Working Vacation

In-ground heated pools and outdoor tennis courts. Entertainment rooms with pinball machines and vintage coin-operated video games. On-staff chefs and breakfasts served at suitably late “rock ’n’ roll hours.” Jacuzzi baths, wi-fi access and horseback-riding lessons. With all of these distractions, who could be bothered with making a record?

For all the live-off-the-land attitude of the indie era, a surprising number of recording studios are doing a booming business by emphasizing the residential side of the equation. Whether an ocean view or pastoral country vibe is the primary attraction [see sidebar], studios the world over have pumped up the amenities in order to attract top-level musicians to their facilities. “We’ve been booked full-time for seven straight years, with some of the biggest-name artists in the industry,” says Albert Stern, manager of Morning View Studios, a southern California facility with on-call massage therapists and a $50,000 monthly rate. “I guess you could say that business is good.”

Power-pop trio Nada Surf recently recorded its new album, Lucky, at Robert Lang Studios, a plush studio/home arrangement located in the Seattle suburb of Shoreline. The facility has some local history: Alice in Chains and Death Cab for Cutie have worked there, and Nirvana’s final studio recording—the posthumously released “You Know You’re Right”—was tracked there. During the downtime for these last sessions, then-drummer Dave Grohl recorded the demos that became “Big Me” and “Exhausted,” thus laying the groundwork for his next project, Foo Fighters.

With its stunning views of the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains, the five-bedroom/six-bathroom brick domicile would probably serve as a top-dollar holiday rental property for well-to-do families if not for the fully functional recording studio occupying its street-level floor. (When Dave Matthews last recorded there, he purportedly grew so tired of climbing the staircase every time he needed to relieve himself that he installed a small downstairs bathroom, now affectionately christened “The Dave.”) The studio complements its state-of-the-art 48-track recording console and ProTools setup (and its wood-paneled control room and multiple vocal isolation booths) with an indoor basketball court, a surround-sound movie-viewing room, a full gourmet kitchen and two panoramic decks complete with barbecues.

The last day of Nada Surf’s recording more closely resembled a Mediterranean vacation than a grind-it-out session to put the finishing touches on what Frank Zappa once called a “studio tan.” “It’s hard to imagine writing something sad when you have this to wake up to every day; it feels like home base,” says singer and songwriter Matthew Caws, waving at the ocean below as seabirds hover above. “The band is flying back home tonight, but I’m staying on another week to mix the record,” he says. “I’m not ready to leave yet!”

THE PROS AND CONS OF STUDIO DECADENCE

Comfortable studio surroundings are hardly a new development in rock history. The Rolling Stones recorded their classic double-album Exile On Main Street while billeted at Villa Nellcôte, a 16-room retreat on the waterfront of the Côte d’Azur region in southern France, while Led Zeppelin routinely fled London for the country confines of Headley Grange when it was time to record.

“I get terrible studio nerves,” guitarist Jimmy Page told biographer Ritchie Yorke in 1976. “You really need the sort of facilities where you can take a break for a cup of tea, wander around the garden, then go back and do whatever you have to do. Instead of the feeling [you get] walking into a studio, down a flight of steps and into fluorescent lights, opening up the big soundproof door. To work like that, you’ve got to program yourself. You’re walking down those stairs telling yourself that you’re going to play the solo of your life. But you so rarely do in those sort of conditions.”

That said, for all the residential studios investing in the bells and whistles that, seemingly, are so in demand right now, there’s an opposing school of thought still alive in the indie community, its leading lights operating under the belief that grandeur is a distraction from the task at hand. Spoon recorded its latest LP, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, in drummer Jim Eno’s home studio in Austin, Texas, a bare-bones affair he built himself in between tours. “It’s basically a small house behind my house called Public Hi-Fi,” he explains. Frontman Britt Daniel recalls that he spent most of his downtime “sleeping on the futon; I was the only one who didn’t have a home in Austin, so I was basically living in the studio.”

And while producer Steve Albini indicates a certain fondness for London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios, his own facility—Chicago’s no-frills Electrical Audio—is much more in keeping with his DIY philosophy. “Most of the bands I work with don’t have any money to waste, so every minute they’re in the studio, they expect to be working,” he says. “I’m much more concerned with productivity than leisure activities. If you’re gonna be in the studio long enough to make use of a basketball court, you’ve already blown it as far as I’m concerned.”