Don Was

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Dear friend of the show, Don Was has had a remarkable career, moving between different corners of the music world. In the nineteen eighties, he fronted the Eclectic band Was mixing funk, rock and pop in unexpected ways. As a producer, who's helped shape landmark albums for artists like the b fifty two's and Bonnie Raid, her album Luck of the Draw, which she produced, featured the hit something to Talk About and marked a major turning point in her career. Over the years, he's worked with Bob Dylan and become a regular producer for the Rolling Stones. For the past decade, don has led Blue Note Records as its president, bringing new energy to the story jazz label, and he's also just released his own album, Groove in the Face of Adversity, a tribute to Detroit and the music that came out of the city where he grew up. On today's episode, I talked to Don Was about his wide ranging career and why his new album is his first onunder his name. He also talks about how working with musical heroes like Willie Nelson, Leonard Cohen, and Brian Wilson in the nineties initially shut down his own creative ambitions and reflects on his time at Blue Note, and I was experienced as a toying artist himself. Now allows him to relate to the label's roster in a completely different way. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's my conversation with Don was, Well, you have a new record out, like the first, your first record in a long time.

00:01:47
Speaker 2: It's the first record I ever put my name on as an artist. Even it was not was I was hiding behind the band.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: Why now?

00:01:57
Speaker 2: I don't know why? You know why not? It's a series of I wish I could tell you there was a master plan to it, but it was a series of random events. Terrence Blanchard's a good buddy of mine, and he was curating a series at the for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It's called the Paradise Valley Jazz, Paradise Valley being the black area of the city where all the great music happened before urban renewal. And so he asked if I wanted to play a night. He asked me two years before the show, and I said, yeah, sure, six months before. Jesus, I don't have a band. I don't have songs? What am I going to do? So I started thinking back to what I tell artists in the similar situation, but I suggest to them, which really stems from an experience I had in the early nineties where in very rapid succession I got to work with my greatest heroes Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Brian Wilson, Willie Nelson, Chris Christofferson, and Macon Keith. And a byproduct of that was that it gave me writer's block. For about five years, I just every time I sat down at the piano, I'd go for ten seconds and think, well, what is the point of me doing this? When Brian Wilson is down the street and let's just let's just take him the lyric. Right about five years into it, I was in a studio with Willy Nelson, again lamenting the fact that I could never be Willie Nelson, and then boom, a voice went off and said, but Willie Nelson can never be you. He didn't drop acid and go see the MC five of the Grandy Ballroom, George Clinton and the Parliaments, didn't play a sock hop at his ninth grade school dance in in the gym, which that did happen. The Parliament still there. They were out promoting I just want to testify. And in those days, a legal form of paola was the DJ at the big Top forty stations would get paid to MC a school dance and if you wanted to get played on a show, you'd go and play for free and lip sync your record. So he was he was bringing a show to the school, but he was keeping all the bread. And that's why you got your record play.

00:04:10
Speaker 1: And the original version of that song.

00:04:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they were. It was a five piece vocal group like the Temptations, but they were they were dressed like hippies, not in tuxedos. And it was it was synchronous with Hendrix. It wasn't before him, but you know, you had to have that that that movement, that that kind of fashion to dress that way. So synchronous. Uh, there's something in the zeitgeist of R and B and blues that created Hendrix and George Clinton and plus George Clinton was going to see the m C five in Detroit. He was going to see the Stooges in Detroit, and he understood that probably wud be good to incorporate that which is how Funkadelic comes about as more of a rock and roll band or anything. But but then he was just it's like a hippie doop group. It's so.

00:05:07
Speaker 1: It's amazing, but you but to your point, yes, to my point, yeah, yeah, I.

00:05:13
Speaker 2: Thought he didn't eat. That's not his background. So usually in the music business, the thing that makes you different from everybody else is considered a marketing lightmare. You know, how do we market this? It's not just like everything else that's out there. But I've come to view it as your superpower. It's really the only chance you have is to be different from everybody else and approach the whole sensibility of your music and all the theme of it from a unique perspective. Otherwise, what are you? What have you got? You just copy and other people. So when so, I've always encouraged artists I was producing to be extremely them, And so when it came time to put this band together, I thought, all right, well, what are you? I'm some yob from Detroit, right, So I called eight other musicians that I've known for a long time and I've played with, you know throughout the years who grew up listening to the same radio stations as me played in the same bars, all people from Detroit, all people who still live in Detroit, and I'm the only one who's a part time residence in Troia. And we got in a room together. This is just to see we could play together, to do this Terence Blanchard thing, And after about ten minutes, it was like, oh, hold on a second, man, this is this is something more than a bargain for where we really speak a common musical language, which is kind of the sound of Detroit, kind of growing up in Detroit. And it was clear from the first day that we should probably do more than the one show. So we booked a whole tour and turned it's not turned into five or six tours. And he'd been to Japan, went there and played a couple of months ago. We got six weeks coming up in January and February, and then we put on an album and it's it's now a thing. It's it's gone from being a one off to be in a nine piece band with an identity based on the characters and the band. If if one of them is sick, we can't call us ub anymore. Now it's just like, Wow, we just got to cancel because this is it's the sound of these nine people from Detroit playing together.

00:07:33
Speaker 1: And is the material on the is the material on the album? Is that stuff that you guys have been playing over the last few tours or.

00:07:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've been playing it. It really was kind of some of it was haphazard, like choose from the cameo song insane.

00:07:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, come on, that was a that was incredible.

00:07:48
Speaker 2: I was so surprised. Well, I was just it was that was actually that was recorded the first day we played it at the first rehearsal we had. We recorded. We rehearsed at a studio called rust Belt and Detroit.

00:08:03
Speaker 1: To go into make the album.

00:08:04
Speaker 2: You rehearse. This was just the first day we got together to play. There was just a room where a comfortable and thankfully Al Sutton, who owns the joint, he put up some mics and that version insane is from it's maybe the second time through it or something like that, and we just did it to see what kind of breadth we would have stylistically, how how far, how many directions can we move in and how how wide a path can we curve, you know, And so that was one end of the extreme and it just it just felt so natural to play that, and it felt like a lot like what the grooves from I was and I was, so, you know, it's the eighties.

00:08:46
Speaker 1: That's what I was gonna. So the coolest thing about the record to me is it feels very different from Midnight Marterers, which is the first song on the album, to take to Insane. But what I loved was like if you listen to Insane, which is the last song on the album, and then you just rolled into something from the course was.

00:09:16
Speaker 2: Not was album very good? Yeah? Yeah, it's almost the same beat.

00:09:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like this really cool book end for all you according music thus far.

00:09:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it What was kind of cool was the the trombone player in the band, Vincent Chandler, who's the he's the head of the jazz studies program at Wayne State University. He was not in was that was a couple of guys Dave McMurray and Luis Resto are on that wreck that outcome the Freaks that you just played there but wasn't But he knew how we arranged horns, and he came up with the horn line for Insane. It was just like it was right out of there was not was songbook, so we thought, all right, well we can do this, and and then we worked on a Henry Threadgill song called I Can't Wait Till I Get Home. Kenny Barron wrote that Newbie and Lady song, He's just a flatief recorded yeah, and then this Midnight Marauners that they're all, yeah, there's a lot of breadth to it, but I think it's all tied together. It's clearly one band. Actually the record is half from live shows and half from studio, and some you're a little calmer in the studio. You don't have the audience giving you this energy, and so on three of the songs they were just better won't played them live, so we use that version. But three of them, like Midnight Marauders, is a good example where it's a hypnotic groove and you don't want to get too excited. So the calm the studio I think was beneficial. But we still set up the same way we set up to play live, and we didn't we didn't really overdub. Maybe some hand claps or you know, a couple of background vocals doubled up or something, but it was so live in the studio or live on record, it seemed to have some unity to it, and that's what this band sounds like. Yeah.

