Doll Parts: Sylvain Sylvain uncut.
Sylvain Sylvain was born Sylvain Mizrahi, in Cairo, Egypt, on February 14, 1951, and passed away at his home in Nashville on January 13, 2021. He is probably best known for co-founding The New York Dolls, whose eponymous 1973 debut was produced by Todd Rundgren. When I spoke to Syl in 2009, for what would become my book A Wizard A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio, the Dolls had reformed and reunited with Rundgren for what was only their fourth studio album, Cause I Sez So. We were there to talk about Rundgren, but I would have been a fool to not try and get a little career history from him, and I found him not only happy to comply, he turned out to be a great guy with a steel-trap memory for details and no illusions about The Dolls’ eternal cult status despite being and enduring influence and archetype for generations of punk, glam. Right from the get-go, he attempted to place his band in the correct light.
“We’ve always been a bit too adventurous in a way,” Syl began, “and some people never took us seriously for that. But we always tried to do our best with the time that we had.”
Here’s a mildly abridged excerpt from our conversation, edited only for clarity and to eliminate certain repetition, Syl liked to say “You know” you know? Parts of this conversation appeared in A Wizard A True Star.
Paul Myers: Paul Nelson signed you to Mercury Records, can you talk a little bit about how and when you got signed, and ended up meeting Todd Rundgren.
Sylvain Sylvain: Well yeah actually you know we all had the same girlfriends in a way in those days you know those were the most beautiful times and to be in New York City and I’m sure every day in New York City is a beautiful day, but during that time the whole Andy Warhol superstars, and all the mixture of the Avant Garde, and of course the Lower East side, and you know all those people who heard their callings to come to New York you know, and you know we all slept with each other, to put it one way. That’s the way it was, we all fucked each other. And I think we still do.
SS: Well, you know we definitely were the first and the only ones out there. I mean before us maybe there was Iggy Pop or the MC5, but they were a sixties bands, they were late sixties bands, and so we were like maybe the next generation to come to be. And being in New York City, at the time, we didn’t have any place to play you know so we had to invent and find places so we could show our art, and by the way it was only supposed to last a few weeks you know? We just said ‘Hey let’s try it and you know maybe this will get us some chicks. Which is always a good, something that always leave behind you know like that’s the reason why you did it, and that is the reason why we did it. When we started finding that there were no places to play and we had to sort of adopt all these post-60’s places or whatever, clubs like Max’s Kansas City, because this was at least five years before CBGB’s was even gonna be born. CBGB’s came around in the mid-seventies, and I’m talking about the early, early 1970’s, like 1971. So we took these places to play, and they really didn’t take us in with welcoming arms you know. We were the next generation, so we were sort of a threat to them and besides we weren’t homosexuals, and you know most of them were gay or drag queens and the beautiful stars that they were. But we had kind of copped their drag, to put it one way. We made no excuses for it either, you know, no apologies.
PM: There was controversy at the time, this whole notion of being a heterosexual band dressing up in a feminine way…
SS: It was blindly done, though, so I will say yes to that but there was a lot more to it, you know? It was like an endless party of, how can I say this, ‘characterism’ and interpretation. The way we felt it was that we had to make ourselves feel famous, before we can actually become famous. We wondered, ‘How the hell did they do it?’ So, while we were being influenced by the drag queens and stuff, we weren’t strictly copycats at all. It was all done with love. Things just happened to have that theatrical sort of influence; I mean the reason why we even put on makeup it was sort of like Little Rascals kind of putting on a show you know. And it was like, ‘Hey man who’s got the curtain? Well, my mother’s got this old sheet. Okay, well that’s the curtain. We’ll put on a show in the barn!’
Next, it was like, ‘Who’s gonna write the songs?’ Well, you know what? Johnny just wrote something that’s kinda weird but let’s fucking try it, whatever you know. Then it was like, ‘Where the hell are we gonna get make up?’ Make up? My girlfriend’s got a whole bag full, okay. In a way, we put on the make up just to get even more girls, it was like an attraction to girls. And if you look at what we were growing up with, this was like the end of the sixties. Everything had already been tried in the sixties and then we’d see movies like Performance with Mick Jagger and of course all those guys in the Rolling Stones and other bands we’d see, Marc Bolan in T. Rex, they were all playing around with makeup. The first time I saw Rod Stewart, man, I mean he looked like he was gonna be in Twisted Sister, you know what I mean, he had so much makeup on, he looked like he was in Twisted Sister especially with those skinny purple pants and all that stretch lame. So, The Dolls, all of us, came from all of that. And everybody in the group had something that they specifically brought into the Dolls. My big influence in the Dolls was the fashion business because that’s the rag business that I was born into being my last name being Mizrahi.
