fifteen

FREE FALLIN’

I’ll bet you a couple of grams this is a… smash hit.

—WADDY WACHTEL

WADDY WACHTEL ALWAYS HATED GOING HOME. BEING AN EXTROVERT by nature and loving the company of other musicians, Wachtel would often swing by a recording studio just to have the chance to hang out with some pals after leaving a session of his own elsewhere. And if the place he was visiting also happened to have some adult beverages available, then so much the better.

While cruising down Ventura Boulevard one afternoon in January of 1981 in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, Wachtel decided to stop in at Record One, a new, state-of-the-art recording studio co-owned, built, and operated by the producer Val Garay. Long wanting to have a place of his own after having spent many years working mostly at the Sound Factory, Garay had partnered with the billionaire shopping-mall builder Mel Simon to create a facility that instantly became a favorite among many recording stars, including James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and Don Henley.

As Wachtel stepped inside through the back alleyway door, designed so Record One’s high-profile clientele could come and go unnoticed, Garay came hustling over.

“I’m really glad you’re here,” he said. “Josh is sick. Would you mind filling in on Kim’s session?”

Josh Leo, a brilliant guitarist who had been diagnosed with cancer, fell ill at the last moment, leaving him unable to make that day’s scheduled recording date for the singer Kim Carnes. Coming off a Top Ten hit from the year before, “More Love,” the attractive, blonde-haired, husky-voiced Carnes, who had been putting out albums since 1971 and writing songs even longer, was finally poised to become a headliner after years of working in the shadows. With Garay, her new producer on board, Carnes was in the middle of rehearsing for her new album, to be called Mistaken Identity.

While actively looking for quality songs for the new Carnes project, both Carnes and Garay were receptive when Donna Weiss, a well-known backup singer and songwriter, called one day to ask if she could swing by the studio.

“I’ve got a song that would be perfect for Kim,” Weiss enthused.

“Sure, come on over,” Garay replied. He loved finding unexpected gems.

But as Weiss sang the much-anticipated tune for Carnes and Garay while Weiss’s friend provided accompaniment on Garay’s office piano, it quickly became clear that it just wasn’t the right fit, at least not for Carnes.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” Garay said politely as he glanced at Carnes, who was equally ambivalent.

“Well, you know, I have another song that I gave to George Tobin and nothing ever came of it,” Weiss offered.

Tobin, a well-known pop music producer, had worked with Carnes on her last album, Romance Dance. It was her decision to discontinue work with him after that project, which had led to Garay stepping in as her new producer. And Carnes had liked the song too when Weiss first presented it the year before. But Tobin somehow didn’t want to cut it.

“Well, give me the demo,” Garay said, smiling.

After Weiss did so and Garay played it, he couldn’t get the odd tune out of his head for days afterward. Recorded almost like a Leon Russell–style boogie-woogie number on piano with a female vocalist singing about a powerfully manipulative woman who always gets her way, Garay nonetheless liked the melody and loved the lyrics. He felt sure it could be a hit if reworked. But how?

Strumming the song’s chords on his acoustic guitar for several days afterward, Garay gradually began to reduce the tempo, taking it from upbeat down to slinky. He then approached Bill Cuomo, Carnes’s keyboardist, about creating some kind of unique arrangement that would help bring it to life.

“Come up with a riff that can play under this song,” Garay directed.

Cuomo, leaning heavily on the use of a then cutting-edge Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 synthesizer, promptly obliged in abundance by crafting a catchy, syncopated blend of breathy synth pads (sounds) on the intro, verses, and chorus that blew Garay away. All of a sudden the peculiar-yet-riveting little song written by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon was contemporary and cool. But there was to be one more crucial element soon added.

During the three weeks of woodshedding for Mistaken Identity at nearby Leeds Rehearsal Studios in North Hollywood, a popular spot used by many big-time producers and musicians looking to polish their material without spending a fortune on daily recording studio rental rates, Garay, Carnes, and their group of players worked hard at shaping all the songs, perhaps none more diligently than Craig Krampf. Brought in by Garay to be the album’s drummer, Krampf kept fooling around on almost every song with a new contraption called a Synare. A precursor of today’s highly evolved electronic drum kits that look, sound, and play remarkably like their traditional acoustic cousins, the comparatively primitive Synare consisted of a series of hard rubber pads connected to a sound-producing “brain” unit. Striking a corresponding pad with a drum stick would then yield whatever sound had been assigned.

