Mr. Hewitt
Let’s talk about John [Frusciante] a little bit. You’ve done tons of work with him. You said a lot of the overdubs for the Chili Peppers record were done at his place, and obviously you’ve worked on all the solo records he’s done in recent years. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship and the work you’ve done over there?
I started with the Chili Peppers by assisting on By The Way. Then John went to do a solo record right after that and asked Jim Scott to record and produce it. It was supposed to be two weeks of tracking, two weeks of overdubs, two weeks of mixing. It turned into this giant record that we spent four months on, but after four weeks of tracking, Jim had to do another gig. He said, “Take Ryan here and go in the other room and finish the record.†I was scared shitless. It was another instance of being thrown in to the fire. All the basic tracks had been done with Jim, so we had to finish all the overdubs – the guitars and synthesizers and vocals. At the beginning I just frankly said to John, “I just want you to know at this point in my life, I don’t have a really great ear for pitch, so I won’t really be able to tell you if you’re sharp or flat.†He said, “That’s okay. I’m not going to ask. I’ll know.†John likes to work extremely fast. He didn’t want to wait for the tapes to rewind or wait for me to patch stuff, so I got really efficient working with John. Because I learned quickly how he wanted to work – and he was really particular about a lot of different things – we got a really great working relationship together. We weren’t friends or anything at that point, but we could work together quite well. He could come in and I’d have everything set up exactly how he wanted it and I knew when he needed a break – just being the psychologist in that sense of knowing when someone is so frustrated or tired that you need to suggest a break for them because they can’t do it themselves. “Hey, why don’t we order some dinner?†or “Do you need anything out there?†That kind of brought us together as friends a little bit. That was three months of our working together one on one before he and Jim went on to mixing, and I went on to Blink-182.
Then a bit later he wanted to do more solo records. He had all these songs written. He said, “I’m going to do a Chili Peppers album in a year and I have fifty-some songs that I want to record before then. Are you interested?†I’m like, “Yeah, of course I’m interested!†Then he said, “But I want to do it super minimal, 16-track, like it’s the ‘60s – two mics on drums. I don’t want to do anything perfect. I want it to be completely the opposite of my last record. I want to make a whole record in a week.†I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it man!†We had this aesthetic where we went it with minimal stuff – not modern sounding in the least. I listened to a whole bunch of ‘60s records – spent a lot of time with The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Nick Drake. John fed me all these other records to listen to as we worked and I checked them all out and then we went into the studio in a way I’d never done before. I’d never done a two- or three-mic drum setup. I got all The Beatles’ books and started looking at pictures of how they did it back then, and just read up on how to do this stuff and listening with a fresh ear to really hear what was going on. John and his friend Josh [Klinghoffer] would play the whole song straight through on guitar and drums, come in to the control room and say, “All right, cool. Let’s do a vocal.†“All right now let’s do bass, now let’s do this…†The first session we had three songs done, recorded and mixed in two days, which for me (coming off a year-long Blink-182 record where we did twelve songs), that was pretty amazing. With that level of musicianship and organization and free-spiritedness it was really something to behold. John said, “Okay that’s the first three songs of the record – let’s do the rest.†We would convene one week every month for six months and we’d do a record. Monday through Friday we’d record, Saturday we’d mix and then Monday we’d master. It was a completely crazy schedule. It was fourteen-hour days. We’d walk in and hit record and just go. Then we’d take a dinner break and go back to it right up to the last minute. John would say, “What time did we come in today, noon? We can work till two, right?†It would be one fifty-five – “Let me do a vocal.†I’d put the tape up and he’d go out there and do a one-pass vocal – then we’d go home. I look back at these records now. My fiancee is obsessed with John’s records, and every time I get into her car, these records are on and I hear these songs again and again. John wanted to leave imperfections on the record, and they become endearing qualities that make you want to hear it again and again, and something new comes to the ear on each listen.
I think of all the stuff you’ve done it’s my favorite.
They’re real fun and for me. Listening to them as they were made from one to the next, it’s cool to hear the progression of ideas. It was just really great to not do the same thing twice. Every time I recorded drums I did it differently. We were treating leakage differently on the different records too – “Hey, let’s put the guitar amp over here this time and let’s put the drums over there and let’s try this vocal mic on this record.†Every record has a slightly different aural take on it, but with the same players and same instruments. I used different microphones every time so I was kind of experimenting and refining my idea of what I wanted out of a minimal mic’ing technique. It’s really refreshing to be given that kind of creative freedom by John to do whatever I wanted.
