the ideas that animated Rick Will
Although you should repress the urge to write an essay every time someone dies, I can’t resist putting something out there about my friend Rick Will. He was a lavishly gifted audio engineer and a delightfully odd duck. Because his high intelligence and competencies were overlaid with stoner mannerisms and some pointlessly profane antics, one was sometimes unsure whether to revel in his company, learn from his wisdom, or fear for his health; but two out of three were blessings he extruded wherever he went, and the third was something inscrutable, his private thing with which to struggle.
Rick engineered and co-produced my third solo record (Let’s Kill Saturday Night), back in 1998. I met him after many long, tiresome months of scouting candidates for the job. I had just stepped up from the indies to the majors, and my company’s non-negotiable demand was that I collaborate with a “producer” -- someone with an approved résumé and an established history of delivering commercially plausible recordings within a modest budget. I understood this rationale totally, and even halfway understood why they didn’t want me working with the engineers from my previous two records, but that restriction made for more of a challenge than I anticipated. I went through one candidate after another, upwards of 100 of them. For various reasons nothing was working out.
In March that year I had dinner with Jay Joyce in Nashville. Jay is now a prominent mainstream producer; at the time he was in a noisy and fun band called Iodine, and was a respected figure in an outsider-ish Southern scene. He didn’t think he was the right person for my project, or maybe I didn’t, I can’t recall; but he mentioned Rick’s name. A glance at his history showed a truly promising variety -- Rick had recorded or mixed Johnny Cash, Junior Brown, Tim Finn, No Doubt, and Nine Inch Nails; assisted Don Gehman and T Bone Burnett; produced Amy Correia and Joseph Arthur; was himself in some sort of a metal band. He had started in Nashville back in the mid-1980s when Mary Tyler Moore’s production outfit branched out into music. MTM had a few of the more interesting acts of the time, such as Foster and Lloyd, of whom the latter was my dear friend, and Rick’s as well. So there were several promising threads there. (The T Bone thread alone got my interest -- he was one of the 100, someone I desired most hotly but who was just as hotly undesired at the label. “Why in the world do you want him?” said Roberta, the A&R head, as if I’d suggested hiring a circus monkey. Interestingly, Rick’s more formative experiences, at least his earlier ones, came from working under Don Gehman. “He taught me all about compression,” Rick remarked, “how you have to learn it very deeply, because compression can ruin a record but the exactly right kind in the exact right amount makes it fly.”)
I went to his house, a somewhat secluded property in the hills off West End Avenue, on Love Circle. We sat for an hour in his music-listening room, and he issued vague-sounding thoughts about music recording and scribbled on a legal pad. What was he scribbling, what was he saying? I couldn’t have told you two days later. I just remember thinking: if I didn’t know what this fellow had provably done, I’d have written him off as the kind of sad sack who wanders on beaches and mumbles. I then reflected that I had known people throughout the years who were deeply smart but presented themselves as a little mixed-up -- artistic misfits. So I gave myself a pat on the back for not being thrown off track, and informed the label the next day that I had my man.
The next six months were an extreme period in my life, mentally and actively, and I can’t think of a way around the dumb phrase “emotional roller-coaster.” At times I thought of myself as a helpless loose fragment in a churning imploding mechanism, and at others as a character in a scripted drama with a smallish cast of whom Rick was one of the two or three leading players. But self-dramatizing metaphors aside, what Rick ended up offering me amid that turmoil, in terms of general wisdom, specific production ideas, and positive thinking, not only helped me bridge a rough patch but left me with sharp permanent tools that I’ve been able to draw on in my ongoing effort to make music that sounds good and means something.
