The missing link between seemingly totally unrelated styles of music will inevitably turn out to be an engineer. Unlike the musicians for hire who are often known as "session men," the participation of recording engineers does not even depend on the particular instrumental requirements of a genre. Whether the music is gangsta rap played on drum machines and samplers or country & western played with pedal steel guitar and fiddle, a recording engineer will be needed before anybody can hope to release a record. The philosophical and moral code of these engineers must be to create the finest possible documentation of the session -- whatever the hell it is.
The slight profanity above is appropriate in the case of
Eddie Miller, one of several talented people with this name in the music business but the only one to work with the notorious
2 Live Crew. Recordings by this outfit, the members of which
Miller has remained involved with in various spin-off projects, apparently set new standards for indecency in the recording industry, making the '60s actions of Doug Clark & the Hot Nuts seem like something designed for grade-school entertainment. Several landmark obscenity cases resulted from the recordings
Miller made of
2 Live Crew, most of which he also participated in as a percussionist. Since recording is really just the forensic science of music,
Miller's talents with microphones and mixing can be considered to be at the crux of the legal court controversy.
At least one expert in the subject insists that if it wasn't for
Miller, crew members including Luther Campbell would never have had their day in court. Dr. Harold Bamba, a scholar in the recording arts who has forced himself to endure
prolonged exposure to so-called obscene material, thinks
Miller's abilities are simply too damn good.
"That pause in the lyric on "Greenback Dollar" by the
Kingston Trio suggests what was considered an obscenity on the radio then, the word "damn," by the total lack of it. This is the opposite of the way
Eddie Miller mixed," the doctor of recorded smut concluded in a recent essay.
"Never before have I heard expletives undeleted in such a crisp, superbly articulated fashion, especially considering the strength of the percussion and bass material also on the tracks. Can you think of a record in which a four-syllable word such as (censored) is tracked with such total equilibrium regarding per-syllable levels." One translation of this is that the cussing on these sides was recorded so brilliantly that, for example, someone two city blocks away from the playback system could pick out offensive words. On mixes done by others in the business, only the bassline would be audible down the block.
Miller may have learned such skills during his apprentice years as assistant engineer at
Prince's Paisley Park studios. His name on hit albums such as
Lovesexy assured employment interest in his future. Weather may have factored into a flight from Minneapolis down to Miami, where he fell into a recording scene with
2 Live Crew as well as
H-Town,
Luke, and J.T. Money & Poison Clan
From here
Miller shifted to Los Angeles, his credits becoming more like a mainstream checklist. Those previously unexposed to such stylistic range on the part of recording engineers would be startled to find him working on
Willie Nelson,
Travis Tritt, and
Brooks & Dunn sessions as well as '90s and new millennium radio rock pablum --
Stone Temple Pilots and
Creed, for example. This is not the same
Eddie Miller who plays keyboards and sometimes produces smooth jazz material with artists such as
Norman Connors and
Patrice Rushen, however. Yet another musician, producer, and engineer to avoid similar confusion with is Georgia's
Edd Miller. ~ Eugene Chadbourne