In particular, the big selling point of the Synare had to do with the sophisticated (for its time) built-in waveform oscillator that generated sawtooth, pulse, and white noise impulses that would bend and shape anything fed through them like so much sonic Silly Putty. The results often could be downright bizarre, depending on how far the programmer/drummer wanted to take it. And although the Synare perfectly captured where so much of popular music was headed and, for that matter, had already gone (the sound of the whip cracking on Devo’s “Whip It” and the alternating thwack on Gary Numan’s “Cars” are good examples), a bunch of futuristic clatter wasn’t remotely what Val Garay wanted to hear.

“If you play that thing one more time I’m going to cut off both your arms,” a fed-up Garay shouted during one session. But the incorrigible Krampf persisted, slyly squeezing in his new toy whenever possible until yet another rebuke came his way. And when it came time to rehearse the Weiss/DeShannon song, by the second verse Krampf couldn’t help himself—he was at it again.

Only this time around Garay loved it.

Pounding out a thin, metallic, whap-whap whap, whap-whap whap pattern, almost like the sound of someone slapping on a screen door to be let in, it provided an unexpectedly powerful counterpoint to both the song’s melody and Carnes’s vocals.

“Man, I want to marry you,” an overjoyed Garay kiddingly gushed.

Garay considered Krampf’s improvised effect to be possibly the most perfectly placed piece of percussion he had ever heard. But then again, that was also a producer’s job—a good producer anyway. Having an open mind and a keen ear for just the right contribution could sometimes make all the difference.

Back at Record One after all the rehearsing, and now with Waddy Wachtel sitting in, it was finally time to record Garay’s favorite track, the one Cuomo and Krampf had made that much better. With all the musicians in the tracking room and Carnes positioned in a vocal booth adjoining the control room while singing into the same Neumann U 67 mic Garay had been favoring for the better part of the past decade (going back to Linda Ronstadt on “You’re No Good” in 1974), the first take took everyone’s breath away.

Singing lines such as, “She’s precocious / And she knows just what it takes to make a pro blush / All the boys think she’s a spy / She’s got Bette Davis Eyes,’” Carnes leaned into “Bette Davis Eyes” with her seductive, sultry best. For good measure, after playing a steady pattern of rhythmic eighth-notes throughout the song on his Les Paul, Wachtel tossed in some guitar work toward the end that sounded like dogs barking.

After asking everyone to give the song a couple more passes just to see if they could do even better, Garay realized after take three that the first one had been the keeper. As did everyone else in the room, including Waddy Wachtel.

As some of the musicians, including Carnes and Wachtel, then walked into the control room to hear the playback, Wachtel turned to Garay and said, “Val, this is a smash. I’ll bet you anything. I’ll bet you a couple of grams this is a fucking smash hit.”

And it was. Except more so than Waddy Wachtel could have ever imagined.

“Bette Davis Eyes” flew up the charts upon its release in March of 1981, spending an astounding nine weeks at number one and becoming Billboard’s biggest-selling song of the year (and eventually the second biggest seller for the entire decade of the eighties). From there, during the nationally televised Grammy Awards show the following year, Garay sat in the audience and watched as Kenny Loggins—who had finally become the solo star he had always wanted to be on the heels of such hits as “Whenever I Call You Friend” with Stevie Nicks and “I’m Alright” from the film Caddyshack—announced from the stage that “Bette Davis Eyes” was now the Record of the Year as well.

But as much as “Bette Davis Eyes” delighted millions of listeners during the early eighties, it also demonstrated that, with few exceptions, the days of album rock being the most popular genre in the land were over, making Bob Dylan’s lyrics “He not busy being born is busy dying” from his landmark song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” in 1965 especially prophetic in regard to the rock bands of the seventies who were still left on the scene.

