MATT WALLACE

O Allmusic.com é um site-referência pra mim. Pra pegar capinhas de discos q ñ encontro no Metal Archieves, mas mais ainda pra ler sobre bandas e artistas de modo geral, dentro e fora do heavy metal.

A mim, funciona tb como uma enciclopédia, e tenho as resenhas por ali como das mais sensatas.

Semana passada, eis q me deparo com matéria sobre Matt Wallace, produtor hoje renomado, e sua relação com o Faith No More, q conheceu nos primórdios, sendo produtor deles até “Angel Dust”, q discutíamos por aqui esses dias.

A matéria toda em: http://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/faith-no-more-producer-matt-wallace/

Pinço uns trechos por aqui, como aperitivo ou paliativo. Sirvam-se:

AllMusic: You go all the way back with Faith No More to their first record. How did you initially meet them?

Matt Wallace: I met Bill, the bass player, back in ’82 when he was producing a band in the Bay Area, we were all going to UC Berkeley at the time, and he had a band called Your First Born, and he was like, “Here’s this band, do you want to produce it?” I was doing my own self-promotion and marketing at the time, I was putting up fliers where bands would rehearse, at clubs, record stores, and Bill found this thing that said, “Eight-track recordings, 12 dollars an hour,” so he brought in this band, and afterwards he said, “I have my own band, would you record us?”

At the time, they were called Sharp Young Men, and they had a different guitar player and keyboard player, but it was still the same drummer, so you had Bill Gould and Mike Bordin on drums, and I did their first demos, and then they came back and I did a seven-inch single with them. They changed keyboard players and got Roddy Bottum on keyboards and Jim Martin on guitar, and then they became Faith No More. It was Sharp Young Men to Faith No Man to Faith No More, so I started with them a long, long time ago and did their first recordings in my parents’ suburban garage. I’ve been with them from the moment they started up through and including Angel Dust, and I did sound for their very first show, when it was just Mike Bordin and Bill on bass and a guy named Joe on guitar and someone else on vocals, that was the first Faith No More show.

(…)

AllMusic: How did they tell you that they were splitting with  Chuck Mosley and bringing in Mike Patton?

Wallace: I knew that there was a lot of internal frustration in the band. I was a big fan of what Chuck did, I like what he did and I thought he was a good lyricist. He wasn’t technically a great singer but he was a really good frontman, I thought he did a good job and I liked him in the band. Chuck was always the guy who would show up to things at the very, very last minute, and I’d seen him do shows, one time with P.I.L., where the band started to play the set and there was no Chuck anywhere, it was like, “I guess we’ll just do an instrumental set,” and at the last moment Chuck would stumble onstage, either his bus was late or he drank too much or whatever, so I think the band was at a point where everyone except for Chuck was prepared for success, they’d really worked hard and been very, very diligent, they had their eye on what they were trying to accomplish, and at a certain point Chuck felt like he wasn’t like-minded.

(…)

AllMusic: The band must have been excited about having a whole new vocal palette to work with.

Wallace: I think so. Technically, Patton is a ridiculously talented singer, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and to find someone like him, who’s built to sing, he can sing cookie monster, hamburger throat, raging metal stuff all the way to R&B crooning and everything in between, his voice is an instrument. To me, it was pretty apparent that this guy could sing. One of my frustrations was that during the making of The Real Thing, when we were doing a song like “Epic,” he’d sing in that really nasally voice. It was interesting, but then when you’d stop recording, on his own he’d sing with this really big, full-bodied voice between takes, and I was like, “Oh my god, we should get that on the recording,” because I thought he was such a technically good singer that we should have done that. We certainly argued about it, and what ended up on the record is the thing which, to his credit, I think was the right approach, it was very angsty, teenager-y, that kind of vibe, and I think that was what really spoke to a lot of the young people who ultimately heard that record.

So that was someone who had a lot of tools in the toolbox and he could try on different things and take different approaches. From the moment he started singing, I just thought, “Wow, this guy is really something.” And he wrote all of the lyrics for that album within two weeks, and some of those lyrics are really stunningly impressive, I think, for a young guy who was maybe 19 years old at the time, that was really something to be able to walk in, the music was already done, the band was not going to change the music or the arrangements, so he had to shoehorn his ideas into that, and I think he did an admirable job of jumping on board with a band that was somewhat established and made it work. He was ready to work hard. Patton was always kind of still attached to Bungle, he had a foot in two different camps, and that was apparent for quite a while. But when he was present in Faith No More, he was really a force to be reckoned with.

(…)

AllMusic: After Angel Dust did you think Martin would be back, or was it obvious that they had to make a change?

Wallace: At the end of Angel Dust, because it was such a difficult record to make, there was pretty severe acrimony within the band, certainly between everyone and Jim, and there were some really heated arguments. Roddy was having his own struggles with some addiction issues, we were at a recording studio that really wasn’t supportive at all, I had to basically produce, engineer, assistant engineer and answer the phones, and it was a really stressful record to make. So at the end of it I took off for a couple of months and said, “I’m done with this music thing for a while,” and at the end of that record I said to those guys, “Listen, I think it’s time for you to find a new producer, a new guitarist or both.”

I like those guys, I’m friends with them and we still talk, there wasn’t any malice or anger, I just said, “I’m done, I think I’ve probably taken you guys as far as I can take you, maybe you need some fresh blood in this band,” and it seemed like Jim was not that interested. We did a lot of work, we did all the guitars, but it was always separate. It would be him and I, then all the other guys would come in afterwards, so it was a very difficult situation to navigate. But I didn’t expect to work with them after that record, the writing was on the wall and I was stating the obvious. He was just not into the music they were making.

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Uma única dúvida q me ocorre, por ora: será q nenhum site ou revista por aqui se interessará em traduzir e publicar isto?