{"id":1411,"date":"2016-11-07T18:31:02","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T18:31:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shindig-magazine.com\/?p=1411"},"modified":"2016-11-07T18:34:53","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T18:34:53","slug":"nick-waterhouse-on-allah-las","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=1411","title":{"rendered":"Nick Waterhouse on Allah-Las"},"content":{"rendered":"

THOMAS PATTERSON has just interviewed NICK WATERHOUSE for issue #63. Here’s what he had to say about his pals ALLAH-LAS<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“I produced the Allah-Las\u2019 first 45 whilst I was making my first 45 because Matt the drummer and I were very close. We met the first day of college at San Francisco State when we were 18. I saw him at orientation and I thought \u201cThere\u2019s a black guy in an Iggy Pop shirt, we\u2019re going to get along well!\u201d (laughs) And of course we really hit it off. We had this shared sensibility. When Domenic Priore\u2019s book All Summer Long <\/em>came out, we were both 18 and that was the first published representation of the LA that we both knew that we were trying to explain to people that were friends of ours. It was just this deeply shared sensibility. The thing I love about Matt is that we\u2019re both such different people and we have different broad tastes but we have a shared baseline and a spiritual connection. So once he started the Las with those guys, he was telling me about it and I was out of town. And I remember, he was like \u201cYou\u2019ve got to come see this band we\u2019re working on.\u201d I had met Pedrum, and I was sitting in a booth in Footsie\u2019s in Highland Park and they were playing in a tiny little corner to 40 people, and they played the electric version of \u2018Early Morning Rain\u2019 the way the Dead demos were and that was just the thing that made me realise that Matt knew how to play the proper way. That was a big thing. Just finding a drummer who could play the things on the records we liked. It was that thing when you\u2019re a kid, you don\u2019t how this magic happens. But you\u2019re always playing with people and you\u2019re like \u201cI don\u2019t know why but this doesn\u2019t feel right.\u201d But everyone in that band was playing right. We all knew we were on the same page, and I thought, \u201cWe\u2019re fucking going to do this.\u201d \u00a0It was a total moment of clarity, and I was talking to Matt about the recordings they were doing on some guy\u2019s Pro-Tools setup and I was like \u201cGuys, that\u2019s total bullshit, let\u2019s go cut this at the studio on tape.\u201d It was a distillery where I grew up hanging around a lot in Costa Mesa and it was funny because the guys in the band who didn\u2019t know me were like \u201cYeah, but this cool guy in LA wants to record us on Pro-Tools.\u201d And I said \u201cLook, just trust me, we\u2019re going to do this and it\u2019s going to be great.\u201d And normally I don\u2019t oversell things but I said, \u201cWe have to do this!\u201d And we cut \u2018Catamaran\u2019 and \u2018Long Journey\u2019 and that was the 45 I put out on my own label Pres. And that relayed into making the whole album. And we made the album piecemeal over a couple of months whenever I\u2019d come into town and I still have such strong memories. I played organ on two of those songs. And the sound of it was exactly the sound and feel that I saw from conception, knowing that there\u2019s such a tiny window for me to find any artists that I would be empathetic to and I\u2019d really get the sound, but that was one of those where it was a deeply spiritual thing. I\u2019ll still put that record on and listen to it.”<\/p>\n