Don Was

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Don Was remembers the exact moment music changed him. He was fourteen running errands with his mom when Joe Henderson's Mode for Joe came on the car radio. Joe's Tenor Sacks taught Don an important lesson you'll hear about later in this episode. It also cemented his love of music, which was everywhere in Detroit in the nineteen sixties, from Motown to the Stooges to George Clinton in Parliament Funkadelic. It's no surprise the city as musically diverse as Detroit turned out someone like Don Was, who's worked across generations and genres for decades now. He led the avant garde new wavy band Was Not Was produced career defining albums for the B fifty twos and Bonnie Rate, including her biggest hit, Something to Talk About. He's also worked with Bob Dylan and as a Rolling Stones go to producer. For the last decade, he's worked as a president of Blue Note Records, reviving the same legendary jazz label that issued Mode for Joe way back in nineteen sixty six. Rick Rubin caught up with Don Was to talk about his wide ranging career and why his latest gig, playing Base for the Grateful Dead's Bob Were is a single best thing he's ever done. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin and Don was who. We start with Detroit. You're from Detroit, Yeah, sure, yeah. I was born in Detroit in nineteen fifty two, which meant I was a teenager there in the nineteen sixties, which was a really great time to be in Detroit. You know, the Stooges played at my high school. Wow, Bob Seger played at my high school, George Clinton, and they were just called the Parliaments then, right, and there was a five piece vocal group and they came to lip sync. God just want to testify at at my junior high school at Asaka. So there was incredible music and there was an incredible atmosphere in the city. You know. After World War Two, people from all over the world started heading up there to get jobs and auto factories, and they brought their cultures with them and they all kind It was like going to you know, a great bazaar. Every day. You could hear all kinds of music and meet all kinds of people beautiful. There was something about coming from Detroit back then that there was no point in putting on any errors. You know, it's a very honest city because everyone's state was tied to the success of the auto business. My parents were both teachers, and if auto sales were down, the families and move away to find other jobs, and they'd lay off teachers, and they'd lay off barbers, and they'd lay off waitresses, and so there was really no point in like Lisa and Mercedes, to impress people because everyone knew we were all in the same boat. And that was that was something very special about Detroit in that era. And I think the music reflects that if you listen to the people who came out of there. To me, the godfather of Detroit music is John Lee Hooker, and that's just brutally honest, incredibly raw stuff without affectation. Incredible, lucky, lucky that you found yourself there. It's amazing how the universe, the universe plays a role in all of this. It's incredible. What was the world in Detroit? Like, paint a picture of your childhood in Detroit. Well, I see it in black and white, probably because we were watching black and white TV, but I don't see it bright and colorful. There was a grit to the place, but a warmth. Man. The people are really nice, man. Really, it's Midwestern and it's got that Cone Brothers kind of elevolence, but its urban and and sophisticated, so it's it's it's not a farm town. There's a pretty hiptown. And the culture was great to music was unbelievable, man, not just in rock and roll, you know, certainly when it was about the R and B that came out of there, but like just on the Blue Note roster, for example, there's a really an ordinate number of musicians from Detroit who ended up recording for Blue Note. It's an incredible jazz scene. I feel like there are other industrial places that don't have that legacy. Is what do you think is specific about what was going on in Detroit particularly that created this. I think it's the combination of no bullshit and having an incredible number of jobs in one period of time that that drew people from all over the world. But it's just it's just some weird phenomenon. It was a booming scene, man. How long did you stay in Detroit? A long time? Man? I was there till I was in my thirties. Wow. Yes, I left in the nineteen eighty six. So I started making records there. I loved. I loved recording studios. David was my buddy, my partner. His parents were both voiceover actors, and so they remember them taking us to a place called the United Sound, which is the studio where John Lee Hooker cut Boogie Chilling and George Clinton had it locked out from the late seventies early eighties and it still standard by the while, And so they took us down there maybe when we were twelve, to watch and records and commercials or something. And I walked into that big room and saw them mic stands everywhere in the cables hanging in all the year and it just looked like I wanted to spend the rest of my life in Edinburgh, Man. So that got me going. When I was in my early twenties, there's something called the Recording Institute of America which had started like almost like trade school, six week class and recording engineering, and they franchised it out in Detroit, and the class itself, it wasn't looking back on it. They taught EQ wrong. They didn't even know how equalizers are, so the curriculum needed work. But it got me in that room at United Sound, and then from there I was able to come a guy, really, I don't know any other way to put it, a guy named Jack