 the digital decline that okay there you go now we are somebody from somebody from Sweden was calling me actually believe it or not on the line yes guys look at this full house today all in full house I only see like whoever's talking is that right is that what's how it's supposed to work well there's a sort of screen like you can do a grid view it depends if you're using your phone if you what are you using a phone or a computer no this is on the iPad mmm this guy's calling again yeah this Jesus we are alive it's okay it's alright so see how busy Max Norman is people are ringing his phone off the hook yeah we have a two-fer today on the metal voice with Andy Curran of Coney Hatch fame and the producer extraordinaire himself Mr. Max Norman or as Andy calls him in blackfish thank you blackness that's right yeah what's the story behind that guys so if I recall and Max you might be able to remember this when we were recording if if a take was particularly bad Max would say I'm gonna be race that and send it into inky blackness and he said it so many times that I started calling him inky as for short but I might be one of the only guys you call them that and I think another story about it was that at some point we we had a stop in one of the songs where it was supposed to get rid go totally quiet yeah and we would I happened to say okay look I just want it to go all the way to inky blackness and yes yes that's another that's another one that came out and then everybody thought that was hilarious and everybody started calling me yeah yeah I don't know I think maybe the Coney's were the might have been the only guys to to give Max that nickname but we had a blast and Max was just saying before the interview that he was the honorary fifth member of Coney and one of the first cool things that Max did was when we were in pre productions I think he said to either Carl or Steve yeah give you a guitar and he put it like a cigarette hung it up the side of his mouth and just started playing with us and it was like yeah he's fitting right in this everybody an overview give everybody an overview in 1983 at a hand in 1985 friction there are two albums and I guess it was a third best of three but that was more of a greatest hits Max Norman produced Coney Hatch so just to give everybody who doesn't know what's going on just to give him a little context yeah about that guys Andy Kern bassist of Coney Hatch and Max Norman producer extraordinaire Alan Dixon so what is going on guys so yeah sorry Andy I cut you off I just want to make sure everybody's sort of following the script here no no that's a that's great background and and and we met Max just prior to to the out of hand record in 83 and then and we spent and in one of my fondest memories was was doing our friction record up in Moran Heights at Lestudio and for some of your listeners who don't remember that place I mean it was out in in the middle of frickin nowhere we all we all had cabin fever but what a great recording studio rush and the police and so many other great bands recorded there and and and the and the interesting story about that was we were trying to figure out where we were going to record and out of the blue our record company got a call saying that a band had canceled and would we like to go to Moran Heights and then once Max found out all the great gear there and there was a house where you could stay and man we just hungered down there we had a blast but it was it was in the middle of nowhere in the Laurentian mountains just north of Montreal yeah yeah yeah and it's right next to a lake as well and I remember there's a you know there's a good story about a rush they had to kneel was out on the on the on the pontoon in the middle of the lake with the drums they set them up out there and recorded recorded in plane across the lake and actually there was a boat that we used to take a couple of times we took that boat from the the house where we stayed across the lake to the studio which was a totally cool thing as well it's a real shame that that place is gone I mean it just fell into horrible just repair and yeah they just they just bulldozed it actually a few months ago they just bulldozed the whole thing which is a real shame but it was a great place a real nice facility had a couple of SSL's there good monitoring they had some good reverberation units and you know equipment is very good there and yeah bowie was there and a lot of a lot of big bands and yeah we were very lucky to be able to go there at that time it's good yeah because it was usually very busy one of the cool things that Max set up there was when it got time to do guitar solos Steve Shelsky was driving all of us mad he was like okay I got a solo I got a solo and then he'd come in and then Max or a few of us would say oh it's almost there so Max got fed up with you know starting and stopping and starting and stopping so we set Steve up in another room the studio was so big Max made him a loop of all the solo sections gave him his own tape machine a set of headphones in an amp and said go sort it out and Steve did that and he did and he did it for a week but he but he came up with some great solos and I thought that was really smart of Max to say that like it because he was stopping our progress so Max set him up in the other room and that was a great idea yeah well you know that's the same did the same thing with Randy Rhodes you know and a lot of other people like that you know so unless they have it all together you know they got to get in there and just practice and practice that's all it is yeah yeah and I think you you said that to Steve this is what I did with Randy and that was enough Steve yeah that's always a good way to get people to do stuff you know that's what Randy's okay all right so you guys are talking about the great stuff what the stuff that went right what about the stuff that went wrong well there was one thing that happened at the house I don't know if you remember this Andy but there was a leather chair there and for some reason I don't know why this chair but there was a hat there was a housekeeper there French lady yes she was she always used to call me mox used to drive me nuts no it's Max so one day I think one night we were watching TV and I don't know it was mighty been you Andy but it went back on the chair and the whole back fell off the chair just snapped right off we were we got we got such crap they came down on this real hard it like what are you guys doing you're you're racking the place like we couldn't have been more well behaved actually just watching a TV and fucking thing fell apart you know it's like you know we didn't do it we didn't do it you know they'll be charged for that because apparently I think they'd had somebody else in there that had been like done the rock star thing and like busted up the TVs and smashed a place up a bit so they were very that was obviously a sore point for them you know so yeah I do I do remember that Max and and no we couldn't like you know that the Canadian boys that were brought up to be pretty polite and we were we were on our best behavior there but it was such a good setup because we had as Max said there was literally a housekeeper there and they cooked all our meals for us it felt quite posh in it Max yeah it was yeah it was very posh yeah very nice yeah the whole residential thing well the first album we did in United Media was it in Toronto yes yes that's exactly right Max yeah and out of hand for everybody out of hand yeah and not much too I'm trying to remember what happened there I don't really remember much about what happened there maybe you've got some good stories about it I mean I think we just got in and got it done and then and got out basically yeah you know Max that studio isn't there anymore and and shortly after we recorded that it changed ownership and everything but my memories about a hand and working with you are had a lot more to do with pre-production and one of the cool things that Max really zeroed on when working with Kony Hatch is that and I was probably at fault on this I wrote a lot of songs sort of inspired by ACDC and the guitar parts and I would give them to Carl and Steve and I would say yeah you guys do exactly the same part and we'll double it and it'll be heavy and Max was like no no no you guys have two guitar players let's start having some interplay between you you and Steve and Steven Carl and we spent a lot of time working with Max on that and I really think it was a defining moment in helping us with our songwriting and just utilizing the fact that we had two guitar players and not just doubling up everything and and I think Max did a great job in opening our eyes on that we had a lot of fun we did pre-production I believe at Falcon rehearsal studios in Mississauga and spent a lot of time eating junk food and hamburgers and going in and sorting out songs and then but you're right Max I like that I don't remember too much from United Media it wasn't as memorable as an experience as the at Moran Heights studio was yeah yeah and of course there was a change in lineup on the second now on the second on the friction because that was a different drummer right Barry yeah who plays with Toronto now I think and he's still around I see him he he still calls me inky blackness all the time yeah no he loved working with you yeah he was a good guy and there's a picture somewhere of him leaning forward or something do you remember that picture where he's leaning and it almost looks like he's defining gravity because he's leaning forward for playing air drums there's a picture somewhere I don't know maybe I've got it in storage somewhere I don't know I have to try and find that but yeah we had a good time up there and it was so you know generally we all had we all had a pretty good time I thought so when you do Max when you do a band back to back with like these two albums out of hand and friction how do you go in is there a different mindset when you go into the the second album well it's all based it's really based on the materials based on the songs I mean it comes from the material so you listen to the material I know that at the time when we were doing the second album Pyromania came out and everybody was leaping around about Pyromania saying how great it was and all this kind of stuff so that kind of we changed our mix a little bit when we were just about to start mixing we changed the mix a little bit because Pyromania was out there so it's like oh this is the latest thing so you know we've got to try and you know make this like Pyromania but not exactly you know but I know I thought that you know all that stuff is driven from the material so you try and do what's best for the material and of course in those days it was a lot there was a lot more pre-production than there is today you know if there's any pre-production today probably not much but in those days the whole the whole deal was to try and get do the pre-production as much as possible get everything out of the way get get the tempo sorted out get the get all