LIKE COUNTLESS studios past and present, Portland’s Jackpot! Recording Studio began in a basement. That, however, changed quickly.
Larry Crane founded his home studio (which he originally called Laundry Rules Recording) with the money he got after being doored on his bike. Crane soon began attracting more and more clients—word was getting around that his operation, unlike several other makeshift recording studios of the era, actually provided nice gear.
“It was a different time,” Crane says, referring to Portland in the late 1990s. “A home studio was like an eight-track reel-to-reel tape machine. Jackpot!, when it first opened, had a two-inch, 16-track machine. Then, just having anything you could record on, they were like ‘Oh my god!’ Now they don’t even ask, they just come in.”
The basement was no longer cutting it. “I had a wife and a roommate, and it was getting kind of noisy,” he says. “Bands had to go all the way through the house to use the restroom, and to have someone go through your whole house when nobody else is home—kind of weird.”