This week I went back and forth about whether to write anything about Rick. The first things that occurred to me, after hearing of his death, were a small number of outlandish acts that, if I put them on the Internet, would risk upsetting people who loved him and casting both of us in a decidedly bad light. I don’t know what he was like before or after I knew him (we almost scheduled a get-together when in 2017 I visited Australia, where he had moved, but sadly missed one another), but in the 1990s he straddled a lonely characterological fence, between hippie good-vibe and punk-rock agitation. There was an engaging ambiguity in him -- “I love everybody” vs. “Fuck everybody” -- but there was definitely an “everybody.” Maybe that’s an ornate excuse for immature behavior. But the more I thought about him, the more I came to think that my attention was training too tightly on a few vivid anecdotes. Just as someone’s recent death needn’t demand a brushing away of thorns, neither does it do the life any relevant justice to grab at them and punishingly pierce our hands. I’m sure we all want not just to be forgiven -- a tough ask -- but to live in conditions of minimal pain. Rick’s life, in its fuller rendering, was guided by precepts that were warm-hearted, creative, and observable. Below are a few of them, along with backup evidence.
Be 14
“Fourteen! Fourteen!” he’d yell, jumping manically on a filthy couch in the room at S.I.R. where the band I and ran songs during preproduction week. Just the single word, and at first we were mystified as to what he was possibly getting at. Rick’s operating theory, we soon learned, was that music should always be played, and much of life lived, as though one were frozen into fourteenness.
At 14, let the record show, I had already begun acting like a cartoonishly old person (opinionated, short-tempered, martini-holding, contemptuous of youth culture). However, that’s not what Rick meant. He meant to be open to impulse, passion’s plaything, not notably professional in attitude, unsnobbish, intensely immersed in art, feverishly in love, and high. Not my approach to life at all; but in the specific field of music performance, these ideas do start to become much more salient.
During preproduction, Rick came to feel that my band wasn’t up to snuff and might have to be fired. “They play like they’re 35, and they’re tired, and they’ve been playing in bars a real long time,” he said to me privately one morning, five days in. His tone was gentle but grave. “It’s not working. It’s not good enough. We can start over again with some great players I can call in. I know these guys are your friends, but it’s your record, not theirs, and it’s not worth the risk.” Panicking, my first thought was a short list of excuses. We were, in fact, 35-year-old bar musicians. What else would we sound like? Also, we had driven ten hours through a tornado the day before preproduction began, Chicago to Nashville, trying to follow the course of the wind from news reports, threading our way down I-65 among wrecked cars, pulling over to jump out and hide in culverts now and then. I was jittery and a little worn down. And what’s more, if I had driven like a 14-year-old, I’d be dead. To me, 35 years old was just fine.
Well, I assembled my little band of washouts and gave them the bad news. They were playing badly, the boss wanted them fired, I had made a plea for leniency and a second chance. Lorne, the bassist, took it stoically and simply said, “We’ve just got to do better, then.” The others nodded in agreement. That’s how much we already trusted Rick’s judgment. Even against our own interests and pride, no one considered that he might be mistaken. (You could say they were interested in keeping their jobs, but believe me, they weren’t being paid enough to be that interested.)
We did a gig at Douglas Corner on a Monday night, at the end of a day off. It was a nice release and a lot of fun, and we returned to SIR the next morning for more abuse. But happily, Rick reported at day’s end that things sounded better to him. The live show had re-stimulated us, after a tornado and a solid week of trying to pass muster before a beady-eyed judge on a filthy couch. The day was saved and the project continued as planned and as cast. But Rick wasn’t entirely done giving us grief for sounding 15 and up, for we did continue to slip now and then into placid professionalism. Rick just wanted the dials all the way up all the time. It was an uphill climb, yet I felt that it was just what we needed, or at least what I wanted.
