff, and there was just a few things I couldn't get together. They had arranged to meet with one of the guys who had been doing sound effects for Warner Brothers for like 30 years or whatever. He wasn't the original person. The original person that did a lot of that was a guy by the name of Treg Brown, who is credited as an editor, but he did the majority of all the sound effects and stuff and created all that. But this other guy, Frank, had been there working, and he... He kind of took over from Treg initially and had built this huge library. And all the sounds were on film mag, mag stock. Okay. Right? Like thick film.

5:51 Yeah. That you have to put through either a projector or through a flatbed, which is what you edit film on. And so they brought me over and they show me this little closet on the Warner Brothers lot and said, here are all the sound effects. that Frank has curated over the past whatever years. And it's all these little reels of film, all kind of loosely cataloged, kind of like here's some whoops, here's a boings, here's a flip -flop, here's a zippity -out and zippity -in, all these things. I'm like, cool, because now I understand the vocabulary here. Because the names of the things sounded like the sound. What is it, onomatopoeia, right? They said, well, what we want you to do is... We'd like you to listen to these, obviously, but we want you to transfer all this stuff to digital tape. At the time, it was a DAT tape.

6:43 DAT, yeah. And they said, you can come in every day for however long you need, and you'll be in this little room. So I was locked in this tiny little room. Not locked, but stuck in this little room and transferred all of these different takes and different versions of sound effects onto digital tape. At the time, we didn't really have a lot of noise reduction stuff, so it still had that. gritty sound a bit to it yeah some distortion in it some noise from the film stock but i was able to just get everything digitally transferred and then we were going to figure out how we could clean that stuff up after that so that took me i think i did that for three weeks It was like seven or eight hours a day.

7:25 The last day I was there was the day that the riots broke out in Los Angeles after Rodney King. So that gives you an idea how long ago that was. I was about to leave and they said, well, you know what? We're going to close up the studio for the rest of the week. And that was the last time I was there. But anyway. I got all that stuff transferred. Eventually, it ended up going to a sound effects library called, I think it was Sound Ideas. They make sound effects libraries that you can buy. And they took all that stuff and cleaned up some of it and just cataloged it and whatever and released them. But there are a lot of sound effects that Warner Brothers wouldn't let them have that were real iconic sounds, like the Roadrunners. That sound? Yeah.

8:10 They said, nope, that doesn't go anywhere. The carrot crunch from Bugs Bunny. Wow. That doesn't go anywhere. And there's a couple other sounds like that. And they said, the only person that's going to be allowed to use these is you and any of our other editors. And you can only use this on Warner Brothers. sanctioned or whatever projects. Right. They made me sign a contract and all this stuff. So I was walking, I had at home in my studio, I had all these tapes of all this stuff. I'm like, whoa! But I couldn't do anything with it unless they called up and said, hey, we need you to work, do some sound for a commercial or whatever. That was pretty weird. And that was an amazing learning experience because I got to hear not only just the sound effect, but what they would do to prep before it and after it.

8:57 Oh, that's cool. Where you could hear where they would move a mic around a little bit to adjust what they were doing. And you could hear how the room would change and the reverb of the room would change. That's how I got my start doing all this stuff. And I eventually went on to work with Chuck Jones, who was the original Warner Brothers animation directors, who did Roadrunner and Bugs Bunny and Foghorn Leghorn. And so I got to work on a bunch of projects for him for like 10 years until he passed away. Was Mel Blanc already gone by then? Mel Blanc passed away the month after I started working for this composer guy. And what was weird is that his son, Noel, was starting to try and take over for him. And he had most of the voices nailed. But the big complaint about him was that he didn't have the acting down that Mel had. Mel could just rip back and forth between different characters and just get into that character or whatever. Yeah.

