This photo is from the Boston Phoenix year-end review. 1988 had indeed been a watershed year for us, though they forgot to mention Sean Slade- who also had no time to do his laundry.

The first sessions that made it on to vinyl were the Connells record, followed by the Oysters single on TAANG! Records, and then a watershed event in the self-released Treat Her Right LP that Paul Kolderie engineered beautifully- with an assist from THR's harp virtuoso, and original member of the four-man Fort collective, Jim Fitting [see the Coots article for more on Jim]. These were all eight track recordings, done on our swanky Otari 50-50 MK. III 1/2" machine, through our first mixing board, a Neotek I that I found in Bloomfield, Indiana. The Otari was part of a close-out sale when the audio supply biz Paul had been a salesman for went out of business. Paul hooked it up for around five grand as I recall, a good deal back then for a brand new Otari; it was bought by the backer that Paul and Sean Slade had been planning to open a studio with, and later when the three of us got together- with Jim Fitting as the fourth partner - I bought the Otari from the backer.

Besides being the first boy-howdy, honest-ta-gawd REKKERD to sport the Fort monniker, the Connells 12" 3-song EP was also the North Carolinian quintet's first release, and my first on-vinyl production outing. I had met the band through Greg "Skeggy" Kendall while on tour with Lifeboat, and split the space on the record with productions by heavy-hitter Southerners Don Dixon and Steve Gronberg. Don was known for his work in and around the South, particularly Athens, Georgia's Drive-In Studios. The studio, which originally doubled as Mitch Easter's living room [or vice-versa], was home base for the first REM recordings. The Drive-In and REM guys formed the nexxus of a brilliant scene, and the tiny 40-Watt Club would become home and host to fellow Athens bands like Love Tractor, the B-52's, Pylon, Let's Active, and later groups like the Flat Duo-Jets. Steve Gronberg, on the other hand, had a full-blown 24-track studio in the basement of his house in North Carolina. Out in the middle of the woods, the first sign that it wasn't home to some lumberjack or survivalist was a basketball hoop nailed to a tree [you had to scratch a free-throw line into the dirt path, and dribbling was at your own risk as the ball frequently struck a rock or stump and shot off at some oblique angle past your face] [ED. NOTE: some survivalists play basketball!].

It was a compliment to Paul's skill when the record was released a second time by Demon Records in the UK, and then a third time by RCA after the group was signed to their major label deal. The only other eight track record on a major that I knew of was the Eurhythmics LP, and that had all sorts of virtual tracks generated by sequencers and keyboards so it hardly counts. The next article to come will cover the details of the Fort Apache South sessions in our first year and a half, leading up to the release of the Pixies' Come On Pilgrim, the Neats Crash at Crush and other seminal early work.

To Be Continued...

TIDBITS...

I GO, YOU GO,LOGO. The original Fort Apache logo was designed for us in 1985 by Gretchen Dyer. I was having business cards made and had asked her to throw something together just a few days before they were due to be printed. Up until then the closest thing we had to a trademark was the prefab "arrow in the bullseye" logo I had put on my personal checks.

The old logo

The new logo
When we opened Fort North in the Cambridge we got much needed office space. To go with with these snazzy new digs and to match the studio's ever-emerging personality we needed an image upgrade. Gretchen Dyer's logo was cute and clever for invoices and such, but with the Fort's increasing exposure we were now badly in need of a replacement with some pizazz. Finding a new logo for the Fort became an ongoing effort during 1988. Gary had already developed his own unique Smitty font so the lettering was all set. Now we needed an appropriate graphic.

Both Gary and I had begun to collect books and photos of Native Americans and I started to flip through them for a short time each day seeking something eye-catching and evocative. I'd been doing this for several weeks when I opened a small beige volume printed in the earlier half of this century, one that Gary had picked up. It had no usable photos but it was interesting and I started to read from a spot I'd opened at random. I finished a chapter and flipped the page to the start of the next when I saw it: our future logo! Just above the title of each chapter was a tiny stamped figure, no bigger than an inch square. The image was perfect. It was distinctive, aggressive, a wee bit comical and just a little out of control- in short, everything the Fort itself was. I showed it to Gary and he agreed. He immediately began the process of copying it, enlarging it and adding his distinctive Smitty script. Within a few days our bootlegged logo was done, and in less than a month Dumptruck's Brian Dunton had printed us up a mess of T-shirts to share it with the world. Oh, and by the way to that graphic artist who inked that tiny masterpiece so many years ago, on behalf of myself and my former associates: thank you.

Of all the grafitti at Fort Apache South- and there was a lot of it added to the bare sheet rock over the years -this little gem was the most controversial. It raised much ire and provoked a barrage of critical comment. When we vacated the Norfolk Ave. space I took this one foot by one foot piece of the wall with me. Art history anyone?