Mike Elizondo Played the Bass on "In da Club". On October 9 His Name Is on a Greta Van Fleet Record

The producer Greta Van Fleet took to a Tennessee cabin last spring co-wrote “The Real Slim Shady” and made Mastodon’s The Hunter. Heavy bands have been hiring Dr. Dre’s bass player for fifteen years and nobody ever called it a betrayal.

The chain nobody finishes

Every outlet that covered the announcement of Palace For The People on 31 July described Mike Elizondo the same way: “producer for Turnstile, Eminem and Fiona Apple.” Then they stopped. That list is accurate and it tells you nothing, because the three names sit in three unrelated rooms and the sentence makes him look like a session mercenary with a wide calendar.

Run the chain properly and it goes one direction, in order, over twenty-five years:

Dr. Dre’s rhythm section → “In da Club” and The Marshall Mathers LP → Mastodon’s The Hunter → Avenged Sevenfold’s Nightmare → Turnstile’s Glow On → Greta Van Fleet, October 9.

Heavy music has been walking toward the same man for fifteen years, five records in one direction, and the band with the most Led Zeppelin in its blood arrived last.

What he actually did on “In da Club”

Mike Elizondo is credited as co-writer and co-producer on “In da Club”, the single that held No. 1 on the Hot 100 for nine of its thirty weeks on the chart (Wikipedia). He also has a co-writing credit on “The Real Slim Shady”, from a record that moved 1.8 million copies in its first week (Wikipedia).

But the credit undersells the job. He played the bass line. Vibe’s account of the session has Elizondo on bass with Dr. Dre and Tommy Coster Jr. building the track up from there (Vibe). So the most recognisable eight seconds in 2003 pop radio started as a bass player in a room, and the man who played it spent the next two decades getting hired by bands who needed the bottom end to carry a song.

Elizondo described Dre’s instruction at that session, and it should land with any Greta Van Fleet fan:

“Dre was using the concept of ’less is more,’ but make it sound as big as possible.”

That is also a description of Led Zeppelin: four people, no orchestra and no stacked choir, with a drum sound built from a room and a pair of microphones. Different decade and different city, same instruction.

The Mastodon correction, because the internet has this wrong

The Elizondo record in the Mastodon catalogue is The Hunter, from 2011, cut at Sound City in Los Angeles and Doppler in Atlanta. It was their first with him, it hit No. 10 on the Billboard 200, and it sold 39,000 copies in its first week (Wikipedia).

It was not Once More ‘Round the Sun and not Emperor of Sand, though those two get attached to his name constantly. If you are building the lineage, build it on the right album.

From there the rest holds up. Nightmare, Avenged Sevenfold’s 2010 record, is an Elizondo production and it debuted at No. 1 on 163,000 copies (Wikipedia). He also worked on Hail to the King. Then Glow On, Turnstile’s 2021 album, which drew three Grammy nominations for the band and a separate Producer of the Year nomination for Elizondo himself (Wikipedia).

So when the Greta Van Fleet announcement hit, it was a fifteen-year pattern finally reaching the band everyone describes with a Led Zeppelin comparison.

The cabin is less romantic than it sounds, and better

The press release language was “a remote cabin in Tennessee”, written and recorded there in spring 2026, co-produced by the band with Elizondo (Louder). It reads like four guys disappearing into the woods to find themselves.

Elizondo has lived in Nashville since 2018 and keeps a studio in Gallatin, Tennessee (Wikipedia). So the cabin sat near his house: four people and a producer in a room, for a season, with nobody commuting.

This is also not their first Tennessee record. Starcatcher was cut in 2023 at RCA Studio A in Nashville with Dave Cobb, plus Low Country South in Savannah (Wikipedia, Chicago Sun-Times). They already live down there, creatively, so the news is who was waiting for them this time, and what he does for a living before he produces: he plays bass.

Three years had passed since Starcatcher, long enough that rumours of the band breaking up were circulating. Danny Wagner, on the record for Louder, put a flat end to that:

“The minute the four of us step into a room with the shared goal of creating, there is very little that can stop us.”

Jake Kiszka, on what they built: “…in its heart, it’s a very modern record.”

Where the title comes from, and why it fits a bass player’s record

The title of Palace For The People comes from a building. Greta Van Fleet headlined Alexandra Palace in London in 2022, a Victorian building that opened as “The Palace of the People”, put up as a space for the public rather than for the monarchy (Louder, guitar.com). Josh Kiszka flipped the phrase around:

“We played the ‘Palace of the People’ in London, and our music is a Palace for the People.”

The building was designed to hold a crowd and named after one, and the band made a record about it with the producer whose craft is making a small number of elements sound enormous: the title and the hire are the same idea.

What to listen for on “Tear It Down”

The third single arrived on 21 September, after “Play Your Games” and “Saw You Stand”. It leads with the riff and the lyric runs on building and destruction (uDiscover).

The guitar will take your attention. Resist it for one pass and listen underneath, to Sam Kiszka’s bass and to the air between the instruments. That is the Elizondo signature and it is Dre’s, the same signature in both cases: fewer things, placed further apart, each one louder than it has any right to be.

If you want to hear the full argument in one sitting, play “In da Club”, then The Hunter, then Glow On, then “Tear It Down”. Four genres on paper, and one bass player’s idea of how big a record is allowed to sound.

The thread to pull next

One thing would close this story, and it is not public yet: the track-by-track credits. We will take the credits apart when they land, because there is one line that would turn this piece from argument into fact. Does Elizondo play bass on Palace For The People? If his name is in the performer credits and not only the production ones, then the band with the biggest Led Zeppelin comparison in modern rock made a record with John Paul Jones’s job filled by the guy from “In da Club”, and the lineage closes with a click.

Record’s out October 9 on Republic Records. If you have a producer hire that sounded wrong to you and turned out right, bring it to us on Threads @realrocklab or on Instagram @realrocklab. We are building the list.