Here's the atmosphere when this band comes on the scene: their immediate successful influence band was B-52's. And their initial gigs were party gigs, just like B-52's. The way that Stipe got the lyrical content that he did get into these records was that nobody could hear it or gave a shit, not because they had big meetings about what it was going to be. Their lack of knowing what each other was doing was a big part of the success. Mitch and I recognized that that was one of the strengths, and that if we began changing elemental things about them to make them sound more like they were from Memphis, then we would lose the more interesting, but perhaps more commercial, aspects of their party band. The label didn't necessarily understand this, they just said, "Well, here's a band that people seem to like." Despite how cool people perceive IRS as being, they spent a lot of money on the Alarm. And they put a lot of pressure on us to deliver Thompson Twin-like singles for them because that's what was hot. We were looking at an era, where almost especially in hip, college scenes, it was almost all British, almost all drum machines, almost all synthesizer. Guitars were dead. As a matter of fact, REM was scared to death of any kind of vague distortion on a guitar at all. We [the producers] had come from the house of the Holy Grail of distorted guitar-land. Guitar sounds to us were boxes turned up loud. It wasn't this clean thing. So we had to work hard to get guitar sounds we could stand, that we felt like did something, that meant anything, that wouldn't also make them [REM] go "Oh, I heard some distortion, people are going to think that we're a hair band!" or whatever label people were using back then.
Did his playing make your job easier though? Lots of arpeggiation — did you sit there and go, "Roger McGuinn, OK, lemme think of the Byrds records, how they were recorded"?
Maybe, but Byrds records have lots more classic guitar sounds that we were allowed to have, especially on that first album.
A lot more compression too.
Maybe so, but we got the compressors working very hard on those records. But what we tried to do was use them playing almost everything, the basic parts. I played bass on "Perfect Circle" or because Mike Mills was playing piano, and it just needed a real plain sort of bass part. So "Perfect Circle" is Mills and Bill Berry, one's playing a tack piano, and the other one's playing the regular Yamaha piano, both at the same time, real close together, I just had one mic on them.
So most of the songs were done live?
No, not necessarily. I always try to make everybody play together, and then I use whatever sounds I can. Typically, if bands already know their songs, they play better all together. If they're hearing the singing, then they know where they are and they don't have to count. That's a big thing, trying to get the guys to sing.
Were REM comfortable in the studio at this point [during the Murmur sessions]?
Not really, they didn't know much about it. What happened is that IRS signed them, said, "OK, now you don't want to make these backwoods records anymore," you know, they're in California. They knew that Mitch Easter, he's probably in the Klan or something [laughter]. So they encouraged the band to work with some guy from Boston, relatively well known guy, Steve "something-or-other". He took them in the studio and made them do the typical thing of beating them to death, made them do 800 takes of a song, told them that Bill sucked, that Bill couldn't possibly play on the record, that they'd have to replace him. He produced these not very good recordings, very modern by 1981 standards, which meant it sounded like the Cars. Which is not horrible, just not exactly what we had in mind. I mean, our records are kind of close, they're not real ambient, they're kind of simple. The ambiance that is there is live, and then we had one EMT plate that we used a lot. It was like, slap delay, my favorite, 151 ms with a 440 machine going, [tape] slapping. So anyway, REM had this horrible experience with these guys, and said "please let us try some songs with Mitch." At which point, Mitch had never been in a real studio, and they IRS said, "well, OK, but you can't record in his garage, you've got to go to a real studio." So Mitch called me up and asked me if I was interested and willing to help and I said sure. So we went to Charlotte and recorded "Catapult" and "Pilgrimage". The guitar amp on "Pilgrimage" was some sort of solid state amp that just happened to be there, because he didn't bring an amp. It was some little Casino amp, one 12". The guitar sounded great, as good as he ever sounded, before he discovered that yes, you can turn it up. We continually encouraged them to turn it up, and they were pretty open to things, but they would also let you know if they were worried about something, and we'd work around it. They always had a certain kind of fanatical following, even when it was tiny. But nobody thought at the time that this band was going to be the next big thing. There was a lot of pressure at the time, the Police were big, U2 kind of big too. I have always tried to protect what is good about a band, and just kind of softening the things that aren't as good.
So how about the story about Michael singing through a handheld mic out in the stairs. You know, too shy to sing in front of you guys, that sort of thing.
It's not so much that. We did, without asking him, simply set him up in the stairwell. Where nobody could see him. He was definitely using really nice mics, though he might have done one song or something that we gave him a handheld mic for, but I don't remember. Typically we used a FET-47 on him for the whole thing.
Was there a particular reason you set him up in the stairwell?
