What were your first steps towards becoming a producer, outside of being an artist?
Well, I suppose you can thank George Martin and The Beatles for making the recording process one of the instruments. A lot of people, like Les Paul, did that earlier, but The Beatles did it in a way that spoke to me. I was aware of production values. A musician hears certain nuances in playing that a non-musician wouldn't pick up on. I was always fascinated by it. David Was, who started Was (Not Was) with me, his parents are both voiceover actors. Before we could drive, we'd go down with them to recording studios and watch. Just being in the studio was magical. There's something about the big mic stands, with the mics and the wires everywhere, the acoustically treated walls, and all the people sitting around in a circle playing together. It looked like the most romantic, coolest place to be. And it fucking is! Sitting here at 63 years old, I can tell you the romance of it has never worn off. There's not a day that goes by that I don't feel privileged to be in the studio. I just got to work at FAME Studios for the first time, in Muscle Shoals, on an acoustic Gregg Allman record, which was just an amazing experience. I'd never been to Muscle Shoals. When I pulled up to the building, I started crying before I even went inside. It's at this anonymous looking intersection, with a CVS and a Chick-fil-A. Life-changing music came out of this normal looking building. Then you walk in and you see the pictures of everybody, and the room is fundamentally unchanged from 1972. To sit in [owner/producer] Rick Hall's chair behind the board — and to be there for ten days actually doing sessions — I don't think a minute went by where I took that for granted. I was really grateful for the opportunity. Last week we recorded some songs for Sweet Pea Atkinson [of Was (Not Was)] for Blue Note at a studio called Vox [formerly Electro-Vox]. You know this place?
I've heard of that.
It's L.A.'s oldest studio. Woody Jackson owns it now. It looks the same as it looked in 1939 when Charlie Parker cut there. It's got a great old Universal Audio console. It's across the street from the Paramount lot. We went to tape for both Greg's album and the Sweet Pea session. I was trying to get it so it didn't sound so literal, clean, and modern. We were A/B-ing against this older music and it hit me: they were bouncing the tracks. So we took the rhythm tracks and bounced it down to a mono track through an old Gates compressor. It's magnificent! It sounds like a record. The engineer did a great job. He said, "I'm taking great notes, so when you want to mix the song..." I said, "What do you mean? We just mixed it! We're going to live with this." I was just so excited. I was playing it all weekend. I was thrilled — it lifted my spirits. It's the great joy of my life, being able to make records. How it happens is you just pursue it relentlessly. Like me, an inordinate number of musicians I know were born around 1952. I attribute that to the fact that when The Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, we were 12 years old. That's just young enough to be dumb enough to say, "I want to do that!" If you were younger, the screaming girls wouldn't look cool, and if you were older, you'd say, "Ah, there's no chance of it." But at 12, you were goofy enough. Really, I never had an alternative. I can't get a job anywhere else. I couldn't. I have no other skills. I just have to make it work.
What was your first experience in a recording studio?
It was probably the Recording Institute of America, but it was an earlier incarnation. I don't remember what it was called. But they taught a class in Detroit at United Sound, on the old Flickinger board. I took the class; I was in my early 20s. It gave me some idea that each of these modules are all the same. You don't have to learn 90 different controls, right? I didn't really learn how to engineer, but I did come out of the class and conned a guy named Jack, who owned a little studio, into thinking I could engineer. I started engineering sessions. This was in the early to mid-'70s. I learned through trial by fire. The very first session I did do was $10 an hour, and the band that came in was called the Amalgamated Funk Co. The lead singer of that band was Harry Bowens, who was later one of the lead singers in Was (Not Was). That's how I met him. But we didn't do a Was (Not Was) record probably for another six or seven years.
So you took to engineering first, and worked your way up?
Yeah. That's how I got into a studio, but I was a musician. I played piano bars, played bass in trios, or any kind of gig I could find, up until I was in my 30s in Detroit. I earned a living on the bar circuit. I put playing in local bars up there with playing in any arena on earth. It was a great period, and a really diverse period. I played with anyone who called me. I used to work with a folk singer named Ted Lucas in Detroit. We had a conga player, a drummer, and I played bass. Somehow we got booked to open for Black Sabbath in Toledo at the Toledo Sports Arena, which was just a bunch of 14- year-old boys on speed. When we came out, this racially mixed folk band, at a Black Sabbath show, we lasted in the ring about a minute and a half before the drummer was bleeding too bad.
That sounds brutal.
It was great, man. I have fond memories of it. I became good buddies with Ozzy [Osbourne]. Just any gigs I could do. I'll still do it. You know who Katharine McPhee is? She's a singer, an American Idol contestant, and is on a TV show called Scorpion as an actress. I was talking to her the other day and said, "Let's just play a gig." We're playing at Vibrato up on Mulholland in a few weeks — just to play.
You played bass on Brian Wilson's recent record, No Pier Pressure, too.
