"We’re, like, the hard-rock studio," says mastering engineer Nick Zampiello, who works under the affiliated rubric New Alliance and drums in the Campaign for Real Time. "We do lots of metal stuff, we do lots of loud rock and high-energy music.... We’re all hard-rock fans, we all grew up on the loud rock stuff," adding that they have worked with softer local performers like indie-pop trio Mittens and Victory at Sea.

Part of that reputation comes from Curve of the Earth Records, the label Rush and Long opened upstairs in 1993. At the time, Rush’s daughter Christine Elise was dating Jason Priestley — she’d co-starred with him on 90210 as his love interest Emily Valentine — so Priestley helped finance the Allston Rock City label. (He also got Curve’s biggest band Powerman 5000 a guest spot on 90210.) Since then, the local-music offices of Wonderdrug Records, Woolly Mammoth Studios, and Black Egg have joined Curve of the Earth.

New Alliance was also where Godsmack’s major-label multi-platinum Godsmack was originally recorded. The studio’s all-time bestseller, it morphed producer/New Alliance co-owner Andrew "Mudrock" Murdock into a moneyed LA-bound audio professional who later sold his half of New Alliance to Long for $7000 worth of paintings and photographs. (New Alliance still has the Godsmacked tape machine; it’s on sale for two grand.) As such, New Alliance has been the destination of at least one fanatical pilgrimage. "Two years [after Godsmack recorded here], the front doorbell rings and it’s this family of four from Iowa wearing Godsmack T-shirts," recalls Rush. "All slightly overweight and asking if they could come and tour the studio where the Godsmack record was made. They come through looking to see some sort of magic. And the look on their faces was, like, ‘This isn’t what we were thinking.’"

Local-music merger
You can tell a lot about a place from its graffiti. In a practice space once inhabited by Roadsaw — a defunct stoner-metal band with song titles like "Starcock" and "Handed You Your Ass" — an unplugged fridge screams beer? in squiggly spray-painted desperation. Also in that room, there’s a utility box that bears a list of brainstormed jokey band names: busty nuns, spastic colin powell, plum-sized lump, whoopsie daisy fuentes. On a wall by the New Alliance back entrance, an anonymous author has scrawled i will miss this place — to which another scribbler appended like a bag full of shit in the face.

The RFT building will certainly be missed, but nearly everyone admits the building had become something of shithole. "I’m really not a natural networker, so I probably never would have been in contact with many of the people and bands we’ve ended up working with and playing out with if it weren’t for the building," David Ward, guitarist/singer from the Bismarck, writes in an e-mail, trying to express his ambivalence about the RFT’s closing. "On the other hand, to be completely honest, our room was always a dump, would get water in it at least once a year, have leaks from the Baseball Tavern upstairs — it wasn’t all great."

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There will be definite advantages to New Alliance’s relocation. "One thing that’s cool about [the Cambridge] place is that it has secured parking and a fenced yard, and no baseball," Rush points out. "There’ll be none of that 80-games-a-year where you’ll have to deal with Red Sox fans and parking [problems] and drunks. [Here] you walk out the back door, there’s always someone either peeing or smoking pot with their little eight-year-old kid next to them."

For now, though, those perks won’t outweigh the impending workload. The offices of Curve of the Earth, Wonderdrug Records, and Nick Zampiello’s mastering room will be the first things set up. Practice spaces and studios will be forthcoming. Desmond also has other big plans for the building, like music lessons and equipment-repair services. But those, too, have to be constructed from scratch.

"It’s mind-boggling, the amount of work that needs to be done," sighs Rush.

More than anything, no one wants to sacrifice that New Alliance "vibe." "We want to take as much of our feeling with us," says Zampiello. "We’re all the same people."

"I’m sure the new place will have the new vibe," says Wilder Johnson, pacing around the New Alliance lounge between breaks a few Saturdays ago. If not at first, he charges, "We’ll go in there and we’ll build it, then we’ll stick a hot poker up its ass, and then it’ll be ours!"

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On the Web:

New Alliance Audio: //www.newallianceaudio.com/
New Alliance East: //www.newallianceeast.com/
The Bentmen: //www.bentmen.com/
Duncan Wilder Johnson: //www.duncanwilderjohnson.com/
Wild Zero on Myspace: //www.myspace.com/wildzero/
Campaign for Real Time: //www.c4rt.com/

Email the author:

Camille Dodero: cdodero@thephoenix.com .