00:11:01
Speaker 1: It made me start to think too about the connection between jazz and funk a little bit too, because I mean listening to it and there's like a really strong second line feel to it. You know, I don't really ever thought it through, but to the degree that you know zig Aboo from from the Meters, you know, like probably grew up with that second line. New Orleans was a big is a big ingredient funk, it seems to me.

00:11:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, well absolutely well Africa is right, so it's all you get regional derivations of it. Yeah, But I think that one of the things that makes you Detroit unique is that after World War Two, people from all over the world came there to work in the auto factories, and they brought their cultures with them. So we had everything when we were growing up, not just funk, not just New Orleans, but we had polka's, you know, you could hear every kind of music. You know. I think it's the the largest era of American community in the country, certainly, and so all that quarter tone stuff and which does up in our music too. And especially in the horn lines. I think we did a song called carrying Me Back to Morocco, which there wasn't I was song. We started playing it live and it's very much got that bende kind of sound. Also it set was I was up really well to be the backup band for Chevrahaled. We made some you know, Chevaled, he's a Algerian rye music singer, being chevs like being MC. It's a title means a young woman or something like that, and it's a style of music. I came out of Algeria and Morocco in late eighties early nineties, and I became a fan of it because they were sticking eight o eights and you know, they were putting some synthesizer things in there, but it was quartertone music and it's it's you know, if you took the lyrics apart, it's not really like two live crew. You know, it's pretty pretty old stuff. But it was quite controversial in the fundamentalist country, and they came after these guys and killed a lot of the musicians and now had to kind of flee to France. So Chevale was living in France and making really cool records. But he just he ran into tremendous racism there for being Algerian. Yeah, so they didn't really play him on the radio. In fact, they had laws about how much Arabic language content you could have on the French radio station. See it limited for like four hours a day. Yeah, it was crazy, man. So the Barkley Records in the late eighties put us together just because I was a fan, wasn't I was. We played in Paris and I met him and we clicked and I loved what he was doing. So he came to La and we cut with a couple of guys in his band and some of the guys from Was and I was wet song called d D That was one of the things we cut that started getting played in Ibiza one summer when in August when everyone's on holiday, when France closes down. So they came back. That was like the song of the of the of their vacation. So it became a really big record, and they had to repeal the law limiting Arabic language content. I think it probably they probably put it back, but for a minute we changed things and it was an Arabic language song that went to number one in France. And I didn't know it at the time, but turns out it kind of changed. It was the Sergeant Pepper of the genre. Everyone heard it and because it mixed American R and B and funk with the Algerian music. But for us it made perfect sense because we grew up hearing that music all the time in Detroit, so that that's just all those things seeped in and created a certain feel.

00:15:13
Speaker 1: I mean, you know that was was so cool for that reason, man, just the breadth of things you guys were able to just fit into, even you know, even doing the the the Richard pryor you know, like and it was not Jean Chandler but.

00:15:31
Speaker 2: Uh Uhlan wild. Yeah, like, yeah, that's wild that we got to make a music video with the two of them.

00:15:42
Speaker 1: It's crazy. And you guys are really the perfect, you know group for that, I would say, you know, because you guys are like just so so eclectic and just you know, you know.

00:15:51
Speaker 2: I think people's taste runs along those lines. Genres are good for organizing record stores. If you can find one, It's a great way to get to what you're looking for. It's like the Dewey decimal system in a library. But does anyone say, well, I'm only going to listen to I'm only going to read nine hundred series books, or more importantly, does an author say I just wrote a six hundred series book. I think I'll do a nine hundred. That's not how it works, man, and that's not how musicians play. You don't sit there and think, all right, I think I'll throw a bluest lick in in a couple of hours, and then after that, I'm going to do this country thing that's gonna blow people's minds. You never think that you're it's just well, if you do, you're doing Some people probably do and they're doing it wrong. Really you shouldn't. I don't recommend because I hear people.

00:16:47
Speaker 1: I'm not to hear people think I want to do a one hundred dpm song. Why are we talking this way about?

00:16:54
Speaker 2: And when do we start talking this way about it? But I just think you play what you feel, and your language is determined by what you've absorbed. So everyone in our band grew up drinking this really rich cultural jambalaya. Yeah yeah, and it's reflected and what we play.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: Did did it bug people out? When you left Detroit? They coming to La from Detroit. Was it was it where they you know, I mean the first you listened to the first hour, the first singles, and the first.

00:17:27
Speaker 2: Album wasn't it was? Yeah, well we had We were a marketing nightmare. And they made no bones about telling us that. At one point they just couldn't figure out where we If we're white guys, it should be a rock and roll band, but this doesn't sound like rock and roll and the singers are black, So what band? What is this? How do we market this? Right? And they sent us to a big label, to the R and B department. That was the label we were on, and the head R and B took us, took David and I in his office and put on a Michael McDonald record, and he said, this is how people do R and B here. That was Warner Brothers hobbies. So we said, well, you know, I love Michael McDonald. I ended up producing Michael McDonald. He's one of my favorite singers on the world. But that's not what we're doing. And I was relieved when someone else came into the office. It was right around the time Prince had just delivered his Controversy album to them, and one of the promotion men came into this guy's office. What are we supposed to do with this shit? I thought, Okay, we're not alone here. There's something going on. And there was actually something going on in Detroit that fed the whole world. And we've talked about Electrifier and Mojo before electrifiering Mojo changed not just musical tastes in Detroit, but impacted the whole world. And the weird thing is that he did it mostly with Warner Brothers bands because there was a great promotion man in Detroit by the name of Ted Joseph who was taking Mojo these records. And Mojo understood listening to craft Work, listening to talking heads, listening to the B fifty two's he understood, and especially listening to Prince. He was Prince's first big advocate in the United States, I think, and he understood that this had broader appeal, that white kids and black kids would all like this as well as the Gap band, and he built this audience that no one had ever cultivated, and it became incredibly popular. You know, Africa bombarda, John Roby and Arthur Baker. They did Planet Rock, which is craft work with a rappin on top, and that comes from Mojo playing it. The word is that Tommy Silverman was in Detroit heard it and said, oh, man, do something on top of craft work. Really yeah, but he made that fashionable for black audiences. It made it cool to listen to this, turned them onto it. Yeah. I played the ship out of prints before anybody was. And then it started trickling back to Warner Brothers. They weren't saying, you know, what are we going to do with this shit? But it didn't help to be It didn't do you any favors to be six months ahead of your time, you know. So we paid a price for it. They didn't know what to do with us. We had some dance hits, and then the next label said, look, we don't know how to market to either fire the black singers, hire some white guys and be a rock and roll band, or you guys stay out of the band and let the singers carry it and be a sole band. And we said, but that's not what we do. Man, I'm not going to but like a family, you know, we're friends. I'm not going to fire an. So they put us on suspension, and I thought it was like baseball. Yeah, they put us on suspension, and I thought you'd do your thirty days and you come back and they'll put the record out. No, it's indefinite. Man, We're on suspension for years. Is that what happened?

