Just so it's clear, Mixerman didn't recommend the studio directly, he merely confirmed that it would be useable, and was a professional place. There was a bit of a hard sell put in place by the studio management after it was suggested by another member of the recording team. Mixerman also wasn't aware that we would be in the mirrored bathroom/tie-dye grotto/Pier One candle department. He and I had assumed we would be in a more sympathetic room.
He was trying to help, and he was helpful.
The reason I didn't object once I saw the studio is that I am not used to making demands, and I didn't want to be a bitch about this studio, which had been recommended and booked. Making any sort of change at this point would have been an enormous disruption and expense, and I didn't want to hang that on the clients. I had certainly made decent records under worse conditions.
There is a bit of background I haven't mentioned. During the period I was scheduled to make this record, my father was in the end stages of the lung-and-bone cancer that would shortly kill him. I had just come from Montana, where I had been able to spend some time with him, and it is fair to say I had little else on my mind. His condition was horrifying. He was in constant, excruciating pain, despite morphine and other painkiller dosages that gave him terrible hallucinations, and should have been enough to kill him.
My mother, who had been my father's constant companion for half a century, had to watch helplessly as her one true love was driven to madness by illness, pain and narcotics, knowing he wouldn't be well again for the rest of his life, and that for all his screaming in agony and begging to be killed, the worst was yet to come.
Whatever we are supposed to take from experiences like this, I felt utterly unable to fathom. It was horror, pure and ugly, raining down on two fine people who deserved nothing like it. If there were a God, I would have ransacked heaven looking for him, cursed him and beat him with a rake until he relented.
So the problems at the studio, while just beginning, didn't seem like a particularly big deal. Anyway, we moved the piano...