Steely Dan | U2 ZooTV Live from Sydney 1993

A few things;

Quite some time ago when I was working at the studio, one of the senior engineers/producers brought in a DVD-audio version of Steely Dan’s Two against nature. It was one of the earliest examples of extremely good production that I’d ever heard, or perhaps listened to with a good engineering ear vs just the casual music-listener’s mindset. Years later, I’ve picked up a CD-audio version, but now will pretty much pursue the DVD-audio edition for its greater clarity.

Simply put, the engineering and production on this album is head-breakingly, exceptionally brilliant.

While no single album can truly shine in all of the different design principals that make good production simply because it’s impossible to cover every style, several albums exhibit the best of those elements. U2’s Achtung Baby is probably the best example there is of overall layered, complex, heavily effected (with effects not only limited to reverb and delay, but compression too – some of the best compression ever heard in music) and multi-textured sound, while Planet Funk’s Non zero sumness is a great example of perfectly mixing and balancing electronic elements with acoustic timbres. There are similar land-mark albums in the way of jazz, funk/fusion, electronic – Underworld’s Second toughest in the infants, Beaucoup fish and BT’s Movement in still life and Emotional technology spring immediately to mind.

Two against nature is simply the cleanest, sharpest capturing of close-mic recording and delicate studio production there is. The mix on this album is phenomenal. Close-miked drums and drum-compression and EQ are out of this world. Guitars and bass are warm and pure, pianos rich and vocals perfectly balanced. This mix has so much space for everything in it, you’d think it was mixed with an Ikea compartmentalised-frequency philosophy – absolutely nothing fights with anything else in the mix for space. Sure, this is might be perceived to be easier when there are less timbres in the mix, but I would argue that it makes an exceptional mix more difficult to produce. The less tracks there are, the less masking there is, and there are less possibilities for psychoacoustic blurring. Depending on the instruments, sometimes a single instrument and a single vocal can be the hardest thing in the world to mix. Sure, perhaps you might be able to produce something passable by popular standards, but there’s a huge difference between a guitar and vocal song, or a piano and vocal song being mixed ordinarily, and mixed exceptionally. We begin at stereo-miking of the instrument, if not triple-miking or more for something like piano, and end with finely tuned EQ and compression at the back-line production phase; it’s not as easy as it might at first seem.
Steely Dan have absolutely excelled with this album, and while many may reminisce about the rockers of old and find this album to be soulless, I would say that it takes a particular turn of mind to appreciate the cool grooves and smooth, refined sounds of this album. As far as musicianship and mood go, to me this album shows the maturity of musicians who could go off the deep-end a la jazz style if they wanted to, but prefer to very clearly say what they want to say, with a very articulate musical language, in order to create a fantastic groovy atmosphere. Make no mistake, this is an album that oozes with lavish lounge style for the home or bar, and smooth cruising attitude for the car.

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Recently, U2’s ZooTV Live in Sydney 1993 concert was finally released on DVD after we’d all worn our VHS versions threadbare. While the first U2 concert I ever attended was Popmart in 1997, I still remember seeing the 1993 ZooTV concert for the first time when an edited version aired on television which we taped… and wore threadbare until the official retail VHS tape was released. It was and still remains to this day for me the single greatest U2 performance ever.

I watched the DVD again last night and thought to myself, this is the U2 that speaks directly to me, that speaks my language. This is the U2 I grew to love. I got into them way back during the period leading up to The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, but when I first heard Achtung Baby in 1991 and read a journalist describe the opening track, Zoo station as four guys cutting down the Joshua Tree, I thought this is it. This is my sound. I love the early U2, but the period from 1991 to 1997 in which Achtuing Baby, Zooropa and Pop were produced will always be the period in which I identified with the band the most, and continue to be in tune with to this day. This couldn’t be made more evident by their most recent offering How to dismantle an atomic bomb which I found to be quite mediocre bar one or two songs. Achtung to Pop represent a period of time where U2 were at their most articulate, mature and developed as far as sound, message, musicianship and culture go. It wasn’t just about being ambiguous and arty, or having a cheap-shot at media, there was an intensity in their music that they have never recaptured since, scaling from sounds of epic proportions to the most intimate, personal and at times minimal pieces.

I’m not totally against the new-new-school U2 (as opposed to the old-new-school which is the afore-mentioned period), the Boston and Slane Castle concerts were phenomenal and quite emotional, true too that there were some greatly intimate moments during both. But every-time I see Bono surrounded in flare-smoke after the dramatic Running to stand still, play the harmonica, walk back from the B-stage to the main-stage in the roar of a crowd overcome with the atmosphere, and just when you think you couldn’t contain any more, the lights dim and the screens turn red as the opening chords of Where the streets have no name begin… the emotion simply surpasses anything I’ve seen or heard from the band ever; so too the phenomenal opening preamble to Zoo Station, the second-last song Love is blindness and the intimate and emotional closing performance of Can’t help falling in love with only The Edge’s guitar to accompany Bono’s yearning voice.

I loved Popmart almost just as much, and being at the concert in 1997 was amazing. When I think about Popmart and Pop, Zooropa, Achtung Baby and the ZooTV concert, I truly do think to myself…

This is my U2.