Thinking it over all these years later, I’m not fully on-board with the teen-spirit dictum. It’s not a tone that’s genre-invariant. Listeners turn to different records for different moods and metabolisms. And there are considerations of personal authenticity. I’m explicitly working from an older-age emotional angle now, and it would create a silly clash to open my face wide and slam my body around while warbling about ancient ghosts or the heartbreak of raising children. Still, I keep Rick’s words close by me as a hedge against complacency. It’s good to get everything routinized, as a benefit of long experience -- travel logistics, getting a stage dressed, daily instrument practice, etc. -- everything except the performing, the music. That needs always to be fresh and in-the-moment. If it isn’t, you begin to lose listener interest, deservedly and immediately. And if you forget what it was like to be 14 and want everything so badly -- if you lose sight of your great good luck in getting to play music for people, in having a song to play and people to listen to it -- then you begin to lose interest in yourself. Cash it in, get a factory job.
embrace adventure
One day, at Quad studio, Rick and I were tweaking a song (“Take Me To The Paradise”) with a modestly “experimental” section. The last verse was intended to tip into hallucinatory, noir-ish anxiety. “I wish we had a sonic throughline here to underscore the mood I’m after,” I said, or something to that effect; “something like a Blood Sweat & Tears trombone pedal, you know? Suspenseful. But maybe not expressly tonal.” I’ve got a lot of crudely articulated, thrillingly esoteric ideas.
Rick did...well, he did a series of things, and I don’t remember where he got all the materials or just how long it took, but it all happened within that session, and it happened directly after I said all that. He got the key to a car that was parked in the lot outside. He got an extension for an XLR cable that ran 70 or 80 feet. Then he attached a 58 or similar cheap microphone to it, and dropped it under the hood of the car. He took some kind of a weight, and jammed it onto the car horn. Then he ran inside and plugged the other end of the cable into the board.
Cueing up the song and recording the overdub of the ceaseless car horn a few times while experimenting on the fly with EQ and ambience took, as I recall, 9 or 10 minutes. A brief enough period, but a long time for a studio of placid professionals to listen to a continuous horn from a vehicle parked against the small building there on Grand Avenue. The police were on the scene by minute 9.5, and luckily it was a wrap about 30 seconds later. I don’t recall any apology, just a polite feigned smile and a “we’re trying to do very important work here” attitude from Rick as he unjammed the wheel and unrigged the automobile.
We did a lot of fun stuff during tracking. One night Rick dropped a dictaphone mic inside a grand piano and I banged around on the wires with a drumstick, to try for a fucked-up gamelan sort of sound. Another time Rick wanted to try backward acoustic guitar (on a tune called “Bethelridge”) so he ran the tape of the band track backward and I played the song by following the chart backward, from the last bar to the first (challenging for me since it was mixed-meter, and also unmetered in I think two spots). We recorded a couple harmony vocals naked. Probably in part because we were working in the most staid of the three music industry towns, we put some extra effort into going out of the box, as it were. When we did, it wasn’t plotted out in advance, the thought just came into someone’s head and away we went.
Not all of Rick’s thoughts were so sensible. One day, again at Quad, he got frustrated with the responsiveness of the tape machine controls, which were mounted on a rack with wheels, and he lit the rack on fire with his cigarette lighter. In truth it wasn’t the most inflammable object, so the risk and the potential liability were sharply limited. But the fire did catch on a bit, consuming most of a plastic “play” button. It made a nice visual effect -- lovelier than just the normal spectacle of sitting and swearing angrily at a machine. The delicate flame plumed upward and attracted the attention of a perplexed intern, who smothered it with his shirt. In short, you just never knew what Rick would do next.
“And then -- why, you’ll never believe what we over-entitled Ivy Leaguers inflicted on the townfolk after that!” I know, I know. The point I’m going for is how very open to adventure Rick was. Some engineers and producers are closed to it. Strike a piano note, break a wineglass, run caterwauling across the room, and twang a ukulele string with a number-two pencil? Not in my studio! To my way of thinking, engineers should be alert to opportunities to productively smash norms -- and my experience has been that the best ones are. Rick thought of new adventures constantly and jumped into them without a moment’s thought -- he was a firestarter!
be high a lot of the time
Well, this was probably my least favorite thing about Rick but it does bear mentioning.
