THE MOJO INTERVIEW
White-bread b-boy turned mentor of legends, Rick Rubin’s road to all-round guru status is littered with platinum albums and (mostly) satisfied customers. Now he’s laid down his wisdom for the ages: “It’s the book I wish I’d had when I was 20.”
THE MOST SUCCESSFUL RECORD PRODUCER of the last 35 years is living the dream, Londonstyle. Today, he’s house-sitting a beautiful five-storey pile at the quiet end of Elgin Crescent, an elite address right across the street from Rosmead Garden, where Hugh Grant romanced Juliet Roberts in the movie Notting Hill. Barefoot, greeting MOJO with a firm handshake and locked eyecontact, his wild grey-white hair and beard resplendent, Rick Rubin is every inch the guru – and not just of record-making, it transpires. The 59-year-old’s new project is The Creative Act: A Way Of Being, his 400-page book of often gnomic wisdom on how best to make art of any description.
“I’d been asked several times to do biographical books, but that wasn’t interesting to me,” he explains. Instead, he opted to ser ve up what he terms “a call to action”, short on rock’n’roll anecdotes, long on encouragement to spend time in nature, and view all aspects of everyday life as an artform, with haiku-like pay-offs such as, “Rules direct us to average behaviours”, and, “Impatience is an argument with reality”.
Rubin’s Zen vibe is hard to tally with the brutality of his earliest productions on his fledgling Def Jam label, which documented the formative sounds of hip-hop and thrash metal: in 1988, he oversaw Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back (in an executive capacity) and two years earlier Slayer’s
Reign In Blood – each an extremity marker in its genre. Originally from Long Island, NY, in the early ’90s he shifted operations to Los Angeles and entered the big league, helping to break the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Blood Sugar Sex Magik and landing star clients including Mick Jagger, AC/DC and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.
It was, however, his rejuvenation of Johnny Cash’s career that has come to define his own. Between 1994 and the country icon’s passing in 2003, Rubin cut six American Recordings albums, dramatically reversing Cash’s fortunes via motivational pep-talks and some inspired choices of material, from Nick Lowe’s The Beast In Me to Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt.
Over the last two decades, mentoring has become his USP, helming tracks on LPs as diverse as Black Sabbath’s 13, Adele’s 21 and Ed Sheeran’s X. In 2021, his six-part Disney+ interaction with Paul McCartney offered a glimpse of his rapport with artists, while in the last year he’s helped hatch prestige longplayers WORTHY with the Chili Peppers (his sixth) and Neil Young, who hazily recalled Rubin’s storied Anthony Shangri-La studio in Malibu as the place where, circa summer ’75, he aired the freshly minted recording of Cortez The Killer for Bob Dylan.
“The place was actually built by The Band, but Bob lived there, in a teepee on the lawn,” says Rubin, who purchased the ocean-view ranch property just up from Zuma beach in August 2011, reputedly at a knockdown price. “If you see The Last Waltz, everything that
wasn’t the concert was shot there.” Wherever you stand on this elusive wizard, he’s too often in the right place, and at an auspicious juncture, for it to be mere coincidence.
How come The Creative Act, at this point? Well, I’ve been working on it for seven years. I’ve made as much as eight albums a year for 40 years, and I started to feel like, anything I can share that would be of help to anyone, I want to do that, to fan the flames of excitement about creating beautiful things, and doing your version of whatever that is, not what you think somebody else wants. It’s the book I wish I’d had when I was 20 years old.
At no point do you share anecdotes with named artists you’ve worked with. Mightn’t some real-life instances have helped draw the reader in?
Only in a sensational way, not in a helpful way. If I were to tell a story with, say, Tom Petty in it, I think we would read it as a Tom Petty story, and not a story for us, not as something for us to do. I wanted it to be for everybody – not to impress the reader, but to help the reader.
I like the book better not naming names.
What guidance would your 20-year-old self have needed, establishing yourself in New York?
