Our interview with Mark “Mooka” Rennick, owner of Prairie Sun Recording, is scheduled for 9 am and when we connect via Zoom he’s already full of energy and enthusiasm, having just returned from walking his dogs on the beach and catching some early morning California sunshine. 

Over the course of our conversation, that infectious energy shows no sign of abating as he takes us through his 40-plus year career and shares stories about how Tom Waits made Prairie Sun his recording studio home for 10 years, or the radical idea Gregg Allman had at 3 am during a jam session, and how Mooka instantly connected with Vintage King co-founders Mike and Andrew Nehra when he realized they all were afflicted with the same “condition”. 

Take us back to when you were setting up Prairie Sun. What was it like sourcing gear back then?

Around 1976-77, I was living in a ramshackle house out in Cotati, California. I bought a quality Ampex 1-inch 8-track analog tape machine and a “had its day” kind of shitty mixing board—Opamp Labs, if I remember correctly. I bought it and then I got a small loan from my father and bought a mixing board from the new owners of Brother Studios (The Beach Boys’ former studio in Santa Monica)—Tom Scott of the L.A. Express, and one of the Cicala brothers, who came from the Record Plant in New York City. I bought their mixing board, we put it in a pickup truck, shipped it north, and put it in a living room where we had no wiring and no schematics.

Of note, The Beach Boys’ album Holland was recorded on that desk; it was one of the first op-amp desks from Clover Systems but the EQs were inductor-based API. The monitor system was the key, in that in 3 years we bought a 24-track 2” tape machine and the desk had a pro patchbay. Now I am competing in a common language, with the ability to exchange tapes with other rooms across the world. 

After that, I met this man called Barry Walters who was working for Neil Young aka Broken Arrow, and over quite a few weekends, we got the mixing board wired and interfaced! So when I started, I was in this house with a tape machine, one microphone, and the well-used Beach Boys’ mixing board. I'm right next to the college here, Sonoma State, and my best friends are all musicians so I said, “Hey, come on over to Prairie Sun and let's start recording.'' That started my career, and it was all based on the fact that I bought equipment that you could find the parts to, and you could find men and women that could actually repair it.

Tom Sharples, Gary Creiman, and Dan Alexander Audio had a huge influence on me and the axiom still holds today in using professional, well-designed recording equipment. For that day-in and day-out use, you must keep a few things in mind—is it repairable? Does it service the client in a dependable and professional manner? Vintage King still supports this axiom and so do many other pros in our ever-evolving recording environments. 

I was surrounded by this huge recording culture in and around the Bay Area, which was just exploding with artists like Huey Lewis and the News, who I eventually did recordings for; I helped be a part of the metal scene in the East Bay, which spawned the beginnings of Metallica; I did Faith No More’s first record, and Exodus’ first record and worked with many other independent labels in this emerging scene which is still thriving today. We even got to do a Dead Kennedys record. Wow, that was an enlightening experience!

I started from very humble beginnings and just by accident, here I am, a true Midwestern boy from a little town in Illinois, studying Indian music, connecting with Zakir Hussain, connecting with a consortium of Bay Area cats including local Sonoma County artist Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead… Does that give you a sense of how fate and karma came together to tell me that I was supposed to be doing this? 

How did you first become aware of Vintage King and what was your first experience working with us? 

I met Mike and Andrew Nehra at an AES show in the early years, where they had a booth. They’re going “Who are you?” and I’m going, “I have a little studio up in Sonoma County.” These guys are buying and collecting gear and they're creating these relationships with all these manufacturers. What I got about Vintage King, from the beginning, was that those poor boys had the same disease that I had—Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS)—it’s a horrible disease. [Laughs] 

What are some of your favorite pieces of gear that you have purchased from Vintage King?

I bought my first pair of Barefoot MicroMain27s—Generation One—from Vintage King. I met the Barefoot people and then later on, I became an investor with them. We now own multiple pairs of Barefoot speakers and there’s more to come—we own their MasterStack, two MM26s, one MM27 Gen1, and one MM27 Gen2 and we're ready to get a new speaker system from them, and this is all because of the original vision of Vintage King, and Barefoot’s Tedi Sarafian and Thomas Barefoot. There is no better speaker that covers more utilizations with an amazing cadre of loyal owners all over the world. 