the parts working properly and make sure that everybody was well rehearsed so that you can go in and you can snap these things out you know without doing too many takes because you know after about the third or fourth take it's really you know it becomes it becomes rote and you kind of lose the excitement so you really want to get in there and get everybody vouched up and get everything working right and then just try to snap these songs out as you know in as few takes as possible so you know it's all driven from there wasn't anything there's no particular thing okay we're going to make this one you know more like this or more like this it was really down to you know listen you listen to all the songs making sure and of course i would get the songs the demos before even working on the records so we you know because in in those days you you would have to make sure that the that they had a record actually and had all good enough songs so you know that a lot of that stuff will be done and out of the way before we actually even got into the studio which is not not so much the case these days of course Andy I mean Andy I don't want to take it away from Kim Mitchell but I mean the production on out of hand is like chocolate and cheese compared to the first one for myself what was you did you take anything different going from the recording the first album into the second album with max which is anything different yeah I would well listen we were all very very big fans of the Ozzy Osbourne records that that max had done and I mean how could you not be influenced by Randy and his guitar tones and so we were all very excited about the possibility of working with max and and especially Steve and Carl with the guitar tones but max had done a bad company record and I'm a big fan of bad company as was Carl but I think we you know as max said that pre-production a lot of time was spent getting our shit together before we were in the studio and max was quite vocal about let's not waste a lot of time in the studio with with coming up with arrangements or tempos and everything so a lot of it was mapped out early and and getting in there and getting those takes before it felt stale and then getting some great oh boy I think we just lost him frozen with the guitars he's frozen back we got you back Andy you disappeared there for a second you know I'll tell you what happened somebody there you go somebody was trying to call me somebody seems to be the consensus somebody from Sweden was calling me but no I think I think max just you know efficient being efficient in the studio and not burning up time um and being prepared I definitely know max was very helpful with that with us and not just sort of flying by to cut the seat of our pants when we got in there and I think max really helped me out as a vocalist too because let's face it you know when when you're in a band with a guy like Carl Dixon the guy can sing a phone book and make it sound good you know so I was definitely the underdog and max really tried to push me and and help me you know be a little bit more melodic or or think about melody because I was quote unquote the talk singer in the band you know and um and unfortunately on friction there was a lot of pressure that that was that came down from the label uh to max and then max had sidebar conversations with me saying you know they really think the band would be more successful if we had one vocalist so you'll notice on on friction that I only sang one song and that was at the time it was a bitter pill for me to swallow but max pulled me aside and the way he framed it up was really cool he was like dude you got a ton of attitude but you know Carl's a hell of a singer so I don't know if you remember that chapter max but you certainly yeah that must be tough well that does happen and that's part of the responsibility of the producer is to is to is to maximize what you get and um I took their point they did give me a lot of pressure about it and but the same thing actually happened when I did when I did the countdown to extinction I realized that Marty was such a such a great soloist that basically I said look you know Marty should be doing pretty much all the solos you know Dave can do a few but Marty should pretty much do all the solos and this is one of the things you know hey look you're making a product at the end of the day and you want to make it as good as possible and I know I do remember that and I always feel bad about that kind of stuff but you know you you were very good about it you were you were a man you were a man you know healing years later I see a lot of healing happening years later lots of good healing I'm glad you brought that up Randy because uh you're on the wrong side of town apparently but that was one of the questions I had you know uh was was max like how much pressure how does that work does the a and r guy come and say look I really want you to kind of push this direction and it's filtered through you or uh because Andy's spoken about this in the past how he was kind of weeded out I mean that was for me and out of hand it was nice to have that you know you have the contrast between the song like stick it and the feel the feeling again I mean that's what made the band in my estimation yeah yeah um you know uh yeah basically is the the label comes to you your a and r guy you know or some such person and um you know hey they're paying the bills so you you know you try not to cross the a and r guys too much because at those times you know they can quite easily take you off the project uh and they'll get what they want so you might as well be there and do it properly and and you know and just take your lumps and deal with it you know um I didn't particularly agree with what they were saying but I did see their point so it was kind of a wow you know this is what's coming down the pipe so we gotta kind of deal with it you know but you know it has kind of a shame I mean you only you only did get to sing one song on the second one so you know yeah but you know what I remember max you you you served up a shit sandwich very eloquently because you said because you said to me I'll never forget this you said Andy let's face it you're in on the songwriting among almost every single song and and it was very much classes half full look at maybe the labels right in in max was quite diplomatic about it it wasn't like he was a prick and said you're not singing on the record he pulled me aside and I remember Carl even feeling a little bit awkward about it but it was you know at that time there was some pressure from the label to like okay let's deliver you know as max said you know pyromania we were on polygram there was a lot of pressure for us to to deliver a great record so it was kind of one all for one one for all but max made it a quite a bit easier for me to to swallow it but man listen it was it was a tough pill I remember that just going what the hell happened here but we got on with it because max is right they could have said max if you don't do it we're going to bring in somebody else to do it so there was there was politics from above for sure there's always some politics in there and you know but I mean one of the things that as a producer that you get good at is polishing turds so you know so you know you you got to be able to you got to be able to be diplomatic and you got to get people and you have to get people to do stuff that maybe sometimes they don't want to do and you know and you're saying look you know you want a great record and and the only way to really do that is to be honest so that you gain people's trust you know because if you know if if you if you start telling febs or you know porky pies there and there you know people don't trust you but if you always tell them the truth and you always say exactly what's on your mind people grow to trust you and they say you know what if that's you know the guy's being honest you know so that honesty thing really works well for productions you know and you got to try and you know you know you have to be honest and you have to get people to sometimes you have to get people to do what they don't want to do and you know you basically say look I know you don't want to do this but we're doing it okay so let's just fucking swallow it and move on you know well Andy I want to switch gears just a little bit and just yeah but you're the project manager on allied forces the 40 year anniversary you want to just speak about that just quickly yeah um the well it's interesting you know after after many years of doing the band stuff and working with with amazing people like max norman I had the opportunity to be the evil record company guy that max is talking about so so so I ended up being you know an a and r guy over at the label where I started and and responsible for a bunch of a curating a bunch of box sets for anniversary releases for rush and max webster and the boys in triumph reached out to me and said we've just done a deal with round hill records we love what you did with with rush and max webster would you help us with this and and cony hatch had toured with um with triumph so we were quite good mates with them and got along really well and um they they were just amazing to work with as max can attest to when somebody opens up the treasure chest and you get to go back in time and and have access to all these masters and maybe remix them or remaster them or find alternate takes it's a lot of fun it's almost like making a record it's the next best thing to making a record is curating it so um so that record's coming out I believe next week or a week and a half from now and um it's the triumph allied forces box set yeah right yeah live disc all kinds of goodies all kinds of Michael Levine said you are crawling in the attic trying to discover stuff I was I was coming out with max I love this I was coming out with half inch tapes and quarter inch tapes going dudes look at this there's an outtake what is this and and so I got them to spend a lot of time transferring and um sending stuff over and of course the boys had to approve it there were some outtakes that they weren't really interested in in sharing but uh it was nice crawling around in what they called the mezzanine it was in metalworks which is which is still a really great studio max if ever you get back up to to Canada metalworks is still like a world-class recording studio yep yep I heard about it yeah yeah I've got I've got my box set on order we're waiting for a record or a record store day to arrive so it's it's on order thanks Andy for finding it and yeah you had you had something else to promote I can't remember what it was uh it was a bass it was it was a oh you know what um you might be talking about for the first time ever in my since the beginning of when I've been in the music industry um I was featured in bass player magazine or bass bass magazine and I was like wow it only took 35 years for somebody to recognize I'm a bass player still I mean I played a lot of eighth notes to earn that uh that right well that's what we call Andy that's about all you did play eight notes oh got you sorry no there was some quarter notes in there and some half some longer some longer ones yeah but you know speaking of bass and bass and drums and max I remember max came up with this awesome idea just to talk about a producer's role and oftentimes we would just send them our demos and he'd be like yeah that one's okay that one's a bit math which is which is an acronym for nasty as fuck but um we had this we had this one song which ended up being called Fallen Angel and it had a completely different groove and max said well why don't we try this bass and drum shuffle thing and I said what do you mean like radar love and he said exactly and and so it was max's idea to change the tempo on that and I always you know I always loved that groove so I would like to thank max norman on air for opening my mind to groove and tempos and and just feel changes you can play eight notes but eight notes with a shuffle is different than eight notes with a four on the floor right you're right you're right and thank you very much for that um and I do take paypal as well by the way so you know should you want to uh you know well you know well those those are things you know sometimes you hear things and and you know the duty you know the duty of a producer is you know is also to is also to look at arrangements change the arrangements if you feel and and just to keep throwing things out to to to get to get a band to get so they get more of an objective view of what they're doing because it's when you're writing a song and you're inside the song it's very difficult to make these kind of you know these kind of value judgments so that one of the roles of the producer is to is to throw out different arrangement ideas throw out different tempo ideas and change stuff around and just try it you know and you know what that's one of the one of the hard things to do is to get bands to try it because they don't want to change it's their song they don't want to change it but once people once people try it out and they go oh yeah that's kind of cool or they go now that doesn't work you know and a lot of the times it doesn't work 90 percent of the times people are like now that doesn't work okay well we tried it so you know yeah i remember max you you often if there was opposition to an idea you were like well look mates you can always go back it like if you don't like it you can always go back and we'd be like yeah you're right we can't go back if we don't like it right and we did yeah but experimenting with grooves and tempos just to make the record feel different that a lot of that stuff we learned from max you know and not saying that kim didn't teach us that but we really went quite deep in into tempos and grooves with max you know your yes you've only sang a one track on friction but i went back and listened to a song like she's gone and you're bass playing on that it's you know usually the bass sometimes muffled in the back but it was popping right out at me through the speakers and every part of that song the guitars the vocals the drums it was so distinct max you could almost pick the each each part take it right out of the song and put it on its own that's how distinct the each each instrument sounded yeah i mean you know like i said i've said this many times you know if you got a good band it's not that hard to make a good record you know you gotta if you got a good band you know you you gotta really screw things up to not make a good record obviously you gotta have the songs but you know if you got a good band that's what makes it work you know what about the old saying we'll fix it in the mix we'll fix it in the mix that's when you've got a bad band right you got a band it's also great we'll fix in the mix guys don't worry about it we'll fix in the mix well yeah that you know that used to occur but i was never a big fan of that i was always always try and get the best possible you know thing on tape and then you know and then when you get to the mix you know if you can take it further and make it even better then you do so but you know you don't want to get to a mix with a part that doesn't work you don't want to get to a to the mix with you know with a bad arrangement you don't want to get to the mix with stuff out of tune you know you basically want to try and do all this stuff before you get there and then when you're mixing you know the it'll probably mix itself for the most part i do a lot more fixing now than i ever used to do uh in in in in those days you know yeah if all you the bands are are not it's not where is that what you're saying max the quality of the bands aren't the same no the problem is that that all the all the relevant stages that we used to do and we that's one of the reasons that andy and i are talking about the pre-production so much it's because it's very very important and uh if you don't do that kind of pre-production then later on when you get to mix it and actually right now mostly what i do is mixing so you know stuff comes in and you listen to it and you go you know what they could have done this and it would have been better and of course now that means you've got to do an edit or you've got to swap parts around or something like that or you got to send it back and say okay look do this re-record this or do this um it's really because of the way the musical situation landscape is now that people don't do pre-production so much you know the what they do is uh they demo the song and the demo becomes the recording and and you know they'll do stuff like they'll do they'll do uh you know drum machine and then they and then they'll come back later on and put the drums on last and stuff like this which is very hairy and it kind of messes up the feel of a lot of stuff and you've got to be very careful doing stuff like that whereas you know in the past we rehearse we do the arrangements we rehearse get everything sorted out and then you go in and you put it down you know you put the thing down and that's how you get the best results and if and most people don't do it that way anymore and it's a shame and it means there's a lot more you know and I tell people listen I mix on I don't fit this this is another question I mix on it speaking to what you're saying so to Andy and to Max so why are we not getting the quality songs you know that those those songs that we've heard in the 70s and 80s why are we not getting these quality songs today is it because there's not enough pre-production there's not enough living with the song and reworking it Andy um well listen I'll give you my two cents on that like there's I think there's still a lot of great music out there but one of the things that Max just said about capturing the capturing the band as much as you can live off the floor and whether it's the Aerosmith records that I love where you can hear the ambience in the room and you know all four guys are in there they might have done some overdubbing but I think capturing the magic of that performance as opposed to what Max has just told you where you get a demo and then you start working on a demo and I'm guilty of it and then you go wow the demo sounds great I just need better guitar sounds I just need real drums on it and and what you're missing is that is the essence of the band in in a room together which I don't know if Max agrees there's no replacing that well yeah and I I'll go even further I do agree and I'll go even further and say that uh one of the reasons for that that I that I feel very strongly about is that when you're playing in the room with the other guys there's a two-way musical conversation between all the players when you're playing an overdub there's only a one-way conversation you're reacting to the drums but the drums are already set the drums are not going to move depending on how you move so when you've got the band moving like that in an in an organic sense you have this two-way conversation and that's a hundred percent conversation when you're doing an overdub it's only a fifty percent conversation so you know as you get more and more into doing overdubs and and people doing everything separately and doing them to a set you know something that's already on tape or already on the door or already recorded um you're you're losing some of the musical conversation and you that that is one of the reasons why people like Led Zeppelin and they like the Stones and they like the you know bands that older bands that used to do this stuff very in a very kind of live fashion and and then it's very difficult to replace that I mean and I blame Steely Dan because they they because they you know they used to record bits and and I blame Pink Floyd as well because they used to record bits at a time and they just piece everything together in order to make it sonically great but they were so good at it that it worked but most people aren't that good and it's it's extraordinarily difficult to make something sound organic when when you don't have that two-way conversation and and you know people there's there's there's always this dichotomy this the struggle between good good sound and good feel because they they almost work against each other you know if you've got everybody in the same room you're not going to get as good a sound necessarily sonically because you don't get the separation you can't you know you can't you know what I mean whereas if you record everything on its own you can make everything sound really cool but then it doesn't mean to say it's going to have a better feel and most people you know don't care about the sound they just care about the feel actually they don't hear the sound really but I blame Steely Dan and Pink Floyd because they they had both and that and everybody said oh dude listen to this listen to these guys that's how we're going to do it and then they forget that oh yeah but these this is fucking Walter Beckham Faye these guys are fucking master craftsmen you know and other people aren't that good at it you know so you know it's it's a danger it's a crap shoot and and you got to try and you know find the best of you know best of both worlds really all right I'm gonna toss in mega death here and I'm just gonna flip I want to flip out a couple of topics okay and and and Andy feel free to stick around you know as long as you're like I'm not sure if you have to drive and pick somebody up or hey listen when you said when you said I'm gonna be on with Max Norman are you kidding me I'm not gonna miss this opportunity calendar I haven't spoken to that to my buddy and you know I was going through the albums and I go oh honey hatch yeah I forgot I might as well ask Andy if he wants to jump on so thank you thank you for including me boys it's great to see Max yeah it's great to see you too all right thank let's talk David Ellison mega death and Dave Mustaine here for a second Rustin Peace how was that album recorded was it recorded in the sort of organic fashion that you're talking about with everybody playing off each other other's cues or was it in pieces no it