Recording
Recording the album was said to be very frustrating for both the Ramones and Phil Spector. In an "Autodiscography" feature article in the Trouser Press magazine, the band members recalled that while five different studios were credited on the album's liner notes, all of the recording took place at Gold Star Studios, the same facility Spector had used for his classic "Wall of Sound" productions of the 1960s.
Bassist Dee Dee Ramone wrote of Spector's obsessive recording techniques: "Phil would sit in the control room and would listen through the headphones to Marky hit one note on the drum, hour after hour, after hour, after hour." At another time, Spector forced guitarist Johnny Ramone to play the opening chord to "Rock 'n' Roll High School" hundreds of times.
Early in the sessions, Spector reportedly held the Ramones hostage at gunpoint. According to Dee Dee, when Spector took Joey away for a three-hour private meeting somewhere in his mansion where the album was to be recorded, Dee Dee went looking for them. "The next thing I knew Phil appeared at the top of the staircase, shouting and waving a pistol," Dee Dee later wrote:
| “ | "Phil," I challenged him, "I don't know what your fucking problem is, waving that pistol around and all that stuff.... I've had it. I'm going back to the Tropicana."...
"You're not going anywhere, Dee Dee," Phil said. He leveled his gun at my heart and then motioned for me and the rest of the band to get back in the piano room.... He only holstered his pistol when he felt secure that his bodyguards could take over. Then he sat down at his black concert piano and made us listen to him play and sing "Baby, I Love You" until well after 4:30 in the morning. |
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Dee Dee claimed to have left the recording sessions without recording anything. "We had been working for at least fourteen or fifteen hours a day for thirteen days straight and we still hadn't recorded one note of music," he wrote in his autobiography. After supposedly hearing that Johnny had returned to New York, Dee Dee wrote that he and drummer Marky Ramone booked a flight and returned home as well. "To this day, I still have no idea how they made the album End of the Century, or who actually played bass on it."
Dee Dee's account contradicts much of the band's collective account from the 1982 Trouser Press interview, where the band stated that the only track that Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky did not play on was the cover version of "Baby, I Love You", as the band, save for Joey, had gone home after cutting basic tracks for the rest of the album. His only consistent recollection in both accounts is his dissatisfaction with his songwriting contributions to the album; he specifically cited the anti-war songs "High Risk Insurance" and "Let's Go" in the Trouser Press interview.
It was ultimately Joey Ramone who held his band mates in line He explained his rationale for wanting to work with Phil Spector:
| “ | I mean, I was excited about it, because Phil Spector was a major inspiration to me and because we were both pioneers. When the Spector sound came around there was a void, there was Pat Boone and then there was Phil Spector. He was a reaction to all that superficial whitebread crap. When we came out there was a gap too; it was the beginning of disco, of the corporate sound, Journey, Foreigner. There was no exciting rock as we knew it, the music that we grew up on. I think Phil liked that aspect of us and I think it was important to him in a lot of ways to get involved with us. | ” |
"In the end the album cost like $700,000 to make because Phil just kept remixing and remixing," Joey Ramone recalled. "Finally Seymour just told him, 'Look, Phil...' you know, that he wanted it as it was, because Phil, he was just never satisfied. He wanted to remix the whole record all over again.... It was crazy."
Read more about this topic: End Of The Century
Famous quotes containing the word recording:
“He shall not die, by G—, cried my uncle Toby.
MThe ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”
—Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)
“Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)