10 Classic Albums Made Outside the Recording Studio

February 12th, 2015 by Michael Duncan

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More than ever before, albums are written, recorded, and even mixed at home. But it wasn’t always that way.

Just a few decades ago, almost all bands booked time in a recording studio to capture the sounds they wanted. Artists would commonly need to travel—sometimes across stateliness or outside the country—because there wasn’t a suitable studio in their town or the next. Even back then however, a few innovative groups chose to do things differently and record their music in atypical spaces including mansions, barns, hotels or their own bedrooms.

Below is a list of 10 albums by well-known artists that you might not have realized were recorded outside the usual studio setting.

Peter Gabriel – So

In 1985, Peter Gabriel and producer Daniel Lanois began work on the former Genesis member’s fifth solo album, So. The record, which was his first to not be officially self-titled, was written and recorded at Ashcombe House in Swainswick, a 17th-century manor house  northeast of Bath in Somerset, England. The studio itself was put together in the house’s adjacent barn. Inside, some of the basic equipment consisted of “two analog 24-track machines, a Studer A80, and a Studer A80 shell that had been modified by a local electronics wizard, with its own audio cards and transport controls.”

According to engineer Kevin Killen in an interview with Mix, “The way Peter was working, he had a demo of each song with piano, maybe a Prophet pad and a Linn drum machine, that he would put up on the B machine, which was the modified machine, and he would play that to the musicians in the studio. They would then play along with that in their headphones, and record all their parts onto the A machine. They’d also copy some parts across from the demo to the A machine. They’d do a couple of takes, say on ‘Sledgehammer,’ and instead of leaving the demo reel up on the B machine they would take the first set of performances and put that bit on the B machine, so the musicians could then hear that in their headphones along with the demo rhythms-all that information was getting transferred across to the A machine along with the second set of performances. And they kept doing that, so they could constantly reference quickly back to a part they’d just played.”

All in all, the record ended up costing around £200,000 to make.

The Rolling Stones – Exile on Main St.

Long before Pharrell Williams’ monster hit “Happy” was released, The Rolling Stones wrote their own track entitled “Happy”. The song can be found on the band’s hugely successful double album Exile on Main St., which was written and recorded at “Villa Nellcôte“. From April 1971 to March 1972, guitarist Keith Richards rented the 16-room mansion in southern France for the band’s use. In addition to music, it is alleged that thousands of pounds worth of heroin flowed through the mansion each week.

Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska

Those of us that record bands regularly are all too familiar with the term “demoitis”. It refers to an occasionally incurable “disease” whereby an artist falls in love with the demo of their song despite the fact that it’s oozing with imperfections like background noise, wrong notes, and timing issues.

Usually, the word invokes a cringeworthy trip down memory lane. But, in early 1982, Bruce Springsteen found that despite trying to record his sixth album in a professional studio with the E Street Band he couldn’t beat the demos he recorded on a cassette-tape Portastudio in his New Jersey bedroom.

As a result, Nebraska was released via Columbia Records later that year with the Boss’ original demos intact—to much critical acclaim. In fact, the album was so influential that two songs were even covered by Johnny Cash a year later on his album ‘Johnny 99’.

Deep Purple – Machine Head

Deep Purple’s sixth record Machine Head is responsible for at least one guitar riff you’ll hear every damn time you walk into a music store. Hits such as “Smoke on the Water”, “Lazy”, “Space Truckin’”, and “Highway Star” grace the band’s 1972 album. The group planned on recording the LP in December 1971 at the Montreux Casino in Switzerland. And when singer Ian Gillan contracted hepatitis last-minute, the trip was almost canceled. The group still went, but an infamous fire during a Frank Zappa concert at the casino put an end to the band’s plans of recording there.

Finding another unusual location to record, the band rented The Rolling Stones’ Mobile Studio and set up shop inside an empty Grand Hotel, on the edge of Montreux. With the mobile recording studio parked out front, they situated themselves at the end of one of the building’s corridors, off the main lobby.

Wikipedia cites that “an assortment of equipment and sound-insulating mattresses [blocking the path to the makeshift control room] meant that to get to the recording van the band were forced to walk through bedrooms and across balconies. This proved so arduous that they stopped listening to playbacks of their recordings, instead performing until they were satisfied with what they had.”

Machine Head went on to become Deep Purple’s most commercially successful album of all time.

Boston – Boston

Boston’s self-titled debut album was largely recorded at guitarist Tom Scholz’s own Foxglove Studios in Watertown, Massachusetts. It wasn’t so much a real recording studio as it was his basement. Located on School Street, the studio has been described by Scholz as a “tiny little space next to the furnace in this hideous pine-paneled basement of my apartment house, and it flooded from time to time with God knows what.”

Although Epic Records thought that the band was heading to the West Coast to record the bulk of the album in a “proper studio”, Scholz went ahead and recorded almost everything in his apartment except “Let Me Take You Home Tonight” and Brad Delp’s vocals, which were recorded at Capitol Studios’ Studio C with Warren Dewey engineering.