9:52 Where anyone else trying to replace him kind of struggled with it. And they finally, I worked on a couple of things that Noel had done some voices for. And then they started using a couple other people. Joe Alasky was another person who started doing Bugs Bunny's voices. But yeah, it was interesting. I never got a chance to work with Mel Blanc, though. That would have been cool because he was just, you know, you go back. I can watch some of the interviews and stuff with him and it's pretty amazing. You know the sound of when the coyote falls off a cliff and you hear that whistle? Yeah. That whistle is actually, he recorded a, I don't know if it was a bomber, some sort of a bomber. Okay. And that's the sound. And he had that whole, you could hear the plane fly over and then you hear the. And so parts of it, you're like, what the heck is that? And then you realize as it gets closer that that's the sound that he used for him falling off the cliff. It was just the way he edited it, you know, and made it fit. It was cool. Rob is the person that introduced me. To the Wilhelm scream. Now, people probably don't know what the heck that is. But it is on two commercials right now. You probably know a little bit more about the origin. I only know the lore. Like, the only thing that I know is they were trying to figure out for sure who voiced it. And the last I heard, it was, I can't remember his name, but he was from Sam the Shaman, the Pharaohs, the singer. Am I correct in that? I believe so.

11:16 The Wilhelm scream. It started out, and I always use this as an example in class, where... If one person has a sound effect and they use it, and then another person gets that same sound effect and they use it, and then that person and another person, you start hearing the same door close over and over again. You start hearing the same car start over and over again. There it is in its glory. So the deal was, I think the first time it was used was in a Western. I don't know the name of the Western. If you go on Wikipedia, there's a whole thing about the history of it where this guy on the horse gets shot and they wanted to put some sort of a sound of him falling off his horse and dying.

12:02 And so they found this scream and put it in. And then that ended up starting to populate. I mean, it started going on everything where anyone was flying away or got blown up and they flew away or got shot. And you start hearing it all over the place. And it became the de facto I'm dying scream. Yes. Right. Yep. So years passed and eventually people kind of got away from it because they're like, yeah, yeah. OK, we've heard that we can make new one, different stuff now, blah, blah, blah. You know, obviously. as the recording process and technology moved ahead. But a number of sound editors, and I think it kind of started with people at Skywalker Sound when they were working on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars. They started putting that scream in in various places where you may not necessarily hear it or notice it, but it was put in as a joke. Yeah. That kind of caught on, and every audio engineer doing anything was starting to put it in everywhere. And it's still, to this day, it shows up in movies. It shows up in movie trailers, commercials. I think most people don't have a clue what the hell it is. They've heard it before, and they think, oh, that's silly.

13:22 But they really don't know where it came from. We would have projects that we would have to do. Sometimes it would be a musical project. Sometimes it would be like a podcast type of thing. It was my mission. When I did it and I was successful at it. I remember. I put in the Wilhelm scream on every single project. And sometimes it was super subtle. You'd really have to listen for it. Other times I just put it in your face. Oh, yeah. But anytime I did that, I would let Rob hear it. And Rob's like, okay, where's the Wilhelm scream? I know it's in there somewhere. I remember that very well. Sometimes audio editing and doing sound for certain things can get kind of tedious. Oh, yeah. How many times do I have to hear somebody get punched? And sometimes you just got to stick something in there that people may not notice, but you know it's there. Oh, yeah. And it just kind of makes you smile a little bit every time you hear it. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. Pretty fun. Something else I wanted to talk to you about. Rob, you are a very talented drummer. And I knew that. Used to be. Talented enough to where you actually went on tour with Bobby Goldsboro for a little bit. Yes, I did for almost 10 years. That was after the Art Institute, correct? It was during. We usually went out over the weekends. Older artists will tend to do that, you know, especially if they're getting up in age. And that was cool because, you know, I could leave on a Friday. We'd do a show maybe Friday night or do a show Saturday and then get home by Sunday. And so. When I was still teaching at the Art Institute, I was able to leave and go and do that kind of thing. We did a number

14:52 of shows in Vegas and Laughlin and Reno, you know, all of those hot spots. Plus then we would hit the Florida circuit and all over the place. Yeah, it was fun. I got the gig from a mutual friend of mine, Michael Stanton, who's a pedal steel guitar player, but he's also a keyboard player. He had worked for Bobby for 40 years. He originally helped Bob. score the show Evening Shade with Burt Reynolds. Remember that? Yeah, I remember that. Bobby did all the music for that. And so Michael worked with him on that and a whole bunch of other stuff. When their original drummer decided to retire, they asked if I would be interested. And I said, yeah, you know, it was the kind of gig where I was like, I can still play, but I don't have to deal with sitting on a bus. You know, I don't have to do all that kind of thing. Right. What was nice is I always used. backline gear meaning that i didn't have to cart my drums around with me so i was able to use you know they always were able to rent good equipment for that and so that was cool it was kind of a low stress gig and it was it was fun it was an older audience Here's a good what the fuck. We were playing in the Villages in Florida, which is a huge retirement community. They have their own theater and they would bring in Bobby and other groups like Tommy James and Hermits Hermits and all of the nostalgia kind of things. And so we came in to do a show there. We're driving into the main entrance and I see like six. ambulances in the front of the

16:26 building in the parking lot. Okay. I'm like, what the hell's going on? What's going on here? So we go into the stage door and I see the stage manager go, hey, man, what's the deal with all the ambulances out front? And he goes, oh, don't worry. It's just there for emergencies. He goes, you do understand this is a really old crowd, right? And I'm like, yeah, but what? What the fuck? You mean these people are going to be dropping dead? What's going on here? Oh, my God. What kind of audience is this? Wow. There were times where we'd have to hold the show for 10 minutes because they were still bringing people in in wheelchairs and walkers and like, okay, I guess that's cool. Whatever. Still a good crowd. They enjoyed hearing Bobby, and it was fun. You're like, Rob, no Ronnie -style stuff on the drums tonight. We don't need anybody having a heart attack. Yeah, basically, yeah. Rob, let's cut that drum solo. Yeah, yeah. The front row is full of 80 plus, and I don't think it's going to go over well. One of the things I noticed when I first moved to Nashville was the amount of celebrities that lived in this area that you would accidentally bump into, like at the grocery store or Starbucks. Coming from L .A., was it a little bit different? When I first moved to Nashville, people were like... And I moved here in 1995 from Los Angeles. So I had this jaded L .A. view of anybody that you see famous, you

17:58 know, stay away from them. They're going to be assholes to you or whatever. And when we got here, I have a number of what the fuck moments I can talk about of people I've met here. By accident, most of the people that live around us here in Nashville that are famous, there's no problem in them going out and being normal folks like they really are. And a lot of them are happy to talk to people and just say, if you go up and say, I'm a huge fan. Now, if you act like a complete asshole or you're losing your mind. Yeah. In fact, here's a great story. I was in Walgreens up the street from me in the checkout line. Luke Bryant walks in with a friend of his. And this woman dressed in orange and white Tennessee volunteer outfit walks in. And right in the middle of the store, she goes, oh, my God. you're luke bryant oh i love you and she's screaming it and everyone's around there looking around he just stops dead cold in his tracks he's like oh and you could look on his face he's like oh shit but he was cool he turned around and she ran up and wanted to give him a hug and it's like he was really cool about it and i just i was you know and then he's walking by and i'm like yeah i wasn't gonna go oh my god Yeah, look, Brian, if you're cool, everybody's cool. You know, it's just that's the way it is.

19:23 One of the things that draws people to Nashville is everyone wants to be a songwriter. Apart from doing the sound effects for Warner Brothers and playing drums for Bobby Goldsboro. Did you ever get into any of the other sides of the music business? My first foray into starting my own business when I was still in Los Angeles, a friend of mine and I decided we were going to start. We wanted to write music for sports programming and news themes and stuff. Oh, cool. I've never been a songwriter. I've never been able to sit down and write a four -minute song with the lyrics and all that stuff. I never just could do that. But if I have a picture in front of me or moving image or whatever, for some reason, I can write to that. That's interesting. It's weird. And I've tried. I've really tried to sit here and I'm like, I'm going to write a song. And I'm like, forget it. This sucks. I get real focused on trying to do stuff to images and everything.

