He started off playing bass in the clubs of Detroit.
His group, Was (Not Was), rolled out some funky dance pop in the '80s. He's produced big records for the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, John Mayer, and The B-52s. But today he is in his office, high atop the famous Capitol Records tower in Hollywood, as President of the venerable jazz label, Blue Note Records. How did Don Was get here? How does he approach production? What makes him tick? I knew someday we would have this discussion, and everything that drives him does stem from a true love of music — just as I had always imagined.
What were your first steps towards becoming a producer, outside of being an artist?
Well, I suppose you can thank George Martin and The Beatles for making the recording process one of the instruments. A lot of people, like Les Paul, did that earlier, but The Beatles did it in a way that spoke to me. I was aware of production values. A musician hears certain nuances in playing that a non-musician wouldn't pick up on. I was always fascinated by it. David Was, who started Was (Not Was) with me, his parents are both voiceover actors. Before we could drive, we'd go down with them to recording studios and watch. Just being in the studio was magical. There's something about the big mic stands, with the mics and the wires everywhere, the acoustically treated walls, and all the people sitting around in a circle playing together. It looked like the most romantic, coolest place to be. And it fucking is! Sitting here at 63 years old, I can tell you the romance of it has never worn off. There's not a day that goes by that I don't feel privileged to be in the studio. I just got to work at FAME Studios for the first time, in Muscle Shoals, on an acoustic Gregg Allman record, which was just an amazing experience. I'd never been to Muscle Shoals. When I pulled up to the building, I started crying before I even went inside. It's at this anonymous looking intersection, with a CVS and a Chick-fil-A. Life-changing music came out of this normal looking building. Then you walk in and you see the pictures of everybody, and the room is fundamentally unchanged from 1972. To sit in [owner/producer] Rick Hall's chair behind the board — and to be there for ten days actually doing sessions — I don't think a minute went by where I took that for granted. I was really grateful for the opportunity. Last week we recorded some songs for Sweet Pea Atkinson [of Was (Not Was)] for Blue Note at a studio called Vox [formerly Electro-Vox]. You know this place?
I've heard of that.
It's L.A.'s oldest studio. Woody Jackson owns it now. It looks the same as it looked in 1939 when Charlie Parker cut there. It's got a great old Universal Audio console. It's across the street from the Paramount lot. We went to tape for both Greg's album and the Sweet Pea session. I was trying to get it so it didn't sound so literal, clean, and modern. We were A/B-ing against this older music and it hit me: they were bouncing the tracks. So we took the rhythm tracks and bounced it down to a mono track through an old Gates compressor. It's magnificent! It sounds like a record. The engineer did a great job. He said, "I'm taking great notes, so when you want to mix the song..." I said, "What do you mean? We just mixed it! We're going to live with this." I was just so excited. I was playing it all weekend. I was thrilled — it lifted my spirits. It's the great joy of my life, being able to make records. How it happens is you just pursue it relentlessly. Like me, an inordinate number of musicians I know were born around 1952. I attribute that to the fact that when The Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, we were 12 years old. That's just young enough to be dumb enough to say, "I want to do that!" If you were younger, the screaming girls wouldn't look cool, and if you were older, you'd say, "Ah, there's no chance of it." But at 12, you were goofy enough. Really, I never had an alternative. I can't get a job anywhere else. I couldn't. I have no other skills. I just have to make it work.
What was your first experience in a recording studio?
It was probably the Recording Institute of America, but it was an earlier incarnation. I don't remember what it was called. But they taught a class in Detroit at United Sound, on the old Flickinger board. I took the class; I was in my early 20s. It gave me some idea that each of these modules are all the same. You don't have to learn 90 different controls, right? I didn't really learn how to engineer, but I did come out of the class and conned a guy named Jack, who owned a little studio, into thinking I could engineer. I started engineering sessions. This was in the early to mid-'70s. I learned through trial by fire. The very first session I did do was $10 an hour, and the band that came in was called the Amalgamated Funk Co. The lead singer of that band was Harry Bowens, who was later one of the lead singers in Was (Not Was). That's how I met him. But we didn't do a Was (Not Was) record probably for another six or seven years.
