Day 1, album #3?

[Miguel]

Jimmy Iovine started as an engineer. Excerpts from a 2012 Rolling Stone interview:

Roy took me to L.A. to work with John Lennon and Phil Spector on Rock and Roll. I was Roy's main assistant. I'd just turned 20. I'd been up to Phil's house. I said, "Phil, I'm going to set up the mics. How many musicians?" "Eight."

Next day, I set up. Every fucking mic was taped [in place]. Nothing in my life had ever been done that carefully. Thirty-eight musicians showed up – two bass players, three piano players, eight guitar players. So I go to work. We got 38 guys set up. That was the first day. The second day, I was like, "I'm ready for this motherfucker."

The legend of those sessions is that everybody was loaded.

Unbelievably drunk. Phil would come in with two guns strapped to his chest and a bullhorn. I was on pins and needles. You'd be standing there, and he would come up behind you with the fucking bullhorn: "More echo!" Smirnoff made this gimmick bottle in those days, as big as a missile, full of vodka. They had one in the studio. Everybody was drinking. There was a liquor store next door. I had to go and get Courvoisier. I wasn't old enough to buy it. I had to bring one of the studio guys with me.

One day, when we got back to New York, I put up the tape of "Sweet Little Sixteen" – set the board up, put the echo on, balanced the sound. My boss wasn't there yet. John's assistant, May Pang, came in and said, "John and I would like a coffee." John said, "You get the coffee, unless you can make it sound like that." My fucking head exploded. He sat down next to me and said, "Wow, that's exactly what I had in my head." I mixed my first record.

You engineered the overdubbing on Walls and Bridges. What was it like to work so close with Lennon?

It was just me and John in the studio, doing vocal after vocal. I learned how a song works and how the voice fits in the track, how to get that excitement – the use of echo and delay without losing the power and feel.

One day, John comes in and says, "Elton's in town. He's going to come in and sing. He's going to do 'Whatever Gets You Through the Night.'" Now, every piano player that walked into a studio then wanted Elton John's piano sound. I have no idea how to do this. Elton arrives, and I'm praying he won't want to play piano. I try to hide the piano. So Elton sings. He plays the organ. Then he says, "John, give us a piano." I'm like, "Fuck."

What did you do?

I take two vocal mics you shouldn't use for a piano and put them up. Then I learn my biggest recording lesson up to that point. As John McEnroe would say, it's not the racket. When Elton started playing, he sounded like no one else on that piano. He sounded exactly like Elton John. I'd never seen anybody hit the piano harder. He comes back into the control room and listens: "A great piano sound!" John turns to Elton and says, "That's one of the reasons I use him" [laughs].

I caught what was there. Same thing with Keith Richards. The Stones were working at one of the New York studios while I was there. Keith's guitar was set up, so we had to find out. One of the studio guys plays it, and it sounds like nothing. Next day, Keith comes in, hits it – bang, there it is. It's the guy.

How did you go right from recording an ex-Beatle to working on Born to Run?

John's retired. I've got nothing to do. Roy calls me: "There's a guy at the Hit Factory. They just threw him out. His name is Bruce Springsteen, and he wants to come to our studio." So I go in, and there's [producer] Jon Landau, [Springsteen's then-manager] Mike Appel and Bruce. He's playing piano – "Thunder Road." I heard this guy sing – and those lyrics. I said, "Oh, my God." Then they played me the track they already had for "Born to Run." Landau looked at me and said, "Hey, I-veen" – Bruce still calls me that – "can you do this?" Absolutely. I'm 21 and I have my second client. [Grins] I'm spoiled.

Did engineering for Spector and Lennon prepare you for Springsteen's vision of a wall of sound?

With John, I learned to make sure the band felt right around the vocal. That's how you get the take, not the other way around. You don't get the music and then sing it. On [U2's] Rattle and Hum, I wouldn't record the take unless Bono was there. I didn't care if he had words or not. I wanted to hear his voice, the moment where it all connects.

I learned all about that power. You can't really pick out what's playing. But if you listen closely, you can hear each instrument. Phil called that a wall. Bruce wanted that. My whole life became about that. It was brutally painful, feeling like we were never going to get there. This is beyond all our grasps, what this guy has in his head. We were all deathly afraid of Springsteen.

Why?

This guy was broke. You couldn't borrow him, rent him, get him to compromise. He didn't give a fuck who you were, what you were going to give him. It was him and that record. Anything else . . . [Shrugs his shoulders]. That's powerful.