Well, back then I probably saw the world in a more black-and-white way, although there was some part of me that understood the spiritual dimension. I was lucky that I started Transcendental Meditation when I was 14 [on a physio’s recommendation]. I was born Jewish, but my parents were not religious in any way, so I felt no connection to that, but I always felt a connection with something.
Was there music in the house?
Oh yes! My dad loved Frank Sinatra, and jazz, particularly Latin jazz. He’d often play [Puerto Rican drummer/band leader] Tito Puente records in the house. Maybe five weeks ago I heard a song that I hadn’t heard since I was five years old, from Tito Puente’s first album from 1956, and it blew my mind 50 years later. You wanna hear it? (Hastily summons Puente’s Rico Vacilon on his phone).
This is Friday-night party music!
If you listen to the horn stabs, it’s not so unlike scratching. I never made that link until I heard it five weeks ago. It’s very minimal music, mainly a beat, but then there are these loud accents. Very hip-hop.
When your high school punk band The Pricks played at CBGB circa 1980, your dad came down dressed in his auxiliary cop’s uniform to break up a staged brawl. He was supportive?
It’s a pretty minor story, because honestly there were only a dozen people in the room, but he was happy to participate, like if you were putting on a play with your friends and you needed someone to play an adult. Mum and dad wanted me to be a doctor, but I’m needle-phobic and I don’t like blood. So the way they saw it, a lawyer would be the next best thing.
You had other ideas?
I didn’t have any ideas, honestly. I always knew music would be a big part of my life, but I never thought it would be a job. I didn’t know that was possible. I got into punk rock first, then I was exposed to hip-hop. I was the only punk rocker in my high school! But there were other kids who liked hip-hop, and I think the fact that there was some community to be part of, and trade cassettes with, drew me in. There was an hour-long show on WHBI, a mixed-bag radio station at the bottom of the dial, called Mr Magic’s Rap Attack, which was the only place to hear hip-hop music anywhere, and we’d all record it on our boomboxes.
One morning before school, I got permission to DJ through the school PA system, playing crazy punk music – which was hated! I remember playing The Magnificent Seven by The Clash, essentially a rap song.
How did the white Long Island punk rocker enter the hip-hop world?
By the time I went to college at NYU, I had a post-hardcore band, Hose, pretty noisy, inspired by Flipper, but I had already seen most of the punk shows, and it was more exciting getting to see hip-hop. I was just looking for an energy. There was this club called Negril, where an English woman known as Kool Lady Blue put on a hip-hop night on Tuesdays, and every other night was reggae. She found the DJs who were playing in the Bronx, Harlem, Queens, Brooklyn, and she’d have them playing in this club that held maybe 150 people. I would go every Tuesday, and I remember seeing Mike D of the Beastie Boys there, who I didn’t yet know, when they were still punk rock. At this place it was mostly white faces, because this was downtown – the same people who would go to the Mudd Club, the Danceteria, maybe even CBGB. It almost felt like a cultural exchange programme.
So how did you break into the proper hip-hop community?
After a while, I was going to clubs where I was the only white person, like Disco Fever in the South Bronx and Broadway International in Harlem. My favourite group was The Treacherous Three, who I thought of all the recorded rap music had made the best records, these three 12-inchers on Enjoy, but then they put out their first album on Sugar Hill, and I didn’t like it.
I went to see them play at Negril, and talked to Kool Moe Dee, one of the rappers, after the show. I was just a second-year at NYU, but I said, “You’re my favourite group, I love your Enjoy records, but I listened to the album, and it doesn’t do what you guys do. I feel like maybe I can help?” At this point, I know nothing!
He said, “Well, we’re signed to Sugar Hill, but talk to Special K,” who was the second MC in the group, “because he has a cousin named T La Rock, who is really good – maybe you can do it with him?” So I met with Special K, he liked the idea and I believe he specifically wrote It’s Yours and gave it to T La Rock to perform.
