A Tour Of 'Moon Gardens': J.D. King Conjures 60's Sounds Through Recording Methods & Musicianship

J.D. King is a California-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and his most recent release is a solo album titled Moon Gardens. In it, he builds on his enthusiasm for 60s sound to create something that's unique--now--but something he'd no doubt argue would be all too familiar in the 1960s: a solidly organic feel to the music coupled with a "warm" analog sound that creates connections with audiences.

To call King an 'enthusiast' is an understatement, since it's a passion of his to render functional the authentic recording and sound equipment from the 60s as well, and those were the instruments that crafted the sound you'll hear in Moon Gardens. He's also a self-professed hi-fi freak and vinyl collector, and after talking with him here on Tower's PULSE!, we can't help but agree that all of these things are very worthy ways in which to spend your time.

Hannah Means-Shannon: How are you holding up out there in California?

J.D. King: Yeah, fine. I have a pool, and I barbeque, and I work in the studio. It’s pretty much same-old.

HMS: Do you have a studio at home to work in?

JDK: Just intimate toys to work with, more or less. It’s good to have the option to go out, but I can pretty much stay in and be a studio shark forever.

HMS: I got the sense that the things that interest you can hold your attention a lot more than the outside world at times. Is that fair?

JDK: There’s just so much to know in the physics of analog recording and the physics of musicianship. For some reason, I’m always wearing ten hats. I’m never ever bored, can’t be, impossible, as long as I’m doing the stuff I’m interested in. I miss driving my Cadillac around or riding motorcycles, stuff like that.

HMS: What color is your Cadillac?

JDK: It’s a black 1976 El Dorado convertible. It’s the last car that Elvis drove, and I’m friends with one of Bob Dylan’s sons, Jesse Dylan, and he said that it’s only car that his dad will ever drive. He’s got a few of them. I guess I picked well. It’s such a great car. It’s beautiful.

HMS: I imagine it’s beautiful. Is it purely the looks, or is it a really solid car?

JDK: It’s a solid car. It’s from ’76 but I just take care of it, and I drive it around when it’s not too hot. It had a lot of innovations at that time, and you can get up hills just fine, although it weighs like three tons. Take it to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

HMS: That car must be great for photo-shoots. I bet it should make an appearance on some of your albums or singles.

JDK: The only real appearance it’s done is for The Olms with Pete Yorn. We stuck a tripod in the back seat and drove it around Mulholland Hills. We made a fun commercial thing, a promo.

HMS: That’s so neat.

You work with a lot of different kinds of equipment, and have a passion for gathering it and making it functional again, right? Rather than just collecting.

JDK: Yes, a lot of this stuff isn’t really worth a lot. They are old tape machines that people in their 80s know how to maintain. I learned how to maintain them and taught my friend. We looked at old manuals. There are technicians all around in Southern California, and I get their numbers and ask them about stuff. There’s this guy who used to do all of Wally Heider’s stuff, who was the guy who did Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, The Family Stone. Heider recruited him out of the army, since he used to be an Army technician, then that became the San Francisco sound. He’s still around, so I had him come in and kind of bless the machines. He went through everything and thought it sounded super good.

HMS: That’s outstanding!

JDK: There was such a feat of engineering with audio in the 60s that people just went nuts for it. Things just sounded amazing. Everything was engineered to be for audio. Before that, everything was for good radio, too. But that totally vanished, more or less. I was talking with Tommy Ramone from The Ramones, before he died, and he said that all that new equipment that came in in the 70s sounded thick. It didn’t sound as good as the warm, round, 60s sounding stuff. That put me on to the idea that it doesn’t matter how technical things sound, but it matters how biological it sounds if it connects with you. 60s records, more often than not, I will enjoy more than 70s records.

Then my friend Vincent Gallo, who is a connoisseur, put me in touch with all that great 60s gear. Basically, when you hear Moon Gardens, you’re hearing a completely analog album. I personally don’t know anyone else who is doing that, especially on four track machines. I basically mixed down the way that they did on Revolver. You bounce to different tracks and everything is done live in the studio. It’s ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ the whole time. Everyone has to hit your cues, it’s a real team effort. After a few takes, we’ve got it. It’s that old studio mentality, and honestly it makes you a better musician, because you have to stay so focused on just being good. Studio musicians now can do a hundred takes and you can pick out the best parts.

To me that’s why 60s music sounds more biological and shows better musicianship and better songwriting. For this record, I studied a lot of songwriting. My first record was Country music and Bluegrass stuff, and that was my upbringing. But now I wanted to try some Bossa nova things, and more Rock ‘n Roll, a continuation of some of the style I did with The Olms, but more live in studio and mixed totally analog.