PM: Are you and Isaac directly related?
SS: Well you know I don’t know how many Mizrahi’s there are in the world but you know that, we were all when we immigrated to the country my parents we were thrown out of Egypt we were exiled, we were actually Egyptian Jews which was a no no in the fifties, you know and so my father who was a banker and then I’d work in Egypt he’d have to teach himself how to become a tailor, we all learned you know my uncles became tailors, my mother, my aunts, they were all pooled together, they would turn like a living room into a sweatshop if you will, just because they couldn’t work at anything else. Actually, my uncle Ralph who was the first one who taught me music because he was an accordion player and so you know on Shabbat or whatever he’d bust out the accordion and I would say ‘What the hell is that note for?’ and stuff like that. So that was my first kinda take on music and stuff. And then when we immigrated to Paris you know the whole French, that whole like sixties influence very early sixties, late fifties you know in the U.S. that was just coming over there had moved to them. And we had bands like the Black Socks, which in French were Les Chaussettes Noires, like the Shadows, and you know they used to have this movie theater because Elvis never played in Europe really. He was only stationed in Germany in the Army. But we had the movie King Creole, and it would come on every Saturday in this movie theater in Montmartre in Paris. I remember all the kids would go there, my older brother would take me because I was kinda too young and he would take me and say ‘Man, check this out!’ All the French kids would be there with their outta tune acoustic guitars Spanish guitars and bongos and everything and would sing the whole damn song it was sort of like The Rocky Horror Picture Show but this was in the sixties.
When we came out in 1973, when we went to Paris and we played the Olympia Theater, and we played this place called Le Bataclan which is like basically it’s sort of sponsored by the government so it cost like 50 cents to get in there so every kid that really wants to go to these shows can go to see them. Man, I remember like looking out the window and I said, ‘Johnny, check this out, I think The Beatles are playing here tonight,’ because there was a huge crowd, there were like going back and forth it was sort of like almost like a stadium going nuts. It was just incredible.
PM: I guess with your cosmopolitan roots, the French would have loved it?
SS: Well they did actually! I was taken quite well there and of course I was the spokesman for the band and introduced Arthur Kane on French television as the ‘Le Monstre’, or ‘the monster’ of the band, and it was cool, it was great. The early Dolls, just to make a long story short, we had all the attractions. But getting back to Todd, when recorded us and produced our first album in 1973 at The Record Plant, Jack Douglas was our engineer and so we made that record together. I remember Todd used to have this little kind of a Chihuahua, well I don’t know if it was quite a Chihuahua, I don’t remember that well,but he used to, like, sit him up on this Neve 8068 or something console you know this probably a million dollar’s worth of instruments, and his girlfriend at the time, Bebe Buell, would come in. At that time David was going out with Cyrinda Fox. Cyrinda at that time was an Andy Warhol ‘superstar’ basically that they kinda found each other at the Max’s Kansas City and all those kinda going out days and they were like a couple David and Cyrinda. So you know we all had like ‘superstar’ girlfriends in a way you know. We were all so young then, I mean I was maybe eighteen I don’t know. Like when the New York Dolls got signed in 1973, some of our parents had to sign for us because we were too young. So, we were all young club kids, all of us kind of hearing our callings, coming to New York and wanting to become stars and showing [our] wares, if you will. Some of them actually did quite well and have plenty to show and their art still lives on forever and will forever live on.
PM: Yoe signed to Mercury. Was there a lot of discussion or was Todd your first choice to produce the record?
SS: It didn’t really happen as magically as everybody would like to believe it happened. It was really more, ‘Hey, who’s around and who’s available,’ as it always is. And then it was ‘Who will take the money that we have to offer and who could give us the time and that’s really the factor on almost everything else and that’s the way it happened in 1973 and that’s the way it happened [with Rundgren again] just a month ago in 2009. You know, that’s the way it always is: Who’s available, and who isn’t, so you negotiate all those variables and that’s the way that happens.