00:21:14
Speaker 1: Is that why there was no Yeah?

00:21:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, And now later I came to realize that what they were really saying was get someone to buy out your contract, you know, don't don't make us look like schmucks, you know. So, but it was it was a long, hard two and a half years where we couldn't do anything. We couldn't play, and we couldn't release a record. But that's how I became a producer. That's how, that's how it happened. Yeah, because it's actually a couple of guys. Gary Gersh was an A and R guy at EMI America Records, and he took a look at this thing. Everyone paid attention because I don't even think David Geffen knew we were on the label, you know, or was paying attention to what we were doing, or was even a part of saying putting us on suspension. But people paid attention to what David Geffen did, So why did he sign these guys and wait a minute, they're just right and produce, so they could do that for anybody. So Gary Gersh was the first guy to hire me to produce a record in the United States. Came to Detroit and Steve Jensen, who ended up managing the B fifty twos and a bunch of other bands, he was an agent at the time and he became our first agent because he understood. He came to Detroit to and figured that out. So in that period of time I started producing records.

00:22:36
Speaker 1: So what was your first job as a producer.

00:22:38
Speaker 2: Well, the first job is actually it was an English band called Floyd Joy that had we didn't have We had like regional hits in the UK. I don't even know if it was ended up being released in this country. They were signed to Virgin Records and they liked the first was and that was album. They were from Sheffield and there's a link between Sheffield and Detroit industrial cities, you know, and they related to it, and so they sought us out in the United United States and we had a chance meeting in New York City and I ended up producing their record. They came to Detroit and recorded with our guys and there was a whole procession after that of British artists wanting to get motownized. Produced telling Terry and did some stuff with boy George, his friend Marilyn. I got a record with him, uh, just a chain of stuff. It became fashionable, but we did have big hits. And then Gary hired me to produce a singer named David Lastly, great songwriter. He wrote you Bring Me Joy and Big Bus Gags Records. Jill Lowdown, Yeah, maybe, yeah, it was one of those Yeah, I can't remember your song was. So I produced his his album and we were after the races did producing?

00:24:03
Speaker 1: Was it fulfilling as fulfilling as being an artist is creating?

00:24:09
Speaker 2: It's it's kind of it's the same thing. Man. You know, you're you're trying to make music that gets under people's skin, makes them feel something, helps them make sense out of life, helps them make sense out of confusing and chaotic times for which there is no good answer. How do you how do you live? I mean that's a real question, and especially today, man, how do you live with the stress that's caused by what's going on in the world. That's hard. Music helps you with that. So the goal is to you want. You want to create something that communicates to the inner emotional life in a way that conversational language fails to do. That's the goal of art. We can only convey so much just talking like this. I can't really describe my feelings, but I can play them. I can turn life into notes. And you want to do that in a way that is not only fulfilling for you, but it's meaningful to the listener. That's the goal, right. The goal is not to see how many notes you can squeeze into a bar. That's you know, a lot of people do that, and I admire the practice it takes to do that, but I'm not impressed with it as a as a means of communication. It's acrobatics. It's like wow, but yeah, man, how do you do for somersaults in a road? It's great? It doesn't make you feel anything. Yeah, So you want to make people feel something. So whether you're producing or playing, or really even running a record company, it doesn't really change. That's that's still what you're trying to do is be a part of feeding the listener's emotional life with something valuable.

00:26:10
Speaker 1: So, so across all the different roles you've played in music. That's that's the common denominen it.

00:26:15
Speaker 2: That's what It's all one thing to me. People say, how do you run a record company and and go out and tour at the same time. It's not that hard. That's part of the same thing.

00:26:29
Speaker 1: Is there are there any logistical challenges that?

00:26:32
Speaker 2: No, not not in these times, you know, thankfully, you can actually be more productive sometimes just getting on a zoom call and getting off and uh, you can stay in touch. I have no problem doing the blue note job from a tour bus. I think I do a better job. Plus, I'm out there every night playing and going through what the artists are going through, so we can relate in a little different way. You know, I used to phase a moment ago. They're turning life into notes. That's you have to bleed to do that. You go, it's a thing that you go through. And when someone's in the middle of doing that making a record, you you know, you can't call them up and start saying, I need the credits by Wednesday or you're past the deadline. We're going to take your record out of the It just doesn't even register, you know. Some Yeah, some labels do that. Yeah, No, they just don't understand the artistic temperament. So I think it's good to someone of the company who's actually out there playing every night doing the same thing I can. I understand what they're going through. Not only do I understand what they're going through, but they're all way better than I am. Everybody on Blue Notice, way better than I am as a musician. So I'm in awe of what these characters do all the time, and and I treat them differently as such. You know, I understand the magnitude of what they're doing.

00:28:01
Speaker 1: Earlier, you said, you know, a big reason why you stop playing, you know, in the early nineties is you're producing people like Dylan and you're working with Brian Wilson, and so there's sort of a feeling of, well, why why would I do anything? Having now crossed back, having now gotten rid of that notion, kind of tossed that aside. Does that feel? Was that like a burden for I mean, I mean that does not feel good For a while.

00:28:30
Speaker 2: Well, like I said, it wasn't that big a shift. I was still making music and participating, and I was doing it with my heroes man the best people ever. Yeah, So I learned a tremendous amount, and it was incredibly rewarding. You know, you don't have to be playing. The biggest difference to me was the difference between actually playing live and interacting with the audience in the in the moment, as opposed to being in a bubble in the studio and the audience may not hear it for another twelve months and you won't see them. When they do hear it. They're going to be home or in their cars, and you'll get a check and, if you're lucky, a trophy, but you won't actually get that interactive experience. When I started playing with Bob Weir in twenty eighteen, he called me up and wanted to start a trio called the Wolf Brothers. He had the whole thing and vision, well, the grateful dead audience. Man, there's such an engaged, expressive audience. It blew my mind to actually go out there and play those songs for them and see their faces and feel the energy and they're so engaged. You play notes and you know they're being received in that instant, and you get energy back that actually impacts the next notes you choose. So it's a cooperative venture into collective euphoria kind and when you get that cycle going, which happens not in every song, but it will happen a couple times a night, you blow the roof off the motherfucker. It's really it changes, you change the space you're in, and it's exhilarating. It's the greatest feeling to do that with a band that's listening to each other and speaking the same language and being generous and trading things, and then taking that same kind of cooperation to the audience and having them be part of it. I actually don't know a feeling in life that's better than that. So you just become addictive to it, addicted to it. You ever talked to Bob Weird about that a whole the time? Why do you think he's out there playing for sixty seventy years? Yeah, every time I read about him or or the Rolling Stones, people saying don't they have enough money? You know, when are they going to retire? You don't retire from that. And it's got nothing to do with money, you know, I'm sure micking key where if you said just go out there, it's going to you got to pa us ten thousand dollars tonight, meaning you pay Bob. We're pays for the privilege of pay, and he pay the ten thousand dollars. Stones would pay the entry fee because it's the experience of getting connected to all those people. That's what we crave. Man. We're tribal, communal people. We really have not evolved that much from living in caves and groups of thirty forty klansmen, right, and we craved this. But look at how we're living here in La Man. Everyone's locked in their cars. I don't even know my next door neighbors and I've lived next door to them for ten years. One time he came over with a dog that told me to tell my son to stop playing drums loud encounter with the man. Can you imagine that? But that's how crazy, you know, life has become. So we crave that kind of communal situation, and what better way to do it than in a musical concert.

