“I didn’t like”: Rick Rubin on the hardest project he ever worked on
When working in the production business, no two albums are the same to work on. All of the instruments might be recorded in the same way and might even have similar styles, but the more that you work with a band, the more you start to see what makes them tick outside of being another musician behind the glass. While Rick Rubin always wanted to help get the best music out of whatever artist he worked with, he admitted that one specific rock legend had one of the most difficult recording sessions he ever worked on.
That said, Rubin was not the kind of person who wanted to crack the whip in the studio. Many of his best moments involve him looking at the music from a gut perspective, often relying on his musical sixth sense to guide him towards where the music is going, whether that’s working with Tom Petty on Wildflowers or working on every System of a Down project.
Then again, it’s hard to really wrangle that if the band themselves isn’t giving him anything to work with. Corey Taylor of Slipknot had said that he never wanted to work with Rubin again after completing Vol. III, and when coming out of their reunion record 13, Black Sabbath remembered feeling a bit awkward when being asked to go back to the drawing board and playing one song over and over again with Rubin.
But those blood, sweat, and tears are normally what gives people more perspective. If someone has played their part to the point where it stops sounding like music, there comes a point where they’re going to start looking at it objectively and realise that maybe that one guitar line that they fought so hard for is actively taking away from the song or not sitting as well in the mix. Still, there was hardly anyone who would tell Mick Jagger what to do when Rubin was coming up.
Since the rock frontman had to deal with compromise in The Rolling Stones, hearing him go off on his own on the album Wandering Spirit gave him an outlet to play the music he wanted. And if he had to hold his own next to Keith Richards every time he walked into the studio, he had zero time for the bearded shaman twiddling knobs behind the board and offering notes on everything he touched.
Compared to every other project he worked on, Rubin remembered always having tension with Jagger, saying, “Certain things that he’d wanna do that I didn’t like, I’d really make it obvious, and get all cranky. He said, ‘Look, if you don’t like something that I wanna do, just go out and get a veggie burger or something. So I started getting a lot of veggie burgers. [That] was probably one of the more difficult works I’ve done.”
Still, it had to have been difficult for Rubin to share his opinions with rock stars at that stage. Even when working with someone like Tom Petty, there was footage of Rubin saying that he felt like the heartland rocker was aiming lower than he should have been, which isn’t something you want out of a guy who’s in charge of mixing everything together perfectly.
At the same time, that tension is what makes those great Rolling Stones albums work, so it might have been a good idea to see Jagger taking Rubin’s advice. After all, that tension that people talk about can usually result in the best records ever made if it’s harnessed in the right way.