So you took to engineering first, and worked your way up?
Yeah. That's how I got into a studio, but I was a musician. I played piano bars, played bass in trios, or any kind of gig I could find, up until I was in my 30s in Detroit. I earned a living on the bar circuit. I put playing in local bars up there with playing in any arena on earth. It was a great period, and a really diverse period. I played with anyone who called me. I used to work with a folk singer named Ted Lucas in Detroit. We had a conga player, a drummer, and I played bass. Somehow we got booked to open for Black Sabbath in Toledo at the Toledo Sports Arena, which was just a bunch of 14- year-old boys on speed. When we came out, this racially mixed folk band, at a Black Sabbath show, we lasted in the ring about a minute and a half before the drummer was bleeding too bad.
That sounds brutal.
It was great, man. I have fond memories of it. I became good buddies with Ozzy [Osbourne]. Just any gigs I could do. I'll still do it. You know who Katharine McPhee is? She's a singer, an American Idol contestant, and is on a TV show called Scorpion as an actress. I was talking to her the other day and said, "Let's just play a gig." We're playing at Vibrato up on Mulholland in a few weeks — just to play.
You played bass on Brian Wilson's recent record, No Pier Pressure, too.
Yeah, I did. That was a trip — I've known Brian for a long time. You can't name any record producers who were ever better than Brian Wilson. There are other great ones, but no one's made better records than he made. It's beautiful to watch him in action and take instructions from him. Just to see him in such good shape, and really be in command in the studio, it's great. It was a beautiful session.
Your documentary on him, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, and the studio sessions in that film were amazing. I thought it was a wonderful, sympathetic way to put the spotlight back on him.
Thank you, man. Music fans hear people say, "Oh, Brian Wilson; he's a genius." But if you put on "Surfin' Safari," you might scratch your head. It's a good record, but... I thought, "Let's focus on his music and actually explain to people why he's arguably the greatest genius in rock 'n' roll history." I think it was a good layman's introduction to Brian. I'm really proud of that endeavor.
I thought it was nice to get him into the studio and tracking those songs to see how he reacts. He just blooms when he's around music.
He really came to life. That movie was shot over the course of a month. Not every day, but a couple weeks went by and we'd shoot some more. Just being around some action and music that sounded good, you can see his spirit is completely altered by the end of the movie. He's speaking differently, more confidently. Yeah, he comes to life when he's making music. There are a lot of guys I know like that. There's a cattle tick that hangs in a tree and lowers its metabolism to one step above death. It doesn't have much free will. The only thing it does is it can sense when a cow is walking directly under it. It can't really steer itself, but it can let go, switch to full metabolism, drop on a cow, get in under the cow's skin, and then do whatever ticks do. I know a lot of musicians like that, who lower their metabolism to just above death until it's time to go out and play, and then they come to life.
You know, as a musician, there's an excitement, and that buzz.
There's nothing like it, man. We just played a Was (Not Was) gig three weeks ago. We haven't played in ten years. We played our first gig together as a band in 1980, and we still set up the same on stage; still the same cats. Man, it feels like home, even if ten years go by. We didn't even have to rehearse much, because muscle memory plays the songs. It was wonderful.
There are a lot of artists that are legacy artists you've worked with over the years, the Rolling Stones being one. You've produced albums with them, as well as the recent reissues. What is it that keeps you working with them?
I keep going with them because they're the greatest band in the world! I've had the privilege of being able to play bass on some of the records, and I've filled in on rehearsals when Darryl Jones isn't around. It took that to fully grasp the magnitude of the thing. The level of interplay, the feeding of ideas, and the musical conversation goes so deep in the Rolling Stones. It's fun to play in the Rolling Stones. They listen intensely, and they're constantly feeding each other ideas and bouncing off each other. It's a really vivid musical experience — it's really alive. There are good bands that are out there, but to get that kind of thing where it becomes a living organism, that's pretty rare. I'll put them up there with the Miles Davis quintet of the '60s — with Herbie [Hancock], Wayne [Shorter], Tony Williams, and Ron Carter — as far as having a language that they speak together, a musical language that just flows, and rolls, and touches people. I'm supremely honored to have been able to spend all this time and work with them for so long.
