This is copied from the old Poptones web site, which seems to be gone. That’s too bad, because this was probably the 100th most interesting interview on the site. I corrected a couple of typos from their version but didn’t have the patience to reconcile the mixed UK/US album & song title punctuation. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same (including the things I wish I’d said differently).

QUESTIONS OF DOOM
James Barber, Record Producer
13/10/05

James Barber answers our Questions of Doom about the life and times of the ground zero of Athens, Georgia during the 80s, the supposed divadom of Michael Stipe, moving from the Georgia DIY scene to Geffen label as A and R, being involved in the life and times of Aimee Mann, working at the legendary Geffen label in the early 90s, working with Hole and Guns and Roses, what happened with Guns and Roses album-in-progress Chinese Democracy, producing the brilliant and legendary lost version of American’s Sweetheart, what happened when Courtney Love was going to sign with Poptones in the Uk, producing Ryan Adams’ ‘Rock’n’Roll, answers that question ‘Is Ryan Adams one of the last rock’n’roll stars?’, advice for all those out in Poptones.co.uk who want to get involved in music, who rules more Comets on Fire or The Icarus Line and much, much more in this week’s Questions of Doom.

Hell Jim, how are you?
Just proud to be here.

In the 80s you managed Drivin’n’Cryin, Adam Schmitt, Dumptruck and Christmas. Did you think ‘holy fuck I’ve got a huge hit band’ when R.E.M. broke?
I think it’s hard to remember now, but we thought R.E.M. broke on ‘Murmur’ or ‘Reckoning.’ They sold something like 200,000 records in 1983. That was more records than any of us could imagine. We thought they were huge long before I finished school.

Was Michael Stipe a big diva during those times?
Michael was never a diva; he’s just had to become very protective of his privacy. In the early days, he was very open, but I always remember an incident after a show in Providence, Rhode Island during the 1984 Presidential campaign. It was a week before the election and, onstage during the set, Michael (who almost never talked between songs then), said something like, ‘Everybody go out and vote next week so we can get a new president.’

Backstage after the show, I was talking to him about David Thomas from Pere Ubu. David was just starting to play solo shows; both Michael and I were friendly with David so I was filling him on the show. A couple of drunk college boys started berating him for ‘attacking Reagan’ while we tried to talk. Michael calmly turned to them and said he was talking to his friend and asked them to stop. They cursed him and it was almost like I watched a curtain come down. I never saw him quite as open in public again, but I don’t think that makes him a diva. He’s done an amazing job of distinguishing between his public persona and his real life.

A lot of other musicians could use him as a model on how to stay sane once you get famous.

Was everyone in a band during those days?
It sure seemed like it. For about a month, I was the lead singer of a cover band called the Thrashmen with Corey “Loog” Brennan (later of the Bullet LaVolta and the Lemonheads) and Matt Wilson (who fronted Trip Shakespeare with his brother Dan Wilson before Dan was in Semisonic). Our idea was to play the entire Nuggets compilation (in order) in the style of Minor Threat. We never really made it past rehearsals but I’m sure our single would be worth a fortune now if we’d got around to making it.

Was there more of a willingness to experiment with sound?
I’m not sure you could call it experimentation. No one had any money and most records were recorded on really primitive equipment in poorly-equipped studios. If any 80s indie record sounds experimental now, it’s more likely that the gear didn’t work or that the engineer and the band didn’t know what they were doing.

Was R.E.M. an influence on the bands in Georgia, or was it a genepool of the same influence?
Anyone who grew up in Georgia then (including all the members of R.E.M.) would tell you that we were all influenced by Pylon and the Fans. Most people know about Pylon because R.E.M. covered ‘Crazy’ and that ended up on the Dead Letter Office compilation but the Fans were the greatest band you’ve never heard of. They never released a full album but ‘True’ is one of my favorite singles of all time. There was a compilation that Peter Buck put together for dB Records but it’s never come out. R.E.M.’s early sound is sort of the perfect combination of both bands.

How did you move from the indie leagues of Georgia to the Majors?
I had my own independent management and publishing company in Atlanta but David Geffen hired me to do A&R and let me stay in the South. For a few years, it was the perfect job. I had all the resources of a great major label but no office politics. When I finally moved to LA, it was pretty much office politics 24/7 but, for a long time, Geffen was an incredible place to work.

You were involved with Aimee Mann who resurrected her career by herself. Was she a pioneer against major label involvement?
Aimee didn’t set out to strike a blow against the empire. All the songs on the “Magnolia” soundtrack and “Bachelor #2” were recorded for the Geffen album we were working on. When Seagrams shut down the label, we both got transferred to Interscope and they didn’t want to release the album. Jimmy Iovine made me drop her; I personally had to do the deed. It was probably the single worst moment in my entire career because I just knewshe was going to get the Oscar nomination for ‘Save Me.’ Making that record had taken a lot out of both of us; we went back and forth for almost 3 years while she wrote and recorded those songs because we both knew that even Geffen wouldn’t release the record unless they were convinced that we had a platinum album.