I personally liked singing in the stairwell a lot. I liked the way it sounded, because it's got a little bit boxy sound, a slight sort of bedroom clank to it, so it wasn't totally dead. And you could turn the lights off, nobody could see you. Now it's got a glass door, so you can peek in there. But at the time, there were two doors between the stairs and the studio.
Did you do that with everybody?
Not everybody, but a lot of singers. To avoid that fishbowl effect. He was pretty secretive and a bit shy. Plus, I'm also the kind of person who is not interested in seeing lyrics. I want to have to hear what's going on, I don't want to be given the opportunity to say, "oh that's not what he's really saying." It's not a judgemental thing, it's to avoid thinking about whether the singer is articulate enough, because that doesn't matter. And so much of Stipe's writing was sound-oriented anyway. And as a singer myself, I'd been given an earful of "You're not articulate enough, you fucking shit," my whole life and I would say stuff like, "Well, what is Mick Jagger saying here you asshole?" I was tired of small-minded, idiot producers. I learned most of what not to do from guys [that were] producing me.
It was all over articles for years, though, about how inarticulate he was, as if they'd never heard a guy where you can't understand anything. Which is of course bullshit.
Yeah. And many of our favorite songs became hits because people were obsessed trying to figure out what they were talking about. I wasn't even being that conscious about that. We were mostly like, "Mike, you can sing anything you want to. I'm not going to tell you what to sing. You tell me when you feel like it's good enough, I'll tell you if you're more out of tune than you need to be." It was kind of that simple.
Did you and him have an immediate bond because you were both singers?
Not really. On the whole, they kind of just looked at me as the technical guy anyway. Because they didn't know me as well as they had known Mitch, and they didn't know me musically and they knew Mitch musically. I had records on Warner Brothers with bands that played in coliseums, so I was like the enemy anyway.
Did they ever show any attitude to you? Act standoffish?
No, they were fine, it was no big deal. But I was just sort of Mitch's friend that Mitch wanted to help on this. They didn't know anything about what I had done, really. But they were good, I tried a few things. On one of those records, I did this real sophisticated vocal arrangement for something and we actually recorded it and listened to it, before we all said, "Well, this is too much for you guys." They were relatively patient.
Alright, let's jump ahead to after it comes out. It was starting to make a difference right from the get-go.
Well, the band had huge critical success and a very heavy, diehard serious cult following. The Rolling Stone response to Murmur was very strong, but it still didn't sell many records. I mean, it sold maybe 100,000 in the first year. And college radio wasn't very organized, with no real charts for it. And I wish it was still like that, only regional charts.
So did your phone just start ringing at this point? Did your standing in the industry immediately go up, was the industry hip to the critical acclaim coming in, or was it still indifferent to that?
Yes, that stuff helped a lot. The problem was that those people didn't really understand why REM was successful. They thought it was just about being obscure and not playing the guitar very well.
Did you get points on that record?
Not much, I think Mitch and I split 3 points, which is actually pretty decent. We didn't get much of an advance. The budget for the first record was slightly under $15,000 and the second was not much more.
Wow. How long did it take you?
We did our typical kind of 21 day sort of thing on the first one and a few days less on the second.
What kind of days were we talking? Eight hours, twelve?
I never work less than twelve. Probably fourteen, typically.
OK, here's a big thing, is ear fatigue a myth?
If you don't listen too loud, you don't get ear fatigue. If you're standing in front of loud amps, or mixing at a level that a lot of people mix at, then, yeah it's a real thing. Absolutely.
I've come around to mixing at real low levels. Because you see what jumps out.
You've got to check it out at high volumes every once in a while, to check for squeaks, pops, and noises you don't hear. But your blending should always be done at kind of low levels.
When you mixed those records, were the songs mixed at the same time?
I prefer to record and mix as I go when I'm in a situation where I can do that. I think you stay focused that way.
Was it an intense mixing experience, with tons of mixes on each song?
We would get mixes up, and once everybody was happy with them, we did it. I think it's very important that the band is there for mixing. You have to defend your decisions to them at that point, if one guy says, "turn me up," you have to explain why he's at the right volume already. And also, sometimes they're right. Sometimes you're concentrating on one particular aspect, and yes indeed, the bass is not quite up loud enough. So you say "thanks, man," and fix it. Or you get to the third bar, and they say "oh, that part is not supposed to be there," and you wouldn't know that, and if they're not there at the time, you have to go back and redo the whole damn thing. So I like having the band around, I almost insist that they are. Unless they completely agree that, when I'm happy with the mixes, they're done.
