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Snow is falling on Weed, the tiny logging town at the foot of Mount Shasta in Northern California. Inside a 90-year-old structure formerly known as the Weed Palace Theater, Sylvia Massy Shivy is proudly showing off her rare, vintage and downright weird gear.
Massy Shivy has a long resume; she has produced, mixed and tracked the likes of Tool, System of a Down, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Johnny Cash. Today, she is the owner and chief staff producer of RadioStar Studios, located in the Weed Palace on Main Street, in a town with no stoplights. Seven years ago, she was the hot hand on the faders around Southern California studios. After several albums she produced went Platinum, she was in demand by bands wanting that big sound and labels seeking that big paycheck. So why did she decide to leave the bright lights and head north to a quiet mountain town that sounds more like something you smoke than an actual city?
"When I left L.A., I had a little house with half a yard in West Hollywood," Massy Shivy explains. "I would sit in traffic all day. I would drive a long way to work in a studio that I was never really happy with. I wound up dragging racks and racks of gear into studios just so I'd have what I needed, because no studio was set up the way I liked it. I was ready to leave."
She bought a four-wheel-drive Jeep in anticipation of a move to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, an area very much like the place where she grew up in Colorado. But fate intervened and she met Greg Shivy on a family outing to Mount Shasta in 1999. The couple married in 2000, and a year after moving to the mountains, they discovered and bought the vacant Weed Palace Theater for a fraction of what a similar property would have cost in L.A. "In fact, my car cost more than this building," she says. So she loaded up her gear and moved up to Weed.
Nearly five years later, RadioStar is a full-fledged hard-rock Mecca, where the perks are clean air, abundant spring water, wide-open spaces and a 14,000-foot snowcapped giant right outside the...