I’m really proud of those records and admire how she’s managed to make exactly the sort of career she’s always wanted. She makes records for herself and her fans and, because she’s opted out of the system, she’ll never worry again about whether she’s delivered a hit single to make her record company happy.

You A’and’R’ed Guns and Roses and Hole. Alan McGee once said to me that the difficult bands are the best bands to work with. Do you agree?
Alan’s just trying to protect one of our trade secrets. What we both know is that the artists who get called ‘difficult’ are almost always easy to work with if you tell them the truth. They usually know what they want and recognize a person who isn’t blowing smoke. Both Alan and I are either fearless enough or stupid enough to speak our minds and it’s served us both pretty well.

When you worked at Geffen in the 90s, it seemed to be at the cutting edge of new music. Almost setting itself up as the label in America. Yet, it has floundered significantly since then. What exactly happened?
I should make something very clear: Seagram closed Geffen Records in January 1999. All of the artists and a handful of the staff were moved over to Interscope. The ‘Geffen’ label that exists today is basically the old MCA Records with a new logo. There’s almost zero connection to the company that I worked at in the 90s. What happened to Geffen? Seagram tried to impose corporate values on a culture that thrived on extreme personalities and near anarchy. The A&R staff that built the company was dismantled and those of us left behind were expected to focus more on corporate protocol than making great records.

The record business is a lousy business if you’re looking for a predictable return on investment. All the corporations that bought into music in the 90s failed to understand that great music was the primary reward for running a record company. Sure you could make a ton of money, but the money was sort of a side effect. Once the people running Geffen had to concentrate on spreadsheets and business plans instead of making the next ‘Paradise City’ or ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ the company was doomed.

Jimmy Iovine totally mystifies me. He’s been able to transcend all of the corporate bullshit and just keep being Jimmy. I don’t like all the records he makes or how he treats a lot of his artists, but he’s the last man standing, the only person who gets to make records exactly the way he wants in a corporate environment.

You worked on the Nirvana boxset. Were you happy with the results? And if you could what would you have changed about it?
Ah, sir, I did not work on the boxset. I did put together the five-year plan with Krist and Dave’s management and work on the Nirvana compilation in 2002.

I learned that there’s no winning when it comes to working with Nirvana. That compilation introduced Nirvana to a new generation of fans and the remastering on the early material (especially ‘About a Girl’) and the ‘Nevermind’ songs was nothing short of startling but not a single review mentioned the sound upgrades.

I always wanted the boxset to be the place that collected all the stray Nirvana tracks and consolidated them in one place, so a kid didn’t have to pay $50 for an out-of-print copy of the KISS covers compilation. All the uncompiled bits and the best stuff from the vault would have made a record that you’d want to listen to. They went a different direction, but the packaging is still spectacular and the box sold really well.

There’s amazing stuff to be released. A DVD of the Reading show would be incredible if the rights problems could ever be solved. Both ‘MTV Unplugged’ and ‘Live Tonight Sold Out!!’ have never been on DVD. Both ‘Bleach’ and ‘Nevermind’ desperately need to be remastered. I’m sure all of that will happen eventually; good luck to anyone brave enough to take it on.

You discovered Girls Against Boys—what was it about their sound that attracted you?
That would be an exaggeration. Every single major recording company in the United States discovered GVSB at the same time and all of them offered trillions of dollars to a band that was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. I just had the questionable luck to sign them.

All I wanted from them was properly recorded versions of songs that sounded like ‘Bulletproof Cupid’ or ‘I Don’t Got a Place.’ They were a ferocious live band that delivered the goods every night; I genuinely believed they were the band that were going to make a commercial success from music that sounded like Wire, Joy Division, Gang of Four and the Fall. Maybe they were just ahead of their time.

Once they cashed the check, they choked. Their Geffen album was a disaster and everyone who once told GVSB they were the Future of Rock suddenly lost their phone numbers.

GVSB singer Scott McCloud and I have been trying to figure out a way to tell the story for about a year now. We’ve written lots of pages. Maybe one day it will turn into a book but, for now, it’s worth your while to get the two of us in a room with a bottle of whiskey. Our stories are so whack that I’m not sure we believe them ourselves. But they’re all true.

