Jan 202012
For those whose time isn’t sufficiently wasted, I invite you to remix a few Paul McCartney songs. Especially those who believe he got it all wrong. Call it “Macca as his music was meant to be heard.”
Actually, I think McCartney got it right most of the time behind the board His drum and bass tones have rarely been matched, even by more experienced producers. The same can’t be said for Jeff Lynne. It must be that giant mound of hair muffling his ears from that horrible glossy drum effect thingy. Agree? If not, I invite to nominate another rock star turned producer who should have left the knob turning to someone else.
That’s cool!
First of all, the link to the “mixing board” is very cool! As for your question, the first artist-producer who comes to mind whose work as a producer I typically don’t like is David Bowie. His work is usually paper thin. It works for most of his own records, and Mott the Hoople pull it off, but it did the Stooges and Lou Reed no favors, the unbelievably perfect “Walk on the Wild Side” excluded.
What about Iggy’s first two solo albums???
They’re not bad…if you like hearing Iggy imitate Bowie.
You can also include Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes in “thin” Bowie productions. However, it’s important to realize that the Stooges, Reed, and Mott albums were all done in the space of a year or so (1972-1973), and outside of occasionally pulling Iggy out of the gutter in the ’70s and ’80s, that was the end of Bowie’s producer-for-hire experiment. It’s also interesting that for most of his own albums, Bowie shared at least some of the production duties with someone else.
I think that it would have been interesting to have someone other than Ray Davies produce the Kinks in the ’70s & ’80s. I think he suffered from not seeing the forest from the trees & overthought things, especially in albums like Preservation Acts 1 & 2.