The guitar solos Rick Rubin said were absolute nonsense: “Nothing to do with music”
Rick Rubin didn’t sign up for the music business thinking that he was going to be the next virtuoso.
Half of his job was about seeing if the vibe was right for any particular song, and sometimes that could mean something as simple as telling the band to play fewer notes whenever they are playing a solo or changing a microphone here and there to make everything sound right. He didn’t have an ear for every technical piece, but he knew when he was listening to a song that sounded like it had reached its final form, no matter what genre he was working with.
Because there’s a lot more that goes into a Tom Petty production than what you heard on a typical Public Enemy track, but Rubin never saw it that way. Both Petty and Chuck D were looking to make the defining statements of their career when working with him, and even if their songs weren’t the most radio-friendly at the time, you could tell that they had pushed themselves far enough to the point where they had made their purest statement possible.
But the fact that Rubin could hop from different genres was always about listening for something that had the right passion behind it. You have to remember that this was the same guy who got his start making punk rock music before hip-hop even existed, and even when he transitioned into metal, it’s not like he didn’t have those same principles in his head when he began working with Slayer on Reign in Blood.
Then again, most people who were used to metal probably weren’t ready for what Tom Araya and Kerry King were doing. This was the most energetic metal music of all time, and while the lyrics were absolutely pitch-black, it’s not like King was going to be voted as one of the most intricate soloists of his time when looking at the more chaotic parts of ‘Raining Blood’ and ‘Angel of Death’.
In fact, what King was doing was almost anti-musical in some sense. Half of his solos sounded like he was strangling a guitar half the time, and when working with Beastie Boys on ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’, he was still making the guitar cry in a way that sounded more like he was trying to pull out every terrible sound that he could while he was in the spotlight.
Any other producer would have said to play that part over, but Rubin felt that King’s approach to soloing was exactly what Slayer’s tunes needed, saying, “I really love the solos on that record because they have nothing to do with music. It’s just about speed. How fast can a guitar, or how fast can anything play? We’ll use this guitar, because we have these, but it has nothing to do with guitar playing or music. And also the fact that they had two lead guitar players who would trade off these guitar solos, neither of which made sense.”
Given that a lot of the songs on Reign in Blood are about the underworld, though, the chaos in those solos actually does a better job at telling the story that Araya is screaming about. If you listen to the solo out of context, they fall somewhere within the uncanny valley where you don’t know how to react, but when you’re singing about the victims that perished in ‘Angel of Death’, the whole thing seems to make sense because of how disorienting it sounds over lines about the worst human atrocities ever committed.
It wouldn’t have fit on any of the songs that Rubin was working on with Johnny Cash, but it was all about knowing where an instrument fit into every piece of the mix. King was never going to change his style because the rest of the world wanted him to, and if Rubin could adapt to what he was doing, who’s to say that he couldn’t do the same thing for everyone from Slipknot to System of a Down to Audioslave?
