So in the case of projects like Pink Floyd's The Wall or the KISS records. Both had instances of members of not getting along or being "well" per se. How did you go about dealing with conflicts and flakiness? Like Ace Frehley just "not being there"...
Well, we don't want to overplay that. At time of working on Destroyer everyone was completely into it. Everyone was co-operating and trying their very best and certainly there were varying levels of proficiency on their instruments amongst the four players but everybody wanted to succeed. We worked really, really, really hard in rehearsal on that album to make sure that not only did we come up with interesting parts but that the band was capable of playing them well. So contrary to the urban myth that there were a lot of session players on that album — in fact, the band played virtually everything. There are a couple of guitar parts where I had to bring someone else in to help out because Ace was sort of missing in action, but that's all really. The rest of it was the band or me, a few specialists — and of course there was the orchestra. But it was almost completely self-contained. And I think that the band should get some recognition for that because I think when you listen to things like "Detroit Rock City" you hear some powerful confident musicians playing really interesting parts. And, playing well beyond what their previous product had indicated they were capable of. They should get a pat on the back for having done that. And, the only way that they did it was by practicing — being in the rehearsal studio and practicing over and over and over again. We spent weeks in there — 8, 10, 12 hours a day, drilling the material until the band was really comfortable.
And does the rest just become a technical process?
No. Then the rest becomes exactly the opposite. The rest becomes an emotional process. Once you know what you have to do and how you have to do it, you then reach for the feeling. Because far too often, in the studio you go in with material that's just recently been written. You're only partially comfortable with it, if at all, and you spend a good deal of your time trying to play it well. And sometimes, that's sort of "all consuming" and makes it difficult for the player who just experienced the music emotionally. So for most of the music that gets made at studios these days you don't really hear that depth of emotion. And the recordings where you do hear that depth of emotion are either ones that exploded in the studio through a kind of chain reaction of invention and emotion or ones where the band has played them live for long enough that they're comfortable with them, and bring them into the studio and just feel them — play them with all the emotion that they deserve. With the KISS guys, that's what went on — and to a certain extent, the same is true with the [Pink] Floyd guys. We figured out the parts first and practiced, practiced, practiced — and then we recorded them.
The Wall, being a grand concept album, how was it done in terms of linearity? Was it produced in order from the story's beginning to end?
Yes. It was an extremely linear process. It started off with Roger [Waters] having a general concept about alienation and the metaphorical wall between himself and the audience that he considers building.
Did you relate to this concept in any way? Did you go through any bouts of mental wariness and perhaps madness from being in a studio for far too long without seeing daylight?
In fact, though we did spend some months in the studio, the settings were always wonderful and the group took very good care of me. So, I did not get cabin fever. On the contrary, I enjoyed the travel and working in different cultures. The project itself, however, was heady, fun, excruciating, mad, brilliant, passionate and draining all at once. It was fraught with the sort of conflict that accompanies any great work — the sort of dynamic tension that must exist when art is being fashioned.
And he presented the idea of the album in the back of a limousine in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1975 when they did that infamous Ivor Wynne stadium show in the residential area...
