Tiny Telephone recording studio hanging it up
Small business serving bluecollar bands resigned to economic reality
Stepping inside Tiny Telephone is like stepping back in time.
Crammed with vintage reeltoreel tape spools and outdated recording equipment glowing with bulky knobs and multicolored lights, the analog studio that originally opened in a quiet corner of San Francisco’s Mission District in 1997 has long served as a cozy, economical space to make records for local musicians and visiting indie rock dignitaries like
Death Cab for Cutie, the Magnetic Fields, St. Vincent and many others.
Now Tiny Telephone is about to become extinct.
John Vanderslice, the musician, songwriter and producer who founded the recording studio at 1458A San Bruno Ave., plans to close its doors on July 1, citing the rising cost of running a small business in a city knocked out of economic whack.
“Our baseline expenses have been going up, and it really
started accelerating eight or nine years ago,” Vanderslice says, adding that he hasn’t raised the $350 daily rate for the main room since 2004. “We opened the studio with the goal of serving workingclass bands, and we can’t keep raising the rates on them because they don’t have the money.”
Even though Tiny Telephone is booked yearround, he says the increasing cost of insurance, power and just keeping the doors open — never mind providing a competitive living wage for his staff of audio engineers — has prevented the studio from becoming financially sound.
Even a couple of unheardof rent decreases from the complex’s landlords, Marilyn and Chris Goode, haven’t helped matters.
“We probably should have been kicked out in 2000 and again in 2015,” Vanderslice says. “But the landlords are artfriendly. They let us stay.”
He has been diverting clients to Tiny Telephone Oakland, the studio he opened in the East Bay in 2016. Vanderslice also recently opened a new recording studio called Grandma’s Couch in Los Angeles, where he moved last year for many of the same reasons he’s shutting down his San Francisco hub.
“You can’t run an arts business here without incinerating family trust money, or being the Opera or Symphony,” he says. “The cultural winners get the goods — and they should — but we are barely surviving.”
It’s not just the cost of doing business that has impacted recording studios like Tiny Telephone. The changing music business and the proliferation of compact, digital recording equipment have also taken their toll. Even Fantasy Studios, the famed commercial Berkeley recording studios where artists such as Santana, Journey and Green Day produced some of their most iconic albums, was forced to close in 2018.
Vanderslice says he will probably sell vintage gear he spent years collecting and tracking down through obscure resale channels, to get out of debt.
The compound that contains Tiny Telephone itself, a cluster of commercial buildings housing art studios and a variety of small businesses bordering Potrero del Sol park and Highway 101, known as the Farm, will probably go through a major transformation as well. The owners have applied for a permit to build a sixstory apartment building on the site.
Vanderslice plans to throw a blowout party to mark the last days of Tiny Telephone, details of which he is still cooking up.
“There’s not one cell of my body that’s bitter about this,” Vanderslice says. “Cities change.”
“You can’t run an arts business here without incinerating family trust money.” John Vanderslice