Sound City

This programme contains strong language.

TUNES GUITAR

-OK, are you ready?

-Yep.

We're rolling.

One, two, three, four.

INSTRUMENTAL

We were just kids with nothing to lose and nowhere to call home.

But we had these songs and we had these dreams.

We threw it all in the back of an old van and just started driving.

Our destination - Sound City.

Watching the world through a windshield there's no looking back.

We have left everything behind.

When you're young you're not afraid of what comes next.

You're excited by it.

We were driving a van that could break down at any moment.

Going on tours that could be cancelled at any moment.

And playing music with people who could disappear at any moment.

We had no idea that the next 16 days were going to change our world forever.

But I remember pulling into the parking lot and thinking, "Really?

"This is Sound City?"

It is weird.

When you walk into Sound City you either love it or you hate it.

Looks kind of dumpy.

It's a shithole.

Everything was second-hand.

It was something of a time warp I think. Or something.

Brown shag carpet on the wall.

That's the kind of thing that you would do to your van.

It was like, the place is already kind of trashed,

so anything goes.

It was dirty.

Didn't really feel like I wanted to sit on any of the furniture.

You could record there and not

come back for 15 years and walk in

and it's the exact same as

the last time you were there.

The parking lot used to flood

and it used to make a wave that

came up the hallway of Sound City.

Sound City was like you could

put your cigarette out on the floor.

And a bottle of Jack Daniels would spill all over the carpet.

Who cares? It's Sound City. Who cares?

I would say you could piss in the corner and nobody would complain.

It was just a little more fucked up than I thought it should be.

But walking down the hallway

and seeing all of those platinum records on the wall...

-Tom Petty.

-Fleetwood Mac.

# Don't stop... #

-Rick Springfield.

-Rick Springfield.

# I wish that I had Jessie's girl... #

-Neil Young, man.

-Cheap Trick.

# They just seem a little weird... #

-The Chilli Peppers.

-Rob Halford.

-Pat Benatar.

-Kansas.

-Guns n' Roses.

-Nine Inch Nails.

-Nevermind.

-Foreigner.

-Slayer.

-Ratt.

-Johnny Cash.

-Carl Perkins.

-Metallica.

REO Speedwagon.

# Time for me to fly... #

-Michael McDonald.

-Mick Fleetwood.

-Buckingham Nicks.

-Steve Nicks.

-Masters Of Reality.

-Frank Black.

-Wolfsbane.

-Rick Rubin.

-Kyuss. Weezer.

Dude, how many fucking amazing albums have been made there?

Vincent Price. Telly Savalas. We would record anything.

Anybody who walked in the door and could pay the bill.

Tom is this big, tall, lanky kind of guy that just

fell off the turnip truck.

He wanted you to think that anyway.

First time I'd ever want into a recording studio

and first time I'd ever even seen one.

I was with a West Virginia holding company that was buying little businesses.

Joe Gottfried and another guy had started Sound City in 1969.

He was actually the vocalist for the US Army.

When he was in the Army he was stationed at a hotel in Manhattan.

A friend of his, Joe Leahy, who was a big band leader and had done

music for CBS, they were the two main guys in the studio

when I came in in 1970.

Keith Olsen was the chief engineer.

The only reason why the studio business survived was because

the building ownership was Tom and Tom would not foreclose on it.

They were about one week away from being closed by the IRS.

They owed taxes. It was kind of chaos to be honest with you.

But there was an opportunity to get into the entertainment business.

ARCHIVE VOICEOVER: 'This is Beatle land, formerly known as Britain where an epidemic

'called Beatlemania has seized the teenage population, especially female.'

The big pot at the end of the rainbow is signing the next Beatles.

We'd have had a zillion dollars.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-'Hi-fi and stereo equipment created an industry with an annual

'income today of 2.5 billion.'

Somebody at Sound City came up with this idea.

We could start a record company.

That was my goal, to produce records, and have a hit record.

And make a lot of money. That was the whole reason we bought it.

Sound City, it was funky. It was in The Valley.

We only used The Valley to get to Hollywood.

The Valley was just this flat expanse of too many houses already.

It was kind of like not happening at all

Neil Young pulled in fast in a very old car,

smoke billowing out of every window.

Behind him was two LAPD officers, guns drawn, you know.

Move over to the rear of the car. Place your hands on the trunk.

I attracted police a lot because of the cars that I was driving.

And I didn't have a licence because I was a Canadian

and I wasn't even supposed to be there.

Five minutes later they just got in their cars and drove off.

I made the record in my house. Most of it I did in my house.

Then we went to Sound City with Briggs my producer

and we put down a piano song called Birds there.

Then we did the vocals.

Then they sounded so good that I said, "Well, let's just sing everything."

So it's really a hybrid record.

# I can love

# I can really love I can really love... #

My dad and Joe were partners in crime. They were very close.

They were thick as thieves.

Tom was like the business guy and stuff like that,

-but Joe was the heart of it all really.

-Sweetest guy in the universe.

Absolutely one of the nicest, truest people I've ever known.

He wasn't a guy in a suit who was counting money

and just trying to rip off as many musicians as he could.

That wasn't his thing.

He loved the fact that bands were coming in

and making great records there.

Joe was always positive, more optimistic,

always, "The next big thing is going to be out there."

Joe gave me time to learn and to hone what I do. He was quite a guy.

When we bought the studio we were struggling for a year

or two and we could see we couldn't just get the premier acts.

You needed state-of-the-art equipment to get the top acts with the top budgets.

It was my goal to do that.

This guy Rupert Neve designed these next-generation consoles. I had

flown to England and I saw one once and they were like this,

built like a brick shithouse.

He was a genius engineer.

There's only four like this in the world and this is the only one that

was custom ordered from the factory by Keith.

There's just something about the Neve sound that my ear

has always been attuned to.

They are mathematically crisp and very, very good.

They're just very solid. It's like a tank or something.

The Neve thing is there just weren't that many made

because they are so handmade.

This Neve board that you talk about. This is not my world.

Engineers have to spend like hours on the kick drum sound.

Please, I would rather have a blood transfusion.

But I do remember there was something

different about the sound of this board

and then of course everybody was, "Oh, my God it's a Neve board."

I'll never forget them saying it.

A recording console is like the centre of the spaceship.

If you're going to fly to Mars you've got to have something with all

the master controls.

It looks like, you know,

the Enterprise on steroids from a long time ago.

A desk is like giant stereo except instead of doing bass, middle

and treble, it's like you can do that on each drum, each mic, each thing.

All the microphones in the studio are routed into that console.

From there you can change EQ, add effects,

change the levels and that goes into the tape machine where it's recorded.

DRUMS THUD

This board, if you put a fader up and turned the mic pre up

and somebody hits a tom-tom or a snare drum it sounds great.

It sounds wide open. It sounds huge.

If you turn the mic pre up too loud

and it distorts it still sounds great.

That's analogue. That's how it sounds.

Especially Neves.

Everything is just better.

The human voice sounds better.

When you've got harmonies going together they kind of meld together.

# You come on with a come on You don't fight fair... #

The Neve console really embellishes things in the context of rock 'n' roll.

It's good on drums. It's good on bass. It's good on guitars.

-It's the facilitator.

-It's a pretty bad ass console.

# Hit me with your best shot... #

It's unlike any other Neve console that I have ever worked on

and I've been lucky enough to work on a ton of them now.

It would always be the greatest sounding desk I have ever tracked on.

There is a large number of modules

about which look the same,

but which are marginally different.

The circuit was a microphone amplifier circuit.

-RUPERT NEVE:

-Crosstalk between circuits

and between busses was absolutely paramount.

The way that transformer behaves with DC flowing in it can vary

according to the material of the core and the gapping of the core.

If those things are properly controlled you get a very sweet sound.

Rupert Neve is a fucking genius.

At the time that Neve console cost 76,000.

To give you an example I'd just bought a house in Toluca Lake

and I paid 38,000 for the house.

My wife would have killed me if she'd known I was doing that.

I thought, "If this place ever goes under that's the thing that will

"pay all the debts."

The first track we cut on this was Crying In The Night with

Buckingham Nicks. Very first thing cut on that was that session.

That's how it started.

# She was that kind of lady

# Times were hard Whoa... #

We signed them to a production deal.

They write their own songs

so all we would provide would be the studio, the engineer and the tape.

Tom Skeeter and Joe Gottfried were almost like parental figures

to us, but Keith's the one who got us out to Sound City.

# She's back in town... #

When we first moved to LA we didn't have a place.

We stayed at Keith's house.

They are starving and they're broke.

Lindsey was painting and Stevie was cleaning Keith Olsen's house.

I'd walk through with my broom

and Keith would go, "That's the maid." And I'd be like, "I'm not

"going to be the maid for long, just so you know. Just so you all know."

# But she'll leave you crying in the night

# She will leave you crying in the night... #

It was obvious that Lindsey and Stevie were really special.

Buckingham Nicks came out in '73 to great critical acclaim and then

got dropped by Polydor

The record label dropped them so they didn't have a record deal

so they were just hanging around here.

-# She's a come on lady...

-#

It was like our home. It was like our home away from home.

I was living in Laurel Canyon

and I went to the country store,

which is exactly the same now,

and someone I vaguely knew was there.

He said, "Well, what are you up to?"

I said, "I'm actually in town

"to find a studio and cost it out

"and see if we can afford it,"

and he goes, "I'm just the guy!"

This rock'n'roll guy came to us one day and he said,

"You know, I hang out with all these rock bands

"and I go to the clubs and all that. If I can bring a band in here,

"you give me 10%."

We said, all day long, bring 'em in.

Mick Fleetwood came in to see the studio.

I played him a couple of tracks from Stevie and Lindsey.

Stevie and I were in Studio B in the back

and I took a break and I wandered out

and I hear our song Frozen Love coming out of Studio A.

I open the door

and here's this 6' 6" guy just...

HE TAPS HIS FOOT

..just grooving on the solo

and I'm going, "Who is that?"

I met Lindsey literally in passing

and I went off

not even thinking anything other than

I've heard some good music that was made in the studio I'm going to use.

We made a deal -

to do Fleetwood Mac's next album at Sound City.

Joe was thrilled - "God, we're going to make our payment" -

everything was good.

Fleetwood Mac had had a few albums with Peter Green in England

that had been successful. Then, after Peter left,

Bob Welch, who then joined the band, was more of a jazz guitarist.

Mick called me. He said, "Bob Welch just left the band."

I phoned Keith Olsen. I said, "You know the tape

"that you played? Tell me, we're looking for a guitar player."

And Keith's like, "Well, there is a problem there

"because you will never get him without taking her."

He's going to have to take my girlfriend too.

And that was the beginning of it.

# Love... #

We joined the band the first day of 1975.

And then we go straight to Sound City.

The first days in the studio were just amazing.

Really exciting, completely fresh,

because Christine, John, McVie and myself

came from a whole different sensibility, musically, really.

# Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night

# And wouldn't you love to love her? #

John McVie said to me, "We're a blues band.

"This is really far away from the blues." And I said,

"I know but it's a lot closer to the bank."

# ..All your life you've never seen

# Woman taken by the wind... #

It became pretty clear right away

how this all fitted together

and that isn't just musically.

It's just as people.

Something is translated

and it is real

and it is profound just, in truth, out of necessity.

It's powerful.

-It's like true love.

-Absolutely.

But what if that Neve board hadn't had been there?

The main reason it was important was

so that we got a fantastic drum track.

HE CHUCKLES It...um...

The drum sound, let's start there, because it's something we all love.

The drums and the feel of a song are like the heartbeat of the song.

It can be the backbone of the song,

it can be the foundation of the song.

So, that's the first thing you do.

You set up your kit and you start putting up your microphones.

A room like this has a really nice decay.

So you put mikes around the room to capture that.

You put close mikes on the drums.

You have all of those individual mikes spread over

a number of tracks,

16 tracks or 12 tracks.

So then you can bring the faders up or down and balance those tracks.

Once you get a good drum take,

it's like, "Oh, OK, great, now we've got the beginning of a song.

