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Audioslave

chemistry, and supergroup Audioslave was born. So grateful to Rubin was bassist Tim Commerford that he called the producer “the angel at the crossroads because if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here today. Rick Rubin was the one who said, ‘You guys should jam with Chris Cornell.’ That was a great piece of advice, and Rick opened up his house to us and we had meetings there with a therapist, and we ham- mered out [musical] ideas at Rick’s house.”

Guitarist Tom Morello recalled to Axis of Justice that he and Rubin first met while working on a song with the legendary frontman of the Clash: “A couple years ago, I had the opportunity to play on a Joe Strummer record. He was doing a song for the South Park sound- track, and Rick Rubin asked me to come down and play guitar, because the guy that they had doing it just couldn’t cut it. I had never been more nervous in my life as I drove up in my 1971 muscle car to the studio and was introduced to the great Joe Strummer. Joe did not disappoint. While the song was not the best, he certainly was. At the studio, [Joe] would disappear for hours at a time into his ancient Cadillac, where he would work on lyrics for the song, and listen to the latest mixes that were coming out of the control room. Rick Rubin and I would sit in the control room waiting as a gofer would shuttle notes back and forth from Joe.” Rubin and Morello had worked together again on the final Rage Against the Machine album, Rene -

gades, in 2000. Rubin had also been in discussions with Chris Cornell

about the singer’s next solo lp when the idea arose to bring the musi- cians together.

Chris Cornell was confident it would be a great musical pairing: “We knew that me singing over Tom [Morello’s guitar] and Tim [Commerford’s bass] and Brad [Wilk’s drums] doing whatever they want to do — whether it’s riff-oriented or kind of funk rock — it would sound great. And when we first started playing, just in ad-lib situations, when we were doing that, it was great. So we went there and it was a comfortable place to go, and we had never done it as a group.” The biggest issue in getting the band together was not creative, but “just the way the organizations had different managers,” said Rubin. “It was an odd start. But, musically, it was always really solid.”

Speaking to mtv, Morello had high praise for Rubin calling him “the fifth Beatle. . . . He’s a great collaborative partner. He has a big-picture way of looking at music, which only tends to bring out the best with the artists he’s working with.”

Said Cornell in an interview with Rockline, “The songwriting process was the part that really blew me away, I mean, we seemed to be so prolific. I think all four of us at one point would get nervous here and there like, ‘We, ah, are we missing something here? Is this awful and we just don’t know it?’ Because we felt like the music was coming out and we were just loving it. It seemed effortless. To me it was kind of a dream record, where I always think, the next record I make hopefully is going to be one of those moments where the music comes together really quickly and the energy’s great. . . . We wrote

songs so fast that sometimes we’d have to go back to a rehearsal tape from a week before to remember what it was. And sometimes I would have to take home tapes and [when I’d] wake up the next morning — and the song had come together so quickly and completely — that when I put it on I didn’t remember any of it and then it was like lis- tening to somebody else. So it had, like, a freshness always. I could be a fan of the music while we were making it. Instead of — often rock bands, or any bands, you get too up into it, playing it too much, and thinking about it too much in the studio, and thinking about the mixing too much, and the mastering too much and when the records done you don’t even want to hear it. And this was not that.” Quipped Morello, “We wrote and recorded more new music in eight months with Chris than we did in the previous eight years with Rage Against the Machine.”

Morello explained the band’s songwriting process to Ultimate

Guitar: “The initial germ of the song comes very quickly. We write

about a song a day, that’s the pace; the first record, we wrote 21 songs in 19 days. It’s very easy for us to assemble verse/chorus/bridge/heroic outro with a complete vocal melody in the course of one hour to five hours in a day’s rehearsal. That’s very easy to do. . . . there is so much more mutual support in the process [with Audioslave than with Rage]. If someone initially came up with an idea, I might cock an eyebrow and think, ‘Hmm, I’m not so sure. But let’s see what happens.’ And after a while, you kinda go, ‘You know what? That turned out to be a damn fine song’ and you get that energy back. So it’s a process of everyone continuing exploring and making musical discoveries as opposed to tenaciously fighting for ideas. . . . Sometimes the big hook of the song or parts of the lyrics will come on the day of the song- writing. The lyrics are fleshed out once all the basic tracks are recorded but sometimes the style of music and style of lyric are felt on that day when we’re writing that song.” Morello felt Rick Rubin was a very cru- cial partner in the pre-production: “Once we’ve written the songs and rehearsed the songs, we will come in and discuss every song. How can it be made better? And sometimes it can be the most subtle changes that can really help to make the chorus explode. Or he might even sug-

gest trying it a half-step up and those kind of changes can make a huge difference. Sometimes there are more dramatic changes than that, but little changes can make a big difference. And then in the actual recording studio, he’s great at giving us perspective on when we’ve got the take, which is harder to do when you’re kind of in your own world of recording.”

Their pre-production process was smooth and prolific, but once they entered the studio to begin principal tracking, there were some bumps. Drummer Brad Wilk explained, “Recording was actually the challenge because the first time that we had went in and didn’t have any set directions for the songs so we would try all day, we would have different versions of the songs and by the time, by the end of the night, we would decide on one different version and record that and that’s really challenging actually in the studio, it’s not something we were used to doing. It seemed to work out alright.” Rubin helped the band slim down the mountain of songs to the final track listing for the album. Joked Commerford to Flagpole of Rick Rubin’s seemingly mag- ical ability to create hit albums: “One thing that people don’t realize is that he doesn’t wash his beard and that he keeps a lot of treasures in there. If you know him close enough, he’ll actually allow you into his beard to pull things out. If you’re that lucky, then you’re assured that you’ll have a hit because there’s more than one hit in his beard. He let us all go in there a few times and just hang out and we came out of there with a bunch of hits.”

