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Originally Posted by Slackdoodle
It's an interesting picture he paints of Lillywhite in the studio. I feel like around here people see him as having a reputation for being a bit of a hard-ass. But he sounds about as goofy as Dave in some ways. Maybe also with the same perfectionist tendencies, then. Or maybe he was just mirroring Dave's drive for perfectionism, because he knew that's what his client wanted?
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I think you'd have a hard time being as successful as he has been with as many artists if you take yourself too seriously. Creativity generally comes best in a positive environment, but one with definite boundaries. So, I image that he kept a strong hand on the process and helped to firmly steer things, but I do doubt that he was like a stern school teacher with no sense of humor.
For another example of it, think about Cavallo's process -- he basically said that the band would jam on one thing all day if he just let them run free. So, he said no, we'll do this one for a few minutes, and then we'll jam on something else. And from that, he got like 30-40 song ideas or snippets that they then worked on and narrowed down to what was on the album. It's possible to enforce those boundaries without having an adversarial relationship.
As far as mirroring perfectionism, take a look into Lillywhite's comments on Lee Mavers of The La's. Sounded like Mavers' perfectionism really got in the way of the work on their album, and Steve was frustrated with that. I get the opposite impression from his interviews re
MB -- sounded like they always had a good relationship in studio, despite what went down the the Lillywhite Sessions (he pretty much stated directly that he was fairly shocked when he got the call that the band was moving on, since he thought it was going well despite some bumps in the road).