Tan who owned a little Hrax studio on top of a warehouse. He needed an engineer, and I told him I was a graduate May and I got in there. I was able to experiment. Then later got into a west Lake room called the Sound Suite. SOU and D s U I. T. E. Were Aretha recorder and Bob Segre made records and there it was kind of jumping and they let me go in at midnight and just start making making any kind of records I could At that point, were you making purely your ound stuff or we did you already start producing other people? Now that it was there was not Watch Stuff was really the first actual record we made that that came out, and that was we were just trying to create a little little microcosm of the music we grew up with. You can hear on our first record we had Wayne Cramer from the MC five playing guitar. We had Marcus Bellgrave, great jazz trumpeter who at the time was playing to Charles Mingus. He played trumpet on Larry Fritangelo from George Clinton's organization. It was playing percussion, and it was meant to amalgamate all those sounds and to create the vibe of that period in Detroit and what we grew up listening to. And I didn't know what I was doing, man, it was we were just doing anything we could. We had no money to work with, so that's a really great thing. When you have no bread to work with, you have to rely on creativity. You can't just hire David Campbell to come write some strings to fill up the bridge and make it rise. You gotta like find rusty nails and grind them together and put them in pitch and a harmonizer. So it was. It was a great period along for that period in the way where we were. It was an uphill battle. It's a twenty four tracks studio. There were always two tracks that weren't working. Two that's great and some and somehow we came up with an album and a guy named Michael Zulka. I don't know if you ever ran in Michael. He owned a copy called See Records The Coconuts. Yeah, yeah, So he gave us a deal. I think also, who else was on the label the Contortions Maybe the Contortions, Yeah, yeah, James White and the Blacks, Christina, the waitresses, the Kid Creole and Cody Mundy were They were the foundational artists at the label. I got an email from Michael Zulka the other day, so wow, yeah, now he's wonderful. I stay in touch with him, and he was a Medici man. He was great. He just encouraged us to be as different as we could be. My favorite story with him we were recording in Detroit. He was sending us money in little and drabs and he said, I want you to send me rough mixes every night of what you're doing. These are like my babies. Well at that time you can just like burn files and email them. It meant. And I was working all night to ten in the morning. I had to stay up to runoffs in real time, make a cassette and go to FedEx myself and drop it off for him so he could listen to it the next day. And it got really tires of that, you know, for so so we said said, let's let's put an end to this, right, So we programmed all these sequencers we had laying around with the volume down, so we couldn't hear what we were doing. We didn't know what sounds were attached or what we We're just banged down him. And then I said to David was, I said, just go out there and yell something man and uh. And the sax player Dave McMurray, went out there with him and started playing. But they were just they weren't hearing the music. They were just playing stuff. And he yelled something about hello Dad, I'm in jail. Was about two minutes long. We put it on a cassette. We brought the brought the sound back up. It was. It was written, recorded and mixed simultaneously, and we FedEx that to him. We thought that would We figured he'd call and say, all right, you don't have to send us anymore stuff every day. No, of course, not at ten in the morning. The next stayed up. I wanted to hear his reaction, right, And of course he called up and he said it's the most wonderful thing you've ever done, and he was probably right. It turned out it's been in like eight different movies and the summoned in an animation or toured in animation festivals for years, and it was a It was a great lesson in not overthinking stuff and dropping self consciousness and just having the confidence to go out there and do anything. And it's also testimony to Michael's taste that he heard that and recognized the honesty of the thing. Yeah, it's amazing how these things work. What motivated you just move from being an artist to being a producer. I never saw them as disconnected. I'm old, but I'm not old enough. I remember the Beatles using this, using the studio as a musical texture, so to me that they were all one and the same, it was just it was another instrument. And I still see it that way. Well, what was the first thing you produced that way? It wasn't your group? Well, I did some odd things for Michael. I've produced his wife, a singer named Christina, and then there were some English groups that it was that was our first album. We we did all right over in England and then we started getting a coached by people. But the first big artist to call me was Carly Simon and she really went out on a limb. I think Frank Philippetti had had worked on some of her stuff, and she was looking for younger people to come in and infuse some new blood. And she took a real chance on me. And what was the experience like for you? Oh? Man, it's Carly Simon. I used to I used to stare at the cover of playing possum, right, you know, And now here I am in her house, eating dinner with her. It blew my mind. And she was she was lovely. I was going to a rough period then, as in the middle of a divorce, and she helped me get an apartment in New York. She actually went to the tenants