Do you find yourself mediating between Keith [Richards] and Mick [Jagger]?
Well, that's what a producer does! I think there's a certain DNA code that runs through all bands. There are certain archetypes of band behavior. In many ways they're not that different from the band I was in in sixth grade, where there was tremendous disagreement. Actually that band was way worse than the Stones. We were meaner! People quit.
With less at stake.
That's the thing about the Stones. I think that there's a certain dynamic. If you make records for a long time, and you're a halfway compassionate person, you understand that if you treat musicians with the respect you'd like to be treated with that most of the problems go away. It's only when people feel like they're not being heard, or treated in a disrespectful fashion, that problems occur. I dig being in the studio with the Stones. It never gets old. We did some sessions in December, which I can now tell you because Ronnie Wood already talked about it. Normally I'm not supposed to break the news.
Word gets out too easily these days.
It does. But working with the Stones never gets old. I just sit there and look at who's in the room. It's incredible. When they start playing and get that sound, there's nothing like it. The way we set them up is kind of like the stage. They're all playing together and it's pretty amazing.
Do you find that's an important thing with a lot of musicians? Say a legacy act? Sometimes, by the time you're working with them, they've been forced to work in ways that maybe aren't compatible.
Well, yeah, I think that can happen. The records by guys like Max Martin and Dr. Dre, if I knew how to do that, I would do it. I have tremendous respect for them as record makers and artists who know how to communicate with large numbers of people. That's a great skill, and they're really good at it. I have no attitude at all about how they want to go about making it. I have no judgment at all about people who sit in front of a computer and layer things up. People have made some incredible records with that method. But, personally, I get supercharged out of having a bunch of people sitting around in a circle in a room and not worrying about whether the mics are bleeding into other mics. In fact, I'm encouraging bleed. It actually sounds better when you have as much drums in the vocal mic as you have vocal. Even better if you can do it without headphones. It's hard to do, but I try to get it as real, and put as few barriers between people, as possible whenever I can. Sometimes you've gotta do what you gotta do. It requires that you work with people who can get through a take without fucking up.
When you work with a solo artist, someone like Iggy Pop, are you looking to put a band together to serve the means of tracking?
Yeah. I think casting for the songs is just like directing a movie. If you get the right musicians for the songs, and it might be that if you're doing an Iggy album, not every song requires the same guys. It depends on the song. But if you cast the song properly, it's a lot easier to make a good record. Casting involves not only people who play well, but people who listen. I'm more concerned about that. I think it's really important to pay attention to the singer and find ways to be supportive, but also to allow room for full interpretation. You hear some records where you know the singers weren't there when they cut the track. You just hear it. You hear really great singers that sound like they've been stuffed into a phrasing cage. I don't understand the point of that. When I've assembled a studio band for a singer, I'll pass out chord charts to everybody, and I really like the ones who say, "Let me see the lyrics." How can you play the fucking song if you don't know what it's about? It's not really about the chords. It's about the emotional context. I'll watch for that, and that's a sign that you're working with the right people. "You hold on to the chords. Let me see the lyrics." That's my favorite thing to hear.
It's true. I'll ask people in bands if they know what the lyrics are about, and sometimes they don't know.
Great singers really get into it too. Mick Jagger and I do that a lot. We'll talk about what's happening in the sentence. Is he sad? Is he wistful? Or angry? One of the things Mick Jagger did, that I thought was incredible, was a song on Bridges to Babylon called "Anybody Seen My Baby." It was a hit single. We had that discussion. Is he mad or is he wistful here? Mick said, "Hold on." He had a notebook where he wrote an essay about what happened leading up to where the song begins and what happens after the song ends. It had a real story to it. Even if the listeners didn't know about the backstory, or what was coming after four and a half minutes, by Mick knowing he was able to infuse it with more meaning. I think that's why it was a single.
That's pretty awesome.
