Lost in the Supermarket: The Sonic Castle

In Skyway, Tad Doyle builds himself a studio where he can be as loud as he likes.

When I pull up to the house occupied by Tad Doyle and his wife, Peggy Tully, I’m certain I have the wrong address. The front lawn is sprawling and neatly manicured, the driveway lined with pristine white utility vans. Everything about its exterior looks tidy, shuttered and highly domesticated. 

Photograph by Andrew Waits

These are not traits one associates with Doyle, a Northwest icon who made his name in the late ’80s and early ’90s as the front man for TAD, a band often cited in the same breath as Mudhoney and the Melvins during discussions of influential heavy proto-grunge acts. 

I steer back onto the road, looping around the block and confirming the coordinates. Though this doesn’t look like the home of a man who titled his debut album God’s Balls, it is precisely that. Still fearing I’m going to knock on the wrong door and interrupt someone’s Sunday brunch, I call Doyle’s cell, which he answers from the house’s home studio, a work-in-progress commenced in November. 

A beaming Doyle answers the door, ushering me into the Skyway neighborhood home he and Tully bought last summer. He remains an imposing figure, both in stature and energy, but is markedly slimmer than in his days with TAD. His head is covered in a healthy splay of wavy white hair, and his peaceful demeanor is more akin to a heavy-metal Buddha than to the speed-freaked lumberjack that Sub Pop, TAD’s label, projected as his image back in the grunge heyday. 

Tully bounces into the room. At fifty-two, she has the carriage, buoyancy and figure of someone twenty years younger, perhaps due to her physically demanding career as an emergency service technician for Puget Sound Energy (“When there’s a big gas leak, the firemen are asking her what to do,” says Doyle with pride). We migrate past a framed poster from a Turbo Negro show in the dining room and into the kitchen where Doyle starts making coffee in a French press. 

Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, Doyle’s current project with Tully on bass and recently recruited drummer John O’Connell, is anchored by TAD’s heavy hallmarks, but written on a broader scale, with darker psych shadings and a hypnotic underpinning of rich, deep tones and enough doom to unsettle the heartiest of stoner rock fans. It’s complex work, densely woven, fraught with texture and epic in length. “Fires Burn Dim in the Shadows of the Mountain,” from the band’s 2009 split ten-inch with Mico de Noche, clocks in at twelve minutes.

It’s also very, very loud. This is something Doyle considers requisite in his music, and therefore soundproofing was a primary consideration when the couple began constructing what they have lovingly dubbed “Witch Ape Studio.”

“This used to be a two-car garage,” says Doyle, opening one of the two doors leading to the performance room. “We did the soundproofing and noise reduction, dual walls. Our primary concern was that we wanted to be able to play late and loud without disturbing anybody.”

Before moving to Skyway, Doyle had engineered recordings of artful metal bands He Whose Ox Is Gored and Lesbian in the couple’s rental house in Beacon Hill, but he and Tully dreamed of building a custom-designed work space.

“I did know a little bit, but I really went down the rabbit hole by reading and researching online,” Doyle says, standing in front of a drum isolation booth glassed in with a door given to him by esteemed local engineer Stuart Hallerman. The space’s original support beams soar overhead, encased in pine and handsomely stained. “[Producer] Jack Endino helped, [custom construction builder] Edward Pierce did much of the hard work, [lighting designer] Bradley Sweek helped with Plexiglas for the control room,” he says. He gestures towards the window that looks out of the performance room and through the hallway to a room filled with sound mixing gear. “That would basically stop a bullet. It’s what they put in banks.” 

It’s a castle not just for the couple’s creations, but for what Doyle hopes will eventually be a client list of musicians they love. “It gives you more access to being creative,” says Tully later, sitting in the couple’s knotty pine–lined living room, outfitted with an antique piano and lorded over by a rotund grey feline named Bear. “But I think the other thing is that I like to have musicians in the home. They can stay here. They can sleep here.” First on the docket of artists in residence are the members of Lucia, a band from Eugene, Oregon, that hopes to begin tracking this month.

“We have to make sure everything works,” says Doyle with a cautious chuckle. “We haven’t even checked connections – then we’ll be full bore and I can start answering e-mails!” •

Hannah Levin is the producer and co-host of KEXP’s metal show, Seek and Destroy, which airs Saturday nights from midnight till 2 a.m. Lost in the Supermarket appears each month.