committee, and at that time, Carly Simon where she's like the queen of New York, right, So of course they wouldn't. I didn't even have a credit card. But she came in and vouched for me, and I got an apartment and she was wonderful. Man. I learned a lot from working with her too. And we're still living in So this is when you were still living in Detroit and then you moved to New York. I moved to New York while I was making a Carley Simon record. I got a divorce and moved to New York. And then it was an adjustment. In fact, I don't think I ever really found my groove in New York. I was struggling. I was doing the same thing I was doing in Detroit, approaching the records the same, but they weren't getting over. We weren't getting any hits. Then I had this one experience, and this was a life changer. I got hired to produce a band for Virgin Records in the UK. And my wife was the A and R at Virgin in the UK. That's not met her, so she was somehow involved in hooking me up at the spank called Award Brothers three brothers from Barnesley, which is kind of like being from Iowa. And they had a little church where they made these great four track demos, great guitar basin drums, and then a bidding war started over them. And now there's all this pressure. Now you can't go to Barnesley to make a record with these guys. We got to bring them to New York and do it right. So they've never even been in New York, so they get plunked down in the middle and it didn't go well. And then and our guy came in from England and didn't like what he heard, and he pulled the band out. Man. He took him home and didn't call me. I came to the studio the next day and they were on a plane going back. I didn't hear from them for a month. It was harsh. And then they called me in a month. They said, well, we're going to do some overdubs here. You can. We're not gonna pay for it, but if you if you want, you can fly over on your own dime and pay for a hotel, but you can still work on the record. And I had nothing going so I thought, all right, I'll go. So I went over and I did overdubs with him for two weeks and it's okay, you're back in our good graces now. Then I didn't hear from them for a month. Then when they called me said we're going to start mixing on this date in uh Like it was a residential studio in England somewhere again. You can fly over on your own dime if you want, and you can be present if you want. So I flew over and it was not going well. It was not the right guy to mix the song. He was a good engineer, but he wasn't the right guy, and they kept talking about and our guy. I was saying, it's got a sound like Don Henley, and it sounded nothing. There was nothing on any track that sounded like Don's record. But finally I said, all right, let me go to LA and I'll mixed with let me mix the single with Greg Ladanni, who engineered Don Henley's records. From the mix, So fly back to New York. I'm going to pick up my wife. We're going to look at apartments and in LA while we're there, So I take a taxi in, we get we get in the cab at midnight on a Friday. I got the two two two intrials under my arm for the mix, and we get up to the ticket count there and she says, wait, we're the tapes. And I left him in the trunk of a New York taxicab at midnight on a Friday night. And thankfully I kept the receipt and I had the medallion number. But nothing was going to happen till Monday, and Greg Ladonney was waiting for me on Saturday. So I didn't know what to do. Man. I actually I lied to people and I said I got mugged at what's the bus terminal called her, It's a transit authority. So I got mugged at the and I called. I called Michael Brauer and Media Sound, who they were good friends, and that I need I needs to help me with this. And we found a reel that had everything but the drums on it, so we had that flown over and um and Steve Ferronia came in and I said, you got to it's a band of brothers. You got to play exactly what he played, and I gave him a cassette of it, and he learned the part and he overdubbed it and they all did it for free, and I was able to get on a plane Saturday night, and Gregor Donnie says, fine, we'll do it Sunday instead. So I go to the complex that was y Yeah. So I go over there to meet greg and he says, all right, well, I'll have a seat in the lounge. It will take you know, take you know, eight hours or something to mix it. And I'm sitting there. I got my walkman and I remember Peter Gabriel's album, so I had just come out right. I'm playing the song Don't give Up over and over and crying. I'm just sitting there with the walkman on crying like I thought I bottomed out. And while I'm sitting in that lounge because I was working there on Sunday instead of Saturday when there was a different artist in the other room, Bonnie Rate came into the lounge and that's how I met Bonnie. And meeting and meet and Bonnie Rate changed my whole life. So it's a good lesson, man, And how you know you can when you think everything's going wrong, maybe it's really going right. Yeah, I never know. We never know, and the brakes really never come from where you expect them to come. It's always someone you met along the way to do the thing. That's the one who's going to change your life. So so I'll moved out to LA and started recording with Bonnie Ray. How long did you work with Bonnie? Well, we did four albums, but that album Nika Time was the first one we did and that that changed you know that wanted a Grammy for album album. I think it one like five Grammys or something. Man, I really went from being a pariah to having work. I feel like I'm still riding the like the wind from Bonnie Ray still in my in my sales. Yeah, You've done a lot of good work in between, though, I'll