| wwittman wrote on Tue, 22 July 2008 17:38 |
| Bernardo wrote on Tue, 22 July 2008 18:35 |
The task of record production is a foggy enough notion to make it difficult to put a price on (as in: what exactly am I paying for?), hence this discussion, I guess.
|
Spend one day in the studio with Mike Chapman, and it's not a 'foggy notion' at all anymore.
|
Though i'm just going on the job that he's done on records--the end result, with no personal experience with his ways of doing things--I agree. I believe that you thought negatively of Material Issue, but Mike had really done an excellent job on Freak City Soundtrack. He really got the band's potential out of them. I'm not as fond of the albums before, and the one after it "Telecommando Americano" was a disappointment to say the least, coming off FCS.
Jim had always set out to sell lots of records. That's cool. In that sense, Mike Chapman did a great job in theory. I think that it's one of the few albums that deserved sales, just because of the power and enthusiasm of the writing, and the production values. Everything was in line for mass success with that one, iI think, in theory. Unfortunately--and here's where the sales aspect comes in--you can make brilliant albums as in the case with that (Kevin Shirley engineered it, too)--and then the record can still fall flat on it's face. Now it's a legend of "what might have been". I'm not saying it's right, but labels and bands can invest tons of money into things and then you're still at the mercy of the record buying public, just to see what they react to and what they don't react to. Mike Chapman probably found out that, even though it was 1994 and the heyday of Blondie and Sweet and Suzi Quatro records was long gone, that he was as much at odds of producing the next should be surefire hit as anyone else may have been.
Do I think that, in cases like that, where a producer takes a band so magically to the next level, that both band and producer deserve it? Sure. But as we know, sales are no way really to judge the quality of something other than the fact that it's popular and that's that, and that
someone has to foot that tab for productions that otherwise indicated a best seller. Even a band like Big Star, like "Record #1", most of us can agree that it's produced brilliantly and that it deserved to have big sales. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. Even well produced albums are slaves to the promo juggernaut and whether audiences like (or even get to hear) the recording.
When you want to elevate bands from cult status or the level of where they're considered successful on an independent level (MI's first album hit the Billboard chart, and with Jeff Murphy producing, it still was their most successful, ironically, not Mike Chapman's record)--to big major sales--it becomes a task for any band or any producer to go from a couple or a few thousand or maybe ten thousand copies being a success, to resonating with a larger fanbase to sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions of copies. Just think of how difficult it was for U2 and REM to make that transition, as they became bigger....the game changes a wee bit when you have a reputation and then wonder whether sticking more to your original sound will get you further, or whether you start to tweak it a bit, follow trends, etc.
Edit: I found this Mike Chapman quote (on Blondie's "Parallel Lines"):
| Quote: |
There's loads of hits, it's a great album, but who gives a fuck. It's easy, you see. When we go into the studio, we go in and make hit records, and it just happens. We don't think about it. If you're going to be in the music business, you gotta make hit records. If you can't make hit records, you should fuck off and go chop meat somewhere.
|
That made me laugh....but he's right. I think that when you're a producer, the pressure's on to make hits, because really, the guys at the top of the label really only know pie charts and whether something's selling and bands sort of just become a liability or a tax writeoff or whatever. I think that it stopped being about people, but that's understandable when they've got to float a profit. I know this will swing this discussion in a weird way, but what do people think of this quote? What if you're not producing hits and maybe backing off the Auto Tune or slammed compression or limiting, but otherwise getting a great sound and record out of a band that the industry doesn't promote and/ or falls through the cracks?
To a certain extent, I think that there's alot of producers and guys that have worked well with bands to try to get more out of them in an honest way, that have been met with disdain or outright contempt by the labels, you know, "no hits= bad production" or something. I think that's as equal an extreme to the "no producer= bad production" argument in which point it tries to validate or devalidate production in terms of records sold, as opposed to artistic integrity
with a producer still at the helm. I think that's a diametrically opposed viewpoint at this point, but i've heard tons of great
produced albums that have sold squat, and I don't think that's the producer's fault. But you wonder what the record company would say, they'd shelled out for studio time at Ocean Way and a big skilled producer and the album still sold nothing. I keep on bringing up Chainsaw Kittens, but really, it's a pretty unique example--"Flipped Out In Singapore" was produced by Butch Vig
post "Nevermind", and it's undoubtedly the worst selling album that he's produced. It sounds great though, great album. The labels gave the band the budget to mix at said Ocean Way with big name producer for the followup (John Agnello) recording "Pop Heiress", which also sold nothing--but it was well done, I loved it, still do. So I wouldn't underestimate the audience for not caring about production and/ or bands.....the labels can't say that they didn't give audiences the chance to hear great smaller bands with big league production and have them not buy the albums.
The other best example that I can think is Dig--for their first album, they had Dave Jerden producing and it sold somewhat, but never anything--despite buzz bin MTV exposure--that really
sold records. Album two, "Defenders Of The Universe" (in which Brian Kehew gets a thanks) was mixed by Tom Lord Alge. Album three was produced by Sylvia Massey, and done at Ocean Way. Now some people are probably thinking "who the hell are Dig?", and that's my point.....they got MASSIVE budgets to make albums that didn't sell. They had some good stuff, but no matter how big sounding the albums were, they didn't really sell, and they can't claim that they never got the proper shot at making big albums. The albums sounded great though, and I don't think anyone's going to accuse Dave Jerden, Tom Lord Alge or Sylvia Massey or Ocean Way not having sold records in the past.
Author
Topic: producers want publishing, not points these days (Read 53160 times)