For someone with so many famous heads stuck on poles outside his jungle hut, you’d expect he’d put a little more “brag” into it. But the soft-spoken Eric Drew Feldman lets his keyboard playing do the talking for him. When you’ve recorded and played live with a twisted array of musical talent that includes Captain Beefheart, the Residents, Snakefinger, Pere Ubu, the Pixies, PJ Harvey and Polyphonic Spree, you don’t have to blow any hot air into your own balloon. Speaking from his San Francisco home, Feldman touched on the high points of a marvelous career like a flat stone skipping over the surface of a mountain lake. His latest project, kNIFE & fORK’s The Higher You Get The Rarer The Vegetation, is out now via Frank Black’s The Bureau label. Feldman will be also guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Feldman: When I was about 21 years of age, I landed a job in a Los Angeles-area recording studio as, basically, a gopher, and soon after, a night manager, since I was quite happy to work all night, with the light responsibilities of answering the telephone and tidying up in the kitchen area after messy musicians. I didn’t want the job in order to do this. I had aspirations of becoming an engineer, since I figured it would be too difficult to make money being in a band. (I think I ended up being right about this!) So once it got a bit later in the evening, I would sit in the control room and be the proverbial “fly on the wall.” This is, of course, not generally allowed, but since I was newly a member of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, I was afforded some leeway as I had become somewhat of a curiosity. I watched sessions by the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Hall And Oates, Toto, the Cate Brothers, Richie Furay, Sarah Vaughan, Al Stewart, etc. It was at this time that I decided that I wanted to produce records, as I watched several successful ones working before me, and concluded that I wouldn’t screw up records any more than they did.
