Buddahead » Crossing the invisible line

I still remember the call. It was a Sunday afternoon and the sun was shining. London was gorgeous that day and I was depressed because I was cooped up in the small bedroom of my London flat, thinking as hard as I could about what I wanted to study for my doctorate. My degree was in English Literature but was teachers had warned me not to continue with English unless I planned on becoming a teacher. I did not. My masters was in Marketing Strategy which bored me too death. Still, I was not ready for the real world. Student life was great: cheap loans, cheap life, and the opportunity to keep making music without having to commit to the life of being a musician which often played out in one of two ways. For a very few stardom, glitz, and money; but for the majority absolutely nothing but heartache and poverty. I did not want to be the old guy busking on the bakerloo line.

That was when the phone rang and a high pitched voice said, “Hey! This is Jimmy Iovine. I am looking for Buddahead”.

The voice sounded so fake that I thought it was friend scamming me. So, I did what any one in my shoes should do and I hung up the phone. About an hour later Merck, Buddahead’s then manager, called to say that Jimmy Iovine had been trying to reach me and that I should call him.

I know of Jimmy Iovine. I knew him mostly as the producer of U2’s Rattle and Hum. That afternoon when I called him back I discovered that he ran one of the most powerful music empires in the world (Interscope, Geffen, A&M) and what he wanted more than anything else in the world was to sign me.

“I have heard your demos and I know there are lots of guys who want to sign you, and they are all good guys, but I don’t want to open up a magazine next year and read about your record being amazing. I want it to be on my label”. That is what he actually said and with that we agreed to meet in LA the following week.

The following week Merck and I turned up to Jimmy’s office in Santa Monica. No windows. That struck me as strange. Then again rumor had it that some people wanted him dead. Our meeting happened to be the day of the Grammy awards and Jimmy’s office was packed with stars. While we sat there R. Kelly came in and left, Jacob Dylan of the Wallflowers came in, sat down, and left. Then Jimmy played us the new Eminem single.

“Isn’t it amazing?. It’s going to be a huge single for us.” He looked at me and then leaped onto his chair. “So you are going to play for me right?”

That is what I did. I grabbed my acoustic guitar and played When I fall and Take it all away.

“Wow. You know if I were still producing I would produce this record. But I am not producing anymore. You know what you should do? This is what I did with Bono. I gave him an SM57 and told him to sing in the monitor room. That is what works for him. I bet you will sound great like that. I love these demos. Maybe we just keep them. You know when we were making rattle and Hum the band had these songs they had recorded in their studio in Ireland and no matter how hard I tried to re-make them better, the demos just sounded better. So, what are you looking for? What do I have to do to make you sign with me?”

What a question. I knew I couldn’t say write me a big check. Though I wish I had. The first semi-intelligent that came to my mind was, “I am not looking for a record deal. I am looking for a mentor”

With that he got up from his seat, shook my hand, and said, “I would love to be your mentor. I am not sure if you need much from me though. This stuff is really good. But you know when I was working with Tom Petty the only think I said to him was that he should add a keyboard to his sound”. He then left the room and headed off to the Grammy’s.

Pst…if you haven’r realised all NSFW photos are photoshoped

I could write a whole lot more about Jimmy Iovine the record executive. Now is not the time though. This entry is about record producers and Jimmy Iovine is what I categorize as the middle man. His strength is truly not as a musical force. His strength is his phone, his paiger, his contacts, his friends and colleagues, and his power to get them to do what he wants them to do.

Think of the middle man as a musical broker. When Jimmy was trying to musically guide the making of Crossing the invisible line he would call me randomly with strange requests. Some of my favourites are:

“Hey Buddahead. How about you use the guitar player from Linkin Park?” but why Jimmy – Don Gilmore produced their record and actually played a lot of the guitars himself.

“Hey Buddahead. How about you use the guitar player from Limp Bizkit?” but why Jimmy, you already sent me to meet Wes and only his wife turned up

“Hey Buddahead. You should sound more like Harry Nielson.” But why Jimmy, okay if you insist I will rip off “Without you” and call it “Outside”.

“Hey Buddahead. You should sound more like dashboard confessional.” Who?

“Hey Buddahead. You should sound more like Coldplay.” I already do though!!

“Hey Buddahead. You should sound more broken”. What does that mean?

“Hey Buddahead. You should produce with Brian Eno” but Jimmy you just begged us to work with Don Gilmore.

“Hey Buddahead. You should scrap all of this and remix the demos with Andy Wallace” but Jimmy Andy already said that the demos are awful and sound like they were recorded in a tumble dryer

At the end of each and every one of these calls Don Gilmore and I would sit in the studio perplexed. What we needed was a translation book, a Jimmy Iovine dictionary. But that is what Jimmy does. That is what middle men producers do. They produce more like movie producers than music producers. They inject the money, throw a million ideas out, if one sticks then they will facilitate it. Any if you don’t take in their ideas you will suffer. They are mercurial in attention span.

On the other hand, if you are the lucky recipient of the master idea, if you are Tom Petty and you realize you need the keyboards; if you are Eminem and you realize you need Dre, if you are 50 Cent and you realize you need Eminem, if you are Gwen Stefani and you realize you don’t need a band, or even if you are U2 and you realize all you need is Bono, then the stars have aligned and the Iovine machine is in over load, and soon you will find an entire building worth of people (including the parking attendant) bowing at you.