was as far as I know because I only mixed it I didn't record it so it was recorded I just and that was my clink who's got a connection to metalworks who's got a connection to guns and roses yeah my clink produced a rustin piece from triumph yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah and I like Mike a mellow Mike and call him he's a real nice guy and very soft spoken and he really does know his stuff and the reason that he had me mix it he was gonna mix it but he could guns and roses called him up and he had to go and work with them and obviously they after appetite you know they were most enormous fans so you know I you can't blame him so well and actually I was at a symposium with him about three years ago or two and a half years ago down in Tampa and with Dave Ellison actually and a few other people down there and I was happy to meet Mike again hadn't seen him for many years and he he looked at me they do this split out things where you sit at a table with a bunch of guys and you just you know the people pay to come and like listen and you sit on these panels and and I was I was actually standing there and Mike was doing one of these split out sessions with a bunch of people and he looked at me with this little smile and he goes you know you want my first choice for that help really in front of everybody yeah in front of all these people I went really I said well who was and he wouldn't tell me so yeah the rotten person anyway but no he's a lovely guy and and he knows his stuff but okay so the original question is um what happened uh in there and you could talk to mccaja ryan because mccaja was was second engineering I would believe in there and Mike was engineering as well and uh Mike is a very old school when it comes to two inch tape and he basically had nick uh running all these parts and they would take different pieces because there was there was so many timing changes in their albums a lot there's a lot of moving around so mccaja was telling me that it was a nightmare in there there was just tape pieces of tape everywhere just hanging hanging up off the walls taped on the walls you know he had a chorus here a chorus you know verse here chorus there and it was all cut together out of out of quite a lot of different takes and then I think Mike went away and and they let mccaja run most of the guitar overdubs and then I think Mike came back to do the vocals with David with David Mustaine and basically when I got it and I was mixing I wouldn't really have noticed because I'm not really really watching the tape machine but uh and this this is this is an old story but I'll go through it anyway um we I'd be mixing and it would get to the it would get to the the pre-chorus or something like that and all of a sudden the snare would like disappear and I'd be like what what and then I'd look at the tape and I realized that we hit an edit and the snare was tuned differently so uh as it went past the edit the snare changed sound and kind of went away and I was like oh what what happened here so I had to do quite a lot of stuff especially with the kick and the snare where I would put them on more than one channel and automate switching between the channel so that I could re-cue them for each part which uh which took me a lot longer than I really wanted to you know spend on it because you know once once you get it sounding good you you want it to be like that all the way through but you know that so I realized at that point that there were really quite a few edits in there certainly as far as the drums were concerned so I believe Mike put it all together edited it all together and then they put the bass on and put the guitars on so no it wasn't really done as a live thing although of course they probably did do um they probably played along with Nick as they were doing it which is a very normal thing doing guide guitars guide bass you know yeah so all that all that hard work and you weren't even the first choice I know yeah I was looking you build them for extra hours you build them for extra hours you know and the funny thing is I got this call from Mike I think it was and and I went down to rumbo recorders in in Burbank I think it's in Burbank somewhere down there which was the captain and Taneel's old place I don't remember those guys captain it's in they had a nice nice studio there and I used to do quite a lot of work there for different bands and he invited me down there to talk about this mix and I walked in and Mustaine and Allison are playing billiards on the billiard table and Mike walks in and he looks at me and he goes the first thing he said to me he says there's no points and I was like okay so it's just down to like you know just down to charging them 10 grand or whatever I charge them for the mix so it wasn't you know so I thought it was you know it was very succinct really and there wasn't really much to say about it and then you know we went over to one-on-one in North Hollywood and mixed it mixed it there in the in the in the small mix room in the front of the front of that place I think that place is gone there used to belong to Hal Clemens I think but that was that was a really nice place that's actually where we where we did the Lynch mob record as well it's nice big studio there and you know just mixed it mixed away in there really so that's really the story behind it and then and then I got a I got a call from Dave to do the to do something about this book that came out you know the making of the making of the record or whatever the one yeah the one that just came out which I thought was a bit of a disappointment really is but the guy called me up his ghost rider called me up and he said well you know let's let's talk about it I said I really haven't got anything to say about it because there wasn't much there wasn't much there wasn't much going on you know I just you know it's like there's no points and you know lots of edits and that's about it and then they and then Moustaine called me up and said you know for the audio book he wanted me to read my part for the audio book so I did that but I'm only in I've only got like two paragraphs so that was a quick deal you know so so you're going for a polite Canadians here with Coney Hatch doing albums with them and you're going to what what has been labeled some substance abuse with Megadeth at that time was there was it difficult to work with? Well I didn't like I say as far as the Rustin Peace record we they it wasn't really anybody around Nick would pop in and say hi Dave would come over every other day or something listen to stuff but there wasn't that much interaction and obviously their job was all done so all I had to do basically was mix it so so I didn't really detect any particular about on these two no I didn't really have any problems with them as far as those kind of things I know that right before euthanasia if my memory serves me correctly I had to go pick Dave Mustaine up at the rehab place out in Phoenix and that never happened that didn't happen with Coney Hatch by the way we were oh that explains 7-11. Thumper wasn't on friction right but no but I've never seen anybody get out of a place so quick as Mustaine getting out of that rehab place he ran to my car when he got out he said quick he said get out let's get out of here let's get out of here he couldn't wait to get out of there you know so but no I didn't really I mean there was some more later on I did an md-45 record with Mustaine and Lee Lee Ving was singing on it and at that point Dave got into some trouble with the you know the bad the badness again and he disappeared for a little while and in fact he never came back to the studio so we ended up just myself and Lee just finished it up sorry Andy did you want to say something yeah sorry I know I can't you know not at all I know I was I was just going to jump in because you guys are talking about all these really great records that Max did and these great artists that he was involved with but one of the best kept secrets that that I don't know if Max talks about and he played this record for me when he was working with us was a band from Detroit called Vendetta and the lead the lead singer on in that band I think his name is Nicky something but oh my Nicky buzz Nicky buzz Nicky buzz and there's tracks like Deadly like the Rose and I mean yeah the the singing and guitar playing and Mojo of this band that hardly anybody knows and Max produced it on anybody that's listening do yourself a favor go and find Vendetta because Max did a killer job on it and it's one it's still one of my favorite records Max moving along anyway it's a great it's a great record not yeah we had a lot of fun making that record and I forget who is oh Frank from Epic one of the A&R guys big A&R guys a guy that signed Boston uh and uh John Boylan was doing Boston in Studio uh we were in Studio D which was normally Fleetwood Max domain but we actually managed to get in there for a little while and um I remember Frank what's I can't remember his second name I remember eventually but I think he's retired now it maybe he's no longer with us I don't know but he came in he was a real Chicago accent and he goes yeah sounds great guys but it's so out of tune you know we looked at it and I looked at him I said well we can put it in tune but you've got to pay for more studio time and he just sort of went yeah you know yeah fucking what a moment you know but it's one of those Chicago guys that nothing was good you know what I mean so everything was like okay I'm getting a lot of questions here this this the elephant in the room here the David Elveson thing here the relationship and him maybe you want to weigh in Max and Andy feel free to weigh in or not weigh in on this but uh yeah you know it is just high level well yeah well I gotta say the first thing the first thing I could say is you know my my girlfriend sent me the video uh a link to the video oh no no no and I didn't I didn't know but I can't unsee it now yeah that's the problem and and uh look I feel I feel sorry for David look he made a mistake it was a silly thing to do I kind of I feel sorry for him but I've kind of mixed feelings about it and I understand Mustaine removed me him from the band because like we like I was saying before we started the show the one thing that Dave Mustaine will not tolerate is being made fun of and that you know because of his upbringing I guess and because of the way he is I think he thought about this and thought about it and it's it's a brand you have to protect the brand and I think that he couldn't he probably was thinking I don't know this but he probably was thinking I can't go out on stage with this guy because everybody's going to be pointing at him and doing this you know what I mean and you know so I can't really blame him but I see both sides of the story um you know so apart from that I really don't have much to say about it I I certainly don't think Dave is a pedophile um you know he's guilty of probably what what 90% of the other musicians out there have done him you know in at one stage or another but you know when you when you have that position and responsibility and as you were saying and I watched your guys talking about this earlier on today I watched your your part your your broadcast about that yeah yeah and one of the things that I did agree with was that I thought it was a little it's a little it feels a little weird because he's a pastor and so you've got this religious thing there as well so you know I I don't know I mean you know it can swing either way and I see both I see both sides and you know I don't want to be judgmental about it and I just feel I feel sorry for David because I think it's going to affect his whole life and he has a lot of other stuff going on and it's going to affect that stuff too so you know the guy's going to go through a real hard time you know and the only other the only other thing that I that I maybe if Dave's David sees this maybe he'll do this but I do think that he should apologize publicly to his wife and his family for the embarrassment and and maybe to make and maybe to make it as to I don't know but I you know I if it was me that would probably have been the first thing I would do so but you know like I say I'm not going to judge you and I don't want to get into like being on one side of one side of the other we spoke about this before and we thought we just kind of like put a high level at it you know just sort of your your opinion about it yeah I mean you know you know you can look at it two or three different ways and I kind of see all the angles and you know it's just very unfortunate and it's kind of sad it's really kind of sad you know and you know I've met Dave I've met David David Elson he's always been nice he's always been forthcoming he's always been you know he's absolutely a kind person he's he's always made time and and you know that's kind of like it's why it's so heartbreaking too right yeah yeah no absolutely he really always comes on always comes across as a very nice guy and you know like I say I do know him quite well and actually I was the the thing with Mike clink when I was down at that thing in a few years ago in in Tampa David was there and he actually was the one that invited me down to go down there and talk and I hadn't seen him for quite a while and it was good to see him and yeah you know he's a very nice guy really so you know you you know who knows the whole story nobody knows the whole story nobody knows the whole story and that that's the point there Max there's just got a question when you were recording Megadeth like Dave Mustaine's one of my favorite lyricists I think he's got some of the best lyrics and intellectual lyrics and all the metal like what you're so focused on the music the drums the bass and everything do you take do you have time to listen to lyrics and say hey Dave that that's pretty good line oh yeah yeah yeah yeah because you have to do the lyrics as well yeah yeah yeah I actually have a funny story about the lyrics and Max Norman we were recording uh friction and Carl Dixon came in with a set of lyrics for a song that ended up being called he's a champion and the original set of lyrics was called the lobster quadrille and and Max looked at him and said you can't fucking sing about lobsters nobody's gonna fuck you can't and he just and it was a very good point like it we're a hard rock bordering on metal bands you're not going to as as much as I think it was from Alice in Wonderland but Max laid it on the line you can't sing about lobsters and shut it down right so he was absolutely paying attention to the lyrics yeah yeah I mean you go through the lyrics and you know and of course with with with Dave Mustaine of course he is an excellent lyricist and you know there's very little to do because he's really on it and he's he really is excellent at that stuff there's one lyric that he used that that was one of mine though which was let me see if I remember what it was uh tangled abstract fallacies that's actually that's actually one that I gave him but for the most part I didn't really have to change anything uh you know he's he you know especially with um the first the first uh uh countdown yeah uh the whole the whole concept of that was really you know really sort of germane and he and he really had it down yet everything was the Rodney King incident which was happening at the same time as countdown to extinction right one of the recording sessions was that sort of playing an influence on in the background of the making of that album well we were in LA and um uh I suppose everybody kind of remembers when that was going on but um you know a lot of time once you get into the studio you're in kind of a bubble so you're not really watching the tv all day or anything like that so you know you you become a bit oblivious to what's going on so I'm not sure that that really played any particular part in in uh in what we were doing I mean of course we were aware of it you know as everybody was but uh I don't think there was anything it wasn't it might have just been the backdrop you know if you know what I mean yeah I can't speak speaking of uh speaking of lyrics and and max saying that one was his I distinctly remember max at the end of friction saying to me so lads what are you gonna call the record and I had like I had pages and pages of shrub titles and I and I was bouncing them off max what do you think about this one what do you think about that no tattoos no I I said and because we were from Canada and we were you know kind of in the east I said what do you think about thunder in the east he said can I have can I have that for gladness and I was like absolutely you can and so I'm gonna story man so you mean Andy Curran Andy Curran where's where's the credit here I don't see any credit no and no points nothing that's a great story I don't know I think he made that up actually I don't know whatever um actually uh I'm trying to remember uh because mine I have a totally different recollection of getting that title actually and you know what you might you might be right you might have said it's that might have gone down I don't I don't remember yeah my memory is my memory is fucking useless these days but but I do remember flying back from Tokyo and I uh they put me in first class I think I was sitting in a really lovely seat and I had a newspaper I think it was maybe the New York Times or something like that and I was looking at the racing section because I was bored and I found out that there were lots and lots of really good names of horses and I was looking at them like wow these are great these are great you know great names so I thought oh this is a good source of you know good album names you know and uh I I remember seeing Thunder in the East as one of the name names of one of one of the horses that was running and I was like oh that's perfect so that's my recollection so now we got two now we got country all right mza let's let's clarify mza what what does this acronym stand for mza and it doesn't stand for anything and I've been asked that many many times and I always loved that that was part of the demo and I was love and I love the fact that they said zed instead of z because they they learn English and they can eat it yeah yeah well yeah Canadian and British of course and they actually learn British as opposed to American in in Japan so uh and I I remember asking them you know more than one occasion you know what what does it mean mza mza I love it mz they were like it doesn't mean anything just sounds good you know and that was a lot a lot of things with loudness and the lyrics was uh that's a whole different ballgame what was it like being in the studio with you know the band and I mean they don't they don't speak English well today they speak a lot better than they did back then I'm pretty sure yeah what was it like communicating with them and trying to get you know well I had to I had to learn some I had to learn some Japanese but it's only a matter of a handful of phrases uh that you need to learn kikimasu is one listen listening gonna listen uh atama kara from the top so you know it's surprising how little uh you need to speak you know to get the to get to get things done yeah I mean you know the the main problem with with loudness and the language was trying to get it so they didn't sound so Japanese and that was very difficult mickey spoke the best English out of all of them being the singer but even he even his English was not very good and so it was kind of difficult and in those days you know it was almost I wouldn't say it's a stigma but it was like you know it's a point of contention people going out what's this Japanese band they sound like they sound all Japanese you know we've got the Japanese accent and stuff I love so so we had to try and get rid well nowadays it doesn't seem like it's a big deal but in those days you know trying to break into America which was the whole point um you know that that was really quite a kind of a struggle and um uh we we hired some to a pair of lyricists to write stuff and they were coming up with stuff and we also I wrote a bunch of lyrics like Black Star Oblivion and these some of these tracks I would go to a nightclub that was open all night called Lexington Queen which is in Roppongi Roppongi somewhere and I would go there after we got out of the studio and and sit there with a beer and just write write lyrics on on napkins and try and you know try and come up with stuff so there was quite a lot of there was quite a lot of outside influence on those lyrics and but of course it was Japanese very very proud people and they didn't want anybody to really know about that so uh that was called kept kind of hush hush and you know uh I did some interviews in Japan about those those records and uh they took all that part out about the lyrics so they were like oh I know you know we wrote all the lyrics you know we wrote our own yeah we it's like Ozzy run bark at the moon yes well yeah yeah that said you know all I gotta say you know Ozzy wrote all the he wrote all the melodies you know and that's half a song right there so you know as we've said before you know so you know again just to go back to my earlier question loudness disillusioned the album before was it's it's technically it's one of it's an amazing album was there any pressure on you from the a and r guys again to kind of dumb it down for the north american market keep it a lot more simple uh for loudness and thunder in the east no no they were pretty good uh the the a and r guys uh uh from uh japan uh they were pretty good they didn't uh they didn't dictate anything they they wanted one ballad at least but that apart from that uh they didn't really uh they didn't really say anything and in fact actually once we got into the studio we did like heavy chains we did a lot more arranging of that one and I had him change all that you know do those cross beats and everything um uh so we actually made it more complex than they originally had written so uh you know because we want to I want to make it interesting wanted to keep