AVC: Fast Man Raider Man has a very understated feel—it doesn't really show off the fact that all these people are playing on it.
FB: You just let musicians do what they do. As soon as you start telling them what to do—some guys will go along with that gladly, "Sure, you want me to play more like that? No problem. I know how to do that." But, then their personalities aren't as strong. They're just kind of giving you a facsimile of something. It's better to just say, "That dude plays like that." Just let him do what he wants. If you say, "Hey, I love what you're trying to do, but could you be a little more like this?" that's when musicians either just won't do it, or they'll say, "Yeah, sure," but they'll still just do what they do. [Laughs.] Or it rubs them the wrong way and that kind of messes them up, or they can't really pull it off, or they end up sounding generic.
AVC: Are there other musicians you'd like to work with?
FB: Do you know any nice guys? Introduce me to a nice guy, and he'll probably end up on my next record.
AVC: You've said that while you were in Nashville, you worked at the studio all day, had dinner, and went back to your hotel room. So you weren't seeking a nostalgia trip?
FB: No. Nor did I have the time. Or the energy to hang out at the bar all night and ride the mechanical bull, or whatever they do down there. Getting too much into the history, it's cool and everything, but forget about that. It ain't about that. It's about music and it's about what's inside your soul, what's inside your brain. But I understand. There's a human need sometimes to pay respects to holy places or whatever. "It happened here, man, right here! He was standing right here!" [Laughs.] I remember a few years ago, John Lydon from the Sex Pistols had his own show on VH1, and I saw this one episode, he had his producer go to some auction to bid on some rock 'n' roll memorabilia. I think he got, like, a personal John Lennon letter or something like that. They spend $50,000 on it, and then he nailed it to a tree or a signpost in the middle of a field, and they put an explosive under it and just blew it up. "Fuck this, fuck this stupid nostalgia shit." And it was great. He was totally right. I think John Lennon himself would have totally loved that.
AVC: You worked with a lot of the same musicians for Honeycomb and Fast Man Raider Man. After you made Honeycomb, was there anything you wanted to do differently for Fast Man?
FB: We made Honeycomb in four days. We tried to make Fast Man Raider Man in one night. We sort of accomplished that, but there ended up being so many players on that first session for Fast Man Raider Man, then the producer even put more overdubs with other guys, so when it came time to mix some of the stuff, we had to make sense of it. Literally, there'd be some legendary Hammond organ performance on track 22, and I'd be sitting there telling the engineer, "Lose the Al Kooper. Yeah, forget the Steve Cropper on this song. There's already two other guys playing guitar, and they make more sense with the song than him." You couldn't leave it all on there just because of who they were.
AVC: What was the most you were able to get done in one day or night?
FB: That first session [for Fast Man Raider Man], we cut 12 or 15 songs, and I think we probably kept 11 or 12 of them, so we did get a lot of bang for our buck on that first night.
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