BY THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1985 JAMES PANKOW HAD FINALLY taken all he could. The band Chicago’s accomplished trombonist, songwriter, horn arranger, and die-hard loyalist was in the middle of a tense meeting with his fellow bandmates to discuss the future of Chicago’s lead singer/bassist, Peter Cetera. And it wasn’t going well.

Having just completed a huge spring tour in support of Chicago 17, their multiplatinum comeback LP, the group was back on top of the charts after a long slide. Once the hottest band in the land with five straight number-one albums back in the seventies, the combination of the tragic death of their guitarist, Terry Kath, along with the departure of James Guercio as their longtime hit-making producer and manager, not to mention the American public’s changing music tastes, had left the septet (and sometimes octet) adrift.

But just when Chicago needed it most, along came the producer, songwriter, and pianist extraordinaire David Foster. Hooking up with the band through the combined efforts of Chicago’s drummer, Danny Seraphine, and the Grammy-winning Bill Champlin—the group’s recently hired, gravelly voiced singer, songwriter, keyboardist, and sometimes guitarist who had been brought in to help fill Kath’s immense void—the Canadian-born Foster immediately made his presence felt.

Chicago 16, recorded in early 1982 for Full Moon/Warner Bros. Records at several Los Angeles–area studios, including Davlen in North Hollywood and the Record Plant West’s new location in Hollywood just off Santa Monica Boulevard, miraculously served to resurrect the career of a band who had sorely lost its way. The admitted control freak Foster was a whirlwind of direction and activity while also cowriting eight out of the ten songs. Yet in doing so he additionally chose to radically alter the band’s traditional sound by placing a distinct emphasis on adding layers of synthesizers, precision drumming, and plenty of strings. Foster even had the courage to bring in outside session musicians, including three from Toto, to augment his aural vision, something the once-mighty Chicago would have never tolerated in the past. Further, within all the sonic rearranging Foster elected to decrease the use of Chicago’s signature three-piece horn section, something that pleased no one in the band except for Peter Cetera.

With a hit record on their hands, however, for the first time in years (Chicago 16 climbed to number nine on the Billboard 200), Chicago’s members for the most part looked the other way as Foster ran the show. They had done the same with James Guercio as their producer for over a decade—the band was used to being told what to do in the studio. Plus, on tour there were still all their older hits to be played too, providing lots of room for the three horns and Robert Lamm’s Hammond B3 organ to still shine.

But the bigger issue with Chicago 16 seemed rather benign at first. The adult contemporary sound Foster had implemented suited Cetera perfectly, letting him be the love-song balladeer he had always aspired to be. Which in and of itself wasn’t a big deal to the other members—they had always been an unusually team-oriented band. If syrupy power ballads were the order of the day, then they would just have to suck it up and go with the flow. Whatever it took to be on the radio and sell records again. Except that as Cetera’s prominence grew as Chicago’s emerging front man, in the view of some of his bandmates so did his ego, which fostered a brewing resentment. To them it felt like the group had suddenly become “Peter Cetera and Chicago.”

Having both cowritten and sung the album’s huge breakout single, “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”—only the second number-one hit in Chicago’s illustrious gold-record-filled history following Cetera’s own “If You Leave Me Now” back in 1976—the pendulum of intraband power had begun to swing sharply in Peter Cetera’s direction. Especially as he had also quickly developed a close working relationship with Foster, who clearly saw the high-tenor Cetera as the voice and face of Chicago going forward.

Three years later, though, by the spring of 1985, after Chicago had released the Record Plant–recorded Chicago 17 in 1984 to even greater sales and acclaim than its predecessor (with no fewer than four more Cetera-sung singles becoming chart-busting hits), Chicago’s unity was put to the ultimate test. Cetera made it clear that he wanted to now record a solo album and would also like to cut back on touring. He was exhausted too—surely the band could understand. Phil Collins got to come and go from Genesis as he pleased. Why couldn’t Cetera have the same opportunity?

