For half a century, David Goggin worked as Mr. Bonzai. His friends called him Bonz. He wrote over a thousand articles for Mix, EQ, Rolling Stone, the Times, Billboard, and the Hollywood Reporter. He produced over 250 long-form interviews with the engineers, producers, and session players that mainstream press ignored. He photographed every major studio in Los Angeles, and most of the rest in the country. In the last decade of his life, he co-wrote the book that told the Record Plant's full story.
It's sad to report that David Goggin died on April 29, 2026, at the age of 78. The cause was a stroke that followed a long fight with two cancers. His wife of 42 years, the artist Keiko Kasai, was at his side. The recording industry and its legions of fans lost the person who'd documented it more thoroughly than anyone alive.
Goggin and Marty Porter spent ten years on Buzz Me In, published by Thames and Hudson in 2024. For the work going on at 2200 Studios (formerly Record Plant Sausalito) today, it's the foundational text, the bible that sits on the table in the Metallica Lounge. Goggin's death is truly a real loss for the whole recording industry. For those of us who document and archive the history, it's the loss of a rich, primary source of institutional knowledge. With so much left to do, we're really going to miss David's contributions.
The Light Shows at Irvine
David Goggin was born in Kingston, New York in 1947. His father, Edward James Goggin, was a cartoonist, and his mother was Anna Marie Farrell. He took an English Literature degree at the University of California at Irvine. On campus he ran the light shows for visiting concerts. Janis Joplin played one of those shows, and Buffalo Springfield played another. While he was at Irvine he also studied drawing under David Hockney, a discipline he never stopped practicing.
A junior year abroad sent him to the University of Edinburgh in 1968 and 1969. He met John Lennon that year and ended up inside a Beatles session for "I Am the Walrus." He wrote about that experience decades later in a book called John Lennon's Tooth. That session changed the trajectory of the rest of his life. He returned to America wanting to be close to the work of making records.
Becoming Mr. Bonzai
The first job after college was hosting a late-night comedy radio show in Montreal. When the station cancelled the show, he came back to Orange County. He took a job as studio manager at Lyon Recording. He also did publicity work for an animation company owned by the same family. The combination put him in a studio every day and gave him press contacts at the same time.
In 1979, the editor of a startup trade magazine called Mix invited him to write a monthly column. The editor was David Schwartz, who became a lifelong friend. The column reported on life inside a small Orange County recording studio. He wrote it with the dry wit of someone who'd grown up reading his father's cartoons. Goggin signed every column Mr. Bonzai, and the pen name stuck for life. The column evolved into a 1984 book called Studio Life. It also became the long-running Lunching with Mr. Bonzai series in Mix and EQ.
The Body of Work
Over the next four decades the column became the trade press's most reliable studio voice. He interviewed producers, engineers, mastering engineers, session musicians, console designers, and mic builders. Every interview ran alongside his award-winning photography of the rooms. Suzanne Ciani called him "always a charming and clever centerpiece at any industry convention." Graham Nash said his greatest single talent was the gift of being invisible. And George Massenburg described him simply as "curiosity and joy."
He worked the rooms in a trademark jazz cat Lester Young hat and always-interesting glasses with metal frames - evoking his own style standard. Anyone who attended AES or NAMM in the last forty years saw him. He'd be in a booth, on a ladder, working the room with his Leica (even though he used others, this is the classic memory).
Eight books followed over the next forty years of his career. Studio Life in 1984 collected the early Mr. Bonzai columns. Hal Blaine and The Wrecking Crew in 1990 told the story through one of its quietest legends. The Sound of Money in 2000 was the book he wrote with Chris Stone. Faces of Music followed in 2006, Music Smarts in 2009, and John Lennon's Tooth in 2012. Buzz Me In came last, in 2024, the year before its author began to die.
The Record Plant Chapter
Goggin's career intersected with the Record Plant repeatedly from the late 1970s forward. He served as press agent for the studio and developed a close working friendship with co-founder Chris Stone. Marty Porter, who later co-wrote Buzz Me In with him, put the relationship in simple terms. "David, Mr. Bonzai, was [Stone's] confidant. He was his personal PR guy and knew more about him than anybody." This fact made him the strongest link to the history of Record Plant Sausalito.
That access shaped the Record Plant's history in ways the public never saw. Goggin and Stone co-wrote The Sound of Money in 2000, the first honest account of the studio business model. When Stone wanted to organize the industry around its working professionals, Goggin helped him. The two of them, along with engineer Ed Cherney, co-founded the Music Producers Guild of the Americas. That organization eventually became the Producers and Engineers Wing of the Recording Academy. They also built the SPARS and World Studio Group networks that linked serious facilities worldwide.
Chris Stone died in 2016 after decades of telling stories about the studio. Before he died, he sat with Goggin and Porter on his patio in Hancock Park. He told them the stories he'd refused to put in a book for thirty years. Marty Porter remembers the location as the genesis point of Buzz Me In. He remembers the back patio, Stone's martinis, and the wooden eagle from Sausalito on the wall. They wrote the book Stone refused to write while he was alive. They finished it nine years after he was gone, and it stands as his last collaboration.
Keiko, and the Other Life
Goggin married the artist Keiko Kasai in 1984, and they stayed married for the rest of his life. He drew her more than a thousand times over the years. Collectors including Norman Lear acquired his portraits and the delicate wire sculptures he made. He practiced Zen Buddhism throughout his life under the teacher Rev. Tozen Akiyama. The same attentiveness that made him a great interviewer made him a serious Zen student.
In January 2026, just three months before his death, he appeared on the TEC Tracks stage at NAMM. He moderated a panel with Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and producer Bob Margouleff. The subject was the making of "Whip It" at Record Plant Los Angeles in 1980. Even with terminal cancer, he was still doing the work. Mothersbaugh had once called him "a master of modern music photojournalism." He'd also said "Mr. Bonzai is the future of the past."
What We Lose
Mr. Bonzai meant a great deal to everyone who knew and worked with him. His career left a real mark, and the people around him feel that loss. I won't gloss it over, we lost our chief historian, the go-to guy, perhaps our strongest link to the historic puzzle and photographic record of the Record Plant Sausalito, and the broader recording industry for a half a century. The industry has plenty of writers who chase artists and chart positions. It had exactly one Mr. Bonzai across the past fifty years. He spent it in the rooms where the records were made. He turned his lens on the engineer, the second, the maintenance tech, the studio manager. He photographed the assistants who slept on lounge couches between sessions. Those people kept the music industry running and almost nobody else wrote about them. He did, for fifty years, with humor and a refusal to flatter the wrong people.
For the work we're doing here, his loss is also practical. Goggin held an oral history of the Record Plant that nobody else holds anymore. Some of that knowledge made it into the pages of Buzz Me In. A lot of it didn't make the final cut, and that material is gone now. The interviews we recorded with him and Porter while we could anchor this site. The book they wrote together is the foundation we're building on top of.
He told a podcaster late in his life that he'd had a front-row seat to history. That was true, and the description was also too modest by half. He didn't just sit in the front row through fifty years of recordings. He was also the one taking the notes the rest of us read.