Yeah, I did. That was a trip — I've known Brian for a long time. You can't name any record producers who were ever better than Brian Wilson. There are other great ones, but no one's made better records than he made. It's beautiful to watch him in action and take instructions from him. Just to see him in such good shape, and really be in command in the studio, it's great. It was a beautiful session.
Your documentary on him, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, and the studio sessions in that film were amazing. I thought it was a wonderful, sympathetic way to put the spotlight back on him.
Thank you, man. Music fans hear people say, "Oh, Brian Wilson; he's a genius." But if you put on "Surfin' Safari," you might scratch your head. It's a good record, but... I thought, "Let's focus on his music and actually explain to people why he's arguably the greatest genius in rock 'n' roll history." I think it was a good layman's introduction to Brian. I'm really proud of that endeavor.
I thought it was nice to get him into the studio and tracking those songs to see how he reacts. He just blooms when he's around music.
He really came to life. That movie was shot over the course of a month. Not every day, but a couple weeks went by and we'd shoot some more. Just being around some action and music that sounded good, you can see his spirit is completely altered by the end of the movie. He's speaking differently, more confidently. Yeah, he comes to life when he's making music. There are a lot of guys I know like that. There's a cattle tick that hangs in a tree and lowers its metabolism to one step above death. It doesn't have much free will. The only thing it does is it can sense when a cow is walking directly under it. It can't really steer itself, but it can let go, switch to full metabolism, drop on a cow, get in under the cow's skin, and then do whatever ticks do. I know a lot of musicians like that, who lower their metabolism to just above death until it's time to go out and play, and then they come to life.
You know, as a musician, there's an excitement, and that buzz.
There's nothing like it, man. We just played a Was (Not Was) gig three weeks ago. We haven't played in ten years. We played our first gig together as a band in 1980, and we still set up the same on stage; still the same cats. Man, it feels like home, even if ten years go by. We didn't even have to rehearse much, because muscle memory plays the songs. It was wonderful.
There are a lot of artists that are legacy artists you've worked with over the years, the Rolling Stones being one. You've produced albums with them, as well as the recent reissues. What is it that keeps you working with them?
I keep going with them because they're the greatest band in the world! I've had the privilege of being able to play bass on some of the records, and I've filled in on rehearsals when Darryl Jones isn't around. It took that to fully grasp the magnitude of the thing. The level of interplay, the feeding of ideas, and the musical conversation goes so deep in the Rolling Stones. It's fun to play in the Rolling Stones. They listen intensely, and they're constantly feeding each other ideas and bouncing off each other. It's a really vivid musical experience — it's really alive. There are good bands that are out there, but to get that kind of thing where it becomes a living organism, that's pretty rare. I'll put them up there with the Miles Davis quintet of the '60s — with Herbie [Hancock], Wayne [Shorter], Tony Williams, and Ron Carter — as far as having a language that they speak together, a musical language that just flows, and rolls, and touches people. I'm supremely honored to have been able to spend all this time and work with them for so long.
Do you find yourself mediating between Keith [Richards] and Mick [Jagger]?
Well, that's what a producer does! I think there's a certain DNA code that runs through all bands. There are certain archetypes of band behavior. In many ways they're not that different from the band I was in in sixth grade, where there was tremendous disagreement. Actually that band was way worse than the Stones. We were meaner! People quit.
With less at stake.
That's the thing about the Stones. I think that there's a certain dynamic. If you make records for a long time, and you're a halfway compassionate person, you understand that if you treat musicians with the respect you'd like to be treated with that most of the problems go away. It's only when people feel like they're not being heard, or treated in a disrespectful fashion, that problems occur. I dig being in the studio with the Stones. It never gets old. We did some sessions in December, which I can now tell you because Ronnie Wood already talked about it. Normally I'm not supposed to break the news.
Word gets out too easily these days.
It does. But working with the Stones never gets old. I just sit there and look at who's in the room. It's incredible. When they start playing and get that sound, there's nothing like it. The way we set them up is kind of like the stage. They're all playing together and it's pretty amazing.
Do you find that's an important thing with a lot of musicians? Say a legacy act? Sometimes, by the time you're working with them, they've been forced to work in ways that maybe aren't compatible.
Well, yeah, I think that can happen. The records by guys like Max Martin and Dr. Dre, if I knew how to do that, I would do it. I have tremendous respect for them as record makers and artists who know how to communicate with large numbers of people. That's a great skill, and they're really good at it. I have no attitude at all about how they want to go about making it. I have no judgment at all about people who sit in front of a computer and layer things up. People have made some incredible records with that method. But, personally, I get supercharged out of having a bunch of people sitting around in a circle in a room and not worrying about whether the mics are bleeding into other mics. In fact, I'm encouraging bleed. It actually sounds better when you have as much drums in the vocal mic as you have vocal. Even better if you can do it without headphones. It's hard to do, but I try to get it as real, and put as few barriers between people, as possible whenever I can. Sometimes you've gotta do what you gotta do. It requires that you work with people who can get through a take without fucking up.