00:32:16
Speaker 1: It's so heartening to hear man. I mean, you know, I'm I'm I don't know. I don't think we've ever talked about it. I want to bother you about it. I am like the world's biggest stones Man. I love I love the stones Man. Like every era of the Stones, And you know, the rap on Mick amongst the general public is he he's like the business. You know, he's business minded, and it's probably he's in it for but to hear from you that, and it's like, you know he he He as much as anyone else, as much as Keith or anyone else, is still in love with music.

00:32:48
Speaker 2: They're all savvy businessmen. But that's not why they do it. Uh And anyone who if you think that about Mick, listen to his harmonica playing. You know, you can't play like that if if you're not a deeply soulful musician. He's one of the great frontmen of all time, which is nothing to be minimized. You know, Like, motherfucker can get up on a stage in front of eighty thousand people and make every one of those people think he's talking one on one to them, even if they're thousands of feet away from him. I went to see him when they were at Sofi Stadium the last Yeah, and you know, I know him pretty well. I spent twenty five at least years with him, right, and he came out, he came walking down that long ramp and I go, wow, it's that guy. Ready. He came to visit us in LA and I just turned into such a fan, you know, because he can't help it. He just makes you feel like he's singing to you in a stadium. Man, that's incredible, and he's got this great gift. I don't even know how to describe it exactly. Listen to Humbling Dice and listen to the mix. Almost nobody in the right mind would mix a vocal that low, so low in, But it doesn't matter because he is so charismatic. He comes leaping out of the speakers anyway. You can't you can't bury him. That's and you can't be that guy without having tremendous soul and tremendous powers of communication. So no one should ever think that he's just some guy out to make a buck. I don't think he minds getting paid. Why he's doing it. I guarantee you and none of them are.

00:34:51
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more from Don Was after the break. He was come to think of me too. When I was I was, I talked to Raphael Sadek one time and I asked him about the Grammy performance they did. I guess he said, you actually you upset that up a bit, Yeah, but he was saying like during the rehearsals, like they went to they did the song that they were gonna do, but then Mick was just like, hey, let's just do some blues numbers, and the mers just kept going and they just ran through blues.

00:35:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:35:16
Speaker 1: And then by the way, Mick speaking of like his charisma, like it's one of the great like Grammy performances ever, Like he killed that stage.

00:35:25
Speaker 2: It was just incredible killed that. He was absolutely incredible. He just he just showed everybody what a real.

00:35:34
Speaker 1: King insane and you're seeing everyone, Everyone's there, Beyonce's loving everyone is like I wrapped it. You know.

00:35:41
Speaker 2: It was an electrifying moment and a masterclass what being a front person means. He made it was at Staples Center, and he made it feel like he was in like a little nightclub. He made it so intimate and he just filled the room. Uh. You know, there was a moment when we were making a record called Bridges to Babylon. We're kind of like right across the street from here. We're what was then called Ocean Way, it's now East West Studios Studio one, which is a big room, and we were on the dinner break, and I walked into the room to talk to the guys and it's just ncking Keith and Charlie standing there. And I walked in and the first thing that grabbed me was that with these three guys in the room, this gigantic room, and they're not big guys, the room was full their personalities, their essence transcended the skin by so much. They were like, their personalities are the size of like the blow up dolls that they had on the Voodoo the remember it was like five stories high, right, or maybe it's the Steel Wheels tour then, But that's who that's who they are. They're their enormous musical personalities, enormous personalities. They can contain it and walk through the world, but they unleashed this thing. And you know, exact same thing with Keith Man. What a soulful player. Man. There's nobody like him. Man. Anyone who thinks he's sloppy is out of their fucking minds. Man, He's he's his technique. It's so crisp man. The attack where he lays into the rhythm and where he releases the notes, that's the other thing. It's a it's a lost art releasing the notes, don't don't just let it sustain into as fine if you're in the ramones and that's that's your sign. But man, but to be to get a groove going, you have to let go of the note and let some air come in there so you can feel the syncopation of the rhythm. Yeah, and it requires tremendous practice and technique, and he's got that's He's a badass guitar player. He completely redefined the connection between rhythm guitar and lead guitar in rock and roll. He's come up with some of the most incredible licks of all time. And I think he's an incredible singer and writer and just an absolutely brilliant and soulful cat man. He's it's such a privilege to have been able to know him and play with music with him and be part of it watching him create a record incredible. Charlie watts Man, nobody played like that.

00:38:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, people discount Charlie's but if you're a fan, I feel like you Charlie's contribution is.

00:38:36
Speaker 2: I mean, you wouldn't have had that band. That band would not have achieved that level of you know, it's more than popularity important not have penetrated the souls of millions and millions and millions of people if they wouldn't ahead. Charlie Watts playing, I used to think about a graphic depiction of a pocket, you know, trying as a bass player, you try to land in the pocket of the drummer so you can feel it. But the second you start playing with someone you can feel it. And Charlie Watts, let me put it this way. If you're listening to, say, a drum machine where the beat is quantized, it's it's like if you're the bass player and you want to land in the pocket of that thing, It's like getting up on a diving board and diving into like a flute of champagne. You got it. You got this narrow little space in which you can hit it and express your own sense of the rhythm. Charlie Watts was like this big, beautiful, gigantic swimming pool that you could land. Man. Because from where his high hat hit, which would sometimes be a little ahead, his snare be a little bit back, and the bass drum was somewhere in between. You could if you graft it out, and you could actually see how the beautiful a pocket he carved and and they and Keith can land in that pocket. Bill Wyman could land in that pocket, and it could sing in that pocket, and it was wide enough to cover the disparity between mix rhythm, rhythmic feel and Keith, because Keith feels it behind more and mix mix more patuated and attacking. That's when people think the Stones are sloppy. I think they don't understand that sometimes the riff is also the melody start me up. So Mick is going to sing it in a different place than Keith's going to feel it because they feel the rhythm in two different places. So yeah, all right, so they're not It's not perfect, and you don't slide mix vocal overr to land where Keith guitared ad or vice versa. But that disparity is where the character and the soul lives, you.

00:40:54
Speaker 1: Know, capturing that in the studio was that ever challenging or was it always? Was it always just an you know.

