Mark Needham audio interview on Say You Will

[bombaysaffires]

Originally Posted by Villavic

Yes, he said and then the band went in and rented a house in Bel Air and set up a studio there.

Who actually paid the rent? I mean who usually pay for the studio, all the band members? Or the label? or the producers, or they look for investors like movie or theatre productions? Cause that also defines who benefits from the sales and how, or to whom the revenue goes.

at that point it would have been the band, because they were essentially making the album on spec... they did not have a label at that point, which is why they had the various execs coming to the house to listen to the songs they had recorded and make offers. At one point as Mick states in the doc, they were looking like pretty set to go with Interscope, and then at the last minute Warners wanted a shot and came out and listened (you see this in the doc) and then it became a bunch of back and forth with the competing offers until they finally chose to go with the Warners offer.

So the band would have been covering costs knowing they would likely get someone to bite and seems likely they would negotiate recouping the costs somewhere in the contract. If Lindsey had a deal for a solo record and recorded a bunch of his stuff using the advance from that record company before it morphed into a band album..he'd owe them a solo album and if they didn't get one from him he'd owe them that money back... But even if he did have some of that money that covered recording his stuff early on, none of that would have been used to record Stevie's stuff... and in the doc don't they say the men of Mac have been at the house recording for like 6 months to a year without Stevie and then she showed up to put her vocals on?

How the band divvied things up internally who knows. They seemed very careful to split the number of songs (and hence money) 50-50 between the two songwriters. This is why Lindsey makes the statement that if they went to 18 songs or whatever for a double album he'd have to eat a **** ton of money because he would have more songs than Stevie but wouldn't get more of a share. No idea how monies got split with Mick and John though.