Well, you know, a lot of bands don't stay for the mixing, obviously. But it's good when a band at least knows the fundamental idea of recording.
Part of what my job is as a producer is to kick the fuckers out of the nest. I'm not interested in doing records for them and perpetuating a career I don't even like. I'm interested in them learning everything they can from me.
That's the most frustrating thing we run into, that so many of these people don't know the basics. And I didn't either, but I tried to listen and learn instead of talk and learn. I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon, but some of these young bands come in, don't know anything, and just start going off and it ends up becoming distracting and taking us away from what we have to do.
Extremely distracting, but it's the real thing. You guys are in a tough position, because until you get a gold record on your wall, they won't shut up.
One more thing on the REM stuff, when you recorded it, is there anything that really stands out, or any secrets or anything? I mean there's a mythology about Murmur, and I think it's funny when you say there's not a lot of ambiance on that record, because most people would think that everything was miced twenty-five feet away on that record.
Some things are. Ambiance was the wrong word. It's still kind of a close record. We're not real far away from the drums on that record. We don't have a lot of big, cracking room around them. They're still pretty compact, kind of deep. We were looking for... an alternative way to fill the spectral area where there was no fuzz. Or bass. So what that did was it opened up this darker snare drum area that we could use. A lot of these songs have boxy, sorta Memphis snare drums on them, because they cut up, they filled the spectral area out nicely without covering anything up. Those drum sounds won't make it through big fuzz guitar sounds.
Those records inspired an entire sound. What do you think the essence of that sound was?
I believe you, but it's hard for me to see it that way. Peter was not interested in being a lead guitar player, which is probably the key to his more inventive style. Since he didn't know many chords, he'd make up these arpeggiated things, but he'd listened to lots of records and was real musical, so he had all this stuff swimming around in his head.
Did you use a lot of close micing with 57's?
Hard to remember. I'm not one of those guys who just sets up an amp and does a whole record. We messed around with different things. And Mitch too was hugely involved in these guitar sounds.
Was the Rickenbacker one of the biggest aspects of that sound?
Well, the single-coil sound of the Rickenbacker is a real thing. The pickups are very low output, very smooth. Which can cause an amp with peaks in it to have really peaky notes. [We used] lots of fast limiting to even these things out with under-compression after the fact. Like take [Urei]1176 [compressor]'s and run the two mix separate and just push them up under the whole mix. So you're not taking the stuff off the top, you're just bringing everything that is soft up. You've still got more transient than if you were beating it all down here, but you've got an ultra-compressed mix with really fast release times under everything so that the cymbals ring out a little bit more, everything rings out a little bit more. But the top isn't crushed down.
So what amp were you using at that point? Did you introduce him to the Vox
AC30?
We used a lot of different things. Probably we introduced him to the AC30... I brought in one I'd had forever.
But he was conscious not to overdrive it. We've found the Rickenbacker to be thin a lot of times, how do you combat that?
A lot of what you're doing when you're trying to get cleanish guitar sounds and still have some power to them is you've got to have those compressors working overtime. But you've got to be careful with the attack times, because you can't take all the attack away. So one of the things that we would do is under-compression. You take your microphone and you split it into two signals. You have one without any compression coming up on a fader and then you have one with lots of fast attack and fast release on the fader right beside it. And then you assign both of those faders to one track. What you end up with is a fuller version that still has all the peaks.
The bass on those records is quite good too.
Yeah, the first album was pretty much a direct bass sound. He was playing a Rick then too.
Did you 1176 that as it came through?
Oh, I'm sure. We had lots of compressors. I may have been using something different on that one.
Why go direct?
I go direct almost exclusively just because I'm too lazy to set it up. It depends very specifically on what I want to do. On this other record I did bass entirely through a Twin Reverb. 10's are better for bass than 12's. So with Mike, one of the discussions we had before Reckoning was that he wanted a bass sound that was more like his live sound. So I went to see him play in this little pizza place in Greensboro, right before we went in. And we started that record without Mitch. I was in there first about three or four days doing initial setup. So for Reckoning, we set up his bass amp in this long tube, a gobo-built tube. It was about twelve feet long, completely isolated with four 12" speakers out at the end, and I miced him maybe six or seven feet out into the tube.
Do you remember what mic you used?
It would have been a large diaphragm mic of some sort. Could have been an AKG.
So after the success of those records, what kind of changes have you made [in your production style]?
Well, in some ways those records were successful, but those were not the kind of records that most major labels liked. They would say, "Oh, this band could sound real good if they got a real producer." Because they were different sounding records for the time. And most people I guess just assumed that there wasn't quite as much technique and forethought going into how those records sounded.