00:41:04
Speaker 2: Well they can always sound like the Stones, you know, I personally have never been to a Stone show that I thought was a bad show. Some nights were transcendental, but they always play well just in general for anybody not just the rolling stones. The biggest enemy you have in the studio is good. Being good sucks. Any motherfucker can be good. That's that's your enemy, because it can fool you. Good can trick you into thinking it's great. And if you can't be great, don't, don't go to the studio. Man, You know, if that's not your intention. I mean, so, yeah, we've all made records that aren't necessarily great. You can't. You can't always control it, but you at least strive for it. So it would just be the take when everybody sat in the pocket just right and you feel some magic. There's a thing about making records. You're waiting for lightning to strike. The great ideas don't originate inside you. They come from somewhere else, and they'd come through you. I'll take you back to where I first started thinking along these lines, which was when I produced the first time I worked with Bob Dylan nineteen eighty nine. I said, how come you can write Gates of Eden and I can't, And he said, well, look it makes you feel any better, he said, I remember moving the pencil over the page, but I didn't write that song. It came from somewhere and I just I was the scribe. I wrote it down and I thought at the time, I thought, oh, isn't that sweet. He's telling me this to make me feel better. Then I started it was a I'd see it everywhere everyone I talked to who I thought had achieved this level of extra terrestrial genius. You know, Yeah, Brian Wilson, the same thing. He'll just talk about it. He'll talk you talked about it coming from God. Keith Richards, if he's in the studio, he doesn't say, hey, wait, I got an idea, he said, hold it incoming, incoming. And eventually I realized that the great artists are the ones who just have really great antennae and can pick this up. But the thing is, and this is the curse of for these guys who are that great, they don't control when it comes. So it's like surfing a little bit. You know, you can you can learn how to stay up on the board, how to get a good ride, but you don't control the waves surf. That's it. Well, that's it's the same thing. Man. You know, you ride the wave that you get, or or you wait till one comes in, but you don't control when it comes in. So that's that's kind of hard for people, man, to know that the thing that everyone's expected from you is it's not something that you can just spew out at random. Man, you gotta go fish and then wait for it.

00:44:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you think so? Because there are people like Dylan's one, you know people, I mean, I think there are there are people who only want Dylan narrowly to be you know, free will and Bob Dylan. Maybe or times there are a change in Bob Dylan. But I happen to think all Dylan is great to varying degrees. Every album is there's incredible, amazing stuff. I think Neil Young is the same, like he seems to always be. So what is like or what is it? The tenna?

00:44:41
Speaker 2: Is it?

00:44:42
Speaker 1: Is? It? Is it a sensitivity thing?

00:44:44
Speaker 2: Is it? Maybe you're chosen? I don't know. It depends how ordered you think destiny is okay, and I don't I don't know. I don't know the answer. The way I used to make sense out of it metaphorically because I pictured this this ether way up there, and and in the ether, all the really great ideas, all the times they are a change in all the every grain of sands. They all float at the top, and only a few people got tentative tentacles that are long enough to reach the top and pull those ideas down. And I don't know why that is. You know, I became aware of something when I worked for the first time with Garth Brooks in the studio. He I liked him. I understood that he had tremendous communicative powers, but I didn't fully get it till I heard him coming through the speakers singing. Because you know, sometimes you put the speakers on the edge of the board, they're behind the thing. And I viewed the lot of the speaker line. It's like the fifty yard line on a football game, right, Who's who's going to carry the ball across? You know, get into the fifty yard line, you don't score a touchdown, no, no glory. And making it to the fifty you got to you gotta get down there. Whose voice jumps out of the speaker line and crosses into into your head? Right, And Garth Brooks, when he opened his mouth and started singing, his voice leapt out of the speakers so far that it was almost like it was behind me. Wow, And I thought, oh, now I understand. Now I get it and mixed. Got that Aretha Franklin's got that Gladys Knight, It's got that Bonnie Raid It's got that just a handful of folks.

00:46:40
Speaker 1: Man Frank Sinatra, you see Frank Sinatra.

00:46:43
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, I got to play Frank Sinatra's last gig. It was I was working with Willie over it right over there Oceanway, and he said, I gotta leave early today and somewhere you go. He said, I'm going to Palm Springs. I'm opening for Frank Sinatra at his Voice's celebrity pro am golf tournament banquet. And it's Frank Sinatra's last gig. Everybody knows it except for Frank. I said, what you got to take me? Kenny Aronoff was playing drums on it, so Willy Willy was just going to do it with Mickey Raphael, but he took Kenny and his heart player. Yeah yeah, Mickey, you know like his he's almost inextricable from the sound of Willie. He's So the four of us drove up there and we played our set, and then I knew Frank Junior, who was this conductor.

00:47:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you put, you put.

00:47:42
Speaker 2: Frank was coming to me and I loved him. He was a really, really good guy and I felt for him a lot, because that's a that's a tough road. He chose man to be a singer and be Frank Sinatra junior. You know, it's tough, tough to win like that. But he was conducted for his dad, and so he said, here, you guys, sit right here. And it wasn't a ballroom. It wasn't like a theater and a reader and it was a hotel ballroom at a Marriott. Then there was a banquet for golfers who were in anything, and so we sat five feet from Frank Sinatra on the side of the stage, you know, like it was like were a wedding band would play, but he had a big band. And it was the last time he played. And Willie introduced me to him at the thing, and I saw him play a number of times. And man, you talk about charisma and character and peckable technique and brilliant phrasing, you know, he had it all. We just did a blue note. We have an audiophile series of records. It's called the Tone Poets Series and is they're produced by a guy named Joe Harley and mastered by a guy named Kevin Gray, who were just brilliant and they just know how to maximize the thing. And we'd expanded into the Capitol Vaults and we just did WE Small Hours. And when you put on this tone poet version of WE Small Hours and play it on your turntable, it sounds like Frank Sinatra is like six inches from your face, singing right to you. It's so intimate and you can really hear every nuance in his singing. And even though I feel WE Small Hours was cut in fifty three, I think he got better, you know, over you know.

00:49:33
Speaker 1: In fifty three he's like late also by the way, also for Sinatra, and you.

00:49:37
Speaker 2: Know, but he's still even then. Man, he was there was no one could touch him. No one could touch him.

00:49:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, we brought up Garth Brooks and you did you did it. Also did a round maybe a little earlier, he did a great Travis Tritt record, Thank You.

00:49:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:49:52
Speaker 1: It was a cool record.

00:49:53
Speaker 2: Man. Well it was weird because he he called me because he wanted to make a more traditional, rootsy country album. You know, I didn't want to do the whatever slip the country was at the time, and he felt he had to leave Nashville to do it, so we got it in l A and uh No, I thought. I thought he was an incredible singer. Man, I'd like to travels a lot. We had a good time making that record, and I thought he was a really soulful cat. We did, we did, I met him. I did an album called Rhythm, Country and Blues in the nineties. There was it was duets between country artists and R and B artists. Really meant to show that, oh man, despite whatever differences you want to imagine, everyone's got the exact same emotions and there are just some phrasing differences, but everyone's the same underneath, you know, And and that's it was a strong testimony to connection among humans.

00:51:01
Speaker 1: I thought.

00:51:02
Speaker 2: So initially we thought it's even going to work. And Gladys Knight and Vince Gill sing a duet. They were the first one who sang on it, and of course they could, so we did. You just covered R and B or or country classics, and as it went on we got more adventurous with the tracks. But he's Travis sang when Something's wrong with My Baby, and you gotta go in the studio and sing live with Patty LaBelle good luck, motherfucker right. He was awesome. He was and I was blown away by how good he was. And we became friendly and I enjoyed making that record, and we had a we had a number one country record. Anything.