That became your first single on Def Jam. You had Russell Simmons running the business side, but was it easy for you personally to get accepted on the rap scene? I became friends with DJs at clubs, just because I was into it, and they saw I was into it as much as anyone they knew. It didn’t matter that I was white. I spoke the language because I lived this music, and maybe because I was an outsider, I lived it in a more extreme way. Like, Led Zeppelin were inspired by American blues, but they took it to this bombastic extreme that no self-respecting bluesman would take it to. They saw it for what it could be, maybe not what it should be – the fantasy version.
On your first album, LL Cool J’s
Radio, your production credit read, “Reduced by Rick Rubin”. It was the stripped-down, raw approach of punk rock? Yeah! The sonic reducer! Take the rawness and amplify it. Another part of it is that the hip-hop records before Def Jam were made by experienced people, basically making R&B records and having people rap on them. That’s why the Def Jam logo had the big DJ initials and the turntable: it was understanding that rap was a form of montage made by DJs using snippets of all kinds of music, and that was what was exciting.
Did you fervently believe that this radical, minimalist new music could break into the mainstream?
Originally, the whole idea was to sell enough records to be able to make more records. We put out seven 12-inch singles by LL, Beasties, Jimmy Spicer, all with the maroon label, and Columbia Records did an overall deal with us, not based on any of those specific artists, just the potential of what they saw brewing. They gave us a big advance, and that was where my parents said, “OK, you can have a year with this.”
The first album we put out was LL Cool J in ’85, which was recorded for $9,000, and it sold maybe 800,000 records. Right out of the box, it was wildly successful. I forget the order, but we had Run-DMC [in ’84], which wasn’t actually on Def Jam, but I was involved in, then the Beasties’ Licensed To Ill, then Run-DMC had Walk This Way, and that really blew up – then Fight For Your Right [all three in ’86]. So it wasn’t like one thing happened – everything happened.
Did you envisage the Beasties becoming l ike the Elvis of hip-hop – a Caucasian-ised version for white audiences? Do you see any cultural appropriation in that?
I remember saying this in a Columbia meeting: “There are many places in the country that are resistant to Run-DMC just because they’re black artists. It may be interesting to know that possibly the Beastie Boys will get played in those places” – just acknowledging the reality of the situation.
We made that album honestly, for us. It’s not really for public consumption. It’s filled with inside jokes, like our favourite stuff to make each other laugh. The idea that anybody outside our small group of friends would like it seemed crazy. Luckily, none of us were making art to try and be successful.
Your first proper rock production was The Cult’s Electric, released in 1987. Did you know how to tackle it by then?
Astbury and Duffy liked the Def Jam singles, and they originally hired me to remix two songs, but we ended up re-recording the whole album. Every day, I made the short walk from my NYU dorm room in Greenwich Village to Electric Lady, which was pretty insane to me. The last thing I would do on every mix was push the kick drum up by 5dB. Now, 5dB is so much: it would be like turning your car system from 6 to 9 out of 10. Usually engineers wanted to do stuff other producers liked, like putting reverb and effects on things. I didn’t want any of that. I wanted it to be very raw, and have the least amount of information, and present it in the most stark, aggressive way possible.
Your next record, Slayer’s Reign In Blood, was the apotheosis of that method. Hahaha, yeah. The power of that band was unbelievable. I almost got killed at a Slayer show. I went to see them at L’Amour, a small rock club in Brooklyn, maybe 500 people, a former disco, and I’m standing behind the soundboard at the back wall. The band starts playing, and the crowd goes insane, as a Slayer audience does, and at one point they heave ➢
“It didn’t matter that I was white. I lived this music, and maybe because I was an outsider, I lived it in a more extreme way.”
back, the sound board flips up and pins us against the wall, with the buttons all pressing into our faces. We were like that for a long time – we almost got crushed to death. It’s not uncommon after Slayer leaves the stage for there to be blood all over the floor.