"Now we can actually start putting more shit on it."

The way to pick studios is through blind-testing drums

because you can record the guitars

pretty much anywhere to sound pretty much like your guitars.

But drums really change from room to room.

That room shouldn't, on paper,

be a great drum room

because it's a big old square room.

Sound City was a Vox factory in the '60s, I guess.

They built Vox amps there

and then they built the A Control Room in '64.

It's one of those spaces that just randomly, haphazardly

turned out to be fantastic to record a drum set in.

That room is the space.

It's like what happens between the notes,

what you're playing, there's a sound that's pretty magical.

Every room has their sweet spot for that sound, you know?

This, I think, has always been Sound City's real sweet spot.

And the freaky thing is, no-one designed it.

A lot of people claim they did, but no.

It's just luck.

Luck and magic.

Not meant to be.

And you can't control those things.

Selfishly, the drum sound was probably why we went there!

I confess!

# Cos when the loving starts and the lights go down

# And there's not another living soul around... #

None of it is planned.

Sound City was welcoming

and we knew that we had a home there.

It's a church.

By the luck of whatever, I had the ability to open that door.

# ..And you say that you love me... #

From that Fleetwood Mac album,

then it would get Santana and Grateful Dead.

Once you have big hits like that, that was huge!

# Dancing in the streets

# Dancing... #

RADIO CHANNELS CHANGE RAPIDLY

The first real

Heartbreakers jam

to just feel each other out was at Sound City.

The studio was fine

but we just didn't have our shit together. We weren't ready.

We didn't have the songs, we didn't even know how to play that well.

Is this how you make records?

It was cruel because it sounded so real

and you'd go into the control room,

they'd crank up through those speakers and you'd go,

"Man, I suck!"

The vocal mike is just a little bit loud.

It had no frills, no effects,

no place to hide.

Everything coming out of an amp

or everything coming right out of a speaker or right off a microphone,

that approach, that was Sound City.

By our third album,

we wanted to get somebody who that could make a good-sounding record

so we hired Jimmy Iovine.

He'd been a recording engineer

and he'd worked with Lennon and Springsteen

and they were recording live tracks.

They weren't overdubbing a ton of stuff.

I mean, you had to learn how to play and you'd go in and play it.

I hired Jimmy as an engineer

to do Damn The Torpedoes

but he showed up with an engineer

without telling me!

He manipulated his way into being the producer of the record

along with me.

Jimmy is brilliant.

I mean, he now owns the music business.

When we turned up with Jimmy at Sound City,

he was just horrified.

Just horrified! Like, "What IS this place?"

The first thing he said to me was,

"I don't know that we can make a record in here."

Somebody should fire-bomb this fucking place.

I said, "Yeah, I think you'll be surprised."

We tracked live and we didn't edit from take to take,

so we had to get it right from top to bottom.

When you're tracking live, pressure's on the drummer big time.

Until you get that, you got nothing.

I just thought he should play straight.

GROANING

It was emotional but, at the same time, we all wanted to learn.

Refugee we played, like, 150 damn times, or something.

You're trying to get lightning in a bottle.

-Yeah, that was great.

-I'm still not comfortable, for some reason.

I'm not quite on my thing here.

-I think we should do one more and listen.

-OK.

Then you go back and play the damn song AGAIN.

# You don't have to live like a refugee

# Don't have to live like a refugee... #

It might look easy

but if you're trying to go for greatness,

a lot of times you're going to fall short and you've got to live with that that night.

'It's brutal, you know, on your soul.'

Goddamn!

You are about to drive me fucking crazy.

It's a tough room.

You know, music really isn't supposed to be perfect.

It's all about people relating to each other,

and doing something that's really from the soul, you know?

It must come from the soul.

Tom was great, you know?

His whole approach - low key.

He'd come in like it was

his own garage studio.

Paula, she was kind of like the field general.

You know? She was in the front line.

Paula, she's great.

She was just unflappable, you know?

Nothing bothered her.

Paula, I think,

took over from Jemima when Jemima left.

Jemima Eddy,

and Jemima had this assistant

who was a little girl named Barbie,

who ended up being Rick Stringfield's wife.

She actually was answering phones when she was 16, 17,

getting hit on by all the bands, of course.

And then after Jemima there was Paula.

I took one look at her

and I was totally in love.

She was smoking-hot

and as sweet as can be.

# You know where your woman is tonight

# Think about it... #

Paula Salvatore, Italiano. Yeah,

Italiana. Italiana.

Every musician that went in thought that Paula was in love with them.

I think! Or maybe it was just me. But I don't think so.

-Do you remember Paula?

-Yeah, I do, actually.

The girl that ran the studio.

Dark-haired girl?

Curly?

Well, I was "Paula at Sound City". That was my last name for years.

Paula was like a one-woman audience.

# ..You know where your woman is tonight... #

Whenever we'd get a mix or there'd be a performance that

I was really proud of, I'd always say,

"Paula, check out what we just did!"

Paula would say, "I really like this," you know?

That could lift my whole day

because I knew she didn't HAVE to say that

and that she heard music all day long

but it made me think, "Wow, maybe this one's good!"

Paula sang on the first Masters record, yeah.

She and her friend did some back-up vocals on it.

A lot of girl back-up singers ended up

working and being secretaries in studios.

"We need a back-up singer." "Just call the front desk,"

and there's one sitting there.

That was my dream, to play music, and I didn't get that

and before I knew it I was kind of in the thick of it.

It's totally attitude.

"I want to do this, I'll do whatever it takes and I'm here."

It's a training ground, you know?

Six months driving a car and then six months being the night phone.

When someone above you quit or got promoted or moved on,

then everybody moved up a step.

I hired Nick because he could make guac. Very important, yeah.

I did. I made guacamole all the time.

As a runner, I would go in there, you know, empty the ashtrays

and dust the console and vacuum

and that's when I started to learn the board.

We had runners that became engineers and then they became producers.

A lot of people that hung around here

became really successful in the record business.

You know, recording, it's a different art form.

