Pinkerton either was or wasn’t exactly what it was supposed to be, depending on who you ask and when you ask them. That’s one of the key parts of the album’s shtick; this was an unsettling album to make, release, and listen to. Just ask Joe Barresi, one of the main studio engineers who worked on the album both when it was Songs From The Black Hole and Pinkerton and being recorded both at Electric Lady Studios in New York, Fort Apache in Boston, and later at Sound City Studios out in LA.
“The whole process was crazy dude, beginning to end.” It’s late afternoon on a Monday and Joe is taking a break from a circus of various projects he’s working on in his studio in LA. “We went into [Electric Lady] to record this album and I was thinking we were making a logical follow up to The Blue Album…. I had no idea what I was in for. The Blue Album had been so polished and precise, but this album took on a life of its own.”
Despite the added difficulty, it was working. Well, for the most part. Recording the album was a bit of a roller coaster ride from a schedule perspective with Rivers enrolled in Harvard and most of the rest of the band working on solo projects, but that wasn’t the only thing making things tense. This was also the first album Rivers had written on his own and it wasn’t going over all that well. That, combined with the burgeoning popularity of said side projects and the farm to table recording methods, made the studio a pretty tense spot but the sound they were look for was definitely coming together.
It was worth the effort though as we now know, and all of that work led to one of the most important albums from the 90’s. “It was an honor to be on the project, and it was one of the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve ever been a part of. I mean it’s crazy man. Think about it. We were working on the birth of emo rock and we had no fucking idea. That’s so wild to me.”
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