00:51:46
Speaker 1: It sits different in his in that in that era of his catalog.

00:51:50
Speaker 2: It's really it's a little more intimate sounds. Agreed.

00:51:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wanted to ask you, man, you're talking about making that album showcasing that there's not a lot of daylight between what we think of as R and B and country. We're talking the day after Steve Cropper. Yeah, did you did you everny to work with Steve.

00:52:11
Speaker 2: Or I played with him a couple of times in you know, some big settings, you know, tribute kind of thing, and I had dinner with him a couple of times. A lovely guy and what a heroic figure man, What an important figure in music. His style of guitar playing impacted everybody, you know, It's just what Steve Cropper brought to the game has become part of the musical vocabulary that everyone shares and so many generations removed. I'm not sure younger musicians understand that he played that way first right, yes, And what a wild milliar to come out of being a white guy in Memphis making those records and just having that band book and MGS man, But what what a great statement that made about people getting along and being the same and the commonality of human experience. Just seeing that band at that time, just seeing them play and having so much fun and seeing Duck Dun so happy and grooving around.

00:53:20
Speaker 1: Like that, and Al Jackson Junior's drama.

00:53:22
Speaker 2: Every one of them, man, every one of those guys. Was there's a diamond you know? Uh yeah, no, there's one. Steve Cropper. Yeah.

00:53:33
Speaker 1: I remember reading the Hendricks Bigraphy at some point, and somewhere in it it's mentioned that like Hendrix can'meer where he was in his career, and he went, yeah, he's like, he's like, I'm in Nashville, like I'm going He like waited in the studio for twelve hours and Steve Cropper to show up.

00:53:49
Speaker 2: The Cropper knew something that Hendricks had played. I can't think he was on some session of.

00:53:56
Speaker 1: Like like Mercy Mercy or something, yeah, something.

00:53:59
Speaker 2: Like oh yeah maybe it's Don Kobe. Yeah yeah it might have been, but yeah it is. Yeah, but he knew that, and he wanted to meet Hendricks but didn't know him. But Jimmy Hendrix was aback. He just knew he was a guy who played on on on the don kovie.

00:54:13
Speaker 1: So I didn't know that part of it way. So he that's fast. Yeah, what it's time to be alive?

00:54:19
Speaker 2: Man? Imagine that.

00:54:20
Speaker 1: Yeah for Bookatin mgs for their first single to be green Onions, unbelievable.

00:54:27
Speaker 2: Man. Well, I've been able to play with Booker a lot over the years, and he played on it was wasn't help him play one. He's on the It's an album called Boo that it took us sixteen years to finish. We started it in ninety three, got dropped by our label and went back and finished it in two thousand and eight. And and he's on it. But you know I could call. He would do sessions and I got to play it. Actually, what a big thrill man. For a couple of years ago, it was William Nelson's ninetieth birthday and we did at the Bowl and I was n't you dah Yeah, So I I'd never played at the Hollywood Bowl. Before i'd been there, I never was on stage playing, so just at the soundcheck, we did start Us, same exact arrangement from the album that Booker produced and played on right, and the song was going down. There's no one in the audience. Song was going down over the hill, and Willie sounded like Willie, you know, like forty years ago. And I just couldn't believe. I remember buying Start Us, you know, being broken Detroit and trying to learn how to make records and just playing it over and over and listen to it, and I got choked up, man, that I was standing on stage at the Hollywood Bowl with these two guys, and the universe had parted in such a crazy way to allow me to get up on stage be playing that song with them. There were so many highlights musically of that. The two nights we played like sixty songs and it was just an incredible array of people coming to pay tribute to Willie. But that one moment was the highlight.

00:56:20
Speaker 1: One last break and were back with Don was we're talking about like the intersection of like you know our country and all that I mean you have going back to your new record, you have a Hank William Williams song work its way into your guys's repertoire that was that blew me away too.

00:56:40
Speaker 2: I initially wanted to well, I wanted to have a good song. I want to go a good you know who you get? I don't. I don't really know better writer than Hank Williams. I know different kinds of writers. But if ever there was a guy plugged into the basic stream of human emotion, it was Hank, and he could express it with the simplicity that no one else could. What I wanted with this album, to be honest with you, was I didn't want the writing to be the weak link, and I certainly didn't want my writing to be the weak link, so I didn't write much for it. I wanted to to launch this thing with an advantage, so I just tried to choose great songs that would help us. But that doesn't mean you got to do it. Just no point in doing it, just like Hank.

00:57:34
Speaker 1: Yeah right, Well, then, how do you guys arrange your Now? Do you guys arrange these songs?

00:57:38
Speaker 2: Is it?

00:57:38
Speaker 1: Everyone comes to do? You write their own?

00:57:41
Speaker 2: Well? That one I arranged. I did an album in the nineties called a Building as Orchestra was, which was kind of the buzzner was guys. There's Sweet Pea sing and McMurray but also had Herbie Hancock, and I had Robbie Turner who was way Lund's pedal steel player on it. We had like thirteen musicians in the room. Terrence Blancherd, but Dave McMurray and Luis Resto from from from Wesna. I was w Aaron Sweet Peace sang and that was one of the songs, and I just worked out a different arrangement it was. It was actually all Hank Williams songs. Merle Haggard sang a song no one's ever heard. It's it's it's streaming.

00:58:22
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pull it up.

00:58:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. So but we never played any gigs. We played one gig, I think one time, and there's too many people, too hard to get everybody together, so I never just the first chance I had to play it live. So we started doing it with the Pandatroit Ensemble and it's we've been opening shows on the last tour.

00:58:44
Speaker 1: Oh that's amazing.

00:58:45
Speaker 2: So it's a Hank Williams song, but it's pretty rewarked from the Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had to go get permission. Let me put it that way. From the publisher to take that kind of liberty with the song you did. Yeah, liver cool, they don't mind.

00:58:59
Speaker 1: It's incredible. Can I I want to ask you about this song because I wonder what did this? I wonder how specifically where this sounds came from?

00:59:11
Speaker 2: Oh? What is that? Well? Here, this that's from our first was not was record called Wheel Me Out. And they didn't have they had eight o eeights, you know, they hadn't They didn't have the lin drub. There were no digital sampling things when we made the record. We did that probably in nineteen seventy nine. So yet I wanted to make dance records, and I knew that having a hypnotic groove was essential, and I thought the groove should be repetitive. So we made loops with analog tape. And but when the way that would work was that, you know, you'd play something for a while and you'd find the section that was great, and you'd cut the tape and and so that it began beginning of the loop and ended, you know, right before the one of the next bar or wherever you wanted to cut it, and then and then you just taped it together. So it was literally a loop that's why they that's what they call it looping it. And then but you did, you put it down on the analog tape recorder and it was too big. The reels didn't matter because you wanted the same thing to play. You thread it through the cap stands so that it would turn. Then you set up mic stands all over the room. You could I think that loop covered it filled the control room. We had to have three or four mic stands. We had the right amount of tension. And then we recorded it on a sixteen track two inch machine and then bounced it over to it made the loop play on the sixteen track, bounce it over to twenty four track, and we built the song up from there.

01:01:01
Speaker 1: How how the hell is you don't know how to do that?

01:01:04
Speaker 2: People have been doing it for years. Yeah, it was not that we didn't invent it, but that was the only way to make a loop there was. They didn't have samplers. There's no digital sampling. And it was nice because it was all played by humans. So uh, we had a drummer come in and then those are like soda bottles that that we're playing by hand. There's a couple of us just sitting on the floor really yeah, hitting hitting soda bottles with drumsticks, but tuned to it. We picked ones that had a pitch. I knew it had to be that interval in those notes.

01:01:47
Speaker 1: And who's playing that part?

01:01:51
Speaker 2: Uh, there's a couple of us. Uh, it's probably I'm trying to remember who was. It was probably Larry Fartangela, who was the percussionist with George Clinton Funkadelic. Right some One Nation under a Groove because that was One Nation under Groove was pretty Uh. It informed a lot of that album, what George was doing at that time in Detroit. Yeah. So Larry was a buddy mine and he toured with them for years, so I think I had him come over, but I think it was there were a couple of us. It took a couple of people to play it so cool and and there was a and then we played played drum drum beat and bounce that over and we built the track up from the loop.

01:02:36
Speaker 1: So it's one of it's it's just to this day it still sounds a he It's.

01:02:41
Speaker 2: Been sampled a lot. I never got fun for it, but it's been.

01:02:46
Speaker 1: There's another thing you can relate to your artist, how did the Curtis Mayfield song make It onto Your Uh, this is My Country. It's kind of an over looks song today in his catalog, but I love I love that song that album too.

01:03:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's a great album. Curtis was such a brilliant writer, and I think I just played it on my radio show, and when I heard the lyrics, it just it broke my heart because I remember the mood in nineteen sixty six when he made that, and it was so hopeful the mood then. Man, if you'd told me in nineteen sixty six that that song was going to be more relevant in twenty twenty five than it was in nineteen sixty six, I wouldn't have believed you, man, And it actually got me choked up to think, how oh, how many backward steps have been taken in the last few years, and it just seemed like an essential message. So we started closing the shows with it, and beyond the message, everyone in the band on the bus, you know the should we'd get back on the bus at eleven thirty at night, at five o'clock in the morning, everybody and their own agrhythm was singing down Down, It's so infectious so we just thought, well, we should cut it. Yeah, it's a timely important thing to say right now.

01:04:19
Speaker 1: The album cover looks I feel like you've shown me this.

01:04:23
Speaker 2: I might have showed you that. I could have showed it to you. It's a great picture taking it in front of Jove von Battle's record store, which is on Hastings Street and Detroit. Hasting Street was the center, the main street of an area called Black Bottom, which was the black residential and economic area of Detroit and one of the most heinous episodes in the history of the city, and it happened all over the country. In the late fifties, there was this thing called urban renewal that was just basically a plan to destroy black communities and displace people into areas that there was not enough housing for. It got turned into a freeway ramp. The fact that I visited it recently, I did a thing that don Ganie for NPRT Music Sites in Detroit, and the Joe's Record Store stood just south of mac Avenue on the entrance on the southbound entrance ramp to the Chrysler Freeway. Torn down for nothing. Man, they could have built that half a mile over, but Joe von Battle was a really important person in Detroit music. Had a recording studio on the back. He recorded John Lee Hooker there, Recordedretha Franklin when she was fourteen. Her first record was made in his studio because he used to record her dad's sermons, ce L. Franklin, Reverend C. L. Franklin. He'd press up the sermons and sell them the week after after church on Sunday. It was like immediate distribution, and that record store was the heart of Detroit music. The photo was taken by a French photographer who went to shoot at John Lee Hooker album covered. It's kind of a famous cover. You see him, you see the store from another angle. He moved over onto the sidewalk and John Lee Hooker's standing in front of the store and you get a better view of Hastings Street. So I saw that picture and I thought, man, this is that record store is metaphorically our spiritual home for this band. So it's actually my wife Jema, photoshopped us into the picture. It looks like we're hanging out in front of the store with Joe as in the picture, and metaphorically, musically that's what we're doing. We're hanging out in front of that store, and those sounds. To me, the real sound of Detroit kind of comes from John Lee Hooker because he's raw and unpretentious and so raw you think the music's maybe gonna the song could collapse at any moment, right, but it never does. Not only doesn't it collapse, but it swings like crazy. Matt groos like crazy, and it's just soulful and from the heart. And that's at the root of Detroit music. If you're looking for the thing that makes Detroit unique, it's a raw groove with real heart and soul on top of it. And it doesn't matter what stream of music that flowed from that record store out, whether it's the rock and roll bands like Mitch Ryder. No one like Mitch Rider in the world when he came along, and Mitch Ryder informed the MC five and the Stooges and really Funkadelic too. But then the R and B stream, not just motown, which everyone knows, which if you really listen to those records, it's clear that those are regional there it's folk music from Detroit. You know, those are raw records.

01:08:07
Speaker 1: They had a Berry Gordy to somehow.

01:08:09
Speaker 2: Well he put pop melodies, and he understood how to tap a world's sensibility. But they're very Detroit. Those records and Fortune Records before that, you know, which was you know, incredible R and B cut in another record store, in the back of another record store. So the jazz comes from Detroit. To me, Alvin Jones epitomizes the thing. Man. He's level of sophistication and knowledge and technique that's not been exceeded, but he's still got this raw energy to his plan. That's it's a rambunctious Detroit feeling. But so many great jazz musicians. When I first got the job a Blue Note man, I thought, let's start doing Let's do a series of regional albums. We'll do famous cities. We'll get people from each city. I'll curate the Detroit one. And I went through this Donald Bird. There's Paul Chambers, there's Ron Carter, there's Thad Elvin and Hank Jones, there's Curtis Fuller. I mean, it just goes on and there's Jerry Allen, there's Dave McMurray. Who's on the label. Now, I mean it's it's the number of Joe Henderson, John Henderson. It just goes on Kenny Burrell. Kenny Burrell's from Detroit. Yeah, I did not, so I thought, well, we'll do this in every city. No, maybe Newark if you put a lot of Wayne Shorter, maybe Philadelphia. But that's it. You can't do it. Uh So there's a there was a Detroit thing that happened in all that, But I see it as being descended from the same. It's just there's no bullshit. Yeah, it's unpretentious.

01:09:55
Speaker 1: Was was Richard Pryor sober when he worked with this?

01:09:58
Speaker 2: Yeah? And he wasn't well, he wasn't just towards the end of his life. Yeah, he's sweet, but he was he was sitting a lot. Yeah mm hmm. Yeah, there's a real honor. Man. We were like, we're we're gobsmacked.

01:10:16
Speaker 1: You know, that's crazy. I mean, you know, some of his records are I don't know, as mythological as you know, any other music record, you know what I mean. Some of those records are just like putting like wild the good Yeah, you know.

01:10:30
Speaker 2: No, I agree. He was way ahead of everybody. Sometimes you it just lonely being ahead everybody. That's a that's a lonely spot to be in. And uh, you understand why he chased the distractions he chased.

01:10:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, he seemed to have an inability as well to be anyone other than him. There was no life cosby I'm this, but I'm really that.

01:11:00
Speaker 2: It's like you. You can't do that and not be it, be it. I think it's the same music too. You can't act. You know. One time I saw I was when I was working with Bonnie. Rait writer named Paul Brady sent us a song that I guarantee you would have been a top ten pop single, but it's about a breakup, and Bodie wouldn't sing it. She said, I can't sing this now. I just got married. Ah, And she didn't want to actress. If she didn't write them, they had to be as if she had written them. And I think that's why she can go so deep with those songs, because she finds a place deep inside where it rings true and she only sings songs that do that. Yeah, and that's why she's You know, there's a better singer around. I don't know who it is.

01:11:56
Speaker 1: We are you a fan of hers when you started? Because I mean her catalog is so insanely good. Yeah, I bought her first I didn't buy it.

01:12:03
Speaker 2: I got her first album when it was new in like nineteen seventy one or something like that, and it was so refreshing. Man.

01:12:10
Speaker 1: It was cut on the.

01:12:13
Speaker 2: Thank You and uh yeah, it's it's a it's just a it's just a really raw, real album, which was refreshing at the time when everyone was still imitating Sergeant Pepper and doing prog rock. To find someone who I think it was like an abandoned summer camp she recorded, or a deserted one. It was not in the summertime and they were just in cabins and set up a four track and it's just real and not echoee or anything. It's just it's a beautiful record. So I was with it the whole time, and she was always one of my favorite singers. When there's a guy named Hal Wilner who invented the tribute record, but he did real artful ones. You know. He did a a Nina Rota record, he did, he did a felonious Monk one that any Call was not was when we were just getting started and they were crazy records and everyone Carla Blaye was on it, and you can't out Carla Blade Carla Blaye, right, So everyone used it as an excuse to go outside, and you couldn't compete in that arena with the real outside people. So the next album, I thought, we're going to go in and we'll be so inside that we'll stand out that way. And so we came up with him. It was a Disney tribute album, and we came up with an arrangement really probably based around a Steve Cropper guitar part for baby Mine, which is this great sad song from Dumbo where the where the mother elephant gets locked up and the baby wants to go to sleep and puts her trunk in there and wants her mom out. So I just heard body Raight singing it and now put us together and we just clicked from the moment we met, and you know, we're still close. Man. I love her dearly. She's one of a kind body. And I went on my birthday this year. She was playing in Detroit and I was there at the Fox Theater. So I went to see her, and she just sounds as great as ever, maybe better than ever.

01:14:19
Speaker 1: She's amazing. Yeah, I think I have a bootleg of her performing at like A Yeah, I shouldn't say that. I think have a bootleg of her performing though whatever. George, Yeah, yeah, yeah, sev one seventy years.

01:14:32
Speaker 2: They can't fign My Way Home? Yeah ye really good ship. Yeah really the radio station show, I think, yeah.

01:14:38
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, insane. Yeah, those those shows were bugged out. I think I like that son Rob from one of those things too, like whoa you know? Two more questions and I'll let you go. Man, you mded the Willie Nelson Ninetie you were? Were you also m D or you at least played in the band for the Dylan thirtieth I was.

01:15:01
Speaker 2: I played on some songs I went. Smith was the m D and most people played with the band that he put together. But I played with Willie and Chris Christofferson and Keltner played drums, and I think we had Reggie Young playing guitar. And then two days later Bob came I was making the record Across the Borderline with Willie, and Bob came in and sang a duet with him on the song Heartland. And that's the show that Snead O'Connor got booed off the stage on the Bobs at Bob thirty because it was a week after she ripped up the picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, so New York wasn't having her at the Garden and it was pretty heavy. Christofferson came out she couldn't sing, she couldn't do her song, and Willy saw that and he said, let's do a song with her. So she came. We did Don't give Up the Peter Gabriel song, and Shanaid sang the Kate Bush part. It's really a cool record. Of all the records I have ever worked on, I think across the borderline that album I made with Willie Nelson, it's the most overlooked and probably my favorite. Oh it just it's one that I put on I can disconnect myself from like thinking, oh man, we should have the tambourine is too loud or whatever, and I can listen to it and it just makes me feel good.

01:16:22
Speaker 1: I've listened it, but I haven't listened in a long time.

01:16:24
Speaker 2: And put that on the visit them. I'm real proud of that record.

01:16:27
Speaker 1: I was watching a some recording of Bob Geldoff in the studio with George Harrison and they were recording something and Bob asks George like, oh, have you heard this? Like they were talking about feedback, and then and Bob goes, I heard this great Neil record where it's just all feedback, this Neil Young records arc Welder. It's just like half his live and the other half it is just all feedback from the show. And George is like, I can't really, Neil, I don't know. We're playing at the Bop there and all of a sudden, someone starts slowly and I look over it and it's Neil and I have to look at He's like, I look at Eric and I said, what I tripped?

01:17:11
Speaker 2: The whole thing must have been, man, it was. It was quite a green room, that's for sure. Man. Yeah. The thing I remember most is being afraid to go up to Johnny Cash. And then I ended up producing The Highwaymen a couple of years later, maybe a year later, A couple of years later, I don't know, insane and he was he was such so approachable and so sweet. Man. He was a really nice guy. Yeah, and uh, what all Whalen was whaling? Great? Well, I didn't know Whalen. He was sober all the time I knew him. I met him a cut a duet with him that never came out with him and Bob Seegers for Bob Seegers record It's a really cool song, but Bob sitting on it. And I loved him. Man. He was a real soulful guy and a real good heart. He's another guy you know you would have afraid to go up and talk to him, but he was incredibly approachable. I remember going over to the Sunset Marquis and talking about I said, what kind of record you want to make? And he said I wanted to be like the like the Dylan album Oh Mercy. He said, I want to be wailing and do I think, but I want those atmospheric textures behind. I said, wow, okay, and then we tend to forget that. What a what a progressive character Wayne was that he was the first guy to cut the person national guy to cut a Stone song. I think he cut a Christofferson song before Johnny Cash. Did you know he was hip to all kinds of different writers and open to it and play with Buddy Holly. Yeah, Oh there's that too. What a guy like.

01:18:58
Speaker 1: What a career man.

01:19:00
Speaker 2: In retrospect, I'm glad I made all the records I made and got all those experiences, and I don't know that i'd changed, but I'm sorry that we didn't keep building that audience. Yeah, it's very interesting starting a band at age seventy three, right, and starting from scratch. You know, some places we're lucky if we can draw three hundred people. Sometimes you know, more people on stage. But it's so much fun just to start from scratch and build a thing up, go from city to city and then see get back there the next time and see twice as many people. That's a cool thing.

01:19:49
Speaker 1: I'm glad you're doing it.

01:19:50
Speaker 2: Man.

01:19:50
Speaker 1: It's a great album. And like I said, I mean just you know the way that album plays, it moves. There's such variety on it. But and I just loved that while they get something to the end, it's cameo and I'm hearing, like, you know, an echo of your your past in it, you know, And it's so cool.

01:20:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, man, will be better.

01:20:10
Speaker 1: Can do Is it cut?

01:20:11
Speaker 2: I'm working on it.

01:20:12
Speaker 1: It's not cut, No, okay, I can't wait to hear. Thanks Don, Thank you brother. An episode description you'll find a link to Don was his new album, Groove in the Face of Adversity, as well as a collection of songs he's produced throughout his career. Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record pot. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Holliday. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond Show