The Producer

The place for any artist, reckoned Sam Shepard, is in the middle of a contradiction. Record producer Michael Beinhorn is a case in point. The architect of an impressive number of multi-platinum, Grammy-winning rock records (a CV that includes the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Mother’s Milk, Soul Asylum’s Grave Dancer’s Union, Soundgarden’s Superunknown, Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals, Hole’s Celebrity Skin and Korn’s Untouchables, plus stints with Ozzy Osbourne and Aerosmith), the accomplished nature of Beinhorn’s production jobs might lead the listener to believe him an advocate of state-of-the-art technology, when in fact he’s savagely critical of modern recording methods – not to mention the machinations of the major labels that bankroll such projects.

Plus, Beinhorn’s tastes are more wide-ranging than his A-list clientele might suggest. He’s also worked with a plethora of avant garde types, from Brian Eno to the Golden Palominos to John Zorn, and he played a major role in the construction of jazz-veteran Herbie Hancock’s groundbreaking electro-breakbeat ‘Rockit’ single in the mid-80s. In the process of midwifing a brace of Nona Hendryx albums, Beinhorn also found himself overseeing rhythm maestros such as Chic’s Nile Rodgers and reggae legend Sly Dunbar.
“I’ll be honest with you man,” he says, “when I was working with those guys I was a kid, and I think on some of those records I was just happy and lucky to be there. Someone like Sly Dunbar just knows what to play, you don’t even need to talk to him about it. I mean, he’ll show you a beat and you go, ‘Ooof!’”
In person Beinhorn is by turns articulate, self-deprecating, and the archetypal straight-talking New Yorker. Although he started out on the downtown scene playing keyboards with Bill Laswell’s jazz-rock combo Material in the early 80s (“I hated playing! I sucked!”), he considers himself above all a listener. When hotpress meets the producer for a mineral water in the Library Bar in the Central Hotel, he’s recovering from a late night session at the end of a six-week stint in Dublin recording Mullingar’s The Blizzards.
“I like it here,” he explains. “It seemed like it would be creatively very stimulating, and on top of all that I heard some songs that those guys did and I thought they showed immense promise. I’ve done a lot of very big records with very, very large budgets and the whole thing starts to get a similar ring to it, you start going down the same paths. And honestly, I’ve got very little experience working with new bands.”

Peter Murphy: Very early on in your career you were already working with people of the calibre of Brian Eno on the 1982 Ambient 4: On Land album. What did you learn from him?
Michael Beinhorn: A lot of good stories! I have to be honest, to a certain extent his first three solo records are the reason I got into this. When I was 13 I was looking through Rolling Stone magazine and I saw an ad for Here Come The Warm Jets, and something about the way he looked made me go out cold and buy this record. I got it home, and the experience was akin to dropping acid at that point, I mean it just completely altered my sense of reality right there, and I was like: “I don’t know what this is! This is Martian for Chrissakes!”
I had a similar feeling when I first saw the video for Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ from the Future Shock album, which you also produced. Between Afrika Bambaataa and the Ze label stuff, there were a lot of groundbreaking singles out at that time, post-punk and ethnic and dance music all engaged in some weird process of cross-pollination.
That’s one of the things that was great about being in New York at the time. The downtown people mixed with the hip hop people, the jazz people mixed with the punk people, it was one big mish-mash and people forgot who they were. Everyone was obviously trying to be cooler than everyone else and suck their cheeks in and be a little too thin for their own health, but it was an incredible time. And at the risk of sounding sentimental, I do miss that. It was amazing to hear the stuff the hip hop guys were listening to, and a lot of the white guys were just obsessed with all kinds of obscure jazz stuff. I mean that was your pedigree: “Listen to this Albert Ayler record,” or “Listen to this Pharoah Sanders record.” I feel as if people don’t really wanna let their guard down now anymore.
The music business, particularly radio, seems so overly formatted now, there’s no place for those kinds of mutants.
The form has been perverted into something bordering on dire, it’s completely lost its edge. I mean, what’s funny to me is people doing songs where there’s no innuendo involved anymore, they’re straight up talking about fucking or blowing each other’s brains out and doing all sorts of horrible shit to each other, and that gets played on Top 40 radio, and it’s laughable to me cos it’s not pornographic in the least, it’s a bunch of kids – even if they’ve actually seen this stuff first hand – basically showing how big their dicks are. That’s the currency of the day: “Look what a bad-ass I am – now buy the clothes that have my name on it.” I mean, that’s not even shit, that’s absolutely nothing.