But the rest of the guys in Chicago didn’t understand. They were as big now as they had been in the seventies, the grateful recipients of something few musicians ever get to experience: a second chance at being on the top of the world. To think of suddenly slamming the brakes on their hard-won momentum by taking a bunch of time off was ludicrous. Especially after several in the group had willingly sacrificed their input and roles. If it was going to be a Cetera-dominated band, well, then, okay, they could deal with that on a musical level—for now anyway. But he didn’t get to call all the shots. Chicago was still a democracy and a brotherhood. And one of the siblings was in dire need of some tough love. Which is why the meeting had been called in the offices of HK Management. It was time to clear the air.

As Peter Cetera and the other band members each had their say during the hour-long conclave, the frustration in the room was palpable. Though hopes were high going in, by the end nothing had changed. Cetera remained unwilling to make an exclusive commitment to Chicago. Either they let him do it his way… or not.

After Cetera left, the other six hashed it all out. Maybe it really was time to do the previously unthinkable, some offered: find a new bass player and lead singer. Chicago had to continue, one way or another. Millions of dollars and a virtually unprecedented career rebirth were at stake. As the discussion continued, James Pankow, for one, felt himself get more and more angry. Who did Cetera think he was?

Able to take no more, Pankow suddenly stood up, spun around, and slammed his fist into the wall. As the plasterboard turned to powder and showered into the air, his bandmates looked on, stunned. But Pankow had made his point, and the others were in agreement: Peter Cetera would be given the chance to sign a deal with the band that would include him agreeing to go back out on tour with Chicago and put any ideas about a solo album to the side for the time being. Otherwise, it was time to move on.

But when Cetera received a phone call from the group’s management providing the details of the proposed contract, Cetera told them that Chicago would just have to look for another bass player. In Cetera’s view the band had forced his hand. He didn’t want to leave, but he was going to do a solo album. Period.

Which Cetera soon did, with 1986’s Solitude/Solitaire. Containing the worldwide smashes “The Glory of Love” from the blockbuster film The Karate Kid and “The Next Time I Fall,” a duet with Amy Grant, it ensconced Cetera as an adult contemporary star. Chicago would also go on to postsplit success, at least for a while. They brought in Jason Scheff (the son of Elvis’s bassist Jerry Scheff), a young, gifted bass player with a tenor voice and sense of phrasing that uncannily resembled Cetera. And for another few years the hits would continue, although the band was never quite at the same level and certainly produced nothing that sounded like the hard-driving rock/jazz/blues they used to play. But by the end of the decade even the uncommonly resilient Chicago, who had weathered everything thrown at them for almost a quarter-century, would start to feel the career-altering effects of popular music taking perhaps its biggest and most permanent left turn yet.

IN THE SPRING OF 1990, WHEN THE DRUMMER TRIS IMBODEN’S home phone rang, he couldn’t have known that the incoming call would be nothing short of a lifesaver. Having been a stalwart in the Los Angeles recording studio world for the better part of two decades, Imboden had come to prominence in the late seventies as the newly solo Kenny Loggins’s main drummer. Starting in 1978 with Nightwatch, the second Loggins LP after Kenny’s split from his longtime musical partner, Jim Messina, the cheerful Imboden, a veritable groove machine, played on hit single after hit single for his new boss. On million-sellers from “This Is It” to “I’m Alright” to “Heart to Heart,” Imboden sat behind the kit both in the studio and on tour while watching Loggins steadily become a star. But it was one song in particular that pushed Loggins over the top.

Three years after Loggins’s success in writing and singing the song “I’m Alright” for 1981’s Caddyshack, the producers of a new film about a rebellious high school dancer asked Loggins to once again write and sing a song for a theatrical release. Only this time it was to be the title tune.

With the perfectionist Loggins instructing his band to practice his evolving composition during the sound check each afternoon before every concert, after a month all the musicians (outside of Loggins) had become sick of it. When the day finally came for recording Loggins’s handiwork in late 1983 at the Record Plant in L.A., after just two takes the new movie theme song was done and in the can—the band knew it that well. And still hated it. They figured the simplistic little ditty would have a short shelf life.

