Sound City Studios was in a warehouse complex near the Budweiser Brewery, and the owner, Tom Skeeter, hadn’t done any decorating since they opened in 1969. I think they rented the same couch for 25 years—they didn’t even bother to buy it. Everyone knew Sound City was a shithole, but that board brought out the best and the worst in musicians. A Neve can enhance the sound of an instrument to make it more powerful, but it is what it is. It can’t make a bad band sound better. There are no shortcuts or digital manipulations. When Tom Petty recorded Damn the Torpedoes, the band played “Refugee” more than 100 times because they wanted the perfect take. It had to be real.

In the early ’90s, Sound City nearly closed because producers and rock stars didn’t want to come out to the Valley, so it stayed every great musician’s best-kept secret. You’d walk down the hallway, look at the records and think, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush was made here? Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog and Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight—are you serious?

Nirvana spent maybe 16 days there—we recorded and left. Six months later Nevermind was number one and we were selling millions of records. Then everybody wanted that noisy sound, and Rage Against the Machine and Weezer recorded there.

I remember coming back to Sound City and seeing that they’d put Nevermind ’s gold record on the wall. I had offered to buy the console before, so when it did come time to sell the board, they picked me to have it. It’s one of a kind, so it was either going with me or to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It hadn’t been moved in 40 years, but I unplugged it, put it on a truck, moved it six miles to my studio in Northridge, plugged it in, and it works just fine.

I initially wanted to do a 12-minute Web piece on Sound City, but there were too many people and the stories were great, so I made a documentary called Sound City: Real to Reel. This is where Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks met Mick Fleetwood. They passed each other in the hallway, and Mick had heard a song they recorded. Two weeks later, when his guitar player quit, Mick asked someone about Buckingham as a replacement. He was told, “If you take him, you have to take his girlfriend, too.”

People don’t understand there’s a whole life and depth behind every song on the radio, whether it’s Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” or Justin Bieber’s “Baby.” But it was these people with that piece of equipment who changed the world.
—As told to Nancy Miller