say thank you, appreciate, but it was a very special working with her Man. She's just such a great artist. We'll be back with Rick Rubin and Don Was. After a quick break, we're back with more from Don Was. Do you think that there's something special that happens when you work with an artist the first time that's different than when you work with them over and over again. Yeah. I mean, I think when you do anything for the first time, you know you have I think creating and recreating a two very different neurological processes. So the first time, it's all creation because you have no routine, you have no anything, You're you're just building a dynamic and method of working together. Then to go back then, especially if it's been really successful, to go back to that same method and try to do it again now. We actually, I think the second record we made after the one after Nicked Time, I think that's a better album. It actually had more hits and sold more records. Yeah, and it had that song I Can't Make You Love Me on that Wow. But we were aware at the time that we had to overcome, but we were aware of the phenomenon that we were going back to recreate a methodology, for lack of a better term, a pattern that was set on something previous that had just caught some kind of crazy wind and spread. Yeah. I think more often than not, when you catch that wind, the healthiest thing to do is to just start from scratch on the next one. Is opposed to try instead of trying to part to it? Well, you can't. You know. One of those things that I've learned lately. I've been playing live more than ever in my life. I've been playing with Were you did a wonderful show? Oh you did well? I didn't know that I pay in Kawaii. Oh right, that was a wild night. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's a good one. Yeah. Well, playing with Bobby, first of all, you can never play the same set twice. And you can, I mean, like ever, you can never put the same list together twice. We have one hundred twenty songs to draw from, and we really don't repeat anything for four nights, but they're always put together in a different combination. And on top of that, we never ever ever play it the same way twice. There might it's got some loose form to it, but you don't know what thing is going to get stretched out. I don't know what the drummer is going to play a different beat, so it doesn't there's no point in playing the same thing I played last night, because everything's gonna be different. So the one thing I've really learned about him is that any thing but trying to repeat what you did the previous night is probably going to get you somewhere. But you also learn not to not to worry too much about it, and I just go out there and play. It's a hard thing to learn. It was one of the attractions that taking the gig. I was interested obviously in playing with them and playing those songs, but what I was really interested in was expanding fearlessness. I wanted to self consciousness is the enemy of really everything right, and I just wanted to get better at going out there, not knowing what I was going to do in front of twenty five hundred people and just start playing. And it's been. It's been great for that, but it it obviously has implications and everything that you do in life and in making records. I think that's been I don't stay up, threatening over what's going to happen the next day. I used to get. I mean, I still get nervous before every session. And it doesn't matter if it's Bob Dylan coming in or it's from nineteen year old kid making a first album, because you really don't know where that magic thing is going to come from. We all know how we can make an okay record in our sleep, but okay is your enemy. Man, just being good is your enemy. How are you going to get that? How are you going to make it great? Something lightning? It's got to hit the room. Yeah, it's completely out of our control. Totally out of control, right, So that that's terrified. I understand why. You know why a lot of musicians end up on heroin and stuff, you know, because having to live with that is a tough thing. It's out of our control. So how do you going to deal with that? I used to get, Really I feel that my stomach before every session, Like, where's the magic going to come from? Today? I don't know? But it always comes to varying degrees. Something good always happens. You have to, but you got to open your self up to that. Anyone's got to be open to the same and you got to make sure to takes role and when when when it hits Yeah, and be patient, you know, like that's another big part. It's like just gotta wait for it time. It's like fishing, you know, you gotta wait for it to well, that's exactly. It's very much like the surfing, you know, like going out, you gotta wait for the wave. You're gonna get one and it's going to be exhilarating when you catch it. Yeah, but you don't exactly know what shape it's going to be. You don't exactly know when it's gonna come. Never, never, Every session is different. How do you deal with it same? It's like I'm always I always have anxiety before, especially before the first session of any project, because I really that then I really have no idea what's going to happen. Usually after we've started, there's something reveals itself as to it's going to be one of these you know it's going to be in this ballpark, and then at least I still don't know what it's really going to be. But at least I'm calm about it because it's not just a blank page. Do you know what I'm saying it's there's some at least there's a frame that I can see, there's where it's going to be contained, and that's helpful. Yeah, no, exactly, And it sounds like from your