How is your band going? I think you have a new record coming out?
Yeah, the Radar Bros.’ Auditorium. It actually just came out. Today I'm going to Austin for South by Southwest. Congratulations! It’s great you’re still making music. What do you remember about your dad? Was there a time when you realized your dad had an unusual job?
That's an interesting question. I don't think so. I think I just kind of thought of it all as normal. He had a lot of friends who were musicians, but more like a lot of jazz-musician-type friends. But he also had a lot of friends who were more obviously on the technical side. But there weren't like a lot of strange people hanging out around our house.

There weren’t a lot of strange people about?
No, there really weren't. There was always just really normal people. I don't know. You hear about people who are in the music industry, and they're hanging out with a bunch of hippies or something. But it wasn't like that.

Were you interested in what he did?
Not terribly. When I was a kid I was more interested in drawing, and I liked to build models and stuff. I wasn't really that interested in recording. But I was really into music, and I think that came from him. Or it came from me being around a lot of music. We would go to a lot of big-band performances and stuff. There are a few clubs, nightclubs I remember. They were these dingy sorts of steakhouse places that we would go to. One place was called King Arthur's. I don't know if it's there anymore. I remember it was this little steakhouse sort of nightclub, with the big, red-leather booths and stuff. And we'd go there a lot to see basically all of the guys who played in like Count Basie and Duke Ellington's bands. A lot of guys were playing there, with other people, other bands. And then there was the Frankie Capp Juggernaut Band that we'd go see a lot. Frankie Capp, he was a drummer, jazz drummer. I think he still has a band. They're still playing.

So even though your dad was recording musicians all day, he still went out at night to see live music?
Well, I think this was after he was recording a lot. Back then, when I was really young, I remember he was gone all the time. I didn't really see him around that much. I think that was probably the tail end of when he was doing a lot of recording.

It's a comforting smell. The mixture of coffee, and all the electronics. It's a very specific smell of being in a control room in a recording studio that I love.

Do you have any kind of first memory of going and sitting in on a session, or going to visit your dad at studio?
Yeah. I have all kinds of old memories of going in the studio. I remember what I think was an opening party for Coast Recording, up in San Francisco. Which was my dad's studio up there. I think it's still there under another name.

Actually I just wrote about the new owners last month. It's in really great shape. It's a great little studio.
Oh, good! It's funny, I remember going there, going to that room. I remember driving up to San Francisco, driving up Highway 1 with my parents. I remember going into the studio and just being totally amazed at the whole place. I even remember the hors d'oeuvres. They were little finger sandwiches. With egg salad in them, or something. That was one old memory.

Was there a session that had a big impact on you as a musician?
I went and saw my dad recording Bing Crosby once, and I met Bing Crosby. I think that was in the late '70s. That was really cool. But I wasn't really that excited about recording until later on. Which is kind of too bad.

How old were you when your dad past away?
I was twenty-one, twenty-two. I was just finishing college. I was in art school, at Cal Arts, and I was just about to graduate when he died. It was right around that time I started getting into recording with a 4-track. He had one of those TEAC 3340 machines, the ¼" reel-to-reel. And I had just started tooling around with that. Then I bought a little mixer for it, and that was the start of all.

Do you do all your own recording?
Yeah. I have a studio in my garage.

I bet it's full of Universal Audio gear!
It is, definitely. [Laughs.]

What do you think of the company, and where it's gone? Do you keep close tabs?
I'm pretty amazed. I have to be honest. When my brother and I were talking about starting the company, he was living in Santa Cruz, and I was living in L.A. I was thinking, well, we should do it here, because Santa Cruz is expensive, and this would be a lot cheaper. But he was like, "No, no, no. We're going to do it in Santa Cruz." I was really nervous about that. But he's just done such an amazing job of building this company. I'm very, very impressed.

You were involved at the beginning?
Yeah. I was involved to some degree. I was more involved in things in terms of ideas for what the products should be. Well, because I do a lot of recording.