The Chili Peppers’ Mother’s Milk album was a breakthrough for you and for the band. Up to that point they’d collaborated with producers who looked good on paper – Andy Gill from the Gang Of Four and George Clinton – but the sessions you did seemed to capture their live dynamic on tape for the first time.
I think it had an awful lot to do with the quality of the songwriting, and that was due in no small part to having John Frusciante in the band, that was his first record with them. That was crazy for him, ’cos he was a little kid and all of a sudden he’s in his favourite band in the world, that’s gonna do someone’s head in, but he contributed quite a bit. The first single was one of his songs, ‘Knock Me Down’. You could see with him in the band they were destined for great things. Whoever is the guitar player is the determining factor between whether they’re gonna make a good record, a great record or just an okay record. They’ve got several speeds to ’em. But he’s an exceptional songwriter, really talented all the way round.
You then went on to do the Violent Femmes’ Why Do Birds Sing? which, sandwiched between the Chilis and Soundgarden, seems like the odd one out.
Working with them definitely had its ups and downs. I was pleased with the record, but the experience wasn’t my favourite recording, let’s put it that way.
Reading Gina Arnold’s book Route 666 – On The Road To Nirvana and Michale Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, I’m amazed by how many bands from the 80s American underground such as The Meat Puppets and The Replacements and Husker Du were making astonishing records on shoestring budgets.
Fucking amazing records. They’re just remarkable. I mean those are bands that made records that are so absolutely profound, they just fucked you up. Zen Arcade, I can’t listen to that record it’s so good. Husker Du had a song called ‘Pink Turns To Blue’, one of the most depressing songs I ever heard, I was like, “That’s the best song I’ve heard in years, but I can’t listen to it again because all it makes me want to do is jump out a fuckin’ window.” And those are the kind of records that people should be making right now. Not stylistically, not musically, but that kind of feeling, that emotion, that’s what we need. We don’t need this bullshit pop whatever-the-fuck that every single band is making. We need something that’s got some fuckin’ soul and some guts, where people who are making records aren’t afraid and just simply don’t care.
Here’s my pet peeve with modern rock production…
Alright, what’s that?
Even with so-called punk or ‘alternative’ rock records, nobody seems interested in capturing an actual performance anymore. Instead you get a simulacrum of a live take chopped up and edited and corrected by computer. There are none of the magical mistakes that give a record real character.
I got a two-word term for you: Pro-Tools. You know, there are things about having digital editing that are fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it would be nice from my perspective to deal with more bands who are actually able to play, and also to work on records where time isn’t of the essence so badly that you really do need to edit, as opposed to whipping a band into shape.
But the degree to which people use the technology, and the fact that they’ve lost their essential understanding of how musicians are meant to play together, and how when drums are gridded up to sixteenth notes inside some digital recording system…human beings never ever play like that, they don’t. Even if a guy can play right on a click, he still doesn’t sound the same as someone whose drums are lined up to a click inside Pro-Tools. Never did, never will. It doesn’t matter how solid this guy is, every hit is gonna be different, and that’s one of the things that makes live performance superior, and that’s why the music that people make now sounds so canned. And they just stick a vocal through this tuning programme, they don’t even find an individual note that’s driving them crazy and tune that, or have the guy drop in on it so they can get the note more in tune – it’s like, run it through this tuning algorithm: done.
It’s weird how so many of these ‘rock’ records sound like they’ve been produced by pop svengalis.
My daughter said to me several years ago, she was listening to this Britney Spears record and this other band, it might have been Hoobastank or someone, and she said, “The vocals all sound like the same person is doing it.” And I said, “Honey, you know why? It’s because they’re all being tuned electronically.” Music now is a cyborg, a fusion of man and machine, with the emphasis on machine, because it’s made not by musicians but technicians. Technical people make the records, not recordists. And there’s a big difference.
When I listen to Exile On Main Street or Funhouse, it’s clear there’s a reason why those records have continued to exist as living breathing organisms.
Fuckin’ right there’s a reason. Because those are moments in time that were captured beautifully. The one rule about making records is that there are no rules, never were, and that’s one of the reasons that I take such great offence and umbrage at the way people make records now. The Iggy record that you mentioned, the way those records were recorded, the technique is abysmal, it’s unsophisticated and horrible, those records are some of the shittiest sounding records of all time, and you know what? They’re amazing. Incredible. It doesn’t matter how poorly they recorded it because they basically said, “This is us, this is how we’re gonna do it, you figure it out.”
