The one artist Neil Young called a production “genius”
Any rock and roll band usually needs a good producer to help get them over the line, half the time. It’s easy for anyone to let the music speak for itself, but if it weren’t for masterminds like George Martin working with The Beatles or Phil Spector twisting the knobs to create his Wall of Sound, rock and roll would have sounded a lot different back in the day.
If there was one person who seemed to care less about the mechanics of production, though, it should have been Neil Young.
After all, Young was the kind of person who valued the song before anything else, and that meant he made some of the most outlandish choices when it came to production. Albums like Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps sound pristine, but there are also some strange detours in the 1980s that would have seemed like the opposite of tasteful, like the album Landing on Water. It wasn’t what everyone wanted to hear, but it was worth it to see him trying something new as well.
Because if there’s one thing Young knew, it was to never step in the same shit twice. The last thing he needed was to get tied down to one specific genre of music, and if he was constantly moving and switching up his styles on albums like Everybody’s Rockin’ or Trans, he could always keep his best interests in mind. For anyone working with that kind of spirit, Young knew how to recognise people who wanted to keep the artist’s best interests in mind, and Rick Rubin fit that bill to a tee.
It would have been hard to believe that the same guy behind albums by Public Enemy and Beastie Boys would have any business playing rock, but Rubin’s taste was always bigger than one genre. He was interested in music that made him feel something when he played it, and whether that was working with Slayer to create something heavy, getting the right guitar tones for The Cult, or coaching Johnny Cash through some of his later records, he’s always coming at it from a fan’s perspective.
Although most people would think that Rubin’s job consists of him doing nothing, Young was aware that everything the producer did was helping to make a song better, saying, “Rick is a genius. It’s so easy because he loves music. You’re not gonna find a person who loves music more than Rick. He’s dedicated to preserving it. If you talk about an environmentalist trying to save the Earth, then he’s a music-mentalist. That’s the way he looks at music. That’s a great thing. He’s just living it. He’s made some really cool records in other genres, but they’re all the same thing to him. It’s all music.”
And that kind of eclecticism is why Rubin has been able to maintain a career. He’s had the ability to work with anybody and everybody that he wants to, but the fact that he can see a band like Black Sabbath and work with them in the same way that he worked with Linkin Park and The Strokes is what puts him on another playing field.
Yet not everything that Rubin has a hand in making is necessarily the cleanest production in the world, either. Each album he has touched has at least been listenable, but the blemishes are part of what makes up the whole picture, like Tom Araya hitting the wrong ending note on the song ‘Raining Blood’ or Cash’s voice clipping in the mix when he reaches the final verse of ‘Hurt’.
Because Rubin’s not looking for the knockout single or the multi-layered masterpiece that every other hotshot producer is going for. A lot of fans can look for that in their favourite artists, but both Young and Rubin know that a musician should be honest with their fans rather than try to give them what they want every time they play.