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Many years ago, through a chance connection, a crap demo of an even more rubbish song I had written, ended up in the hands of a manager named Ian Wright. Ian who had passed the song around to a bunch of his producers, who had somehow miraculously reported to him that I had talent, had decided to sign me on as developing artist.

One day Ian and me were sitting in his Notting Hill office listening to my usual run of the mill rubbish, when Ian gave me a press copy of Achtung baby and said, “Steve (Lillywhite) just finished this and when we heard it we were all like holy shit. I think you’ll like this one”.

“Ian, why don’t you hook me up with Steve Lillywhite?” I asked.

“Nah, you don’t want to do that. Steve can make your record sound great but he can’t make it into a hit. You need to write that first and then give it your sound, he’ll then just make it sound great”.

Back then, of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. I was knee high to a chicken and thought my musical droppings where ultimately brilliant. In many ways I saw that as Ian denying me the opportunity to work with Steve, something that hurt me and ultimately led to the end of our working relationship.

Ian was right of course. Steve Lillywhite is a captor and what captors do is capture the essence of a band that has their songs, and has their sound, but needs to make sure their essence is not lost in the mechanics of the recording studio.

Steve Lillywhite has during his incredible carrier produced tons of great albums for bands such as U2 and Dave Matthews Band (including the famous Lillywhite sessions after which the band and Steve split and DMB for the most part lost the art of capturing their magic in a studio). If Steve would have only produced my album the ky would have been the limit. I would have formed a super band with Bono and Dave, been as cool as Jason Mraz and Chris Cornell….a boy can dream, can’t he…

Not so long ago I was sitting in Pete Glenister’s studio in London, working on Ashes, when we started talking about Steve (Steve and Pete have a long history). The conversation began with Pete mentioning to me that he had played Ruin to Steve. Steve had really liked it and had made a comment about how much he liked my voice, and asked to be sent a CD of my music. Steve was at that moment in time working at Columbia Records as an A&R manager.

Again, I jumped on the opportunity and said to Pete, “why don’t you ask Steve if he wants to produce this album with us?”

“Nah, not sure if he is right really. Steve is great at getting a band that has their sound and capturing them in the studio. I am much better at understanding what a singer/songwriter is all about. He just doesn’t get it.”

This time the older and wiser Raman knew exactly what Pete meant. Steve had just won a grammy for his most recent work on U2’s “How to dismantle an atomic bomb” and had produced really rubbish albums for Jason Mraz and Chris Cornell. Pete was right, but then again he is rarely wrong.

A few weeks later Steve Lillywhite called. He had received his copy of the Buddahead material and he invited me to meet with him at his office at Columbia Records. Armed with my copies of the Steve Liilywite produced albums I wanted him to sign I arrived at this office.

“You are a tart,” Steve said to me as he signed the album covers, “Shall we listen to some music?”

Steve looked entirely different to what I had imagined the great British producer who had produced so many cool albums would look like – he looked, well, to put it mildly quite Hollywood. Bleach blonde hair and chiclet white teeth. I stared at him while he played his air guitar along to a song from “Crossing The Invisible Line” called Strong.

“I love it mate. This is fab. So, I have an idea, can you write a song for Aerosmith?”

WHAT? WHAT THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT?

“What kind of Aerosmith song?” I asked politely.

By then Steve was half way out of his office. He turned around hurriedly and said, “Anything. I need a new single for their greatest hits album”.

Ian Wright and Pete Glenister had both been right. Steve was not right for me. He got my music but not my essence. He didn’t know what to do with me. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the rule is that a singer/songwriter can never work with a Captor; but before you do you have to meet a very basic requirement: You must be really developed in your writing and performance, and confidence. So much so in fact that all you need is for your producer to figure out how to capture your essence.

A great case and point for this is the relationship between Andy Wallace and Jeff Buckley when they were working on Grace together. One night Andy and I were sitting in his studio listening to mixes he had done for Crossing the invisible line when somehow we started talking about his work with Jeff Buckley. That is when he told me the story of how Hallelujah was recorded. These are Andy’s words, pretty much word for word as he recounted the story. They have been ingrained in my mind:

“I knew that Jeff played a lot of shows around the city and he was really good live, and that everyone talked about his live performance. So, every night after we finished recording I would invite a bunch of people to the studio to sit around and watch Jeff perform. I would set him up like he was sitting on stage and then while he played I would just have the record button pressed. The album version of Hallelujah is just one of those performances. One night he just nailed it”.

So the lesson of this story is if you are an artist, and you really honestly have your songs and sound together but something is lost in translation when you record in a studio then you may benefit from a captor. Captors are not there to make you sound good from a technical point of view; they are the ones who capture the essence. Still, not every artist who is great is great because of his or her essence. Sometimes there is no essence to capture. From Chris Cornell to Jason Mraz, there is no essence. Essence is that identifying factor that no other artist or group of artists can recapture except for the one artist or the one band (and their captor). Think Dave Matthews Band, think U2: It is exactly that combination of musicians with that producer that make that sound happen.

Tags: A&R Manager, Achtung Baby, Aerosmith, air guitar, Andy Wallace, Bono, british Producer, Buddahead, buddahead ashes, Buddahead Ruin, Buddahead Strong, CHris Cornell, Columbia Records, Crossing the invisible line, Dave Matthews Band, DMB, How to dismantle an atomic bomb, Ian Wright, Jason Mraz, Jeff Buckley, Jeff Buckley Grace, Jeff Buckley Hallelujah, Lillywhite sessions, Music producers, Navigating shark filled waters, Pete Glenister, singer/songwriter, Steve Lillywhite, The Captors, U2
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