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A Fan of the Artist

STARPOLISH:  What is it that really makes you want to work on a project these days? And do you really need to be a fan of the artist to become involved with them?

RAMONE:  Well, I think you have to be a fan of the artist; otherwise, you are working under false pretenses.  I don't think any veteran producer -- and I hate the word "veteran" -- should do any project that you don't care about. If you're doing everything for money, then something is wrong in your lifestyle. I think you have to have passion, which is what I live by, and good songs -- it's the primary thing with me  -- and the talented performer who can deliver... as unusual as they may be, or whatever their sensibilities of when and how they are going to perform, or if they're going to stay closeted. I mean, you can be just a recording performer, but I believe you have to be the consummate performer -- for me, that's the fun.  And that's when you get to make the record, and maybe produce the TV thing, or what goes on with their live concerts -- that is kind of the challenge for me.

STARPOLISH:  When you're doing an album these days, do you have to be more aware that there are other ways that het record label might try to exploit the music -- and by that I mean through commercials, through TV and films? I mean, is it just much more complicated now, or does that really not enter into picture during the recording process?

RAMONE:   No, it certainly doesn't during the recording process. I think if you do, you get... sideswiped.  Your goals have to be about your talent and your artistry and your material, and then somebody can come along with a marketing plan.  But unless you're saying, We are a boy group, we are in Florida, this is a programmed idea, and this is how we see ourselves growing into an instant pop market, it's a different kind of world.

I think the world that I try to live in is that if you were developing a Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears, no matter what age they are, I like to look at a three- to five-year look at what could go on. If they're 17 years old, at 23 what will they do? Or what maybe could they do. If they're 25 to 35, you gotta see what's the span of where you want to go. Are you the concert type?  You know, I used to go to through this with bands all the time. They'd say, "We don't want to record anything that we don't do live."  And I'd say, "Well, recording is a technique -- it's a film, it's a movie, it's a soundtrack of your life." You can be as raw as you want you're certainly overdubbing and fixing things. So that means when you finally do a live album, people should feel great about seeing and hearing you.

I think the Dave Matthews Band is a perfect example of what you hear and then you go see it -- and it's wonderful, and you get to enjoy the band in all of its forms. But when you are making the record, you can't stop and say, "You know, I can't perform that live because I can't double on three instruments."  I think that becomes sort of not important, because you know that if you went on the road and you had to carry another keyboard player, you would.

Live Vs. Studio

STARPOLISH: Well, I'm thinking back to Queen, who had such vocal complexity in their work, and yet they -- I'm assuming that they played to tape in some instances -- somehow managed to recreate that, and it was part of their live show.

RAMONE:   I don't know if they played to tape in those days, versus nowadays when you have all the technology, but they probably had some backstage extra singers. I think that certain things were enhanced. You know, when technology hit back in the late 80s of that style, and being able to carry multi-tracks and playing to a click and all that --I mean, today's concerts are pretty well organized, and don't or shouldn't let you down.  If you're going to sit in the studio and say that I am afraid to perform -- well most performers at certain ages are afraid to perform, and afraid of failure and the obvious, and the sound system and not having good lights -- you don't have to be afraid of that anymore.

STARPOLISH: It just seems to me that there has been an increasing demand for hits to happen immediately, and that the artist development that happened in say in the 60s or 70s -- or even' 80 s -- has really been shortened, so the shelf life of some performers... they are not going to get a chance to do their second or third albums if the first isn't successful. Have you seen that as one change that has affected the business? And if so, does that affect anything that you do in terms of having this pressure to create a hit on every album?

 RAMONE: Well, I think everybody would like a hit, if possible, out of their album. What people forget about in the late 60s and 70s is that people put out a lot of singles, and you didn't make the album until the single hit, or two hits were made. So you kind of walked into a semi-good sale [when the album was released]. You know, when the single market was destroyed -- even though they claim it wasn't -- the kids that went out in those days and bought two or three of your singles, and there were a lot of acts that never really sold well on album. So the pressure was the same -- the difference was they would let you develop in some ways a little longer. But I think... when I first met up with Billy Joel -- I think he was on his fourth album -- I think we were the critical, pivotal [record] -- maybe they won't renew his contract, who knows?  So there is no guarantee.