HE CHUCKLES

When we came to Sound City,

the producer Gary Lubow said, "No, man, slow it down

"so they can hear the fucking song."

"This is punk rock - we don't slow anything down!"

# I don't care about you

# Fuck you! #

You're getting 50 seconds' worth of music but the same amount

of fucking notes because we play 'em faster!

# ..Some man who was sleeping in puke

# And a man with no legs crawling down 5th Street

# Trying to get something to eat

# Oh, I don't care about you

# Oh, no! ##

One of the greatest punk rock albums.

They made their record at Sound City.

That sounds comes out of his face, man. That's actually his voice.

# ..I don't care about you... #

Gary Lubow had been the producer on the REO Speedwagon record,

but what he wound up being was the engineer

who fought with me every day.

I became a producer by default

because nobody knew what a producer was.

The old definition of "producer"

was more watching the budget,

scheduling musicians, scheduling studio time.

That's not what they did at Sound City.

A producer works with the songs.

# You don't know how it feels

# To be me... #

A producer says, "Hey, I think this could be better,

"that could be better. I think that's amazing.

"Why can't the rest of it be as great as that?"

That's not easy to do.

Everything I try to do is from a fan's perspective.

I can listen and go, "Hmm, this part really speaks to me. This part doesn't speak to me so much."

It sounds like you're aiming a little lower today than you should be.

What balls, you know?

To tell rock stars that they got nothing.

# Well, let me get to the point

# Let's roll another joint... #

I like to push it during the songs.

Oh, hit the guitar and mess it up!

I want it to be on fire.

Working with Ross was as intense as shit.

We did 12 songs the first night we were there

and the whole time,

he is throwing potted plants at us.

I grabbed one of the candles and I threw it against the wall

as hard as I can, whacked someone across his face.

He's like, "Wah!"

Screaming into the floor. It was so good.

# ..You don't know how it feels... #

The way I love the term producer is someone

that puts a cake dish over the bat phone,

you know, they protect you from the outside world.

And they help you actualise the sounds in your head.

The producer's job is really easy.

He is the vehicle to get the artist's creativity on the tape

in a way that is accessible to your marketplace.

# To be me... #

What you have to do is get the listener to claim what you

have done as theirs.

A girlfriend, an ex-girlfriend, it's always an ex-girlfriend,

hooked me up with this guy that knew Joe at Sound City.

He said that Joe is looking for artists to sign.

I think we signed him in the middle '70s.

Joe's office was under the car ramp that took the cars

up to the parking lot on the roof.

I actually thought about not signing because of that!

# Love is alright tonight... #

He was turned down by RCA for about five years.

I had gone into the studio when the paying clients had bailed.

"Tom Petty just cancelled, we have got Studio A for four hours."

Joe took Rick Springfield under his wing and he kind of developed him.

Got him acting lessons, got him an apartment, got him some

little car, got him the General Hospital thing

that started his career.

Bobbie Spencer, this is Noah Drake.

-How are you?

-I am very happy to see you again.

It was the first steady money I'd actually seen in my life,

was 500 bucks a week. That was the first regular money I had ever had.

Joe came to me and asked me to do these couple of songs.

Keith Olsen picked Jessie's Girl out of the demos that we gave him.

I didn't get why he picked it, I thought there were stronger songs.

Rick didn't think I knew what I was talking about.

# Well, Jessie is a friend

# And, Lord, he's been a good friend of mine... #

Keith didn't like my guitar playing so he had Neil Giraldo

play guitar on Jessie's Girl, and bass.

Being a record producer, there is a time when you have to say,

"It would really be good for your career if you let this go that way."

Keith never liked my guitar playing, the prick!

Patricia and I had just finished the Crimes Of Passion

record at Sound City. Then I just met him one day and we just did it.

I mean, I probably knew him for 15 minutes before we did the song.

He had this pit terrier, so he would bring the dog into the studio.

He goes, "Watch this." He'd throw in a basketball

and it would take the basketball and go... It punctured it with its teeth.

My dog, Ron, the sound guys would get this razor light

and run it up and down the walls of Studio B and he would take

chunks out of the wall, there were holes in all of the wall.

So we get ready to do the take.

All of a sudden the dog comes into the studio,

sits down, puts his nose right in my crotch.

I was like, if I screw up it he's going to bite me, what the

hell is going on?!

And I made it through the take,

and might have even been the one we used, it was pretty good.

He never moved, he sat right there. It was fantastic.

# You know I wish that I had Jessie's girl

# I wish that I had Jessie's girl... #

We signed a lot of acts.

Every one you signed you thought,

this is going to be the big one, this is going to be it.

I was the only one that really finally paid off for him.

Nominated for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance,

singing about Jessie's Girl, it's Mr Rick Springfield!

APPLAUSE

The first cheque we got from RCA was over 1 million.

It's mind-blowing.

I think Joe had pretty good karma and this magic studio

sprung up out of this ass-ugly complex in Van Nuys.

And all these people just started coming. It was amazing.

All during the '80s, we were booked solid.

You listen to one of these stations where they play rock'n'roll,

seven or eight out of the ten songs were recorded at Sound City.

Describe Hollywood in the '80s.

Hollywood in the '80s?

I don't remember!

It was all like, you know, the hair bands, it was all the make-up,

all the pretty boys, you know.

# Cos I'm a wanted man... #

I was wondering whoever used the board after us,

if they had a burning sensation the next morning.

Then they'd know we were there!

# Some kind, some kind of friend

# You turned out to be... #

I only did one record at Sound City.

It was more family than any studio I had ever been to.

You know, family might be a bit heavy

but it was a warm feeling between us and the people that worked there.

Dio, Holy Diver, yeah, you know that record.

# Stand up and shout

# Let it out Stand up and shout... #

Paula was Italian. That's an in.

Lonnie and I are Italian so we got on with her great

and they just let us do whatever we wanted. It was so cool.

We were having such a good time at Sound City,

almost like it was a hang, and we just had to play.

I think it was a lucky thing for all of us.

I met Barbara there for the first time, in front of that board.

# Oh, baby, stay we got all night... #

I have a lot of stuff that formed me in that place, in Sound City.