naturalize the studio
I remember my first four or five times trying to record music in a “studio” -- whether that’s what a guy called the tricked-out room in his basement or it was a lavish artificial space serving a corporation’s bottom line. Having no understanding of the machine technology or the process (what was punching? what was gating? what was the difference between delay and echo? what was mixing? and by the time I had read enough dorky magazine articles and clocked enough session time at $200/hour to achieve fluency in these arcane subjects, how many teeth would remain in my head?) was daunting enough for a teenaged rookie. But these are problems that are solved in a straightforward way, by learning over time. The trickier problem was a psychological one. Something inherent in the nature of a “studio” felt alien and intimidating. All through my 20s, I couldn’t quite crack the puzzle of how to make music in that setting that sounded nearly as good as I could often sound in a normal place -- at home, or in someone’s living room, or in a club, or in a church, or almost anywhere that wasn’t a recording studio.
Studios were places owned and operated by other people, making you a sort of privileged squatter, even though you’d paid (and often dearly). If Michael Jackson had been in the room a month prior, or Steve Winwood was currently working the next room over, you felt your unease increase. You needed to relax, and yet almost anything you’d normally do to conjure a music-making mood was discouraged or forbidden outright. Don’t move around, the mic is fixed right at your mouth hole. Don’t bang your foot on the ground, it’ll get picked up on tape. Don’t try to gain energy from the audience, they’re not there. Don’t make a single noise as the last chord is struck and fades away, but stand deathly still until instructed to move. Oh, and you’ll hear everyone’s voice and instrument including your own through small speakers attached to a device on your head and positioned an inch from each eardrum. Go!
The friendly and relaxed personae of many engineers and producers can go a long way to reduce this problematic condition of tense artificiality, along with improvements in your own learning curve, as your first few studio efforts turn into your first few dozen. Rick Will went the absolute maximum distance that a recordist can go to naturalize and de-louse a studio space. He picked MCA for tracking, for starters. It had been Ronnie Milsap’s room in an earlier era, and had the exact vibe that datum implied: comfy, faded but clean, sunset-over-Malibu colors. (Hey, no blind jokes, cut that out.) The lighting was soft and the hues on the batting were soft too. A Neve room where the optics were Neve as well, if you follow me. The day before starting, Rick gathered us: “Bring anything and everything from home that you like to look at. Posters, statuettes, ikons, framed family pictures, rabbit’s feet. We’re gonna redecorate the space just as much as we want.” Rick brought in a ton of incense -- the joint reeked.
We didn’t use headphones very much, which at that point was a fairly novel approach to me. Isolation had always been such a primary concern in working with engineers that it was hard for me to imagine how not to record with headphones on. But the less I used them in the studio, going forward from those days, the more I found I disliked them, on both a mechanical/physical level and an ideological one. All that said, they’re no huge deal. What was entirely novel to me was that Rick recorded some of our most raucous songs not only headphone-less but with active monitor wedges spread around the tracking room, like a live show. Was there untenable bleed? Yes and no. Considering the decibels pouring from the wedges, the track-by-track isolation was very surprising to hear upon playback -- Rick had incredible knowledge and instinct about mic placement, room dynamics, and wave activity, and so was able to pull this hat trick off far better than most engineers. But yes, there was bleed aplenty, and this proved one more lesson in a long series in my life about its beauty and usefulness.
Summary: Rick had a natural lack of pretense and a goofball sense of humor that drained stiffness from any environment; but he also employed smart tactics aimed at converting studios into rec-room-like performance zones.
family is love
I don’t remember a day in Rick’s company when he didn’t talk tenderly and at some length about his wife and his infant son Oskar.
music is sacred
Most of us love music, but I always feel there’s a small but essential distinction between those who listen obsessively and compile factual knowledge, in the way of baseball fanatics, and those who have been led by music into a mental space that no level-headed authority would altogether condone. You can look at their dress code and their disfigurements and see that they’ve written themselves out of regular society; you can tell from the very sag of their skin that they’ve allowed music to take years off their lives. Surprisingly, or not, musicians tend not to fall into either category, moderate or extreme obsessives. Entering into a practical relationship with music has its disadvantages but it does temper the mania a bit.
