Musical Masterminds: 10 producers that transformed rock bands
The relationship between an artist and their producer always changes every time they make a record. Either the one behind the board is coaching them through every song to get the best performance, or they’re the person absent-mindedly twiddling their thumbs while telling them to do another take. If you have the right person interacting with the band, though, acts like The Beatles lucked out with the dream team of their generations.
Despite a lot of people getting up in arms when an album is overly produced, it was hardly a problem when looking at these record craftsmen. As opposed to just trying to inflate their ego, each producer saw the albums as an opportunity to collaborate with the artist rather than press record and call it a day, resulting in some of the greatest moments of their career.
Regardless of who’s singing the song or what the guitar lick is, most of the producers have their sonic fingerprints all over the album, from sounding like the record was recorded in a trash can to putting cathedral-like choral parts on top of everything. It’s one thing to be able to coach the rest of the group, but when you’re handling the arrangements of songs, it sometimes comes down to being a musical thinker just as much as the people on the floor.
Whereas most of the crew behind the best records of all time just tend to get a credit on the back of the record, every one of these record sculptors helped transform their respective acts from a humble group of musicians to the titans of the industry on their projects. They might get a lot more royalties as a result, but there’s a case to be made that they might deserve to be a glorified member of the group.
Producers who transformed classic bands:
10. Jimmy Iovine – Stevie Nicks
At the end of the 1970s, Stevie Nicks had fallen out of love with Fleetwood Mac. She had been one of the most essential parts of the band when making albums like Rumours, and even after the bad blood of that record faded, Tusk didn’t exactly give her much to look forward to if they stayed together. She needed a major new outlet for her songs, and Jimmy Iovine was exactly the person to get her out of the supergroup’s grasp.
While Nicks had planned to do her own album for years, Iovine worked more as a song doctor when sculpting some of her classic hits. An album like Bella Donna was already made up of great songs that she had left over from ‘The Mac’, but the idea of getting someone like Don Henley on the track ‘Leather and Lace’ was the marriage made in heaven that no one could have foreseen.
Even when Iovine managed to screw up something, he still ended up winning out in the end, convincing Tom Petty to write the song ‘Insider’ for Nicks, only for it to be deemed too good and giving her smash hit ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ instead. Given those kinds of instincts going into Nicks’s solo career, is it really any wonder why Iovine now seems to own half the music business these days?
9. Bob Ezrin – Alice Cooper
By the 1960s, rock and roll was almost starting to get too weird for the mainstream. Some major acts dominated the charts, but the fallout of the hippie movement led to many artists who seemed to be throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck—the weirder, the better. Alice Cooper may have emerged from that hippie scene out of Phoenix, but once they moved to Detroit, Bob Ezrin helped them put a stake through the heart of peace and love.
Cooper never liked the idea of playing songs about living in a utopia, and once Love it to Death arrived, Ezrin started making tracks that sounded like you were being thrown into the depths of hell. Despite moms everywhere having a field day going after Cooper for his antics, you couldn’t really argue with the results on tracks like ‘Schools Out’ and ‘I’m Eighteen’, both of which remain fixtures in Cooper’s stage show.
Even when the rest of the band left him high and dry, Cooper and Ezrin practically made their own solo album on Welcome to My Nightmare, which rewrote the definition of what a shock rocker is supposed to be. Because this was more than just music to Ezrin. This was entertaining on as grand a scale as possible, and you better believe Roger Waters was taking notes once he signed him to work with Pink Floyd on The Wall.
8. Owen Morris – Oasis
If Oasis had had their way right out of the gate when recording Definitely Maybe, they probably wouldn’t have even made it past the bar circuit. Their tunes sounded phenomenal, and Liam Gallagher still had his trademark snarling voice, yet everything sounded incredibly thin whenever their songs came out of the speakers. Most people would want to wash their hands of their first record after trying so many times, and once Owen Morris entered the picture, lightning struck.
