DAVE GROHL'S SOUND CITY

STUDIO ART

Dave Grohl gets a whole lotta help from friends like Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Trent Reznor, and Rick Springfield on the soundtrack to his new film Sound City

by Matt Ashare |  

Posted March 13, 2013

In May of 1991, three guys in a beat-up white van pulled up to a studio in LA's San Fernando Valley with a sixty-thousand-dollar recording budget, and got to work on an album that would define a decade.

       The band: Nirvana.

       The album: Nevermind.

       And the studio (the supporting actor in this modest blockbuster): Sound City.     By most accounts a fairly modest facility, Sound City Studios sat nestled among the strip malls and fast-food joints that dominate the Valley's suburban landscape. A relic of the rock boom of the early 1970s, where classic albums were cut by Neil Young (1970's After the Gold Rush), Fleetwood Mac (1975's Fleetwood Mac), and Tom Petty (1979's Damn the Torpedos), it finally closed to business in May of 2011, almost twenty years to the day that Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl arrived from Seattle as the band who would unwittingly change the world.

       The potentially mystical implications of that strange synchronicity wasn't lost on

Grohl. He contacted the studio about acquiring its highly coveted Neve 8028 mixing console, a pre-digital analog beast that, over the decades, had lured artists as diverse as Rick Springfield and Rage Against the Machine, Barry Manilow and the Black Crowes, Elton John and Elvis Costello to Sound City. As he geared up for the nostalgia storm over the 20th anniversary of the sea change that was Nevermind, he became the proud new owner of said console. And, what might have been a minor footnote in the evolving legacy of Nirvana became something of the central character — the lead, if you will — in a surprisingly romantic drama scripted by Grohl: Sound City, a documentary about the studio, debuted at Sundance earlier this year; and Sound City: Real to Reel, a soundtrack orchestrated by Grohl, hits stores this week.

       Grohl clearly has a personal connection to Sound City and the board that helped launch Nirvana into mainstream orbit. But, the Neve also stands for something much larger than a single band and one chart-topping album. It's more than just a cool fetish object. Like a ’65 Mustang or a classic vinyl jukebox, it  represents an entire set of values — values that are at once specific to a certain era, and transcendental. So, if Sound City, the film, is, at heart, Grohl's earnest tribute to a piece of recording equipment that embodies a shared set of aesthetic principles, then the soundtrack is his way of putting theory into practice. After all, it's one thing to see a vintage Mustang in a showroom; it's another thing altogether to rev the engine and take it out on the road.

       The central conceit of Real to Reel is fairly straightforward: Grohl simply convened a series of sessions at his newly Neve-equipped studio with an eclectic array of artists who had a history with him and/or Sound City. And, then hit the record button. But the rules intrinsic to this game made it a bit more complicated than that, and, frankly, rather daring. For starters, there are egos to contend with when one includes the likes Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Trent Reznor, and even Rick Springfield — four of the dozens of artists featured on the soundtrack. At the very least, these are performers who are likely to have cultivated distinct, idiosyncratic creative processes. Even if none of that proved problematic, Grohl was still counting on the Neve 8028 to work its magic and coax something beyond merely passable from some strange bedfellows (Springfield backed by Foo Fighters; McCartney with the surviving members of Nirvana; Slipknot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor backed by Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Neilson, out-there desert-rock bassist Scott Reeder, and Grohl).

       It was a gamble, which is kinda the point. And it paid off in more than just novelty tokens. Grohl, for his part, set the right leave-your-ego-at-the-door tone by spending much of the album behind the drum kit. Indeed, he doesn't emerge as a frontman until the disc's last two tracks, the ruminative acoustic beauty "If I Were Me" (with Wallflowers keysman Rami Jaffee, violinist Jessy Greene, and the great Jim Keltner on drums), and the solemnly poetic atmospheric rocker "Mantra," a consummate collaboration between Grohl, Reznor, and Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme.

       Mostly, Grohl takes on the role of nimble facilitator. His muscular drumming elevates "Heaven and Hell," a narcotic trance-rock nugget featuring singer/guitarist Robert Levon Been and bassist Peter Hayes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. With Foo drummer Taylor Hawkins behind the kit, and Jaffee on keys, Grohl helps nail down a convincingly classic Fleetwood Mac groove for the Stevie Nicks number "You Can't Fix This." And he and Hawkins are also on board, along with Nirvana/FF rhythm guitarist Pat Smear, as Fear's growling frontman Lee Ving takes the lead on a full-throttle detour into aggro-core punk.

       Although it's not likely to rank as one of his top songwriting credits, McCartney rises to the occasion on the raucous "Cut Me Some Slack," a nifty grunge/r&b hybrid that features the improbable pairing of a bona-fide Beatle with the guys from Nirvana. And, Rick Springfield (yes, that Rick Springfield) acquits himself rather well fronting what amounts to a Foo Fighters line-up on "The Man That Never Was," a sinewy, melodic churner that's right up the Foo's power-pop alley.

       By nature, and by design, Sound City: Real to Reel isn't exactly a cohesive album. And yet, in sprit, it holds together remarkably well. There are a few tracks — "Time Slows Down," with Rage Against the Machine's rhythm section; "From Can To Can't," featuring Corey Taylor and Rick Neilson; and "A Trick With No Sleeve," a vehicle for full-throated singer-songwriter Alain Johannes of Eleven — that verge on the generic, in a manner that understandably suggests the epic brood of ’90s-era, Seattle-style hard-rock. But they're all surprisingly solid. More importantly, they succeed in capturing something essential, if intangible, about the organic alchemy that embodies the spirit of rock and roll as a collaborative studio art. Grohl's deep in his element on Sound City. Here and there, in fits and flashes, he even succeeds in catching lightening in the proverbial bottle. That may be the best tribute of all to Sound City Studios and the history that came out of the room with the Neve that he stumbled into with Nirvana back in ’91.