“At least that’s the last time we’ll ever have to play that piece-of-shit song again,” a laughing Tris Imboden said to his bandmate, the bassist Nathan East, as the two walked out to their cars afterward.

Except the joke was on Imboden.

Instead of becoming a throwaway, 1984’s “Footloose” went straight to number one and became the biggest smash of Loggins’s lengthy solo career, with his band subsequently resigning themselves to playing it nightly thereafter.

But as the eighties came to a close, even the superstar Loggins began losing audience share. The hits had evaporated, ultimately leaving Tris Imboden looking for work. That’s why the phone call he received out of the blue from Chicago’s Bill Champlin came at such a welcome time. The band was replacing their old drummer.

“How would you like to join Chicago?” Champlin asked, getting right to the point.

“Are you kidding me?” Imboden gasped. “Hell, yes!”

After the departure of Peter Cetera in 1985, Chicago had soldiered on, surprising many by scoring six more Billboard Top Forty hits by the end of the decade. The band seemed to be the exception to the sharp decline in popularity among most album-rock bands by the late eighties. Yes, Chicago had changed their sound along the way too—if you closed your eyes, you might not even know it was the same bunch of players. 1988’s “What Kind of Man Would I Be?” was a long way from 1970’s “25 or 6 to 4” (which Chicago ironically remade during this later period to little notice). But success is success, especially in the music business. It’s taken where it’s found. Unfortunately for Tris Imboden, however, he joined his dream band precisely at the wrong time.

By 1991, a year into Imboden’s new position, Chicago’s longtime album-rock competitors such as the Doobie Brothers, Santana, REO Speedwagon, Heart, and even the seemingly imperishable Fleetwood Mac had all dropped off the charts for good. Carole King was gone. Ronstadt and Benatar too. Chicago appeared to be one of the few from the old days in the L.A. studios still standing. Until even they weren’t.

Despite the band’s tried-and-true dependence in later years on a slew of Diane Warren–penned songs (she had become a certifiable hit-writing juggernaut for dozens of artists in the eighties), Chicago Twenty 1, released in 1991, contained no hit singles and could do no better than sixty-six on Billboard’s Top 200, making it Chicago’s worst-selling album since 1980’s XIV, back when the band was still reeling from guitarist Terry Kath’s untimely death. But this time was different. There was no loss of confidence or lack of interest or direction on their part. They had stayed true to their late-eighties-style formula. Only now it was the nineties. Popular music had changed yet again. Chicago’s balladry held little appeal for the millions of teens and twentysomethings who bought the majority of CDs. Those consumers hungered to hear rap and, especially, a fast-rising style of music known as the “Seattle Sound.”

AS TOM PETTY BEGAN PLUNKING A CHORD PATTERN ON THE PIANO in the key of F, his friend and producer, Jeff Lynne (the founder and former leader of Electric Light Orchestra), stopped what he was doing nearby, his natural musical instincts piqued.

“You played one chord too many,” he said, smiling.

As Petty continued, he cut his simple, lilting riff down to three chords, then added some impromptu vocals.

“She’s a good girl / Loves her mama / Loves Jesus / And America too.”

Thinking it to be all in fun, just a silly little tune designed to get Lynne to laugh, Petty continued making up verses.

“It’s a long day / Livin’ in Reseda / There’s a freeway / Runnin’ through the yard.”

But when Petty got to the chorus, just before he creating his next line, Lynne leaned over and said, “Free falling.”

With the utter simplicity and appropriateness of the two words catching Petty by surprise, he began singing them over and over while going up an octave.

“And I’m freeee, free fallin’.”

Within a few short minutes, when he least expected it, Petty, with Lynne’s help, had just composed a future hit song about aspects of his life from back when he had left his native Florida many years before for the big time in Los Angeles. The title also reflected the state in which the album-rock world, which Petty had been a part of for so long in L.A., now found itself. In the wake of Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s previous album, 1987’s Let Me Up I’ve Had Enough, having been the band’s poorest-charting effort since 1978, Petty, by 1988, had decided to cut a solo LP instead as his next musical venture. And rather than record the whole thing (Full Moon Fever) at Sound City as he had done so many times before, Petty elected to utilize a variety of studios around town, including—tellingly—his bandmate Mike Campbell’s well-equipped garage facility where Petty wrote and ultimately recorded “Free Fallin’.”