Instead of focusing on making everything sound clean, Morris dialled in the guitars and drums to the point where they were almost clipping in the mix. That thought alone would give most other producers cold sweats, but this ‘brick walling’ technique would become the norm for Oasis going forward, even managing to sound huge when playing fairly simple songs like ‘Rock and Roll Star’.
Then again, even that magic had to run out at some point, and that break came the minute that Morris and the Gallaghers decided to walk into the studio with mountains of cocaine and call it a record on Be Here Now. Both of them could still work their magic just like they always had, but this was the point where they hit their own brick wall and never recaptured the spirit again.
7. Mutt Lange – Def Leppard
Mutt Lange doesn’t really make records; he builds them. For every artist who wants to capture the perfect take, Lange is looking to record as many perfect takes as he can so that the entire song has a certain sheen about it once it hits the audience’s eardrums. It doesn’t take much to get the attitude out of a rock juggernaut like AC/DC, though, so once Lange entered the 1980s, Def Leppard was taken to rock and roll boot camp when they signed him on.
High ‘N’ Dry was the test run of what the hard rock icons could do, but when listening to Pyromania, Lange’s presence was felt a lot more when the vocals started. During production, Lange forced them to play as tight as possible, reaching Queen-level precision with how well the vocals sounded. Despite having to fire original guitarist Pete Willis along the way, the results spoke for themselves.
This was AC/DC by way of Mott the Hoople and T Rex, and Leppard would manage to outdo themselves once again one album later on Hysteria, bringing that signature brand of raw rock and roll to arena size. Getting the right take for a song might sound easy if you’ve done your homework, but getting someone to sound this tight only comes from playing for hours upon hours until the guitars sound like well-oiled machines.
6. Rob Cavallo – Green Day
By the mid-1990s, Green Day had a major choice ahead of them. After being kings of the punk underground in their native California, they could either spend the rest of their days trying to make the same underground punk everyone knew them for or run the real risk of alienating their fanbase by signing to a major label. Reprise Records was too enticing for them, but no one needed to worry about a thing once Rob Cavallo got involved.
Being a student of the music industry for years, Cavallo related to the trio as musicians before anything else, often referencing acts like The Beatles and Cheap Trick to get the guitar sounds on Dookie. While purists were still pissed that their favourite group was sharing space on the Lollapalooza tour, the difference between the Dookie version of ‘Welcome to Paradise’ and the Kerplunk version is like night and day.
Sure, the arrangement might be similar, but everything is dialled in much better, including the atmospheric bridge being fleshed out a bit more and Tre Cool’s drum fills sounding much tighter than his nervous-sounding attempt the first time around. The original still exists for those who want to listen, but there’s no reason to ever fault musicians for making music that actually sounds better.
5. Jeff Lynne – Tom Petty
Not many people can claim to have better producers than Tom Petty sported. Although Jimmy Iovine and Petty were both hungry when they made classics like Damn the Torpedoes, there are only so many places that you can go once you’ve kissed the sky once. Petty needed to be able to fly free, and after a brief stint in The Traveling Wilburys, Jeff Lynne quickly became his musical brother working on Full Moon Fever.
Petty’s songs may have sounded fine on the Wilburys’ tracks, but he was definitely saving some of his best material for his first solo record. Without having to answer to any of his bandmates, this is about as close to the bone that Petty ever got in the studio, often having a Lennon and McCartney relationship with Lynne when making songs like ‘I Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Free Fallin’.
And while the Heartbreakers eventually got the same treatment when working on Into the Great Wide Open, that record still sounds fantastic, turning the heartland rockers into the modern version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound when making tracks like ‘King’s Highway’. It was the same songwriter writing the same songs he always had, but bringing Lynne in to tidy everything up is like putting that last coating of paint on a classic car.