It's cool. It was a very impressive thing. Richie Sambora and I made a record [Undiscovered Soul] in the '90s. He's a buddy of mine. It was guitar driven, in the Bon Jovi vein. We heard about a movie that Jerry Bruckheimer was making, Con Air, that was looking for a ballad, so we drove over to see him. We played him the song and he said, "This is a really good song, but I can't use it for my movie. I've got this Celine Dion song temp'ed [temporary scored] in here, and they won't let me use it." I don't know who refused, but he couldn't use the song. It was all synthesizers, and it was a ballad, but texturally it was 180 degrees from where Richie was. We said, "We want this song to be in the movie so bad that we're going to go back and rework the record to match this." Richie and I stayed up for three days, and we did it. We replaced everything with keyboards and tried to get the sounds that Celine had. Then it came time for Richie to do his vocal. I had worked on a movie, The Rainmaker, with Francis [Ford] Coppola and had the privilege of sitting on the set with him. One of the techniques I saw him do was have the actors act out the five minutes leading up to where the scene was [that was being shot]. Improvise, get into the character, and then start the dialog so you're not going from zero to sixty. I said, "You're going to be Nicolas Cage, and I'll be John Cusack. We're going to improvise whatever time it takes leading up to the scene. And then when you're in character, we're going to do the vocal. When you do the vocal, look at the screen and be Nicolas Cage." It was the best vocal on the record. It matched so well. Like I said, we'd been up for three days. We stayed up until 9 o'clock in the morning and drove over to meet Jerry Bruckheimer to ambush him as he was coming into work. He saw us, and was amused by our condition. He played it and said, "All right. I've got to hand it to you. You've done a really good job and you really did cop the feeling of the Celine Dion track. It's just not right for my movie." We were pretty out of our skulls. We said, "You've got three weeks to wrap the movie. There's no way you're going to find a song. We're going to wait you out." Of course the song he got was nominated for an Oscar. It was a Diane Warren song, "How Do I Live."
Yeah. Oh, my god.*
Trisha Yearwood had a hit with it, and LeAnn Rimes had a hit with it. Waiting him out wasn't necessarily the best strategy. However, I stand by the technique of improvising the five minutes before the song starts.
Were you acting it out, doing the dialog?
Yeah, it was just Richie and me. We were at my house, up on Mulholland Drive, at the studio there. It was three o'clock in the morning. Once I said it, I really regretted it. "Now I gotta just abandon all self-consciousness and risk being a shitty actor." He sang the fuck out of it too.
Singing is emotional, but it's also a bit of acting.
Yeah. It's storytelling. You don't have to be lying. Think about somebody like Bonnie Raitt, where half the songs we recorded she didn't write. But she only recorded songs that pertained to her life at that moment, that she could have written. In doing so, it was very easy to infuse it with the truth.
You wouldn't listen to those records and think they were disingenuous.
No, you would not. They weren't. I saw her turn down songs that were hit records. She said, "I can't sing that now. I'm not going to. It's not like my life reality."
With her Nick of Time album, how did that job come to you? That was one of your first big successes as a producer.
Yeah, it was my first real one. Nick of Time and "Love Shack" with The B-52s were done in a month or two, back to back. I went from being a pariah to having gigs.
Ed Cherney and Nick of Time
Don Was called me and said, "Hey Ed, I'm going to produce this record for Bonnie. Would you be interested in recording and mixing it?" I met him the next day over lunch. We spent three or four hours together, laughing like we'd been friends forever. I ended up doing that record. That album went crazy. At that time, with my skill set, I was in the perfect place to make a record like that. I absolutely got it. What set the tone for that record was the first song. It wasn't drum heavy, but we were just coming out of hair bands and sounds like that, where there's a lot of reverb on drums. I needed to get a drum sound, without having heard the song yet, so the first thing I did was to turn the reverb up on the snare. Don said, "Eh, maybe a less reverb on that." I turned it all the way off, and it sounded better. We knew then that it'd be a dry record. Just by kismet, like that. I knew I could get emotion out of the cold, hard equipment at that time. It was just a perfect thing.
Was (Not Was) had a bit of acclaim.