I don’t know if Rick would have preferred to have been more of a player than an engineer. I think he might have. When he talked about his band, Vagantis, as he did almost daily, he seemed to assume a certain level of familiarity and interest, as if he were talking about the cast of “Gilligan’s Island.” I find it a little relieving to have some interest in dumb old shows or cobwebbed books, just to have something to take my mind off the hypnotic subject of music and to dissociate myself from the behaviors and habits of musical types. The long hours, the official indifference to money, the smoking and other health infractions, the uncompromising political declarations, the dramatic professions of love and loyalty: these are traits that (except for the long hours) I’ve developed a certain ambivalence toward. But they sucked Rick in like a hungry baby.
When toward the middle of our mix session he saw a stream of commentary issuing from my label’s New York office via the studio fax machine, he swiveled around in his rolling chair and addressed me sternly. “We are no longer mixing a record. We are engaged in a mortal campaign to save the art we have created. We will use every tactic at our disposal.” This was exciting to hear but I was also a little concerned by the rhetoric. What was he planning to do, and might it hurt me? One of his bluntest tactics, a not uncommon one I’ve since seen sound technicians use, is to meet a sound-design-related request they deem unwise by pretending to turn something up or down. “Sure -- how does that sound now?” Most people won’t say, “Did you just insidiously pretend to do what I asked for while actually doing nothing?” It’s an accusation. Most people will instead say, “That sounds a bit better, thanks.” And they’ll mean it.
When we were done mixing, headquarters demanded a re-mix on two songs, by a different engineer in a different city. That was its own story and Rick’s involvement in it is recounted in the next section. After the re-mix, though, there was more trouble brewing over at corporate. I was seeing some symptoms and hoping there was an alternative interpretation, but then an agent told me straight out -- they’re mothballing your record. “Mothballing,” perfect term! He meant that, though the company was committed to releasing my record, it would do that as non-showily as possible, almost with a spirit of penitence and mute regret. When Rick found out about this, he called me on the phone to deliver another of his manifestos. “We are now in a state of all-out war,” he announced. “We will promote the record ourselves, in a guerrilla manner. We will be working under, around, and against the company. The two of us will compile a list of every industry contact we can think of who can conceivably be of aid. We’ll probably fail, but without trying, we definitely will. We’ll...” It went on for a good while. Once again Rick’s militancy was heartwarming and worrying both. His involvement in my record was not really an open question -- it had been very officially done with for months. I didn’t expect his extralegal ardor to lead to great results (nor did it), but it did mean something to me at a point when I was in a dark funk and suffering the death of my pumped-up hopes, even contemplating career flameout.
Something Rick did that combines a lot of these aspects I’m separating out -- the music-love, the impulsiveness, the I’m-14 -- was to pick up an instrument and jump into a song without having been invited. To put this into context, let me say: I’m a pretty good player, my band guys at the time were all pretty good players, and the guests on our record, like Sam Bush and John Hughey and Lucinda Williams, were unmistakably in a realm beyond pretty-good. I’ve never seen any other engineer leap out of the control room and into this context of clearly capable musicianship, holding a rusty banjo and wanting in on the fun. It was a disarming move that he pulled off with charm. On one hand: are you fucking kidding me, engineer? On the other: making a record is making music, which is expressing joy and impulse, unlike designing a stock portfolio or serving on your PTA board. We overlooked this basic fact more frequently than we knew. When our performing shaded into audible joylessness, Rick would often meet it with mockery, making his body stiff like the Frankenstein monster and intoning, “Display. No. Emotion.”