4. Rick Rubin – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Rick Rubin seems to be more of a son doctor than he is a producer. It’s still unclear what he actually does when he sits behind the board, yet his creative input with his clients normally results in them pairing everything down to where it sounds near-perfect. Rubin always looks at things from a fan’s perspective first, and when Red Hot Chili Peppers walked into his studio, everything seemed easy.
The past few years had already seen the California funk gods beaten and bruised, but Rubin helped them realise they needed to channel that emotion into their songs. Although the uptempo jams like ‘Give It Away’ didn’t go anywhere, songs like ‘I Could Have Lied’ and ‘Under the Bridge’ were the results that not even the band realised they could pull off.
Once it paid off the one time, Rubin’s biggest asset is refusing to tell them no, letting them fly into the 2000s on albums like Californication and By The Way. Despite being the butt of the joke half the time they were playing in the late 1980s, Rubin turned them from a tongue-in-cheek funk rock joint to one of the few California rock acts that are as identifiable with the West Coast as The Beach Boys are.
3. Steve Albini – Nirvana
Nirvana didn’t really need a big-name producer to succeed. Given the power of Kurt Cobain’s songs, half of their guitars could have been soaked in water and beaten to a pulp and still manage to sound pretty decent when making songs like ‘In Bloom’. Cobain didn’t exactly like the idea of everyone loving his stuff on that level, though, so when he got to make his next masterpiece, he made sure Steve Albini made the most caustic mainstream record committed to tape.
While Butch Vig deserves a lot of credit for helping bring Nevermind to life, Albini’s approach of capturing everything live in the room is more in line with what Nirvana was supposed to be. If ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was intended to set the world on fire, ‘Serve the Servants’ is that sound in a funhouse mirror, as if Cobain is cheekily making fun of him becoming the biggest star in the world.
Although there were still some tender moments across In Utero, like ‘Dumb’ and ‘All Apologies’, never forget that this was not the Nirvana you knew before. That band had been hungry to take on the world, and this new version was more likely to give the middle finger to anyone who would dare call them commercial.
2. Bob Rock – Metallica
In a perfect world, Metallica would have probably continued to tour the stadium circuit for the rest of their lives without ever having a hit single. No matter how many records they sold back in the 1980s, you didn’t necessarily have to know about them if you didn’t want to if you only went about as heavy as The Osmonds. Every act needs to expand their horizons, though, and once Bob Rock entered the picture, the metal icons realised what they could do in the studio.
Compared to every other commercial rock act that Rock had worked with, the fact he even got in the front door of Metallica’s studio seems like a miracle. This was the same guy who produced the big comeback albums for Aerosmith and engineered Bon Jovi’s hits, so what the hell did he know about making the kind of ferocious metal that they were used to?
Instead of putting that sonic sheen on Metallica, Rock functioned more as a song advisor half the time, giving them more sonic tricks to choose from and beefing out tracks like ‘Sad But True’ until they were as heavy as possible. That kind of experimentation may have been a hard sell if all they made were songs like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, but putting that song right next to tracks like ‘Of Wolf and Man’ and ‘Through the Never’ is the work of a mad genius.
1. George Martin – The Beatles
Before George Martin, The Beatles were nothing but a scruffy bar band. That had a lot of potential to become one of the biggest acts in the world, and yet they were still the kind of group that could fill up the pubs and get fans to sing along with their rough-and-tumble approach to rock and roll. Martin may have helped to rein them in just a little bit, but when they had to leave the road, the title of ‘producer’ seemed to change to ‘fifth Beatler’ a lot more often.
From Rubber Soul onward, Martin became as integral a part of arranging the music as any of the Fab Four. Whether it was adding classical instrumentation or experimenting with tape loops to get the right sound, nothing was really off the table when it came to getting any of the tracks down on tape.
You just have to look at the scattershot production of an album like Let It Be to see why Martin’s contributions should be missed. While The Beatles were always bound to become a musical giant based on the strength of their songs alone, Martin was the one person who could actually translate their music visions into reality.
