harry andronis
Reprinted from "Zappa!", published in '92 by Keyboard and Guitar Player magazines:
Harry Andronis: Mixmaster Outside The Kitchen
"He says, 'anyone who has a coat like that must know
something,' and he hired me," laughs Harry Andronis, house mixer for Frank
Zappa since the 1988 Broadway the Hard Way tour. Was that coat of many colors?
Lined with French postcards? Why special enough to warrant on-the-spot hiring?
"Who knows?" Andronis muses. "It's really nothing. Just one of
those heavy, East Coast overcoats."
As
with many Zappa hirings, that glib comment was in fact the end, not the flip
beginning, of a screening process that had already been completed after a strong
recommendation to Frank by one of his most trusted workers, Marque Coy, then in
charge of monitor mixes and now manager of Joe's Garage.
Coy
and Andronis had worked together in the '70s for Chris De Burgh, a superstar in
Europe (if barely an opening act in the U.S.). In 1987, while Andronis was
working on a Shadowfax LP down the street from where Zappa was rehearsing, he
convinced his old road buddy to sneak him in to watch. Emboldened on discovering
that no house mixer had yet been hired, Harry told Coy to throw his name into
the hat.
A
longtime Zappa fan, Harry was first introduced to his music at age 13 by a
cousin who sat him down with Hot Rats. "I thought it was brilliant,"
he recalls. "I was always moved by what was happening in the tracks
sonically and musicallyjust the sound of different instruments, and he used
weird ones-bass clarinets and xylophones. It was almost like Spike Jones, only
it wasn't hysterical."
A
10-week course offered by the RIAA taught Andronis the rudiments of recording.
An apprenticeship during college at the Paragon Recording Studio filled in gaps
of his audio education. Besides learning to clean out garbage cans, he learned
how to copy tapes, set up sessions, and second in the control booth. Finally, he
was doing jingles for Schlitz, McDonald's, and United Airlines, as well as
night-time stints with rhythm and blues groups and local celebrities such as
Stix.
"Eventually,"
he states, "I got too big for my britches and too burned out, and I split
for Los Angeles." A fluke led to a position with Supertramp just as their
Breakfast In America soared up the charts, dragging the support staff up and
away on tour, and leaving Andronis to hold down the board in their demo studio,
where he worked with such luminaries as Jean-Luc Ponty and Earl Slick. In 1982
he moved on to Shadowfax, with whom he still works occasionally. "I learned
a lot with Shadowfax that applies now to Zappa," he says, "especially
early on, because they used a lot of exotic percussion. We also played a lot of
places that didn't have adequate P.A.s, and I had to learn to use the room. If
you don't have the right reverb, you listen to the room and I say, 'Okay, well,
it's got a bit of ring to it, so there it is."'
This
minimalist/improvisational approach is the I key to his work now with Zappa,
though initially, because of it, he feared his first gig would be his last.
"I think I worried Frank at the rehearsals," he explains. "The
first day, he came up and was talking to me, and I could see him looking at the
back of the console. Finally, he said,'Is everything plugged in?' I walked
around the back and looked and said, 'Yeah, looks like it. Why?' 'There's a lot
of holes here.' I looked at the stage and told Frank, 'It's a 10-piece band, and
it's pretty busy anyway. Everybody's got a lot of processing on their stuff now,
don't they?' And he went, 'Yep.' And I said, 'Most of the halls we're playing
are going to have at least 1.5 seconds of reverb time, aren't they?' And he
said, 'Yeah.' 'Most of the places are going to have 200 300 milliseconds
slapping off a wall somewhere, aren't they?' He said, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'Well,
I don't think I need anything, do I?' And he said, 'Well, maybe not.'
"You
see; I had decided I wasn't going to use a lot of effects. Since 1973 I'd seen
at least one show from every one of Frank's tours. I was never terribly
impressed by the sound. I felt it was almost insulting, even painful at times.
They used to tear apart the house studio and bring it on the road. So in the
front, they'd have chambers, delays, compressors, auto pans, gates, Aphexes, and
all that sort of stuff-and it sounded that way. Plus, there seemed to have been
high-end deprivation, because they used to bring these extra piezo packs and
throw them on top of the stacks for extra high end So the first thing I did was
get rid of all those effects.'
