Rick Rubin and The Cult: The Minimalist Revolution

 

In the mid 80s, Rick Rubin was fighting a personal battle against the way rock was being made. After working with Slayer, the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC, he discovered something that would become his obsession as a producer: music had to be felt physically. It wasn’t enough to just listen to it. It had to hit you, shake you and make the speakers explode.

His hip hop and thrash productions had a quality that Rubin wanted to transfer to rock. They were direct, forceful and built around rhythm. He understood that a song’s impact didn’t depend on how many elements were piled into it, but on the force with which each one occupied its space. He wanted to make a rock record that carried that same energy.

And then The Cult appeared.

The English band had released Love in 1985. Effects laden guitars, psychedelic atmospheres and songs like She Sells Sanctuary. Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy didn’t want to be pigeonholed. They wanted to move toward a different sound. They weren’t satisfied with the first sessions for their next album, recorded with Steve Brown in England. They had invested a huge amount of money and time. The result felt overloaded and scattered to them. There was no clear direction.

The album was going to be called Peace. It was practically finished, but the band felt that something was missing, or rather, that something was left over. Too many layers of guitar and too many ornaments that ended up hiding the essence of the songs.

The Cult approached Rubin to remix the material. They had heard his early work with the Beastie Boys and been impressed by the way he made the music hit the listener directly. They wanted to transfer that feeling to their own songs.

The meeting changed far more than just the sound of the record.

Rubin met Astbury and Duffy and discovered that they shared the same devotion to the primitive, visceral rock of the late 60s. Blue Cheer, MC5 and Steppenwolf were among their most common favorite references. They also shared a fascination with Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and, especially, AC/DC.

Rubin proposed an idea that went in the opposite direction of everything expected from a producer: rerecord the album from scratch, using fewer elements.

The proposal was simple. Strip away the ornaments, eliminate unnecessary effects and leave only the essentials: guitars, bass, drums and voice. No more hiding songs behind layers of production. It was time to return to the bones of rock.

Rubin didn’t want to add personality to The Cult. He wanted to discover the one that was already there, hidden.

His strategy consisted of reducing the band until he found what could really hit the listener. Fewer effects, fewer artifices and more volume. The space left by the eliminated elements would allow the remaining instruments to acquire a monumental dimension.

Duffy wanted the guitars to sound harder. More AC/DC, one of Rubin’s great musical obsessions. Ian Astbury, for his part, wanted to integrate the power of figures like Jim Morrison and Steven Tyler. He wasn’t simply looking to sing louder. He wanted a vocal presence capable of dominating a song and holding its own against a wall of amplifiers.

Rubin understood that both goals could coexist.

Another reference was the early 70s records of the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith. Rock with swing, repetition, dirt and a rhythmic foundation that advanced like a machine. It wasn’t about playing more notes. It was about making every riff carry its full weight.

Beneath Billy Duffy’s post punk guitar there was an extraordinary architect of immediate riffs. Rubin recognized that talent and found in AC/DC the perfect reference to take it into new territory. The guitar had to stop functioning as a tool for building atmospheres and become the furious engine that roared behind the songs.

The transformation demanded a new attitude from Astbury. Rubin wanted an imposing vocalist with a titanic presence, capable of occupying the space left by the guitars. Jim Morrison and Robert Plant were two obvious references. Astbury was ready to take on the role.

His mission was to keep control of the performance while Duffy raised the volume of the amplifiers and the drums acquired greater prominence.

The chemistry between the three temperaments shaped Electric, recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York during November and December 1986. The album was released on April 6, 1987.

And here is what is truly interesting about the story: Rubin did not transform The Cult by adding elements. He did it by removing them.

His intervention was surgical. He dismantled a production that had lost its way and forced the band to confront their songs directly. The guitar stopped hiding behind effects. The bass and drums acquired decisive weight. The voice was left exposed, with nowhere to take refuge.

The result was a record that reacted against much of the rock that dominated Los Angeles during that decade. While Mötley Crüe, Ratt and Poison represented an aesthetic associated with visual excess, big productions and glam metal, The Cult recovered a much more elemental idea of hard rock: riffs, attitude, rhythm and electricity.

They didn’t need to compete with that aesthetic. Their answer was to return to the roots.

Electric didn’t invent hard rock, nor was it the first to recover the sound of the 70s, but it did anticipate a sensibility that would acquire enormous importance shortly afterward. Its rejection of production excesses and its bet on organic guitars help us better understand the musical terrain in which albums like Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction and, later, a large part of grunge would appear.

The Cult had reached that conclusion first: rock didn’t need more makeup. It needed to recover and sharpen its teeth.

The songs were already there. Wild Flower, Lil’ Devil, Love Removal Machine and Peace Dog didn’t need a new identity. They needed someone to eliminate everything that prevented their true nature from being heard.

Rubin understood the paradox that many producers forget: the best way to improve a recording can be to stop intervening in it.

His later work with bands like Wolfsbane and Danzig would show that this philosophy could be repeated in other contexts. Find an identity, eliminate what gets in the way and concentrate on the elements that produce the greatest impact. The same search for forcefulness, with different results and personalities.

What was brilliant about Rubin was understanding that The Cult had an enormous reserve of energy and talent that they still hadn’t managed to release. The band arrived in New York with a sound that felt confused and left with a completely different identity.

There is a phrase that perfectly summarizes his method: Rubin didn’t produce The Cult, he reduced and concentrated it.

That is what is fascinating about Electric. The Cult stopped sounding, to a certain extent, like the band that had recorded Love, but it remained The Cult. It conserved the personality of its songs and the intensity of its members, even though it radically changed the way of presenting them.

Rubin didn’t build a new band. He found the one that was hidden underneath all those effects.

Revolution is not always inventing something new. Sometimes it is having the courage to remove everything that is superfluous until what was always there finally appears.