Life of the Record

The making of penthouse by luna - featuring Dean wareham

Intro

Dan Nordheim:

You’re listening to Life of the Record. Where artists look back on the making of a classic album. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Dean Wareham formed Luna in 1991, after the breakup of Galaxie 500. Upon signing with Elektra Records, Dean Wareham brought in Justin Harwood, formerly of The Chills, on bass. Next, former Feelies drummer Stanley Demeski joined and Luna released their debut record, Lunapark, in 1992. In 1993, Luna expanded to a four-piece as Sean Eden joined on guitar. They released Bewitched in 1994, followed by their third album, Penthouse, in 1995.

In this episode, Dean Wareham talks through the making of Penthouse on its 25th Anniversary.

Dean Wareham:

This is Dean Wareham. And I’m here to talk about the making of Luna’s Penthouse album. Penthouse is probably my favorite Luna record. I mean there’s things I like on every record but I think it’s the one where it all kind of gelled to us. You’re never quite sure why that is why some records turn out better than others. It’s not a question of effort or intention. You know, if people could make a great record every time, they would. 

I feel like some bands, their first record is their best and they just get worse from there. But I feel like with Luna, our first album, Lunapark, we weren’t really a band yet. Because I had signed to Elektra and then I brought Justin in and we’d written the songs and then Stanley came in but we hadn’t been gigging together. And then the next one, Bewitched, felt more like a band. But this one, Penthouse, especially so it just seemed like we really honed in on what it was that Luna was all about. 

We made the record really in two sections, about four weeks, with an engineer named Mario Salvati at a studio called Sorcerer. And we picked Mario because we liked the Television reunion album he had done and his work with Tom Verlaine. You’re coming out of the eighties so sometimes the sounds you’re looking for are a reaction against what came before. I think what we were trying to do with Luna was make sort of natural sounding records, that is, you know, get away from gated reverbs and just the big sounds of the eighties. Which is sort of why we picked Victor Van Vugt to do Bewitched too because his stuff with like Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds sounded sort of natural to us and that Television album we thought sounded great. 

So we started with Mario. The first thing we did, now that I think back, we recorded an EP with Mario, just a few tracks we said, “we’ll try a few tracks and see how it goes.” And we recorded “Chinatown,” “Bonnie & Clyde,” the Serge Gainsbourg song, and “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel,” a cover of that Talking Heads song. That EP, we listened to that and we were like, “this is the best thing we’ve done as a band.” We were allowed to go back. You know, when you’re signed to a major label, there’s always a discussion of who’s going to make your record but our A&R guy Terry Tolkin kind of let us do what we wanted. 

“Chinatown”

“Chinatown” is at least partially written about Terry Tolkin. The lines, “you’re out all night, chasing girlies, you’re late to work and you go home earlies.” Which I know is a spectacularly bad rhyme. It annoys some people but I (laughs) kind of like it. I like Edward Lear a lot who is one of the pioneers of the limerick and a guy who invents his own words. Yeah “Chinatown,” I guess it’s sort of about, I guess it’s maybe what you might call a drinking song. It’s about being out on the town. Justin came up with the chords and that riff, that (hums guitar riff). So that one, “Chinatown,” is really a Harwood/Wareham composition. 

Within a couple of months, we were back again at Sorcerer Studio which was on Mercer Street, just above Canal. There used to be a lot of recording studios in Manhattan, now so many of them are gone. It was a cool place, they sort of had a whole building there in SoHo. They’ve got a big studio in the basement, we were mostly in the B studio which was way up top. 

“Sideshow By The Seashore”

“Sideshow By The Seashore,” that one is a super cool riff that Sean came up with. With a bent note on the whammy bar. It took a long time to record that one (laughs). We got a theremin in there, none of us knew how to play the theremin but Justin sort of figured it out. 

Sideshow By The Seashore was a club, well I thought it was a club, I guess it was what you might call a freak show out in Coney Island. In the late eighties and early nineties, a friend of mine put on Friday night shows out there, indie rock shows, and people would go out there. One time, I was doing a solo set, anyway there was this huge storm and everyone had to come in off the boardwalk and there’s a lyric in there about that. “An electrical storm has caught us in a trap.” It really is a tongue twister, as is “Sideshow By The Seashore.”