Radar Bros. live

Do you record other bands besides your own?
Yeah. I do. I've done quite a few projects with other bands.

Do you consider yourself a producer?
Not really. I think people come in to record with me, and they think I'm going to produce them, and I guess I do, to a certain degree. Being a producer--it could be anything. I heard about some big producer who, I guess would just put the team together, and then show up for maybe 15 minutes, during the whole time.

Isn't that kind of the Rick Rubin school a little bit?
That's what I heard. I heard Rick Rubin does that. I wasn't going to name names, but …

I think there's a lot of leeway about what the roll of producer really means.
Yeah. And I guess to some degree it is like the person who puts together the team who works on something. But I'm more of an engineer than a producer. I'm more concerned with getting things to sound good. But when it comes to doing vocal overdubs, mostly, I'm terrible. I get so--I just get really impatient with people, I think. Because if they can't sing, and they come in and they want me to sit there and just go over, over, over again. And then they want me to coach them and stuff. I can't do that.

How do you describe the Radar Bros.?
It's like mellower rock, I guess. I don't know. We get compared to Pink Floyd a lot.

Do you still do visual art?
I do, yeah. I draw, and I make paintings. I kind of just started making paintings again, and it's really a nice thing.

Do you think growing up as Bill Putnam's son had something to do with you being a musician and recording? Do you think something rubbed off?
Yeah. Oh, totally. There's no doubt. I don't know exactly what happened, or how it happened, but it's a funny thing, one of my favorite things about recording is the smells of all the equipment. And the tape. And the tape when it's on the machine, and it's warm, and--I don't know. It's like every time I open a fresh box of tape--it comes in a little bag, and when you open the bag, you can really smell whatever it is it's made of. It's probably really toxic chemicals. But I love that smell anyways. It's a comforting smell. The mixture of coffee, and all the electronics. It's a very specific smell of being in a control room in a recording studio that I love. And that's one of the sad things about the whole digital thing, is that, yeah, that tape smell is going away. But I still use tape.

That's so great. So you record to tape. Excellent.
Yeah. Just because it smells good. [Laughs.]

Do you use the UAD-1 plug-ins at all?
Yes, I do. I use them a lot.

What host program?
I use Nuendo. But I didn't start using a computer until Universal Audio sent me one of their old computers, so I could use the UAD plug-ins. I just started futzing around with them. Then with our latest Radar Bros. record, I recorded it all to tape, then I dumped it into the computer and mixed it out of the computer, just so I could use the plug-ins and stuff. Now I don't know if I could mix anything else any other way, because it's just so great to have all that.

Do you have any favorite processors?
I like the Plate reverb a lot. The Space Echo I love. And I really like the Neve 1073 plug-in. That's really great.

What do you like to use them on?
Pretty much anything. I use them a lot of time on drums and stuff. I like the low frequency. Low frequencies sound really nice. It's amazing how it's just--it's not even a real thing. It's just this virtual equalizer. It's kind of bizarre to me. But I have an amazing console. It's a Sphere console from the '70s.

I’m not familiar those. Tell me about it.
They're amazing. Actually Tape Op did an article--it must have been a year ago or so--but they actually did the article right after I bought the console, I was kind of freaking out that I'd bought this obscure, '70s console. But then this article came out in Tape Op, basically hailing these things and how great they are. So I was like, "Oh, awesome!" I guess it all started with Electrodyne. You know the old Electrodyne Company? And I guess when that company split up, or when Electrodyne stopped making consoles, I guess one guy went off to do API, and one guy went off do to Sphere. They only made like fifty consoles, I think. A lot of them are in Nashville. And I bought this one; it used to belong to Ronnie Milsap. It was actually made for him. But yeah, this thing is really cool, because it's got these crazy paragraphic EQs. They're like those API graphic EQs, but I think even better because--it's hard to explain, but they have a lot of good frequencies in them, and they sound really great.

So you're on your way to Austin.
Yep, I'm leaving to Austin today.

Well good luck and most importantly–have fun! Thanks for sharing your memories.