And I think also that when you have had two or three major, major hits, or if you've dropped down from X-amount of millions down to half of that, they think you may be on your way out, or that [your] star isn't shining in the sky anymore. You have to get over that. The question is [whether] you have to reinvent yourself. But if you're really good, you're going to have a plateau at some point where your not selling a billion, and things are not going the way you would like them to. But there were many times that big artists were required to put out a second album before they were ready for it -- and sometimes it's better to have the time and rest, because you're pretty much touring, if you've got a reasonable big record, for most of the year. You don't have time to write again. You've had five years or more to write the first album, depending on your age. 

I think it's critical to not over-plan your life, but to stick to your musical strength. And if a label didn't have a No. 1 record with you and they dropped you -- well, you know we've seen Alicia Keys and other people get picked up. It's purely no different in the business -- what's changed for us in the long, big picture is that [now] the quarter books are the tough ones the ones where they have to make their quarterly nut. Whereas the record company sometimes would go two quarters, three quarters and suddenly have the biggest hit in the world and it qualified the whole year.  Business just doesn't run like the old days. So an adventurous A&R man is there for you, but if he places -- or he or she puts -- their stamp on it, they know that there is also a failure rate, or conditions at the time you made the record, or the time you released it -- there is a long time between making the record and actually seeing it on the market, and that's changed the immediacy factor because what records used to be able to do was, you could make them on a Monday and on Thursday or Friday, you could be test marketing it in certain radio stations. 

STARPOLISH: Now when you were talking about the single and also the immediacy aspect, isn't that in some way the promise of the Internet?

RAMONE: Oh, I hope so. I mean, I have preached that since... I really was involved with the Internet in early 97, 98, and '99 -- that period, you know, when quality was the worst, but it still had the gratification.  I was associated with a company called N2K at the time -- Need 2 Know -- and the point was, I wanted to bring back that immediate single that you can download -- that you can test, taste, get to know, [then] go to the club and get to see the artist -- before you built the album. Maybe you had two or three [bands] with an audience of a couple of hundred thousand people that actually followed the group. Boy, the net income from that can be incredibly rewarding to the performer, because you can also change your head about where you are.  If you can work that act and start to show them in clubs for, like, three months, with real audiences not set-up audiences -- and you start to get a feeling for what you are doing... that is the only trial and error that is missing now for artists, because you jump from there if you have a big record -- you're pretty much playing three- to five-thousand-seaters after that. It's pretty hard, you know? Being in that 200-seat club, two shows a night for 20 weeks, really teaches you a lot. You learn from your songs, because most people do sing the songs -- they sneak a new one in every once in awhile just to get a feeling for how the audience works, what it is...

STARPOLISH: Like a comedian breaking in new material...

RAMONE:Exactly totally, exactly the point.They develop those first four minutes so they can go on Leno or whatever shows they go on, so they can have eight minutes, then they can have 50 [minutes], and you're absolutely right: the priming of an artist is the key now. Some people can be primed quickly. We didn't develop child stars just this year -- it's been going on for 50 years or more.  In the movies, they used to train people to sing and dance, and they'd build a picture around you, and then somebody made a record.  The record business is an art form that requires tremendous investment.

The Musician Producer

STARPOLISH: Does being a musician yourself allow you to talk to the musician as a musician, and the technology allows you to capture that in a certain way? How do those two things sort of work together?

RAMONE: I think they work incredibly well for me and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way -- as long as you don't overdrive one over the other.  Sometimes I walk in the studio and I'm only about capturing the music you know, we all want to be perfect and be great at our trade, but you have to [take] some chances and have some things in your brain that make you an adventurer, technically, so that you can capture the moment because sometimes that moment doesn't get repeated for days. Being a musician, to be able to transpose your ideas it's not about calling out chords to somebody, or saying, "This is how the horn should sound" -- but sometimes it is. You never want to step on either one's talent, but boy, it's a short, translatable idea for me to not have to go through describing the signal path to somebody.  When you walk in, they say, "Oh, he knows what he is talking about so we don't have to impress him." I don't overuse any of it.

