Bad Religion, Todd Rundgren, and Bob Clearmountain collaborate on a punk-rock milestone
By Alan di Perna
I think this is the way that punk albums of the ‘70s should have been made," says Greg Graffin. "But, of course, they didn’t have the digital technology back then." Bad Religion's lead singer and all-around major thinker is talking about his band's latest manifesto, The New America. The legendary Southern California-born punk band celebrate their 20th anniversary this millennium year. And The New America may also go down in recording history as the first punk-rock album to be recorded without a single guitar amp. All of the album's thunderous, crackly, buzz-saw guitar magic was created in the virtual environs of Line 6's Amp Farm, a computer-based sound-modeling program. The latter was part of a Digidesign Pro Tools rig set up in a barn in Hawaii. Bad Religion journeyed to the 50th state to create The New America with veteran producer Todd Rundgren.
"This being a sort of watershed or milestone album for Bad Religion, I think they wanted to involve someone who was more than just an engineer," Rundgren notes. "Someone who would get involved with developing the material a bit and help them to think more about song components and worry less about getting the punk-rock sound." Not to worry, though. The New America is 100 percent pure Bad Religion in style, spirit, and intent. But there's a new note of revolutionary optimism in many of the songs — a mood that's well suited to the spacious sonic grandeur of the tracks. Much of the latter quality is attributable to another key player in the disc's creation, mix engineer extraordinaire Bob Clearmountain. While both Clearmountain and Rundgren are MVPs of the mainstream rock establishment, they've also got substantial punk roots: Rundgren produced the first New York Dolls album, and later recorded Class of 77 alumni such the Patti Smith Group, the Tom Robinson Band, and XTC. Clearmountain, for his part, not only produced the first Dead Boys album, but played bass on it as well. Study his resume closely enough and you'll find first-generation punk classics such as Tuff Darts' Tuff Darts! and Rezillos's Can't Stand the Rezillos.
"Neither one of us is without pedigree," Rundgren quietly avers, "Bad Religion weren't going to get David Foster and Arif Mardin to put this record together. I guess there had to be some element of punk credibility somewhere in the resumes if this was going to fly with the original core audience. But it wasn't something that anyone was self-conscious about. I think the band feels that they're not capable of doing anything that betrays too much of their basic roots."
HOME ALONE
Bad Religion have always been a punk band with a difference. As a Ph.D. candidate in evolutionary biology at Cornell University, Graffin is almost criminally overqualified for his job as punk-rock frontman. And while the band grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and first emerged from that city's fertile early-'80s punk scene, they've long since scattered across North America. Graffin lives in Ithaca, New York; drummer Bobby Schayer is in Seattle; bassist Jay Bentley makes Vancouver his home; guitarist Brian Baker dwells in Washington D.C.; and guitarist Greg Hetson has recently forsaken L.A. for Austin, Texas. This geographic isolation has given rise to a unique way of working: Every Bad Religion album since 1988's Suffer has been extensively demoed at Graffin's home studio in Ithaca. Other band members may drop in on Graffin to see how songs are developing, but the group generally only gets together to record or tour.
"Rehearsal, what's that?" laughs Brian Baker, Bad Religion's youngest and newest member, who joined the group in 1994. "My stock answer is, 'If you don't know three chords by now, you have no business doing this.' But also the majority of the people in this band have been playing together for at least 15 years. There's a certain rhythm that develops, and it doesn't take us very long to figure out what we're supposed to do."
At first, Graffin shared songwriting duties with Bad Religion co-founder Brett Gurewitz, a practice that continued even after Gurewitz left the band to focus full time on running Epitaph Records, his L.A.-based punk label. But, as Gurewitz lapsed into a dysfunctional phase due to drug addiction, songwriting for Bad Religion became Graffin's sole responsibility. He soldiered on admirably, but opened the writing process up to group input on Bad Religion's last album, 1998's No Substance. For that album, Graffin's home demo studio became a project studio where master guitar and vocal tracks were recorded.
But the situation reverted to "normal" for The New America. A recovering Gurewitz contributed to one song, "Believe It," but the remaining 12 tracks were composed by Graffin, working alone at home.
"It was more of a private affair, putting the songs together for this album," he says. "I used my home studio more in the way I usually do, as a project environment for writing songs. I spent more time tweaking in my laboratory, so we wouldn't have to assemble the album during the recording process."
Graffin had separate, "upstairs/downstairs" recording spaces in his home for the making of No Substance. But now, he says, his studio is "substantially different than when No Substance was made. I've moved everything downstairs and renovated considerably. So I now have a live room and a control room. I spent some money on infrastructure." The studio, Graffin continues, is based around "a Pro Tools rig and some 20-bit ADAT machines all synced together with a Yamaha 02R [console] via an Aardvark Aardsync. I've got a lot of good microphones and expensive outboard gear. I have two Focusrite EQs and two of their two-channel compressors. I also have some Avalon compressors and mic pres."