We had a bit of success. Nick of Time and "Love Shack" changed it. I was always a huge Bonnie Raitt fan. There are other good singers around, but I don't know anyone who's better than Bonnie Raitt. To this day I get choked up listening to her sing. She really has a way of cutting through both your physical skin and your emotional skin and getting deep inside you. Not just to me, but clearly for millions of people. I was just really excited to meet her. We hit it off. We did a song for a guy named Hal Willner who kind of invented the tribute album, but did these really eclectic ones. He was doing a Disney tribute [Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films], and we did a version of "Baby Mine" from Dumbo. We just got on. We thought, "Let's do more projects." She didn't have a record deal at the time, so we started doing demos for Nick of Time in the basement of my house.
Were you working with Ed Cherney from the beginning on that album?
Yeah. I didn't know him before. Ry Cooder had recommended him to Bonnie, and the three of us just clicked. It was a real triumvirate. The sound of that record was quite different from everything else going on. It was a weird combination. We had three really different things in mind. I was hearing something dark, like [U2's] The Joshua Tree. Bonnie was hearing something pretty clean and unaffected, like the record she had previously made. And Ed was hearing something clean, but with a little more polish. He was just coming off a stint doing records with Quincy Jones.
Right, which informs you in a whole different way.
We disagreed about how all the mixes should sound. Ed landed on a way of pleasing both of us by keeping it sounding real and unaffected, but there's actually quite a bit of engineering going on. He did some brilliant mixing, but he didn't make it huge. It's just tighter delays, as well as a subtle use of the outboard gear that creates the feeling of intimacy, but it still has some polish. It made it a very accessible- sounding record for people.
Compared to her earlier work, it's a different tone.
It is, but none of that would have mattered were it not for how great Bonnie is. She had gone through this transformation of getting sober and having to confront feelings, as opposed to drowning them. This was the first record she made like that. There're a whole lot of real deep emotions that came out. That's really what characterized it more than anything, I think.
It connected with so many people. For some of The B-52s Cosmic Thing album, you were producing those tracks at the same time?
Yeah, I did them back-to-back. One was in August, and one was in September. That was just fun. I loved The B-52s.
Nile Rodgers produced half that record, but you did "Love Shack!"
Yeah. That's probably the biggest single I ever had. They're a great band. They would write in a very unique way. The basic groove of "Love Shack" is kind of like "Cool Jerk" from The Capitols. They would just play this groove, the three singers would improvise for 45 minutes, and they'd tape it. Everyone kept a list of the cool lines that they sang, so there were three lists. There was no context to it. That wasn't really a song we intended to record, but we finished early on one of the ones we intended to record. They said, "We've got this one other song, but it's 15 minutes long and we don't know what to do with it." Nothing ever repeated. They asked me to edit it, and it just seemed like this bit about the "Love Shack" was what held it together. So we sat there and cut it down to three and a half minutes from 15 and made that the chorus. We went up to cut it and the first take was great, except to when we got to the "tin roof rusted" part. God knows what it means, but Cindy [Wilson] infused it with so much meaning and emotion that everyone was startled. We didn't come back in right. It fell apart there, because it was like, "Whoa, what was that?" We tried it another 30 times — all day long. We just kept cutting it, and it'd get worse and worse. We'd lose the groove. This was before Pro Tools. We went out to dinner and we were kind of depressed. Someone said, "Wait, let's listen to the first take again." We put that on and heard it fall apart, but we had all stopped at, "Your tin roof rusted." So we just punched in. We went back to the first take, punched in after, "Tin roof rusted," and did the "Love shack" vamp out. It was an easy solution. I hadn't had the depth of experience to think of it at the time. It was an almost improvised moment.
Wow. The singing brings so much energy to it. It makes it fun.
There's a great chemistry between them, those four principles. Charley Drayton was playing drums. That made a big difference.
You've produced a wide variety of styles. I think one of the things that people are unfamiliar with is the fact that you've produced country singers and songwriters, like Kris Kristofferson.
I like all kinds of music. Truthfully, I don't know any musicians who sit there and think, "Okay, I'll play an R&B line. Now I'll play a country lick." Musicians don't think of categories. They just play. Categories are good for organizing the iTunes store, or if you want to keep track of your records at home.
Or record stores, if they still exist.
