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Mark Hudson Interview - Part 2
 JOE:
I love the Tom Snyder interview from 1975 where John talks about
how proud he was of Ringo’s success.
MARK: Yeah! Well, you know what’s interesting? Ringo gave me
a great compliment one time. I’m very energetic, multi colored
beard, which you can’t see out there in radioland, it’s
pretty frightening, and when Ringo sings, I really get him energized,
because he’s always insecure about his voice, and Ringo always
says, “I wanna be James Brown, I walk up to the microphone,
I’m Bing Crosby”. So that Ringo thing that we love so
much, he would rather be Little Richard or Stevie Wonder, or James
Brown. And I always sort of like make him feel like he can hit notes
that he never could. And one time in the studio he said, “You
know, you remind me of John”, because whenever Ringo had to
sing a song, he’d get insecure, and evidently, from what Ringo
said, that John would come out and say, “Allright Ring! Here
we go man!” and he would start this thing like a football player.
“You can do it! Here we go! Hit that note!”, ‘With
a little help from my friends!” and he would hit the note and
he says “John had this thing that made me feel so confident”,
and a huge compliment to me, saying that made him feel the same
way. And it’s only because I quote Lennon, “Nothing you
can do that can’t be done”. And I think that was a way
of life, and I think that was the way John felt that way about Ringo.
And that’s when we look at John’s first solo album, it’s
three guys playing on it: Klaus Vorrman, John Lennon and Ringo Starr,
and that goes to show you the faith that obviously John had in him,
was you know, three guys is pretty naked, and this day and age,
usually we do things to cover up.
It was interesting, because I got to hang out with John
during “The Lost Weekend”. I was like a Beatle freak and
The Beatles had broken up and I was just excited to be there, and
he would let me ask one Beatle question at a time. No more! (Doing
John): “Alright Hudson, you get one question, you bastard,
and no more!” And it was interesting in talking with him about
what he liked and what he didn’t like, and he said to me, “Make
your mistakes louder.” And I looked at him like Nipper the
RCA dog, “What do you mean?”, because whenever I make
a mistake in the studio, you kind of duck it, or put something else
up to mask it. And he goes, “No man, make your mistakes louder,
and they think you’ve done it on purpose.” What a great
way to think! I mean I would be like putting it under the carpet,
putting horns over the top, anything to hide it. But his theory
was don’t be ashamed of it, make it bigger and then it gets
looked at different.
JOE: Take a mistake and turn it into a plus like “I Feel
Fine”.
MARK: Exactly. And when I was doing “Vertical Man” and
Ringo first came in, he said, “Number one: there are no demos
and there are no mistakes.” And I looked at him like I was
getting all these wisdom Beatle-McNuggets. And I said, “What
does that mean?”, and he said, “Well you know with The
Beatles, everyone would say, ‘well they’re doing a bar
6-19’,” and he goes, “we were lost! We were just
playing the song and someone would screw up. They’d look at
each other and say, “go to that”, and they’d go to
the next section and it would end up sounding like…it’s
like in “She Said She Said” (sings) “She said
you don’t understand what I said, I said no, no, no, it’s
wrong, when I was a boy”, they’re like dropping beats
and he (Ringo) goes, “We were lost!” And I’m thinking
that it’s some kind of hip thing, they did a bar of 9-million,
and Ringo goes, “No, we were lost!” And I go, ”That’s
great!” So the making of “Vertical Man”, we’re
doing “Without Understanding”, and we’re playing,
we’re rocking, and Joe Walsh is playing and The Roundheads
and Ringo and we all do it in a little room, maybe 20 x 20, and
all of a sudden we get to this part, and we just hit this chord
and we’re looking at Ringo, and looking at him, I could see
the back of the stadium. He was gone. Didn’t know where he
was. And then we as the musicians, all look at each other and there
was a moment of panic, like “Ah!” and he was mouthing,
like “three, four” and he does another one, and we’re
going “boing”. No one knows what we’re doing. Then
all of a sudden goes “boing” and give another cue with
his eyes and his head and he goes, “middle eight!” ba
boom bada ba boom and we go to the middle eight. We keep playing
and when it’s over we all have a laugh like, “what was
that 9 years of stopping?” And he says, “I was lost”,
so were we! And he goes, “Let’s turn it into something”.
And the idea of that was usually that would be cut out, or we’d
do another take. He loved the fact that it was “the other thing”.
 So
he than has the idea that he’ll call Brian Wilson and let Brian
Wilson do like a vocal cluster over it. In comes Brian Wilson,
you know whenever Ringo wants to call somebody, they just show up.
So I’m just this dork of a fan. I open my door and there happens
to be Brian Wilson. “hello!”, how great is that? And Brian
was amazing. A little to the strange side, but aren’t we all?
And he was say like, “Ok, give me 7 tracks, no I want 9. You
got 18 tracks? I need 18 tracks.” And he’d sing, “do
dut duh do dut, a low ho. Give me 7 more of those”, and it
was in his head before he did it. And I’m just sitting there
as a fan. You know part of he has trouble producing because half
the time my jaw is on the floor. And Brian Wilson’s asking
me questions and I’m staring at him like, “please, autograph
my ‘Pet Sounds’”. And so I really have to struggle
to be a talent in my own mind against these guys who are legendary
artists. So we took that middle eight part that Ringo just invented
as a mistake, and it becomes this beautiful “Pet Sounds/Brian
Wilson” thing. And Ringo says, “See what I mean? No demos,
no mistakes.” And that to me is like, wow, how great was that?
JOE: So when you produce other artists, all of a sudden that’s
your thing?
MARK: It becomes my story. And it’s weird because when you
tell “A Beatles Story”, It’s a lot different than
saying “it came from Menudo”. And now when I do the Aerosmith
record, I produced “Just Push Play”, the first
thing I did was go to the drummer, Joey Kramer, and said,
“Why don’t you try playing a four piece kit, instead of
one of those kits with 85 drums. Why don’t you just get one
of those kits where you’re forced to play great drum fills
because there’s not that many drums to rely on?” And Joey
went, “great idea”. Sets up a four piece drum kit and
ends up buying a Ludwig because he’s also a “Ringo Freak”.
And next thing you know, the style of his playing becomes this other
thing. Mistakes start to happen and we embellish the mistakes. It
becomes a combination of what John had said and what Ringo had said,
and in his own way, what Paul said.
…to be continued. Check www.brunchradio.com for more from
Mark Hudson! And meet Joe Johnson and Mark at the “Fest for
Beatlesfans” the weekend of August 16th in Chicago.
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