You go to the places where they know what they’re doing. Vintage King was hip to Barefoot way early—and they were hip to so many other different things as well. Then you have somebody like Ryan McGuire at VK who also has this GAS issue that I have—he and I did a deal on Burl Audio converters and we own a lot of them. He is a great partner for understanding the market and what is going to improve the quality of audio as we transition to digital environments while supporting a hybrid-analog partnership. Everybody wants to take digital forward and, paradoxically somehow, backwards to a tonal immersion experience while still supporting superior audio integrity. 

What sets Vintage King apart from other pro audio gear companies?

If I have questions, like ‘Tell me about the new FLEA 47 mic, tell me about AMS Neve 1073s, or Heritage Audio versus Shadow Hills’ and on and on, I can ask Vintage King. Where did I get my first mastering compressor? Vintage King! Then there’s the Bricasti Digital Reverb. Oh, and also, guess who has his live chambers and his EMT plates sampled and put in the firmware of the Bricasti Digital M7 Reverb? We do! Brian sampled my rooms! 

I remember I was out selling guitars in the Midwest and my friend was going, “Someday you need to own a Neve.” And by the time I retired commercially, though not privately, I think Eugene Productions (my own production sound company) ended up with over 100 channels of vintage Neve modules in various formats of presentation including fully integrated, totally restored classic 80 Series desks. If you do a recording with a vintage Neve—or now, if you use a lot of the modern-day recreated Neves—and you record and mix on that using the transformer-based, built-in second-order saturation harmonic tonal processing, it has an ecosphere of all that transformer technology that creates a sense of warmth, inclusion, and a melding of the tones. That is Vintage King! What does Vintage King do? Vintage King restores Neve mixing boards! 

Also, I need to mention Dan Alexander, Geoff Tanner, and Sean Green, who were and still are huge in our full-blown commitment to Neve classic desks. Again, from the beginning, we met the techs and the brokers and we rebuilt our own desks and immediately offered a step up in quality that competed directly with the big boys in the world. To this day I lean heavily towards high-quality analog vintage equipment. I know everybody says there isn’t a difference with today’s plug-ins, but sorry kids, there is a difference!

Let's talk about some of the memorable artists that you've worked with over the years. 

There are some big names there, so let's go in reverse from 2022 when I closed my commercial recording location because of the stresses and the issues of real estate in Northern California. 

Nancy Wilson came in to record in 2021 and I was very happy to work with her. One of many projects we did with her was "Amigo Amiga" produced by Nate Nauseda, which was a track honoring her dear friend Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters. That year, I also worked on a remix for Bob Dylan with producer Doctor Dread; I got to do a reggae remix of the song "Jokerman," which features Mark Knopfler and Sly & Robbie, two great rhythm section guys. We were doing this mix and they couldn't find the overdubbed lead vocal but they had his scratch vocal and the original recording from the Power Station studio in New York City and we got to actually remix the song in a reggae dub mode, which was crazy! Two days of “dub” fun and loud mixing in Studio A on our SSL (from Bruce Millet aka The Desk Doctor), using all kinds of gear from Vintage King, like Burl Audio D to A converters—we got to mix Bob Dylan playing live harmonica and his lead vocal from the basic track take. You can hear the bleed from Mark Knopfler's guitar into the iso booth next to him, so this is history, right? Max Hein, who was the engineer with us on this, was instrumental in finding all the files and I can’t say enough about all the amazing young talented cats that came through the Sun over the years! Nate Nauseda, who was our chief engineer, along with Liz Silver, who was our manager, were so helpful in coordinating our work with Doctor Dread who, by the way, is based in Calistoga, California, and is still making amazing recordings all over the world.  

