And now, the remainder of the relevant portion of last week’s “Sound Opinions” interview with Butch Vig. (Read part one here.)

Butch Vig: [Siamese Dream] was by far the hardest record I’ve made. We went straight through for five months in Atlanta, sometimes seven days a week, 14 or 15 hours a day. And then we came out to L.A. and mixed, I think for 36 straight days, with Billy and Alan Moulder and I. And I remember, I think I lost like 10 or 15 pounds. For like two weeks when the record was done, I just lay on the couch and vegged out. I couldn’t even…I was catatonic, basically. There was something about that band, the sort of mis-fits between the four of them, how they connected…I mean, even though Billy played a lot of the guitar and bass — almost everything on Siamese Dream — there was something neat about the whole band together, how they talked about the songs and when they would work out arrangements, and I mean…they were just phenomenal live. When we made Siamese Dream, we wanted to make something really glorious and ambitious. You know, it wasn’t, “Let’s just go into the studio and we’ll just record au naturale and we’ll put that out because that’s how we sound.” I mean, some of the songs had 40 or 50 or 60 guitar overdubs on them. We lost our minds a little bit, but I think that the songwriting and just sonically how the album turned out I think it was worth the effort.

Jim DeRogatis: It’s interesting what you just said, too, Butch, that even if Iha or D’Arcy weren’t on a track, the fact that they were part of the mix, and living with the Pumpkins and living with Corgan and giving their feedback…I mean, they were still part of the band.

BV: Yeah, definitely. We were set up in the studio and we would run through arrangements when we were getting ready to track a new song. They would play all the parts, and sometimes just the discourse between James and D’Arcy and Billy, or Jimmy and Billy, you know, there was tension, but that tension — in trying to figure out the arrangement and what they were going to play, the tempo and speed and the vibe, is it going to be loud or are we going to pull back here and be quiet? — there was group input from that, and I think some of that came from them playing live and being such a phenomenal live band. The truth is, though, that Billy is just an amazing musician, and when it came to getting some of the parts down, when we started overdubbing the guitars and bass, he was just great at it.

Greg Kot: The other issue, too, was Chamberlin was already sort of sinking into drug use, and those kind of issues were becoming a part of the band’s psychology as well. How were you able to sort of keep Chamberlin in the studio long enough to record? Were there issues where, like…I heard stories like he was M.I.A. during some of those sessions, and, I mean, that must have been hell to go through that.

BV: It was. The funny thing is, one of the reasons we chose Atlanta was we thought we’d go someplace where we didn’t know anybody, and we’d be kind of isolated, you know, the studio’s kind of north of the city. Within one day, Jimmy knew every drug dealer and hooker and crazy person in the city. All of a sudden this parade of lunatics started coming by the studio. It got pretty bad. There was one point where he was M.I.A. for a couple days. Or he’d show up to play and it was clear he couldn’t play very well. We’d go, “Well, that’s it, we’re going home, we’re not doing anything today.” Billy would get really pissed off at him and say, “Look, you gotta get your shit together and come in and play tomorrow.” And usually he would, but there was one day where he didn’t show up and we didn’t see him for a couple days, and we started freaking out and going, “oh my God, maybe something happened to him.” He finally showed up two or three days later, and I said, “okay, look, I’ll play drums on this record, man.” And there was no way in hell I could play like him or play any of those parts, but I think we sort of had to put the fear of God into him that, “if you’re going to be part of this band, then you have to put your musicianship and your playing first.”

I remember we did — after the M.I.A., after the three days he was gone — we did “Cherub Rock”, one of the key tracks on the record. We ran through the song a couple times, and we went for a take, and I literally think he nailed it on the first take. Did another take, it was incredible. Billy came in and said, “I want to do, like, another 20 takes.” And so I said, you know what? So I got on the speaker and I said, “okay, it’s not quite there, it’s not good enough, we gotta do another one.” So we sort of tortured him. I know that sounds terrible and sadistic in a way. But to his credit, man, he played 20 takes blazing on fire, every one fantastic, and his hands were a bloody pulp when he finished. A couple hours later we said, “Okay, boy, you can go home and get some sleep. We’re going to come back and rock again tomorrow.”

JDR: And you used the second take.

BV: Yeah, we used the second take, yep. [laughter]

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.

Wikipedia is always being edited, and thus there is a good chance that any given error will eventually be discovered and corrected — that is, to be discovered and corrected on the Wikipedia website, wikipedia.org. However, since Wikipedia content can be copied freely, snapshots of Wikipedia entries are often taken and posted by third-party content providers. Therefore, any given Wikipedia error will likely continue to exist, somewhere on the Internet, indefinitely (and, obviously, long after it has been corrected on the Wikipedia website itself).

For example, this sentence once was part of the Wikipedia entry for the Smashing Pumpkins:

To give them indie credibility, Virgin matched the band with Sonic Youth producer Butch Vig and released their 1991 debut album Gish on Virgin subsidiary label Caroline Records.

The first part of this sentence seems to have been entirely made up, which probably explains why it is no longer part of the entry on Wikipedia’s site.* Vig says on Vieuphoria: “The first thing I worked with [Smashing Pumpkins] on was a Sub Pop single. Jonathan [Poneman] from Sub Pop called me up and said, ‘There’s this band from Chicago that is awesome and you’ve gotta work with them.’” Vig then produced the Pumpkins’ single “Tristessa”, which Sub Pop released in December 1990. Shortly thereafter, the Pumpkins signed with Caroline. Vig first produced Sonic Youth in March 1992.

However, you can still find the erroneous sentence today on a variety of third-party sites that copied the Wikipedia entry at that time. A lot of these sites are weird and spammy, but they do find their way into search results. My guess is that they still get read, and believed, fairly often.

*It doesn’t explain, however, how the sentence came to be there in the first place. That is not the subject of this post, but, generally speaking, “where does this stuff come from?” is one of the driving questions behind this blog…