You know, you're in your 20s

and you don't realise that this might not last for ever.

You don't know what is coming after.

Considering its quality and size, the compact disc most

certainly will become a part of our lives in the future.

It is all based on something called digital sound.

An innovative technique that uses lasers.

We have been sold a bill of goods about digital being so great.

You can duplicate it for ever and never lose anything.

The industry is behind it unanimously.

11 companies, from Mitsubishi to Sony,

have all agreed on using the same compact disc and the same equipment.

Everybody thought that was great but the thing that was wrong

was that they had already lost everything when they did that.

It plays theoretically pure perfect sound for ever.

In the beginning when they created the algorithms to decide how

music is recorded into the digital domain, there is a mistake in it.

So of course you can duplicate this, it was kind of a mirage.

The official company spokesman, Mr Spock, Leonard Nimoy.

The sound is great,

we have been using it on the Enterprise for decades.

It is about time it got to Earth.

Everything changed. You had a lot of things coming at you at once.

The techno side of it.

This guy named Roger Linn, who is a friend of ours.

I remember Tom and I once went over to his house

and Jim Keltner was there.

And there are all these wires and gadgets on the desk.

Roger was tinkering with them. "What are you doing?"

He goes, "I'm building a drum machine."

All the drum samples were my own drums.

You had to be a drummer to sample drum sounds in those days.

# Hey!... #

I got really, really good at it and I really loved it.

It is just a tool, it is just another way to make music.

# Don't come around here no more... #

Digital was in its infancy.

In the '80s, everybody was trying to be state-of-the-art.

People are saying you only have 24 faders and we want 32, 64.

We want 72. Whoop-de-doo!

Keith Olsen left Sound City and built a studio right next door.

That was the weirdest thing, you know.

You go out in the parking lot, there would be Keith Olsen.

I did this thing with Rick Springfield, I told

Joe Gottfried, "I want you to build me a studio.

"And I will give you the specs and I will put in the gear."

He told me one day, "You got to see this studio I built."

So I go in and he has got a board with one fader.

I said, "What you do with that?" He goes, "That is all I need.

"It is all in the computer. What do you hear what I am doing?"

I thought, I don't give a fuck.

I want some shit to play with. I want to turn knobs and I can't trust this.

Keith Olsen clearly had a lot to do with making Sound City what it is.

But then if you went to his studio next door,

it was nothing like Sound City.

It was the precursor to the digital studio.

That was an interesting time in music where sequences were

starting to come out. Now you can record audio into the computer. Wow.

We could manipulate it in ways we never could have done on tape before.

And you could think about stuff in different ways.

It was a whole new world.

# Here I go again on my own

# Going down the only road I've ever known

# Here I go again... #

In the '80s everything was a lot more digital,

things started to get more processed.

Things were really overproduced. With a cannon shot snare.

Sound City couldn't keep up.

Joe was way over his head and not just with the studio.

That time we made a lot of mistakes.

We spent a lot of money chasing other acts.

And then one day, Rick decided he wanted to go with a younger,

better manager, in his opinion.

I was kind of talked into switching managers.

And I didn't do it very well.

It was supposed to be that Joe

was like Colonel Parker and Rick was Elvis.

That's the way we all thought about it.

Rick Springfield made some money for Joe and stuff,

but Joe became like a second father to him. Rick was his baby.

This guy talked me into, you know, dumping Joe.

There was a lot of untruths told, you know.

Joe was completely shattered when it happened.

It shattered me too but not personal like it did to him.

It was a really bad day for him.

That happened, and drum machines and all that stuff

and synthesisers and stuff like that started taking over.

It just got a little haywire.

By the late '80s, Sound City, it just couldn't compete.

This was a time when studios got nicer and nicer,

like some studios had hot tubs.

At Sound City, you just wanted to work and get the hell out of there.

It was not a place you wanted to spend time.

And it seemed like it would have been so easy to clean it up,

but just no-one took it upon themselves to do that.

I got up after nine years at Sound City, 29,000 for the year.

No health insurance. Joe took it away, couldn't afford it.

And then when Joe wouldn't give me my second week vacation,

that is when I said, I'm leaving.

By the time I got to Sound City, it was really dying.

We had a tech who was dealing drugs.

Receptionist who wanted to hang out with Keith Olsen more than me

at the studio. So I got rid of her.

I remember Keith telling me I was wasting my time

and the studio would be closed in six months.

I told him to go fuck himself and get out.

I took the last 200 bucks out of my chequing account

and I bought paint and repainted the walls.

Sound City was dead. It was dead.

To be honest, I don't remember how the fuck we picked Sound City.

It is a gritty place but we were used to living on the edge,

so it's just like... It was roomy, it was comfortable.

I think it was like 600 bucks a day.

16 days in the studio and then accommodations.

I think maybe 60k was the budget for the whole record.

We had these songs and we busted them out.

We had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do.

# He's the one who likes all our pretty songs... #

As much as we loved noise

and we loved crazy-assed punk rock shit, we wanted to be a good band.

We loved the Beatles.

# Knows not what it means

# Don't know what it means... #

One of the craziest songs that we recorded was Lithium.

For whatever reason, the band and Dave kept speeding up.

Not subtly but a lot.

It would start out a certain tempo and then keep going faster

and faster, racing along basically.

I said, "Dave, have you ever played with a click track before?"

My heart just went... "Aagh!" I was fucking...

I just felt like someone had stabbed me in the fucking brain.

When you are a drummer, you don't

want anyone to ask you to play to a click track.

That human feel is what gives a player their personality.

CLICKING

Some drummers don't really know how to play to something that is

keeping them in line, like a click track.

# I'm so happy cos today... #

Lo and behold, the first take,

he locked in like he had played to a click 1,000 times.

And I think we got the song the first or second take.

# Yeah, yeah

# Yeah, yeah, yeah... #

Then when I listened to it, I'm like,

"That sounds like it's slowing down.

"It's OK to speed up a little, isn't it?"

# Yeah, yeah

# Yeah, yeah, yeah... #

A remember every night we would bring a cassette

back from Sound City to the Oakwood Apartments where we were staying

and listen to what we had done that day.