Outboard effects at the studio include Lexicon's LXP-15 and MPX-1, and a Yamaha SPX990. Graffin monitors on JBL LSR-32's powered by a Hafler Trans-nova 7000. He says he uses his Pro Tools setup very sparingly. "I use it for one purpose only, and that is to assemble songs. I use it as a tool, as it was intended, for looping parts and building songs. I generally don't use the plug-in effects. I have the real Focusrite outboard stuff, so I don't need the Focusrite plug-ins. Talking with people, I think there's a consensus: as long as you have good D-to-A and A-to-D conversion systems, it's better just to send the signal out to some outboard unit and return it back to your console. That's not to take away from Digidesign or any of the people making plug-ins. That has a purpose, too, but I think it's got a way to go yet."
NEXT STOP, HAWAII
Greg Graffin has been a Todd Rundgren fan ever since age nine, when he purchased Another Live by Rundgren's band Utopia. "I liked the idea that it was pop songs, but it was presented as Todd being more of an underground artist," Graffin says. "I think that had a great influence on the way I always wanted Bad Religion to be as well: a band that had a lot of pop potential but was always appealing on an underground level."
Graffin and Rundgren began communicating around the time of Graffin's 1997 solo album, American Lesion. But they didn't get together until it came time to make The New America. On reviewing Graffin's demos, Rundgren's input mainly had to do with the lyrics. He suggested what he calls "a more proactive lyrical direction: Instead of the typical Bad Religion, 'what a bunch of crap the world is' kind of thing, there's more of a sense of 'there's work to be done and let's organize to do it.' At this point, most of the band members have children and things like that. They can't go around acting like they're post-pubescent troubled young men."
Graffin did some rewriting and Bad Religion went to record with Rundgren on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. They set up in a rented space that Bad Religion guitarist Brian Baker describes as, "an old, non-climate-controlled barn that I believe was initially built for the drying and curing of marijuana sometime in the '70s. The current owners are professional photographers, a wonderful couple who thought it would really be fun to have a band come and set up in their garage. But it was completely primitive."
"The owners have this really nice house and gourmet kitchen," adds guitarist Greg Hetson. "They're food photographers. They make gourmet food and take pictures of it. So we ate pretty well. But there was very little ventilation in the barn, so we had to keep the door open. A lot of mosquito candles were burned. [Drummer] Bobby [Schayer] got bit up the worst."
"You should have seen my face when I showed up at the barn the first day," Baker laughs. "I'm like, 'How much are we paying for this?' But Greg Graffin said, 'No, no, no. Just remember, Todd's a genius. Utopia. He's a genius. He knows what he's doing.'"
"Well, there are no studios of sufficient size and soundproofing out here anyway," Rundgren shrugs. "With a band, the loudest thing is the drummer really, especially when you have a drummer like Bobby. So we had to find a place where we wouldn't get a lot of complaints about the noise."
The producer wasn't after room acoustics. All he needed was to get clean signals into his Pro Tools Mixl24 system, which he was running on a Mac G4. "I only have 16 channels of I/O," says Rundgren. "But I haven't needed more than that so far. Two guitars, bass, drums, and scratch vocal is pretty much where you start from. With most of the projects I do, I never need to record more than 16 tracks live at one time. For the most part, I close-mic the drums to try and eliminate the room as a factor. If you keep everything fairly isolated, you can add whatever kind of ambience you want afterwards."
The entire project was recorded direct to Pro Tools. "Nothing ever left the computer," says Rundgren, "and I never used any outboard gear." All signal routing and levels were set via a Digidesign Pro Control console. "We called it the $50,000 mouse," Graffin quips. Basic tracks were recorded live in the studio. "Todd really helped us with tempos," says Baker. "We do have a tendency to play everything at 150 mph, even if a song shouldn't be played that fast."
Although initially skeptical, the band's two guitarists wound up going 100 percent Amp Farm for the sessions. "We shipped all our equipment out and a bunch of spare amps," says Greg Hetson. "And Todd goes, 'Check this out: I got the Amp Farm built into my Pro Tools. Give it a try.' And we were like, 'This is gonna sound like sh*t. It's fake. It ain't the real thing.' But we plugged in and said, 'Hey, this sounds pretty damned good!' "
"I had my Les Paul plugged into the back of a G4, and I could hear the air pushing off speakers that weren't really there," Brian Baker marvels. "I said, 'Okay, the man does know what he's doing. And he's got good hair. So I'll sit here and play.' I just wish we hadn't shipped all the amps out."
