Last week marked the final edition of Tom Werman’s run on our Producers column and, in the course of his finale, he mentioned a special mixtape disc he made for his family and friends. Many readers replied wanting to know which songs he chose as his most indicative productions, the work he was most proud of. We’re hoping maybe to get Tom’s input for a future Friday Mixtape based on those requests.
But overall, it’s not a bad idea, is it? A mix themed not so much on a topic, artist or concept, but on the producer involved in the project gives insight to that producer’s choices, inclinations and “sound” and there hasn’t been a producer of recent time as prodigious as Brendan O’Brien.
His first high-profile job came with Stone Temple Pilots’ debut disc Core. After that he became Pearl Jam’s de-facto producer for life, starting with Vs., their second offering. He also mixed The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall and Soundgarden’sSuperunknown. Recently he has found himself behind the boards for Mastodon and Bruce Springsteen. Music fans are mixed on O’Brien, some believing he’s the quintessential producer of the ’90s into today, while others are put off by his signature ‘dry’ sound, lacking reverb and sparkle. This miniature capsule of a very small part of his output serves as an opportunity to decide for yourself. (more…)
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.
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…)
One day a year or two on either side of 1995, I was sitting in my kitchen — something I found myself doing more and more during the mid-nineties – and the phone rang. I picked it up, and the man’s voice on the other end asked for me, told me his name (I can’t recall it), and said he was calling from Paul McCartney’s office in London. Assuming it was a ruse, but not positive that it was, I proceeded cautiously as the man explained that he was calling to check on my schedule to determine if I would be available to work with Paul during a certain portion of the following winter. Slightly amused, I considered saying “no, I’m afraid I’m busy,” but thought better of it, and assured the voice that I would definitely do what I had to do in order to make myself available. Before he wound up our conversation, I explained that I was delighted to receive the call, and of course I was excited by the prospect of possibly working with Paul, but could he please explain why he called me in particular, given the nature of the music I was known for producing. He replied that Paul always liked to explore all the options, thanked me for my time, and hung up.
I sat in stunned silence for a minute, wondering how he could have obtained my home number – it must be a practical joke of some sort – so I phoned Sandy Roberton, a producer’s manager who represented me for a couple of years during the nineties, and asked if he would mind checking this guy out for me. Minutes later, Sandy phoned back and confirmed that this man indeed did work for Paul in London. More stunned silence for me, reflecting on the fact that Paul McCartney actually knew who I was, and might have even spoken my name. (more…)
Myron Grumbacher, a drummer whose history includes a stint with Pat Benatar, became involved professionally with Lita Ford some time before I produced Lita’s album Dangerous Curves. I mention Myron because he was a great guy, a great drummer, and a great help with the album. Possessing a healthy sense of humor, he was able to offer suggestions all the time without seeming to butt in or to try to do other people’s work for them. He was a pleasure to work with. Lita, too, was very upbeat, funny and really pleasant. The one difficulty we had with the recording was vocal pitch.
While Lita was a good singer in a live situation, there was something about the headphone scenario that gave her trouble. She was just a hair off pitch when she sang with those headphones on. We tried opposing speakers for monitors ( you can try placing speakers directly facing each other on either side of the microphone, like giant headphones, and this should allow the singer to hear the mix while the two speakers theoretically “cancel each other out” so that the microphone hears only the vocalist), but this method is only occasionally successful. (more…)
It has been over two weeks since I sent the two emails to Dee Snider’s web site and to his publicist. No reply so far, so I guess I won’t be holding my breath.
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.
The club was vast, and I waited around in front of the stage for about 45 minutes until the band came on at 1:30 or so. Sure enough, they kicked serious ass in that club, and I really liked their frontman Steve Whiteman. I also liked the guitar players, Ronnie Younkins and Brian Forsythe, who were serious shredders, but had a very calm and easygoing personal manner offstage. In stark contrast to Steve’s humor and Brian and Ronnie’s calm was Donnie Purnell’s angst and paranoia. He was the undisputed leader of the band, and the bass player and main songwriter. He rarely smiled, and seemed to feel that people were naturally going to try to take advantage of him. He was a fine musician and a dedicated professional, but he simply wasn’t very much fun to be around. (more…)
The previous installment provided some curious tales of Twisted Sister. An Australian musician/journalist friend of mine named Joe Matera frequently sends me items from the Web that he thinks may be of interest to me. Since I don’t get around the Internet as thoroughly as Joe does, this proves to be a service of great value, as I’d otherwise be unaware of what people may be writing and/or saying about me and my work. Just after I had forwarded the last installment to Jeff here at Popdose, I received an email from Joe, informing me of a recent interview with Dee Snider, who some 25 years later, still feels the need to bag on me in any way he can. [Note: Said interview was conducted by our own David Medsker, and can be read in full here.]