Those imperfections, that's cool. And it makes it sound like people.

And Kurt was entirely about performance.

To us it was most important that there was an honesty

and truth to what we were doing.

# Don't care, don't care don't care, don't care

-# Don't care, care if it's old...

-#

The music came through the speakers

in a way that was primal.

You could hear the sweat in the tracks.

You could hear Kurt's vocal cords.

# ..Girl, if you have

# Give it to me... #

Looking back at Sound City,

I realise so much of that record is about performance.

MUSIC: "Something In The Way" by Nirvana

When we tried to record Something In The Way,

the band tried to record it live in the big tracking room,

and it was just too kind of big and bombastic sounding.

That song had to be right because it was

such a delicate, fragile composition.

# Underneath the bridge

# The tarp has sprung a leak

# And the... #

Kurt came into the control room, he started playing the song.

He laid in front of the Neve on this couch,

and I turned off the fans and the phones and everything,

and he played the song just barely mumbling,

barely singing and barely playing that five-string guitar.

# ..And the drippings from the ceiling... #

We had to focus on making it correct in the way that it should be,

which isn't necessarily perfect. It just feels right.

# ..Something in the way

# Mm mm... #

That was when I first saw a computer used with music because

it was so hard to play that guitar.

I couldn't really figure out how to get the performances

locked together without trying to do crazy edits with them.

Somebody had told me about this new digital machine.

So this technician brought in a computer. And the screen...

it was basically like Pro Tools or something.

It was archaic, it was incredibly slow. You can't do

what you can these days in Pro Tools.

You hit this render button and it would take like two hours.

We used to call it "Slow Tools"

because it just used to slow everything down.

And when you finally listen to it, if you didn't like it,

you had to hit undo and then try another one and hit render again.

It'd take like another two hours.

The computer was such a pain in the butt.

It was like, "This is a gimmicky thing.

"A good thing we have tape. This'll never take off."

MUSIC: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana

When I hear Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio,

I remember those really simple moments of being in the studio.

And those 15 days, or 16 days - whatever it was -

that board totally changed my life.

# Hello, hello, hello with the lights out... #

Nirvana!

-Nirvana!

-Nirvana!

# ..Here we are now entertain us... #

Sound City would not have survived if it was not for that record,

you know?

Nobody'd never heard of Nirvana and it went right up to number one.

We knew right after that. We got a lot of business.

# ..Here we are now! #

It was like Fleetwood Mac all over again.

Joe was always really good to me. There was a plaque

that was brought over to me when Nevermind hit number one.

And we hung it on the wall and it was just a couple of weeks later

that Joe actually passed away.

MUSIC PLAYS

He was an absolutely beautiful person, absolutely a doll of a guy.

And, er, I didn't...

I didn't treat him very well after, you know, the separation.

And, um...

So I'm really glad we made up, you know, before he died.

It was a sad day. He helped a lot of people

do a lot of things in their career.

I remember coming back to Sound City.

I hadn't been there in a while

and the record had gotten big and they sent them a platinum record.

I remember opening the door and seeing that..

and it was such a huge moment for me.

I was just like...

because I remembered walking in there for the first time

and seeing all of those other records.

To me, Sound City represents some sort of integrity

like a truth,

which is very human.

Actual people doing this thing that inspired

millions and millions of fans

all over the place to do the same thing.

That September, the phones just blew up.

I mean, you come in in the morning, there'd be like 50 messages.

It was like this tidal wave of interest and it was a no-brainer.

Sound City.

MUSIC: "Killing In The Name Of" by Rage Against The Machine

We chose Sound City because

Nevermind was recorded there.

I'd never been in a studio before, and there was a lot of time

spent cutting a tape at an angle

and taping it together.

It really seemed crazy. It didn't make any sense to me.

# Killing in the name of... #

We did our record at Sound City like a live show.

We brought monitors in and we invited a bunch of our friends down.

I think we got half the record in that one night.

# ..Uh... #

Things got a lot more raw and down-to-earth again.

MUSIC: "All My Ghosts" by Frank Black

I had started to give in to simplification and analogue tape

and vintage equipment

and that kind of thing.

And so, obviously,

all roads led to a place like Sound City.

It became the centre of my life.

# I had a date for the eleventh hour

# Oh oh oh... #

The Catholics stuff was all live, two track, no overdub.

After making records in the '80s

and working toward perfection and all this kind of stuff,

suddenly to just doing rocking out and have it recorded,

and it's all done, it just felt really...right.

# ..Well, who needs that now?

# Ah, who needs that now... #

I kept working there pretty much into the '90s with Rick.

MUSIC: "You Wreck Me" by Tom Petty

All he kept saying was, "Oh, there's no Paula. This is really weird."

And I was just like, "You know, seriously?"

Shivaun was great, she didn't take no shit off nobody.

# Yeah, you wreck me, baby

# Yeah, you break me in two... #

And right after that, Rick did a record with Johnny Cash.

MUSIC: "Rusty Cage" by Johnny Cash

He was the coolest guy in the world and he was really humbled.

He was sick during the making of that record

and there were times where we would have to take breaks.

But he loved recording, he loved being an artist.

# Too cold to start a fire

# I'm burning diesel burning dinosaur bones... #

We kept on calling him Mr Cash, and he would get upset

and say, "No, call me Johnny."

So we all started calling him Mr Cash

behind his back.

Johnny wanted to play with the band

and he picked US, which was totally off the map for me.

It was never like the Heartbreakers playing their normal stuff.

because for each song everybody would pick up different instruments.

# ..Gonna break my Gonna break my rusty cage

# Oh, yeah. #

One of my greatest nights was when Carl Perkins came down.

MUSIC PLAYS

I was the runner and I'll never forget sitting at the front desk

at Sound City and Tom Petty and Carl Perkins and John Fogerty walked in,

and it was like...

"Wow!"

# Come on go with me, babe

# Come on, go with me, girl... #

Tom Petty never loses his cool.

And he walked out of the control room totally calm

and just slammed his hands on the table and goes,

"It's Carl fucking Perkins. Can you believe it?"

