In a city where producers and engineers like Steve Albini, Brad Wood, and John McEntire are as celebrated as the bands they record, the late Phil Bonnet kept a profile so low as to be invisible. Bonnet, an engineer and musician who died last week at age 38 (a brain aneurysm is suspected), “didn’t know how to blow his own horn,” explains Thymme Jones, who played with him in the prog-rock band Cheer-Accident for eight years.
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Yet if you follow local music at all, chances are you own something Bonnet worked on. The Slugs, Screeching Weasel, the Smoking Popes, Eleventh Dream Day, Green, the New Duncan Imperials, Apocalypse Hoboken, U.S. Maple, Bobby Conn, Sam Prekop, Jim O’Rourke, No Empathy, Sidekick Kato, Illusion of Safety, the Krinkles, Will Oldham, and Edith Frost were among the artists he recorded over the last 15 years. He routinely cut selfless deals with young, inexperienced bands to make recording affordable, turning the meter off after midnight or flat-out working for free. But he also made the musicians feel comfortable in the studio, and for many he became an indispensable confidant and creative adviser. No other engineer was connected to as many disparate subsets of the local rock scene, and by all accounts he was right at home in every situation.
The Smoking Popes recorded their first single with Bonnet in 1991, and he engineered most of their subsequent sessions, including their 1994 indie breakthrough, Born to Quit. When they signed with Capitol in 1995, they went to the mat to keep working with him. “We had to fight to get Phil on [Destination Failure, from 1997] because the label didn’t want to use anyone who wasn’t an established name,” says front man Josh Caterer. “We refused to do it without him. He had given so much of his time, energy, and talent to us for pretty much nothing over the years, and we felt we owed it to him. We were also nervous about being in a major label situation and we knew that having him there would help us and make us more comfortable. He would protect the integrity of the music because Phil would never do anything he didn’t absolutely believe was right for the music.”
