Working with Public Enemy and other rap and hip hop groups constituted quite an education for Sansano—technically, because the sonic approach favored by the Bomb Squad was consciously low-tech; and socially, as he was a white boy working on some of the most politically charged African-American music of that era. “It seems as though in the beginning everything I’d learned, [the Bomb Squad] wanted the opposite,” he says with a laugh. “As I would work to clean things up and to get it to sound what I thought was presentable, I quickly learned that this was what they were about, and this is what the whole movement was about, and this is the way it should be, and I had to serve that. I had to forget about everything I knew and just serve what they needed. Then I came to realize that it was just as valid an aesthetic as a more conventional approach. We would go through tons of ways of doing things. It was about experimenting with sound and twisting sounds. And that would influence what I would do later with Sonic Youth. Between what we were doing with Public Enemy and Sonic Youth, by the time I had finished that string of records, I was completely twisted in the other direction.

“With Sonic Youth it was, ‘What is the best way we can overload this preamp? How many can we chain together? If we press all the buttons in on the 1176 and chain it to some other compressor and then overload a preamp, what’ll that sound like?’ We were looking for ways to change the rules and include the dirt and to make the dirt as valid as spending $3,000 a day at a top studio using top-of-the-line microphones. I remember that when we did [Sonic Youth’s] Daydream Nation, the H3000 had just come out, and by the end of the night, we had everything running through it.

“We were looking for a way to present a different picture. It wasn’t like we didn’t know what we were doing. It was conscious, we had a real direction and a certain quality that was undeniable. There was stuff that was accidental that came from just wildly experimenting, but there was always some thought behind it. Just playing, trying to find ways to make things a bit different. And I got that from working with Public Enemy and all those other groups.”

As for the racial issue, “There were times when it would be a little tense,” Sansano acknowledges, “but it was always with some extra bit player; never with the core of guys we worked with day-in and day-out. I still keep in touch with those guys. We had some problems when we did the Ice Cube record, and we had a whole bunch of L.A. people come. Then, with Bell Biv DeVoe, there was a posse, and there would be some hanger-on, some friend-of-a-friend that shouldn’t have been there in the first place that makes you feel uncomfortable or says the comment about race you don’t want to hear. It was unavoidable, I guess, but it never ever got in the way.

“But the musicians always stood behind me. I cleared out the posse a few times,” he chuckles. “You could be the fall guy, because [the group] didn’t want to be the ones to throw out their friends. But there would come a point sometimes when I could just say, ‘Look, we’ve really got to get this done now,’ and people usually respected that.”

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, November, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved