Michael Rosen by Michael Rosen himself:

I met a crazy, shabby looking dude while I was working the graveyard shift at a 7-11 in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. He came in every night about midnight and get the same thing — a pack of smokes and some O.J. I finally struck up a conversation with him and he told me that he worked over at Capitol Studios.

I was 16, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. The only two things I loved were pot and music. I figured pot didn’t have much of a future, so I thought I’d try out the music thing. The dude invited me down to Capitol and I fell in love immediately. Booker T and the MG’s were working and the whole place was just amazing. He told me how to get work at a studio: start in the maintenance department and work up to engineering.

I moved to Berkeley, went to electronics school and got an associate’s degree. It seemed like more school was a good idea, so I transferred to San Francisco State University. The school had the best broadcasting department around, and while there, I worked at the Student Union as the head of technical services. We did everything, from movies on Tuesday nights to bands in the coffee shops to headliners like Gil Scott-Heron and Greg Kihn. It was a great gig and there was always exciting energy around.

Of course, I couldn’t find a job once I graduated. I happened to live right around the corner from one of the best studios in San Francisco called The Automatt and I’d walk by it every day on my way to a shitty busboy job. One day I decided that I hadn’t invested all that time in school and love for music just to give up, so I went into the studio and introduced myself to the studio manager. Actually, I told her that this was the only place I wanted to work. A fellow New York Jew, she wasn’t impressed and told me there weren’t any jobs.

I went in there just about every day for two months until she finally hired me as the studio gofer and assistant maintenance engineer. It was 1982 and my start in the music business was all about getting lunch for whoever was working, flowers for the producers and dope for the engineers.

I had real work to do as well, including cleaning up the entire studio. So, every morning I would go into the rooms and after cleaning up the mess I would take a look at the patch bays and the room set-ups. I’d take notes on what the engineers were doing and then if they were cool, I’d grill them about what they were using and doing. Then I’d offer to hang out and help, just to see it first hand.

At that time, The Automatt was the hottest studio in town. We had a couple of hot shot producers, including David Kahn and Narada Michael Walden, who was working with everyone from Whitney Houston to Patti Austin to Aretha Franklin. That place was always hopping with names like Randy Jackson (way before American Idol), Corrado Rustici (a famous Italian producer), Preston Glass, Walter Afanasieff, Celine Dion, Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey, Santana, and Herbie Hancock… It was a great place to learn.

I worked my way up to assistant engineer and I got to work on records for Sylvester, The Jefferson Starship, WASP, Margie Joseph, Aretha Franklin and Narada’s solo record. I was just getting my flow on, assisting on a lot of Narada’s sessions. The Automatt was happening, but there were some behind the scenes things happening and the studio closed down.

I got my hustle on and ended up across the Bay at Fantasy Studios, another one of the happening spots in the area. I was a staff engineer there for five years, working on records for Journey, Night Ranger, Eddie Money, Greg Kihn, Huey Lewis and a ton more. Fantasy was also a film audio post production studio, so I recorded Foley sessions for the films Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Mosquito Coast, Blue Velvet and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

In 1989, it was time to go out on my own, although I stayed close to Fantasy. The metal scene in the Bay Area was blowing up and I caught on with some of the top local bands like Testament, Vicious Rumors, Death Angel, Forbidden and Violence.

After about three years of that, I was recommended to the up and coming punk band Rancid. I clicked with Tim, Lars, Matt and Brett right away and I worked with those guys on the "Let’s Go", "Out Come the Wolves" and "Life Won’t Wait" releases. During that time, I also worked with AFI, Less Than Jake, The Sick and a handful of others.

In addition to the engineer and producing work, I’ve taken on the management of a pair of studios in the Bay Area. The first was in 2003 when I took over TML Studios in Hayward, which was owned by Troy Luccketta of Tesla. We did a ton of local bands in there and it was a hot spot for quite awhile. Troy and I worked with an early version of Third Eye Blind, along with Tesla, The KGB and a handful of local hip-hops acts like E-40.

My second run at studio management came at Studio 880, who hosted Third Eye Blind, The KGB, Chris Isaak, Lars Fredrickson and Green Day during my stint there. Studio 880 is now Green Day’s home studio and is still one of the best studios in the Bay Area.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time in Bay Area studios and traveling out of town to work with both established bands and up and comers. For instance, I worked on Santana’s Shaman release (and won a Grammy for it), a bunch of Papa Roach stuff (a concert DVD, a bunch of mixes for singles and I engineered The Paramour Session record). I’ve also done the last three Tesla records, worked with Lars Fredrickson on his latest stuff and with some indie releases from The Heart Attacks, The Forgotten and Cock Sparrer, the legendary punk band.