Slapping The Band Into Shape
The amount of work that Mixerman, "Willy Show" and Fingaz perform to make Bitch Slap sound halfway decent is staggering.
Willy obviously was a man that wanted a record with some feel. If he didn't, we'd have gone into Alsihad ["alls I had", Mixerman's mocking term for Pro Tools, his digital recording platform] already. The editing jobs would take entire days, and everything--including the guitars, bass and vocal, would be chopped up, tuned and put together again like a chicken nugget--which, in many cases, is reconstituted. That is the way many, many of today's rock records are made.That's a brilliant observation. With music, and especially musical production, sometimes less truly is more. But to make a less than competent group like Bitch Slap (who based on Mixerman's descriptions clearly lacks the collective vibe of an early U2) compete in the big leagues, Mixerman puts in an enormous amount of production work and studio trickery--and ultimately ends up replacing one of their musicians with a veteran studio musician, a fairly common practice in L.A.If U2 were to put out Boy [their first album] today, I contend that record would have been a sterile piece of s**t. They really weren't great players back then. But U2 had a vibe, and they were innovative, and the fact that they weren't great players made the music all the more alive. Today, a young U2 band would have more than likely been destroyed by a producer and his Alsihad, that is, if they ever got signed at all.
In The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, author Mark Lewisohn illustrated that at least until the end was nigh, George Martin ran a surprisingly tight ship in the studio, and his discipline paid off with some of the most incredible pop music ever made. While Led Zeppelin was infamous for their outrageous hijinks and destruction (often self-destruction) on the road, in the studio, Jimmy Page said that he too was an extremely disciplined producer, and for the most part, the sessions he oversaw ran like clockwork. In contrast, the Bitch Slap sessions illustrate months of pulling teeth and ego clashes with a band that doesn't seem to understand how much of their career is riding on the success--or lack thereof--of the record they're making.
A Few Minor Flaws
Is this a perfect book? Not quite: The language is very salty, but then, that's no doubt an accurate reflection of what transpires in recording studios. And while I'm sure he did some editing in transforming it from an electronic medium to print, it appears that Mixerman largely ran with his online diary almost verbatim. He could have used some additional editing to tighten the narrative in places.
Article comments
1 - Jim Carruthers
I followed Mixerman's site until it trailed off, where does the book end?
My favourite observation from the original posts was that it is much cheaper to treat a band like millionaires than it is to make them millionaires.