Exactly. It's like a Dewey Decimal System. But the author's not thinking, "Should I write a 900 book or a 600 book?" The style doesn't matter much. What matters is that it's infused with some real feeling and that it's communicative. I personally find Willie Nelson to be as expressive as John Coltrane, the way his phrasing is so inventive. I just played with him two weeks ago. He was on fire, man. He's the only guitar player in his band now so he's stretching out more, and he's really playing well. He was like Jimi Hendrix the other night. We played a gig in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, as a tribute for Kris Kristofferson. We were doing "Sunday Morning Coming Down," and Willie did an extended solo on it. It was deep. There's a conversation going on. He'll play off of you. You do something, and he'll react to it. He's like a jazz musician. He's using different modes.
I've seen him baffle his band a couple times!
He'll fuck with you too. He'll pull a phrase back so far that it's into the next line, and if you don't know where the 1 is, you're fucked.
Producing someone like Willie has to be really interesting, to figure out what he wants to do on an album and where he wants to go with it.
It's great. I've made a number of records with him. He's always himself. I only saw him get upset once, and it was interesting. He came into the room to hear playback. His guitar was down in volume, and his vocal was up. He couldn't understand why the engineer didn't get that they were the same thing. There's guitar playing, and there's vocal. It's all part of one performance. It would be like having a fader that turns down all the consonants. Willie's a great artist. Kristofferson's a great artist. I've had a chance to cut with Merle Haggard, George Jones, and I did Conway Twitty's last session.
Wow. Every one has a very distinctive style, as well as ways of phrasing and singing.
Yeah. I started a band [New Maroons] once with Ringo [Starr]. We got Benmont Tench playing organ, Mark Goldenberg playing guitar, and a singer out of Nashville named Jonell Mosser. We wanted to get a male singer too. First we called Levon Helm — he just didn't show up. Then we called Delbert McClinton, but he was in Japan. Lyle Lovett came in and played, but he was busy doing his own shows. I had a dream about Merle Haggard singing in the band. Willie's manager, Mark Rothbaum, connected me with Merle. We went up to Merle's place and we cut some tracks. Benmont and I still can't believe we were present for this, to be in a room playing live with Merle Haggard and Ringo Starr! It never came out, but man it was great. We got a version of "Born to Lose" that's floating around. I don't even think I have it here with me. It was mesmerizing to record with those guys. [Sadly Merle passed away right after this interview was conducted. -ed.]
Oh sure. It is crazy the number of things that never do get released, for various reasons.
Well, sometimes getting it released isn't your primary intention. It's just getting it out of your system. You've got all this music pent up. Commerce doesn't always walk hand in hand with music.
And here we are in the Capitol Records tower saying this.
Yeah, well that was a big deal in taking this gig here. The idea of working at Blue Note Records was absolutely irresistible. But the idea of working at a record company, to be honest, was anathema. To me, they're the guys who came in and fucked up your records, told you the wrong things to do, and if it worked they stole your money. I wanted to minimize my exposure to record companies, to be honest with you. But the chance to be part of Blue Note, which has meant so much to me since I was a teenager, was something that I couldn't pass by. I'm really glad I didn't.
The Rolling Stones reissues of Exile on Main St, Some Girls, and Sticky Fingers.
You were revisiting tracks that weren't finished. I was really fascinated about how to get in the mindset of something that was recorded decades ago, and how the process worked for you guys in doing that.
Well, obviously I wasn't there the first time, so I don't know how to get back in that mindset.
I mean how to get the band thinking about it fresh again, as well as in revisiting it.
