Arts & Life

Dave Grohl explores rock history in ‘Sound City’

In the Southern Californian valley, next to the Budweiser Brewery and a slew of suburban homes, sits a little studio named Sound City.

The place is a dump, with brown shag-carpet on the walls, stained floors and a bare-walled white, square room where most of the recording takes place. It wouldn’t cross most people’s minds that top albums like Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors,” Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “One Hot Minute,” Queens of the Stone Age’s “Rated R” and countless Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s titles have all been recorded to tape in the same outdated building.

Foo Fighters’ main man and former drummer of Nirvana, Dave Grohl, organized and directed a documentary to honor the studio and what it offered to the music history. “Sound City Movie,” which was officially released on Thursday, marks Grohl’s first feature film as a director.

The movie starts out with a simple history of how the studio, which used to be a Vox Amplifier factory, started in the late 1960s and went on to become one of music’s landmarks in rock ‘n’ roll history. The instillation of the “Neve Board,” a massive one-of-a-kind studio soundboard, made Sound City stand out to musicians like Tom Petty and Neil Young. Artists flocked to the studio to use the high-quality equipment that was provided, and they stayed for the hospitality.

Grohl, who started making the movie after purchasing the “Neve Board” in 2011, devotes a scene in the film to something called the “drum sound” in Sound City. Something that anybody can overlook in any song, the drums, was one of the main reasons why musicians would travel to the studio to hold recording sessions. The “drum sound” even brought together members of Fleetwood Mac, who formed in 1973 in Sound City.

An extensive array of archive footage and interviews with past managers, record producers and musicians who worked at Sound City offer an idea of what the environment was like before computers and pro-tool technology existed. Musicians had to practice before they entered the studio. Imperfections were expected. Manual labor was necessary.

With the ability to edit and mix an entire album on any laptop, most young musicians take the efforts that go into making music for granted. Relying on technology, the film argues, has the ability to make artists lazy.

Grohl, however, does include clips of Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor, who creates most of his industrial, anger-filled rock music with computers. Unlike most musicians who use computers, Reznor does not rely on the machine to make his sound blemish-free. He rather uses computers as an instrument and not as a buffer.

A focus on digital versus analog gives the film not only a look into the history of the music industry, but it also gives another perspective and depth on the creative process of making music.

After Grohl purchases the “Neve Board” and installs it into his own studio, Studio 606, he gathers the Sound City artists to relive the tonal qualities that emulate from the board. Basically, an ultimate jam session takes place among greats like Rick Springfield, Stevie Nicks, Trent Reznor, Josh Homme and John Fogerty.

The film crescendos when Grohl invites former members of Nirvana, bassist Krist Novoselic and guitarist Pat Smear, to jam with the mop-top originator and song writing extraordinaire, Paul McCartney. The four men entered the mike-filled room and did multiple live takes of a heavy blues rock song that was written on the spot, “Cut Me Some Slack.”

While Grohl pounded his drums and McCartney belted vocals into the microphone, Smear and Novoselic got back into their Nirvana-days groove and blended their amplified distortion into the energy of the song.

One of the most heart-warming aspects of the film was getting to see the artists at work. An inside look at how music-greats create the sounds in their heads by using physical instruments and recording it onto a reel to reel tape recorder gives hope that music and rock ‘n’ roll may still have a heartbeat.
 

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