For both The Cult and Slayer, you’d used Andy Wallace, a genius engineer who soon worked a miracle on Nirvana’s Nevermind. Presumably, Wallace ran things on the technical side?
I never got involved in any of that. I still don’t. I will hire an engineer who can do that job: they get the sounds, so everybody is on the same page. The sounds are important, but it isn’t the focus. If it’s wrong, it’s a problem. Once it’s right, then it’s like, OK, now we can start working.
You’ve said that getting hired by Tom Petty to make 1994’s Wildflowers was like being invited to sit at the adult table…
Yes, I was considerably younger than [The Heartbreakers], and the fact that they took me seriously was massive for me. Most of the bands I’d worked with up to that point were kids, a similar age to me. But I don’t think I was fazed. I wasn’t put there. Tom asked me to be there. I loved the records he’d made with Jeff Lynne, and part of what made Wildflowers so great was precisely the fact that they had just made two albums with Jeff, who is a real taskmaster on the song front. You’re not phoning in your songs if you’re working with Jeff. Those good chops rolled over to Wildflowers, and my more documentarian, live-in-the-moment recording felt new sonically to people.
What did you learn up at the adult table?
Of the four or five albums I made with Tom, I believe that Wildflowers is the best. In some ways, it felt like, because I was new, Tom wanted to impress me, and once he did that with Wildflowers, I don’t think he felt the same responsibility. Also, he got into some drug stuff,
“The reason any song got selected for Johnny Cash was always the lyrics. Never the music or the melody. It was the only consideration.”
which screwed things up – he was definitely not himself. I saw him shift into that, which taught me a lot, having always been the sober guy.
It was Petty who urged you to go after Johnny Cash. How did your first meeting go? I went to see him in a dinner theatre in Orange County. There were maybe 150 people sitting at tables eating while he played, like the retirement circuit. I met with him backstage after the show, and we sat next to each other for a long time without speaking, like we were in each other’s presence and a lot of communication was happening, though I can’t really explain or understand it. Then he said, “Why do you want to make records with me?” I said, “I think we can make something really good, though I’m not totally sure what it is.” By this time he had been dropped by two record labels, and he felt disposed of, so he was surprised that anybody cared. I think he felt he had nothing to lose.
Much of the first American Recordings album is Cash performing acoustically before live audiences. Was the idea to show his immediacy as a storyteller on-stage?
That was unintentional. Also, the idea of it being essentially solo acoustic was not decided in advance. Those were really demos for what the record was going to be, then we recorded them with bands, and it wasn’t as interesting. So those takes were chosen purely because they were the best versions of each song. There was no further thought.
On the later Cash albums you were introducing songs from your post-punk generation of musicians, such as Glenn Danzig, Nick Cave, Beck, Trent Reznor. Did Cash enjoy the cross-generational respect?
Each time, I would invite the writer down. While we were doing The Mercy Seat, Nick Cave was going to be in Los Angeles, too, so he came, but he walked. He was staying really far away, and he was not so familiar with LA, with the hills, and he’d decided to come on foot. There’s a reason you don’t do that in LA, and he found out the hard way. He was wearing some sort of a suit, or maybe a blazer – professional, like always – but he came in soaking wet, drenched in sweat.
He recommended that I listen to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. He actually suggested a different song, but I See A Darkness was the one that spoke to me. The reason any song got selected for Johnny was always the lyrics. We never took into account the music or the melody, only the words. It was the only consideration.
Did Cash ‘get’ all the songs you played him? Hurt wasn’t one that he understood at first, or [Soundgarden’s] Rusty Cage. Rowboat [by Beck] he understood from the first time he heard it. With Hurt, it was more that the nature of the original recording was so foreign to him, that he didn’t hear the song in there. I ended up doing a demo of it, just with acoustic guitar and vocal, closer to how he would do it, and then he went, “OK, I see what it is – it’s like folk song lyrics.”
Once his health started failing, was it his decision to keep working?