PM: The story that I heard was that Bebe brought Todd to see you guys maybe at Max’s, I guess.
SS: It was just the kind of thing that happened. All the chicks were getting turned on by us and they were all bringing their guys. They would all like to show up in front of their guys, ‘Hey you know that guy really turns me on,’ you know? Maybe this is the reason why they have sex that night. [chuckles]
PM: Earlier, you said that by the time the sessions commenced, a lot of it was mapped out. But was there any pre-production? I ask because that’s something I think Todd generally doesn’t do.
SS: No all I remember is Todd showing up to the recording studio and maybe we might have done a demo before that. I forget. But Todd was just at our shows and was probably brought there, like everybody else, by their lovers.
PM: So, the material was all pretty much selected by the time you go in. But did Todd have any hand in arranging, or was it pretty much all written already?
SS: Contrary to popular belief we were the first band to get signed, but it also took us years and years and years to get signed. [It was a situation where] everybody had gone up and down the wagon with us and we basically put together a showcase in front of all the record companies but without our fans. We could never really perform well without our fans, so we didn’t do so great at the showcase and they all passed on us. The only company that didn’t show up that night was Mercury Records and that’s why we wound up with them. And so that’s really the story behind that. That was a ploy from our managers back then, they thought that that playing a private gig would be the best way to get us out in front of the record executives and they sort of forgot that the most important thing was our fans was the only reason we were performing, you know. And the only reason why we came together and when they took that away from the equation well of course we were doomed to fail.
As far as the production and everything else, you know the songs had been tried and tried and tried and they were hits already to the kids who came to see us. Our songs were very much in demand. Although, we weren’t making vinyl or pressing them up, but songs like ‘Personality Crisis’ and ‘Trash’ and our version of the Bo Diddley song ‘Pills’ you know and countless songs they were hits already. I remember our song ‘Frankenstein’ was a big hit with our fans, but you know even before we got to make a record, Edgar Winter came out with his song called ‘Frankenstein’ not that the song sounds like our ‘Frankenstein’ at all. They sort of took our title, so we decided well we’re gonna call our song ‘Frankenstein Original’ and Rundgren produced that record. Then Todd produced the Edgar Winter song.
[NOTE: Syl was clearly confused and misremembering that Rick Derringer was the producer. In a moment I will step in and remind him of this fact, but at this point in the conversation it seemed unpleasant to stop his flow to argue with him.]
SS: We had a conversation with Todd back in November [2008] when he was getting ready to produce our new record which is called Cause I Sez So. I said ‘Hey Todd you produced the original New York Dolls so beautifully, you know the way he put Johnny Thunders on the right side and Sylvain Sylvain on the left side. The kids had been talking about that over and over you know, for years past that and he was really instrumental into reproducing the sound that we had. It was really very simple, and just repetitive you know the whole thing became The Ramones and that whole punk thing with the Sex Pistols too. had done that on that and that was conversating with him telling him ‘Wow what a great job you did and especially ‘Frankenstein’ and he said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah I remember’ and then he went off speaking about Edgar Winter. And then I said ‘Todd no I’m sorry but you know it’s our version of ‘Frankenstein’ I’m talking about and so we had a little bit of spacey moment there you know.
[Note: I finally had to say something, armed with a Wikipedia entry on my laptop]
PM: It was from Edgar Winter’s They Only Come Out At Night…
SS: Yeah, that’s what it was called. You know that was a fucking rip off right there too it was so lamely done it was like through the eyes of these guys, they you know they I don’t know somebody didn’t really have their head straight, said ‘Hey that’s what the kids are doing today’ and if you wanna be popular they only come out at night like big fucking deal.
PM: But Rick Derringer produced it.
SS: Oh, did he produce it? Then did Todd have a hand in it at all?
PM: All I can say is that Rick gets the credit, and there is no credit for Todd anywhere, it says here on Wikipedia and Discogs.