When you’re used to hearing a song a certain way and then you hire someone to mix it and they throw stuff out or add things, sometimes there’s just a period of adjustment while you get used to it. It’s difficult at first, you really expect to hear it the way you had it in your mind. But that’s why you hire those people, I think. There’s another version of “Sideshow By The Seashore” that’s mixed by Mario Salvati. It’s a rough mix that has a lot of Sean’s extra guitars. It has like five guitar tracks of extra stuff. When Pat came in to mix it, he was like, “No, I just want to strip it down to that one riff and I’ll have that doubled, that’s the best thing about the song. The (mouths guitar riff) over and over again. He didn’t loop it but he focused on that and then he brought in the theremin, he said, “Let’s get a theremin, that will be a cool sounding thing.” It all worked out in the end. 

We decided to bring Pat McCarthy in to mix the record because your record company, they always want, if you’re trying to get you on radio, they think we should bring in someone to mix it who has mixed songs that have been on the radio. Pat had mixed that Counting Crows hit. I guess T-Bone Burnett produced, he’d worked with him and he’d worked with U2. Pat came in and I think for the first time in my life, I was sort of pushed, I had a producer saying like, not just like, “Oh yeah that’s good, let’s move on.” But like, “No, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again.” He had me re-sing a lot of things. Pat’s thing was like, “I’m not here to mix the record, I’m here to help you finish the record.” I think he did an amazing job with this record. The attention to detail. I had never worked that slowly before or that agonizingly but you know he would sit there for just hours just adjusting, tweaking the vocals on each syllable, just making sure that it sits exactly right. My early recording experiences are with Kramer at the helm where it was always like one take, like “Next, that’s it.” And you’re like, “well I made a mistake.” He’s like, “I like the mistake, we’ll leave the mistake.” Whereas Pat McCarthy would sort of be like, if there were like eight bars or something, he’d be like, “Well one and three are really good but two’s a little wobbly.”

“Moon Palace”

“Moon Palace,” I have a version of that with different lyrics but I think I’ve destroyed it (laughs). When we left Sorcerer I did not have, maybe I had the chorus down, but I did not have the verses down. And at any rate, Pat was going to have me re-sing it. 

“Moon Palace” was named for the Paul Auster book that I was reading at the time, Moon Palace. Which he named for a Chinese restaurant. Yesterday on Twitter, I saw that David Chang of Momufoku has opened a restaurant called Moon Palace and someone asked him, “Have you done this in tribute to the Luna song?” And I happen to know he’s a huge Luna fan so I’m thinking maybe he did.

I’m not sure what this song’s about. Maybe it’s another drinking song. But it also references one of my heroes, Christopher Boyce, the Falcon in The Falcon and the Snowman. “You’ve got no choice, feel like Christopher Boyce” is the lyric. One of my earliest political experiences, before I’d moved to New York, I was living in Australia, I was twelve years old. The Australian government was sort of ousted in murky circumstances with the help of the Queen’s representative and also apparently the C.I.A., doing all this stuff. Anyway, I reference Christopher Boyce. He worked at TRW and he discovered that the C.I.A. was trying to destabilize the Australian government and overthrow them. He started sneaking secrets out of TRW in a potted plant with the help of his coke dealer friend (laughs). They went down to Mexico and were selling secrets to the Russians. Of course, he got busted and put in jail and escaped from jail famously. He’s now out again, he’s free. And he’s still into, loves working with birds, falcons that is. 

“Moon Palace” is one of my favorite Luna songs. It features a great guitar solo by Tom Verlaine. Mario said he could get Tom in to play on the record if we gave him some of our studio time so that was the deal that we did. Tom liked to work late so it really didn’t matter. He’d come in at 10pm and work for hours. He plays on “Moon Palace” and he plays a long guitar solo on “23 Minutes in Brussels.” It’s great listening to him play. He doesn’t use any pedals or tricks, just his fingers and the Stratocaster or Jazzmaster, whatever he’s playing. He uses the volume knob, he sort of swells. Whatever he’s doing, you know it’s him immediately. He’s a unique player, which I think is the highest compliment you can pay a musician really, not that they can shred. Well that’s a different kind of compliment, not that they can do incredible things at high speed but that they have a sound that only they have. 

