PAUL LAURENCE: How about Mick Taylor? How does he record?
ANDY JOHNS: Well, Mick Taylor always plays incredibly loud. That's how he gets all of that sustain. It's not just for tone alone—he likes that level as well. Because he does play so loud, you have to screen him off a lot. You tend to have him the furthest out of all the musicians, sort of on the outside. More than just level, he has a very penetrating sound. He also has a lot of bottom end, which you don't really notice so much when you're listening to him with the other instruments. It goes around the room like mad, though, and we often have trouble with it coming in and through the drums or the piano. This happens even when he's using a Tele, which is a bit surprising.
As far as his equipment goes, he usually uses Fender amps, like a Twin Reverb or something. He also has one of those little Fender Leslies. When we had 16 tracks, I'd often take two channels of him—one the amp and one the Leslie—and send them to opposite sides in the mix. As a general rule, he doesn't use a lot of effects in the studio. If they're about, you can ask him to use them and he'll give it a try, but he's not totally into it.
It's really great to work with Pagey and Mick Taylor and people like that. They're so good that they'll turn you on every time. Just listen to Mick on something like Stop Breaking Down, he's about the best white bottleneck player there is! That's what I really like about it—not the "engineering" as much as working with people who really bring out the best in you. You hear this music coming through and you can't let 'em down—you've got to try to get the best sound possible because it's turning you on so much!
Excerpt from Paul Laurence's Andy Johns Talks About Others and the Stones Album "It's Only Rock 'n Roll" interview feature for Recording Engineer/Producer (RE/P) Magazine
Here, for a change, we have a wonderfully simple matter, without any great complications, with very little text, no metaphors or other loquacious frills.
Because today we're not dealing with small details like ripped and chopped riffs, melodies or even bridges, but with an entire song. Neither Paul nor Gene, but in this case Mitch Weissman himself (1), once even admitted this, sometime and somewhere, don't ask me, because I'm just parroting it.
But to smuggle in an at least reasonably apt comparison, the kinship between today's While the City Sleeps (1984) and Free's Wishing Well (1975) (2) could probably best be compared with that of Hotter Than Hell (1974) and All Right Now (1975), also by Free. What a surprise.
Everything's kinda similar and yet kinda different, to pass as self-standing enough not to be sued for it. We've performed this tango many times before, so maybe I'm just running out of figurative comparisons.
Anyway, thank you Mr. Weissman for your kind cooperation and making my work easier, I appreciate it.
Side Note:
(1) The co-author of this cheerful song, or rather the sole writer of the music, Mr. Hollywood-Gene only wrote the lyrics as far as I can tell.
(2) If you're not above a little commentary about a not entirely unjustified parallel to Ace's Rocket Ride (1977) and While the City Sleeps intro and main riff, you're welcome to click on exactly this link.
"In those days you knew you weren't going to get anything good until Keith started leaning over and looking at Charlie and then Bill got up out of his chair. They could play really shabby. Then, over the course of five minutes, it would turn from fairly shabby into magic. It was my job to capture those magic moments."
Andy Johns on Recording Exile on Main Street (Guitar Player Magazine, 2010)
When I was still in The Yardbirds, our producer Mickie Most would always try to get us to record all these horrible songs. He would say, “Oh, c’mon, just try it. If the song is bad we won’t release it”. And, of course it would always get released [laughs]. During one session, we were recording Ten Little Indians, which was an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement. In fact, the whole track sounded terrible. In a desperate attempt to salvage it, I hit upon an idea. I said, “Look, turn the tape over and employ the echo for the brass on a spare track. Then turn it back over and we’ll get the echo preceding the signal.” The result was very interesting — it made the track sound like it was going backwards.
Later, when we recorded You Shook Me, I told the engineer, Glyn Johns, that I wanted to use backwards echo on the end. He said, “Jimmy, it can’t be done”. I said “Yes, it can. I’ve already done it.” Then he began arguing, so I said, “Look, I’m the producer. I’m going to tell you what to do, and just do it.” So he grudgingly did everything I told him to, and when we were finished he started refusing to push the fader up so I could hear the result. Finally, I had to scream, “Push the bloody fader up!” And low and behold, the effect worked perfectly. When Glyn heard the result, he looked bloody ill! He just couldn’t accept that someone knew something that he didn’t know — especially a musician! The pompous git!
The funny thing is, Glyn did the next Stones album and what was on it? Backwards echo! And I’m sure he took full credit for the effect.
Glyn Johns was the engineer on the first album, and as I mentioned earlier, he had a bit of an attitude problem. I’ll tell you what he did.
He tried to hustle in on a producer’s credit. I said, “No way, I put this band together, I brought them in and directed the whole recording process, I go my own guitar sound — I’ll tell you, you haven’t got a hope in hell”. And then we wend to Eddie Kramer for the second album and Andy Johns after that. I consciously kept changing engineers because I didn’t want people to think that they were responsible for our sound. I wanted people to know it was me.
Andy Johns did that mix with me, and after we finished it, Glyn, Andy’s older brother, walked in. We were really excited and told him, “You’ve got to listen to this”. Glyn listened and just said, “Hmmph, You’ll never be able to cut it. It will never work”. And he walked out. Wrong again Glyn. He must have been seething with envy.