Good old Sound City came through for us again.

Other rooms in other studios all around town,

started to shift because

more and more people started to use Pro Tools.

Everybody just jumped on this bandwagon

of everything's got to be digital.

Digital consoles, digital tape machines.

I mean they hadn't decorated since 1974,

they sure as shit weren't going to spend 20 grand

on a fucking Pro Tools rig, you know?

When you came to work at Sound City,

you knew what you were getting.

It was a tape-based studio.

MUSIC: "The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret"

At some point it became cultural -

we're against that.

It starts in the runner, right the way up to

all the engineers and the studio manager.

They were just against it. Like, "Digital sucks".

Bring them in the room and mic them up and just let tape roll.

# I've got a secret I cannot say

# Blame modern movement

-# To give it away... #

-That's what Queens was about.

We were not only analogue, it needed to be live.

It needed to be something that you were proud of that you had done.

It was just what you had to do if you were a real musician.

# ..Whatever you do

# Don't tell anyone... #

Sound City was a place where real men went to make records.

It wasn't going to be easy

but, you know, all good things take an effort.

I'm going to make a mark on the tape.

And that is going to be where I'm going to cut.

When you have to record on tape,

it's pretty difficult to manipulate the sound.

We do the same thing there.

You have to really focus on, one, how it sounds going in

and then, two, the performance has to be amazing.

OK.

Part of making it in the record business in the old days

was that there was something

you could do when nobody else could do that.

Pro Tools has enabled people, any average ordinary person,

to achieve those sorts of results now.

To do that same thing with Pro Tools,

there we go. Done.

It's really that simple.

When Pro Tools came in, it freaked me out when I realised you could

drag music onto the grid and make it sound perfect.

The good thing about the digital technology is

if somebody makes a mistake,

like the bass player hits a wrong note or something,

you might be able to fix it much easier than we used to.

The not so great is it's kind of enabled people that have no business

being in a band or the music industry,

to become stars.

I heard some young guy in a band say,

"Well, you don't have to practise any more.

"You know, you just slice it up in

"the machine..." Meaning the computer.

"..and it comes out perfectly."

CLASSICAL GUITAR

Somebody like Andres Segovia, you know,

who played the guitar beautifully

there's no machine's going to do that.

MUSIC ENDS

I am NOT a Pro Tools fan.

But Trent uses it as a tool and a real creative tool.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC

I never went into it with a kind of fear of it's cheating.

I never used samplers as a way to sound like the real thing.

It was a thing that could record sound like tape,

but you can fuck with it in a million different ways.

It's a wildly inspiring tool really.

# I believe I can see the future... #

I like to record it in analogue at the highest level

and listen to it that way.

But that's not what's happening on the street.

That's not where our audience is.

You want them to live their lives in the way they want to live it.

I think it makes a lot of

independent music possible.

It's one of the reasons why

we're able to make records for a couple of hundred bucks.

I think one of the big tape manufactures went out of business.

So that really pushed everybody

into the digital world and the Pro Tools world.

The days of moving into the studio and writing your record

and recording your record and mixing your record, those days are gone.

I used to have 2, 3, 400,000 dollar budgets to do an album.

Now the money is just not there the way it used to be.

The budgets were so small. We'd be tracking five days, ten days.

It was always last minute. "Can you work this afternoon?" or whatever.

So...

MUSIC: "Lover There Will Be Another One" by Neil Young

In the end, it was a little hard to swallow.

We started selling off the gear in studio B.

The studio was way behind on bills.

# Lover, there will be another one

# Who'll hover over you beneath the sun... #

Most of the great studios have gone out of business.

And a lot of what you hear on the radio was made on people's laptops.

I think Pro Tools has really, was to a lot of people, the death knell.

It always was an insider place. Always.

But it could not survive against Pro Tools.

You know, the internet's cool for some stuff but, like many things,

there's no book store, there's no music store

and there's no Sound City.

# ..And show you the way to go

# It's over

# It's over... #

I had heard that Sound City was about to close.

Someone said, "You should call Shivaun."

And I talked to Shivaun and she was in tears, man.

It was... It was heavy.

Sound City was my home.

And, um, basically, after all those 19 years laid-off,

no severance pay. No medical. Nothing.

Shivaun was like... She was like a mum to me.

You now, I'd left my mum. My mum was in Tennessee and then I was out here

and Shivaun was so cool. I love her so much.

# ..Shadow on the things you know... #

I'm sorry.

Yeah, it's been hard.

Yet, still...

I'm trying to move on but it's...

it's hard.

# ..It's over

# It's over

# Ooh, ooh-ooh. #

MUSIC ENDS

Looking back, I was just a kid,

when I walked into Sound City.

And that board is the reason

I'm here right now.

I'd do anything for it.

This big room and that Neve console

is what got us all the big rock'n'roll bands.

We're digging out all this stuff

and I never dreamed in a million years I could find this.

Here's the original order for the Neve console.

Oh, my God. Really?

Wow!

And your signature. Is that Neve's signature?

I'm going to give that to you if you'd like it.

Oh, Tom, thank you so much, man.

You're welcome.

-A historic document there.

-It really is.

-Thank you very much, my friend.

-Thank you.

That's great, man. Wow.

That Neve console we sold to Dave and that's how this all started.

ROCK MUSIC PLAYS

All right, let's do this.

To me it's like it's a living breathing piece

of the music that we've made.

It's just as instrumental as any instrument that's run through it.

It's the sound of the records

that were made at Sound City.

This thing is a piece of rock'n'roll history.

I thought that board would just go

straight to the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.

I thought NO-ONE was going to get that board.

I think they knew like, I wasn't going to

bubble-wrap it and stick it in a warehouse.

I was going to fucking use it.

A lot.

Seems like you'd kind of pull it through a window.

CHUCKLES

Spent so much time sitting over here, with these things.

Well, was it still sitting there, Dave?

Yeah, you know, it had been working...

The first thing I really wanted to do

was invite everyone back to make this new record.

Giving that old board this new life with new music.

Telling the story of Sound City is one thing.

