Rick Rubin
Life Among the Wildflowers

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RICK RUBIN: SELECTED CREDITS

PRODUCER
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Californication (Warner Bros., 1999)
Tom Petty: Wildflowers (Warner Bros., 1994) and Echo (Warner Bros., 1999)
Various Artists: Chef Aid: The South Park Album (Columbia, 1998)
System of a Down: System of a Down (Sony, 1998)
Johnny Cash: Unchained (American Recordings, 1996)
Mick Jagger: Wandering Spirit (Atlantic, 1993)
Andrew Dice Clay: The Day the Laughter Died, Part II (Warner Bros., 1993), 40 Too Long (American, 1992), Dice Rules (American, 1991), The Day the Laughter Died (Warner Bros., 1990) and Andrew Dice Clay (Warner Bros., 1989) Beastie Boys: Licensed to Ill (Def Jam, 1986)

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Various Artists: Big Daddy soundtrack (Sony, 1999)
Sir Mix-A-Lot: Return of the Bumporsaurus (Warner Bros., 1996), Chief Boot Knocka (Rhyme Cartel, 1994) and Mack Daddy (Def American, 1992)
Public Enemy: Yo! Bum Rush the Show (Def Jam, 1987)
The Black Crowes: Shake Your Money Maker (Def American, 1990)
Danzig: Danzig III/How the Gods Kill (Def American, 1992)
Slayer: Undisputed Attitude (American, 1996) and Divine Intervention (American, 1994)
Dan Baird: Love Songs for the Hearing Impaired (Def American, 1991)
Various Artists: Private Parts (Warner Bros., 1997)

Is it true that you actually hate working in the studio?
I don’t love it. The idea of knowing how it can be is the best part. And then the actual work of having to get it there is just going through the process. Once you hear it in your head, it’s like being a carpenter—trying to build the thing when you already know what it is.

Or like a sculptor chipping away what you don’t want.
Yes. It’s not an accident. You already know what the sculpture is, but you have to do all that work of chipping the stone away, and that’s not the fun part. The fun part is knowing what it is. But no one else gets to know what it is unless you do the work.

The collaboration with Aerosmith and Run-DMC on “Walk This Way” was landmark. And culturally, very cool. It didn’t seem, for me, as unusual as it did for other people. I grew up with rap music and with rock music, and they always felt like different versions of the same thing to me. People viewed them as such polar opposites: I can’t tell you how many times people have talked to me about rap not being music. But if you listen to “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith, it really is not that different from rap. It shares a lot.

What are you excited about now in music? I just finished a band called Paloalto, which I love. I also just finished a record with a guy named Saul Williams who’s a poet, who is really beautiful; lyrically, he’s very important.

Poetry and music?
It’s hard to explain what it is. If you had never heard rap music and someone described it to you, it could be what this is. But if you’ve heard rap music, it doesn’t sound like this.

How do you feel about music in general lately?
It seems like music is getting very disposable. It’s getting song-oriented, but not in a good way. Instead, it’s about one hit and not about an artist. Artists just don’t mean as much, and a lot of music is becoming producer-driven. Which, being a producer, you’d think I’d like, but I don’t. When it’s so producer-driven, the artists become interchangeable. If the producer is making the tracks and different people could sing on them, it’s pretty close to being the same record regardless of who the artist is. I don’t think that’s a good thing for music, and I think that because everything has become so single-oriented, the album has suffered.

Sure. Why bother to lay out $17.99 for one song?
I think that’s one of the reasons that downloading of music makes more sense today than it ever did before. The music that’s coming out isn’t worth what people are trying to charge for it. Although I should add that I do like a lot of music out now: Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock—I think they’re great. I like a lot of things that are popular today that often get maligned.

So, to get people to actually purchase a whole album, there will have to be better albums.
Everybody’s wondering what the new sound is going to be. What I’m wondering, or hoping, is that maybe there won’t be a new sound, but, instead, the quality of music will get upped. I think there are several records that have come out that have done that, like the Travis record [1999’s The Man Who].

The Travis record doesn’t sound new in any way. It’s just really good at what it is, and it’s consistently good at what it is. You can listen to the whole album and enjoy it. And you can buy into their trip and want to see them. I’m hoping that music will get less about, “Well, we have a single and now we can put whatever else we want on the album.” And more about making a whole great record.

One of the things I like about the Paloalto record is that the songwriting is consistently good. You can listen to the whole album and like all the songs. That’s also what we tried to do with the Chili Pepper album [Californication]. And I think that’s one of the reasons they’re enduring when so many of their contemporaries, or even the crop of groups after them, are less significant. The quality of the material is really high, and ultimately that is undeniable.

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