Failure's albums Magnified and Fantastic Planet seem to follow a natural progression, in terms of the sonic growth, but your first album, Comfort, is quite a contrast.
Well, Comfort was recorded probably a month after we signed [to Slash], which was probably like 14, 16 months into the life of the band.
With Steve Albini...
Yeah. You had a situation where you had a really green band that had done little or no recording, wasn't very good — I mean, had good ideas — we were really trying. We wanted to be original and be different and have a different sound — but we didn't really have the chops to pull it off, and I wasn't a very good singer. Combined with Steve's kind of dogmatic style of recording, it just didn't work out — I don't think it worked out. It's kind of interesting to hear the record, but as a whole, it wasn't really a success. He does so many bands and he has his way of doing things and he doesn't really change them to accommodate any sort of situation or help out any weaknesses in a band. It's like he does what he does and if it works out and syncs up with your sound, then you get a great record. The one thing that made me want to work with him when I talked to him was that I mentioned two specific records that he had done, Goat by the Jesus Lizard and Pod by the Breeders. And when I mentioned those records, he immediately said, "Those are the two records I'm most proud of."
It doesn't seem to me, just from a listening standpoint, that his approach is very adaptable.
I guess he thinks of himself more as this audio... documentarian or something, where he's just trying to take a picture of what's there, which is fine, and can work sometimes. It's just, I'm not interested in that — I look at the studio as an instrument and I wouldn't want to work with someone like that again. You get to a point and everyone's standing there looking at each other going, "Why does this suck?" It's usually, I think, the producer's job, or even the engineer's job or whoever's got the most experience in the room to go, "Let's try something different." Steve is very good at saying provocative things about recording. It's helped give him his notoriety. I think he likes to fuck with people. It's pretty awesome [when you think about it]: his whole thing — and I think he knows this and pretty much everyone else knows this — is that he enjoys getting attention by what he says. His dogma on recording really plays well with a lot of bands because it's got this like blue collar work ethic. Like if you just work, work, work, it's gonna happen sort of a stance — and bands like that. They want to hear that.
From the credits, it's not clear how much you guys were involved in the mixing.
It's hard to remember exactly... With Steve it's not like you really go in there and say, "Now we're mixing." He thinks mixing is over emphasized. I think, basically, as we finished the last overdub, he just kinda tweaked it for a few minutes and then printed it. Keep in mind this was ten years ago. My memory is a little foggy. I have no idea what he's like now.
And it's difficult for younger bands to even know where they fit into the mixing process.
I just remember there were some really awkward moments where he turned around and went, "That's it — does it sound alright?" and we were just like... we couldn't say anything. [laughs] We just didn't know what to say.
Sure, and you wouldn't have had the vocabulary at that point to even express...
Right, what would we [say]? [laughs] We thought it didn't sound good — we were just kind of hoping, "Well, maybe when we take it home, it'll sound different or something..." It was really hard. I just remember the communication process didn't feel open.
And from there to Magnified?
Greg and I lived in an apartment together and we started demo'ing Magnified, and during the demo process for that record, Robert quit. The demos were pretty good. I think we had an 8-track cassette at that point. I was [really] starting to get into recording at that point. I mean, I had a natural interest in it, but I think the disappointment of Comfort helped push me a little bit. We were working more on the sound of the band and everything. The label really liked the demos and they didn't really seem to care who we were gonna work with. They were just like, "If you beat the demos, we'll be happy." So our manager at the time hooked us up with this guy Paul [Lani], who got what we were doing but it just became one of these things where I guess by the time we were into tracking on that record I was starting to come into my own and I had my ideas on how to record... and engineering and sound and I started to have a pretty firm grip of the way I wanted the band to sound. We started butting heads [about] two or three weeks into it and basically he quit. He walked out pretty much two-thirds of the way through the recording of the record, so I just finished it with the assistant. My technical knowledge was still too low to mix the record, so we got David Bianco [Tape Op #104] to do it, although he had so little time that he mixed I think eight songs because he only had seven days available, and the first day almost got blown out because there was a problem with the board. So we squeaked out eight mixes and there was pretty much no time for any notes of ours, for changes or anything. So when he left, we looked at all his mixes and went, "You know what? He did a really good job on the basics, but we wish the vocal had a special echo here..." and like little bells and whistles that we wanted and little massaging of certain tones and maybe a little bit more automation on certain things [that] weren't there because of his time constraint, so I ended up recalling almost all of his mixes and tweaking them, which isn't credited. But I really was just polishing his work, and I think it's something he would have done had he not been so rushed, but he was literally in-between Tom Petty and Mick Jagger or something like that.
By that point, how much would you say Greg Edwards was helping — consciously or unconsciously — shape your sonic sensibility and vice-versa?
The producing side of it was very much a team effort on both [the later] records. He had a lot of great production ideas all the time, and it worked really well because a lot of times I was literally there working the gear and he would have a bit more distance, like more of a classic producer where you sit in the back, walk in and out of the room...
Then you go from there to setting up Fantastic Planet Studios.