By this time, in the late eighties, high-end recording gear had become far more affordable, for the first time allowing many professional musicians the luxury of building their own studios at home. Which left places like Sound City on the outside looking in. Rather than changing with the times and investing in digital equipment, the Sound City owners had chosen to stick with what they knew: racks of increasingly obsolete analog gear. Their refusal to switch to digital left them uncompetitive in relation to premier studios such as the Record Plant, the Village Recorder, and Sunset Sound just as analog tape machines and consoles were now also being sold by the likes of Guitar Center, which opened in 1985, and the venerable West L.A. Music, which had been around since the sixties. If an act wanted digital recording capabilities, they could go to one of the big studios in town. If they wanted analog, well, there were plenty of ever-more affordable choices, including just setting things up in their own garage.

Keith Olsen, however, had seen digital recording’s value early on. He had already been integrating its use into his studio, Goodnight LA, for some time. Sound City, his next-door neighbor, had not. Excruciatingly slow though it was in its earliest incarnations, the editing options digital provided were worth it alone, in some cases able to shave hours, if not days, from a project’s timeline. Instead of manually cutting and splicing two-inch magnetic tape every time an edit needed to happen as he had done since the sixties, Olsen could now simply make the corrections on a computer screen with the audio wave forms for each track right in front of him. For a natural-born tinkerer and techie like Olsen, digital’s possibilities were a gift from the heavens. And as he got better and better at it, he became the man to talk to.

Further, from Olsen’s vantage point as one of the top record producers of his era, he knew all along he was going to have to go after as many genres as he could if he wanted to stay relevant as the eighties headed toward the nineties. He in no way wanted to be pigeonholed—that was a quick way to see a career disappear.

By then the once all-inclusive Top Forty–style of radio programming that had done its best to offer something for everyone was but a fond memory. In its place had come a mind-numbing mélange of genre-specific formats (and subformats), all fighting for their slice of people’s attention. With AM radio mostly having ceded its airwaves to news, talk, and sports during the eighties, FM was now the wide-ranging musical home to stations that featured oldies, classic rock, adult contemporary, active rock, adult album alternative, mainstream rock, urban, and a dizzying array of other niches, including several country formats. Gone were the days of hearing Johnny Cash followed by Led Zeppelin followed by Joni Mitchell all on one Top Forty station. Though Top Forty was still around too, it had long since changed by the mid-eighties, evolving into a tightly scripted “contemporary hit radio” showcase for the kind of pop music that dominated MTV, featuring acts such as Madonna, Lionel Ritchie, Culture Club, and Bananarama. But other forms of music were still around as well, if in rapidly changing forms.

With heavy metal and glam rock more or less merging in the mid- to late eighties to create the red-hot genre of so-called hair metal, Olsen decided to go with that particular trend and find some of his own clients with whom to work. Van Halen had basically started the whole thing in 1978, with Dio and, especially, Guns N’ Roses, putting their own mammoth imprints on the genre by the mid-eighties. And from there Mötley Crüe, Poison, Quiet Riot, Ratt, and a swarm of others featuring preposterously teased hair and spandex leggings took the visuals to almost a comic-book level. In their own theatrical way these bands were all trying to pick up where the hard rock Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple left off in the late seventies, with more than a dash of the flashiness of David Bowie, T. Rex, and Mott the Hoople mixed in for good measure.

Subsequently producing platinum albums for premier metal acts such as Whitesnake, Ozzy Osbourne, and the Scorpions as the decade came to a close, Olsen made the transition as well as anyone in the business. But as the eighties became the nineties, hair metal finally began falling out of favor too. Just like always, popular music was moving on to reflect the tastes of the younger generation.