When you work with a solo artist, someone like Iggy Pop, are you looking to put a band together to serve the means of tracking?
Yeah. I think casting for the songs is just like directing a movie. If you get the right musicians for the songs, and it might be that if you're doing an Iggy album, not every song requires the same guys. It depends on the song. But if you cast the song properly, it's a lot easier to make a good record. Casting involves not only people who play well, but people who listen. I'm more concerned about that. I think it's really important to pay attention to the singer and find ways to be supportive, but also to allow room for full interpretation. You hear some records where you know the singers weren't there when they cut the track. You just hear it. You hear really great singers that sound like they've been stuffed into a phrasing cage. I don't understand the point of that. When I've assembled a studio band for a singer, I'll pass out chord charts to everybody, and I really like the ones who say, "Let me see the lyrics." How can you play the fucking song if you don't know what it's about? It's not really about the chords. It's about the emotional context. I'll watch for that, and that's a sign that you're working with the right people. "You hold on to the chords. Let me see the lyrics." That's my favorite thing to hear.
It's true. I'll ask people in bands if they know what the lyrics are about, and sometimes they don't know.
Great singers really get into it too. Mick Jagger and I do that a lot. We'll talk about what's happening in the sentence. Is he sad? Is he wistful? Or angry? One of the things Mick Jagger did, that I thought was incredible, was a song on Bridges to Babylon called "Anybody Seen My Baby." It was a hit single. We had that discussion. Is he mad or is he wistful here? Mick said, "Hold on." He had a notebook where he wrote an essay about what happened leading up to where the song begins and what happens after the song ends. It had a real story to it. Even if the listeners didn't know about the backstory, or what was coming after four and a half minutes, by Mick knowing he was able to infuse it with more meaning. I think that's why it was a single.
That's pretty awesome.
It's cool. It was a very impressive thing. Richie Sambora and I made a record [Undiscovered Soul] in the '90s. He's a buddy of mine. It was guitar driven, in the Bon Jovi vein. We heard about a movie that Jerry Bruckheimer was making, Con Air, that was looking for a ballad, so we drove over to see him. We played him the song and he said, "This is a really good song, but I can't use it for my movie. I've got this Celine Dion song temp'ed [temporary scored] in here, and they won't let me use it." I don't know who refused, but he couldn't use the song. It was all synthesizers, and it was a ballad, but texturally it was 180 degrees from where Richie was. We said, "We want this song to be in the movie so bad that we're going to go back and rework the record to match this." Richie and I stayed up for three days, and we did it. We replaced everything with keyboards and tried to get the sounds that Celine had. Then it came time for Richie to do his vocal. I had worked on a movie, The Rainmaker, with Francis [Ford] Coppola and had the privilege of sitting on the set with him. One of the techniques I saw him do was have the actors act out the five minutes leading up to where the scene was [that was being shot]. Improvise, get into the character, and then start the dialog so you're not going from zero to sixty. I said, "You're going to be Nicolas Cage, and I'll be John Cusack. We're going to improvise whatever time it takes leading up to the scene. And then when you're in character, we're going to do the vocal. When you do the vocal, look at the screen and be Nicolas Cage." It was the best vocal on the record. It matched so well. Like I said, we'd been up for three days. We stayed up until 9 o'clock in the morning and drove over to meet Jerry Bruckheimer to ambush him as he was coming into work. He saw us, and was amused by our condition. He played it and said, "All right. I've got to hand it to you. You've done a really good job and you really did cop the feeling of the Celine Dion track. It's just not right for my movie." We were pretty out of our skulls. We said, "You've got three weeks to wrap the movie. There's no way you're going to find a song. We're going to wait you out." Of course the song he got was nominated for an Oscar. It was a Diane Warren song, "How Do I Live."
Yeah. Oh, my god.*
Trisha Yearwood had a hit with it, and LeAnn Rimes had a hit with it. Waiting him out wasn't necessarily the best strategy. However, I stand by the technique of improvising the five minutes before the song starts.
Were you acting it out, doing the dialog?
Yeah, it was just Richie and me. We were at my house, up on Mulholland Drive, at the studio there. It was three o'clock in the morning. Once I said it, I really regretted it. "Now I gotta just abandon all self-consciousness and risk being a shitty actor." He sang the fuck out of it too.
Singing is emotional, but it's also a bit of acting.
Yeah. It's storytelling. You don't have to be lying. Think about somebody like Bonnie Raitt, where half the songs we recorded she didn't write. But she only recorded songs that pertained to her life at that moment, that she could have written. In doing so, it was very easy to infuse it with the truth.
You wouldn't listen to those records and think they were disingenuous.
No, you would not. They weren't. I saw her turn down songs that were hit records. She said, "I can't sing that now. I'm not going to. It's not like my life reality."
With her Nick of Time album, how did that job come to you? That was one of your first big successes as a producer.
Yeah, it was my first real one. Nick of Time and "Love Shack" with The B-52s were done in a month or two, back to back. I went from being a pariah to having gigs.
