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Rick RUBIN “I Always Thought I Would Go on to Be a Lawyer.” Except He Didn’T – Instead He Became Guru to the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash and More

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Rick RUBIN “I Always Thought I Would Go on to Be a Lawyer.” Except He Didn’T – Instead He Became Guru to the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash and More The INTERVIEW Rick RUBIN “I always thought I would go on to be a lawyer.” Except he didn’t – instead he became guru to the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash and more. His formula: meditation and not knowing how anything in a studio works. WORDS paul rees pORtRaitS robert gallagher ick Rubin lives a mile off the Pacific Coast Highway Run-DMC set the template for the spare, sparse in the affluent Californian seaside community of sound the genre was built on (LL Cool J’s debut LP Malibu. Set on a verdant bluff above the Pacific Radio carried the credit “Reduced by Rick Rubin”). Ocean and hidden from the road by a line of trees He has preached the same basics – great songs and an entry gate, his home is a chocolate box need little enhancing – ever since to artists ranging version of an English manor house with its wattle from Slayer to Justin Timberlake. He sees himself walls, wooden beams and stained glass windows. less as a producer and more as an editor/coach – A blue Mini and black SUV are parked in the he doesn’t spend months in the studio with his crescent-shaped drive. On a small hill to the side charges, but leaves them in the hands of an is a perfectly maintained tennis court: it came with engineer and issues notes on the work in progress. the house and Rubin doesn’t play. This Zen-like approach habitually leads to career- His dog, a hairy Hungarian Puli called Cielo, and best work from the artists he oversees and to Dave, one of two, entirely bald men who act as his records that sound as if they were made by real personal assistants, are on hand to greet Q. We walk flesh-and-blood human beings. In the latter sense through the kitchen – spotless, furnished in wood he is both a throwback to another era and one of and chrome, a phalanx of vitamin pills on one shelf music’s last great iconoclasts. It also ensures there – and out into the garden. Two cushioned deck- is never a shortage of people willing to stump up chairs look out over the lawn to the ocean beyond. his reported six-figure fee. Pelicans circle above, rabbits skitter about the grass. In 2007, Time magazine named him among It is 25 years since New York University film their 100 Most Influential People In The World, studies student Frederick Jay Rubin officially the same year he was appointed co-chairman of founded Def Jam Records as a home for the city’s Columbia Records in the US. In this role he is a emerging hip hop artists. He was unique from the figurehead for a label that still prides itself on being Rick Rubin at home off – he had no experience in a recording studio and a musical institution, one that is home to such in Malibu, July didn’t even know how a mixing desk worked, yet his heritage artists as AC/DC, Bob Dylan, Bruce 2009: ‘Now, where did I put my chin...’ early productions for LL Cool J, Beastie Boys and Springsteen and Barbra Streisand, as well as 050 april 2009 qthemusic.com Rsubscribe at www.greatmagazines.co.uk october 2009 095 the interview Rick RUBIN contemporary heavyweights such as Beyoncé. It’s a measure of Rubin’s power that no one at the label suggested he stop producing artists for other labels. He joins us damp from a shower and smelling of exotic oils. He is barefoot and sporting a billowing white T-shirt and jeans. His hair is long and straggly, his beard a bush flecked with red and still more with grey. His features are softer than they can seem in photographs and his voice an unexpectedly gentle, buttery burr. The canvas hat atop his head completes the impression that he has just wandered Clockwise from in from Middle Earth. opposite page: Born on 10 March 1963 into a Jewish family packing heat in 1985; with his punk in the New York suburb of Lido Beach to a shoe band Hose; hanging wholesaler father and a housewife mother, he was with the Beastie an only child. His first passion was for magic; as Boys; a Def Jam a child he would take the train into Manhattan to summit with the visit the Bellmore Cafeteria where the International Beasties, Run-DMC Brotherhood Of Magicians met monthly. It wasn’t and Slayer; with Def Jam partner Russell until he was a teenager at Long Beach High School Simmons (right) that music took over, initially when a teacher gave and Run-DMC. him guitar lessons. By the time he formed his first band, The Pricks, he had grown a beard and become, as he puts it, “the only punk in school”. what sparked your interest in magic? A relative gave me a magic set when I was seven or eight. I started practising every day. I was interested in all other-worldly things and it felt like being a part of this world of mystery. how did growing up an only child shape you? distributed. We built up a network of indie morning. The worst was our inexperience in dealing things that are different and unusual. It’s hard to It definitely has… I remember when I first went to distributors around the country. We’d ship orders with it and watching it ruin relationships and step outside of yourself and know why… college having tremendous issues with boundaries from the front desk at the dorm. Artists would undermine good creative decision-making. I was 23 – I didn’t know there were any. My parents were come to 5 University Place thinking it was a record when the Beasties went to Number 1. Our lawyer apparently you owned a wrestling circuit at very liberal. I don’t think I really knew who I was company and would realise it was a college dorm said, “You have the Number 1 record, how does it one point? until I moved out of their house. when they got there. feel?” I said, “I’ve never been so miserable.” The I did. It was in South Carolina. I met the people thing I’d been waiting for my whole life that was involved and put up a bunch of money to allow your father has said that you slept in their bed “In sChool I wore sunglasses 24 ll Cool J’s radio was the first def Jam album going to fill whatever hole there was inside me had them to do what they do. until you were 12. hours a day and a MotorCyCle in 1985. you had no experience or training in happened… and I didn’t feel any better. I don’t know if it was 12 but I was definitely old. We the studio. what on earth made you believe as someone who doesn’t drink or take had a close relationship. It wasn’t like I was the kid – JaCket. I was an oddIty.” you could produce it? ere are some facts about drugs, you must have been an observer for I was accepted as one of them. I was mechanically Because there were no expectations. Everything Rick Rubin. He dislikes much of your career… inclined, so if anything needed fixing in the house people in the room and they got the plug pulled asshole. Through spending time with the Beasties was done through trial and error. As long as it flying, complaining that Many times. I’ve never seen a case where drugs I’d be the one to do it. And personality wise, I’ve after a song and a half. I grew to see that they had this great sense of sounded good it didn’t matter how technically “the radioactivity up there” have made anyone better at their art. That said, always been kind of grown up. humour. It wasn’t that they were assholes, and even wrong it might be. I always thought I was going to affects his ears. He’s never I really like psychedelic and drug-inspired what attracted you to hip hop? if it was they were funny with it. go on to law school. Anyone at the time who taken drugs and has been music, but at least from my perspective I don’t when did music enter into your world? The same thing as punk – it was edgy, compelling. thought there was a career path out of hip hop drunk just once in his life. know that taking drugs is the way that you My Dad liked Latin jazz – Tito Puente – and we’d Outside of a small group of people no one was In 1984, at the age of 21, you formed def Jam would’ve been insane. I met the head of another In the 10 hours we spend together he doesn’t eat – get there. always listen to the radio. From an early age The interested. I got to go to the clubs where it all records with your friend russell simmons. record company in LA who said, How do you Hinstead on three occasions his assistants bring him Beatles came my way and I was obsessed by them. started, like Disco Fever in the Bronx. Chuck D – how did you meet? explain your success? I mean we know it’s not a protein shake and a bowl of vitamin pills. At the you were born into a Jewish family but have a he was a DJ on a college radio station.
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