Andronis
actually had brought an old Scamp effects rack, an FPX and an AMS delay for
Zappa's comfort, but he ended up using only a little reverb for a couple of
outdoor shows. "Otherwise" he
recalls, "with ten guys playing these arrangements which had 128th-notes
flying and bouncing all over the place, the last thing they needed in a hall was
some added reverb and delay. I'm out there to make Frank Zappa sound good-
whatever it takes, and I think the people that went to see those '88 shows got
to see the finest performances they'll ever see.
"I'm
very happily employed. People are sometimes intimidated by Frank, because he
looks you straight in the eye, but he's amiable and fun. I've always had a good
time, if for no other reason than to be able to get my hands on this kind of
music. And the humor factor is great When [evangelist Jimmy] Swaggart got
busted, there was high morale for a couple of weeks. That's always what makes
you want to work hard, because you just know that something special might just
happen any night. Not to mention, having the acknowledgment of someone like
Frank Zappa that I know what I'm doing certainly helps my own self-esteem.
"It's
his music, he's paying you to do the gig, do it. I ran up against that real
early, because the first soundcheck that we did, Frank walked in and turned on
his guitar and it was just blazing, and I didn't even have the P.A. up, so I
immediately got on the talkback and said, 'Frank, you've got to turn it down,'
and my intercom started flashing and a couple of the guys from the crew who'd
been with him for a while were saying, 'What
did you say to Frank?' 'I
told him to turn down, it's pretty
loud, isn't it?' And they said, 'Yeah, but it's his show,' and all I could say
was, 'Look, he's paying me to make him sound good, and right now he's really
loud, and it's making it really difficult for me to make anything else happen.'
Anyway, Frank walked over, and turned down, and walked back to the mike and
said, 'Is that okay?' and from that day on, he would come in and play the guitar
and ask if it was too loud or not.
"When
it comes to the gig, if you have something to talk about he'll talk to you all
day, but if you don't, then just get on with it. The guy hires you to do the
gig, and he expects you to do it, and once he knows that you can do it, he
leaves you alone. He's absolutely wonderful. He's going for a certain thing, and
he knows how to get it, and when you're working with him, he can not only tell
you what he wants, but he can also tell you how to get it. What more do you want
than to be left to do your gig? The people that stay are consummate
professionals- they know the gig."
Since
the end of the '88 tour, Andronis has continued to help Zappa remix old material
(by the end of the tour, the set list totalled nearly 130 tunes). He also has
established himself in the world of television, doing Foley work and dialog
recording for such shows as Batman, Tiny Toons, Tasmania, L.A. Law, Doogie
Howser, and Ren and Stimpy.
Andronis
looks forward especially to the upcoming Zappa events in Germany. Advance
preparation will be handled by the Ensemble Modern, which will send him
diagrams, basic room dimensions, and probable location of PA stacks.
"Because it is six-channel surround sound" he says, "we're going
to have to put double stacks on the sides [of the auditorium] in the middle, and
the board will have to be stuck in the middle of the audience. The Ensemble's
tech has played in these halls, so I'm depending a lot on him. The surround
sound is what's going to be the trick. We may feed the sound to the truck first,
because I'm still not sure how many inputs we're going to end up with. The
biggest problem is going to be that these musicians are going to be spread
around the stage in unorthodox manners, and we're going to be mixing in
six-channel surround. We'll go over a couple of weeks early and work in a
rehearsal hall with the system, since we can't get into the actual halls until
the night of the show. They'll also need to monitor the taped Synclavier
material because they're going to be playing with it at times, with it at times,
so we can expect some monitoring problems on stage that will interfere with the
miking there's a lot of stuff we haven't worked out yet.
"I
think these shows will be of severe historical importance," he concludes.
"It's Frank Zappa. The man is one of the more unique composers around, and
is one of the few who actually has the balls to try to execute something like
this. I know he would probably kill me for saying this, but to me it's really
like going to see Stravinsky conduct his orchestra- on that level. It's Frank
Zappa doing something that no one else would do. The guy truly is the
vanguard."