A crème-colored pup named Dude greets me as I enter the swanky West St. Pete pad of musician Billy Summer and his wife, Zoe, which is trimmed with velvet paintings and quaintly strange little knick-knacks. During our mini home-tour, Summer stops briefly at a closet lined with his collection of vintage Nik Nik “disco shirts, man.” His pride and joy of a studio lives out back, in a bifurcated garage/apartment. His mother-in-law, Kay (also known as the sweetest lady I’ve ever met), lives adjacent to the studio space; if Summer gets too loud, she just takes out her hearing aid. Once inside, he heaves a deeply contented sigh. “It’s one of the greatest things in my life.”
Lovingly dubbed “Hey, We Put Some Foam Up!” by bassist Jay Schultz, the studio began in 2011 as just a room and a computer.
Summer has worked with other bands in the space but ultimately decided it was really for his own music: When he’s not playing gigs with the area’s beloved Black Honkeys, he hustles material almost non-stop for his beachy psych alt-punk outfit, Luxury Mane. In terms of engineering others’ sound, “I just do what I do the way I do it and if you don’t happen to like that, then you’re probably fucked.”
He records everything here. Songs begin with guitar and drums; the stream-of-consciousness lyrics come later. “Here, it’s safe to trash it or decide it is cosmic,” Summer says, strumming. “Sometimes you get both; sometimes you get cosmic trash.”
He records everything analog, reel-to-reel, and usually touches little to nothing in post-production. “Everyone cautions me against recording this way but I like weird risks,” Summer explains. “I like capturing something weird and living with it.”
In two years, Luxury Mane has laid down four albums at Summer’s home studio. The latest, Isn’t This Great, was released as a 10-song cassette tape on March 4. The album features Summer’s face superimposed onto a photo of the infamous bikini-clad Phoebe Cates from the pool scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
He takes only a month or so between albums, he confesses. And it isn’t a bad hustle. He works for a couple hours in the studio, rides his bike, walks Dude. “But I’d piss in a bottle and eat nothing until the next creation was done,” Summer says. “So I put in a clock two days ago.”
