Inside Rick Rubin struggles with Poison: “It was awful”
Not every band is meant to come to life onstage the same they do in the studio. There are a lot of bells and whistles that can be added in the background that are impossible to replicate in a live setting, and even if bands have their moments where things are firing on all cylinders, asking them to create perfection every time they take the stage is fighting a losing battle. Any audience should at least expect their favourite acts to be competent, and Rick Rubin was no stranger to moments when things looked dire for his clients.
Then again, Rubin always looked at the lack of polish on his records as a good thing. Nothing in rock and roll is meant to be perfect, and although there are brilliant recordings he has made throughout the years, there are still those few times when things either don’t come together or he starts moving in slightly different directions that make everything sound incredibly dated or actively harmful during his “loudness wars” era.
But there’s also something punk rock about Rubin’s approach. He had started working with hip-hop acts when the genre was emerging, and even if not everything went off perfectly in the mix, it was always better for him to keep the takes that had the right attitude as opposed to throwing in something that was technically right but had no mojo.
That wasn’t necessarily the order of the day in mainstream rock when he started. While he did have some help from Kerry King of Slayer when putting together songs like Beastie Boys’ ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’, the mainstream had been flooded with every single Van Halen ripoff that Los Angeles could spit out, with acts like Cinderella and Ratt trying to get by on how much lipstick they could put on between guitar solos.
That didn’t mean that everyone in Los Angeles could play their instruments effectively. There was a good chance that anyone with high enough hair and the ability to hold a guitar properly could have nabbed a record deal at the time, but when Rubin was putting together songs for the Less Than Zero soundtrack, seeing Poison waltz into the studio was a hot mess once he started recording them.
Since they were determined to show up with their entire stage get-up, Rubin’s engineer George Drakoulias remembered everything getting in the way of their recording, saying, “They were definitely putting on a show, and musically, it was awful. It took us three days to get through [guitarist] CC [Deville’s] solo. I would fall asleep and wake up and he and Rick were working on it. He was just a perfectionist, and it was a simple thing, but he was very methodical and particular.”
It’s not like the song was the hardest thing in the world to play, either. Their version of Kiss’s ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ is far from doing justice to the shock rock classic, but given how much effort went into getting the guitar solo correct, it was going to be a breeze for Rubin once he started working with Aerosmith to recut ‘Walk This Way’ with Run-DMC.
But as much as the Less Than Zero soundtrack sold in droves, it was also a subtle goodbye to that era of rock and roll. The era of spandex and leg warmers was about to become a thing of the past, and since Red Hot Chili Peppers were on the rise, Rubin found himself right at home going back to rock and roll with a bit more punch.