The technology then in the nineties, it was kind of the worst. I mean the best (laughs) at the time. But you had these (sigh), you would have twenty four tracks and then you would have another twenty four track machine slaved to it so you could have extra tracks, forty eight. And they would sync up but sort of slowly, it’s kind of clumsy or it uses a lot of tape. With Pro Tools now obviously you can see things as well as hear them so I think it’s a lot easier to go in and fix things. Or maybe if you had to do something, you needed eight bars to be perfect, you could take a couple and loop them but back then it was a lot more difficult to do. So it’s painstaking. Even comping a vocal was sort of a painstaking...Comping means you sing like three or six or twenty takes of the vocal and then you go through and pick out the best line from each and make a composite. When you’re pushing buttons on tape machines, it’s a pretty slow thing and Pat was very good at it. But having to go and pick out maybe, “I like this syllable here and…” Now as I say it’s just so easy because it’s all in a drop down menu in front of you and you just pick out the syllable you want and cut and paste it. I know a lot of the young bands now who are obsessed with tape and for those of us who recorded in the nineties, we’re over it. 

“Double Feature”

“Double Feature,” that took a long time in the studio too. That’s very different on the version that’s on Penthouse Deluxe. You can hear a wholly different drum track. Pat was mixing that, he had Stanley come back and redo the drums. He had me and Sean playing bass on it too. He wasn’t happy with the bass line so there’s three different people playing bass. And I think we were kind of like, “What is he doing?” It’s so much better than the rough mix of it, it really came to life. We actually had a gig, because mixing was taking longer than we anticipated actually. We thought it was going to take two weeks, you know maybe a day per song. So we had a gig up in Boston and we left Pat, we were like, “Ok you’re doing ‘Double Feature’ by the time we come back, you know you’ll be finished with ‘Double Feature’ and you’ll have something else up.” So we came back on Sunday, he was still working on it. 

But you can hear all that work. Cool stuff in there, strange sounds. I think it starts with this weird sound that you hear sometimes of one tape machine catching up with the other tape machine. As it slows down sort of makes a weird (mouths tape slowing sound). Listen for that. 

The chimpanzees, yes, we listened back over and “I have seen the chimpanzees.” You know, I’m talking about going to the zoo (laughs). And when that line comes by, Pat was like, “Do you hear the chimpanzees?” And I was like, “Yes I do, actually.” He’d been...I don’t even know what that sound is. I know it’s not chimpanzees but it could be. 

Generally we would do probably three or four takes of a song. We would do a take, our drummer Stanley would often check it on the metronome as we were listening back. Wanted to know for himself that he hadn’t fluctuated. We did not play to a click, this is pre...we were not using Pro Tools. Now everybody does everything to a click but we rarely did anything to a click. We didn’t need to. We had Stanley. 

“23 Minutes In Brussels”

I love playing “Friendly Advice” and “23 Minutes,” some of the long ones. We do play these songs a lot. “23 Minutes In Brussels,” I must have played 23 hundred times. No I don’t know, I’ve played it a lot. That song, I took the title. That’s an interesting trick for songwriting, steal someone else’s title and write your own song around it. Or take someone’s first line and write your own song about it. But “23 Minutes In Brussels” is a bootleg album of the band Suicide, opening for Elvis Costello in Brussels. The gig lasts 23 minutes, they’re booed off the stage, someone steals their microphone and (laughs). I think this happened to them a lot as they opened for Elvis Costello or for The Cars, Ric Ocasek was a huge fan and produced their record, but they would stand out there and start playing their music and people would throw stuff at them. They just projected something onstage that was dark and confrontational I think. 

“23 Minutes In Brussels,” there aren’t a lot of lyrics in there really. But I think sometimes those are the best kind of lyrics. A haiku or just things that repeat. Like “Tugboat” or whatever, that Galaxie 500 song, it’s just a few lyrics but it’s evocative. I had come up with the riff (mouths guitar riff). Stanley and Justin made a great contribution too. I mean that’s the thing, I feel like “23 Minutes In Brussels,” if someone else came to do it, it’s not that great of song. But it’s a great performance and it’s a great groove and so it’s all about what you do with it collectively rather than what it would be if someone sat there with a piano and played that song. It’s not a particularly beautiful song. 

