Music production for film is a different animal from the music production I was used to; once you’ve assembled and installed the band in the studio, you’re all sitting in the control room literally on call to turn out a variety of arrangements of the same song as quickly as possible, depending on the requirements on the set. A couple of times we were required to learn, arrange, record and mix a song, all in one day. This was not a low-stress experience.
![RockStar_mark[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/RockStar_mark1.jpg "RockStar_mark[1]")
For Rock Star, because of the storyline, we needed two separate bands playing the same songs. One band had to sound as though it had been playing as a unit for 20 years. The other was a tribute band, and had to be good, but not quite as good as the older band. In a couple of cases, I actually preferred the tribute band’s finished version to the more seasoned band’s finished version. For the main band, Budd Carr had secured the services of Jason Bonham and Zakk Wylde, so the choices for drums and guitar were already made. After spending a little time with the two of them separately, I knew that I would need someone really diplomatic and cooperative to play bass and keep things running smoothly. I called Jeff Pilson, the bass player from Dokken. Jeff is a great bass player, has a good sense of humor, and is a real team player. He wants things to work, and he’ll do what he has to in order to make sure they do. As it worked out, his presence was quite useful in the studio. We needed a strong, mature lead voice with a huge range, so I called the singer from Steelheart, Michael Matijevic. I had worked with Michael several years earlier on an MCA album, and I had never heard a vocalist with a greater range – especially on the upside. (more…)
Sometimes Oak, sometimes Oak & Rick Pinette, sometimes Rick Pinette & Oak and even sometimes Oak & the Rick Pinette Band, this multinamed crew will always have a place in my musical heart. Their #36 hit earlier in 1980, “King of the Hill,” was easily the hardest of the all the top 40 songs to find and the first time I really had to dig to find a track. I searched high and low for that self-titled debut album for years with no luck, until I found not only a copy, but an autographed one at that (surely adding about 63 cents in value to it.) Their second hit, “Set the Night on Fire,” was from the album of the same name, which I still don’t own. I settled for the 45 which was also quite a pain in the ass to acquire. This was back in the day where I was excited to listen to the rarer stuff and almost forced myself to enjoy it based on the amount of work I put in. It was only later on that I realized most of these tough-to-find tracks are rare for good reason. But Oak and now-and-then Rick Pinette, you have avoided my wrath.
God, I hate the Oak Ridge Boys. “So Fine” is such a poor song. I know it was a cover of a tune by the Fiestas and I’ve never heard that version, but it can’t be any better ‘cause it’s just poorly written to begin with. Obviously, the Oak Ridge Boys didn’t think so and my taste in music is suspect anyway. But that opening two seconds of keyboards sounds exactly like an ‘80s sitcom theme song (someone tell me which one though!) Maybe the biggest problem I have with the Oak Ridge Boys is very evident on “American Made” which is that bass vocalist Richard Sterban just sounds so out of place with the other vocalists on a lot of tracks. The other problem that I have is that every time I run to the record store I have to weed through 10,000 copies of Oak Ridge Boys records and I swear that every time I find ones I’ve never seen before. They put out 16 damn albums in the decade. No one needs 16 albums in 10 years.![3944[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/39441.jpg "3944[1]")
I was called by my colleague Derek Shulman at Atco Records (Atlantic) regarding Kix in 1987. I wasn’t very familiar with them, but I did know that they were a high energy band who were very much in the AC-DC vein. I recall the night I first saw them that year, because they were playing at a Long Island rock club on a weekday night, and I had a difficult time understanding why their official start time was 1 AM. Even for a guy who considered himself a nighttime sort, this was absurd. I checked into the hotel next to the Nassau Coliseum, and spent the evening thinking that I should be in my pajamas, but tried to maintain enough energy and enthusiasm to leave the hotel for the night’s activity at 12:30 AM. I think the club was L’Amour’s, but I can’t be sure. It was a gold mine, jammed wall to wall with kids who by the midnight hour were drinking with a fair amount of abandon, and needing to hear some hard rock immediately.
In 
I never watched a full episode of The Osbournes, one of the first reality programs to focus on famous people and their everyday lives, but it was hard to escape its net: Ozzy’s daughter Kelly recorded an album for Epic despite limited musical skills; his son, Jack, appeared in a few episodes of Dawson’s Creek despite nonexistent acting skills; his wife, Sharon, got her own daytime talk show despite having trouble completing a sentence without the F word; and Ozzy himself, a heavy-metal icon who once fronted the legendary Black Sabbath, found a new career as a mumbling, shuffling punchline who was (mostly) in on the joke. The entire family even had a cameo in the third Austin Powers movie. It was too much too soon, so when The Osbournes finally stopped production in 2005, it felt like it’d been on the air much longer.
Kevin DuBrow