Springsteen was also a fascinating contradiction: He knew exactly what he wanted on his records yet took forever in the studio to articulate and achieve it.


There's two different things. On Born to Run, the entire idea was at stake. Darkness was about the right material – we had gotten the sound to where we wanted it. We were creating everything from the ground floor on Born to Run. His first two albums were just songs with some electric guitar. Born to Run was "No, I'm tired of that. No more compromise." The guitar parts on "Thunder Road" were 13 hours in the studio. I fell asleep at the console in the middle of it. All he said for 13 hours was "Again. Again. Again."

Couldn't you hear what he was thinking?


No. Because he didn't know. What I did know was I cared as much about their thing as they did. Whatever my thing was came second. I was there to help them get what they want. I remember the time I went to Mike Appel's office when they first hired me. He had this picture of Bruce behind him. He said, "See this guy? That's Jesus!" [Laughs] Born to Run was brutal.

Do you remember the day Springsteen finally decided it was done?


Yeah. Because it wasn't. I had mastered the album and took a train to Baltimore to play it for him. Jon and Bruce were at a motel where you sleep around the swimming pool. I go into Bruce's room, and he goes, "OK, I-veen, put it on." We're listening to it on a stereo he'd just bought, with two speakers and a turntable. When the album is over, he gets up, takes it off, walks outside – and throws it in the pool.

I was crushed. I didn't know what to do. Maybe this record player is fucked up. And Bruce is going, "I'm doing the whole album live." I couldn't deal with it. I went back to New York on the train. I must have taken 10 Valium on the way home. But Landau talked to him. It ended up being the album. Landau called me: "It's all right."

When you worked on Born to Run, Damn the Torpedoes and Patti Smith's Easter, could you tell you were making classic albums?

I recognized Damn the Torpedoes because of what I went through on Born to Run. I was like, "This is the same fucking thing, except the guy has blond hair." It's a third album; this guy has built up all this steam. This is the same thing, except I'm producing.

^ Interesting observations there about Springsteen and Petty's third albums.

Additional comments:

Turn on KROQ [in Los Angeles]. Every guitar sounds exactly the same, unless it's played by Tom Morello or Jack White. We used to go into the studio and unless the guitar sounded like nothing you'd heard before, we didn't stop. Tom Petty – it was 20 amps, 14 guitars. "Try this one. That one's good for the chorus." These kids, because it's so easy, have lost the energy and innovation that the Sixties and Seventies were about. The Beatles and the Stones, Pink Floyd – they were into sounds. Eddie Kramer was working as an engineer with Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. That's where I come from.

Are there kids out there who are the next Trent Reznor? No. They're saying, "I'm going to write software." There are kids out there who could be the Edge, but they say, "Nah, I can edit a video."

What do you get out of appearing on American Idol? At best, the show creates momentary stars who barely last the season. And the biggest artists you've worked with – Springsteen, Bono, Eminem – wouldn't even pass an audition.

They wanted me to be on the show. I said no – I'll work out of my studio, helping kids make music. That's what I do. I'm not a joke a minute. Film it. You can edit it. Just make sure I don't say anything fucking ridiculous. It's a great platform. I can put my acts on the show, to help break them. And the label needs it. We still don't have our new model yet, the industry. It's fucking dead as a duck.

there's so few people that still covet and listen to albums. I'm not saying the album is dead. But 90 percent of the albums in the world should not be made. There was a time when you earned the right to make one. You had to have a body of songs, a hit single. Now you can't sign anybody for less than that. That's a business thing.

Lady Gaga's got a chance of having the career Elton John had. She's that good a writer. Who she'll become after her second album, I don't know. Adele is creating a body of work. The change is in the way people consume it. Rock has a real problem. All you hear every day is how not cool the record industry is. That's going to have an effect on who gets into music. All you need is a new Bruce Springsteen deciding he's going to work for Apple – or create his own. Look at the intensity and force that went into making Darkness. If Bruce ever had a fucking excuse not to do it, maybe he would have chosen not to. It's the same thing you see when musicians get older. To make an album like [Pink Floyd's] The Wall or any of the great Stones albums – it's painful to go to that dark place. When you have horses and a boat and friends in the South of France, kids who want your attention, it makes you not want to go to that place. You go there because you have to.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/j...s-20120412