In reverse timeline order, we go from Bob Dylan to The Killers who we worked with during the pandemic. They booked two weeks of recording time at Prairie Sun and that evolved into parts of tracks for their album Pressure Machine. While The Killers were here, the George Floyd tragedy had just taken place and the band changed the lyrics to one of their songs because they were very concerned about what had happened. Now, NBC was doing their big 4th of July show and they said, “Do you mind if we bring a film crew up and record the track live with the new lyrics?” So we had lead singer Brandon Flowers on our 9-foot 1950s Baldwin Grand Piano, co-producer Jonathan Rado, and The Killers drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr., plus local singers and our audio crew, and it was filmed and recorded…and on the 4th of July show, it says, ‘The Killers—From Prairie Sun Recording Studios in Cotati, California’ and they play the song. I'm up in Portland with my grandchildren, my wife, and our friends, and there is my recording company being a part of the live recording of this incredible moment in time that changed the world and helped bring attention to police brutality. Credit should be given to Liz Silver, Brett Brazil, Nate Nauseda, Nigel Wolovick, and Joe Jones for this memorable moment in time. I grew up where culture meets music and I got to contribute in more ways than one. 

Some of the other names we have worked with are Journey, The Grateful Dead, Primus, Van Morrison, and Huey Lewis and the News, besides doing lots of metal and alternative artists including AFI, The Melvins, …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Bass Drum Of Death, The Mountain Goats, and Whitney, to name a few. We then started working with a label based in Marin County called Shrapnel Records that featured guitar players on their roster, like Marty Friedman, Jason Becker, Greg Howe, Racer X, Vinnie Moore, Tony MacAlpine, and, I suppose of note, Yngwie Malmsteen on his first recording in the USA when he was in the band Steeler with Ron Keel. Steve Fontano needs to be mentioned as a huge contributor to the Shrapnel legacy as an amazing producer and engineer. He later went on to work on the GRAMMY-winning record Supernatural with Carlos Santana at Fantasy Studios, an amazing facility that always inspired me!

On the equipment front at that time, we were using Trident Series 80 (studio B) and TSM desks (studio A). By the way, Dan Alexander brokered these iconic desks from England and A&M studios in LA, before the Neve mixing desk acquisitions all the way through the ‘80s and into the mid-90s. We used the Studer A80 MkIII and MkIV tape machines (still do) and German microphones and classic analog processing outboard equipment.

Tom Waits arrived at Prairie Sun around 1989. We did "Night on Earth," a film by Jim Jarmusch; Biff Dawes was the engineer, and that was the beginning of a long run with Tom Waits, which lasted for many years. He won some GRAMMYs and the songs were recorded and mixed at Prairie Sun Recording. Unconventionally, he recorded outside and tried out many concepts. So the story goes, he would put mics outside, cars would drive by and he’d go, “I'm good. I love the cars and the distortion on the tape machines.” During "Bone Machine," we’re now going through what we call the beginning of this lo-fi period with Tchad Blake and Tom who was always experimenting. They were doing recordings outside with PA system speakers that TChad bought when he was in India on a vision quest, and with the Schoeps binaural recording system, in the middle of the parking lot. Our live chambers were also widely used. Those live chambers were sampled and are still out in the plug-in ecosystem. Oz Fritz, Jeff Sloan, and Tom’s musical family really deserve special mention here as "Mule Variations" is considered an iconic recording to this day. It takes a team and boy howdy he had one! Jacquire King and Gene Cornelius also need to be included as a part of the production team.

One of many stories, by the way, is from when Gregg Allman arrived—he was also a really nice and sweet man. It was 3 in the morning, I'm hanging out with Gregg Allman and his crazy entourage, they're recording and he goes—in a southern accent, since he’s from Georgia—he goes, “Have you ever put a 12-string guitar into a Hammond B3? Get me an RCA and a quarter-inch cable.” He took a Fender 12-string electric guitar that we had and he plugged it in! You can't make this stuff up, that's just Gregg Allman. 

This gives you a little bit of an idea about what the studio was like—it was a funky old chicken ranch that I just adapted to my vision as a musician and I had the dream that other people would come and feel comfortable here; you don't feel pressure, you can make it work here. I'm out of the business commercially now, but I knew early on that I had to have a niche—why would artists come up to this funky old chicken ranch? I realized that you have to have a residential component. People come and stay with you, they rehearse, cut the basic tracks, do the overdubs, then go up to another room and you mix. They live with you and there's a certain love that I have with a lot of the artists because you hear about their children, you hear about the triumphs and the defeats, and you get to see it really close up—talk about a reality television show! You get to see close-up interactions between the musicians and we did that for 45 years… You look back on your career and you go, “Okay, there are a lot of good things here and also a lot of things you needed to learn”, and I'm still learning. I hope that helps you understand a bit about the recording business and recording studio culture.

