The classic rock song ruined by Rick Rubin: “I always had a weird feeling about remixes”
It’s every producer’s job to try to enhance every song they are working on. The musicians might have all of their parts down perfectly and might even have a clear idea of what the song should sound like in their head, but it’s your job to take all these bits and pieces and find a way to make them great once they are balanced out in the mix. Although Rick Rubin has made some classics with some of the biggest names in music, even he has to admit that there are moments when things don’t come together.
Then again, he hasn’t managed to strike out all that much throughout his career. Many of his early records provided the basis for what both thrash metal and old-school hip-hop were supposed to sound like, and when it came to every one of his projects, everything was kept incredibly dry so everyone could hear the band playing rather than something built like Mutt Lange did with his bands.
For instance, look at his record with Tom Petty, Wildflowers. A lot of the heartland rocker’s sound on Full Moon Fever and Into the Great Wide Open had been dictated by him and Jeff Lynne, creating textures of sound with different things going throughout the mix. While Rubin still had that mentality, there was never a point where it didn’t sound like you were listening to Petty and the rest of the Heartbreakers in the room playing together.
That’s not to say that every studio session was great whenever Rubin walked into the room. Despite his reputation as a wise sage of music, there were more than a few times when people were fed up with his hands-off approach, from Corey Taylor vowing to never work with him again to the members of Black Sabbath saying that he was very strange when putting in time on their comeback album, 13.
“The idea was to go the other way and not try to make it great but try to make it ridiculous and try to ruin it.”
Rick Rubin
If there’s one thing that Rubin should know before anything else, it’s the beat. This was a producer who saw AC/DC as the model for how any good rock record should sound, and that always meant having a great groove behind him whenever the band stormed in on any of his greatest projects. So, really, working on a cover of ‘We Will Rock You’ should have been a no-brainer back in the day, but that’s not how things planned out.
As much as the Queen classic relies on the essentials, Rubin thought that his version took a shit on the original, saying, “I remember thinking, ‘This is a perfect record.’ I always had a weird feeling about remixes. We put so much time and effort into making the record that a remix seemed to be tainting what was good about the record. So the idea was to go the other way and not try to make it great but try to make it ridiculous and try to ruin it. The message of it was, ‘Don’t do this.’”
But is it really that bad? Well, not really. It’s easy to see why this would send shivers down the spine of any hardcore Queen fan, but listening to the way that the different drum layers play off each other, it does capture that inhibition that comes with a DJ putting together their first remix of a song, only this time stretching the song out a little more to the point where everyone’s over it after three minutes.
If anything, this record should be a lesson to any DJ or producer who thinks that they can improve on something that was already perfect to begin with. It’s not impossible to add something new to everything, but you better have a good idea before taking a musical scalpel to one of the best tracks of all time.