20:18 And so we were like, okay, let's try this out. And so he and I, he was a keyboard player and good at programming and all that stuff. And I was playing drums and a little bass here and there. And so we... We wrote a couple of sports kind of themes, like energy pumped up. With lyrics or just the music? Just the music. Just kind of to be like intro music or play underneath, you know, one of the announcers or whatever. A mutual friend said, hey, I got a guy who works for this brand new cable company called the Z Channel in Los Angeles. And they just got the contract to broadcast all the Dodger games. And I think they're looking for music for their opening and for all that. that kind of stuff. And I'm like, no shit. Okay. So we contacted this guy and he came over and we had this tiny little studio in my apartment. With him, we worked on some stuff. He gave us specific, I wanted to build up here for the first 10 seconds and then we want to cut down there and blah, blah, blah.

21:18 So he guided us through all that. We recorded a bunch of stuff, gave him big mistake. First dumb ass mistake I ever made was gave him a DAT tape with all of our music mix. on it he walked out and didn't hear from him like two weeks he was like oh yeah they're gonna love this this is the fact that i'm working on it with you we're getting it tailored to what i think they want two weeks go by I don't hear back. You know, what's the deal? And it's starting to get closer to opening day for the Dodgers, right? And I would call the guy, finally got a hold of me. He goes, oh, well, you know what happened? They decided they were going to go with something else. And I'm like, oh, well, okay. Thanks. Thanks for giving it a shot with us. That's cool. I hung up the phone. I was just like, okay, well, whatever. We'll try to, you know, keep going.

22:06 You don't let one door close and keep finding the right door. I'm a baseball fan, so. Opening day, I decide, okay, I'm going to watch the Dodger game. I'm not a Dodger fan. I'm a Cubs fan, but I'll watch the Dodger game. Sitting there. And guess what comes on? Oh, my God. I was afraid you were going to say that. And I said, what the fuck? That's our music they're playing. That is bullshit. I got up. I'm running around the apartment. I'm looking for a baseball bat. I'm going to get in my car and I'm going to go find this asshole and beat the shit out of him. And my friend's like, no, let's not do that. You know, I think you need to maybe get a lawyer, find out what the deal is. So I called my dad. I was hoping he had a good suggestion for me.

22:48 He goes, well, only thing I can ask is did you copyright the music yourself? Even if his name's on it, if your name's still also on it. I said, no, we just gave him the music. And he goes, well, I would suggest calling an attorney and see what the deal is. And I did that. And the attorney said, do you have a way to prove that you did this? You know, you hold the copyright or part of it. And I'm like, well, I have the sequence and stuff, but I don't have the master tape of it. I have a cassette of it. And he was like, the amount of money you'll get out of them is not. The same amount that I'm going to be charging you to do this. Right. And he goes, I would just chalk this up to don't do that, you stupid idiot. A learning experience, yes.

23:34 Exactly. That's unfortunate. And so I never saw, never heard from that guy ever again. But man, I was just like. Did they continue to use that fucking music? Oh, yeah. Wow. But the saving grace is there's even a documentary about this. A year later, I think the owner of this cable company was indicted or whatever for mishandling funds or I don't know, something like that. And the place was shuttered. So I was like, OK, fuck you. Good luck. Here's a weather -related what the fuck, and this ties in with the Art Institute while I was attending the flood of 2010. Oh, yeah. I'm trying to think of who the teacher was. It might have been Seth. Seth, okay. But we had a project due that day. And I lived in Jolton, so I lived at the top of a mountain, so I wasn't seeing any of this. And I just happened to turn on the news, and I'm watching. The next thing I see, I see this house floating down Interstate 40. Like, what the fuck is going on? This is a little bit more serious than I thought it was.

24:31 And I'm like, Art Institute, they had to cancel, right? So I turn on the radio. and everything's fucking canceling. Not hearing anything about the Art Institute. I'm like, what the fuck? I know they don't expect us to try to drive to school. So I reached out to Seth. He didn't even know what was going on. Oh, really? He didn't know how serious it was. I'm like, do we have school today? He's like, let me find out. So Seth had to actually go and talk to one of y 'all to see what the hell was going on or to see what he could find out. And finally, he called me back. He's like, yeah, don't even worry about school today. We're not. Yeah, because the whole, there was that stream that was by the entrance of the school, I think. Yeah. And that overflowed. It took out half of the asphalt and stuff down the street a bit. Yeah. You couldn't even get in there anyway. Yeah. Lucky for me because the project that was due that day, mine wasn't done.

