Kevin Griffin looks back at the making of Better Than Ezra’s platinum-selling 1995 Electra release, Deluxe.

“I was living in L.A., standing in line for a movie preview with my wife. She struck up a conversation with this girl and… just the coincidence of it… her boyfriend was Dan Rothschild, son of Paul Rothschild, who produced the Doors and Janis Joplin. We met and became friends.

Tom and Cary came to L.A. and we recorded almost all of the drum tracks in one night where these crazy twins, the Rotter twins, lived in two rehearsal rooms in East L.A. They took sink showers. This was a bizarre place to record, but they had a 16-track half-inch machine.

If you listen to the tempos, the drums are all over the place because we didn’t have time to get it right. We would do a few takes of each song and edit it together later. Listen to ‘This Time of Year’ or ‘Heaven,’ the BPM’s change abruptly in the middle of the songs because of different takes.

After that we recorded at Dan’s on half-inch 16-track tape mixed through a Fostex half inch tape deck in a converted living room of an apartment in West Hollywood. We ran the cables down into a 1978 Dodge Ram parked behind the building to record the guitar tracks.

We made the artwork ourselves. Tom and I went to the garment district, got the velvet, all the trinkets. We did all that, including pressing 2,000 copies for under $10,000. Of course, later we got signed to Electra and it sold a little over 2 million records.

We recorded over 10 months. Dan’s rate was $15 an hour. When we had money, we would call him. Dan was a lot more musically savvy than I was, added things like the half-step intervals on my guitar part in ‘The Killer Inside Me.’ He has a great musical ear. There’s a lot of Dan on that record.

We were playing ‘Good’ at shows before the words were finished, so we had the line ‘wah-uh it was good.’ People started coming up saying, ‘I like your band man, that one song, the Wah-Uh song!’ So we knew we had something and left it.

‘In The Blood’ was about my wife’s uncle. She moved to Los Angeles from Louisiana to take care of him when he was dying. I met this man, he was a great dude. The song is about someone you love having AIDS. When we mastered that song, we actually played another guitar part live as it was being mastered, really working on the fly.

We mixed with Dan moving the faders himself, when he didn’t have enough hands, we made our moves over him, old school, not like today. You can’t recall that stuff, you can’t ‘recall’ Deluxe”