With The Olms record, I did a lot of overdubs, playing cello and flute. I ended up playing like twenty-one instruments.

HMS: Wow! I knew you were a multi-instrumentalist, but that’s a lot.

JDK: I always played a lot of instruments as a kid. I’d always bounce around to different instruments constantly because I like how they sound. But this album is more Rock ‘n Roll.

HMS: I wanted to mention, regarding analog recording, that the only person I’ve heard doing stuff like this recently is when I was talking to Dan Penn here on PULSE.

JDK: Oh, Dan Penn! He’s great.

HMS: Yes, he was right there at the beginning of Rock, and hit the scene as a songwriter in 1960. Well, he just put an album out, Living on Mercy, that was recorded live and pretty analog, but he had done others in the past that were very, very analog.

JDK: It’s a dying art, really, unbeknownst to me, since I listen to no modern music at all. I’m constantly buying stacks of records. I haven’t listened to a digital file for a long time.

HMS: What’s your sound set up like?

JDK: For inside, I have Flamenco speakers and a line magnetic tube amp. The Flamencos are Altec, from 1968. I have modern tube amps and I can pump it up through the whole yard. They are the same design that Disney had, so they look like theme park rock speakers, 50s-looking rocks. They are called Stereostone speakers.

HMS: [Laughter] Whoah. That’s amazing.

JDK: I’m super high-fi crazy.

HMS: Are you electrocuting yourself all the time, doing updates to the antique tech? Surely the wiring has to be replaced.

JDK: I literally do it all myself. All the cables. I want to know what I’m doing, and I mark it all down. It takes a lot of organization, but I like designing the systems. I find it almost equally fascinating as I find music. My friend Vincent Gallo is the same way. He’s more of a guitar expert too, though.

HMS: You’ve mentioned working with the older generation, who won’t be with us forever, and learning how to do these things. Are you interested in sharing that knowledge with others, to make sure it continues?

JDK: Maybe if I made videos or something. There are some kids who come in the studio, and they know how to engineer, and they learned that from engineers from the 60s, too. There are like-minded people, but it really boils down to if people want that sound, still. Some people are diving back in, but some people have never thought about it because they are techno or something.

There’s a lot of sampling of old records now, where they just sample them, and put a drumbeat on them, or speed them up, or slow them down. Music is such a plastic medium, you’ll always have that element now of manipulating music in any way, shape, or form.

HMS: You mentioned Creedence Clearwater Revival earlier, well, I was speaking to Doug Clifford of CCR, and he described that direction as the “death of melody”.

JDK:  I think there’s room for everybody. But if I put up a piano video or something online, people go nuts for it, saying, “You can actually play this piano from the early 1900s? And sing an actual song with an actual melody?” Kids just haven’t seen that before, now. And they see a record player for the first time and they say, “What is that?” I feel like an old man, now.

It’s esoteric to say, but it analog is so much better sonically, and if fills the frequency so much more. You’re missing a lot of overtones in digital music, and it sounds more like information rather than a linear event.

HMS: That’s a great description. This is the over-compression on CDs. Mainly older musicians have talked about this with me. Some won’t listen to CDs or to digital files, which are worse in that way.

JDK: Yeah, I feel bad that I can only give people a digital medium at the moment, but if there’s more interest, I can make copies of this record. I just couldn’t sit with records in my storage, and have melted vinyl. But maybe I can start making records for people, we’ll see.

HMS: Tower Records sells CDs and cassettes too, but vinyl is our biggest seller. I love this conversation because it fits in so much with Tower’s history in the 60’s onwards.

JDK: I loved Tower Records when it was on Sunset.

HMS: What do you hope that an audience will take away from listening to Moon Gardens?

JDK: I listened to it yesterday after not listening to it for a while, and I thought, “Wow, I did a pretty good job.” All the engineers, all the musicians, everyone is A+, and I thought I wrote a pretty good record. You have the best of what the 60s would have to offer, you basically have the best of what musicianship can offer, all on a modern record. We all had a lot of fun and tried super hard to make the record sound good. I think we did.

It’s truly meant for a 60s hi-fi experience. It is. If you put it through a tube amp, or you know someone with a nice hi-fi, throw it on Spotify, and it’ll sound really, really good. If you like character and originality, it’s cool. I like it.

HMS: Congratulations on finishing all that hard work and getting it out there. I look forward to seeing what you might get up to in the future. 

JDK: Thank you.