25:13 But he never knew that. No, he doesn't know. He doesn't need to know that. It's a weather -related incident. That was my problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you've grown up and you've gone away from home, you always go back and you tell your parents, you know, all the bad shit that you did now that they can't punish you. Right. So Rob was the head of the audio department. And every semester we would get like a set number of studio hours that we could go into the studio and use it for projects and whatever. Toward the end there when it was apparent that I was actually going to graduate. I had all my projects done. I was booking studio time for the Kentucky linemen, and there were some nights where we were there all fucking night from like 10 o 'clock to like 6 o 'clock in the morning. And I can't tell you how much Jack Daniels was drinking that fucking controller. Yeah. There's a number of projects that that occurred in, and I knew some of it was going on, so I was the kind of person that was kind of like, uh -huh. That's good.

26:12 Yeah. Okay. Sounds really good, guy. Keep going. Because, you know, that is part of working in a studio situation with creative people. And that's part of the job. And if you don't know. How to handle that. You're going to suck at doing this. We started loading in and then somebody walked in with a bottle of Jack and then somebody else walked in with another bottle of Jack. And I'm like, at some point, so wait, this is a school. Are we allowed to do this? And I'm like, I'm not going to say shit. We just got to be cool about it. I don't know. There was one night where we, it was an all nighter at five o 'clock in the morning. We're all like, and we had the studio until eight. Right. So we're all like burnout by this time at five o 'clock in the morning. We're like, let's do a Tammy Wynette cover. So we're there, and we pull up YouTube, and we're listening to the song, and the song was Till I Can Make It On My Own. It's a ballad. Oh, yeah.

27:03 Yeah. And we laid down the bass and the drums and the rhythm guitar. And Mitchell, he was tired and his voice was cracking. And obviously, he's a male. Tammy went at his feet. So he wasn't trying to sound like Tammy went at it. Right, right, right. But he did this scratch vocal that we were just going to, you know, just a scratch vocal. It's going to be thrown away. We'll do the master vocal later, right? So we did that. And then, you know, we cleaned the studio. No one ever knew. I mean, no one ever said anything to me. Like, you guys fucking trashed the place. I was like, no, we left it clean. Drank a lot of Jack, but we left it clean. Well, that's, you know, that's... To me, that was part of the gig. That's part of the, you know. And you would do that if you were working in another studio. You can't trash the place. I mean, I guess. There's some people who probably can get away with it.

27:44 But most of the time, you're in there, and if you're the engineer, you're kind of supposed to be the grown -up, so to speak, in the room. And so, you know, it's kind of your deal. You make sure people aren't trashing shit up, and you clean up after everybody's done, and that's the way it is. I knew certain things, certain people were doing stuff, but I wasn't going to. Rob's like, you're not telling me anything I didn't fucking know, Jake. Come on now. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't going to. I was not going to. be that guy, you know? I was like, hey, wait a second. The funny thing is, a couple months later, we actually went back and Mitchell was trying to do a master vocal for that track. He listened to that scratch vocal and he did a couple takes and I'm in there trying to comp the vocal and Mitchell's listening to it. He's like, play that scratch vocal back. And he's like, I don't know what it is. In a scratch vocal, he sang through an SM58, so we didn't even care what microphone it was because it was just a scratch vocal. Mitchell's like, I cannot get that level of pain in the way that I... He said, I can't do it. Like, it was 5 o 'clock in the morning.

28:45 So we ended up using the scratch vocal as the lead vocal for the track. And then we just kind of built it around that. Part of your job as the engineer is to capture whatever is happening in the moment. And if you had not hit record on that scratch vocal, you would have been bummed. Yeah. I've learned real quick since that day, probably. I hit the record button. Even if they ask me, hey, are you recording this? No, no, don't worry about it. Absolutely. Yeah, you never let somebody know you're in record. chord just make sure you are rolling all the time because you never know what's going to come out of somebody's mouth or what some lick someone's going to play or some cool drum fill or oh my god you hear about omni studios they fucking tore omni down yeah i know absolute Decimation of Music Row.

