“I learned to make records by the seat of my pants, and I still do it that way,” producer Butch Vig said during his keynote remarks for Milwaukee’s Yellow Phone Music Conference this morning. Eschewing a prepared address in favor of a casual conversation moderated by Elektra Records president Jeff Castelaz, Vig spoke for more than an hour and a half about his youthful introduction to the art of music production, his formative years at Madison’s Smart Studios, his breakthrough records with Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and his recent sessions with Foo Fighters and his own band, Garbage.
Early in their discussion Castelaz asked Vig to define, in his own words, what a producer is. “In the simplest form, a producer is someone with an opinion,” Vig replied. “More than 50% of it is psychology. You have to figure out what an artist’s strengths are, and then amplify them ... A good producer established a strong psychological connection with an artist, so there’s trust.” But a more elaborate answer to that question emerged in the stories Vig shared, which described how the producer achieved some of his biggest successes by simply trusting his instincts. “You never know what’s going to happen when you walk into a studio,” Vig said. “You never know how an artist is going to perform.” Whether working on a hyper-tinkered studio album like Garbage’s Version 2.0 or a raw-to-tape record like the Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light, ensuring the final product captures the essential essence of each performance is the most important thing, he contended.
In the discussion’s most enlightening segments, Castelaz played snippets from some of Vig’s most recognized productions, asking him to share his emotional response to each track. After sitting through the iconic opening thrashes of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the ensuing chorus, Vig responded simply, “That is a catchy song.” Explaining he didn’t do much to the song other than add a few small tweaks and double track Kurt Cobain’s guitar (despite Cobain’s initial objection), Vig noted that “you can feel in the way the band played, especially the way Kurt sings, that it has that kind of raw performance feel to it, and that’s why it holds up. It doesn’t sound dated to me … it still sounds to me as vital and passionate as it did back then.”
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Several times Vig choked up while discussing songs, including two Smashing Pumpkins singles, “Today” and “Disarm,” which he described as some of Billy Corgan’s most personal. “It broke my heart, because it’s about him,” Vig said of the latter track, recalling how he struggled to find a fittingly moving arrangement to accompany the song. And in the conversation’s most emotional anecdote, Vig described meeting Garbage singer Shirley Manson in London for the first time on April 8, 1994, the day the world learned Kurt Cobain had died.
Castelaz noted that for a producer as in-demand at the time as Vig was, starting his own band was a risky career move, but Vig explained that he formed Garbage simply because he wanted an outlet for the remix-style production that was interesting him at the time. And since Vig chalks up his intuitiveness as a producer to his background having played in bands, it only made sense for him to keep playing in another.
“You can’t have too many bands,” Vig maintained in perhaps the closest thing he offered to take-away advice for the Yellow Phone attendees. “If you’re already in a band, get another band.”
The Yellow Phone Music Conference runs through Sept. 7.
