FORT
APACHE NORTH:
THE NEW DIGS
by Joe Harvard
 THIS ARTICLE STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION, OK?
 This photo is from our first press coverage at Fort Apache North. The excellent and extremely well written Boston Globe article it accompanied ("Giving Musicians the Fort to Play In") was penned by veteran scene scribe Jim Sullivan; at bottom right is Gary Smith- and Spot -from a later Globe article on Boston's growing music industry presence.  Finding
and then buying Fort Apache North was an adventure all in itself. By the
end of 1987 it was clear that just as we had had to move up to 16 tracks
to keep up with our maturing clientele we now needed to go to the next level.
Critt Harmon, manager of the commercial Soundtrack Studios, was a friend
of mine, and the first time he came to our Roxbury neighborhood to see Fort
South he practically shat. "I can't believe anyone comes here!" he blurted
out, then caught himself and added "I mean I know you guys are getting business,
there's a buzz around town about the place. But pretty soon you need to
find yourself a real studio space in a decent neighborhood." At first I
was a bit ticked off, here he was dissing my home and all. When I thought
about it later, though, I realized that he was partly right: I didn't want
to close South but we did need a place for more timid clients, and it was
time to look for a 24 track facility. You can read all the gorey details
of the deal to buy Fort Apache North in the next article, Fort
Apche North: Music Business Blues.
Beyond all the abilities that Lou added to our team there was another, less tangible item he brought with him. That was a sense of continuity between the old Radio Beat studios and the Fort. While I was unaware of the existence of Radio Beat at the time it was around I later learned that there were close tangents between their way of doing business and my own. Not least of these was a willingness to put the music before the money, to record bands even if they couldn't afford it in order to keep from losing work important to the local scene. The philosophy I tried to use as a guide to the way the Fort operated had apparently had a precedent over at Radio Beat. Like one of the decendents of the Prophet Muhammad who have the baraka- an intangible, spiritual quality passed down in a chain of transmission - Lou brought the spirit of Radio Beat that helped to symbolically pass an invisible torch to the Fort. Also, he was Italian and that never hurts in my book. It was nice to have another paisan on the crew. When Lou got married in Pennsylvania he invited me to his wedding. At the time I still had a monster narcotics habit. The day of the wedding was during one of those not-so-rare times when it's impossible to find dope. I liked Lou and Cara so much that I couldn't bear to miss their wedding. So even though I wasn't unable to cop that day I drove down, attended the festivities and drove back totally dope sick and miserable. His relatives must have wondered why Lou's boss was so fidgety- and how he could be sweating bullets in the cool shade of the house where the reception was held. The drive back to Boston was one of the most miserable of my life, but it was worth it to show my respect for a guy I respect greatly as a person and a professional.
 To see the whole of my guitarsenal at its peak go to the Joe's Guitars page.
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The
arrival of Lou Giordano to the Fort Apache team was important in more
ways than one. The most obvious of course was the addition of a tremendously
talented engineer and producer, one who had his own list of faithful clients
that he took with him to his new gig. Mr. Giordano had built up a roster
as impressive as our own, but he'd done it alone where we'd had a team
of six, sometimes seven (Paul, Sean, Jim, Gary, Tim, myself, and for a
while Mike Costello). Lou is a crackerjack audio engineer with a distinctive
style to his projects whether he produces them or just tweaks the knobs.
He was also the only one on our team with a genuine technical background.
Paul had amassed an impressive array of self-taught skills that got us
through a lot of tight spots in the first two years, but the knowledge
Lou picked up attending MIT were invaluable now that our equipment was
getting more fancy-schmancy- and there was so much more of it to boot.
Lou could literally take a tape machine apart and rebuild it or pop a
channel module out of the mixing board to clean or repair it. 
