Few bands of late have been so successful at forging an air of mystery and danger as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. If you’re in a somewhat cynical mood, it’s as if the creative teams of films such as The Crow, City of Lost Children, and 28 Days Later collaborated to brainstorm the next-generation of tormented rock stars. The scene unfolds with the band’s music—dark, dreamy, and soaring on its self-titled 2000 debut, and feral, swaggering, and somewhat nightmarish on the new Take Them On, On Your Own [Virgin]. Then there’s the ragamuffin, beat-poet visage of BRMC masterminds Peter Hayes and Robert Turner and their psychic-twins style of speech that is simultaneously well-considered and distracted. And let’s add another twist to keep things off- balance—a British Isles lilt that will keep audiences guessing whether the accents of the San Francisco homeboys are an affectation, an hommage, or a bizarre cross-pollination of cultural intrigues.

The most fascinating plot turn, however, is how BRMC managed to go off and record the new album’s haunting collection of IMAX-sized guitar textures, riffs, and solos all by themselves in a noisy rehearsal space with one guitar, one bass, a couple of pedals, and no amps. It helps that the band has seldom backed down from a challenge.

Formed in 1998 with one authentic Brit—drummer Nick Jago—BRMC quickly outgrew the S.F. scene, relocating to Los Angeles in 1999, and gaining airplay and critical raves with their 16-track demo CD. Signed to Virgin in 2001, the band’s debut stirred up even more underground hysteria, and landed them on multiple covers of Britain’s New Musical Express, as well as features in the pages of GP, Mojo, Maxim, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and countless other magazines, fanzines, and newspapers.

Whether by calculated design or heartfelt inspiration—or a combination of both—BRMC is a group that takes its image and its music very seriously. And in a cultural season where vibe, charisma, and mystique have even less value than the Yen, the BRMC experience is a very thrilling “screenplay” for lovers of guitars, bad boys, emotional savants, and angst-ridden screw-ups. In other words, everything that’s great and sacred about rock and roll.

What was the basic creative process behind the new album?
Hayes: Um, I don’t know how much mystery I should keep in this stuff! I usually double the main guitar part, and pan the tracks hard left and right. I don’t like using a delay to split one track into a stereo signal. I’d rather run through the song twice, and play off the other guitar part. The subtle differences in the two
performances make the guitars appear larger. I usually leave those parts alone—the drastic EQing occurs with the overdubs as we try to find places for everything in the mix. We really tweak the other parts so that they fit in and don’t eat up too much sonic space.

Turner: For this record, we took a couple of days to track the drums and bass at Mayfair Studios in London. We wanted the rhythm tracks to have a natural room sound that captured a band playing together. At this point, we aren’t into over-producing anything, but when we do the guitars, we always go away and hide. So we rented a room at the Fortress [a London rehearsal facility] for &ound;20 a day, had our gear shipped over, and locked ourselves away to track the guitars and vocals. That’s the best way for us to work, because we enjoy the time and the freedom to experiment. Unfortunately, the noise from the other bands was pretty ridiculous. We’d constantly hear this boom, boom, boom, boom while we were working. And then there was a rave party every weekend, and the bar was set up two steps from our door. We constantly had to resist the temptation to get drunk.

But we didn’t want to fall short, you know? We wanted to respect what has been given to us. We needed to stay focused, do our homework, and make each song sound the best it could. We obsess over that, and we often go after each other’s throats because we care about the music more than anything—for better or worse. The process of creation is the whole thing, and if you’re not enjoying it, no amount of record sales or awards or headline shows is going to do it for you.

How did you sculpt the mammoth—and often eccentric—guitar tones for the new record?
Hayes: I don’t usually use amps in the studio. Maybe that’s our big mistake. I haven’t figured out how to record an amp to get the sound I want, so I plug into a pedal, and then straight into the board. That’s it. The way I see it, the only thing an amp gives you is a room sound. What I’m doing is skipping the middle man—which is the microphone—and using console EQ and the guitar’s pickup selector to shape the sound. I don’t have to EQ the amp, and have that tone colored by a microphone, and then have the board add its coloration—there’s a lot of B.S. going on there!

Turner: It would be simpler to do what everybody else does, and just mic the amp. It’s really frustrating how badly we suck at that. Maybe it’s the guitar, maybe it’s the amps, maybe it’s the mics we use and how we position them, but, whatever it is, it forced us to get the best sounds we could with direct signals. We’re lucky that, with us, it’s our limitations that often bring out our strengths. And we kind of like the fact that nothing is easy.