So I play a solo at the start of the song, and maybe, well I guess play one in the middle too, a shorter one, but mostly it’s Tom Verlaine. He’s got that little tease and you can tell him again, it’s sort of that sound that he’s using, the volume knob with his pinky. Just sort of swelling into it. It sounds like him. He pays a lot of attention to guitar tones, he sort of had a little suitcase full of tubes or whatever, he knows about old different tubes and their characteristics. 

“23 Minutes In Brussels” was actually originally even a bit longer than this but Tom Verlaine said that, “I think you might improve this if you trim the guitar solo a little bit.” So maybe we lopped a minute out of there. You can hear the longer version again on Penthouse Deluxe. I think we titled it “24 Minutes In Brussels.” He did a few takes but he knew exactly what he was doing, he really did. He was sort of like, “Well back me up, stop, back me up like forty seconds, punch me in exactly here where you go to this.” He was really quick with it. Tom played that guitar solo and even he was like, “That was good, that was a good one.” We were all kind of dazzled by it. 

“Lost In Space”

Side two, well you know really we didn’t plan this as side one and side two because this is the CD era, the compact disc era. We just thought of it as sequencing the ten songs. But now, side two kicks off with track six, “Lost In Space.” This is a beautiful sounding song. 

“Lost In Space,” ok so sonically, I think what’s really cool on that is the mellotron and also a lot of stuff that Sean is doing on the whammy bar. Where Pat would slow the tape machine down to half speed and have him play this bend, double that with having it in real time. You know, maybe you can hear that Pat worked with U2, you can hear that sort of stuff in there, that sort of atmospheric... We went on to make another record with him and he always wanted there to be something else going on besides a rock and roll quartet bashing out their songs. You learn from everyone you work with, that’s why it’s good to work with different people. 

Now that I spend more time on vocals, you don’t want to sound too soft and you don’t want to sound too hard (laughs). So you don’t want to sound mean but you don’t want to sound sappy, you want to be somewhere right in between. Sometimes I’ll do a vocal and I’ll think it’s really great and then I listen later and I’m like, “Oh no, that’s too, there’s too much emotion in that.” Like I’m trying too hard to sell it. Sometimes I’ll have to go back and strip some out of it. But I think “Lost In Space” hits that sweet spot or it’s in a good register for me. It’s delicate but hopefully not too delicate. 

“Rhythm King”

“Rhythm King” is named for the drum machine my friend Angel gave me called the Maestro Rhythm King. I had this video at home made by James Burton, the guitar legend, showing all his tricks. He was Elvis’s band leader, played with Ricky Nelson on that TV show, anyway amazing guitar player. I could never get close to his...I could never play anything like that, he’s incredible. He had this one riff, I don’t even know what song it’s on, but it’s the riff that opens Rhythm King. We had Stanley double that on the vibraphone. Stanley is a trained percussionist, he can play the vibes too.

I’m not sure what this song’s about either. Where I take a dig at the dead Richard Nixon. While not an overtly political album, I do both mention both Richard Nixon and Christoper Boyce. I try to get these things in here without hitting people over the head. But again, Rhythm King is probably another drinking song. I don’t mean drinking heavily. I was never a heavy drinker. I just mean going out at night. It’s about someone who’s actually his girlfriends have gone out for a drink without him. I think. If it’s about anything. 

Say that about Penthouse too, why I like Penthouse more than Bewitched, I think the lyrics are much better on Penthouse than they are on Bewitched. Maybe we were rushed into Bewitched. Maybe I was just smarter by then but for whatever reason, it’s a better group of songs I think. The lyrics and the music evolve separately. Like I’ve got lyric ideas on one side of my brain and musical ideas on the other and then the difficult thing is pulling them together. Trying to squeeze your clever thoughts into a song. I guess really the first thing is the melody. That’s the way that we would write in Luna. We would sort of jam together and then I would start singing a melody and then once that stuck, then you would have to cram the words into the melody. That’s the way I do it anyway. It’s difficult (laughs). 

