FROM THE MDs ARCHIVE / 02
Recording Brain Damage
Brain Damage was recorded in May 1981, and everything happened remarkably quickly.
According to the band's recollection, the entire process—from recording through mixing and mastering—was completed in roughly one week.
There wasn't the luxury of endlessly revisiting performances or trying dozens of alternate versions. The band went into the sessions with the music they had been developing and captured it.
Some parts of the record were finished astonishingly close to the moment they were recorded.
That urgency is still audible.
Rather than sounding carefully polished into something it wasn't, Brain Damage captures a very young band at a particular moment: energetic, imperfect, experimental and completely transparent. A copy if the finished recording ON CASSETE was dropped on Johny Vega’s desk and on that same day it was played almost entirely at the mayor FM Rock station, Alfa Rock 105 (Not even Alfa Rock 106 yet).
More than forty years later, details surrounding the sessions sometimes differ depending on who remembers them or which account is being consulted.
That's part of why we're building this archive: not to rewrite history, but to keep adding the memories of the people who lived it.