In 1980, producer Reinhold Mack went straight from making The Sport, arguably Queen’s crowning achievement, to recording Billy Squier’s blockbuster breakout album, Don’t Say No. Mack’s signature model funneled the artists’ hard-rocking energy into pop crossovers that helped outline the musical second and achieved success as large as their sound.
The story of how this all got here to be begins within the studio the place Giorgio Moroder helped Donna Summer time summon the electro-erotic drive that’s “I Feel Love.” Mack helped Moroder construct his Musicland Studios in Munich and labored there because the legendary producer’s engineer, the place he earned his exhausting rock cred on albums by the likes of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, but additionally performed an important function in serving to the Electrical Gentle Orchestra notice their symphonic pop imaginative and prescient.
Hearken to Queen’s The Sport now.
Sooner or later in L.A. in 1979, Moroder talked about listening to rumors that Mack was wished again in Munich by Queen for his or her subsequent venture. This was information to Mack. However off he flew to confirm the scuttlebutt firsthand. He encountered an initially ambivalent Freddie Mercury, who ultimately performed Mack a track he’d simply written in his lodge room, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” The 2 set to work within the studio and rapidly referred to as in bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor.
“About six hours later, the track was done,” Mack informed Izotope.com in 2002. “The guitar solo was an overdub later on. Brian [May] still hates me for making him use a Telecaster for the part.” Having earned Queen’s approval by facilitating the rockabilly rave-up that might turn out to be the band’s first U.S. No. 1 hit, Mack grew to become Queen’s accomplice in producing The Sport.
The classes yielded yet one more big success: A disco-rock earworm constructed round Deacon’s Stylish-inspired bass line, “Another One Bites the Dust” was Queen’s solely different American chart-topper. It was born out of experimentation. As Mack put it: “‘Another One Bites the Dust’…is built on a drum loop. There was the main riff and a bunch of backwards piano notes, cymbal crashes and claps, some guitar fragments. Stuff everybody has in their sample library these days…. The band would have never contemplated going about recording in this manner, ever.”
Might concurred, telling On The Document in 1982, “That was when we started trying to get outside what was normal for us…. We turned our whole studio technique around in a sense because Mack had come from a different background from us. We thought there was only one way of doing things, like doing a backing track: We would just do it until we got it right…. Mack’s first contribution was to say, ‘Well you don’t have to do that. I can drop the whole thing in. If it breaks down after half a minute, then we can edit in and carry on if you just play along with the tempo.’”
Mack sanded off a few of Queen’s grandiosity whereas amplifying their depth. “I am always torn between a lot of space on one side and complete overkill on the other,” he mentioned. “Making everything louder than everything else was always one of my fancies. Of course, all in the best possible taste, so you don’t really notice it.”
Mack led Queen in new instructions with out compromising their core identification. As an illustration, the band’s ‘70s album sleeves had all the time proudly proclaimed that the band achieved its orchestral grandeur with out assistance from synthesizers. However the very first sound on the title monitor that opens The Sport is an extraterrestrial-sounding intro offered by a state-of-the-art Oberheim synth.
From the hook-festooned energy pop of “Need Your Loving Tonight” to the feral funk-rock of “Dragon Attack,” Mack discovered a solution to current Queen in a extra stripped-down mode whereas in some way concurrently making The Sport sound as large as any of their earlier arena-rock anthems. It’s no surprise Mercury included a tribute to the producer within the lyrics to “Dragon Attack,” triumphantly roaring, “Gonna use my stack/It’s gotta be Mack.”
Billy Squier
Through the making of The Sport, Brian Might needed to beg off producing Billy Squier’s second solo album, Don’t Say No. Squier was a 30-year-old veteran of the rock ‘n’ roll wars who had made two great-but-unnoticed albums fronting Piper within the ‘70s. His 1980 solo debut, Tale of the Tape, got enough notice to bring him to fame’s beginning gate, however didn’t earn him any hits, so the follow-up can be Squier’s make-or-break second.
Squier initially requested Might to supervise the recording, however the guitarist was as much as his neck in each The Sport and Queen’s soundtrack to Flash Gordon. He heartily advisable Mack for the job as an alternative.
“When I heard The Game, I knew I’d found my man,” Squier later informed Guitar Participant. “Before he produced Queen, he had engineered a lot of the ELO records. That drum sound on the ELO records was incredible, and the presence on Jeff Lynne’s voice, that was Mack, too. And what Mack did for Queen on The Game, sound-wise, he opened everything up. So I got him over from Munich, and off we went.”
They set to work on Don’t Say No at New York’s legendary Energy Station studio, the place data by everybody from Bruce Springsteen and Dire Straits to Madonna and Stylish had been born. “[They] had this spectacular, big wooden cathedral room with a sound that was unmatched for what I was doing,” mentioned Squier, “and you can hear it all over that record.”
Mack made the a lot of the room’s sound, giving the album a walloping, arena-ready vibe whereas nonetheless retaining a pure really feel. However he wasn’t above using some technical wizardry to deliver some particular sauce to the tracks. The primal assault of “The Stroke” gave Squier the hit that launched him to stardom, and its gut-punch of a beat had a whooshing reverse assault, the likes of which had not often – if ever – graced a rock report earlier than.
“I suggested that we flip the tape and have [drummer] Bobby Chouinard play to the tape running backward,” mentioned Squier. “Mack heard it and immediately said, ‘Do another track.’ Bobby ended up playing it half a dozen times, and that’s how we got that sound.”
Squier’s swaggering tenor was midway between Mack’s earlier shoppers Freddie Mercury and Robert Plant, so the producer knew simply how one can body these vocals inside the titanic tracks he and Squier assembled. As with The Sport, Mack let the guitar lead the cost however weaved synthesizers in for some essential contributions. Like “The Game,” Don’t Say No’s opener, “In the Dark,” arrives on a rising tide of science-fiction-esque tones, and Alan St. Jon’s snaky synth offers the album’s second High 40 hit its signature riff.
Don’t Say No is just about a nonstop rock machine. The lone ballad, “Nobody Knows,” doesn’t arrive till monitor eight. However for all of the carnivorous guitars, there’s an equally unflinching onslaught of pop hooks, from the instant-adhesive refrain of “My Kinda Lover” to the bottom-end bump of “I Need You.” And Mack punctuates them completely with a gloriously in-your-face digital impact right here, a judiciously tweaked bass tone there, and a mixture that in some way makes each instrument on the tracks really feel prefer it’s acquired not only a room of its personal however three beds, two baths, and a completely completed basement.
The important thing, in accordance with Mack, was simplicity above all else. In The Recording Engineer’s Handbook, he mentioned, “The most simple thing is what translates – It’s kind of like when you’re frying eggs, the whole house immediately knows it. But if you have a French chef with a lot of ingredients you know that somebody’s cooking something up, but you don’t know what it is.” On the onset of the ‘80s, Mack’s recipe made positive the entire world discovered what Queen and Squier had been cooking up.
Hearken to Billy Squier’s Don’t Say No now.