It’s interesting, sometimes I think, there are albums I love or songs I love and I listen to them and if you asked me to tell you what the lyrics were, I’d be like, “I have no idea what the lyrics are.” (laughs). But it doesn’t matter. It matters if they’re horrible. It matters if they’re really bad but or sometimes there’s one really clever one that sticks with you that you love. They don’t have to be great all the way through I think. Because you’ve got the music to help you along. 

“Kalamazoo”

“Kalamazoo,” well that grew out of an instrumental piece I had done. My wife at the time had made a short movie called Kalamazoo and I did the music for it. So I had this piece called “Kalamazoo” on slide guitar. I’m kind of a clumsy slide player but...That’s another video I had some good slide player’s video and I never really bothered to get good at it but it’s good enough.

That’s where ideas for songs come from is from other songs often. When you hear something you like, you can either cover it or you can steal from it. Both are valid. Both have been valid anyway. We’re getting into scary times now because things are getting very litigious. Going after hit songs, trying to sue people for similarities, things that in the past I think you would just say, “Well that’s nothing. Whatever, that’s just common.” But I feel like after the success of the lawsuit against Robin Thicke over “Blurred Lines” and the Tom Petty getting the publishing from Sam Smith for what I think is really nothing. It’s getting scary now. So yeah by studying, that’s where ideas come from. They don’t just come out of a vacuum. Lyrically too. 

“Kalamazoo” is another drinking song, it’s about drinking in the day time I think. I can sing drinking songs because I’ve never really had a problem. When it comes to drink and drugs, there’s two kinds of people. Some people have a go button and a stop button. I know I do. Like, I can stop when it makes sense to stop. I can look at the clock and be like, “Oh it’s 4:00, I’m going to stop.” But other people only have the go button, they just go go go. We used to have fun, we had some late nights but it never was destructive or dangerous. Not to any of us in the band. I guess I’ve seen other people’s lives fall apart, subsequently take a turn, but not ours. Our A&R guy, Terry Tolkin, who “Chinatown” is about, by the next record, Pup Tent, he was gone. He was a great music fan, he didn’t function very well in the corporate environment of Elektra Records, I think. And yeah, he used to…(laughs), he would smoke a lot of weed, he would do all kinds of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Which they generally tolerated. But they would tolerate it more if you had a hit record. 

“Hedgehog”

“Hedgehog,” which was picked to be a single from this record even though I think it’s probably the weakest song. But these were grunge years and that was the grungiest sounding song so I think when they’d go to the alternative radio department, “Anything here get played on the radio?” They said, “Hedgehog.” It did not get played on the radio. You can’t fool people. We were not a grunge band. 

When they’re trying to get you played on the radio, you’re competing against a lot of other people trying to get on the radio from other labels and you’re competing against bands on your own label. And if they’ve got a meeting over at MTV and they’re like, “Well we’ve got the Better Than Ezra record or this Third Eye Blind…” I don’t know. They were taking off, they were doing well. We were always being told by the label, “You need to come up with a hit song. If you don’t do it, you know the band will get dropped.” But we didn’t get dropped. We made another record but then finally on the fifth record, it finally came true. (laughs). That’s ok. 

I know we were signed to a major label and they are in the business of having hit records and this is why I don’t get angry when we get dropped or anything because you sort of understand that. They’re not doing it just for fun and they’re not interested in putting out a record that just sold a hundred thousand copies. Nowadays this would be an enormous success actually, sales-wise. But back then they’ve got a big office, they want to make records that sell millions and that’s the business they’re in. I don’t think I ever really believed that that was going to happen for Luna. I don’t know, I think I have kind of a strange voice. You know, we didn’t spend time, we didn’t listen to alternative radio or modern rock radio. We were just trying to write the best song we could each time, make each song the best it was but we didn’t think about writing hits. We wouldn’t know how to do it, you know. And I think this record has aged really well, it doesn’t sound like, you know, it sounds like Luna doing their own thing, it doesn’t sound like ten other grunge bands were the vocals and drums are the really loud thing. 