I include some excerpts from this interview, and my responses to these excerpts – truthfully, it may take the form of a rant, but I promise we’ll get back to more colorful history next week. The accumulation of two decades of bogus complaints from Dee Snider has prompted me to answer back: (more…)
I called my daughters to talk about Michael Jackson, because I know how important he was to them when they were teenagers. Young people all over the world were saying, “Now I know how my parents felt when John Lennon died.” I told them I was shocked by Jackson’s death rather than saddened by it: I was fascinated by him as an artist but not emotionally involved with his music as I was with both Elvis’s and John Lennon’s.
My daughter Julia mentioned going to see the Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984 with me. I didn’t remember it at all. She told me in detail how I had taken her to see the show at the Forum in LA when she was in fourth grade, and how I asked the person in front of her to please sit down so she could see the stage. And she told me about the time when I was doing something at Westlake Sound with Twisted Sister while Michael was making Thriller. Julia and Nina came over to the studio for dinner, and apparently I took them in to meet him. They were over the moon about this, and Julia said they were “queens of the school” the next day because they had met Michael Jackson. It was nice to hear that.
Speaking of Twisted Sister, they were all New York natives, so they had no problem working in the New York area. I agreed to come east to do both the rehearsals and the basic tracks for their third album, Stay Hungry, and they agreed to come west for overdubs and mixing. We rehearsed out in Long Island for a few days, and in January of ‘84 we set up at the New York Record Plant. Normally, load-in and setup took about a day, and we usually needed one more day to mike everything and dial it in so we’d be ready to roll tape. The first day went fine, but on the second day we weren’t able to arrive at a satisfactory rhythm-guitar sound for J.J. French, even though that’s all we worked on all day long.
By the third day we’d been through half the rental amps in Manhattan and weren’t too much closer to a good rhythm-guitar sound. It took us three days of experimentation and trial and error before we were able to attempt any recording. On the morning of the third day I woke up in my room at the Warwick Hotel, and I remember wanting to just stay in bed and cry — I was desperate to get a guitar sound. I was used to spending about an hour on this particular task, and now I just couldn’t see our frustration ever coming to an end. Eventually, of course, we overcame the problem somehow and managed to record the tracks, but I’ll always remember that project as the most difficult one of all in terms of establishing a basic sound for a band.
I departed Elektra after four months as Vice President in charge of A&R. I had signed one band (Stranger, whose album included a song called “There’s a Party in My Pants and You’re Invited”) and agreed to produce three Elektra albums per year for two years; I would receive an advance fee that would be collateralized against any future royalties (if the album recouped its recording costs), and I would receive a number of percentage points per album, based on the retail price (I can’t recall the number exactly, but I know it was quite acceptable to me after seven years of being underpaid for producing). I was happy with this, as it was competitive with the best production deals at the time. If I could be fortunate enough to produce a platinum album with these terms, I stood to make half a million dollars.
Before exiting the label, I attended the Grammys with Bob and a few other executives – a pretty boring affair lasting four hours (it’s actually recorded “live on tape,” which allows for reshoots), replete with orders to minimize the number of trips we made to the bathroom in order to avoid visibly empty seats. The next time I had an opportunity to attend the Grammys, I passed. I had one personally significant meeting at the office with a Mrs. Ellis McDaniel, who was Bo Diddley’s wife. I can’t recall the express purpose of our meeting, but Bo Diddley was such a heavy musical influence on me in my teenage years that I count this as one of the more significant meetings I had while at Elektra. (more…)
Our little cul de sac in Los Angeles was short and narrow, just off Laurel Canyon and just south of Ventura Boulevard. Except for the occasional airport trip when I would call for a town car to pick me up, limos were generally scarce in our neighborhood — so when a big black stretch limo pulled up at about 6:30 one weekday evening, the neighbors knew somebody of some note must be visiting. John and Judy Belushi, accompanied by their driver/assistant Smokey and Paul Cooper of Atlantic Records, came into the house, and we introduced everyone to our daughters Julia and Nina, who were then eight and five. We had some drinks and some hors d’oeuvres, and John was as hyperkinetic as anyone I had ever known, even when he was sitting down. Every minute he was doing something with his hands or jiggling his feet, talking nonstop or walking around looking at things in the living room. At one point, while fooling around with Nina , who was a very petite five-year-old, he literally tossed her over the back of the couch onto the floor – she wasn’t hurt, but she still hasn’t forgotten.
