Ron Young recalls Little Caesar’s debut album becoming a “Bob Rock record” after ‘Dr. Feelgood’ got to #1

Ron Young recalls Little Caesar’s debut album becoming a “Bob Rock record” after ‘Dr. Feelgood’ got to #1

Little Caesar frontman Ron Young was interviewed by Shawn Ratches for the Laughing Monkey Music podcast back in mid-December 2020.

For their debut self-titled album, Little Caesar had Bob Rock handling the production duties after the latter had recently finished producing Mötley Crüe‘s album Dr. Feelgood (1989) that ended up going to #1 on the Billboard Charts in the United States of America.

In terms of that latter event changing the sound of Little Caesar‘s debut album, Young indicated (as provided by the Laughing Monkey Music podcast with slight edits):

“Yeah, it’s pretty, pretty funny. We got sucked into that whole drama. But, you know, the thing was, when we sat down with Bob Rock, we said, Listen, we want to make a very straight ahead, very honest, very, you know, not overproduced rock record. That’s precisely [how] the band comes through and he was down with that. We go to Vancouver, we start recording like that, and, like, three, four weeks into recording the record, Mötley Crüe‘s Dr. Feelgood goes to number one, and all of a sudden, right then, we felt the change. Like overnight, we went from making a Little Caesar record to making a Bob Rock record. And I was calling back to L.A. going, ‘Errrr. We’re doing tons of open [inaudible] in these keyboard parts. And it’s getting really out of hand. You know, listen, we kind of fell asleep at the switch and at the time, we didn’t have anybody in there monitoring him or looking at for us, and then we just figured, ‘Hey, it’s Bob Rock. He’s got a number one record don’t you know? What do you guys know?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, we know the music. We know where we’re coming from.’ But we, like I said, hindsight is 2020.”

You can listen to the interview with Ron Young on the Laughing Monkey Music podcast below: