All through my life, I've always felt like I don't belong here. I don't belong anywhere.

Welcome back to Where Everybody knows your name with Woody Harrelson and Ted Danson. Sometimes. You heard me right. For this special bonus episode, Woody is going solo. He recently had the opportunity to speak with his good friend, music producer, Rick Rubin in Italy. I couldn't make it, but it sounds like they had an amazing time eating pizza and talking about Rick's incredible life and career. Rick is a creative genius, and you'll hear them go really deep on his life and his approach to his art, including his work with LL Cool Jay, the Beasty Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, even Johnny Cash. Here's Woody and his good friend I'm Rick Rubin.

This is my first time to interview someone alone. I'm just honored that you're taking the time to do it. Here we are, what's south of Florence, near Siena in Italy, and one of the most beautiful, most amazing Shangri-La places I've ever been. So I just was wanting to... You're such a fascinating guy to me. I've known you for many, many years, as long anyone I think I've known in LA. I met you in LA, and you've also introduced me to a number of my closest friends to this day.

I wasn't really aware of that, but that's good to hear.

Well, I first started hanging with Owen through you. When I first met you was in Austin, Texas, and you were there. I came to see World Party, Carl Wallinger. And You just happened to be there.

It was one of the first South by Southwest, maybe.

Was it that? Yeah, it was an early South by Southwest.

Yeah, I've only been one time. That was the only time I was there, but it was early.

I wanted to talk to you because I don't know that much about your childhood. I know you grew up in Long Island, right? Tell me what that was like as a kid in this very small town in Long Island.

Yeah, it's a little beach town. It's an island off of the Southern The Southern part of Long Island. So there were three little islands. There was Long Beach, which is the town that I came from, and then Jones Beach, which was more like a place where people would come to go to the beach I don't think people lived in Jones Beach. I don't think there are any houses. And then the next little island was Fire Island. And Fire Island, you had to take a boat to get to. Both Jones Beach and Long Beach had bridges you could get to. And in the scene in the Godfather, where there's the murder at the toll booth, that toll booth was the toll booth to get to Long Beach.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, where Sonny gets... Oh, that is...

That was where I grew up. We went through that toll booth every day.

Oh, my God. When you saw the Godfather, that must have been a while.

Very familiar. It was a beautiful little beach town. It was six blocks between the ocean to the bay. You just walk six blocks and you're at the bay. You walk blocks the opposite way and you're at the ocean. Then it was just a long strip of land, and it had a boardwalk. I would bike on the boardwalk, which was really beautiful. It was a really beautiful little beach town. I guess people would have gone there in the 1940s and '50s, leaving Manhattan for a weekend retreat. It was that a place, a weekend retreat place.

But it's very different now?

I've been back since my parents passed away, but I don't know how different it is. I don't know how different it can be, the nature of what it was.

There's just limited space. It's pretty...

Yeah.

Were you an only child?

I was an only child.

Tell me about your parents. I know your dad was a shoe salesman.

My dad was a shoe salesman. His dad owned a shoe store. Then when his dad passed, he took over the shoe store. Then at some point in time, when Martin Luther King was killed, there were riots and his store got burned. All the stores got burned in that neighborhood in Brooklyn. Then he became a buyer for small discount stores, like a businessman, I I would say a regular working class businessman.

How was your relationship with your folks?

It was good. My dad was a workaholic, so I didn't see him that much. But when I did see him, it was always good. Neither my parents drank. So what What you saw was what you got all the time. They were consistent in who they were. They smoked a lot. I remember waking up in the morning and the house was filled with smoke, and I hated that. I never smoked because in reaction to their smoking, I got really turned off of the smell of smoke.

However, this might change soon.

You never know. I told you the story. I smelt somebody smoking a cigar on a beach, and it smelled really good. It's the first time smoke ever smelled good to me. It sparked a question mark my mind of what that could be like.

But I mean, it's interesting to me because from the time I first met you, or certainly when I first met you, I think I might have asked you if you had any herb because you just seem like the most likely guy by appearance that you're going to have herb or you're going to be a party animal, but you've never had a drink, you've never had a smoke, you've never done any drugs whatsoever. And this probably helps account for the purity of your vision.

It is what it is.

Artistic vision.

I can remember between my junior and senior year of high school, I did a summer program at Harvard where I studied logic and design. I wore a motorcycle jacket, now wear sunglasses, now it's a punk rocker. But Everyone at the school came to me to buy drugs. I was like, I don't sell drugs. I don't have drugs. But everyone assumed I was the drug dealer.

Did that amuse you or did it bother you?

It's just I suppose it gives you insight into when you see somebody and you make up a story in your head about who they are, that we all just make up stuff. We have no idea about anyone. I think Some of those things in real life. I remember one time I was sitting in an office building in the hallway of an office building waiting for an appointment with a therapist. I was just sitting in the hallway because I was going through a really bad depression and I had nowhere to go. I was waiting for the doctor's appointment. I was just sitting in the hallway. I remember security came and escorted me out of the building because of the way I look. I remember saying, it's like, No, I'm supposed to be here. And they said, We know you don't mean any harm. And they just walked me out of the building.

That is so funny. But now, when was that?

Probably around the time that I met you. In the time when I was living in the Hollywood Hills sometime in that time.

And what were you depressed about?

When I turned 33, I went through this crazy depression. It was the first time I ever dealt with it.

Was it like, Hey, Jesus did so much by this age. Why ever?

