We are fortunate to have a number of folks here on the SDMB with a vast wealth of knowledge about popular music. Yet as far as I can tell, there hasn’t yet been a thread devoted to record production.
As you know, though producers work behind the scenes, they have the potential to leave an indelible stamp on a song. Understanding what they’ve brought to the table adds a new dimension to appreciating the music.
(The subject’s been on my mind after re-reading the book Sonic Alchemy: Visionary Music Producers and Their Maverick Recordings. This book is chock-full of great stories about producers like George Martin, Phil Spector, and Willie Mitchell and how they worked with their artists to spin gold. It also covers a few forgotten but groundbreaking producers like Curt Boettcher.)
I’d love to hear who you think are the best producers, or which albums/songs you think are particularly well produced, and what makes them so. And I’m interested in examples you might cite of different approaches to production – because there seem to be a thousand different ways to play the role of producer. Any and all observations about record production in modern music – pop, rock, R&B, and such – are welcome!
I will recommend the HBO documentary “The Defiant Ones” that goes into a lot of details about the career of Jimmy Iovine, who worked with a bunch of musicians, including Springsteen, Patti Smith, Meatloaf, Tom Petty, etc.
As for producers, I’ve always thought that Brian Eno is one of the best. I have no musical background, though, other than listening to it.
Not one of my favorites, Jeff Lynne had a tendency to build up walls of keyboards around songs, which tended to give them a tad too much gloos. It’s notable that after the first Traveling Wilburys album, which he coproduced as well as performed on, he would man the boards for the new records by Roy Orbison and Tom Petty (he’d already produced George Harrison’s Cloud Nine) a year earlier. Petty’s record was great, though definitely shinier and glossier than his previous work. Bob Dylan was the only Wilbury to not avail himself of Lynn as producer: his next record (Oh Mercy) was helmed by Daniel Lanois, and was a big critical success after a string of solo duds.
As for a great producer I’d cite Martin Hannett, the in-house genius at Factory Records. When recording the first Joy Division album, I’ve read that instead of just miking the drum set as a whole, he would have Stephen Morris hit only one drum at a time and then Hannett would stitch the tracks together. For the small amount of reverb and overlap this eliminated, it contributed a lot to the spaciness and desolate feel of the record.
Joe Meek is probably the only producer whose entire oeuvre I’ve made a point of listening to. A true DIY genius whose records were the prototype for much of the hard and prog rock that followed years later. “Telstar” kind of overshadows a lot really groundbreaking work in the mid-1960s,
Quincy Jones. Anyone who can produce Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer, Rufus w/ Chaka Kahn, and Frank Sinatra (among others) and put together We Are the World is pretty damn high on any list.
In early 2019, his single sales were tallied by The Hollywood Reporter to be at over $135 million.[7] According to Variety, his net worth was approximately $260 million in 2017. The previous year his corporate entity generated revenue of $54 million, with a profit of $19 million.[8]
Heh, “record producer” is such a squishy category. It ranges from the guy who wrote the song, set up all the mics, played and recorded all the parts and then also mixed the thing himself; to the guy who’s main job is to keep the label off the musicians’ backs and let them actually make a decent record; and then even further to the guys who will potentially ruin the record trying to deliver something commercial or put their own stamp on the band’s music.
Probably my favorite producer of old is Tom Wilson. He and Andy Warhol took the heat from MGM, allowing The Velvet Underground to make two of my favorite records. Wilson also did normal producer-ish things like helping arranging things like “Sunday Morning” on the first record. With VU committing to doing things such as doing only one live take on “Sister Ray” on White Light/White Heat, there wasn’t so much for him to do on the second record. He also did normal production jobs, but I’ve heard his greatest skill was just bringing the right people together and keeping the band motivated.
I’m also a big fan of Steve Albini mentioned above. He’s a guy who basically progressed from doing the whole thing himself with early Big Black records to producing Big Black records when they were a several member band, and then to producing pretty much anyone who will pay his quoted rate. He also prefers the title “Engineer”, because he’s not into making your record reflect him, he’s into trying to make the record you want to make, and recording it faithfully.
One of my least favorite producers is Tom Werman. His production of Cheap Trick’s In Color and Heaven Tonight seems like he was actively trying to take all enjoyment and excitement out of the music. Like most of the records produced by him, I like them despite his production if I like them at all. When you listen to the same songs on At Budokan, it’s pretty easy to hear how he was strangling the life out of them.
I don’t know if you can call them “normal” production jobs, they were groundbreaking records after all, but that’s exactly what he did on Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” and of course in the legendary session for “Like A Rolling Stone”.
No, I normally think about a “normal” production job as helping with arrangements, having a final say in the mix, making something that the label or the band (whoever is paying) wants, things like that. Mr. Wilson’s job on that record seems to simply be one of his best jobs at feeling out at what the musician wanted to do and assembling the correct team to make that happen. Probably my favorite Dylan album, in fact. That was an extraordinary production job, similar to being smart enough to shield VU from the label intruding in the music they were making.
But I imagine that he didn’t do that kind of work for someone like Sun Ra (and to be fair, he owned the label, personally picking the artist kind of counts as a producer credit). That seems like a “set up the mics and see what they make” situation for the most part.
That guy [Steve Albini] doesn’t know anything about production. He might be the second-worst producer of a great record after Jimmy Iovine, who totally fucked up [Bruce Springsteen’s] Darkness on the Edge of Town. It sounds like Bruce is in a fucking shoe box full of tissue paper.
That fascinates me, because in most cases, I wouldn’t have the ears to listen to a recording and find fault specifically with the production (as opposed to the performance).
I’m a fan of the trio of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman.
The music they produced in the late ‘80s with artists like Kylie Minogue, Sinitta, Jason Donovan, and most famously Rick Astley is some of my favorite pop music. They also worked with the already mentioned Donna Summer, including producing her 1989 album Another Place and Time. Her song I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt from that album is, IMHO, their best work, even topping Astley’s Together Forever. It’s a shame that era was so short lived.
Rick Rubin certainly deserves mention here, especially for his work with Johnny Cash. Ted Templeman as well for his work with The Doobie Brothers and Van Halen.
Rubin’s work for Johnny Cash was phenomenal, he got the best recordings of his career, a long career with many great records, out of Cash in the last few years of his life. But my favorite Rick Rubin produced album is “Wildflowers” by Tom Petty. The two Jeff Lynne produced albums before, “Full Moon Fever” and “Into The Great Wide Open” had been very good records, but you know, every Jeff Lynne production sounds alike, and he did produce a lot at that time, and you could easily get sick of his sound. After that, “Wildflowers” was a breeze of fresh air, it sounded dry, modern, powerful, engaging and straightforward, without any production gimmicks. It’s still my favorite Tom Petty album. Rubin did similar things for other established bands (ZZ Top, AC/DC).