As an almost direct reaction to the onslaught of all the over-the-top glitz that hair metal bands had thrown in people’s faces, a stripped-down, punk-influenced genre known first as the Seattle Sound then as “grunge” began gaining traction by the beginning of the nineties. Grunge featured bands such as Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, and Screaming Trees that wore their disillusionment on their stereotypically plaid flannel shirt sleeves by proffering a frenetic, often three-chord-driven, highly distorted sound aimed at eliminating all subtlety and any questions about their disaffected, glowering intentions—they were pretty much anti-everything.

DURING THE SPRING OF 1991, HAVING JUST COME OFF OF PRODUCING what would be the Scorpions’ last big album, Crazy World, featuring the worldwide smash “Winds of Change,” which had so perfectly mirrored the recent fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Keith Olsen was sitting in his office one day at Goodnight LA when his receptionist, Victoria Seeger, stuck her head inside his door.

“Keith, there’s a Butch Vig here that would like to see you.”

Vig, an exceedingly intelligent, mild-mannered son of a physician, had grown up fascinated with music. His mother, a free-thinking teacher who loved practically every genre, frequently brought home records ranging from Frank Sinatra to the Camelot soundtrack to the latest Top Forty rock-and-roll hits played on the local AM radio station. Though a fan of British Invasion bands such as the Beatles and Herman’s Hermits along with their American “answer” Paul Revere and the Raiders, it was particularly while watching the Who’s manic Keith Moon and his exploding drums during a now-famous telecast of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968 that led Vig to desperately want a kit of his own.

Subsequently playing drums in various pop-rock bands with names like the Rat Finks and Eclipse throughout his grade school, junior high, and high school years in and around his hometown of tiny Viroqua, Wisconsin, Butch Vig graduated, after several stops and starts, from the nearby (two hours away) University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early eighties with a degree in communication arts and with only one thought on his mind: playing more music.

After pairing up with a close friend and fellow musician, Steve Marker, the two opened a fledgling recording facility in Madison called Smart Studios with a tiny amount of basic gear, including a twelve-channel mixing board, a Space Echo unit, and a used compressor from a garage sale. Catering to the needs of local bands and those who might be passing through on the concert trail, Smart Studios gradually became known by the mid- to late eighties as the place to lay down some tracks in the greater Madison area and, for that matter, the entire upper Midwest.

With Vig’s reputation for especially bringing out the best in up-and-coming alternative-rock bands such as Killdozer, Tad, and the Smashing Pumpkins, the Sub Pop record label in Seattle eventually approached him about producing a three-piece band they had under contract called Nirvana. Consisting of the charismatic Kurt Cobain on guitar and vocals (and as chief songwriter) along with Chad Channing on drums (soon to be replaced by Dave Grohl) and Krist Novoselic on bass, Nirvana traveled to Madison and cut most of an album with Vig at Smart Studios.

But while waiting several months to then hear back about mixing the record, Vig got a call from Novoselic telling him the band had signed a new deal with Geffen Records and wanted Vig to join them in Los Angeles to produce it. Agreeing to be their man, Vig then flew to California and, with a tiny budget in hand from Geffen of only $65,000 to complete the entire project, he and the band ended up at the by-then mostly empty, exceedingly affordable Sound City, which cost only six hundred bucks a day.

While spending a little over two weeks in the studio with Nirvana, Vig coaxed and cajoled one memorable performance after another out of Cobain, Novoselic, and Grohl on songs such as “Lithium,” “Come as You Are,” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Sound City’s reputation for making drum sounds come alive especially pleased both Vig and Grohl, who knew how important a solid bottom end was to any good recording.

Toward the end of cutting the album, however, as Vig found himself in need of possibly adding some percussion effects, he popped next door to talk with Keith Olsen. Vig, being a longtime student of the recording industry in terms of the major producers and engineers, was well aware of the living legend working right next door at Goodnight LA, who just so happened to have been responsible for the Neve mixing console Vig had been using—and loving—inside Sound City’s Studio A.

“So who’s the guy I’ve heard about that you’ve been using to create computer-generated percussion loops?” Vig asked Olsen during their sit-down.

After giving Vig the name and contact information for Eric Persing, a guy who could twist and turn various sounds into a digitally rendered rhythm track that could then be dropped neatly (if slowly) into a song, the two chit-chatted for a bit and then Vig was on his way, back to finishing the Nirvana project next door. And at that moment, without either of them realizing it, the torch had been passed.