There were times that they were able to. It's primarily, for the most part, things that were finished, except maybe they didn't have final vocals, or Mick never finished writing the songs. Keith did some things where it just needed some part to sound like a record, but it wasn't too hard for him to lock into the sound of it. Mick can lock into the sound, but he doesn't always want to. I think he liked the idea of being who he is today revisiting the songs rather than trying to fool people. I think he saw it as a more sincere way of approaching it. Particularly on Exile on Main St, I tried, because I know he can do it, he can sound just like the guy singing "Tumbling Dice" if he wants to. We got the same mics and the same everything. I think he felt it was disingenuous to pretend to be the guy, and that's what he didn't want to do, to try to trick people into thinking these were, "Oh, look, we found some finished records." He wanted to be very straightforward about the fact that these were tracks that were leftover and he was going to finish them. I'll commend him for that. It's this weird mixture. The Some Girls tracks, I think those were a little bit further along. They required less work. With Sticky Fingers there was nothing left. If there were songs left over from Let it Bleed, they ended up on Sticky Fingers. What was left over from Sticky Fingers ended up on Exile. Periods overlap. We had really depleted it. There's tracks, but it's just blues jamming. There just wasn't anything that was worth building on top of. But there are periods where there are two whole albums. There are all kinds of leftover tracks around Emotional Rescue, and there's at least one album [of extras] of those three Virgin studio albums that I produced.
Unfinished, unreleased?
Yeah, that are really good. We had to make hard choices to leave them off and say, "Oh, we'll use them on the next one." We'd never use them on the next one! They're sitting there. There are more fertile periods. I think what they did with Sticky Fingers was really cool, adding the live sessions. It was really fun going through and listening to hundreds of hours of outtakes from Exile... You really get a feel for what went on. That was like being a theologian and getting the Dead Sea Scrolls at your house for a couple years to mess around with.
With such a loose recording scenario, and the amount of material that was obviously edited down to be in the album, that must be the most fascinating little snapshot there.
It's interesting. One of the things I found that's not of that period, but was lumped in with the tapes, was the evolution of "Honky Tonk Woman." All takes. It started at "Country Honk," and it wasn't really making it for them, I guess. Ian Stewart came in the next day and started doing this honky tonk piano, and then they filled in around what he was playing on the piano. On the last couple of takes, they took the piano off, and that's where all the angular guitar rhythms come in. I always wished they would put that out as a CD, just that evolution. How did they get there? It's a fascinating documentary.
You see that in the Jean-Luc Godard movie [One Plus One] where they're working on "Sympathy for the Devil."
Exactly. It turns into the "thing."
They were thinking of maybe even ceasing the label, at that point.
Here's what happened. I was in New York working with John Mayer, recording Born and Raised. We took a Tuesday night off because he had a private gig that basically payed for the whole album. I went up to a club that's almost all the way up in Harlem on the west side, and I saw this guy, Gregory Porter — an amazing singer. At that point he'd made one independent record that I just loved. I went to the gig, sat there for three sets, ate ribs, drank coffee, and had the best time. The next morning I was having breakfast with a good buddy of mine, Dan McCarroll. He's a drummer that's played with Sheryl Crow and Lloyd Cole. At that point he was the President of Capitol Records, and now he's the President of Warner Brothers Records. We were talking about other stuff. At the end of the breakfast I said, "Is Blue Note Records still part of Capitol? If it is, you should sign this guy I saw the other night, Gregory Porter." Totally unbeknownst to me, that was the week they were trying to decide what to do with Blue Note Records. With [Blue Note President] Bruce Lundvall retiring, there didn't seem to be a vision for how to move the company forward. They were thinking, "Maybe we just close it down, turn it into a website that sells catalog items and t-shirts, and call it a day." Dan wasn't comfortable with that. Roger Faxon, who was the CEO of EMI at the time, wasn't comfortable with that either. I showed up with an idea, and they offered me the job. It was irresistible. What I did learn was that, for the most part, the people who work at record companies actually love music and love the musicians. They are willing to stay here until 10 or 11 o'clock at night for artists they maybe haven't met or don't know personally, but they're so devoted to make sure that people get to hear it. I was really moved to see the dedication and devotion of people who work here. I'm not saying that it's not a constant battle to reconcile artistry and commerce. But a weird thing happened to me as a producer. Overall, the sum total of my experience was that the more I didn't pay attention to commerce and just made records from the heart — or helped artists make records from the heart — the more successful they were. Every time I entered into a somewhat cynical attempt to do something commercial, it flopped. All the records that were hits were records that kind of defied the trend of the moment, but they got through to people because there was something real going on with the artists. The business plan was just to try to make really great records and hope that a good percentage of them connect with people. I think you can carry that over into the record company. When it becomes your responsibility to connect with people, the conventional wisdom used to be that nine out of ten records stiffed. I really know how hard it is. Think about how hard it is to write a song, how you've got to bleed to write something that rings true, and it might take a year to write. That's before you start thinking about how to record them, and then go through all the recording and mastering. You go through all that, and the cover art, and the interviews; and then to have your record company drop the ball, that's just not acceptable. To be honest, it's happened to me way too often as a record producer. Sometimes things just don't come together. I take that real hard as a president of a record company. You try really hard not to drop the ball on anybody. It doesn't mean every record is going to connect with people, but every record should have the opportunity for people to decide if it means something to them or not.
