Brendan O'Brien x Rick Beato

May 23, 2024 4:51 PM

Brendan O'Brien Interview: The Unsung Hero Of Rock Music "In his first ever full length interview, producer/engineer/mixer (and multi-instrumentalist) Brendan O'Brien talks about his contributions to many of the most significant records of the past generation."

"Check this out:

The Black Crows, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Rage Against The Machine, Kings X, Korn, Audioslave, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, Train, Incubus, Mastodon, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Killers, Paul Westerberg, The Offspring, Velvet Revolver etc.

Brendan is one of the most important and elusive musical icons who I have been wanting to talk to for the past 30 years. Here's my interview."

posted by hippybear (16 comments total)

Oh lordy, I'm really good about including video length usually... This is a 3 hour interview.
posted by hippybear at 4:56 PM on May 23 [1 favorite]

Ahhh, adding this to the queue with the docs in your earlier post! This is very much relevant to my interests.
posted by limeonaire at 6:42 PM on May 23

That Rick Beato guy is alright - his enthusiasm and background knowledge make for good interviews. A real plus to have come out of the YouTubeFactory
posted by From Bklyn at 11:47 PM on May 23 [1 favorite]

Caveat: I haven't watched an entire Rick Beato anything—but I do enjoy hearing him in bits and pieces as he breaks down little bits of music I'd taken for granted for decades. He's got the creds too, having worked with thousands of musicians and been a lecturer. I wasn't surprised when he started appearing in my algo, and never having heard of him before. Most of his stuff is right on, and he's documenting and analyzing important stuff when it comes to late 20c/early 21c popular and off-to-the-side music. Thanks for posting. I will flip through it for a bit here and there and enjoy that he and people like Brendan O'Brien, the glue that holds the biz together, both exist.
posted by not_on_display at 11:55 PM on May 23

Rick Beato is.... fine, so long as you accept he has an absolute blind spot when it comes to any kind of music that doesn't have a direct lineage back to the Beatles. If it's not (mostly) white (mostly) men with (mostly) guitars, then it's very unlikely he'll acknowledge it or consider it to be important.

The very excellent Jeremy from Red Means Recording posted this (very, very funny, very crude and incredibly Insider Baseball) take a while back: Rick Beato Unedited is LIFECHANGING.
posted by parm at 1:54 AM on May 24 [5 favorites]

(Beato made a video literally called "Why Gen Z Doesn't Care About Music" and it wasn't ironic)
posted by parm at 2:05 AM on May 24

Yeah, Rick Beato has been merging into Get Off My Lawn territory for the last few months and I don't like it one bit. However, when he's not showing his old ass like that, he's got great stories to share. Like this one where he relates a story of when the band he was in during the '90s might have been on the edge of making it, they committed career suicide by hating on Creed.
posted by NoMich at 6:37 AM on May 24 [1 favorite]

If you haven't seen Pat Finnerty's What Makes This Song Stink series, it's a play off of Beato's What Makes This Song Great series, and it is highly, entertaining, not to mention hilarious.
posted by willc at 7:07 AM on May 24 [8 favorites]

Beato's crusty moments aside, the thought that hardly anyone even approaches Brendan O'Brien to do interviews (as he says in the first couple of minutes) is pretty mind-boggling. I mean, look at all the Steve Albini love we saw in the wake of his recent death... O'Brien produced all of Pearl Jam's '90s albums from Vs. onwards, and Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun", and two of my favourite Matthew Sweet albums in 100% Fun and Blue Sky on Mars, which makes him a flippin' '90s producer god in my eyes.

Thanks, hippybear—I might even stay for the full three hours on this one!
posted by rory at 8:29 AM on May 24

Given the above Rick Beato limitations, I would to add that when he talks of music he is not a little bit boring. He seems to lack fervor and genuine inspiration when talking about music. I am sure that he is knowledgable, but he still bores me.
posted by DJZouke at 8:30 AM on May 24 [1 favorite]

I have mentioned this on the blue before, but if you have any interest in Pearl Jam at all, the Brendan O'Brien remixed version of Ten (Ten Redux) is a revelation. All of that whole loudness war, let's fill up the EQ with bright red lights horseshit is gone. Eddie's vocals are crystal clear, the instruments are much more readily distingushable, and the bass player can actually be heard. So much less unnecessary reverb, gaudy multi-tracked guitars dropped in favor of more power and dynamic range to a few tracks.

It's not a little better. It's a lot better. There is no reason I would ever listen to the original mix ever again, not even for nostalgia.

Here's a comparison of the two versions of "Alive."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:29 AM on May 24 [4 favorites]

That's amazing—the old one sounds like it was recorded in a barn. Sounds like it might be the best remix since Eddie Rayner's 2006 version of Split Enz's 1979 album Frenzy (which I'm sorry to read is now hard to find, it was a revelation... but I digress).
posted by rory at 9:48 AM on May 24

The two recently remixed Replacements records (Tim: Let It Bleed Edition and Dead Man's Pop, the remixed Don't Tell a Soul) are way, way up there on the remixed albums list too and worth seeking out for similarly bold re-imaginings.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:52 AM on May 24 [2 favorites]

In spite of being absolutely-not-my-jam, Brendan O'Brien has been behind some of the most amazingly done mixes I've heard. The way he manages to properly seperate out all of the instruments so they're distinct and crystal clear, and yet gelled together is amazing. It's not artistry, it's dark magic. Or maybe he made a deal with the devil on top of an SSL console?

I'll be watching this thread to see if the investment is worth it. I'm with Parm. Beato is ... fine, but his Old Man Yells at Cloud routine undercuts a lot of his stuff. I can't help but wonder if that's a result of
The Algorithm. Finding justifications as to why the Music you grew up with really is better then the schlock the kids are listening to probably does the numbers.

That Red Means Recording video is exactly what you said on the tin Parm. Thanks for the share. It feels a little mean spirited, but then, so is trashing the taste of a new generation of music lovers.
posted by jonnay at 11:10 AM on May 24 [1 favorite]

I've had to pause at 2 hours 15 to get some sleep, but so far, so good - for most of it Beato is letting O'Brien do the talking, and there's some interesting stuff in there, especially around that whole period where he was about to break through and then did. Good insights into how the music industry worked at the time, and some studio insights. A lot of technical stuff that flew over my head. Beato does butt in a bit more once it gets past the early personal history that he doesn't have an opinion about, but it's okay even when he does. No doubt the three hours could have been tightened up by a good editor to an hour, hour and a half, but if you like reading long-form articles in music mags and artist biographies (and like O'Brien's work) you should enjoy it.
posted by rory at 5:08 PM on May 24

Well, I watched the remaining 45 minutes, and that was worth it too—some nice anecdotes about Springsteen, AC/DC, and working with Chris Cornell. Again, a few technical moments that didn't mean much to me, but I did think while listening to all of this: how great to have an opportunity later in your career to talk with someone at such length about the technicalities of what you do. How many of us get that chance in relation to our jobs, other than the occasional chat with a colleague to complain about something at work? The chance to leave behind a three-hour recording of you talking about your job and career is pretty cool. And as a viewer, it reminded me of a lot of '90s music I love—so thanks again, hippybear.
posted by rory at 2:36 AM on May 25 [1 favorite]