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 directed records by rock legends such as Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music and David Bowie, often from his home studio, Mix This!, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I could feel the Santa Ana winds whipping up the coast and through the canyons.
“From Sunset Boulevard, I could see flames on the hill and smoke. I thought, 'Well, I'm sure the fire department will be here very soon.' The news said the wind was blowing in the other direction, so I assumed they were going to contain it very soon. But a few hours later, my daughter called me and said, 'You have to get out of there.'”
As Clearmountain, his wife and assistant packed three cars with equipment and valuables, they still hoped it was just a precaution. Much of the studio equipment that he had custom built over decades was immobile: the Bösendorfer grand piano or the SSL recording console could not come out at short notice.
“We grabbed everything we could think of. I had some things that Bruce Springsteen had given us; I had done one of his little stick figure doodles for my wife's 50th birthday, and I thought, 'Well, that's something really special.'
“But we thought we'd be back in a few days,” Clearmountain continued. “That once the evacuation order was lifted, we would just be loading everything back into the house. “It didn’t really occur to us that this could be the end of our world.”
They returned to Apogee Studios in Santa Monica, where Clearmountain and his wife, Apogee founder Betty Bennett, stayed in a guest apartment usually reserved for step bands. Helpless, they watched the scene through their doorbell camera as the Palisades Fire moved down the hill toward their community.
“We could see that our neighbor's fence was on fire and our trash cans were on fire. The cameras went off around quarter to 8 and we thought, 'Well, I don't know, maybe it somehow skips our house because our walls are all stucco.' We didn't hear anything until Wednesday, and then we found out that all but one of the houses on our street were completely gone.”
“Finally, this morning, one of our new neighbors somehow came in and took a picture of our driveway with nothing behind it,” he said. “Just a driveway and some ashes.”
The scale of 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, including beloved recording studios where artists recorded some of their treasured albums.
The rustic recording studio retreat is a visual icon of Los Angeles music history. In the Los Angeles recording community, the Clearmountain house is an almost sacred place. Many other studios are also believed to have been damaged or lost in the area and in Altadena, which has become home to Los Angeles' independent music community.
Clearmountain is just beginning to come to terms with the reality of losing its home and a recording studio of generational significance, built over decades to its exact designs and filled with the instruments and equipment that produced some of the most popular rock music of our time. He said he will continue working in one way or another as a result of this.
“I see it as a challenge, the next chapter,” he said. “I really can't look back. I can't spend too much time being discouraged about that. I have to say, 'Okay, what can I do?' I'm going to change the style of what I do. I'm going to do what I do, but I'm going to do it differently and hopefully it will be good, maybe better than what I was doing. “That’s all I can think about right now.”
He's concerned about other home studios and recording sites that don't have the resources to rebuild elsewhere. The lives and homes lost are countless and devastating, but the cultural loss and inability of musicians to work is also part of the tragedy.
“Maybe there should be a fund. Not for me, because I'm doing well, but for other studios,” Clearmountain said. “There are many people who are not so well off. I can survive, but there are people who are going to have a very bad time and need help. “I would be willing to collaborate and help them.”
