You won't recognise his face, and you may not even know his name, but should you ever bump into Andy Wallace, you might want to give him a hug and thank him for changing your life. Because if you're a fan of rock music, your record collection (or streaming playlists) would be infinitely poorer if stripped of the albums that the New Jersey-born producer, engineer and mixer has worked on.
Examples? Reign In Blood. Nevermind. Rage Against The Machine. Meantime. ...And Out Come The Wolves. Roots. Hybrid Theory. Puzzle. Relationship of Command. Prequelle. Grey Britain. Basically, we're talking about some of the greatest, most influential, timeless albums in the history of rock, and Wallace's fingerprints are all over them.
It was Wallace's engineering and mixing work on Slayer's thrash metal masterpiece Reign In Blood which truly kickstarted his career as one of the most in-demand and respected recording studio technicians in the world. And, as he admits in a wide-ranging and fascinating new interview conducted with YouTube personality Rick Beato, even before he began mixing the Rick Rubin-produced album, Wallace was aware that the LA band's 1986 record was a game-changing piece of art.
"I remember hearing it, before I mixed it," he tells Beato, "and thinking, Holy mackerel! You want aggressive? Here it is!"
Wallace's work on Reign In Blood would directly lead to his involvement with another world-shaking album, Nirvana's 1991 major label debut Nevermind, as Kurt Cobain was a huge admirer of the dark magic he had bottled for Slayer. Fom moment he heard the opening bars of the album's opening track, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Wallace was equally blown away by the Nirvana's energy and raw power.
"First you get slapped in the face, then you get shoved, then you get punched", he tells Beato, in reference to the album's "beautiful noise".
"The whole album is incredible," he marvels, before admitting. "I didn't realise how big it was going to be, I don't think anybody did. It's timeless."
Later in the two hour-plus interview, Beato asks Wallace about his production work on Jeff Buckley's only studio album, Grace, which the YouTuber hails as "one of the most important records of the last 30, 40 years."
Wallace agrees with Beato's description of the late Californian singer-songwriter as "a genius", and recalls his very first meeting with Buckley in New York.
"Right from the very beginning there was a kind of kindred soul feeling," he says. "We had a lot of similar mindsets about music in general. It felt good, and I know he liked it too."
For Wallace, watching Buckley play solo live was "jaw-dropping".
" I was just spellbound by Grace," he recalls. "I looked at his manager and said, Did he write that? Is that one of his? And he said, 'Yeah'. [I thought] Oh boy, I can't wait to get into the studio on that one!"... The record was so magical in my estimation."
Watch the full interview below.