How did you get involved in Guns N’ Roses?
Nothing else had worked, so Geffen figured they’d send me in to talk to Axl after I moved to Los Angeles. We desperately wanted the new album for Christmas 1998 and I had a year to get it finished. Whenever anyone asks me about GNR, I think about Rutger Hauer’s line in Blade Runner: ‘I’ve seen things youpeople wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’

No expense was spared; they were the biggest band in the history of the label and, even though everyone except Axl was gone, Geffen Records lived and breathed for another GNR album. The Robin Finck/Josh Freese/Tommy Stinson/Billy Howerdel/Dizzy Reed version of the album that existed in 1998 was pretty incredible. It still sounded like GNR but there were elements of Zeppelin, Nine Inch Nails and Pink Floyd mixed in. If Axl had recorded vocals, it would have been an absolutely contemporary record in 1999.

People close to the project have since told me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that the current version of the record in no way resembles what I heard in early 1999. That’s too bad.

Do you think that Chinese Democracy is ever going to come out?
I have no idea. Seven years ago, the record just needed a lead vocal and a mix. The last time I was at the studio was two days before my daughter was born. Last night she read all of ‘Hop on Pop’ to me. Some mysteries passeth all understanding.

Any words of advice to fledgling A and R people out there…
They’re going to fire you anyway, so don’t be afraid to express an opinion.

You’ve left the world of Major Label A and R … why?
They fired me because I had too many opinions.

You went into the world of record producing … your first two high profile projects were Ryan Adams ‘Rock’n’Roll’ and Courtney Love ‘America’s Sweetheart’. What do you think you brought to their sound?
I believe in the illusion of chaos. I’m absolutely in love with digital recording but I want to use it to recreate the feel of the records we love from the 70s and the underground records of the 80s. ProTools is God’s Razor Blade; if you use it correctly, it can make a session move incredibly quickly. Knowing that you can correct minor mistakes on the fly gives you an enormous amount of freedom to concentrate on the quality of the performance. You can correct one flub in a drum, bass or guitar track without recutting from the beginning and keep a great take rather than beat your musicians into the ground trying to get them to punch in a perfect performance.

That being said, the mindless application of Autotune or quantizing programs like Beat Detective sucks all the life out of a recording. Too many producers correct ALL the mistakes just because technology lets us do that.

Peter Asher taught me that it’s a producer’s job to know when to stop; you’ve got to know when the part you’ve just cut is going to fit together with the rest of the tracks to give you that killer rock feel you’re looking for.

I also like to use as much of a complete vocal take as I possibly can. If you base the final version on asingle take, you’re more likely to get a performance that hangs together. Vocals that sound pieced together from a hundred different takes drive me crazy.

Do you think Ryan Adams is one of the only true characters left in rock’n’roll?
He’s definitely at war with the idea of being a Rock Star. He wants everyone’s attention but desperately wants you to leave him alone. I used to talk to him about that amazing scene in Basquiat where Benicio Del Toro explains to Jeffrey Wright how to become a famous artist: ‘You gotta do your work all the time … The same kinda work, the same style—over and over again, so people recognize it and don’t get confused. Then, once you’re famous, you have to keep doing it the same way, even after it’s boring—unless you want people to really get mad at you—which they will anyway.’

My take was a little different: just pick a style and make the same kind of record twice in a row. Once you do that, you’ll sell a lot of records and then you can do whatever you want.

What was the concept behind ‘Rock’n’roll’….?
RNR was supposed to be the first record in the Ryan Becomes a Rock Star program. We had to make it in 21 days so we could make a November release, so we were practically living at the studio. It was disorienting and thrilling and completely spontaneous. Of course, once he released the record and went on tour, he got bored with the game plan and now he’s back to the usual program where every record still sounds completely different.

My favorite Ryan songs are the things he hides in places he thinks people won’t notice them. “Fuck the Universe” was a European bonus track on one of the ‘Love is Hell’ EPs. My favorite Ryan song ever is ‘Tonight,’ which is the bonus track on the vinyl copies of ‘Cold Roses.’

With ROCKNROLL, we were definitely out to make a confrontational record; people were either going to love it or hate it. We certainly succeeded on that front. I meet people almost every day who are obsessed with the sound of that album and an almost equal number who think it’s the worst thing he’s ever done.

We had a sign on the console during the recording: ‘NO BORING PARTS.’ At least we succeeded with that.

And, if my phone rings tomorrow and Ryan says, ‘Come record a gamelan album with me in Bali next week,’ I’m probably on the next plane out.

Alan has been telling Poptones.co.uk that your mixes of American Sweetheart were absolutely brilliant with the fire of MC5 mainlining into pure rock’n’roll. What happened?
I’m still not sure. Courtney planned to sign with Poptones for the UK and another label for the rest of the world but at the last minute chose Virgin. Virgin were supposedly buying a finished album but, immediately after the deal closed, they announced that they wanted to trash the record and make it over from scratch.