29:27 I had a critical listening class, or it was an assignment or something, and we had to pick between three songs, and one of the songs was a Vince Gill song, and we had to book the studio time and listen to the song through the control room, through the speakers. We had to draw out the sound field and what you're hearing. It was a really cool project. So I had the studio booked for like two hours. A half hour before my studio time was up, this older gentleman comes walking in, and I had no idea who it was. Not a clue. So I'm sitting there, and he's like, oh, that's a great Vince Gill song. And I'm thinking to myself, who the fuck is this guy encroaching on my studio time? I had no idea who he was. And I wasn't being a shithead to him, but I wasn't being as cordial as I could have been had I known who he was. It was Bob Bullock. And he had the studio booked for 8 o 'clock, so he was just there a little early, right? So I had no idea.

30:12 I did my thing and I left and I turned a project in, you know, and I didn't think about it again until a couple of years later. I booked a mixing class and I see this name, Bob Bullock. And then I looked at him up like, holy crap, this guy's done some stuff. Like he's worked on some stuff. One of the sweetest and nicest people you'll ever meet too. Oh yeah. Yeah. I walked into his class and it was at Omni Studios. That's where we had the class. I remember. I'm like, okay, I'm going to fail this class just because, no, he was super cool. And we were in one of his classes and he was telling this story. He was doing this part spoken word, part music project with Waylon Jennings. Oh. It was basically Waylon songs and there was talking in between. And I don't know if it was recorded at Omni, but it was being mixed there. Yeah. Bob was doing something with Waylon at Omni Studios. Okay. So Waylon was back in the vocal booth and I think he was doing a spoken dialogue part. Bob kept hearing this crinkling coming through the mic, and he couldn't figure out what it was. So Waylon's just sitting there, and they're trying to figure it out, and the engineers are trying to figure it out. They're swapping out XLR cables, and they're swapping out mics, and they'd get everything hooked back up and hit record again, and the crinkling is still there. Come to find out it was Waylon fucking with him. Waylon had a cigarette pack and was fucking with the cellophane, and every time they would get everything straight, oh, let's try it now, Waylon, he would just crinkle that fucking cellophane. That's awesome! Bob said, I don't know how long that went on until they figured out what it was. But finally, he said, wait, I said, all right, guys, this is this is me messing with you. That's awesome.

31:37 You still are the first person I've ever met that was a fan of Kiss and Waylon Jennings at the same time. Oh, of course. Yeah. I was impressed with the spectrum. We had a studio project and this wasn't even mine. This was for a classmate and they had hired Cowboy Eddie Long to come in and play pedal steel on it. And I had never met him. Cowboy comes walking in when I said, Cowboy, when I was 18 years old, my dad took me to see Hank Williams Jr. in Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And I said, you were the steel player. at that time he's like yes i was wow he's like i probably couldn't tell you much about that show he said because i was drinking a lot back then but uh we became friends we became really still are really good friends and after i graduated from school cowboy called me up one day he goes uh you're done with school right i'm like yeah he goes uh hmm Are you able to do overdubs? Like if I brought my pedal steel to your house, if we had a track for me to play to, could you record me? I'm like, yeah. When he's not on the road, people will hire him to play steel on their records. And I'm usually the one doing it. That's awesome. That's great.

32:39 There's a band called Whiskey Myers. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. Yeah, I've heard of them. We did their White Album. Cowboy called me up and he said to, hey. have you heard Whiskey Myers? And I was like, yeah. He goes, we have eight songs that they want me to do for their record. And he said, it's legit. There's money involved, you know, the whole nine yards. He said, but can we do it in two days? I'm like, you bet your ass we can. And we did. To hear that you were happy with things and you got information out of it that you still use to this day, that's the biggest compliment that I could ever get, really. Anybody that is involved in teaching like that. One of the very first audio classes, John and was teaching and this was very early on and we had a huge class where they hadn't started weeding people out yet right one of the classmates in the middle of learning the science behind audio he asked when do we see the strippers and cocaine and the parties and john's like he didn't say it but the look on his face like what the