Death of a Recording Engineer
Anonymous submission
This won't mean anything to most of y'all, but Bill Korecky passed away at the beginning of August.
Bill ran Mars Studios in Cleveland, Ohio. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, he recorded all the records by Cleveland hardcore bands (INTEGRITY, RINGWORM, FACE VALUE, and... more than one band that doesn't deserve to be named), not to mention bands from outside Cleveland like CATHARSIS and UNDYING. He recorded the "Firestorm" EP by EARTH CRSIS. He even fixed the guitar sound on a certain STRIFE record (I include that detail for the benefit of... well, you know who you are).
A lot of the credit for those bands' recordings and the whole 1990s metallic hardcore aesthetic goes to Bill. He wanted everything that came out of Mars to sound fiercer than anything from any other studio.
Bill was an intense person. Working with him, you never had to worry that you would be the only one who cared about the results. Beyond politics or kinship, there is the particular camaraderie of people who are working on a shared project, applying themselves to the limit of their ability. Bill brought that energy to every recording session and insisted on it from every band that recorded with him. If a band was struggling to get a part right, Bill was there, too, working furiously to show you how it was supposed to go, stressing even harder than your bandmates... and making no secret of what he thought of your performance. If he didn't think a band was delivering on their potential, he would forbid them from telling anyone they had recorded at Mars (if memory serves, that may have happened to ENDPOINT).
He recorded plenty of bands with major-label recording contracts, but he set low rates for DIY bands. He was a fucking maniac, and I think he must have liked working with somewhat younger fucking maniacs, if only to tell other maniacs stories about their bad behavior (e.g., the time that the first drummer of INTEGRITY threw a fit by hacking up the studio couch with an axe, all the fistfights that took place in the studio, etc.).
We didn't see eye to eye about... a wide array of things. We're talking about a boomer from Cleveland. Whatever you're imagining as Bill's politics, imagine something weirder and worse. If there's a silver lining here, it is that Bill won't be voting in the next election. But in a way, that only makes it more meaningful that he was willing to work so hard to record penniless bands that were calling for the destruction of the meat industry, or capitalism and the state, or civilization itself.
I remember using a phone dialer at two pay phones to put Bill in touch with a bandmate. This is back when you had to pay by the minute to make long-distance calls, but you could outsmart the system by jerry-rigging a dialer to make the same sound the phone would make when it received coins. I held the two phone receivers up to each other in a 69 position until Bill and my bandmate had worked out the details, stopping to apply the phone dialer on one receiver or the other to keep the lines open. Pedestrians walking by gave me weird looks as I kept an eye out for the pigs. Bill just thought it was hilarious.
In addition to the aforementioned bands, Bill recorded several excellent MASAKARI records and the first ZEGOTA album, not to mention hardcore bands like MISERY INDEX, TERROR, and BROTHER'S KEEPER, and bands that were more on the punk side of the spectrum like NINE SHOCKS TERROR, HELLNATION, and THE AWAKENING.
In the picture, you can see Bill with Dan Young, the member of CATHARSIS who passed away in 1999. They are looking at us from the other side.
Tonight, I'll be listening to INTEGRITY's "Vocal Test." To this day, I can still remember Bill's voice in my headphones: "All right, let's try that again."