Sumo wrestling: The 1,200-year-old Japanese sport where refrigerator-size men hurl themselves at each other in a display of power and quickness. With all the ritualistic belly-on-belly action, one might not notice there's a referee in the dohyo, or sumo ring. He wears a kimono and is called gyoji. The gyoji holds a wooden war fan and regulates the bout with sharp perception and strong will. The highest-ranking referee is called a tate-gyoji. His robes are purple and his standing is achieved through many, many years of steady service. He is a wise and revered individual.

Seattle's Crocodile Cafe is home to its own tate-gyoji, but sound engineer Jim Anderson wears a blue blazer instead of a purple kimono.

Anderson has been running sound around the city for 25 years and at the Crocodile for 16. Instead of a wooden war fan, he holds a wireless Yamaha LS9 digital console. During shows, Anderson roams the room, dialing in consistently high-quality sound. Like the gyoji, you might not know he's there.

"I've joked with bands for years about having their mix stored in my head," he says. "Now it's reality. Running the control program on a Tablet PC, wirelessly, lets me get out and hear what everyone else does. Like I don't know already! I know what it sounds like everywhere in that room."

More than 14,000 acts have come through the Crocodile; Anderson has mixed them all, from Nirvana to Meat Puppets to Jucifer. Behind various soundboards since the early 1980s, he's seen the musical movements of this city evolve—hotshots and unknowns, quiet acoustic and thrash. Anderson's mastery comes through in the care and attention he puts into every set of music, regardless of talent, regardless of pedigree. He judges not. Over the years, Anderson's calming demeanor and respectful technique have gained the trust of the musicians and the venue's management, who've encouraged him to evolve the sound equipment as technology and finances allow.

"I consider myself a craftsman," he says. "I don't half-ass anything. For me, this is a career. And a good mix is a good mix, no matter who's playing. I try to be meticulous and find the right levels for everyone. It doesn't matter to me if it's your first time playing or you're on a major label with an airbrushed tour bus parked outside."

A default Seattle music historian, Anderson has stories to tell. He remembers one sound check from Pioneer Square's Central Tavern—once a grunge incubator, now a refuge for cover bands. "The guys from Mother Love Bone and Alice in Chains got up and did a jam," he says. "Andrew Wood sang. We were treated to about 10 or 15 minutes of some pretty awesome metal improv—Mother Loves Alice's Bone in Chains."

There are more, but Anderson prefers not to talk about dead musicians. He would rather talk about sumo. He can tell you about the great masters: Asanobaka, Butayama, and Kusonoumi. Anderson is, for personal reasons, an avid and knowledgeable sumo fan.

Growing up, he was always the fat kid. "It was emotionally hard," he says. "But in sumo, these big guys are respected rather than ridiculed. They have dignity, respect, and grace. They are the rock stars." He learned how to appreciate the form at a young age. He's been to Japan three times to see grand tournaments, called honbasho. He also puts together low-bandwidth podcasts at www.SumoRecap.com, full of sumo news and match results. His listenership includes a U.S. soldier in Iraq.

Fusing tradition and technology, Anderson oversees each gig the way a gyoji oversees the ritual and honor of a sumo bout. From the silken loincloth—the mawashi—to the Lexicon MPX-500 Multi FX, Jim knows the lingo and the accoutrements of both trades.

Or from another perspective, to be a good sumo, one must have patience and balance, be flexible, and adapt quickly. To be a good soundman, the same can be said. The difference, perhaps, is only several hundred pounds.

"It's never the same two nights in a row," Anderson says. "I listen to the band and then make things as much louder as they need to be. Sometimes that means doing a lot, sometimes not much at all. It's all about balance. If it hurts my ears, that's a bad thing."

Anderson's expertise, intelligence, and humor ("For 25 years, I've been looking for two specific knobs on the board: the 'Play Good' knob and the 'Play in Tune' knob") have helped the Croc become a sanctuary for listeners and musicians alike. He relates a time when Yoko Ono stopped in the middle of her set, looked around, and said, "This place is magic."

Like a true grand master, Anderson adheres to a select few truisms. One is the sumo affirmation ganbarimasu!, Japanese for "I'll do my best." Another is part of the Hippocratic oath, relevant to one with the quality of a band's sound and the health of an audience's ears in his hands: "Above all, do no harm." The last is Anderson's own: "It is very difficult to polish a turd."

