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“I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone,” he says. “As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1 kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with.” But the coup de grace for the sound was when Z pumped the processed and blended sample through an Auratone speaker set upside down atop another snare drum, which rattled the metal snares and gave the result some ambience and even more high end. The whole thing was limited slightly and then sent to a track on a roll of Ampex 456 running on a Studer A800 at 15 ips. Only a slight amount of reverb was added to the track later on. The sonic result was closer to a hollow wood block sound than any snare found on a conventional rock record, and in becoming, along with Gift’s vocals, the signature of the song, it would go on to have many lives of its own subsequent to the single’s run up the charts. More on that in a moment.
Guitars got similarly complex treatment that belied the seeming simplicity of their final sound. The staccato single-note lines were actually layered six deep, with a few chords thrown in here and there. Some of the lines and chords were actually recorded only once, then manually triggered from a sampler during playback and mixing. One of the lines was also played back through an underwater pool-type speaker Z had laying around, then re-recorded to tape, giving it a muted, mysterious quality that no onboard or outboard EQ could mimic.
“What really made the guitars stand out, though, was that as Andy [Cox] was playing to chord parts, I was slowly twisting the EQ from one extreme to the other, giving it this wah effect,” says Z. “So every part on the record has a very individual and unique sound. But there aren’t many parts at all, so the space between them becomes part of the sound.”
Gift’s vocals were recorded a couple of days later through a Neumann U87 microphone. Up to that point, the band had been rewriting the lyrics as they went along. As they came together, so did small but perfectly phrased vocal scats by Gift, as punchy and precisely placed as the guitar lines. “It was a matter of small things like that that were giving the track a personality to match the attitude of the new lyrics and the sentiment of the new title,” says Z. “To me, that was as important as the snare sound and anything else. Every note on the track and every sound had its own sense of purpose, and all worked toward supporting the attitude of the song.” And because each of the parts were recorded individually—there was no drummer on the song—the processes of tracking and overdubbing blurred into each other. “Parts worked off other parts and the groove, not off of a basic track,” he adds. One result of that was a record that just about mixed itself. Because most of the sounds and signal processing were recorded during tracking, the mix consisted more of muting tracks than effecting them. “I don’t like to leave decisions for later,” says Z. “I like to make them as they go down. It’s more spontaneous. So it sounds on the multitrack the way it’s going to sound in the final mix pretty much. It really keeps people involved in the process of recording, not having to wait to see how it’s all going to come together in the end during the mix. You don’t spend the entire recording process trying to imagine what it’s going to sound like. It already sounds like what it’s going to sound like.”
Reaction to the record was initially mixed from the label. Z recalls that a general comment was that Gift’s vocals were too low in the track. “That was one of those pop music arguments, where they always want the vocal to be the center of attention and way out in front,” he says. “No one in the band agreed with that, and we just said go and listen to a Rolling Stones record, and let us know how far the vocals are up front on that.” Meanwhile, Z also notes, label exec Jehrl Busby from distributing label MCA told the band it was a hit the moment he heard it in his office.
It was. But while “She Drives Me Crazy” would go on to be included in dozens of compilation records over the next decade, the snare sound created by David Z would have even more of a life, both by being approximated in various interpretations on records and commercial tracks and by being blatantly sampled on other recordings. The one that stands out most in Z’s mind is its appearance on a national Pepsi-Cola campaign a few years after the single was a hit. “It was all over television, and there was no doubt as to what had inspired the sound,” he says. “But it was before people thought seriously about protecting things like sounds. The legalities of sampling were still being thrashed out. No one was sure if you could copyright a beat or a groove. I’m still not sure. All I know is, I went to my lawyer about the Pepsi spot, and he said to me, ‘What are you gonna do? Pepsi has a lot of money and a lot of lawyers.’ Did I feel like being an expensive test case? It was so recognizable that any court would have seen it immediately. But who knows, and that’s one of the pitfalls of making something sound very unique, of not just going for the usual pop sounds. Besides, it was so easy to steal—the song starts out with nothing but the groove, so no one has to do a lot of cleaning up or editing to sample it.”
The matter irked Z but hardly traumatized him. He just went on to the next thing and the next sound and the next groove. “If you’re going to get crazy about stuff like that, you lose sight of why you did it in the first place,” he says. “If I didn’t like music so much, I wouldn’t have been in the studio in the first place.”
As for Fine Young Cannibals, they had a second Number One hit from the album Good Thing, a Number 11 song with “Don’t Look Back,” won Best Group and Best Album honors at the Brit Awards in 1990, but have all but dropped from sight since.
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Reprinted with permission from
Magazine, March, 2001© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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