"We got it four or five in the morning, just as the sun was coming up. It was dawn filtering through the windows, so it had that almost half-asleep feeling. It was gorgeous. I still listen to that song now and again."
Van Halen took a year off after the tour in support of OU812 and then needed another year away to put together a follow-up album. And even though the band had gotten a bit keyboard heavy on its recent records, Van Halen's first music of the '90s found them getting back to basics, with Eddie Van Halen showing he still had some distinct six-string tricks up his sleeve on the lead single from For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, “Poundcake,” which was released on June 1, 1991.
The track - which opens the album - kicks off with the guitarist using a Makita 6012HD power drill he’d picked up in the studio and discovered was in the same key as the song. He scraped the tool over his guitar strings to start “Poundcake” and then sprinkled its sound throughout the song. (The drill was later painted red, white and black to match his guitar for the subsequent tour.)
But this wasn’t another Eddie Van Halen innovation. Much like the tapping technique he popularized earlier, the drill sound that kicks off "Poundcake" wasn't the first song to include it. It wasn't even the first song in 1991 to feature the tool: "Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy (The Electric Drill Song)," the opening track on Mr. Big’s Lean into It, which came out in March, included guitarist Paul Gilbert and bassist Billy Sheehan dueling one another using electric drills on their instruments.
And there was more than just a drill on "Poundcake." At the suggestion of producer Andy Johns, Eddie Van Halen embraced overdubs and even picked up a wah-wah pedal to round out the track's thickness - an element he said helped the song come together.
“I came up with a riff that didn’t really excite anyone until Andy suggested I use some electric 12-strings to flesh out the rhythm tracks,” Eddie told Guitar World. “It turned out to be just the thing the song needed. All of a sudden, the lyrics, the title and everything came into sharp focus. What you hear are two electric 12-strings doubled beneath my usual dirty guitar. It’s an odd sound. It wasn’t really planned.”
Regarding the guitar solo, Eddie said that "The solo goes four bars, another four bars, then two bars. Al kept insisting that it wasn’t finished. He likes to count, and I never do. I’m strictly feel. I’m always screwing around with time, because I never count.”
Unlike the group’s first two albums with Sammy Hagar, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was not quite a group affair; getting all four members in the studio at the same time even became a challenge. The singer's wife was having mental-health issues that required his attention, pulling him in different directions between his personal and professional lives. It got to the point where “Poundcake” almost didn’t make the final track listing because Hagar had gotten so behind schedule.
“The songwriting was drawn out, I would get behind on the lyrics, because I wouldn’t have time to focus on it,” Hagar said in a 2015 video. “When I did the vocal on ['Poundcake'], I remember in the end screaming, ‘Wow … that’s my woman, uh-huh uh-huh-huh,’ and Andy got the goose bumps. He’s looking behind the counter and he’s looking at me when I’m singing, he’s pointin’ to his arm and he’s got the furs all up. Just moments in the studio when you remember doing that to someone, it’s something that I judge everything off of; a vocal, a mix, a song – if it gives me the goose bumps, it’s done.”
“It really is kind of definitive of what the whole record is about,” drummer Alex Van Halen told MTV about the song.
Hagar noted in an interview that came with the CD single, which begins with hearing Eddie say, "Hey, this is Eddie Van Halen...", that the lyrical inspiration came from an actual pound cake recipe, which requires a pound of four different ingredients. He equated the simplicity of the formula to the band. “It is sort of a love song, just kind of a twisted love song with a sense of humor, but there’s a lot of honesty involved.” In addition, the single version of "Poundcake" begins immediately with the drill and omits the opening few seconds of Edward plugging his guitar into the amplifier and saying, "Ain't that some shit?"
Hagar later told the Album Network in a special to promote the LP. “I happen to like a ‘down home’ woman, and I do love my baby’s pound cake.”
“Poundcake” reestablished Van Halen as one of the biggest hard-rock bands of the new decade, just as they had been throughout the '80s. The song rocketed to No. 1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, and the Andy Morahan-directed video became one of the most popular on MTV in 1991. “We spent around $400,000 on that video, which had a ton of hot babes in it,” Hagar said in his memoir Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock. "That was the peak of MTV and the music-video form and people spending money on them.”
The music video opens with Eddie using his Makita cordless power drill painted in his trademark red, black and white stripes, revealing how he "played the drill" on the intro. The video, itself, cuts between scenes of the band playing and a demure young lady - played by Diane Manzo - who has shown up for an audition (a handmade sign on the wall says "Van Halen Casting"). While waiting, she spies on the other girls through a hole in the changing room door and is fascinated by their provocative dress and behavior. When they finally notice her, one - played by Tania Coleridge - uses a power drill to create a hole in the door and harass her, ultimately scaring her off.
The video is also preceded with a young girl reciting a poem of "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" The video ends with a blooper of the girl making a mistake and the director saying they will do another take.
In September, Van Halen opened the MTV Video Music Awards by performing “Poundcake” in their first-ever live performance on U.S. television. Show host Arsenio Hall introduced the group by enthusiastically calling them “the greatest American rock 'n' roll band ever.”