it interesting want people to you know be in there and then and when you got when you've got great players once again there's a great band you know really really good band you know uh money taco great drummer and uh kira tagasaki and a kira tagasaki of course you know great great great player and uh you know and mickey good singer and and and uh mickey the bass player good bass you know really good band so you know once again you know you've got a good band you just got to make sure they got good stuff to play and and and a lot of cases production is like that you've got a great band here don't don't have them play a shit song you know if they got a shit song get rid of it rewrite it you know if they got you know make all these songs better so the band gets off on playing it and that's how you start to get a really good record and uh and they they we did quite a lot of rearrangements and like rewriting of the lyrics and all that kind of stuff with with uh thunder and lightning strikes and uh of course it got a little easier we sold to a fortune because uh there was a change of singers but um you know yeah you know right was like going too far with mike viscera like okay we want to capture the american sound but now we're losing our identity right now now we've people like the fact they were japanese and the first japanese band to sort of crack it you know the american war wasn't happening yeah i was a bit it was a bit it was you know it was a bit of a it was a bit political uh there was some i think there was some blowback from the american label about you know mickey's vocals and you know as i recall people were thinking he wasn't getting any better with his english and that was still kind of a bit sticky you know and that was a that was a much bigger concern in those days because they really weren't any there was them and there was easy oh and that was the only two japanese bands that ever been you know heard of in america so um you know obviously everything's a lot more um you know cosmopolitan these days but in those days you know it was quite a big deal you know and um so it was it was a point of contention i was listening to this today and the vocals he did a little bit of a rust dwarf thing happening from the killer door son i actually reconnected with my link not too long ago on facebook i think and i think he's a real good singer um i didn't fully produce that record i had another guy working with me on it because i had a conflict and uh so it didn't come out as well as i wanted it to come out and but that's true of almost every record that i do because you know you have to be you got to you know you want to be as perfectionist as much as possible so um that's one of the questions i have uh mac you know if you're listening to like lightly strikes with the song let it go it's got that poppy la you swear you're right on the sense that strip with the sound and then this album sounds a little bit darker soldier of fortune do the error the timing does that play into what you're trying to achieve on an album uh yeah yeah i think so yeah yeah i mean you you know uh you're aware of what else is out there and this was a time of quite a lot of change uh in the record in techniques in the recording industry um somebody actually asked me online uh yesterday um i'm in one of these producer groups on facebook or whatever it is and they they they asked me about um the uh there's a hole in one of the songs that it just goes absolutely uh totally quiet i can't remember sitting like this it's on lightning strikes in key blackness and that that's what i told them i actually replied and told them yeah we because for the first time uh we did when we did that record lightning strikes and we did it in japan and they had the sony 24 track digitals uh on half inch tape so uh i said oh let's use that because you know and that was a real help because you could take whole pieces of the song punch them into other parts of the song you have two of them and you could just multitrack edit away and you never lose any generations so you can really basically do a lot more with stuff and uh you know as you're recording so um there was a time of great flux in the recording industry digital was coming in uh you know you were able to get stuff done somewhat faster and you were able to do more stuff you know the reverberation units were coming out digital you know lexicon you know 224 and then the 480 and all these kind of things so that drives you as well that tends to the technology tends to drive what you do and and how you how you make things sound and you know i mean we've all we've all seen this in like like share using you know abusing the auto tune in you know do you believe in life after love you know and then she never used it again but everybody else uses it now so you know it's like all these things max was list studio a digital that andy was was a digital recording back then max if i recall they might have had a digital machine that we were bouncing back and forth to but it would have been on the cusp of it um if i recall but it's interesting that max brought that up because you are aware of the other records and a lot of times max would say hey you know what are you guys like what records do you like you know just to get a feel for where our headspace was at and i remember having a lot of talks with max about bass at that time because that my my life was you know all a lot about bass guitar and we were talking about the van halen records which was fair warning and i was telling him you know my my client then he's tuned down to a low d like should we try that because i love the sound of it and then max went even one step further and on this ain't love had me double the bass with a bass keyboard and we mixed it in there and it made it sound big and fat and huge but there's a perfect example of me coming to him because fair warning was was really happening at that time and talking to him about that record and things that i loved and max kind of put it in his hand like a blender and and and we worked on it and we did a lot of low tuning on bass on all of those records yeah i you know and you are you know you are aware of what's going on and you hear stuff and it inspires you and you go wow yeah i want it you know i want it to sound like that you know uh so yeah it's a constant recycling of what you hear and and you kind of you bring it in and you mix it all around in your brain and then you try and you know get it back out onto the tape somehow and that that does happen so um but i remember that um with uh soldier of fortune roger proba was working on that for me and so i didn't have as much control on that as i probably should have done and that may be responsible for some for some of the way that the tonality is different so you know i one of the things i noticed on all your records that you produce max is the guitar sound it's just amazing no it could be loudness it could be coney hatch it could be ozzy the guitar and that's something that was just missing i found off of the loudness soldiers of fortune it just it doesn't have that that max norman sound the guitars you know yeah uh clarity i can't remember uh how we ended up mixing that and uh uh so i i i don't recall but uh i the one thing that i do remember is after that record i was like you know i'm not gonna i'm never gonna do that again i'm never gonna have somebody else proxy you know the project either i'm gonna do the whole thing or i'm not gonna do it at all because my clink isn't that it pulling on my clink just say yeah kind of yeah and you know and basically if if you know if you if you if you want to get what you want you got to be there all the time in fact there's an old studio saying it's like if you know if if you're not there don't moan you know so i couldn't really moan i couldn't really moan about it but i i i moaned to myself and said you know what this this could have been so much better but i just i didn't have the time i was doing something else at the time so you know that's how it ended up and uh i just i i said to myself after that i'm never gonna do that again i'm always gonna you know stay get get 100% in there so andy we still we still want to know how you came off with the friction title oh yeah we had the end of story oh my god well no there was so much fricking friction between all the members at that time um max max got caught in the crossfire that was an aptly titled record um i wouldn't i wouldn't say i wouldn't say camaraderie was at its highest during that and then it just even worsened on on the tour but um yeah yeah unfortunately like there and i think there was pressure from the label and we got dropped halfway through touring with crocus and accept and um and and so i always say that that album title was quite apropos for for what was going on in the koni camp but but i i hate to do this boys i gotta tell you my phone has been saying it's on on the last couple bars it's all good it's all good man i just want to say thank you so much for having me on it like it it's made my day seeing my buddy max norman again after all of these years and max so great to see in my pal and and boys thank thank you for having me on you should continue on with mr norman and and um and get some great rock stories but i'll try to be more uh receptive on facebook for you okay max and yeah i'm gonna try and get up there we gotta get up there and go have a couple beers i would love to i would love to see a web but before i go where are you living these days i'm in new york i'm in the upper east side new york so i'm not that far away no you're not okay i will i promise you i'll remember that and boys thank you for having me on the on on the show again and what an awesome treat to be on with you again max and you take care of yourself brother yeah you look great man it's great to see you excellent thanks thanks for coming on and trying my mind coming out next week andy just before you go the last time we spoke there's the poster from antham publicity poster for uh cody hatch's first album ready to help out the story that's a good one that's a good one buddy well boys uh thank you again for having me on max you take care of yourself brother and we'll see you soon okay good right good to see you thanks very much andy thank you see you see you bye bye boy thanks thank god we got rid of him no i'm kidding no i love him he's back he's still on what a great guy we always enjoy having andy on the show it's a real pleasure every time we get to speak with him so yeah i always i always had to get on really well with andy and he is a really nice guy and uh yeah it's a real pleasure having him on yeah very good yeah excellent what about when and we'll just fire off on a couple more topics we're not going to keep you much longer but lightning strikes so you have this huge success with thunder and east and you know it's it's it's you know here's a japanese band making it big on billboard right they're breaking america on tour with molly crew so what happened with lightning strikes you got the hits why did things sort of go sour i mean uh i don't know um you know uh in those days and it's still kind of similar today it's a little bit different the business but um in those days uh if you didn't get out on tour you didn't sell the records and um they were they were lucky enough to to do some good touring with the with the thunder in the east and uh i don't really know what happened with lightning strikes to be honest um i thought it was a good i thought it was a yeah i thought it was a really good record and um you know we did the best we could the best that we could obviously and uh but i couldn't tell you that's out of my domain you know once it's mixed and mastered then it's up to everybody else to to work it and and if it if it wasn't worked hard in the us then that's probably the reason i mean if they i don't know if they toured then uh for that record i can't remember but there is that may that may be the the problem you know that they didn't do enough touring just enough you know yeah yeah so again with with max's fabulous career we just focused on three bands today kony hatch loudest and mega death because everybody's asking what about y and t what about sabotage i mean we can go on to part three this could be a 12 part mini okay max norman so that's why we're only focusing on these bands it's already been an hour and 20 minutes and uh very well we we didn't we we didn't say much about mega death really um well we could end up on mega death euthanasia all right so how do you get a co-producer credit i want to know they've mustains a co-producer that i can understand it's his band it's his vision so it makes sense but also a lot of times people's like i want my name on there i i have the power to put my name on there was he really a co-producer well um i was telling people what to do Dave Dave said i remember Dave said to me on countdown when we started to do countdown um uh he said i want you to teach me how to produce you know and i said well look i i said i really can't teach you that i said you just got to pay you know you pay attention and and you know i i can't teach you how to do it you just got to pay attention and and you know learn the best you can and uh right at the end of that album when after it was mixed and it was about two weeks before it was um uh release uh i got a call from my attorney Joe Sirling in in new york i was in LA at the time and he said okay all the all the all the you know uh final contracts are done and uh i made the change to the production credit and i said what change and he said you know Dave produced by Dave Mustaine and Max Norman and i said whoa whoa whoa whoa i said no no no i said and i called Dave and said hey you just fucked me by changing the credit right at the end i said and they've already printed 400 thousand copies of this i said how about i how about i junk the fucking record right now and he started freaking out so dude dude dude dude it's a mistake it's a mistake and i knew it wasn't a mistake he did he did it you know it was a little bit of a backstab and i got very very upset about it i said listen you're on the you wrote all the songs you sing all the songs you play on it you know you i gave you a co-production credit and now you're stealing my credit i said that's not right i said i'm the engineer producer you're the co-producer so i said you you flip that back right now or it's going to be a real real big problem and i said i'll call i'll call the label right now i'll call capital right now and tell them that that that it's not coming out and they already had like 450 thousand out in the stores so so it was a real it was a real mess and it took me quite a while to get you know to stop being pissed off about that and Dave kept apologizing to oh i'm sorry it was a mistake i don't know what happened blah blah blah and i was like you're you're so full of shit you know you did it on purpose i know why you did it don't ever fucking try it again you know so basically uh i don't think that on uh countdown that Dave was really a co-producer but i gave him a co-producer credit anyway because you know i've been a nice guy i guess does that come with points like a co-producer does it is there points associated with that well it doesn't don't don't come off my points well that's what i mean well no it comes off the records uh well i don't know uh what deal he had uh it's probably not probably doesn't come with points but he's already getting a lot of points anyway so you know um and i don't know how that how that breaks down on his end you know yeah but um and then euthanasia we were going to do originally do euthanasia um in a house somewhere in phoenix and we went and looked at a bunch of different houses and and we just decided to build a studio instead there was only really one studio that was suitable in phoenix and it it really wasn't that suitable and then the guy gave us an enormous quote for it because he knew it was mega death and he you know wanted to make a killing on the studio so uh we we decided to just go build one so that so that's the whole story behind that one you know and uh uh but uh tell me tell me about the relationship between marty freedman and dave mustane you know just just sort of giving him the reins and you were talking about this before giving him the reins to sort of be himself marty you know to just go out and just play solos well you know right it's tough it's tough to hold on to something like that right well you know uh there's a funny story about that is uh we we got into um the enterprise which is where we recorded countdown in uh in burbank and uh we uh we were in there and i was talking to uh marty and uh unbeknownst to me dave just walked in behind me but i didn't see him but i said to marty i said look you know you should probably do most of these solos because you know you're just like a master player and dave is like a little bit sketchy on some of this stuff so dave then dave walked past me and he looked at me like you know giving me one of those looks and i thought well you know i said it somebody it's the truth you know and he said i think you're right when i was like i got away with that one you know but but you know dave's not a stupid guy i mean he's a very smart guy and uh you know he understands look everybody wants the best record and you know if if and some of marty's solos on that record just astonishing solos you know i mean they're just amazing solos and you know the guy's got such a great tone and i was lucky enough to go see him uh last year i think or maybe the year before in chicago with his band from japan and uh he just has such a lovely tone and he's such a great player and it really is a really nice guy but um so i don't think that you know and he's very non-confrontational marty you know you just do he's just like very quiet and you know just basically do you know what he needs to do and uh so he doesn't get into anything you enter into any kind of you know altercations with anybody you know and we had a really good time doing those solos and uh we developed a really good relationship working relationship and actually when i i went out to the bus after the gig in chicago he didn't know i was there and i walked onto the bus and he goes holy shit and then i sat down next to him i said how are you doing you know i'm seeing you since the nineties or whatever it was and and he goes uh he says dude he says he says thank god somebody knows how to record solos you know and i was like i'm sure a lot of people know how to record solos he goes dude he said you have no idea so you know the thing is we had a really good working relationship we developed the window punching method because we started to use the sony digital and the great thing about the sony digital is you can punch in on the millisecond so we could actually do a really good solo with a really good feel and if there was a blurred note in the middle we'd just go in and punch in for about 300 milliseconds and just pick that note out and and and so i said all right just play along and i would read and i got very fast at rehearsing the punch so i'd do like a second before punch second after looping round and i'd be nudging the in and out points and just go okay play along boo and you just play along with the solo and it'd be in and out you wouldn't even know that it that it went in in and out of record and then we'd listen back and go oh yeah fixed next you know so so so we got a really good method of doing it and that was one of the great things about starting to use digital you know but not not not dropping a generation and you don't have a 55 or 56 millisecond delay to punch in because you just can't do that on analog tape it's not not possible to do that smaller punch the smallest punch you can do is about a frame or two frames which is each frame is a you know 30 millisecond so you know you you just can't do that kind of fixing but with the with the digital you can so that we we did that quite a lot to just to make sure of stuff so we got the best of both worlds got a really good feel out of it and we kind of did the same thing with the drums too had nick play all the way through without any fills so he would get a real steady beat on it nobody not that he needed to do this but we did it like this and then we would go back and write each fill and punch it in and we were able to do that with the with the digital because it was so it was such an accurate machine and you just keep you can't hear you can't hear the punches you can't do that without you know it's not possible to do that I mean it's a lot more easier with a digital audio and you know digital audio workstations you know like this but that was that was one of the things that we pioneered in in in countdown was the ability to use that sort of techniques to just enhance everything just get everything as more spot on and we actually another thing that Dave and I said we started to to track the rhythm guitars and I said you know what we got to make these tighter they're got to be more accurate and Dave looked to me said yeah he said you're right we got to make it super accurate so so we we got into a whole mindset of just getting everything really really accurate and they weren't in fact on punching on the rhythm guitars they weren't allowed to be any more than one frame in front of the in front of the drums so they had to they had to force themselves to sit back and get right into the groove because most sound yeah yeah yeah because because most guitar players play on top of the beat and they play in front of the beat and that's that's okay but it limits you in how you can mix it if you get everything exactly in time then you can mix it how you want it because nothing it's not going to change you know if you turn things up or turn things down and so so we spent a lot of time doing that the same with Dave Ellis is a great story with David Ellison is when we were tracking the bass he habitually plays about 10 milliseconds in front of the kick drum and we could start to hear this because everything was so accurate and I was saying wait a minute