Before she signed, there were eight completed tracks recorded in Los Angeles that featured Patty Schemel on drums: ‘Mono,’ ‘Julian,’ ‘Hold on to Me,’ ‘Sunset Strip,’ ‘All the Drugs,’ ‘Evil Woman Blues,’ ‘Never Gonna Be the Same’ and a cover of the Vertebrats’ ‘Left in the Dark.’ Those are the ones Alan’s talking about. I especially love the original ‘Sunset Strip’ and ‘Hold on to Me’ has a totally different feel from theversion that ended up on the album with an incredibly cool mandolin part that sounds very Led Zep III.

Virgin released the ‘real’ version of ‘Mono’ as a B-side in the UK (it has a great Liz & Dick sample from ‘Cleopatra’ in the intro), but they’ve buried the rest of the tracks so deep in the ground that I’m sure they’ll never see the light of day.

You’ve recently been over to the UK … what are your thoughts on the bands that the UK are producing at the moment?
Maybe it’s because guitar bands still sell over there , but while I was in London and Manchester, everyone seemed to be having a better time than we are in LA and New York. I saw great shows by King Biscuit Time in London and the Arctic Monkeys in Manchester, ¡Forward Russia! were really amazing and I love the Young Offenders Institute even if I’m not supposed to. It was really cool to spend an afternoon sitting in the sunshine in Hyde Park and listening to both the new Paddingtons and Franz Ferdinand albums.

I live in a country where people say that ‘Kanye West and Eminem are the new rock stars.’ I love me some hip hop but that’s just not right. God bless a country that still knows how to operate a Marshall amp head.

Who are the Family Force 5?
FF5 are the Kings of Crunk Rock. I found them completely by accident in Atlanta when I walked into a bar on a Tuesday night and they were playing to about 25 people. They blew me away and I spent a year developing a record with them that’s coming out next February on Maverick in the US; I hope Warners will release it in the UK.

They’re an incredible live band that sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard. I’ve described them as Rick James fronting the MC5 or Ronnie Van Zant as lead singer of the Gap Band.

Solomon Olds is the Bobby Gillespie of rural Georgia and ‘Business in Front….Party in the Back’ will either be a gigantic success or leave the world completely baffled.

What advice do you have for any bands out there dying to become rock’n’roll stars?
If you’re really a rock star, you know it already. Everyone else is lazy. It’s all there, so just take it. We need you.

Who kicks more RAWK ARSE - The Icarus Line or Comets on Fire?
Comets on Fire most truly rocked the Main Stage at the Arthurfest in LA, but gimme the Icarus Line for pure, epic confrontational rock brutality. ‘Penance Soiree’ was my favorite album of 2004 and both Spike Island and Getting Bright at Night are stone classics. Of course, I haven’t seen the I-Line since Aaron North sold his soul to Trent Reznor and joined NIN, so the question might still be open.

You’ve named your blog ‘Conflict of Interest’—why?
I heard the new Tom Collins album ‘Daylight Tonight’ and flipped out. Since I’d produced some tracks for them, no magazine would let me write about the record even though my tracks (for lots of boring legal reasons) don’t appear on the album. I fucking love this band and everything they stand for, so I cracked open a bottle of Blanton’s Bourbon and out came a 4500-word rant about the Tom Collins, their brilliantrecord and how much it sucks that a band like them can’t get a record deal in 2005.

I emailed it to a few people but their publicist convinced me to post it online. I called my web page ‘Conflict of Interest’ because I make no pretense of being objective. It’s my own damn page and I can be as much of an advocate or a participant as I want to be.

I wrote a premature obituary for Alex Chilton when he was missing after Hurricane Katrina. Even though he showed up in Houston after I published, I decided to leave it up since I’d already outed myself as a total Big Star Loser.

But I refuse to admit that it’s a blog—I’m not keeping a running commentary on my life. I’m writing long pieces when the mood strikes and now I have a place to put them. I’m working on several ideas right now: I’ve been watching both Michael Almereyda’s documentary about the photographer William Eggleston and his unreleased film ‘Happy Here & Now’ over and over, so there may be something about that. Plus maybe I’ll write about the Arctic Monkeys show in Manchester or Dan Wilson’s new solo album if I ever get a finished copy of the record.

But I guarantee that I’ll never write 25 words about what I had for breakfast or a squib about whatever show I saw last night at the Viper Room. Boring.

What’s on your iPod?
I answered these questions while listening to the Complete Fun House sessions. Currently in heavy rotation is the “Goodbye, Babylon” box set, some vinyl rips of the first three Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels albums, demos by a San Diego band called Dirty Sweet, Steve Wynn’s “…tick…tick…tick,” the audiobook of Michael Connelly’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Big Black’s “The Rich Man’s Eight-Track Tape,” Get Away by Flipper, David Alan Coe’s “Penitentiary Blues,” a live bootleg of a 1984 Echo & the Bunnymen show on the SS President Riverboat in New Orleans (I was THERE!), LCD Soundsystem, Gene Clark’s “No Other,” Honcho Overload’s 2 albums, the Tom Collins, “Screamadelica” and Since U Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson.