06/08/2025
From the head cheese!
Woot! A new decoration has arrived for my country getaway Hell's Half Acre Studio! This one is for the single ‘Stone Love’ by the Hawaiian punk/reggae band Pepper. It appeared on their LP “Kona Town” which I made in 2002.
A couple of anecdotes about this recording. There was only a 7500.00 budget and studios were still expensive back then so we elected to record the record in the basement of the Volcom warehouse in Costa Mesa CA. We drove a few of their employees nuts but we made it work, cobbling together a work space out of nothing. It was the first record I did completely on Pro-Tools having just acquired their digital TDM rig. I hustled Brent Avrill for a pair of Neve 1064’s to front end the digital set up and it worked perfectly. The record has a nice mix of punch and crispness.
When the band came to me they had decided on about 4 songs they felt were ready but didn’t know where to go from there. I asked them to play me everything else they had and I took notes on a pad. At the end of their demo set I pointed to the songs I had highlighted on the pad and said; “this is your record.” They didn’t question me in the least, the entire repertoire and roadmap was settled in a couple of hours. Like any good record there was a lot of hard work and many hours involved. One highlight was tracking the “radio play” intro to ‘Give It Up” in which we mic’ed up the Volcom staff parking lot and drove the band’s van screeching into it as part of the song's set up.
Despite the record doing so well the band moved on to producer Ron St. Germain (Bad Brains, Sonic Youth) for their next release. When I met Ron years later he told me he took on the record because the vocals on Kona Town were so good, making his gig “a little easier.”
The thing was… I did a ton of work on the vocals. And Ron didn’t know that. The story went that awhile after he got to working on that next record he was pulling his hair out and called the label telling them “whatever Kravac had done on the Kona Town vocals was a miracle.” I just figured he had to create his own miracle! When I met him he told me it was a true story and we had a good laugh about it.
Nice to see this one get this kind of recognition. The record helped launch the band’s entire career and it’s been a successful one by any standards.
If you need your record tracked or mixed hit me up, I have some openings available this fall. Gold record not included... lols!