experience with Weir, it's almost more like a jazz approach in terms of playing free. It's totally like a jazz approach, except the modes and scales are a little bit different. And even then he listened a lot to McCoy tyner, Love McCoy tyner, and he'll he'll do things like we've we've referenced Coltrane records as far as to try to shape the nature of our improvisation. And I had to really try to come up with a way to play bass. I'll tell you the story. I was producing John Mayer in twenty eleven and John got me really into the Grateful Bed again. I'd seen him play in the late sixties, but I hadn't really been like a deadhead or anything. And John was a fanatic for him. Every time we got in the car, it was the Grateful Bead channel, and he could identify the year that the concert was even if it wasn't on the screen. He really knew their plan so I started listening again and started appreciating what they were doing. And then I ran. I'd known Bob since the early nineties, but ran into him somewhere and he started talking and he was looking for something new to do, and how were they going to move forward? As it's a band that Bobby and Mickey Hart came over to my office at Blue Note in the Capitol Tower and John was working downstairs, and I said, man, you'd better come up here. You won't believe was in my office. And that led to the two of us going up to Bob's studio and San Raphael and that was how Dead and Company started. And to be honest with you, I would have elected been the bass player and Dead and Company. And I did play, but John, there's about a two month lag. And John stopped his album and went home and shedded Grateful Dead songs and I did, so we got up. I didn't really know the songs, and I made him sound when I played, it sounded like a bar band doing Grateful Dead signs. Know it was the guys, but it worked out great with John, but I didn't know how to do. What Phil did that really baffled me. He's I think he's a really unique musician, and I don't know where he's coming from me. It's a unique voice that belongs to him, and I can't figure out what he's doing or imitate him. So I was not the right guy for that. But then Bob called me about two years later, he said, let's start a trio. I said, I had a dream. We started a trio. Beautiful and you play acoustic bass. So I started. You know, this time, I thought, well, I'm really gonna shed man, I'm really gonna practice these songs and I'll be ready. And I was ready, but I was. I started, I was playing a whole lot of notes. And then once we started playing together, I realized that he wanted something different. It wasn't It wasn't. He wasn't saying play like Phil. He was saying, I want to I want you to play with what I'm singing. Play play the play the lyrics, play the song, don't worry about the chords, don't worry about a bunch of notes. I want to be able to phrase, and I need you to support me. So then it became a whole different challenge. Not how do I play like Phil? It became how do I stay the fuck out of the way of his phrasing and still be supportive. What's the what are the fewest notes I can play that will still provide support, but that won't inhibit his guitar playing or singing. And that was the challenge, and it is every night, because every night's different. He phrases something, He phrased the song completely differently. Every night he approaches it fresh. It's like, what's the next line, Where's he going to sing? Where don't you need to play? So no, but that forces, it forces an interactive nature of performance and focus that if you were playing your same part every night wouldn't be there. It's like we know a lot of we know a lot of rock bands that essentially go on autopilot when they play live, and it sounds like this every night. You're in this moment and much are I like jazz again? It's also you know what else, It's like it's like meditation. Yeah, because we played for three hours every night, and really, if if I take my eye off the ball, I'm gonna get hit in the head. Yeah, the whole time. I've got to be like inside, and I come off those shows like flying. So exhilarated from it. So great, that's so great. That's the best, it's the best. It's actually the best thing I've ever been involved with in my life, playing with Bobby Industry beautiful. We'll be right back with Don was after a break. We're back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Don was, let's talk about about jazz, and let's talk about Blue Note. So how did Blue Note? How did Blue Note come into your life? Blue No, Well, in nineteen sixty six, I was fourteen years old and I was riding around running errands with my mom in Detroit, and I was being grumpy. You know, I don't want to be with my mom. I wanted to be out at the mall, hanging out with my friends. I was a pain in the ass. So she left me in the car with the keys I could play with the radio. She running to do something. I started messing with the dial, and on weekends, the local R and B station WCHB, which simulcast the local jazz station WCHD, and I landed on the station. I didn't know anything about it, but I landed on the station and there I came in just as the saxophone solo of a song that I later learned was called Mode for Joe by Joe Henderson. The saxophone solo was beginning and I could hear like about notes, and it wasn't about instruments. It was a guy talking to me and he was anguished, man, and so was I because I stuck driving around with my mom, so I totally related to By About twenty seconds later, the drummer Joe Chambers. So by the way, we just resigned to blue note. He was making a new album for us. As we speak, Joe Chamber starts kicking him with this groove, and Joe Henderson kind of falls into