“More Than a Feeling”, ranked the 39th best hard rock song of all time by VH1, was supposedly played on a $100 Yamaha acoustic and recorded with an Electro-Voice RE16 microphone. To date, Boston’s first album has sold over 17 million copies.

Bob Dylan and The Band – The Basement Tapes

Boston wasn’t the only album recorded in a basement. A year after the release of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the singer-songwriter crashed his Triumph motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York and suffered a cracked vertebrae and mild concussion.

While recovering, Dylan and members of The Band stayed cooped up in a house on 56 Parnassus Lane (formerly 2188 Stoll Road) nicknamed Big Pink where they wrote and recorded a ton of tunes. Dylan would later tell Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, “That’s really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting—in somebody’s basement. With the windows open … and a dog lying on the floor.”

Ultimately, some of the songs by The Band turned out to be recorded in other locations, eight years later Columbia Records decided to officially distribute the material as the ‘The Basement Tapes’. The record was well-received upon release and made its way to number seven on the Billboard 200 album chart.

Beck – Odelay

Shortly after the success of his first major label release, Mellow Gold, Beck began working with producers Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf again on Odelay. For a variety of reasons, things didn’t pan out the way they did the first time, and Beck started collaborating with the Grammy Award-winning production duo The Dust Brothers instead. Known for their extensive use of samples, the producers invited Beck to join them at their house in Silverlake, Los Angeles where they built a studio in a spare bedroom, lovingly referred to as PCP Labs.

According to an interview with Sound on Sound, “the studio existed from 1991 to 2001, and sported a 24-channel Soundcraft Spirit desk. ‘We loved this board,’ [said Dust Brother Michael] Simpson. ‘We tracked a lot of great songs through this board, including all the songs from Odelay.’ PCP was split into two control rooms in 1996, with two Yamaha 02Rs in King’s room and a 64-input Amek Einstein in Simpson’s section.”

A year later, The Dust Brothers bought a building aptly named The Boat, which was originally built in 1941 for live radio broadcast. In 2003, they opened The Boat Studios to the public and numerous big league artists recorded there until it was bought years later by Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Even though Flea didn’t own The Boat Studios yet, the Red Hot Chili Peppers used a very alluring place to record ’Blood Sugar Sex Magik’ in 1991 — a 10-bedroom mansion owned by producer Rick Rubin.

Originally built in 1918, the mansion is located in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles and is actually named “The Mansion”. Many prominent musicians who have recorded there believe the place to be haunted, including drummer Chad Smith who refused to live there while the band worked on the album. To document the recording process, Flea’s brother-in-law filmed the group daily and the footage was eventually released as a documentary called Funky Monks.

Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral

In 1992, Trent Reznor moved to Benedict Canyon, north of Beverly Hills and put together a brand new studio.

10050 Cielo Drive, or the “Tate House”, is where Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson Family in 1969. According to Wikipedia, Reznor named his new studio “Le Pig” after the message that was scrawled on the front door with Tate’s blood by her murderers. He called his first night at the house “terrifying”.

In a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone, Reznor remarked, “While I was working on [The] Downward Spiral, I was living in the house where Sharon Tate was killed. Then one day I met her sister [Patti Tate]. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: ‘Are you exploiting my sister’s death by living in her house?’ For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, ‘No, it’s just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I’m in this place where a weird part of history occurred.’ I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don’t want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, ‘What if it was my sister?’ I thought, ‘Fuck Charlie Manson.’ I went home and cried that night. It made me see there’s another side to things, you know?”

Co-produced by Reznor and Flood, The Downward Spiral became a major commercial success. The house was later used to record Marilyn Manson’s debut album, Portrait of an American Family, co-produced by Reznor.

Radiohead – OK Computer

Considered by music critics to be one of the best albums of the 1990s, Radiohead’s OK Computer was largely recorded at St Catherine’s Court, a Tudor manor house in Bath, England. Guitarist/keyboardist Jonny Greenwood has stated that the house “was less like a laboratory experiment, which is what being in a studio is usually like, and more about a group of people making their first record together.”

In Welcome to the Machine: OK Computer and the Death of the Classic Album, author Tim Footman points out that “the group made extensive use of the different rooms and acoustics throughout the house: the vocals on “Exit Music (For a Film)” featured an echo effect achieved by recording on a stone staircase, and “Let Down” was recorded at 3 AM in a ballroom. The isolation from the outside world allowed the band to work at a different pace, with more flexible and spontaneous working hours.”

‘OK Computer’, the band’s third album, became the first to be self-produced by Radiohead, with assistance from longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich. Despite labelheads at Capitol Records initially estimating low sales, millions of copies of the record have been sold worldwide since its release.

Michael Duncan is an up-and-coming producer/engineer based in NYC. He has assisted several notable producers, including Dan Romer, John Siket, Andrew Maury, Rick Kwan, Oliver Straus, Jon Kaplan, Jeremy Scott, and more. In addition to his studio work, Michael has years of experience in radio (Nights with Alice Cooper, HardDrive, Touchdown Radio) and runs a rock/metal website called Rock Edition (an affiliate of Substream Magazine) on the side.