Matt Wallace on John Hiatt

Matt Wallace produced the Perfectly Good Guitar and Comes Alive at Budokan? albums. Actually, Matt has produced a lot of albums, including the Carpenter's tribute, but don't hold that against him. :-)

Chris Richards asked Matt where he first heard of John and how they hooked up. Here is what Matt had to say.

Matt's First Listen

It was around 1974 or '75. I was in high school and a friend of mine -- Dave Konjoyan -- said, ``Hey you should check this guy out, this new artist called John Hiatt.'' I remember listening to him and he was back in his kind of an angry/young, kind of punky, young-fellow days -- and it was pretty cool. I really enjoyed Two-Bit Monsters and Warming Up to The Ice Age and some other stuff. I remember just feeling a real affinity for what he was singing about.

On PGG and Budokan

How did I get hooked-up with JH for PGG and Budokan? On PGG, apparently JH would drive his step-son to school everyday and they'd take turns playing each other music. John would play his step-son some old standard, classic rock or country. His step-son would play some of the new music. So JH's son said, ``Hey Dad, check this thing out'' and he played Faith No More's The Real Thing recording. Apparently JH really liked the sound and the energy of that. To which his step-son said, ``Hey Dad why don't you get this guy to produce your record?''

I think John kind of laughed about it at first, but he started thinking about it and said: ``Hey! we'll give it a shot.'' So he gave me a yell and sure enough we ended up working together. Of course, Budokan was just a follow-up after doing PGG. We liked working with each other and he asked me to do the live record and I said, ``Sure!''

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