SS: Well you know that whole clique, Rick Derringer, Steve Paul, Steve Paul was the manager Steve Paul also managed both Edgar Winter and Johnny Winter and God knows how many blues guys. He had this record company called Blue Sky Records that went out on Columbia. Now Cyrinda Fox, getting back to her… she introduced David Johansen to Steve Paul, who had the Scene club, and then Steve Paul managed David Johansen throughout his whole solo career, all the way through the eighties. Right up to the Buster years, that was it. I wrote songs for him like ‘Funky But Chic’ and ‘Girls Girls Girls’ all these songs you know came out on the David Johansen solo records.
PM: Todd actually met Moogy Klingman outside The Scene.
SS: Oh, that’s another connection because I actually recorded with my band called The Criminals at Moogy Klingman’s studio. It was his mom’s apartment it was like it wasn’t really a studio. It was good.
PM: I am pretty sure I know this answer, but did any of the first Dolls album get mixed at Secret Sound?
SS: No not at all. Back then, the record company had more you know control over these things, so we went to do our first album at the Record Plant, which was basically brand new and refurbished with all this 24 track you know Neve consoles I mean they had this stuff from Europe. We had a lot more time back then. You know, one difference between this new album that we just did at Todd’s Hawaii place and the first album is that back then we had a lot more time because of course we had more of a budget. I mean, this last record we did with Todd we also got there less prepared and between that [working out the songs] and the time that we had allotted to record it, well you know, we basically did it in a few weeks. And it was essentially recorded live so that’s not gonna make for a really ‘studio album’ but it’s also not gonna be overly produced. I don’t think anybody will ever say that. And it’s got some great tunes on it, but you know we really wrote them in a hurry, and I just wish we had more time to spend.
PM: I’ve heard from Todd and a few of his clients that he likes to just throw the mics up quickly and keep all the same sounds and then just get everyone do their performances and get the hell out of there. Is that sort of what happened?
SS: Well in a way, Yes. I mean he was like ‘Sylvain you don’t want this record to end’ and I’d say, ‘Well yeah but I didn’t even play that solo yet.’ So it was little bit like that. But I don’t really blame him you know cause I put that on the money issue you know. If you buy more time, you have more time.
PM: And you got to spend more time on the first album?
SS: Oh God yes! And don’t forget, those songs were already proven and perfected in front of an audience and they had been played for years. To the kids coming to see us, these were hit songs already. With those songs you didn’t have to think twice. The minute we cut our basic tracks, our rhythm tracks, they were so solid that now we could like color them up with a layer with this, and let’s try that, and all that didn’t work okay let’s try you know whatever we have time. This time we were in and out of there you know.
PM: Didn’t Todd play some piano on the first album?
SS: Well actually it was me who played the first piano he did the additional piano. I did all the rhythms, and the squishes and all that kind of stuff, he did a few tricks and on ‘Frankenstein’ he did his weird kinds of sounds on his synthesizer. It was one of those old machines, I forget the name. It was one of those [synths] that only the Beatles had, and of course Todd also, you know. It was really a beautiful instrument with a little keyboard, and I remember he brought it in. Anyway, the point is that we had more of a chance to develop. If I could add to whatever all your other bands said about Todd, I’d only add that back then we didn’t have computers to tinker around with. Today with the advance of whatever you know computer recording, with the editing and everything else, a lot of times producers would rather make you perfect [in post] instead of you taking your track over and over and maybe getting it right on the third take. So that’s kind of the poison of modern recording. There’s no time to get it right, but we’ll fix it all up in the mix like they used to say in the old days. But then what you end up with is the producer’s execution not the musician’s actual performance, which it kind of takes away a little bit, as far as I’m concerned. You know, I’ve produced bands too and I know what that’s like but I think it’s more natural to say that, first, the band should be prepared, and be fucking so ready that the audience wants those songs and knows those songs, they’re in demand before you even recorded the son of the bitch. Where people are bootlegging it, in those days, or as they do now, downloading it, from a live performance. Know what I mean? Once you do it in front of the audience the audience cleans up everything for you. They wil tell you, ‘Hey man, about that arrangement, you should have like vamped at the end or is that third part didn’t even belong it made me bored and I stopped dancing. You know the audience gives you all the answers, all the questions whether this was right, whether this was wrong, even if the song is fucking any good, you don’t know that until you go in and do it in front of them.
PM: Road testing it?
SS: Exactly. And then you know then you can take it into the studio when it’s all ready and then you have everything together and then you can get into production instead of making it a glorified demo.