Marx’s thinking about capitalism’s artificial divorce of self from work is -- if it’s not a too-clever-by-half extrapolation -- probably a cousin to Rick’s thinking about music, as it connects precepts like “be 14,” “your band is your life,” and “your record is worth the best battle you have in you.” If you can leave home and enter the offices of your law firm as a changed person, no longer a loving husband or father, but instead a producer of wealth and a cigar-chomping colleague and a warrior on behalf of strangers, good for you. Maybe that’s a possibility. But that doesn’t quite sound like human beings the way we know them to be. And that one-mask-off-another-mask-on approach fails utterly in the field of music, where the fullest (including the softest and the most irrational) expressions of personhood are used in the work. If you somehow are able to suppress those expressions, the work will almost certainly suffer as a result. The “product” is inextricably bound together with the sensation of aliveness, what it’s like to suffer pain and fear and to want for no reason to jump up and kiss people and all that stuff. This is obviously not all that relevant to the human beings coiling the cables or delivering the lunch, but it does have a lot of relevance to those performing and recording the music, and it has total relevance to the person whose name is atop the project and a few others tasked with high-level oversight. The demands of efficiency and procedure must be heard, of course, but with no bulwark to meet them, they will quickly overtake the central task -- the crystalline communication of aliveness.
confound your antagonists with honesty and generosity
Out in L.A. David Bianco was assigned to re-mix the two songs, and David turned out to be a swell and reasonable person, as well as -- no surprise -- a highly skilled engineer. But the session was overshadowed by Rick’s and my opposition to it. In demanding that the music be reopened and reconfigured, the company had offered only procedural reasons -- “this is what always happens at this stage of the operation, don’t worry” -- that I found far from reassuring. At least one of David’s mixes, and maybe both, turned out to excel Rick’s, in the final analysis. But that happy result was in no way pre-ordained.
Rick decided on his own, and rather wildly, to fly out west and drop in on the session. We were a few hours in, and I was just getting into a friendly groove with David, when in popped Rick through the door, with a sheepish Bill-and-Ted expression and holding a bottle of wine with a bow on it. David accepted it gratefully and looked at the label. I remember his eyeing Rick warily, as though unsure of his intent. “This is an extremely expensive wine,” he said, like a confused protest. Rick shrugged and plopped down in a corner chair. “Please go ahead with the work,” he said. “I’m not going to distract you.” I’ve never been at another remix date where, as the work proceeds, the person whose work is being altered has travelled thousands of miles to hover humbly in the corner of the room. A weird situation. Rick and I ended the day nightclubbing around Sunset Blvd. At 4:30AM he was in my room, still hovering humbly. I sat drooping on the bed; I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask him to go. He had spent some of the night acting a little bizarrely, but in the wee hours he was feeling calmer and broadly sentimental. “A lot of people will say they support you and love you, in the music world,” he said, with his eyes gleaming. “But I say it, and I mean it. I will always love you, and I will never stop believing in you. I am truly your friend for life.” It wasn’t the last time I saw him, but it was maybe third-to-last.
Now that I’m reflecting on my time with Rick, I can see a pattern of his frustration with many of the people my production brought into his orbit. The manager, the A&R representative, the attorney, the drummer, several supporting musicians, the re-mix engineer. At times I felt that he felt I was thrusting him into a substratum of amateur incompetence. If that was true, it was a result partly of my own poor decisionmaking (choosing Geffen, not DreamWorks) but more generally of my economic frailty (Rick Will was on my menu of options but not T Bone Burnett). I was very gratified that Rick had such high belief in me, that he thought I was like Hank Williams (!), that he threw himself so passionately into my low-paying project. I’m a little regretful that I didn’t or couldn’t make a smoother path for him through the work. From the inside, it felt as though we were hurling ourselves hard at the goalpost (sorry, sports aren’t my line) as a professional team of bored goalpost-movers repeatedly insured that we landed in the dust.
Earlier this week I talked with a few of the musicians he wanted to fire from my project for sounding tired and washed-out, and I found no residual ill will, just amused and warm memories. Rick’s displays of extravagant generosity, his adeptness with machines, his sometimes brutal honesty, his declarations of unconditional love, his love of harmony but also of provocation...it was a complex that defied easy analysis, but it surely added up to an unforgettable character.