Rubin spent the greatest amount of time focused on Morello’s guitar sound, saying “in many ways Tom Morello is the Jimmy Page of today.” Morello described his technical setup: “I’d set the guitar, amp, and pedals up, then the techs would put mics in front of the cab. There was no constant tweaking, basically, what I set up went straight to tape. Sometimes with overdubs, there were a couple of little amps I’d use for cleaner tones. Otherwise, I’d just use the same amp as normal and turn my guitar’s volume down to clean up the amp sound.” To

Ultimate Guitar, Morello got deeper into the technical nitty-gritty:

“I’ve had the same setup now for over 15 years. It’s identical. It’s unchanged, for every ratm album, every Audioslave song, every show.

It’s a Marshall 2205 head, a Peavey 4x12 cabinet, which is embarrassing to admit but it’s true and it sounds alright. Which of course I had to ratchet the Peavey [logo] off the second that I bought it to keep my shame to a minimum. The pedals are an mxr Phase-90; a dod eq pedal set for a boost for solos; a dod digital delay pedal; the original Digitech Whammy pedal, not the remake original Digitech but the original Whammy pedal. And there’s a CryBaby wah and sometimes a dod tremolo pedal. . . . That’s what I bring into the studio.”

Not surprisingly, Rubin referenced his rock archetype for Audio - slave’s guitar sound. Said Morello, “[He] would like every guitar solo to sound like Angus Young; the more it sounds like Angus Young it’s a good solo, the less it sounds like Angus Young it’s a poor solo.” Rubin demanded the best performance from the player he knew to be great. “To be honest, kid gloves were never an option with Rick,” Morello admitted. “He was so hard to please.” That high standard for excellence extended to the entire band. “We’d be in the studio just finishing a take that felt really awesome,” recalled Morello. “But just as the last cymbal crash dies away, we look up at the control room to see Rick showing us a big thumbs down. Actually, that would happen a lot, and we’d be like, ‘Oh no, you’re killing us!’”

To achieve the “very dry drum sound,” Brad Wilk used vintage Gretsch kicks and toms, but he needed a few lessons from the master producer. “[He] always complained that we didn’t have a clue how to play a slow song, so we had to learn it. It was pretty tough, but I think we all grew with it. With Audioslave, I feel much more of a musician than I did with ratm.” Wilk first played softer on songs like “Getaway Car,” “Like a Stone,” and “The Last Remaining Light,” but “Rick said, ‘When you play those harder, they sound better. The dynamics are still gonna be there. Trust me.’ I did, and he was right. So we have slower songs that are in a more ethereal light, but it’s still a solid block of a record.”

As with many of his past band productions, Rubin recorded Audioslave’s basic tracks live off the floor, which worked for Wilk. “It was the first time I’ve ever done a record where I actually had the vocalist there doing his thing. That’s important, because what’s going

on vocally has a lot to do with [what] you’re ac cent - ing. On ‘What You Are,’ for instance, the hi-hat and vo - cals are at tached to each other in a way that’s simple but really hypnotic. And ‘Co chise,’ I feel like that’s the sluttiest groove I’ve ever played. I don’t know how else to de scribe it. I don’t think I could’ve played those songs like that had Chris not been there.” Morello also loved record ing live.

“If somebody makes a horrendous mistake, we’ll fix it, but we’ve al - ways re corded to try and get that. It’s playing to our strengths; what we do best is we play as a rock band together. . . . The overdubbing process this time was pretty extensive; mixing the guitar tones and stuff to get it right. But, yeah, it’s everybody in a room rockin’, Chris too; he’s singing along with the track while we’re rockin’ it.”

Chris Cornell approached the Audioslave album differently than he had Soundgarden albums, taking a less hands-on approach to the overall production. “With Audioslave, I was away from the producing side of it. [I just wanted] the producer to do their job. Soundgarden never allowed that. We would just shut them down. I just wanted to see what [not producing] was like. I was working with Rick Rubin. . . . It was comfortable to let that go. I was very into the singing, lyrics, and the songwriting process but I didn’t go in when Tom was recording his guitar parts or anything like that.”

Upon completion, the group was thoroughly satisfied with the record they had created. “When Timmy and I sat in his garage the first time and listened to the whole record I was knocked over by it,” said Cornell to Rockline, “and that’s more than any other record I’ve made. It’s great.” Fans old and new agreed, sending the album to a

Top 10 debut on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart in November 2002. The group and its self-titled debut were nominated for mul- tiple Grammy Awards in 2003, including Best Rock Album and Best Hard Rock Performance.

“   Californication was only foreplay,” said Rolling Stone in its review of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2002 album By the Way. Even though this was his fourth album with the band, Rick Rubin con- tinued to be astonished by their creative output. On John Frusciante, Rubin said, “He’s brimming with ideas, and he lives and breathes music more than anyone I’ve ever seen in my life,” while Anthony Kiedis “really outdid himself ” with his lyrics and performance.

Reflecting on his evolution as a lyricist, Kiedis said, “I’ve never felt comfortable writing ‘love songs’ or ‘relationship songs,’ but it’s sneaking in there and certainly not in a typical way.” The way he approached his lyrics was from a more emotionally honest place on By

the Way. “I put less sexual aggression into the songs and try to give

them more soul. I don’t feel like I have to hide behind an image any- more. I am who I am. I’m not a sex machine. I’m human, a spiritual being and there is nothing wrong with showing emotions. Things change and people change. Now, I see being able to be emotional not as a weakness. I see it as strength. Even my lyrics are far more personal

Red Hot Chili Peppers