The 1995 album Rick Rubin will always regret: “It never worked”
Rick Rubin never seemed to be the kind of person that walked around to get too nostalgic about his own work.
He was looking to make the best records that he could with whoever he worked with, and even if the relationship could get soured from time to time, he never had the time to waste when he started working on the next big record from whatever new band struck his fancy. But even if he was friends for life with bands like System of a Down or Red Hot Chili Peppers, there were many groups that left him more than a little bit disappointed when he got into the studio with them.
At the same time, there are more than a few artists that don’t realise what they are getting into when they hire Rubin to be their producer. Any other band would want the producer in the room with them 24/7 and keep suggesting new things to work on at every opportunity, but that’s not really how Rubin operates. He functions almost like a wise guru on every one of his records, and a lot of it comes from him listening to the music intensely and trying to see what parts are speaking to him more than anything else.
That doesn’t necessarily sound like the hardest job in the world, but it’s usually what makes or breaks one of his recordings. Sometimes that tension between the band and him can produce something great like Slipknot’s Vol III, but bands like Black Sabbath remembered having more than a little bit of a rough time trying to figure out what some of their songs needed whenever Rubin made them play some of their songs into the ground every single day.
But if there was one band that Rubin always wanted to get right, it was AC/DC. To him, they were second only to The Beatles as one of the greatest rock and roll bands that the world had ever seen, and since half of the battle with the Young brothers is about keeping everything simple and hard-hitting, watching them come together for the album Ballbreaker wasn’t the kind of collaboration that Rubin was hoping for.
Then again, AC/DC’s classics did have a much different producer behind everything. Mutt Lange was known for fine tuning every record that he worked on until it sounded absolutely perfect, and while Rubin could admit that he had a lot of respect for Lange as one of the biggest names in the industry, his process of working never managed to be the same kind of thing that AC/DC were looking for.
Even years after the fact, Rubin felt that the band wasn’t the same as the one that he heard on all of those classic records, saying, “I was excited… but it never sounded good. We did a million things trying to make it sound good – nothing worked. And I remember saying to Malcolm [Young] at one point, like, ‘Maybe we should just move somewhere else?’” But that didn’t have to do with the fact that the band had become a husk of themselves, either.
They had one of their biggest hits only a couple of years before, so there was more than enough gas in the tank but there was a lot more method to what they were doing. For all of the simplicity behind AC/DC, it takes the right producer to really understand their sound, which probably explains why someone like Brendan O’Brien was able to get the best out of them with his more stripped-down approach.
It must have been a disappointment for Rubin seeing the album not come together, but he wasn’t about to let that get the better of him whenever he was making music. That timeless groove that he fell in love with when he was a kid was always going to be there, and if he had to let go of the reins a little bit more in the studio and let someone else sit in the producer’s chair, he was more than happy to step aside.