Plugging in and actually putting it through the board

and putting it on a two-inch reel...

That's what I'm talking about.

# We don't talk much about it

# It goes back so many years

# All the times we almost didn't make it

# We stayed clear

# We walked through the darkness

# We made a pact not to dance with the devil

# Even when the devil seemed to have a heart

# He said we'd never be sorry

# For what we'd done

# And we never allowed the devil

# To come to the party... #

I messed up.

-It's amazing. Want to do another?

-Sure.

You want to take it up through verse one and verse two,

-up to that first chorus.

-Yeah.

What we're hoping to do on this album

is to catch a little bit of that vibe

that was captured when all those classic records

were made at Sound City, and try to put some of that into this album.

TAPE RESTARTS

# For what we'd done

# And we never allowed the devil

# To come to the party

# You can't fix this

# You lost a friend

# Hearts breaking

# Write a letter... #

TAPE SLOWS TO A STOP

Fuckin' A. That girl can sing.

Any input from the Foos?

-Just go...I'm not... just do what you do.

-OK. Thank you.

I am kinda radical, you know.

# Never dance with the devil

# He will burn you down... '

There's a reason why these people have achieved

these things that they've achieved.

You can hear it, you can see it.

# Don't ever dance with the devil

# He will burn you down

# You can't fix this... #

TAPE SLOWS TO A STOP

It's red. It sounds red.

And I get to do my snake dance.

LAUGHTER

I'm just feeling very wonderful to be in your studio with this board

and know that this board was the first place

that we did Buckingham Nicks.

15458, Cabrito Road, Van Nuys, California.

This is a letter that I wrote to my Mum and Dad and my brother

in the middle of the making of Buckingham Nicks.

"Dear Mum and Dad and Chris, well,

"here I am once again at the famous Sound City recording studio."

Sound City, Inc.

Ta-da!

"I'm getting very tired of sitting around listening

"to 12 hours of music per day.

"Oh, well. I know it will pay off in the end. It will all be worth it.

"I hope that all of my little family is doing fine

"and not working too hard.

"Moving right along, I just want to say

"that I certainly do miss you all,

"and wish you could be here to hear some of this stuff.

"Lindsey may go down in history as one of the greats in guitar playing.

"It really is quite amazing.

"Well, no more news as of yet.

"So much love to you all,

"and hold good thoughts about this thing.

"I love you, Stevie."

I think it really is a testament

to how many people actually did love Sound city

and do love that Neve console, and want to be part of history.

I was bragging to everybody. "Guess who I'm calling tonight?

"Rick fucking Springfield."

PLAYS FAST, BLUESY RIFF

I've always been just a big believer in the power of the song.

To me, the highest I ever feel is in the middle of writing a song

that I think I've hooked into something, you know?

I had an idea. I don't know if it would work,

but would you want to try something?

So if we played over the riff, it goes...

That's fuc... That'd be really cool.

Let's try it from the top and see how that sounds.

Yeah, I think it's a great part.

-It got Rick Springfield written all over it.

-I know, it's awesome!

I love it. It's got that stress rock. I like that.

I just want to go hang out in a studio.

I just like the process.

I love doing things on the fly and in the studio.

Just trying to think what would be nice, if we...

To get back into that section.

I just kind of play arrangements in a repetitive fashion

over and over and over, until some little change happened.

What did you just do? You did something kind of cool.

D, A?

A little happy accident or whatever, and it was like, everyone,

"Oh! What was that that just happened?

"That's part of the arrangement now."

It'll be so great. And then, right out of there, you just go...

HE SCREAMS

It's the perfect pair of pants, it really is.

The good thing about learning while you're recording,

when you sometimes accidentally get something good, if you don't

have any idea what you're doing.

The sense of discovery, like...

Is a big part of it.

Everybody gets it all at once, and that's the first time

you've ever played it, and it's got everything new for the first time.

It's like your first anything.

And that's the cherry of all time.

What if we tried doing the Rick part as a pre-chorus...

Yes! That's so good!

Cos then it goes into the chorus. It's awesome!

-Better be good now, Pat.

-I know!

LAUGHTER

2...

# I can't say that I like her manner

# I can't say that I like her face

# Carved up on a silver platter

# Served warm, she's a real headcase

# I won't wait for an invitation

# I can't stay for the sacrifice

# I won't die as an unknown soldier

# I won't even try... #

We came in, we practised the song,

played it a few times,

kind of a bunch of times, and we did it live.

How special is that?

# Just like the man that never was...

# Just like

# Just like

# Just like the man that never was

# Just like the man that never was... #

All the elements of it, the playing, the writing,

it's something that will pull you out of bed every morning.

And make you resist going to bed at night

because you want to keep working on it.

Music's been that for me.

# I am the man that never was. #

-Great, thanks.

-You've got some darkness in you, boy!

-Oh, yeah.

-A lot of darkness in me!

-It's true, man.

Spent a lot of time in front of that board.

-Thanks, Dave.

-That's cool.

It's a great enabler.

Fucking great, man.

'Anybody that's been to Sound City knows exactly

'why I'm making this record. They get it.'

I have an idea. Why don't we just start it Lee Ving style,

where you go, "1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4!"

I'm on it!

1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4!

-# Your wife is calling

-Tell her I'm not here

-# Your wife is calling

-Just having one beer

-# Your wife is calling

-Der uberfrau!

-# Your wife is calling

-I'll be home in half an hour

-# Your wife is calling

-Did you say something, dear?

-# Your wife is calling

-Having one more beer

-# Your wife is calling

-You have nothing to fear

-# Your wife is calling

-Divorcing for beer... #

In the studio, you're trying to boost your own performance

from the energy that you're feeding from in your partners.

# Your wife is calling

# Your wife is calling... #

You can't do that if you're standing there alone.

# Your wife is calling

# Your wife is calling

# Your wife is calling

# Your wife is calling

# Your wife is calling. #

LAUGHTER

Fuck, yeah.

'It's a conversation,'

and that's a musical relationship that I think everybody searches for.

I think the downside these days is thinking that

I can do this all on my own.

Yes, you can do this on your own.

But you'll be a much happier human being