Crocodile Show Archive in UW Library

Live recordings from the Crocodile are going to be archived in the University of Washington Library. In 2001. In conjunction with the UW Ethnomusicology Department and the head of the UW media department John Vallier, some 3000 hours of shows from the Crocodile are set to be preserved forever.

There will be something like a dedicated device and a pair of headphones. People will be able to go to Odegaard Undergrad Library, search up a band or a date, and listen to the show. People won’t be able to download or burn the shows for themselves though. They are working on how to protect and index it all now.

Crocodile Café Collection: [UW Site]

Over 3000 hours of live music recordings. Recorded at the Café between 2002 and 2007 by audio engineer Jim Anderson.

Click here to view a list of the collection's contents.

The archive is resting in six cardboard boxes, two hard drives, and 300 data DVD’s. Just short two terabytes of data, it’s roughly 3000 hours worth of recordings. If you listened for eight hours a day, it would take about a year to get all the way through.

In the beginning, Anderson was only recording the headliners, then he began recording entire shows. It was a feed directly into the board. Evolving the recordings, he set up a pair of Octava MK219 room mics. After the smoking ban, he switched to a pair of Audio Technica AT3030’s, which are medium to large diaphragm condenser mics.

Anderson said:

Basically it’s most of the shows for the last five or six years of the club’s run. The whole show, not just the headliner. I’m excited about it. The archive is a snapshot of the time, a window into pop music and what was going then. All the talking in between songs is recorded. Someone a hundred years from now will be able to get a clearer sociological perspective of our time.

What makes this collection unique is that in archival recordings from other clubs, there’s not a whole lot of the between song banter. I did blanket recordings, and was able to capture everything. Even now, four or five years later, it’s interesting to look back and see what the concerns of the day were. Bands and people talk about politics, sports, events, the environment, equipment issues, technology, and so on. There’s a lot of stuff that gives you the flavor of what people were thinking and talking about at that point in time.

Recording the shows also became a great stage management tool for me. I could look at how the recording was going and see what time the band went on and how long they’d played. It really helped the shows stay on track.

Chances are, if you played at the Croc from 2002 on, you’re in there.

Access to the archive will be through the UW libraries so you will have to be a registered user to have access. provisions will be made for non-students who would like to listen to the collection.

The tech details still need to be worked out. we'll make a formal announcement when access to the collection becomes available. IT'S EXCITING and i want to thank John Vallier and Laurel Sercombe for making it possible.

Jim Anderson Fattens Slim's Sound

Jim Anderson is a sound-engineering nobleman and sage. For nearly 30 years, his ears and soundboards have helped to mix sound for Seattle music. He has a meticulous audible sense of where sounds should be placed, and at what levels. He's patient, pleasant as can possibly be, and he treats bands with respect, no matter who they are. In the 1980s, he was at the old Central Tavern in Pioneer Square, and then at the Crocodile for 16 years.

As Seattle's music has evolved, Anderson has been behind a mixing board, making bands sound as good as they can. The respect he has earned over the years is well deserved. Lately, Anderson has been traveling the world to exotic locales and running sound for Seattle garage-rock icons the Sonics. Jim's been jet-setting, hitting places like Greece, Norway, Bangladesh.

Another exotic locale Jim has sonically touched is in Seattle's own Georgetown neighborhood, where he did sound design for the great Slim's Last Chance.

What kind of speaker cabinets does Slim's have?

Mackie S408s. They're interesting cabinets. They're meant to be mains or a monitor wedge. When you're looking at it, it's got four eight-inch speakers that are in the corners, and a strip in the middle is a horn. The coverage pattern when it's on its side as a monitor is 70 degrees up and down and 40 degrees side to side, so it's a fairly narrow horn pattern. Mackie told them to put them sideways as mains, but that would have meant a very narrow strip of high end that you'd hear in a couple places in the room. So I flipped them up on their side, and that way the wide part of the horn pattern is covering more of the room. Also, Mackie had originally said to put four of these cabinets up there, but that would be totaloverkill for that tiny of a room. Two of these are plenty loud for Slim's. I can get this PA loud enough to keep up with Zeke's vocals, when Zeke plays. And that is saying something. Those boys like loud guitar.

What's the sound like in there? Any sonic oddities that are peculiar to that room?