“Hedgehog” refers, there’s a line in there, “Are you a fox or a hedgehog?” Which people think is from a Woody Allen movie and he does mention it but it’s actually from an essay by Isaiah Berlin about Tolstoy and his theory. I think he’s really just having fun, he didn’t mean it to be taken that seriously. That there’s two kinds of writers or artists, there are hedgehogs and there are foxes. The fox has wider ranging knowledge, knows all kinds of things. Whereas the hedgehog only knows one thing but they do it very well. So I’m definitely not a fox I would say, if I’m lucky, I’m a hedgehog. But you have to decide. (Laughs) And his theory was that Tolstoy couldn’t decide if he was a hedgehog or a fox and that this contradiction drove him crazy. I don’t know. 

“Freakin’ and Peakin’”

“Freakin’ and Peakin’”, that sounds like another drinking song, drugging song. I guess it is. It’s about having taken too much of something. We did take ecstasy now and then, so if “Freakin’ and Peakin’” seems to be about a drug, that’s probably what it’s about. Pat went and mastered it and came back and we all took E and listened to it and maybe that’s a cheat. Because it makes you feel good about yourself and about the music. But you know what, some music sounds good on ecstasy and some does not. And I think there’s a lot of sort of sparkle on this record. It sounds good that way. 

“Freakin’ and Peakin’” is in this tuning of, it’s in the Keith Richards, well a tuning that he used a lot. The slack-key, sort of a G/D. It’s in open G I guess but it’s slack because he tunes everything down a little bit. He was probably taught this by Gram Parsons or someone. Once he discovered that, a lot of the Stones hits are written with that. Because it just lends itself a certain flavor to the chords. 

“Freakin’ and Peakin’”, Stanley plays great on that. Great drum track. I don’t think we knew what was going to be the album closer but looking at that, that’s a pretty obvious one to be the album closer. 

That one, I think “Freakin’ and Peakin’”, that was the one song where Pat was like, “Ugh this is just like, you guys are just jamming.” (laughs) We do that sometimes. We don’t get too annoying, we try and stick with the groove and it’s not about virtuosity, it’s about...yeah maintaining the groove. Hopefully. Generally, we knew the structure of the songs just often the lyrics weren’t written. Well I guess these long ones, we don’t actually know exactly how long they’re going to go on for. We let it rip and see what happens. We have some idea of where it’s going. Now we know. Now we know exactly where they’re going (laughs). Now there’s a map that we can go back and listen to the record and be like, “Ok, it builds up here and then it goes quiet…”

It was a good time to be in Luna. We were having fun, I think. I mean not that there weren’t some struggles in the making of this record, and was it a little more difficult than we anticipated. But yeah, I guess we took like, I’d say this record took seven weeks to make, which was certainly the longest I had spent making a record. But that’s nothing compared to some other people. When you’re signed to a multi-record deal to a major label, there’s this impetus I suppose to get off the road and you’re like, “Ok we better make a record so we can get paid again” (laughs). There’s good and bad in that. It’s not a terribly good reason to make a record but on the other hand actually it is a good reason to make a record (laughs). It’s pretty understandable. And like I say, it gets you working.  

Well Penthouse remains my favorite Luna record. It’s unusual that you hear a record that works from beginning to end and I think this one does that just kind of casts a spell and maintains this mood from track one to track ten. Often times, it’s just like two interesting songs and a bunch of filler. But I think this one, Penthouse, really captured us at our best. 

Outro

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Luna. You’ll also find a link to stream or purchase Penthouse. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Chinatown"

"Sideshow by the Seashore"

"Moon Palace"

"Double Feature"

"23 Minutes in Brussels"

"Lost in Space"

"Rhythm King"

"Kalamazoo"

"Hedgehog"

"Freakin' and Peakin'"

Music by Luna, Words by Dean Wareham

Published by Moon Palace Songs

© Elektra Records / Warner Music Group / Beggars Group

Intro theme:
“Winter Cold” by North Home

Intro/Outro Music:
“Skinny Fool” by Charlie Don’t Shake

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Mastered by Jeremy Whitwam