How has the industry changed since you first opened your doors and how has your studio adapted to those changes?

From the beginning, I had to hustle. I had a wonderful manager by the name of Claris Sayadian (Studio Expresso) who was my studio manager for the first eight years of Prairie Sun, and she always said, “You have to have a Rolodex”, meaning you have to have a database; you have to go out and call people, and you need to be able to give and get back, to help people and be a big part of your community. You also have to get involved, you need to be useful and support the recording schools. We did that from the beginning and still continue to do that. She connected with a guy you might know by the name of Matt Wallace who did Faith No More over two weekends, which led to their first release "We Care A Lot." He’s still in the business and kicking butt in LA.

We've had these horrible fires in Sonoma County, Northern California, so we did a recording and live performance at the studio with contributions from a lot of the local artists here in Sonoma County and then, amazingly, Brad Lunde at Trans Audio introduced us to Lurssen Mastering who contributed the mastering! We recorded and mixed the project ‘Out Of The Fire’ and helped raise money for people who lost their homes. Prairie Sun, with the local community of engineers and recording artists, produced an album and then we took the money and gave it back to the community to buy instruments, and we gave back to the schools to support music education. 

On a sobering note, I think it’s going to get harder and harder to make money as a commercial studio, and that's why you need to diversify. I started my own live sound company in 2012 so I diversified there; I had a recording studio that had a residential component—you have to be entrepreneurial. And you have to also work on your own music and record others on spec if needed. Imagine that you call me for the first time and you say, “Why should I record at your studio?” I look you in the eye and go, “Because I care about what you do. It's really important for me that you feel comfortable, that you feel like I feel when I'm recording my own music. I'm scared shitless most of the time when I'm working on my own stuff—I have red light fever.” So there's a certain empathy there… If you want fame and/or profit and/or anything else, this is not the game to capitalize on that! Go into real estate and/or other pursuits. 

What are your plans for the future of your studio?

I humbly want to focus on education and philanthropy. Something that many don't know is that Prairie Sun’s name is based on the native prairie grass restoration movement from my native Illinois, where my roots are. God willing, I will be finally putting a lot more energy into playing my little part in helping the environment and that will feature, with a hope and a prayer, a recording studio based back in the Midwest as part of that total vision—it always has been. 

Patience is the key for me, and a spiritual program sure doesn’t hurt. Music is the key to healing and inspiring everything, including all sentient beings. There is so much doom and gloom but breakthroughs are coming nonstop based on a total reimagination of what the whole world can actually become. ‘Stay Positive’ and ‘Keep Coming Back’.

If the artist is a good fit, then anyway I can help produce is on the table for me. Of special note, I have a new artist that I just finished producing and co-engineering with Nate Nauseda. His name is Ty Stonehawker and he is just amazing—the project is being mastered at Lurssen Mastering as we speak. 

As an artist/producer, I have also been part of an ensemble of political activist spoken word recordings called The Abolitionists. Our latest release is "Sons Of Lincoln" (featured on Bandcamp), which I produced/performed with co-producer and brilliant poet Jim Cohn. We need to mention other artists including Jeff Sloan, Oz Fritz, Max Hein, Gene Cornelius, Tim Gennert, Steve Kimmock, Larry Otis, Jack Antonoff, Jason D’ottavio, Allen Sudduth, Mike Varney, Michael Lee Firkins and many other contributors. The Mission is simple and this non-commercial project is ongoing—it is about supporting the quest for equality, based on the Constitution. It is the most important cause we have today. Forever be vigilant, never forget! The Abolitionists changed the world in the 1800s and literally stopped slavery, culminating in the 13th Amendment. We honor the ongoing quest as the same issues from the 1800s are still under attack today.

Chris BolithoIf you’re interested in purchasing any of the gear mentioned in this blog, contact a Vintage King Audio Consultant via email or by phone at 866.644.0160.