Frequent Prince collaborator and renowned producer David Rivkin – known professionally as David Z – has died at the age of 78, it’s been confirmed. He was being treated in hospital but suffered complications from an infection.
Like Prince, Rivkin hailed from Minneapolis, and the pair came into contact in the mid-’70s. It was Rivkin who worked with Prince on the demos that would eventually secure him a recording deal with Warner Bros, and the pair had a long-standing creative relationship. Indeed, Rivkin is remembered as one of the originators of what became know as the ‘Minneapolis sound’.
Perhaps Rivkin’s most notable input came on 1986 mega-hit Kiss, which Prince began on the acoustic guitar, and was originally intended for Minneapolis funk band Mazarati, who he was working with.
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“The song sounded like a folk song that Stephen Stills might have done,” Rivkin told Mixonline in 2001. “I didn’t quite know what to do with it and neither did the group.”
The story goes that, alongside Revolution bassist BrownMark, Rivkin then worked until 3am to create something very different, using the Linn 9000 drum machine as a foundation.
“The groove began to get complex, especially the hi-hat pattern,” he explained. “I ran the hat through a delay unit, set about 150 milliseconds, printed that to tape and printed the original hat to another track and then alternated between ‘source’ and ‘blend’ on the delay unit, recording those passes. It created a pretty cool rhythm that was constantly changing in tone and complexity but was still steady.
“Then I played some guitar chords and gated them through a Kepex unit and used that to trigger various combinations of the hi-hat tracks. That gave us the basic rhythm groove for the song.”
With Rivkin absent (possibly at home getting some well-earned rest), Prince returned to the studio the next day and asked an engineer to pull up the track. By the time Rivkin returned, Prince had recorded his own guitar and vocal parts.
“I asked him what was going on,” the producer recalled. “He said to me, ‘This is too good for you guys. I’m taking it back.’”
Kiss wasn’t the only ‘80s smash that Rivkin was involved in – he also co-produced Fine Young Cannibals’ She Drives Me Crazy, which became a US number one. What’s more, it was Rivkin who was responsible for the song’s distinctive and much-copied snare sound, which used not only the Linn 9000 but also some clever processing of an acoustic snare.
“I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone,” he explained to Mixonline. “As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with.”
There was more, though: Rivkin then took this blended sound and ran it through an upside down Autatone speaker that was sitting on a snare drum, which then rattled and added more ambience. A bit of limiting and a touch of reverb and the wood-blocky ‘snare’ was complete.
Rivkin was also a member of Lipps Inc, who had a 1980 hit with Funkytown. He was the elder brother of Prince and the Revolution drummer Bobby Z, who broke the news of his death to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
“He was a master of gizmos in the studio,” he told the paper. “He was linking instruments together and using the board in unorthodox ways. He was a true rebel. He was a very creative guy.”