Well, that's just wherever our gear was. That wasn't a real place. For [the third album] — it was really funny — we actually rented a little house up in the hills outside of L.A. from Lita Ford, if you can believe that. What a trip... and she even came by a couple of times. We were holed up there for like nine months — it took us about six months to do Fantastic Planet and then the Replicants album right after.
You didn't have to do any persuading to the label to not have any outside people?
Basically, they knew what had happened on Magnified. They were pretty happy with [it]. They thought it was good, and they knew that I had done a lot of it on my own. They were very supportive about that whole situation. Some bands were starting to do that... the turning point for us was the demos for Magnified — they thought those were good and I think they actually still said, even when Magnified was done that there were a couple of songs that they liked the demos better on, but we didn't so we didn't want 'em on the record. So when we approached them and said, "You know, we don't even want [or need] anyone," they were really fine with it. I think they [allotted] some money in the budget for a mixer, which they didn't end up using. It was really cool of [Slash Records owner] Bob Biggs and Randy Kaye [A&R] to let me do it because that was the record that really launched my whole career as a producer.
Fantastic Planet is very dense.
On certain songs, the rhythm tracks are pretty layered. Sometimes there is just a pair, of literally one mic on one cabinet, one performance on the left and one on the right. Other times it's like two cabinets and an ambient mic [for each] performance with two performances where both mics [per performance] are hard panned, and the ambient mics are panned the opposite way — you know what I mean? — and then maybe even another couple of guitars, another whole pass, but maybe not quite as much mic'ing of a different guitar. Instead of a Les Paul there'd be a Jazzmaster or something. I had a Marshall and I had a Twin with a Big Muff on it and I could switch that on independently. There's something about the Big Muff and Twin which is like this not-very-much-mid- range, lots-of-bottom, fizzy-top, you know, Big Muff sound, with a more cutting Marshall sound... they blended well together, filled each other's gaps. The Marshall pretty much sat inside the Fender. I had this one bathroom in this house that was just awesome for guitar. It was sort of L-shaped and I put the cabinets down in the short end, and then I would put the ambient mic at the end of the long end.
And where in the timeframe does the Replicants album fit into all this?
When we presented our whole idea and budget and Slash decided to make [Fantastic Planet], we told them we had the house, but we didn't. All we had was this rehearsal space, so we bought all the gear and just brought it to this rehearsal space. It just so happened that me and Paul [D'Amour, then bassist in Tool] were hanging out a lot at that time and Chris Pitman was hanging out a lot with us, and me, Greg, Chris and Paul ended up just hanging in our rehearsal space a couple of times right after we bought this gear, and we were just jamming with everyone on different instruments than we would normally play. We were just doing it for fun. I had just gotten the ADATs and was just figuring out, like, what wiring was, and we recorded these demos, and it was a good test for me to just make sure everything was working before we actually rented the house and moved in and were on the clock. I made a cassette — we did like two or three songs, I think — and, it was literally just for fun. I didn't even think that anyone in that — it wasn't even a group — even wanted a copy of it, but Paul and Chris each got a copy. Somehow, Paul was with Tool's A&R guy, Matt Marshall, way after that. We were like in the last month or two of finishing Fantastic Planet, and Matt heard those demos and was freaked out and thought it was awesome. By then he was already a big Failure fan too. He was like, "Why don't you guys just do a one-off record of all covers just like this and Zoo [Entertainment, Tool's label at the time] will put it out?" And we're just like, "How much money you gonna give us?" [laughs] And they gave us some cash, and it just made it worth our while to stay in the house basically, and we knocked it out in like two- and-a-half months. And it was really fun, too. We didn't work that hard on it or that long. We just did it when we felt like it. Paul and Chris didn't move up there. Me and Greg were already living there. The ironic thing is that we delivered that record about three months after we delivered Fantastic Planet, but that record came out like four months after we delivered it, and Fantastic Planet came out eighteen months after we delivered it. The waiting for Fantastic Planet to come out was one of the reasons Failure ended up breaking up. Waiting that long just fucked us up bad. We had put our heart and soul into that record, and by the time it came out, we were just so bummed. Warner Brothers liked it and sort of promoted it for a while, but I don't know, there was already a dark cloud over us by that time. Drug abuse had crept in as well.
How smooth of a transition was it from producing your own stuff to being at the helm for someone else's album, the first time around on Blinker The Star's album, A Bourgeois Kitten?
It didn't seem that difficult to me, especially with Jordan [Zadorozny, Blinker The Star's main songwriter] because we kind of thought alike and we liked each other and we got along pretty well musically, and for the most part the label left us alone and wasn't all over us during the process, so it was good. It generally wasn't that hard. One thing that I think about producing, at least for me, is that I really benefit a lot from having been an artist. Whoever I'm working with, I can see things from their point of view, especially when there's conflicts, I just empathize with them.
Conflicts within the band?
Conflicts in the band, conflicts with me, conflicts with them and the label — wherever they come up. I feel their pain 'cause I've usually experienced it. At the end of the day, they're the ones [whose] whole lives are riding on that record, and I think a lot of producers who haven't come at it from the artist point of view don't really see that. 'Cause to them it's just a gig that they're working on right now and it's gonna go away in a few months.
In your opinion, what should the role of a producer be?
