Bob Rock can do no wrong in my eyes. a few of my childhood friends and I were hardcore metallica fans back in our middle/high school days. We watched "a year in a half in the life of metallica part 1" like it was our jobs. we probably sat and watched that weekly, mixed in with all of the bootlegs i was sourcing, for most our of high school years, in the late 90's. we all got mad respect for bob. We loved his laid back confidence, his standards, his attitude, and how he flat out SCHOOLED Metallica and treated them like they were clients, and not "metallica". It also gave us the "production bug" so to speak. that led us to a local recording school, which was basically a building with one really nice studio that was in an upstairs giant bungalo style room (to emulate a stage), all oak wals and floors, a quarter milly analog SSL board, an arsenal of classic mics, 2 isolation booths (for our 4x12's), a miced grand piano to pick up room resonance...which is amazing shit that basement bands like us would have never normally had access to), we all learned the basics, and got access to that ssl board room all the time. They had an advanced recording class on sunday afternoons, and we got to be the band that the class had to mic up and record like we were real clients. the downside was that we didn't have legal control of the masters, even though we were playing originals. we could leave there with a mix that sounded pretty good that we could use as a demo, but we couldn't like "use it" for real shit. we never signed anything. it was a gentlemens agreement with the teacher who we remained friends with. we loaded our gear in, and the class was micing it, were in my car drinking jack daniels to "get ready to record"
and since back then, we seemed to need alcohol to be at our best, we gave them all a solid performance, then sat back and watched the teacher show the students how to mix us. we took that knowledge with us and went off on our own, but then the problem became we all have our own creative vision for how our own shit should be recorded and mixed. with all of that said, i'm stil friends with those same guys and we have 14 highly refined songs that will never see the light of day lol. either way, bob rock was as big of an influence on me and my circle. "its like crack uM BOOM, DADDA DOODEN DOO, DADDA DOODEN DOO!" is constantly referenced. Bob Rock is always going to be the 5th member of metallica, just like the beatles had george martin.