It's a smaller size room, so if someone has a loud stage volume, it tends to take over. This is something that takes a long time to deal with and not be frustrated. If they are cranking their half-stack, it gets to be too much.

Are you talking about cock rock?

Well, sometimes guys do play too loud. And not to say that it's bad to play loud, but it's just that for a space that size, acoustically it's a little difficult to deal with. It gets back to the idea of sound reinforcement, meaning that I make something only as loud as it needs to be. The difficult part for some guys is if you don't have to make it any louder, then don't. With a bunch of mics up and a guy playing really loud guitar, it can be too much. Then they get frustrated because they can't put any guitar in the PA.

Half of your job is basically to be a psychologist—dealing with volume as an extension of the phallus. What do you say to those guys who are too loud?

For years I've learned to let the band play the music that they want to play, and then I adjust to that. My job is to be a chameleon. If it doesn't need to be any louder, I won't make it louder. There are lots of times bands will come in, and all I have in the PA is kick drum and vocals. If that's all you need to balance the stage volume, then that's okay. It's not a crime. That's where some sound engineers get into trouble. They try to be control freaks about how loud the guy's going to play guitar, telling them, "You have to turn your guitar down so I can put some in the PA." That's bullshit. You gotta let guitar players play how they want, let them get the tone they want, then work around that. With tube amps, they have to be a certain volume to get tones. Sometimes it's just really loud and you have to deal with it. I'll put my earplugs in and be fine with it.

Do you encounter female guitar players who play too loud? Do women suffer from cock-rock syndrome?

They can, yes. It's not necessarily a gender issue. I think it's something more associated stylistically with the music. Plus, there are just more dudes who play guitar. I certainly have been in situations where there were female guitar players onstage who were too loud.

And let it be said that volume is an inherent facet of rock music.

You can't have a quiet death-metal band. At the same time, if you have someone playing solo acoustic guitar and it's so loud it's feeding back, that's just as inappropriate.

What do you want for Christmas?

A plasma cutter.

What's a plasma cutter?

I've been doing metalwork lately. I took a class down at Bates Technical College in Tacoma. The instructor demonstrated a plasma cutter. It's basically like an arc welder except that it has a stream of air that goes through it so that it actually blows the molten metal out from the cut. It makes really precise, neat cuts, quickly into any kind of conductive metal plate.

Sounds like cock rock. Is the welder an extension of the phallus? Come on, Jim, you can be honest with me.

Not so much. It's blacksmithing, not cock rock. I built a porch railing for my house.

What's your next metalworking project?

One of the reasons I got into metalworking was because of all the busted mic stands I end up acquiring. It ceases to be useful as a mic stand, but it's still good metal tubing. It's serviceable, it's good for something.

Like cock rock.

I have visions of giant yard-art dinosaurs made out of mic-stand tubing.

We'll put it in the sculpture park. They're cool with giant yard art. You have to paint it orange, though.

I'll get to work.

Georgetown needs a sculpture park, too. Wait, so how did you get involved with Slim's?

Michael and Celeste, the owners, who are also the owners of the Pig Iron Bar-B-Q next door. Michael used to be one of the regulars at the old Central in Pioneer Square when I was running sound down there in the 1980s. He was in a couple bands and I had worked with him before. When Slim's decided they wanted live music, they called me up.

Is that your system in there?

It started out being my system, then they got a Mackie sponsorship and went with more of their gear. Mackie gave them a bunch of stuff and kind of said, "We'll give you these cabinets and you just put them up here and here." I took a look at what they had given them and was able to help them make a lot more effective use of the cabinets in that particular room. I was able to make a little more sense out of it for them, with respect to the coverage from the horn patterns from the cabinets.

What are some other bands you've run sound for at Slim's?

Dusty 45s, Cicada Omega from Portland, who are one of my favorites lately. The Rainieros. Lots of good rockabilly and country stuff, but cool variety, too. Eddie Spaghetti did a solo acoustic show. A bluegrass band I really like called Hillstomp. A few jug bands. Baby Gramps has played a couple of times. It's a solid eclectic mix of stuff. And there's good rock, too, with Zeke, Neon Nights, the Midnight Idols. Having all the different types of music really keeps me on my toes. Obviously, you run sound way differently for quiet acoustic music than you do for loud rock.