PM: And again, with the first album, The Dolls had done all this road testing by being a successful club act.
SS: Right yeah, we were there from 1970 and until 1973 when one member of ours had passed away unfortunately.
PM: Billy Murcia.
SS: Such a life, the kids had gone and made ten twenty thirty bands from our just our own creation of one song. Don’t forget ‘Looking for A Kiss’ became KISS. You know it’s cool they might not want to admit it. Not that I want to compare myself musically. We have no comparisons to those kind of people.
PM: I suppose it’s obvious that they were running with one aspect of The Dolls thing, and I think they mixed it with Gene Simmons’ love of comic books and they took it into more of a metallic direction.
SS: And they also made money, which is something I never made.
PM: Then again, The Dolls ever toured with fire breathing and elaborate stage sets like KISS kid. I mean, talk about not making money!
SS: Well we did it the way we wanted to do it, which was sexy. The way they did it was, to me, more like the way a young kid, like six years old, would want to see it. But musically they didn’t have anything to do with the revolution, you know, hence the reason why they are not in those books about, whatever they want to call, it ‘the punk movement,’ the alternative, the new wave. Sometimes I get calls [from other musicians who ask] ‘why weren’t we in that book’ and I say well ‘What did you have to do with the fucking revolution?’
PM: Todd being a guitar player, did he comment on your playing, or on Johnny Thunders’ playing?
SS: I think he was actually quite taken with what we did. You know, we derived our talent from the streets, we were never professionally trained, and yet that we can still write three minutes worth of magic, when others who may have graduated from Julliard or whatever and worked the orchestra pit and were so well-seasoned, you know, but they couldn’t write a damn good fucking tune. You know what I mean? We were writing tunes for our generation, where we were daring you to have sex with a monster like Frankenstein. That was some pretty damn cool stuff. Then our cover versions of older songs, interpreting them in our own style, which became the norm after that, you know why do a cover if you can do it the way you can do it and otherwise it doesn’t mean anything. You know like I said we maybe we never got that call from the banker telling us ‘Wow you’re rich’ but you know forget it as far as influence is concerned you can’t even put a dollar figure on it with them were gazillionaires you know. But to answer your question, Todd would comment on things but he would only try to improve it and try to bring you out, to be better and maybe you know if you were really out of tune and couldn’t even figure it out. There were a few times even with our drummer Jerry Nolan, where he couldn’t keep a beat so Todd would be out with him in the isolation booth and with a cowbell and a drumstick like hitting the beats for Jerry in his eardrum, in his cans as we say his headphones, just so he could stick to that one tempo. Todd would be out there, sort of a human click track, keeping the beat for Jerry to follow.
PM: I don’t even know if they had machine click tracks in 1973.
SS: Well they did but we never used them, even today we don’t use them, but and that was basically it. Todd helped out a lot with helping us do the background voices.
PM: I wanna ask you about gear. Not that it’s that important in the history of rock, what gear somebody played, but what gear were you playing?
SS: Well we had back in 1973 on that album we had 100 watt Marshall Heads they were probably Plexis because that’s all they made back then, and we used to use Fender Dual Showman cabinets. The biggest amp that Fender makes, it’s now we only use a cabinet for that and instead of their Fender heads we would use Marshall heads. That’s how we married those two together, and we would throw in Fender Twin Reverb amps. The piano we used was like a Yamaha Grand. The drums of course were a pink Ludwig kit custom made for Jerry Nolan, with a twenty-six inch bass drum. That’s being used today and has been for the last, I don’t know how many, years since hip hop started as a sample drum kick drum. You hear it on probably a lot things that we don’t even know about but it’s in there in life.
As for guitars here’s some history that Gibson doesn’t even know. The reason why we used Gibson Les Paul juniors is because they have only one pick up and one knob, so it’s what we call an automatic guitar. You don’t have to fuck around with like ten knobs and you know this things got like three pick ups and this and this and that and master volumes, and three way switches, this thing didn’t have nothing like that you know. Well the reason why [we used them then] is that the Juniors were only two, three hundred dollars and the Les Paul Customs the Black Beauties and all that, they were like 900 or a thousand dollars, so we could never fucking afford that. Peoples said we were geniuses for picking those Juniors up, but it was all because we were broke. It’s the poverty that got us there, and I could say as much about the music too. The New York Dolls were so fucking pragmatic at everything you know? You gotta do it with what you’ve got at hand. Need stage curtains? Well my mom’s got a great fucking sheet we’re not using anymore. And my girlfriend’s got the lipstick and the high-heeled shoes.