While some of the basic rhythm guitar tracks were kept, a substantial number were replaced, according to Hetson. "We were in a barn, we had the mosquito candles going, the headphone mix was terrible, and it was loud. So we pretty much went and redid the guitars and bass. Fix it up. We moved the computer over to Todd's house and did a lot of guitar overdubs in his living room. But most of the rhythms were done in the barn."
Although the Bad Religion rhythm guitar sound is massive, it's generally just two tracks: Hetson in one channel and Baker in another. Lead guitar embellishments and solos are added via a democratic overdubbing process. Baker explains: "Greg and I just go in separately and play whatever we feel like. We both tend to have set ideas of what we want to do on any given song. And then the poor guy who's mixing has to figure out what to use — take the cream off. On this record, as on many past ones, Greg and I didn't really realize what was going to be kept until we were at the mix. It's very egalitarian."
"We were essentially plugging the guitars right in flat," says Rundgren. "The guitarists were hearing an Amp Farm algorithm in their headphones, but if you were to listen to the signal fiat, it was just completely dry, direct guitars. That allowed us to adjust the sound of the guitars at any point we wanted. We'd only print the sound at the very last moment. This way, the guitarists could just concentrate on doing overdubs and solos without having to constantly move mics around and plug into different things. Everyone knew we could spend time making adjustments later m on and not have it impinge on the performance."
Graffin's vocals were also recorded straight into Rundgren's Pro Tools rig, via an old Neumann U 87, the singer's usual mic preference. "When I'm recording a vocal," says Graffin, "I sometimes like to add the Focusrite compressor, set to a soft, 1.5:1 compression ratio. But, on this record, Todd used a plug-in for a lot of that. It was in my headphones, but he didn't print it. It was just a raw vocal signal. When we got to Bob Clearmountain's house for the mix, we just processed it again."
Like all Bad Religion albums, The New America is well fortified with Graffin's solid baritone choral harmony style. "There's a lot less to it than you might think," the singer says. "If it's a three-part harmony, the high and middle parts are generally doubled — one in each speaker. And the low one is usually mono. So the most you'll ever hear on a harmony is five voices. People think there's some kind of trick to it, but the only trick is technical perfection in your vocal execution. What makes a chorus harmony sound enormous is that the harmony note is precise in relation to the melody note. That's all it's ever been on Bad Religion records. I have really high standards of vocal execution. And Todd does, too. Where a lot of heavy metal bands used to fail was layering vocal upon vocal and coming up with a sort of pseudo-grand chorus background."
For all instruments and voices, Pro Tools was used primarily as a recording medium. There wasn't a lot of editing or track manipulation involved. "There were only occasional things — places where it became invaluable," says Rundgren. "For example, Brett Gurewitz's solo on 'Believe It.' Because of the meaning it would have for fans, the band wanted him to make a cameo appearance on the record — without having to fly to Hawaii. So I sent him a mix of the song on CD. He went into some project studio, played along to the CD audio, and then sent me back a CD of the solo, which I then — using Pro Tools — laid into the song. It saved everyone a lot of misery, I think."
Pro Tools was also used to lay in a few small elements from Graffin's original home demos: a keyboard and guitar loop in the intro to "A World Without Melody" and some sound effects in "I Love My Computer." But situations like these were the exception rather than the rule, as Bob Clearmountain remarked when the tracks arrived at his studio for mixdown.
"I've done a lot of projects where people bring in Pro Tools sessions and when you look at it there's an edit on just about every beat. With this, there was practically none of that. Looking at the session, they basically just used Pro Tools as a tape recorder."
CHEZ CLEARMOUNTAIN
Mix This!, Bob Clearmountain's studio, is located in his home in scenic Pacific Palisades, CA. The engineer's first act on receiving the Bad Religion masters was to transfer them from Pro Tools onto digital tape. "I have a Sony 3348HR with six Apogee AD-8000SE converters," he details. "I have a Pro Tools rig here, but I had to rent in another one because I didn't have all the plug-ins that Todd did. So we rented one, hooked it up, and bounced everything over. It took a couple of hours."
This enabled Clearmountain to mix the record on his modified 72-input SSL 4000 G+ console and deep collection of outboard effects. "Bob mixes analog," says Graffin. "Even though the Sony is a digital machine, he pipes it all through his SSL console. I think that gave the record a much more familiar feel — made it really crackle."
Band members were present for various parts of the mixing process. "We were a little bit worried that we would lose something when we tried to transfer all this digital information from Pro Tools onto a medium Bob could work with," says Baker. "So I wanted to be there. I did wind up fixing a couple of little things I could have done better. I don't think we actually lost any tracks, but I was basically there as a clean-up man, to put a few finishing touches on. Bob's a huge Todd fan, which is nice. He'd come across something and rather than saying, 'Well this is digital distortion because the mic was recorded too hot,' he'd say, 'Hmm, I wonder what Todd was going for here.'"