When we finished the fourth record at my house in California, he shook my hand on the last day and he was like, “Thank you so much, it’s been a great ride.” I said, “Yeah, I guess we’ll start the next album tomorrow!” And he just looked at me because I think he thought it was done. His health was really failing, and it wasn’t that he wanted it to be done, just that the reality of the situation looked like it was.
But I knew, from a purpose standpoint, how important it was for him to continue working for his own benefit, so I set it up where he could record at home every day. At times he would be embarrassed, like, “My God, my voice was the one thing I could always count on.” Some days he could do it and some days he couldn’t, but especially after June passed, I think he felt no reason to carry on other than wanting to share the music.
By the late ’00s, you were a co-chairman at Columbia Records. Some of your mantras in The Creative Act, like “success is not about sales”, must’ve jarred with the corporate mindset, surely?
What I say is that [commercial success] can’t be the aim. It can be the result, and I believe that the best chance of getting that result is by not aiming at it. My role was A&R, and I enjoyed the creative part – we signed Adele, and MGMT was really popping – but I did not like the corporate politics. That had nothing to do with me.
Muse’s Matt Bellamy dissed you in a 2010 award acceptance speech, saying, “We’d like to thank Rick Rubin for teaching us how not to produce.” How come?
I’ve heard that too. I’ve never been in the studio with Muse in my life. I’ve met them, and they were nice. I consider Matt a friend, although I’ve only met him a couple of times.
I can tell you one which is true: Crosby, Stills & Nash. We did start recording together [in 2012] and they essentially got cold feet. Like Johnny Cash, there was a wariness of the way their voices sounded. They felt a little naked, mainly Crosby I think. The only sadness I have is that people don’t get to hear it. It wasn’t done but what was there was really cool.
Do you understand why Black Sabbath grumble about the making of 13?
I loved the album, and I thought they loved it. It was their first Number 1 album, wildly successful, and they played the songs live. I thought everyone was happy, so it’s interesting to hear anything after.
The gist of it is that they felt you pushed them too hard in the writing phase, to come up with more material. U2 went through something similar, when you collaborated circa ’09’s No Line On The Horizon.
Yes, I was suggesting that U2 work in ways that they weren’t used to, which is to focus on songs, because they tend to make tracks and hope that they eventually turn into a song. It’s just a different method. They always say they want to go back to [those recordings]. I hope that doesn’t happen because it felt like it was of a time.
On the other hand, you definitely hit it off with Paul McCartney. Had you met before 2021’s McCartney 3, 2, 1 Disney+ series?
I met him two or three times before. We were lucky enough to see Prince play in a tiny place, maybe 100 people, on the New Year’s Eve right before he died [at Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s private party on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy]. Both of us were standing at the front of the stage, and we talked like fans at a show.
Macca has been asked every conceivable question about The Beatles. What was your strategy to get him talking, and enjoying himself?
I thought about how almost everything I’ve seen, Beatles-related, is either about the songwriting or Beatlemania. Paul McCartney the bass player, or Paul McCartney the musician, because he plays everything – that’s a little told story. You just think of him as Beatle Paul, yet in my opinion he is the best of all bass-players, he’s Number 1.
You hit him with that Lennon quote, basically saying just that – that everyone has copied Macca, because he’s the greatest.
I read that quote years ago, and I had no idea he didn’t know it. He said, “Hmm, John never said that to me!”
What did you learn that you weren’t expecting?
What blew my mind was when he sat at the piano and started showing me how to write a song. He was saying, “See, you could do it like this,” and what he was showing me was the simplest thing, but then he starts moving his fingers around slightly, and all of a sudden it evolves into Hey Jude or Let It Be. He’s using this technique that any child could do, then it morphs into one of the greatest songs of all time!
Reduced by Paul McCartney? Absolutely! Like, that’s how it’s done? I had no idea.
The Creative Act: A Way Of Being by Rick Rubin is published by Canongate Books, priced £25.