PM: Was it challenging to play in high heels?
SS: Well you know what I actually wore the roller skates on the first album cover. I said ‘I’m through this fucking platform [shoes] crap.’ I said ‘Let me show ‘em, let me teach them something.’ As I was telling you before I came from the whole rag business where my company was called Truth and Soul, we were like the late sixties. I had a shop up in Woodstock actually with Billy Murcia, me and him those this was our first venture out it was like yeah we’d love to play music but we also have to eat, you know? This was Woodstock in 1968 we had our first shop a year before the Woodstock festival, and we were only like fucking fifteen, sixteen if anything but through our parents helping us out you know putting us into the business as they say. You know kid needs a sewing machine, there you go, there’s your first Singer.
PM: Woodstock was the site of the hippy dream, maybe the nightmare too, but by the time the Dolls came out it felt like you were the answer to, or the reaction to, all of the peace and love hippy stuff.
SS: Well you know we were basically you know sort of the beginning of the seventies, and we definitely called the sixties over and you know after they seen us that was definitely over. But as I said we weren’t really embraced it wasn’t like it took us years and years and years to really to show, or to get appreciation and at first we said ‘Hey let’s put on a show it’s gonna last a couple weeks let’s see what happens.’ It was my name I take the title because I used to work across the street form this place called the New York Dolls Hospital, which is still around today it’s on Lexington Avenue in New York City, in the sixties and it’s a toy repair shop and I used to work across the street there in this kind of like a hippy sixties shop called the Different Drummer that was like really popular in New York and one day when I was working, walking home and Johnny Thunders he used to go shopping there, and Billy Murcia was working there with me too and I said man wouldn’t that be a great name for a band they said what New York Dolls Hospital? I said no just the New York Dolls.
PM: It could have so easily been New York Dolls Hospital.
SS: Well it could of and in some ways it still is you know.
PM: So how did you end up getting reunited with Todd Rundgren all these years later?
SS: Well this is it was like we just got a deal like I was saying before, you know and the thing was okay whose available and actually he works for the company we just got signed to which is Warner Brothers which is Rhino which is you know Atco actually, and so you see it’s like all connected and they said this is really funny because my new manager Ron Stone from Gold Mountain he calls me up and he says ‘Sylvain, guess what? We’re gonna get Todd Rundgren to produce your next record.’ I said ‘Great man. That’s, like, taking me back to old days!’ So he says ‘Well what do you mean?’ He didn’t know that Todd had produced our first album.
PM: He didn’t know that?
SS: He did not know that. You know, he’s another, like a fan that’s taking from what were doing today and a lot of people don’t know a lot of our history in many ways the New York Dolls will always be and always were an underground cult kind of band.
PM: People who know, knew the New York Dolls. Like the singer from the group Japan like named himself David Sylvian after you and David.
SS: Hey can I tell you something funny about that? Okay cause I once told this to David I said hey you know cause Johnny and Jerry had gone to England of course as the Heartbreakers but me and David had kind of stuck it out in New York and formed our bands or whatever went our own ways and stuff. I said this to David hey listen see if we made it to England this guy’s name would have been Johnny Nolan, instead of David Sylvian. And did you know something else that’s funny I always get like if you Google me on the internet and stuff it’s like I always get credited for being in that band. This guy, me, was a genius in that band, Japan, and this and that. I’m going ‘Shit that was not me.’ But anyways I’ll take the credit you know what the hell.
PM: So 36 years later you’re in Kauai, is that like the last place on Earth you’d expect a New York Dolls record to be made?