Nirvana’s album Nevermind would come out later in the year to rave reviews and stratospheric sales, becoming not only the biggest music story of 1991 but also the most influential LP of the nineties. Following its multiplatinum success Butch Vig, just like Olsen before him on the heels of the breakout success of the Fleetwood Mac album in 1975, would go on to dizzying heights as one of the most sought-after producers in popular music (as well as one of the founding members of the multiplatinum alternative band Garbage).

But for Keith Olsen, along with his friend Waddy Wachtel—and virtually every other album-rock practitioner who made it big in the seventies and eighties—the arrival of Nirvana and the huge grunge-rock scene that followed effectively shut their door for good. Olsen and Wachtel’s hit-making days were over. For them the seventies and eighties had been the musical gift that kept on giving. That golden era of album rock in the Los Angeles studios had become bigger than they could have dreamed. Olsen’s ocean-front home in Malibu and the Lamborghini Jalpa and Ferrari Mondial in his garage, along with Wachtel’s horse property, were gratefully earned reminders of all that had come their way.

And though both Olsen and Wachtel were immensely talented, it was more than that. The Los Angeles–based pair had also been in the right place at the right time. Album rock or classic rock or whatever anyone wants to call it was different from anything before or since. It has reached listeners and endured like no other musical genre. Songs that Olsen and Wachtel helped create such as “Rhiannon,” “Double Vision,” and “Werewolves of London” are heavily played to this day, decades after release.

So why does this style of music from so long ago still matter so much to so many? Furthermore, how were the septuagenarian classic rockers Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Roger Waters, the Who, and Neil Young able to headline a sold-out series of concerts before hundreds of thousands of rabid fans in California at Desert Trip 2016? The answer boils down to one element: the songs.

Everybody who enjoys music has their own favorite recordings, those that came along during key points in life. Maybe during a high school prom or as part of a wedding or at a time of despair when only the lyrics of a cherished song could bring solace. Of course, the forties had some of these. The fifties too. Except those were mostly short and sweet love and/or novelty songs. “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” “Oh! My Pa-Pa (O Mein Papa),” and even Elvis’s “Hound Dog,” as cool sounding as it was, could only take a person so far. Even through the bulk of the sixties most rock and roll hewed toward brevity and simplicity. It took the always forward-looking Beatles until 1967 before they came out with the transformative “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life,” which were nothing like anyone had heard before. Yet true sophistication within popular music really only began to develop across the board in the late sixties, when the format of album rock started to take hold.

Without a two- or three-minute time constraint requirement as with most singles, by the dawn of the seventies especially, record labels were now giving their rock musicians carte blanche to explore the human condition in full-blown sonic detail, to create miniature worlds and metaphorical imaging that had the capacity to resonate deeply and make people think and feel. It didn’t matter the length of the tune—it just needed to be good, whether it trucked in at five minutes or eight, which was a revelation. Suddenly the palate was wide and the color choices were bounteous. Rock songs began featuring actual movements and layers, complex elements that occasionally even rivaled the works of the great classical composers. Sometimes it was the lyrics, sometimes it was the melody, and sometimes it was the arrangement that mattered most to listeners. Usually, however, it was the deftly intertwined combination of all three.

Whatever the precise components of the equation, songs created during the album-rock era, especially those coming out of the Los Angles studios, brought a previously unheard level of human emotion, storytelling, and expansive musicality to the masses. Who can’t help but sing along with and probably relate to Los Angeles–recorded favorites such as “The World Is a Ghetto” by War or “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers or “Let Me Take You Home Tonight” by Boston? Yes, they have by now become vastly overplayed on the radio, both terrestrial and satellite. But that’s precisely the point. Forty years on, these cuts and hundreds more album-rock tracks just like them from the seventies through the early to mid-eighties are evergreens extraordinaire for a good reason: song for song, the quality and depth of artistry contained within them is as good as it gets. And that has never happened before or since on such a massive—and massively satisfying—scale.