place, and then he starts swinging and he's mollified by the groove. And the statement that came through to me from listening to that music, although not necessarily in these words, was down you got to groove in the face of adversity. And sure enough, man, when my mom came back to the car, I was a nice kid again. I was happy, and this music spoke to me and changed my frame of mind one hundred eighty degrees, that's fourteen. I didn't know what hit me, but I did know that I liked the music a lot. And so it was on the broadcast on the FM all the time, and back then he had to go audio way to listen to after you had to buy a special radio. So so I got a AMFM portable radio and started listening to the jazz station. And I found that a lot of the music I liked was coming from this one little label out of New York called Blue Note Records, and I wanted to know more about him, and I started collecting the record started looking at him. You know, there's no internet, you couldn't just look at all the covers. So my friends are not. We just get on buses and go record store to record store. And back in those days, every record store was you know, it was like a mom and pop store, and the stock reflected the taste of the owner, and so you tried different ones at different stores. And I remember once calling around and find out that there's a copy of Larry Young's album called Unity Blue Note Classic, that there was one on the east side of Detroit, And we wrote a bus for forty five minutes. Didn't even buy it. We just wanted to look at it. We need the liner notes and maybe you could count the owner of the store into breaking the plastic seal and playing some of it for you. So I was just enthralled not only by the music and the message behind the music, but by the whole vibe of it. Man. It had the great black and white photos of these musicians sitting and smoke and wearing cool clothes, and I just wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be in that room. And the album covers themselves all designed by a guy named Reid Miles, who really changed the language graphic design. You can see his influence everywhere now. But those covers just made such a strong individual statement. The whole culture around Blue Note was appealing to me, and I followed the company my whole life, right up until twenty eleven, when I was again that same record talk about other records leading the situations I was producing John Mayer. We had one night off and I read that a singer named Gregory Porter was appearing up at a club you Harlem called Smoke. So on my night off, I went up there and it was just the greatest show I'd seen in years. Man. I sat to three sets, eating ribs and drinking coffee, and the next morning I had breakfast with a guy named Dan McCarroll. I don't know if you know that. He used to be a drummer, played with Sheryl Crowe and Lloyd Cole and emotions and somehow one of the best guys ever and he worked his way up and at that moment he was president of Capitol Records. So we're just having breakfast. We're old friends. And right at the end of the breakfast, I said to Dan, said, is Blue Note's still part of Capital, because if it is, you should sign this guy. But I saw last night and he said, But as it turns out, unbeknownst to me, Bruce Lundball, who'd run the label for thirty years, was sick and he couldn't carry on, and they weren't quite sure what they were going to do to keep the ethos alive. There was some talk about turn it into a website that sold catalog and blue T shirts. Was to plan down most uncomfortable with it. And I came in with an idea on the day that they were looking for an idea, and you offered me the job right there in this little diner in New York City. I said, you should sign them. Amazing, So so I never aspired to work at a record company. In fact, I never my whole my whole life was kind of devoted to avoiding having a job if I just didn't have to. I never thought about playing or making records, just being a job as long as I have to get a job. I was okay, I was fifty eight. I almost made it irresistible offer, so I couldn't say no to that. I walked around for an hour, thought about it, and it was like, what the fuck it? And did you sign Gregoryporter? Those first call? Yeah, first call, great choice, thank you and h and then the second guy. I ended up on an airplane with the lawyer named Kenny Hurts, who I've known for years, and he represented Wayne Short. I said, Wayne ever want to be on Blue Note again? And that was that was the second signing. Amazing, So it's really worked out. I love it. I love doing it. I love being a part of maintaining the legacy of the company and extending it. There's nothing, which I'm sure you know you've experienced time and time again, there's nothing quite like a feeling of finding a young artist and saying come with us, and you see something build off of that and you've enabled them to grow and to have their music. It's it's just a it's a wonderful experience. Absolutely. Tell me, what do you know about the beginnings of Blue Note? When was it founded? What's the story of from the beginning? Founded in nineteen thirty nine by two German immigrants, Alfred Lyon and Francis Wolf, who were getting away from Hitler and they came over here. They were totally enamored of Black American music and just started hanging out listening to it. They were in a like a jazz club, not a bar, but like a like chess club. They joined a club and they would talk about records and all that, and then their way in was to start recording some of the musicians they loved. So the first record was released in nineteen thirty nine is a Mead Lux Lewis and Albert Ammas. And they just kept going and it seems that if there was a pattern there, it was that they signed artists who had strong fundamentals, knew the history of the music that came before them, had had a gift. But we're looking to push the threshold of what was then contemporary music and go one step beyond, do something new and reflect the times that they lived in. So I jumped in nineteen forty eight. They could have signed anybody in bebop. They signed Thelonious Monk, who was definitely left the center. Of course, we listened to Monk. Now it sounds you've become such a part of the vocabulary. You don't think of it as radical music. But it was totally radical when he created it, and he changed the face of composition. He changed in the nature of the way people voice chords. I mean, he's just had such an influence on generations to come. But they took a chance on him and repeated that again five or six years later when they put Art Blakey and Horace Silver together to form the Jazz Messengers, and and that became the birth of hard bop, which again revolutionized music. He jumped into the sixties where I came on board as a fan, and they had Herbie Hancock and Wayne short Of doing all these incredible modal things, but they had Ornett Comer and Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor, and even the most commercial I have a label was probably Jimmy Smith, the organ player. But what he was doing with the D three, even though you could dance to it and had a group that was radical and revolutionary. No one had done that but a B three before they played bass with this hand and foot and combination, like that's incredible, but Jimmy Smith did so that seemed to be the legacy. That's the real essence of the label, and we try to continue that today. When my first day on the gig, Robert Glasper came in to play rough mixes of Black Radio, which I just remembered being totally transported when I heard that, because I'd never heard anyone put hip hop and jazz together the way he did on that record. People have done me to Roy Hargrove did incredible things ten years earlier, but no one had done it quite like the way Robert was doing it, And I just remember being totally tripped out listening to it. And now that was, you know, that was maybe nine years ago or something like that. Credible. Now, if you go to a student concert at any college, someone's going to get up and say, we'd like to do Robert Glassper song now Afro Blue, which of course there's an old Mongo Santa Maria song the Coltrane, but everyone knows Robert's arrangement and he's now become a permanent part of the jazz vocabulary. So the goal is to keep doing that. Amazing. How often do you see someone who can fit in that lineage? Seems like they're few and far between. Yeah, they are few and far between. Now you don't see some of that often, but you know, recently, I actually asked my sons, my youngest kid, Solomon, he's bass players twenty he's going to be twenty four this year, and I said, who in your generation is like the Miles Davis, you know? And he didn't hesitate me. He said, there's a vibes player out of Chicago named Joel Ross. To check him out. So we started watching the videos and he's awesome, man. So I called him up and he'd already had an album recorded, you know. He was He was really sharp, he really on the case. The more I hung with him, I realized that he was quite well known and he's the leader among the musicians of his generation. And I can see that when people play in his band, they played differently. He elevates the playing just bout being with them. But when whenever, wherever he goes to play, it changes, which reminds me of Miles. It reminds me of Charles Lloyd, the same thing. So we signed him and he put out a record about a year ago and he's really blossoming. And now we just signed the guy who plays saxophone with him, Emmanuel Wilkins. Such a record coming out. Both Joel and Emmanuel new records coming. So they're there. Uh, you know, people are out there. You just have to keep listening and stay open. Yeah. It sounds like the same like being in the studio. Just the patience, you know, that's it. That's exactly like that. And I think that a lot of the things I learned in the studio and also learned as an artist who ended up being produced by other people. I think that's been that's been really helpful. I don't I don't rule with an iron fist. I do the opposite. I'll try to sign people whose instincts I trust. Yeah. Absolutely. How did your relationship with the Stones begin? They called me in ninety two. They just signed a Virgin Records, and Virgin Records is trying to get them to use a producer. And you know, I was on the heels of I'll just be fifty twos Bonnie Rate stuff, and they suggested I meet with them, so I went to New York City. They were right after Bill Wyman left the band and they were auditioning based new bass players. I went to sir, and you gotta understand. I saw them play for the first time in nineteen sixty four, bought the first album, bought every album subsequently, went to every tour subsequently, and now here I was in a room watching them play the greatest hits audition and a bass player and there's nobody else in the room. I just couldn't believe it. So then Mick and Keith come over and they sit down next to me. I hadn't met Keith before, but I'd met Mick before, and they both started talking at the same time, and it was like like watching a tennis match, and my head's going back and forth which guy that I listened to, and they did not yield to the other guy for it felt like an eternity. But it's probably a good three minutes right, probably yet probably still to this day it thinks I haven't changed that much. But Keith was basically giving me, you know, all the reasons that they didn't need a producer. I don't need some fucking guy to tell me how to play guitar. And Mick wanted the producer, but he had he had his read so they were both talking at the same time, and then they both stopped at the same time and Keith said, you share, you want to be the meat in this sandwich. And I thought, oh man, they're never gonna hire me. But I got a great story to tell my grandchildren. So I split that day thinking I was never going to see him again. And then and then Keith telled me a couple of weeks later, and we figured out what they did need and what they don't need. He doesn't need someone to tell him how to play guitar, so I don't have to do that. But there are there are other things where having an objective third party helps. So it's been really nice that it's been. It's those nineteen ninety three, so it's twenty seven years, and they've been good friends. They're really good friends and really generous guys, and they are the best rock and roll band ever I think, you know. And I just every time we go in to make a record and I get to sit in that little circle with them playing live I can't believe how good they are. And I've gotten to play with them too, which is nice. There's been times that darl Jones hasn't been able to be at a rehearsal or session. When you when you play bass with them, you become a where that the conversation, the musical conversation that's going on, there's zero tension in it. It's quite jocular. They're having so much fun, and it's kind of like you know when when you go to a baseball game, before the inning starts, there'll be several balls out in the field and they're just tossing it around, warming up before the inning starts. So that's kind of like what they do to each other. They throw each other these really nice softballs, these beautiful pitches that just land right in the glove, and that they're just flying around and Charlie will play something that makes Keith play something, that I'll make Nick play something something, that I'll make Ronnie play something, and they're so quick and there's so much listening and it's so improvised and it's so much fun. Man, they have a ball when they play. It's great. Tell me about tell me about the show in nineteen sixty four. What was it like seeing them back then? I didn't know anything about it, man, No one knew who they were in nineteen It's like February nineteen sixty four, March, the Beatles had just been on Ed Sullivan, so everyone was totally into this whole notion of English groups coming over and here's another Beatles kind of group. And they played the Olympia Stadium in Detroit, which is a hockey arena, and there were maybe three hundred people in a place that held eighteen thousand. But a couple of weeks later they were you know, they're on Ed Sullivan and then they were huge. How would you say your relationship to music has changed from the time you were a kid, from the time that you were in your mom's car and you heard that saxophone yep. How was your relationship to music changed to today? Well, there's made me just a little bit of awareness of the backbone behind you what you see pathy. The impact is still exactly the same, but there's a lot of research about, like the neurological implications in music that the part of the brain that processes these is there originally so you could communicate with babies. It's the pre language communication. And so like a mother CRUs to a baby, Oh look at the baby. Last music. Those are intervals, and those intervals are repeated and disparate cultures all over the world the same thing. It soothes a baby. But once you learn to speak, you know, by the time you're three years old, maybe close that area of the braindown. We close down nineteen of twenty active synopses by the time we're twelve or something like that, because we can't have them all open, and we keep open the synoptic pathways that we use, and we keep the music one open. Well why is that? I think it's because conversational language, no matter how particulate deep you get with it, it still fails to convey the full depth of our inner emotional lives. That's why we have art, you know, because you have to convert these emotions to another medium in order to communicate that to somebody. And great art is made by someone who's is willing to dig deep inside and take something even that it makes them really uncomfortable and really you know, tears them up, and bring that out in some way and share that with other people so that when they receive it. It puts them in touch with their lives. So anything that brings you some understanding of what's going on inside of you, anything that even just brings you comfort for three minutes, that's an amazing thing to offer to people. So I just know that even before I was making music, I was impacted by music and it sued my soul and made life bearable. And it's nothing has changed, and that's that. I just have a little bit of insight into how you can at that from the artist to the listener. It's still all magic and all it's a big fucking mystery. Yeah, we're so lucky that we get to feel that on a regular basis. I feel super fortunate, I really do. Man, it's a great way to spend your life. You can hear all of our favorite Dona Was related tracks on a playlist we created for this episode at Broken Record podcast dot com, and be sure to check out our YouTube channel, where you can find all of our past episodes and also some great bonus material. You can subscribe at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrell, Mel LaBelle Leo Rose, Eric Sandler, and Martin Gonzalez for Pushkin Industries. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. Thanks for listening. I'm justin Richmond.