First-string Chicago rock critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis interviewed Butch Vig last week for their radio program “Sound Opinions”. Listening to this interview reveals two fundamental truths: (1) Vig somehow remains willing to take questions about Having Produced Two of the Greatest Records of the Early ’90s as Well as Sonic Youth, and (2) he still has a calm demeanor and an authoritative voice, both of which serve him well when dealing with volatile artist types and nerdy journos.

I’ve transcribed the portion of the interview — which is most of it — that is relevant to Vig’s work with the Smashing Pumpkins. This post will contain the first half of the interview, and I’ll post the remainder within the next day. I pick it up as Vig discusses the reasons that his Smart Studios began to attract independent rock bands in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

Butch Vig: I think one of the reasons that some of the records…I started to get a lot of work was because, you know, I’m a pop geek. I just love pop music and melodies, and I wanted things to sound good. I wanted to hear separation, you know, between the guitars and drums, and the vocals and the bass or whatever instrumentation they had. And so I think even those records were fast and kind of down and dirty, I think they sort of did have a vibe, and you could hear the hooks when there were hooks. I think that’s why I got a lot of work, really. And that’s why, I mean, it just sort of snowballed…that whole indie scene led to me, you know, working with…Billy Corgan heard those records, and that’s why he called me from the Pumpkins.

Jim DeRogatis: Corgan comes out there to do that Pumpkins record, and I guess that’s the real superstar…first act that put you on…first time you had a record on the Billboard charts.

BV: Yeah, and I mean, I loved working with Billy, because he’s very intense and very driven, but when we made Gish, that was the first album where we actually had time…I was like, “oh my God, we have like 30 days to make a record,” and we worked like 14 or 15 hours every day for those 30 days to, you know, just to try to make it sonically…take it to another level. And I really, really respected his work ethic and just his talent. You know, sometimes we’d butt heads, but more often than not I think we sort of got a lot of chemistry and were sort of on the same wavelength in terms of what we were trying to do with those records. I’m really proud of the work I did with the Pumpkins. I think those records still hold up really well.

Greg Kot: Yeah, that was a pretty amazing opening statement for that band. I remember talking to Corgan as soon as he got off that recording session, and Corgan was saying, like, “One by one, the band was dropping like flies, and the only guy who could stay up all night with me was that guy, that producer Butch.” [laughter] It sounded like you guys were going long, 36-hour stretches with no sleep and just working obsessively over this record. It almost sounded like you’d gone so far in that you almost didn’t know your way out at a certain point.

BV: Yeah. It’s funny when you say that, because I remember, at the end of Gish, we were struggling with the last mix — and you’re right, we hadn’t slept for like two days or something — and I remember Billy crawled under the console for maybe an hour and a half to get a little shuteye while I was trying to figure something out in the mix with the guitars or whatever. And it was a real bitch of a mix…I can’t remember which song it was now. At that point I remember it was like 6am, it was our last day in the studio. Billy and I were exhausted. We sort of looked at each other and I think we said something like, “You know, when you finish a record, it’s not like everyone jumps up in the air and high-fives and goes ‘Hooray!’” It sort of is the last man standing: “Okay, it’s time to go home.”

GK: One of the things with the Pumpkins, Butch, is that obviously it was a very volatile band. Four very distinct personalities. You mention Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin the drummer, D’Arcy Wretzky on bass and James Iha on guitar. Four people who really didn’t belong in a band together, yet were in this band and had a chemistry, created a lot of issues in the studio, obviously with Gish and certainly exacerbated when you did Siamese Dream with them in ‘93, which was their huge breakthrough. But I mean, you’re not only a producer, but you had to be something of a psychologist and a coach to sort of get along, to have everybody getting along and getting on the same page. Was that the biggest challenge for you with that band, just sort of keeping the personalities together in the studio?

BV: Yeah, it really was. That was the record that I realized, a record producer is a psychologist, and that’s probably your job actually more than just worrying about the music. It was such a tentative time for the band. They had high hopes for what they wanted to do, and yet they were…the stress level was ready to break.

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