Episode #22 - The Producers (Part 1): Max Norman
Generally speaking, the Enter Sadmen podcast is usually all about the people making the noise, not the people who are left to survey the empty cans of super strength Tennents and overflowing ashtrays covering every surface, listening to the hum of a Marshall amp in the newly-minted silence of the studio while they work out how the fuck they’re going to stitch together a month’s worth of assorted riffs, screams and clangs into something remotely coherent.
The inaugural Producers episode saw the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes pluck Max Norman’s name from the lengthy list of those knob-twiddlers deemed by the boys to be the greatest of this particular generation.
Now before we do anything else, let’s get one thing straight: all the great hard rock producers are British. We’re not saying that out of a misguided sense of patriotism (or, indeed, jingoism). It’s just the truth. Controversial, we know, but in a game of 5-card stud where hard rock producers are the cards (stay with us here - it’s worth the wait), we’re holding Norman, Birch, Tsangarides, Allom and Johns, and we dare you to raise us.
And with that argument laid to rest before it’s begun, we smash cut to our boys as they take themselves off to the wild lands of Wikipedia, Discogs and Encyclopeadia Metallum in an effort to find the most obscure Max Norman-produced album they could. In which endeavour - spoiler alert - they fail miserably, returning instead with a trio of familiar house specials that would grace any metal buffet.
Savatage - Power Of The Night (1985)
First up, then, are the Oliva brothers and their merry band with Savatage’s second album. You have to go back eight episodes in the pod to stumble across anything you might consider to be in any way highbrow (Maiden’s Flight of Icarus, to be precise), but any appetite the lads might have had for classics history is well catered for here with Fountain of Youth and the story of Ponce de Leon’s 15th Century governorship of Bimini, a remote Caribbean island said to be the home of the mythical youth-sustaining geyser.
Oh, and there are also songs about sex with dead people, blow jobs and anal. Say what you like about Savatage, but don’t knock the pursuit of diversity in their subject matter.
Armored Saint - Delirious Nomad (1985)
It was hardly surprising when Steve rocked up with this in his sweaty little palms. A Saint-botherer of some standing, the merest hint of a Dave Prichard guitar solo has a Stepford-like effect on him. He goes all glassy-eyed and can’t hold a proper conversation. With an album cover that appears to depict a Tubeway Army refugee circa 1979 trying to gatecrash an ambassadorial dinner after an arson attack, it’s a wonder the album sold at all. But sell it did, and in decent enough numbers that John Bush and co. were invited back by Chrysalis to do it all over again two years later with Raising Fear.
Ten songs, then, and ten opportunities for Prichard to let his guitar sing and make Steve weep. But would Mark and Richard have their own epiphany on the road to Los Angeles and join him in worship at the altar of the Saints?
Megadeth - Youthanasia (1994)
It takes a certain kind of special to plump for an album cover depicting babies being pegged out on a washing line, and it takes a special kind of stupid to look at it and come to the conclusion the babies are real. Yet the complaints of uproarious outrage flooded in upon the release of Megadeth’s follow-up to the commercial behemoth that was Countdown To Exinction. There were no complaints, though, from Richard, who almost soiled himself with excitement upon learning that Max Norman had had to construct a brand new studio to contain the enormity of his knob-twiddling on this fine opus.
But Countdown casts a long shadow in the late afternoon of hard rock and heavy metal’s golden era, and as this episode reached its final sprint, questions remained over whether Youthanasia had the necessary grunt across its 12 tracks to power its way out of it …