you know what's going on here you know so we we took a look at it and I had a I had a did have a computer at that point but it was only for it's only a two track audio computer and I would we took a look at it and I said are you consistently hitting 10 milliseconds we knew why is because he when he plays live he's 10 or 15 feet away from the drums so he's playing on top of the beat but he's actually in time because by the time the sound gets to him it's 15 milliseconds later so we understood why he was playing like that and then so he says well how do we fix it I said go stand at the back of the room do the dubs from there because that was about 12 feet back from the speakers so he started doing that and all of a sudden bang he's right in he's right in time we're like yeah hey genius you know so amazing all this kind of stuff you know you know and so a lot of this stuff goes into you know a lot a lot of the technical stuff goes into the making of the record and actually does color how the record comes out you know so it's kind of interesting it's just shocking rest in peace okay well you mix that one and you engineered that but you know euthanasia and of course countdown and loudness their albums it's just it's just mind-blowing Alan it's just mind-blowing no I mean and we're only focusing on those three there's a yeah and the other thing that the other thing that happened actually is it's interesting and I I hope hopefully Dave doesn't mind me saying this but at that point I was already tuning vocals with a computer and it wasn't auto tune I was tuning them by hand and in those days I could only get I was using floppy disks and I could only get one phrase about three seconds on a floppy that was the most I could get on there so I have to take each line and one side of the it was a stereo stereo track one side would be timecode one the other side bit of vocal I put it into the computer tune it up retime it because the tuning algorithm I had either stretched or squashed a note so I had to put little marks in there to get it back into time and it would take me about eight ten hours to tune the vocal and when we when we started count then we got to doing the vocals and I said listen I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna do one of these I'm gonna tune one of these tracks for you let you have a listen see what you think so he came in and he said sounds great let's do all of them and I said well it's going to take a long time because I'm doing it on floppy disk but at this point there was a what he likes to call the gigabit drive but there was a half there was a 500 megabyte scuzzy drive that was out there 500 megabyte 500 megabyte scuzzy drive which I could hook up to I was using an Atari ST computer actually to do this and I said listen you buy me the driver's about a thousand bucks I said listen you buy me the drive I'll tune them all for you so he goes done so we went over to the engineering shop in the enterprise and the guy there said oh yeah I got one right here she gave it to us like put it on the bill and I plugged it in and so we ended up tuning up all the all the vocals and uh that that was that was another thing that we did too and it's not like auto tune it's not like you can hit you know what I mean nobody was coming back to me and going oh dude you know it sounds like chair or all this kind of stuff and that's actually that was actually when shared actually came out doing it you know yeah but so that was another thing that we did and I did that on quite a lot of records I did it on death angel act three um I remember I ended up with a box of about 400 floppies with all the vocals on it and um so I did that with uh with those guys yeah mark yeah mark or bon sloth as he's known these days um and uh I uh dangerous toys I did it with them actually dangerous toys was an interesting thing because Jason McMaster was a great singer and he sounds a lot like Axl Rose actually and um he he constantly was like a half tone sharp all the time and I was like you know what this this is going to be a real doll to keep him in tune even if I go in afterwards and tune it I didn't want him that far out of tune so what we did is the feed his headphone feed I gave him I put through a harmonizer and tuned it down half a step and uh so he ended up actually singing pretty much in tune so so you know when they hit the stage that's what I want to hit the stage then why nobody you're not there you're not there max well nobody cares when once you hit the stage you know but uh so you know you have all you have all these tricks and you develop all these tricks and you know you just try and get better at the craft you know and that's what that's what it's all about we definitely have to do a third show because we didn't even touch upon y&t which is the one that want to uh yes I want to be the most interested it's okay you know there's so many more stories there's so many more bands y&t sabotage everybody wants to know about sabotage armored saint we're gonna talk about these guys next time yeah oh okay all right yeah so just bring out the memories unlock the box I'll I'll try you know I want to thank Andy Kern for checking in and he was get to see max after all these years and max it's always a pleasure to have you on the show I mean the stuff we learn every time you're on it's it's it's fascinating yeah well thanks very much I've got one more story about about death yes yes we went we started pre-production I went into pre-production for countdown and we did we went through a lot of the arrangements and one of the things that we thought I was doing at that time and and continue to do with a lot of other bands was to use a moving click track and I might have mentioned this before in the last show but we uh what we do is put the old arrangement in the computer and have that computer change the tempos according to where where you are in the song because uh and the way way you would figure that out is you record a good take on the cassette or whatever when they played it good you go oh this sounds really good this is a good take and then I would tempo map that with a stopwatch and a spreadsheet and so every four bars I would get a tempo for every four bars I would go through go through the whole thing and I would see where the tempo was lifting and it would give you an idea of how that tempo was helping the soul so we I would do that and then I would program that into the again the Atari one of one of my many ataris at that time and we program that in that and I give Nick that click in his headphones and it wasn't just a click it was a whole rhythm track of different stuff up beats downbeats and all that stuff because it was straight click it's very difficult to hear so drummers tend to move off the click until they hear it and then they move back on the click then they oh well there it is there it is there it is so they tend to do this a little bit but if you've got up beats and everything else in there they can groove in it and then just say in the groove and and it's a much easier way for them to stay on a click track so we went through all the songs we did all the arrangements I did I programmed up all the click tracks and then and I drove home to studio city and I left all the equipment in the car because we were going to the enterprise the next day and some guys broke into my car and stole all the equipment so I got to the studio the next day and I said I got some bad news guys we don't have any inter click tracks because they all got stolen so but funnily enough they've been working with these click tracks long enough that we didn't need them anymore so so it ended up that the pre-production once again had really had really like saved the day and so when we went in it was it was it was so much easier and everybody knew what you know where stuff was supposed to be and and how the feel of the song should go so that's one more one more silly story well what about Lita are you finished the album yet uh no we're still mixing what's going on with Lita well you know it's kind of a slow process I mean the stuff is sounding really good and we're going backwards and forwards and she's in rehearsals now and she's been very busy doing photo shoots and rehearsals all this kind of stuff so I basically send them something and then they don't get back to me for about a week and then then I get a bunch of notes and then I go and and I do all the corrections and then I send them out again and so it's going backwards and forwards and I did say to George who's the intermediary between myself and Lita and I said you know is there deadline for this and he goes no don't worry about it just take your time do whatever you've got to do you know so apparently there's still no deadline I don't know she's going out on tour in about two or three weeks so I mean it's not ready so I don't know what you know unless she's got somebody else mixing it they didn't tell me about my clink yeah probably my clink yeah buddy but Mike you weren't the first choice yeah that's it that's right so I don't know you know so I don't know but next time maybe we'll try and get Lita to call in or something I'm sure that she I'm sure she would be you know into doing it but maybe she wants to call in yeah yeah maybe she wants to do it a little a little closer to the release date or whenever that is so yeah that's about to be pushy well yeah that's where we are yeah but it's really is very nice record and I think everybody's gonna really like it and I know she's got a lot of a lot of she's got a pretty big following out there actually so you know and she looks great and she still seems great and the band is good so you know should be it should be very good for her this year and everybody's starting to get back out and tour so that's a really good you know that's a really good thing for the for the industry as a whole you know if not for like sales particularly but you know yeah yeah all right okay friend we will talk again part three coming up okay all right good to see you Jimmy Allen great to see you thanks for inviting me on again very nice sorry I talked too much but you know what I'm really enjoyable and I'm glad you got to speak to Andy too yeah that was really great yeah and I you know I missed the guy and haven't spoke to him literally for since since we did those records so like a lot of these people so you know that's really good and I'll try and get up there and have a couple of beers with him at some point and hopefully yeah we can yeah yeah that'd be good and I want to be big well you guys are in Toronto too aren't you we're in Montreal oh you're in Montreal yeah I think we should all meet in the studio what's left so we'll go sit on the ashes of Lur studio so it'll have to be a labats beer if you're up in labats right labats blue labats that's a good one yeah yeah that's right you'll take a beer with me you know I know what it's I know what it's like up in Montreal all right Max we'll let you go we're gonna have some supper thank you very much thank you so much all right thanks very much guys