At the other end of the spectrum, Hole’s Celebrity Skin, which you produced, was an incredibly lush and polished sounding record.
I’m very proud of that record. I felt in many respects it encapsulated more of Courtney’s personality than a lot of other work that she did, which sorta wore its heart on its sleeve. Y’know, she’s a straight up fuckin’ screamer, a fuckin’ punk rock chick singer making these tough records, but the thing is, on that record she was trying so hard to be a pop artist and clean up her image and walk the straight and narrow, and you could feel her personality was just struggling, just fighting to get out, and she’s trying to rein in this fantastic mess that’s her life. Like she’s just a fuckin’ train wreck presented in this beautiful frame. I just love the juxtaposition of that on that record, and I love the lyrics on it, she really rose to the occasion.
Those songs capture the mythology of Los Angeles perfectly, from The Black Dahlia and Chinatown to The Runaways and Fleetwood Mac.
It definitely had that. I always felt the record was more about her personally, she’s such a narcissist that inevitably she can’t help herself. I think there’s a failsafe switch in Courtney’s personality that will prohibit her from being focused. She can’t focus, it’s impossible. She’s got ADD or whatever the fuck you want to call it up the ass.
How do you get a performance out of someone with that kind of personality?
Every artist like her has their own unique capability that makes them great. You can always somehow find a way to get what they do onto a recording, you just have to know what it is. And late enough into the recording I realised that Courtney, who was trying so hard to be an actress, which involves obviously doing a lot of repititious work, only had one take in her. We did guide vocals for every single song on that record, and we did them all in about a day and a half. And we spent months redoing vocals, and at one point I remember a lightbulb just went off in my head and I went back to her guide vocals, and everything that I was looking for, the heart of the record, was right there, and 70 to 80% of the vocals that we wound up using were the result of her guides. I pointed this out to her and she was not very happy about it, but after a while she sort of saw the humour in it and she was like, “Well, when I worked with Milos Forman he always called me the ‘Queen of the First Take’.” After the first take, that was it.
Butch Vig said the same thing about Kurt Cobain – a maximum of three takes and then his voice would be blown for the day.
The way he sang, I can’t imagine how he could do any more than three takes. If he was still alive right now, his voice would sound like the fizz at the bottom of an empty bottle of shaving cream. The guy would have no fuckin’ voice at all.
There’s something kind of car-crash compelling about that.
Well, yeah. And that’s exactly what Courtney’s about, that’s what she is. That encapsulates her and I’m sure to a certain exntent that’s why she and Kurt made such a good couple.
Going from one Courtney, who’s a brilliant conceptualist, albeit after the fact…
(Laughs). Yeah, I think she gets that by default, I think that she just knew that she was good innately, she wasn’t conscious of it while things were happening, but in hindsight was able to turn around and go, “Everything I’ve done, it all sort of adds up in this really funny way; I’m just gonna keep doin’ what I do and shit’s gonna work!’”
… to Marilyn Manson, who’s another. He was making a very particular kind of record with Mechanical Animals, a sort of updating of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs era, applying a lot of theatrical ideas to the subject of how celebrity isolates and dehumanises artists.
It’s a shame that he didn’t stay the course with it, y’know, ’cos that was really his first foray of getting out of “Marilyn Manson”, this dark gothic character with all the make up, (going), “Look at me, I’m a bad Halloween costume.” He really had an opportunity to go off into a much more seriously theatrical thing. Even now when he apes ’30s Berlin cabaret type stuff, you still can’t believe it, because you go, “This is the outer shell of that, this is the fascia of it, it’s not the guts, it’s not the mentality and the sensibility behind that which makes it more fascinating, this is just a show.” He’s doing it because people don’t know what it is, and his persona will merge with that kinda stuff, because there’s darkness and gothic sensibility in both. But if he had attacked something like that from a standpoint of really developing himself and his character, it would’ve meant so much more. And I think that’s what he was trying to do with Mechanical Animals, and he got rejected on that record very badly.
How was he to work with?
Very professional, with the exception of the odd peeing on the drumkit (incident), or driving a mike stand through it. I mean, he just had it in for the drummer! He’s very good at finding…he’d pick out a particular person in his band and sort of earmark them for constant abuse.
Why?
