LITTLE STUDIO ATTRACTS BIG NAMES: WAITS, MCCARTNEY, IGGY POP AMONG THOSE WHO'VE COME TO COTATI'S PRAIRIE SUN

Don't tell the Grammy Awards committee that landmark music recordings are produced in an old chicken coop. And don't expect an easy explanation from Mark "Mooka" Rennick, founder of the Cotati recording studios at which they were produced.

Thirty-four years after Rennick opened Prairie Sun, the legendary recording studios on the serene edge of Cotati are still in the business of capturing music on vinyl.

They have survived the unpredictable cultural music trends, rapid technological developments and the ever-changing, competitive music industry.

"There were over 250 studios when I started," Rennick says. "Of this caliber, there are five of us left in this area. It's shrinking and disappearing. I am competing against myself."

Ask Rennick why he has lasted and he says, "a deep appreciation of really good recording equipment. A really good vibe. A middle-class rate structure -- but not cheap."

"It's about relationships. It's an attitude of gratitude. My whole thing here is about spirituality and faith. If you build it, they will come. Well, they've come."

Among those who have are Eric Gale, Beats Antique, Paul McCartney, Charlie Musselwhite, Primus, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Greg Allman, Iggy Pop, Doobie Brothers and Van Morrison.

Scenes from the film "Coffee and Cigarettes," starring Winona Ryder and Iggy Pop, were filmed there. And Tubes drummer Prairie Prince designed and painted murals in the largest studio that featured a barn, corn fields and a cloudy blue sky on the ceiling.

"I had been gone for two weeks," Rennick says. "He did a whole baseball diamond. I said, 'No, no, no, no,' and he had to repaint the wall."

Perhaps the best story is about Valley Ford's Tom Waits, who recorded his first album at Prairie Sun using a variety of distortion devices but generally disliked the studio atmosphere.

"He said, 'I just want to take all your equipment and go home with it. Before I go, let me look around here.' So he walks in this storage room and he loved it there."

Rennick says Waits did daily takes of about 30 minutes, and if they weren't good, he would leave and come back the next day. The end result was an album called "Bone Machine" that won a Grammy in 1992.

"To say that Tom Waits has been good for Prairie Sun ... understatement."

Now 60, Rennick grew up in a small farm town in Illinois and came to Rohnert Park because of Sonoma State University's East Indian music program. The idea of owning and running a studio came to him as a youth "out of boredom and extreme imagination."

"Someday you are going to own a recording studio in Northern California, and that's all I thought about," Rennick says. "It's a vision."

He met Clinton Buck-Kaufman through friends, and both wanted to produce local musicians. They opened Prairie Sun in 1978 on East Cotati Avenue, then moved it to the old chicken hatchery that now houses it.

"It's a cool place. It's not pretentious. It's not terribly clean and it's not dirty," Rennick says.

The only things visible from the road are weathered redwood and corrugated metal siding with decaying tar roofs. The idea was to open an out-of-the-way place that would provide artists with the solitude they needed to focus.

"This is just an old farm building that has been inexpensively worked with," Rennick says. "Anybody could take a square room, work with these concepts and make themselves an acoustic environment instead of spending millions, or hundreds of thousands of dollars with an acoustician."

Rennick owns two vintage mixing boards -- one used by BBC productions and the other by guitarist Pete Townsend of The Who -- and said he is proud to merge analog, the recording technology of the past, with today's digital. That's one of the hallmarks of his rustic hillside complex.

"Our digital approach to this whole thing (is) very, very up-to-date," he says, "but it has taken the heart and soul out of recording by making things perfect.

"Producers used to work with the band and they'd get takes. It was that magic moment you would wait all day for, one take."

Throughout Prairie Sun's evolution, one thing was constant. Rennick says his father supported him spiritually and financially.

On the night "Bone Machine" won the Grammy, "I told him, 'All that pain-in-the-ass, bull---- that you had to go through, tonight's the night. We have been validated.'"