By the mid-’80s, SPOT felt the underground starting to change. In the wake of the increasing success of bands like Hüsker Dü, the anything-goes attitude that had defined the early days of SST had begun to fade, replaced by a new set of genres and categories. A key moment, SPOT believes, occurred when people “started calling things ‘alternative’… I think it pulled things in the wrong direction. All the things that had been opening up suddenly had to be defined, and not just be what they were.”

At the same time, tensions within SST had begun to tear the label apart. Despite increasing sales, bands complained about not getting paid, while Black Flag’s ambitious schedule of releases absorbed attention and resources from other groups. Eventually, SPOT decided that he was over it. “The dynamic of how the label functioned, under that model, just didn’t work too well. I worked with them until I kinda couldn’t work with them anymore,” he explains. “It’s really sad.”

SPOT left SST and Los Angeles in 1986, and moved to Austin, Texas. With the time to focus on his own music, he found himself drawn to an entirely different style. “One thing Austin had going on was a pretty strong traditional [Irish] scene,” he says. “It was like, Wow! This is almost like going to those punk shows. It was a bunch of people sitting around playing what they wanted to play, the way they wanted to play it. As punk rock and alternative and whatever the fuck you want to call it kept getting bigger and bigger, I was able to jump off of that, into a pool where I could just kind of float, and not have to worry about swimming across the stream this many times in a day.” Only occasionally producing local bands, SPOT has spent recent decades focused on his own art, writing and recording folk and Celtic-influenced albums for his label No Auditions and publishing two well-received books of photography.

Despite almost completely ducking out of the music industry in the late ’80s, SPOT’s impact has only grown in the years since. With his ability to draw brilliant performances from bands on time and under budget, he ensured SST’s enormous artistic legacy, one visible everywhere in the next three decades of rock. Groups as varied as Green Day, Nirvana, Superchunk, Electric Wizard, Modest Mouse and the Red Hot Chili Peppers haved cited albums he produced as major influences, while SST stalwarts like Black Flag and Saccharine Trust remain legendary today, their t-shirts and patches worn by young fans around the world. Working behind the scenes, SPOT was happy to serve as a facilitator, spending long hours striving to make sure that STT’s bands sounded precisely like themselves. By doing so, SPOT helped to create an extraordinary body of work, but at the cost of rendering much of his contribution invisible. Or, at least, mostly invisible.

Whenever he received vinyl copies of his SST records, Saint Vitus guitarist Dave Chandler noticed something mysterious – the run-off grooves at the center of the vinyl had cryptic phrases written on them, things like “Worship Volcanoes on Virgin Knees,” or “Los Alamos: Another Roadside Refraction.” Asked about it, SPOT bursts out laughing. “Well you gotta do that! Look, not every session went the way I wanted it,” he says. “That was my chance to have the last word on every project I did. Any word beyond that just becomes hearsay or fan feelings or reviews or promotion or whatever. Once you finish with one project, you put it away. You just can’t get so caught up on it that you can’t get away from it.”