The Vig roll

Smashing Pumpkins – Gish (1991), Siamese Dream (1993)

“What I loved in Billy (Corgan) was that he was very driven and he had a vision and really took pride in playing it as good as you could get it, he would happily spend ten hours on one guitar part to get it right. I jumped at the chance of making Gish. Billy really pushed me and I really pushed Billy and he really pushed that band, he expected them to be constantly at the top of their game. I mean, it was very tense – they were not a happy band. Siamese Dream was a hard motherfucker to make; it almost killed me at the end. Five straight months of working six, sometimes seven days a week, 15, 16 hours a day. And working too: not sitting around the studio drinking beer or smoking; really intense sessions.

In some ways I think that’s the record I’m most proud of really. I had to deal with the whole dysfunctional breakdown of the band, and Jimmy (Chamberlain) going AWOL for days doing drugs and everybody threatening to quit, including Billy. There were numerous times he went, ‘Fuck you, fuck you!!’ He’d stomp out say he was gonna get on a plane and go back to Chicago. But somehow we were able to just barely keep everybody together. When I went and saw them play their final show in Chicago, people were asking me, ‘Are you sad to see them go?’ and I said, ‘I can’t believe they’ve lasted so long!’ They made it through a lot of really horrible disasters, and a lot of that was I think Billy’s sheer ambition, his willpower to keep them going.”

L7 – Bricks Are Heavy (1992)

“I met them through Dave (Grohl), he was dating one of them, and they were hanging out at the Nevermind sessions and Donita (Sparks) kept bugging me, saying, ‘You should produce our record’. I think part of the process for them was going to Madison, because they completely took over the town. They knew every bookie, every late night bar, every cab driver, every restaurant owner, every possible weird little connection in the city. I mean, you’ve been there, Madison can be small town, and by the time they left they were running the place. They got into a lot of trouble – had to bail ’em out a few times!”

Sonic Youth – Dirty (1992)

“I’d seen Sonic Youth many times and I was a fan, and I was slightly intimidated by them ’cos I just thought they were so fucking cool, and Kim (Gordon) is beautiful and has this intense gaze, these eyes that can just burn a hole at a thousand yards. I thought of them as being very cerebral and brainy and arty, and when I actually met them they were really funny, very human, just super cool people to work with. I had to figure out ways to sort of… I mean every band is completely different, and the dynamic of that band was different. Kim I think had a pretty strong influence on Thurston, and Thurston had a fairly strong influence on the band, even though as individuals the four of them were in a lot of ways like Garbage, all really opinionated and coming from all over the place. I had to learn how to deal with the politics, adapt to the personalities and how they interact. But once I got past that intimidation thing they were great.

It’s funny; these three records that we were talking about (Nevermind, Siamese Dream and Dirty) became the psychological productions for me, less technical. I think it was from working with those three artists that I really realised more than half of production is psychological, ’cos anybody can get a good drum sound. You have to get inside an artist’s head and figure out what their vision is and find a way to motivate them, and sometimes get them to do things they don’t want to do. That is the trickiest thing a lot of times, to do it in a way that you don’t alienate them or piss ’em off and they walk out of the studio. Or fire you – I’ve never been fired from a record! Although there are some I probably should’ve been fired on or wish I would’ve been fired on.”