It’s pretty hard to believe that such ferocious guitar sounds were constructed without an amp, or, at least, a modeling processor.
Turner: Peter is just brilliant with EQ. He goes too far most of the time, but he often touches on sounds that no one has ever heard before.

Hayes: I’m still learning how to do it right, and I drive people crazy. When you overuse EQ, you can end up losing a lot of the [natural] tone, but it’s worth the risk because drastic EQ can really unveil some amazing sounds. For example, I’m of the belief that whatever melody you think you’ve written, you haven’t—it was already there in the music. So I EQ everything to pull out all the overtones, undertones, hums, shrieks, and feedback, and put them way up front. That’s why I don’t care about the typical big, rich vocal sound, because if the music is singing along with the voice, then all the melodic elements are working together.

What were some of the pedals you used?
Hayes: It was almost exclusively a Tube Screamer.

What’s up with all these different tunings—there’s almost a new tuning for every song?
Hayes: I figure, you have six strings, so you might as well treat them as six different instruments! That’s just the way my mind works. I usually work out a tuning so that I can do these arpeggios where the main groove is on the bass strings, the offbeats are on the high strings, and the lines are in the middle.

This goes back to how listening to Jimi Hendrix ultimately got me into recording. I’d hear a rhythm and a lead guitar in his songs, and because I knew nothing about overdubbing back then, I never figured out how he could play two parts at once. So I started tuning my guitar in weird ways so I could keep the rhythm and play solos at the same time.

As you produced the album yourself—mostly in a tiny, home-studio-type situation—were there any challenges that threatened your sanity?
Turner: Mixing is the bane of our existence. Recording is fun. Mixing is when it gets into obsession, and things go too far. For example, “Six Barrel Shotgun” was cursed, and we spent half the mixing time and money on that one song. There were broken mics, crackling noises, and poorly recorded parts that we couldn’t tame inside the mix.

And, “In Like the Rose” is the hardest song we’ve ever recorded, because Peter used this great Dunlop tremolo that gives you these extremely chopped, harsh cuts. We had to play to the tremolo on the verses, and Peter isn’t used to being the timekeeper—he usually floats over the top of the band. The hard part was when we went into free time for the choruses. We had to keep the tremolo tempo in our heads, and match it when Peter clicked the pedal back in. We tried recording the song about ten different ways, and the only option that worked was having Peter record the entire song by himself—with the tremolo on throughout—and then having Nick and I play to his track. For the mix, we just muted Peter’s tremolo track in favor of the overdubbed chorus lines. Playing that song live is going to require two amps—one with the tremolo on constantly, and another for the chorus parts—and a separate monitor mix that lets only the band hear the tremolo part for timing. We’ll be playing to a messed up version of the song, but the people in the audience won’t be able to tell.

The new record sounds way more aggressive than your rather dreamy debut album. What prompted you to increase the rock and roll factor?
Hayes: The new album was definitely affected by all the touring we did, and it’s more punchy as a result. When you play for more people, you have to push the music out there a bit more—make it bigger. In fact, the whole tour was a complete fight. We had to live up to our hype, we had to get people to remember us, and we had to prove ourselves each and every show. That really pulled the band together.

Turner: I’m pretty obnoxiously proud of how good we became as musicians—purely from doing 200 shows in two years. If we didn’t get better, then we were really doing something wrong. And all the struggle has shown itself on this record. Musically, it has all the things that are unspoken—if you know what I mean. Nick is 11 times the drummer he was on the first record. He has more strength and power, and his dynamics are incredible. And I’m proud of Peter and myself, as well. This record is more about musicianship, and I think people are starting to care more about that right now.

Really?
Turner: Well, the music we make is probably not regarded as much as our haircuts or the hit singles. People often base their assessment of a great band on its image or success. But I feel we bring something great to the music and to our performances. I can’t describe it, but I don’t hear it in other bands.

Can you be more specific?
Turner: Most people think a great musician is someone like Santana—a musically intelligent person who is very skilled at his craft. But I have no respect for that. That’s all about doing your homework, but not putting your heart into what you do. It’s being educated, but being a complete idiot.

BRMC evolved from a regional club band to a major-label big deal in a relatively short time. Did the explosion of notoriety surprise you?
Hayes: We didn’t think about the explosion, and we didn’t want it, either. It’s dangerous to talk about, because I don’t know what will happen to us, but I’m not into being an ant magnified on a jumbo screen for the benefit of a festival crowd. We just wanted to earn it, you know? We did a lot of time in a van, and a lot of time in very small clubs, and we loved it. I want to hold onto those experiences as much as possible, because they were all about getting out and winning an audience. I’d never want to get so caught up in our own thing that we forget to consider exactly who we’re playing for.