Words and Photos by Daniel Taylor
The irony is not lost on me that I’m writing this in 2024 from the comfort of my very own Suburban Tract Home. But back in the spring of 2000, I was 19 years old and much less comfortably playing drums in a punk band called Inverted Nines (as in sixes, like 3 sixes in a row… edgy, I know). A caravan of Chico punk and punk-adjacent bands including ours had made the trip down to Burnt Ramen Studios in Richmond to record three songs for the first volume of a series of compilations featuring Chico bands called the Suburban American Tract Home Project. As was customary in those days, I had procured from a gas station along the way a disposable 35mm film camera to document the ordeal in blurry, finger-obscured detail.
Inverted Nines had come together the year before, writing enough songs to play a few shows and release a CD-R EP that had been reviewed in the local alt-weekly by Shawn Pawn from local punk stalwarts P.A.W.N.S. Shawn was the driving force behind the Suburban American Tract Home Project, and when he subsequently asked us if we wanted to come down and record some songs in Richmond for the compilation we of course said yes.
The set up for this compilation was somewhat unique: the bands featured on the comp were going to record their songs live at Burnt Ramen, all in a single day. Seven bands playing 21 songs, committed to posterity with as few takes as possible, for better or worse (most likely worse, in my case, I thought). Besides Inverted Nines and P.A.W.N.S., there was Union of the Dead, Callous Neglect, Face Down, Smeat, and Nogoodnix (Hit by a Semi were also included on the compilation, but they recorded their songs separately).
You could have not Westworld-ed a more appropriate setting for a punk rock studio than the slice of Richmond in which Burnt Ramen Studios was located. Surrounded by post-industrial blight and forlorn patchwork of houses, businesses, and vacant lots, Burnt Ramen occupied a sign-less building at the end of a cursed block directly abutting both the train tracks and the elevated BART tracks running overhead. According to the internet, the building was once a brewery, then later become a grocery store before eventually becoming Burnt Ramen (before getting shut down by the city many years later in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland). The Burnt Ramen complex included a stage for shows, a skate ramp, and most importantly for our purposes, a recording studio located inside the grocery store’s old industrial-sized freezer.
To the best of my recollection, the session was engineered by studio namesake Mykee Ramen with the help of some of the more technically astute members of the Chico delegation, and without much bullshit the bands began blasting through the tracking, with drums, guitars and bass all being tracked together live with minimal overdubs using mostly shared gear to cut down on changeover time. The studio itself was nothing spectacular but it being the case that, up until that point of time, my studio experience had been limited to such well-known studios as Some Guy’s House in Ripon and the legendary Some Other Guy’s House in Chico, recording at Burnt Ramen felt like being at Abbey Road. Thankfully Inverted Nines weren’t the first band on the list to record and in the meantime the beer flowed like wine and the beautiful Richmond sky accommodated some solid outdoor football tossing and general hanging about. When it finally was our turn, nerves were suitably calmed, and our three songs were tracked without incident.
24 years later, most everything about that day is a little bit foggy memory-wise. However, one particular moment I can remember like it was yesterday: standing outside the studio as a car full of dudes drove by and yelled angrily “Go back to Berkeley!” Unfortunately for them, you couldn’t have possibly paid me a higher compliment at that point in my life. In conjunction with the day’s activities, it struck me that maybe I wasn’t a poser after all (Spoiler: I was still a poser.)
Overall, being part of the comp was a rad proof of concept to my young brain that doing cool shit that was hard logistically was possible. They went on to make another couple of volumes of this compilation after this one, but by that time I had retired from punk rock and moved on to trying to become an indie rocker (whoops). Shout out to Shawn Pawn for making it all happen and to the Eastman Kodak Company for their fine disposable cameras.
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