Why? That’s his personality! Maybe he was picked on a lot when he was little, but he’s very good at needling people. He’d start with me all the time. He’d look for a chink in anyone’s armour, and if he found an opening, he would hit it so fuckin’ hard. But he couldn’t fuck with me. He never got through. He tried. It was good. It was a lot of fun actually! (Laughs at length.) I enjoyed it. I had to humiliate him a couple of times.
How, pray tell, does one go about humiliating Marilyn Manson?
It’s obscene. Well, I didn’t do anything personally. It’s a good story, I’d have to tell you with the tape off. But he was incredible to work with, and he had a very, very clear vision in his mind about what that record was supposed to be about. I think he didn’t get a lot of support from his record company, that was the main thing that really fucked him up in the end.
The late 90s were dark times for a lot of bands on major labels. It was like the last days of the Roman Empire. There was a lot of money around, but also a sense that things were about to fall apart.
Back then it was getting to critical mass because people were making so much fuckin’ money. At that point the gloves had started to really come off. You knew what Satan looked like at that point, and he looked like, y’know, insert the name or face of any record executive here. In that case it was Jimmy Iovine – not wanting to name names, but there it is! (But) here’s what it came down to: the record came out and it broke sales records at several major chains and people were going crazy about it and they were like, “This record’s gonna go to number one.” And they had predictions. As an aside, I’ve never been able to figure out how people in any record company are able to figure out what the fuck kind of sales they’re gonna do the first week. How would they do that? I mean, it’s a rhetorical question: don’t answer if you know!
I have no idea, but it sounds like the opening weekend numbers on blockbuster movies. The whole enterprise is abandoned if it doesn’t create a new box office precedent in the first few days.
They’re nuts! They put everything into the first week, so they said, “First week, number one, he’s gonna sell 330,000 copies.” They had it down to the thousands column on the sheet, right? So the record comes out, the first week it goes number one in Billboard, 230,000, and that was it. They’re 100,000 shy. 230,000, that’s an amazing first week for a record, but back then it simply wasn’t good enough. So everyone at Universal freaks out, they start calling up Manson and the manager: “You gotta take the tits off! Kids in middle America can’t relate to you wearing six tits! That imagery, it’s too cold, you gotta go back to the old stuff. You look too gay!” All this kinda shit. And I’m sorry, but this guy’s a fuckin’ artist. He’s really talented. And you don’t play with an artist like that. You don’t do it. And they fuckin’ did it. And it surprised me, because some of the people who were running that particular company have produced plenty of records themselves, and you’d think they’d know. But that record suddenly didn’t matter a shit to those guys, it meant nothing. They went out of their way to hamstring it, and it’s a shame.
Did that undermine his confidence?
I think it’s affected Marilyn to this day, I really do, cos I think he could’ve gone much further in his career as an artist. Building up to that, everything was extremes, but when you go from one position to another, and then you go back to the position that you originally held, it’s a retreat. That’s an immense chink in his armour.
You’ve also produced wizened old warhorses like Ozzy Osbourne and Aerosmith. Presumably that’s a whole different ballgame.
What the fuck do you think?!! C’mon, is this a trick question or something?!!
Okay then, how are they different. Do you have to carry a first aid kit around with you or what?
No, I mean… (laughs, shakes his head) these guys have had years to escape into this fantasy world that they’ve created around these aliases, these imaginary creatures whom they’ve become. I mean, Ozzy’s real name is John. Steven’s last name is Tallarico. There is no Ozzy Ozbourne and there is no Steven Tyler.
So do the real guys show up for work or is the persona –
Ther persona is who they are now, they’ve changed, they’re self-created illusions that they’ve disappeared into. And god bless them for that! Are they headcases? Yeah. Are we all headcases? Maybe. I mean, this is in no way meant as a put-down, but if people like that ever lose their stature in the world, it’s very difficult for them to go, “I had it, it’s not here anymore, I guess I’ll take up stamp collecting or get work as a chimney sweep or something.” It ain’t gonna work like that. It’s absolutely fascinating to see these guys operate, it’s unbelievable. They’re so overblown, such caricatures of human beings. They can’t be normal. They don’t wanna be normal. When guys like that say sobriety sucks, it’s not just a catchphrase. They just love the fucking drama that they’ve created, this strange miasma that their lives have evolved into. It’s remarkable. In no uncertain way it lets you know that there’s a divine consciousness about us all! (Cracks up laughing). There’s divinity in it! It’s magnificent!