I think it's just very fortunate that I got to know both, but I was challenged musically by the fact that technology was not recording and making sounds the way I thought they could be, or multi-layering...  I was always interested in why we were [still] where Les Paul, who set the pace in the 50s, was -- that it took a long time before people started realizing how good all that stuff was, and it wasn't passé and it's never been passé. And it's just like I said to Les Paul the other night, " Man, it's incredible, they still want to play a Les Paul guitar. They still want to hear how that works."  So generationally, he was a musician and a technologist, and I think he was a kindred spirit for me... and a John Hammond, who had this instinctive feeling about great black and creative musicians, and the Dylans, the Springsteens, the Billy Holidays... I would say those should be role models that you should be completely comfortable with. For me, to never make people nervous in the studio is half the battle, and giving them an environment so that if a guy says, " I can't really hear myself," or the technician would rather have him in a isolation booth, sometimes you have to say screw it, forget about what you learned in school or wherever you learned it.  Make the musician comfortable to play.  We have a generation now of young homemaking recording people who understand what this is. They don't know what we went through to get a good echo sound.

STARPOLISH:  I sometimes wonder whether or not [home recording capability] makes it easier or more difficult. I mean, do people come into the studio thinking they know it all already, or does it allow them to come into more studio-ready? 

RAMONE: Well, I think the home studio environment is so much hipper then it ever was, and here is the rule for me: Don't impose your experience on anybody other than to help them.  Don't [tell them] "Well, you know, when I worked with so and so..." Don't lay your biography out there. And I think sometimes you can show someone something by just being subtle and saying, "Here is an EQ that you might enjoy," and "I like what you got, but I think this could be hipper," instead of saying, "You know, that parametric is a piece of shit compared to what I have." I've worked with some musicians who go out there and just are chord droppers they've got to say, "That inversion is wrong." They've got to criticize instead of being able to be helpful with someone who's young, to say, "Here is something really amazing  have you ever thought of this?" Spending hours after the date and finding out what they really do know. You know, somebody may say, " I must have a 414 [an AKG 414 large-diaphragm microphone], that's my voice, that's my sound," and "I must have this old LA 3A [UREI LA3 compressor/limiter]." and you go, "OK and by the way I've got this Avalon I want you to try..." Don't force anything [it's] not important.

As I said, what you get in a box today for three grand -- I'd sit sometimes all weekend, painting a room that was a bathroom until I got it slick enough to hang a microphone and a speaker in it to get delayed echo, so I don't have to do that, you know? I'm happy to own gear that goes "blop blop" and then gives me that sound, or gives me a flange.  I think about how we used to make flanging guitar sounds, and I used to hang guitar amps up on a scaffolding in a room to get the biggest guitar sound. I never liked what was on record. I mean, half of it was [the] vinyl, and the other half was you couldn't get through the lack of crunch. I mean, those are challenges. Music to me is what is in the mind of the composer or the performer, and you have to transpose it.  So if they come in with a better idea and they say, "You know, if you hang this amp out in the back room and mic it at 12 feet and 22 feet..." I mean, I spent half my life trying to get a guitar sound, and so I said, "Well, you know, maybe this is a new technique."  I once had a guitar built for me that had five outputs well, I mean each string, so we had six outputs for the six-string guitar -- and a compressor and a limiter and an EQ built for each channel, and it went to six different amps. I don't want to say how much time [I] wasted... But then you go out and you go by a pawn shop and you see a old Marshall [amplifier] or something and you bring the guitar in and you play it and say, "Oh shit, that's what I've been looking for," [and] you forget what the Beatles played on, or some English amp that you forgot about.  So it goes around in cycles. And I don't think anybody who has any good ideas should be ignored -- they should never be ignored.