Paul Q. Kolderie lives in upstate New York now, but every time a younger listener stumbles across Radiohead’s “Creep” or Dinosaur Jr.’s “Freak Scene,” he’s still the Bostonian engineer who never intended for any of this to happen.
“Things have kind of taken off,” said Kolderie, one of the founders of the legendary Fort Apache Studios. “A lot of the tracks we did back then have become mainstays. Old music is streamed more than new music, believe it or not.”
Though Fort Apache — named after the gritty Paul Newman cop movie — has been closed since the 2000s, its legacy has been cemented as the birthplace for iconic Boston rockers such as The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Buffalo Tom, Juliana Hatfield and Morphine. It all began 40 years ago when Kolderie, along with fellow Yale graduates Sean Slade and Jim Fitting, began producing indie rock music at 169 Norfolk Avenue in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
They’d dabbled in remedial recording while playing in new-wave outfit The Sex Execs, but when the opportunity arrived to rent space in an old commercial laundry building, they never looked back.
“It was pretty desolate,” Kolderie said. “Cars would get torched a lot, all our cars got broken into. One time, [our late co-founder] Joe Harvard came out at three in the morning after a session, and his little Nissan truck was flipped over, burning in the street.”
“Someone said, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s like “Fort Apache” around here!’”
Fitting, whose band, Treat Her Right, was the Fort’s first major-label success, described the studio’s mission as capturing lightning in a bottle: Unlike most major productions of the time, Slade and Kolderie favored raw, imperfect live recordings that went well with the building’s “factory windows, wood floors [and] flickering fluorescent lights.”
There was no MIDI setup, no synthesizers, certainly no hair-metal trickery or other studio production tactics.
“The problem was that, [at the time], a band would come into the studio and the engineers would try to change them,” said Slade, who teaches music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music. “The engineers would say, ‘Well, you’ve got to turn down that amp,’ or ‘We have to work for a week on the drum sound.’... We were real punk-rock, real militant.”
Plus, as the crew at the Fort realized, a faster, cheaper production could lead to a faster reaction. In the 1980s, Kolderie and Slade would make cassette tapes of their bands and take them to Boston radio stations like WBCN and WFNX, whose influence could lead to better gigs, clubs, bigger audiences and dedicated fans internationally.
When Pixies recorded their first demos at the Fort in 1987, it not only led to a record contract, but a major cult following in the U.K.
“It created this real competition among anyone who was recording bands and bands themselves,” Kolderie said. “It wasn’t that we wanted to beat the other bands. It was like the opportunity was there, and if you could put something good together, good things would happen.”
Soon, “good things” did happen in abundance for Kolderie and Slade, whose graduation from local engineers to producers in demand brought them major commercial success with artists like Radiohead, Hole and Warren Zevon. Fitting went the musician route, going on to play the harmonica with The The and Bonnie Raitt, before forming local folk collective Session Americana.
And the Fort evolved, expanding into Cambridge and becoming a three-location operation that regularly held radio concerts for artists like David Bowie and Goo Goo Dolls.
Recently, after the passing of early Apache producer — and later, owner — Gary Smith, journalist Joan Anderman began writing a book about the studio, and sifting through its archives on Instagram account @fortapachestudios.
Yet, even with revived interest in their story, none of Fort Apache’s founders are confident they could replicate their careers if they tried. Today, with TikTok acting as the ultimate talent scout, and rock’s dominance giving way to rap and pop, they view their success as being in the “right place [at the] right time,” Kolderie said.
“Now, everyone has a digital recorder in their phone, [and] you can do all that stuff,” he explained. “There’s no barriers, and you don’t have to go to a studio to record, so why would [artists] do it, you know?”
“I don’t think the emphasis is on local music quite so much, and I just don’t think it has the purchase [power],” Fitting said.
That hasn’t stopped Slade, who, in his second career, is capturing the same lightning in a bottle that he spent years putting on tape. When he first came to Boston as a struggling 20-something-year-old, he fantasized about getting paid to “sit in a chair and listen to music” — an important role he continues as a professor.
“Somehow it worked,” Slade said. “I listen to music, I talk about it. That’s what producers do.”
Guests
- Sean Slade, producer, engineer and associate professor in the Music Production and Engineering Department at Berklee College of Music.
- Paul Q. Kolderie, Grammy Award-winning music producer and recording engineer.
- Jim Fitting, a harmonica player known for his work with Treat Her Right, The The and Session Americana.
