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Joe Barresi: Hear No Evil

Joe Barresi has produced, engineered and mixed some of the most important hard rock, metal and punk bands out there. He tells Headliner how he got the nickname ‘Evil,’ and how working with bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Tool has been a musical education.

Joe Barresi is renowned for working with the heaviest of heavy metal bands, including Tool, Queens of the Stone Age, Avenged Sevenfold and Slipknot. His inspiration? The Partridge Family.

“I don't think they'd ever play the same stage together,” he laughs, speaking to Headliner from his home in Valley Village, California, where he’s hanging out with his dog. Also known by his nickname ‘Evil’ – although he says I can just call him Joe – he was given the name while working on a Judas Priest record.

“I used to be Smiling Joe but now I'm Evil Joe. It actually came from Scott Travis, who was in Racer X before Judas Priest. The guys in Racer X were friends with a guy who did these prank phone calls, and one of his characters was Evil Joe. Racer X did a song called Evil Joe and they put the actual prank phone call on one of their albums, and I worked on a Raging Speedhorn record and they put it on one of their records. Then Tool opened up Coachella and played the prank phone call in front of 60,000 people. It was just kind of funny, and since I was Joe, I became Evil Joe.”

Learning to play the guitar when he was seven, Barresi went on to play in local bands in and around his home. He’d always liked music, and fondly remembers his grandmother’s AM radio, placed proudly on the top of her mantlepiece.

“I started watching The Partridge Family, and I just thought it was kind of cool – it was a very family oriented show,” he recalls. “There is a point in your life when you try to figure out what you are going to do, so I played in bands to try to get better. At some point, it became almost therapeutic in a way, but also, I could focus. I would practice up to 10 hours a day just trying to get better and learning stuff – you never know what it's gonna lead to.”

Despite the intense guitar-practicing sessions, things changed for Barresi when he helped a friend take some gear into a studio, which he realised was “way cooler” than actually being in a band.

“I didn't have to deal with flaky musicians and singers and all the drama that goes with being in a band anymore! It was actually kind of cool just to be creative in a different way, but still involving music.”

Barresi studied classical guitar – “mainly because I loved Randy Rhoads” – and music theory at the University of South Florida before graduating from the University of Miami, where he also studied piano and music engineering. During this time, he began recording and developing local bands in Miami.

“I could see that there was so much classical influence in some of Uli Roth’s playing – he was one of my favourite guitar players because of that neoclassical kind of thing,” he explains.

“Classical music to me is just filled with beautiful melodies, so going to school studying music theory was just to try to figure out what exactly the harmonies were. I was actually a fairly decent classical guitar player because I could play rock guitar ahead of time. All the guys that were actual classical guitar players would always marvel at my hands, and I’d be like, ‘you guys should listen to more Uli Roth!’”

After graduating from college, Barresi moved to Los Angeles and began working his way up the ladder by working at numerous local studios – a move that helped him gain an understanding of the different consoles, rooms and clientele at the various studios. His first big break came when he engineered a demo for producer Garth ‘GGGarth’ Richardson.

“This was pre Rage Against the Machine Garth,” he points out. “We enjoyed working together and then the next record would come along and Garth would have a little extra money and pay me some extra cash to help do the record, and that turned into a couple years’ worth of work. What I wanted to do was not be a runner in the typical way: just going to get food for two years before I was actually allowed to touch the microphone. So I took some classes on how to use an SSL and the guy who ran USC’s music department hired me to work in his studio. I realised the importance of different clients, different studios and different gear.”

Barresi ended up working as a freelance assistant at four different studios, where he mastered different consoles and saw a few projects all the way through.

“Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't,” he admits. “But it was beneficial to my career for sure.”

Barresi went on to mix tracks for Monster Magnet, Fair to Midland, Hole, Veruca Salt, Weezer, Rancid, Bauhaus, Anthrax, Skunk Anansie and Alpha Galates, eventually gaining enough experience and insight to start producing records. On going from engineering to producing, Barresi noticed that the producer seemed to get most of the recognition for a finished product:

“With engineering you usually get paid a daily rate and that's a steady job if you're working with a producer who's working a lot, or if you're in favour at that point. You get hired quite a bit. Producing is a whole different beast – it’s almost like wearing three hats, and you have to split less money across more work. But it was more creative to me. I've never really worked on a tonne of stuff that I hated. And if I did, I just would leave and say I'm not the person for this job.”

I could see that there was so much classical influence in some of Uli Roth’s playing – he was one of my favourite guitar players.

Terry Davies’ engineer gave Barresi a piece of advice that has stuck with him:

“He told me that to be a producer, you have to stop engineering, because you just keep getting hired to be the engineer,” he remembers. “So that was a tough, tough challenge because I would get called to be the engineer on a record and I would turn it down; it could be an amazing amount of money. I didn't think anybody looked at who engineered a record anyway – they all looked at who produced it and who mixed it.

"Really it’s the engineer that sets the bed for the sound of the album, but everybody looked at the mixer as being the person who saved the album. Really it was the engineer who made it sound great back then.”

Barresi hit a turning point when he produced the debut album by Queens of the Stone Age which, at the time, did not have a record deal. The self-titled album garnered attention from the press, and the band soon landed a deal with Interscope Records.

“They weren’t called Queens of the Stone Age yet,” he notes. “They were just trying to get a record deal. Josh sent me a cassette tape and said, ‘I'm trying to make a record with this band I've got; are you interested?’ I was like, ‘okay, let's do it. I don't care how much money we have. Let's just do it’. So that's how that started.

"It was the first time he actually sang as the lead singer, so it was definitely a challenge because he was just finding his way and there was no real bass player in the band yet. It was just total guerilla-style in Palm Springs at a studio called Monkey. It was challenging, but it was brutally honest music and it sounded so different. People pay attention when things don't sound the same.”

Barresi then engineered and mixed the Tool album 10,000 Days, a job he received after a recommendation from Buzz Osborne of The Melvins, and has enjoyed a working relationship with the band ever since – most recently mixing the 2019 album Fear Inoculum.

“I love Tool! I love the dirtiness of the first couple records and I love the clarity and the punch of the later two records that they did prior to me. I tried to marry the two things together – I wanted it to sound like Stinkfist with a dirtier undertow. That was the idea in my brain for 10,000 Days, and it was definitely challenging because musically they're on a whole different level than my brain can think,” he laughs.

“There were times where I just flat out had to ask Adam, ‘just what exactly is going on in this passage?’ And he would say, ‘I'm playing seven over Justin playing nine, and Dan's playing 13 …’ I was just like, ‘wow – how are guys even keeping straight with that?’ Then he would explain how it turned back around, so it was definitely a musical education! That's the beauty of working with those guys – they want it to be the best it is, which in turn makes me want to make it the best it can be for them as well.”