On Tuesday afternoon, Bob Clearmountain was driving back from Apogee Studios in Santa Monica to his home in Pacific Palisades. The revered producer and mixer has helmed records by such rock legends as Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music and David Bowie, often out of his home studio, Mix This!, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He could feel the Santa Ana winds ripping up the coast and through the canyons.
“From Sunset Boulevard, I could see flames up on the hill and smoke. I thought, ‘Well, I’m sure the fire department’s gonna be there pretty soon.’ The news said the wind was blowing in the other direction, so I kind of assumed they’re going to contain it pretty soon. But a few hours later, my daughter called me and said, ‘You’ve got to get out of there’.”
As Clearmountain, his wife and his assistant packed up three cars with gear and valuables, they still hoped it was just a precaution. Much of the gear in the studio he’d custom-built over decades was immobile — the Bösendorfer grand piano or the SSL recording console couldn’t get out on short notice.
“We grabbed everything we could think of. I had some some things that Bruce Springsteen had given us; he had done a little one of his little stick-figure doodles for my wife’s 50th birthday, which I thought, ‘Well, that’s something pretty special.’
“But we just figured we’d be back in a few days,” Clearmountain continued. “That once the evacuation order was lifted we’d just be loading everything back into the house. It really didn’t occur to us that this could be the end of our world.”
They decamped back to the Apogee Studios in Santa Monica, where Clearmountain and his wife, Apogee founder Betty Bennett, stayed in a guest apartment usually reserved for bands passing through. Helpless, they watched the scene through their doorbell camera as the Palisades fire advanced down the hillside toward their community.
“We could see our neighbor’s fence was catching fire and our trash cans were on fire. The cameras went out at about quarter to 8, and we figured, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe somehow it’s just gonna skip our house because our walls are all stucco.’ We didn’t know anything until Wednesday, and then we heard that that all but one house on our street were gone completely.”
“Finally, this morning, one of our new neighbors somehow got in and took a picture of our driveway with nothing behind it,” he said. “Just a driveway and some ashes.”
The scale of the destruction from this week’s fires is overwhelming, with at least 10 lives lost and more than 9,000 structures damaged or destroyed in Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other neighborhoods. Among that devastation are irreplaceable cultural sites, which include beloved recording studios where artists made some of their cherished albums.
The rustic recording studio retreat is a visual icon of Los Angeles music history. In the L.A. recording community, Clearmountain’s home is a nearly sacred site. Many other studios are also believed to be damaged or lost in the area and in Altadena, which has become a home for L.A.’s indie music community.
Clearmountain is only beginning to take in the reality of losing his home and a generationally important recording studio, one built over decades to his exact designs and full of instruments and gear that yielded some of the most popular rock music of our time. He said he’ll continue to work one way or another in the wake of this.
“I look at it as a challenge, the next chapter,” he said. “I can’t really look back. I can’t spend too much time being bummed out about it. I’ve got to say, ‘OK, what can I do?’ I’m going to change the style of what I do. I’m gonna do what I do, but do it differently, and hopefully it’ll be good, maybe better than what I was doing. That’s all I can think right now.”
He worries about other studios and home recording sites that don’t have his resources to rebuild elsewhere. The lives and homes lost are innumerable and devastating, but the cultural loss and inability of musicians to work is part of the tragedy as well.
“Maybe there should be a fund. Not for me, because I’m doing fine, but for other studios,” Clearmountain said. “There’s a lot of people that aren’t as well-off. I can survive, but there are people that that are going to have a really rough time, and they need help. I’d be willing to chip in and help them.”