SS: You know what’s beautiful about that? It’s like, oh my god, you hear Hawaii this and this and that, [but when] you get there and then it rained every fucking day because this is winter in Hawaii and not only that those mosquitoes… and I live in the South, and I swear to god those mosquitoes fucking killed the shit out of me but you know it was beautiful. And let me just put this this way, here we are and were just recording in this house and we’re all overlooking the ocean and one of the cruise ships come by and all of the sudden, you know our the song that Todd originally put on our first album ‘Trash,’ the one that I wrote, you know I started doing it sort of calypso, kinda reggae style, like watching this cruise ship just cruising down. And you know they’re checking out the whales and everything you know, so you know I started doing the riff to ‘Trash’ but kind of reggae-ish, well as much as a Jewish can boy play reggae, but anyways all the guys came out and David came out and said ‘Man, that’s beautiful Sylvain.’ So we started recording it and it’s actually on our record, so wait until you hear that and that gives you the feeling of the influence of Hawaii, how’s that? The Jewish Reggae…
PM: When you got there, this time, you didn’t have many songs finished?
SS: Well, we were not as prepared as we should have been and then I think we would have had a little more time but we needed. I think to me it would have been wiser to spend more time no matter what the outcome was you know and that’s not Todd’s fault and it’s not our fault, it’s all [of] our faults together.
But it’s a beautiful album, I’m very proud of it. The songs on it are, I think, especially for how quickly we came up with them, and how, against all my rules of having this stuff ready before you even go to the studio, you know, it came along pretty damn fucking well. I’m very happy.
PM: Anything stand out?
SS: There’s one that’s called ‘Exorcism of Despair,’ check that one out, that’s the one that I keep on want to hearing over and over, there’s a lot of beautiful stuff. There’s a lot, you’re gonna think a little bit though this is you know sort of ‘The Dolls go Nashville,’ that’s the way I see it. That might not be such a good thing, but you know, I would say to all our public and to yourself and all our listeners who are about to listen to this record, give it a chance and listen to everything. I want to hear their opinion, to us you know musicians and producers alike you know [the songs are] like children, you know? They are always beautiful no matter how bratty they could ever become, you know? They’re all beautiful. I just wish we had more time because then it would have been even better, but then again in the words of John Lennon ‘I should have never released that record because it was never finished to begin with’ and he’s talking about probably, who knows, like Sgt. Pepper or something like that.
PM: Yeah you’re saying that part of the artists challenge is to know when to let go.
SS: Exactly. But I swear it we didn’t get to that stage, I know it’s not like Bruce Springsteen with ‘The River.’ It was not that at all because I swear we had one week where we tracked everything, and basically we tracked everything live, and that’s your meat and potatoes of the whole damn thing. We hardly overdubbed [much] besides voices and a whistle here and there and a guitar solo here and there. There was not much overdubbing.
PM: Did you record to Pro Tools or Logic Audio. I mean, how did you track it?
SS: They used a couple systems [which] they bounced back and forth. Ask Todd, he knows more. But like I said, we recorded it live and then of course some things had to be moved here and there or the track one was a little better and then you’d pick up that guitar from track one and drop it into track two which was the track you really chose and you know? Just manipulations like that, which is basically always done in recording since they started recording. The only difference now is that it’s a lot easier. Where we used to have to actually use our fingers and knives to cut the tape and nowadays its like you can do it by editing on a screen, which is a lot cleaner and a lot faster and you don’t take the chances to ruin the whole tape like cutting it wrong.
PM: Did you use real amplifiers and everything to get sounds, or softward simulations?
SS: Amplifiers, everything was amplifiers. There were no plug-ins, as a matter a fact, used on this album. We had a Drum Works kit for the drums, and as far as guitars were concerned, we used Gibsons, and Martins, we used Gretsches, we used even a Daisy Rock.
PM: I don’t even know that last one.
SS: Daisy Rock is that sort of kid kind of company, they’re part of Schecter. They make like all those young kid’s guitars, but of course they make them for adults too and we use them. As far as amplifiers are concerned, we use Marshalls but we really we use Orange amps. And we use this company called Demeter, outta California.
PM: Was that stuff just there at Todd’s studio already?
SS: No, that’s the stuff we brought and we shipped over and it cost us a fortune, because there’s nothing there on that island, you know? We had to bring all our amps and guitars. You know so there’s nothing there. For the bass amp we used Ampeg SVT’s, the old ‘refrigerator’ cabinet, bravo and we always used Ampeg, even on the first album.
PM: The hardest working amp in show biz.
SS: You got it, it was built back then and it still can’t fucking beat it today. And we used Neumann U87 mics.
PM: Oh thanks. That’s all good detail. Thanks for sharing this stuff. Good talking with you Syl.
SS: No problem, Paul.