At dinner, John explained that he was on the wagon at the time, and that Smokey was along to make sure he didn’t drink and to “take the cocaine out of his nose.” After dinner, we repaired to my music room, where John proceeded to thumb through my 1500 vinyl albums, and we pulled out a bunch of records and started to compile a list of songs that he would enjoy doing. He danced with my sister, who was visiting us, and we had a pretty enjoyable evening. We agreed that I would meet with Dan Aykroyd in New York, and further discuss what might happen on the next record. Some days later, I met with Danny at the midtown office he shared with John (where one of the office decorations was the actual passenger door from a Chicago police cruiser). (more…)
By the end of the ’70s, I had just about made a clean transition from A&R man to producer. My corporate title was Senior Vice President/Executive Producer, since I had gone through all the promotions one had to have at CBS in order to justify my pay grade. The CBS Records offices in LA were located in the Carlsberg Building, on the western margin of Century City, on little Santa Monica Boulevard. If I went into the office at all, it was to catch up on routine paperwork, read mail, open unsolicited cassettes, and return messages. I was trying to settle into a nice three-project-a-year groove, with a summer vacation so I could actually spend some time with my family. There was really no one at the office to whom I reported, so if I wasn’t in the studio and I hadn’t any pressing matters or label meetings, the time in between projects was mine to use as I chose.
I was beginning to feel just the slightest bit of complacency about my situation, which was as unsettling to me as it was comforting. It seemed to me that a bit of repetition was creeping into the production process, even though I was eager to keep things fresh and exciting. I remember this period as a time when I started to formulate answers to the same questions being asked by journalists, and I recall saying that I tried to avoid having “a sound” to my productions, maintaining that each project required a unique approach. In theory, I truly believed this, but in practice I found myself relying more and more on things I had done on previous albums, because they produced great results. I don’t think that I had a sound, really, and I do think that I served each artist in the proper way. (more…)
![RockStar_mark[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/RockStar_mark1.jpg "RockStar_mark[1]")
For ![paul-mccartney-picture-1[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/paul-mccartney-picture-11.jpg "paul-mccartney-picture-1[1]")
One day a year or two on either side of 1995, I was sitting in my kitchen — something I found myself doing more and more during the mid-nineties – and the phone rang. I picked it up, and the man’s voice on the other end asked for me, told me his name (I can’t recall it), and said he was calling from Paul McCartney’s office in London. Assuming it was a ruse, but not positive that it was, I proceeded cautiously as the man explained that he was calling to check on my schedule to determine if I would be available to work with Paul during a certain portion of the following winter. Slightly amused, I considered saying “no, I’m afraid I’m busy,” but thought better of it, and assured the voice that I would definitely do what I had to do in order to make myself available. Before he wound up our conversation, I explained that I was delighted to receive the call, and of course I was excited by the prospect of possibly working with Paul, but could he please explain why he called me in particular, given the nature of the music I was known for producing. He replied that Paul always liked to explore all the options, thanked me for my time, and hung up.![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.![Ts-color[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/Ts-color1.jpg "Ts-color[1]")
The previous installment provided some curious tales of Twisted Sister. An Australian musician/journalist friend of mine named Joe Matera frequently sends me items from the Web that he thinks may be of interest to me. Since I don’t get around the Internet as thoroughly as Joe does, this proves to be a service of great value, as I’d otherwise be unaware of what people may be writing and/or saying about me and my work. Just after I had forwarded the last installment to Jeff here at Popdose, I received an email from Joe, informing me of a recent interview with Dee Snider, who some 25 years later, still feels the need to bag on me in any way he can. [Note: Said interview was conducted by our own David Medsker, and can be ![blues[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/blues1.jpg "blues[1]")
Our little cul de sac in Los Angeles was short and narrow, just off Laurel Canyon and just south of Ventura Boulevard. Except for the occasional airport trip when I would call for a town car to pick me up, limos were generally scarce in our neighborhood — so when a big black stretch limo pulled up at about 6:30 one weekday evening, the neighbors knew somebody of some note must be visiting. John and Judy Belushi, accompanied by their driver/assistant Smokey and Paul Cooper of Atlantic Records, came into the house, and we introduced everyone to our daughters Julia and Nina, who were then eight and five. We had some drinks and some hors d’oeuvres, and John was as hyperkinetic as anyone I had ever known, even when he was sitting down. Every minute he was doing something with his hands or jiggling his feet, talking nonstop or walking around looking at things in the living room. At one point, while fooling around with Nina , who was a very petite five-year-old, he literally tossed her over the back of the couch onto the floor – she wasn’t hurt, but she still hasn’t forgotten.