By all accounts, Clearmountain and the band got on very well. "They're huge Dead Boys fans," Clearmountain relates. "And one of the songs on the album, '1000 Memories,' starts off with sort of a tribute to the Dead Boys' 'Sonic Reducer.' They didn't know that I played bass on that first Dead Boys album. Most people don't. When I told them they were like, 'Wow, really? We got the right guy!'"
Graffin ended up working most closely with Clearmountain. "Bob preferred to have the songwriter present," Graffin explains. "He says that's an important element. And he really is great to work with, because he looks for input and ideas."
"Greg was there the whole time, and we had a lot of fun," Clearmountain adds. "He let me do what I do, but his comments were really helpful. He had an extremely objective viewpoint. Plus we had some really interesting conversations about physics."
The transfer from Pro Tools to the Sony 3348 included both the dry, unprocessed guitar tracks and the final "Amp Farmed" tracks that Rundgren had printed. This situation afforded Clearmountain considerable flexibility in the mix. "I could actually go in and change the sound of a guitar track if it wasn't working," he says. "Which I didn't do very often, because most of the sound selections Todd had made were right on the money. But there were a few places where I was able to substitute a different amp sound, or augment what he had with another amp in Amp Farm. To me, that was a real advantage."
"One curious thing I noticed," Clearmountain continues, "is that all the guitar tracks needed the same sort of EQ. Usually when you do a rock album, the different types of amps used by the band have such divergent sonic characteristics that you have to EQ and process them differently. But even though Todd and the band used different settings in Amp Farm, the relative brightness was very similar. Looking back at my EQ settings, there was a similar shelf at around 5 kHz, just to brighten things up generally before I started doing any other EQ. I'd do that and then maybe I'd plug in a Pultec for a specific type of character."
Unlike Rundgren, Clearmountain used plenty of outboard processing gear. A Motion Sound rotating speaker simulator was used in a few spots, including the breakdown section in the song "The New America." "It's actually a rotating horn in a rackmounted box," says Clearmountain of the device. "There's a couple of controls on the front. And it's got four mics in it. It has a little tube circuit and a nice little overdrive sound."
Clearmountain tends to prefer delay over reverb as a means of pumping up rock guitar tracks. "I use delays that are in time with the tempo of the song," he says. "So you don't really hear it as delay. I'm sure I used some reverb for the guitars, because I have two live chambers here. I might have used that a little bit, but not a lot. I had an old AMS DMX80 that I use for guitars, and an old Echoplex that I use once in a while. The coolest delay gadget is this thing that nobody knows about, called the Yamaha D5000, which is just the best digital delay on the market."
"Old stuff," is how Clearmountain characterizes his preferences in outboard gear: "I don't mean super old stuff. But things like the Roland SDE 3000, which I use for vocals. They're so easy to work with and there's something about the sound of them I really like. They've got a warmth — almost an analog kind of sound to them. As far as EQ, I have three Pultec EQP183's that I really like. It's a cool thing for guitars. And the Focusrite Red 3 is also good for guitars. The [Empirical Labs] Distressor is good, too." As for The New America's profoundly punchy rhythm sound, Clearmountain gives maximum kudos to Rundgren's recording and drummer Bobby Schayer's playing. But Clearmountain does admit to triggering a bass drum sample from the original bass drum track for a lot of the album. "We used Sound Replacer, which is a Digidesign plug-in," he says. "But that's the only thing I replaced. And I don't think I actually replaced it. I just sort of augmented what was there, to give it a bit more punch."
In the main control room at Mix This!, Clearmountain monitors on Yamaha NS-10M, KRKE7, and AudixMS speakers. "I switch back and forth between monitors. The Audix's are better to listen to, but the E7's are a bit better to mix on. Mixes I do on them tend to sound better when I take them out into the real world. Which is why the NS-l0M's are still my main thing. You take the mix outside and it generally sounds good. There are no big surprises. But really my favorite monitors right now are these little self-powered Apple computer speakers that I have over at the side of the control room. Also, because the studio's in my house, I have the whole place wired up. There's a little lounge with some speakers and another little room upstairs with some consumer Tannoys that I'll also use to check out a mix."
Not that much chin-scratching was required to mix The New America. "The whole thing took less than two weeks," says Clearmountain. "We were mixing one to two songs a day. It's real simple. You can hear what's on there. Those guys knew what they were doing. They didn't waste a ton of tracks trying to make something out of nothing, as a lot of people do."
With The New America, Bad Religion feel they have attained their goal of making a punk-rock album for the masses. "We wanted it to be a big album and sound like the guitars are larger-than-life," says Greg Graffin. "But what I like about it is it doesn't have the conventional trappings of those vain heavy metal albums that pretend to have those grandiose guitars. This is much more crisp. It has much more clarity."
"What I like," adds Brian Baker, "is that every single thing is too loud. But nothing steps on anything else."