Being that you were his right-hand person during this time, it was obvious that he trusted you with handling his overall sound. What was it like working alongside him while crafting this album? I came to him as an audio technician to repair his equipment to keep it running. He expected that, after everything was hooked up and running properly, that I was going to be his engineer. I came to his camp without any engineering skills. I knew how to use the equipment, but I wasn’t an engineer. An engineer is more of an artist. So he taught me his sound. I learned from him what he liked. I learned what EQ, reverbs, delays, and signal processing he liked. I became very adept at getting his sound for him. What were really the constant themes for me were gratitude, appreciation, and a strong determination to do everything humanly possible to facilitate his work. It mattered a great deal to me that I stayed up longer than him, because he would go to bed, and I’d be in the studio pulling patch cords, putting all the wires away, and making copies of things. I would routinely get fewer hours of sleep than he did, because I had to be the last one out and the first one back in the studio. I tried really, really hard to be what he needed. I wanted to serve this man that I admired and who I knew was a genius and did great work. My attitude back then was, “Just let me keep up. Don’t make any mistakes. Just keep this train rolling.” [ laughs ] It was a pleasure and a privilege to work with him. I recognized that we were doing great work and it was selling and he was popular. I was young just like he was, but I had no preconception of how history would view him. I thought he was great, but I came in thinking he was great. I knew we sold a whole lot of records and so did other people like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and other bands that were coming up, like U2, and became huge. So I had no way of knowing what would happen thirty or forty years later. All that mattered to me back then was to get these records made. .
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