“A perfect record”: The song Rick Rubin attempted to sabotage
Shoeless beardy-man Rick Rubin did not have the upbringing that you’d expect from most mega-producers in music. He wasn’t hunched over a piano, frittering away hours reading theory, or endlessly playing around with 808s as a child. When he finally started playing in a punk band called the Pricks, their biggest feat lasted for two songs at the CBGB before brawling with hecklers called Curtains on the show.
Since the disastrous debut, he has more than made up for things. He is now estimated to have been the produced behind over 250million record sales following work with the likes of Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Wu-Tang Clan, Lana Del Rey, Weezer, Black Sabbath and too many others to mention. In short, if you like modern music, you’ll have heard his influence.
When it comes to music, he works on feel, citing: “There’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get a point across.” This simple tenet has served the likes of Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath, Lucinda Williams and Public Enemy wonderfully, with the bearded bard of production behind the mixing desk orchestrating things with instinct.
Indeed, limitations can often be a creative blessing, forcing you to hone rather than flounder in endless possibilities and sweat over the details, which is where it really matters. However, what happens when simplicity has been adhered to, and all the details are perfect? That’s what happened when Rubin was tasked with remixing the original Queen masters when the band finally got them back from their old record company after a dispute.
What song did Rick Rubin think was “perfect”?
“They reached out to different people that they thought could do something interesting,” Rubin recalls. As a big fan of the band, he had to seize the opportunity, but he was tasked with a classic that left him struggling. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow’. ‘We Will Rock You’ is, like, this is a perfect record. I always had a weird feeling about remixes,” he told Rolling Stone.
It was an anthem that had inspired him since he was young, so tampering with it presented quite the pickle. As Josh Homme said when he was presented with George Harrison’s guitar, “Some things you’re never supposed to touch.” Rubin felt similarly, continuing, “We put so much time and effort into making the record that a remix seemed to be tainting what was good about the record. That was my thought then.”
So, if someone had sweated towards perfection, then he figured the only artistic cause was to sweat in the opposite direction and imperfect the Queen classic from 1977. “Well, there’s no way I could make it better than theirs. It’s perfect as it is. 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,” he decided. True to his experimental ways, he wondered whether you could sonically undo perfection.
After all, the original already exists in all of its glory, so it wasn’t like he was tarnishing it in any way, but rather he was looking to build on the artistry of it by coming up with a creative solution to an impassable creative problem. So, instead of the “surreal” jam at the end, he delved into the multi-tracks and layered in the solo from ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ which he then played backwards.
“The credit that I took on it was ‘Ruined by Rick Rubin’, for that reason. I was thinking, ‘What are the more surreal, bizarre choices I could make to play up the point that we’re not supposed to be remixing classic songs? The message of it was, ‘Don’t do this’,” he concludes. He was more than happy to sign off on that.
And as mad as it sounds, few songs in his repertoire showcase his strength as a producer more clearly. Writing songs is hard enough as it is; then, as an artist, you can get wrapped up in them, so when you contact a producer, you really want them to look holistically at work, almost like an interior designer after the house is built. ‘What more can we do with this space to heighten the artistry?’ is what they should ask. On this occasion, he left the “perfect” ‘We Will Rock You’ as it was and simply built an odditorium in its honour.