Working mostly with jazz, I assume you're not trying to get multimillion sellers out of the gate.
In this climate — where record sales are nosediving across the board, and everyone's looking for a new way to underwrite music — I consider any year that we're profitable and can keep the doors open to be a great triumph. We've been able to do that every year.
Have you felt like you've been able to get it back on its feet? I know the last few years that Bruce was here it was difficult for him.
Yeah, it was very difficult for him. I think we have an incredible roster. I'm very proud of the records we put out. Sometimes I'm totally mystified about why they're not connecting more with some people. Especially in the last year, I really feel like we've got our marketing together and we're able to get out there and reach people. We've got a good team of folks working with us.
What does your typical day-to-day involve?
I try to change it up every day. If I have five days in a row that are the same, I might jump off the tower. There's a lot of listening, but, unfortunately, there's not enough time for listening. That's the biggest problem. People send me a lot of things, and the music's really good. You don't want to disrespect anybody, but you also have to listen at the right time. You can't just flip it on and go through like some kids go through YouTube; they give it 20 seconds and go on to the next thing. You've got to listen with an open mind. Sometimes it means you have to wait a couple of weeks if there's a lot of shit going on. You have to wait until your head's clear. It's a balancing act — it's about staying open. Taking this job, I was concerned about right brain versus left brain. I do have to actually think about the budgets, as well as the profit and loss on everything. I don't have to sit there and be a lawyer and negotiate the contracts, but I've gotta know what's in the contracts. I was afraid that I was going to deactivate the creative parts of my brain. You can open up previously dormant synapses, but you can only have so many synapses firing at once, right? So you shut down things that you're not using. I had no need to ever look at a spreadsheet, ever. I was kind of looking forward to closing out the rest of my life without ever going near a spreadsheet, but I've gotta do it now. I was telling myself, "Okay, I'll take this gig. It'll be cool. It'll be a fun adventure," but I had a feeling I'd never write a song again. What I try to do is play as often as I can. I've got a couple great gigs coming up this month. I try to do that as often as I can.
You're making time for producing other things that are outside of Blue Note?
Yeah. Not as many, but I'm producing Gregg Allman. We started a Stones record. Maybe we'll finish it, maybe we won't. I just produced a Dr. Lonnie Smith record [Evolution] that came out. I produced an all- star band [Our Point Of View] of Blue Note artists, with Robert Glasper [on piano], Marcus Strickland on sax, Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, Derrick Hodge on bass, Kendrick Scott on drums, and Lionel Loueke on guitar.
That sounds like it would be stellar.
It's a really great record. We cut it down at Capitol Studio A, and it's really good. It's a great band. That'll come out later this year.
Is it pretty crazy working at a label that's got studio facilities at its disposal?
The first time I did a record here with an office in the building, I thought, "Of course, that's why they do it." It's so great; you get in the elevator and you're at the studio. No traffic, no nothing. You go back up if you take a break to take care of business, and the people from the company can come hear it. It's great to have a studio in the building, especially that studio. That's another one that you never take for granted. The experience never gets old. The ghosts living in the walls are vivid and present. You can feel it, and they're good.
www.bluenote.com
*Funny Fact: Con Air's "How Do I Live" (performed by Trisha Yearwood) was up for a 1997 Academy Award against Elliott Smith's "Miss Misery" (from Good Will Hunting), which I had co-produced with Elliott. Of course, and massively ironically, Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" (from Titanic) was the winner. -LC