It wasn't anything I understood, but it is the year they got Jesus. I went on a trip, my very first trip to Hawaii with my then-girlfriend. We at this resort in Maui, and I had a phone call with someone who told me something insignificant, but what I heard and what was said were two different things. In a sense, it was like a challenging phone call because I was an only child and because my parents raised me with this wild amount of love and very little questioning. Then I started making music and got successful really fast. Even before I knew that it was a job, it became successful. So rarely was I questioned. I just people liked the things I made and was given carte blanche. And then at 33, I got this first call where somebody was questioning me. And on the call, it was fine. I didn't think about it. But then that night, I couldn't sleep. And then I started feeling like I couldn't breathe and basically had a panic attack. I didn't know what a panic attack was, but it felt like I was dying. I was in that state for about two years, very, very depressed.

Even when the situation got resolved, it somehow like it was like a balloon that got punctured. Because up until then, I felt...

No doubt.

Yeah, just zero, like everything, confidence to a fault.

Because there was nothing that ever impinged that.

When I say confidence to a fault, not like I was right. I never felt like I was I never wanted to be right, but that I knew what I wanted to do, and I'm going to do what I want to do. That's all. I'm confident in my path.

But that spiraled you into a two-year depression.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Only because I had never been challenged in any way, I was basically coddled. I wasn't prepared for any pushback. I'd never developed any skill set to be able to deal with it.

Right.

I didn't need to.

Okay, let me wind back because I was really interested to hear about your aunt, Carol.

Yeah, my aunt, Carol, was the coolest.

She worked with that Estalada in Manhattan.

Yeah, she was the coolest. She ran the Creative Services Department for Esther Lauter, which was an unusual thing for a woman to do at that time to have a big corporate job. But still, it was an artistic. Everyone who worked there worked at an artist's drawing table. I loved going there to an art department in a big corporate place when you're a kid was just the coolest thing in the world.

I bet. Coolest. She was an intellectual, and she brought you plays at Broadway.

Yeah, she brought me to Broadway plays.

She brought me to museums.

I introduced you to classical music. Classical music. She would give me jobs to do. It was like a big closet with all of the equipment and all of the cuttings from all of the ads that they did, and she would have me put stuff in books and arrange it. Just fun to have jobs and feel like I was part of this thing that was going on. Seeing all alike, I guess in those days, they were called mechanical or the artwork that ended up becoming the packaging for products. I don't know. As a kid, all of these things, packaging and logos and the materials used were really interesting to me. I loved them.

That's all a part of the creative act.

No, I would just really fly on the wall and got to play with the equipment on my own because the equipment was there. I got to play with the tools of the craft.

And did you ever think you might become an artist?

No, I didn't. I just liked it, but I never thought of it. I never thought of any of those things as work because I didn't think of them as real work. Even though my aunt, Carol, had a professional job in that area, I still never thought of it as anything that anybody did. It's odd because I was seeing people do it, but I never made that connection. It seemed very foreign. Kids who I went to school with would all grow up to be surfers because it was a surf community. Some people would do surfing. Some people would become policemen or firemen. Some people would become doctors. Some people would become lawyers. Those were pretty much... Or bus driver. Those were the regular jobs that people had. But anything outside of that was never even considered.

What was that like for you in high school, in junior high school? Because you're such a unique person. It seems to me like you could never just fly under the radar.

I always felt like I didn't fit in. All through my life, I always felt like I don't belong here. I don't belong anywhere. I didn't belong in school. I didn't belong in any of the classes I was in. I didn't belong in... I remember the first time I went to London, this is when, probably the first year of college, in those days, you had to fill out a form if you were traveling internationally to enlist your next of kin. And I wrote none. And I meant none. I was honest, even though I had two healthy parents, loving parents who I loved and they loved me. But the honest answer to the question was none.

That's interesting, though, that feeling like an outsider. But you started meditating when you were 14. And what was the circumstances?

My neck hurt when I was in sixth grade. I went to see the doctor who delivered me, Dr. Pizzucano, who was a a hip doctor. He looked like a beatnik. He had a goatee and listened to jazz music. And he said, The reason your neck hurts is because of stress and you need to learn to meditate. So in the '70s. My parents could have said, That's crazy. We'll go to another doctor. But they said, Okay. Then I went to a woman's house who taught transcendental meditation. I remember the block that it was on, and it was across from where I went to maybe third grade, this little house, and I walked in, and there was no furniture in the house. It was an empty house. She walked me into this room, I guess you'd call it a front room, and closed the door. In that room, there were two chairs, two wooden chairs, like dining room chairs. One was painted red and one was I just remember, I'd never been in a room with nothing in it before, with just what was needed. I remember in that moment thinking, I really like this. This is a good experience.

It was unusual, but it wasn't unusual negative. It was unusual positive. It's really nice not having all of the stuff that you see in every house you go into. It felt good. Then we sat and we meditated, and she taught me, and I went back several times, whatever the schedule was to learn. Then I started doing it every morning. I would sit on the floor leaning on my bed Sometimes I would light incense in the room, and I kept up that practice until I went to college. Then when I started college, I stopped because I had roommates, and I don't know. I just felt- It'd be like sleep with your Teddy bear.

It would be awkward to be noticed doing it. Maybe.

I'm not sure why. So I stopped. Then when I moved to California, which was just a couple of years after graduating, I decided to start again. Eventually, I felt ready. Immediately in the first five minutes, I felt like, Oh, I know this. I know this, and I know this is a big part of my life. Even though I haven't been doing it for six years, I am who I am because of this. Had I not stopped, I would have never known that.

You started really early in this You became a punk rocker when there weren't very many punk rockers, right?

It was during the first wave of American Hardcore Punk. So the bands that I saw, the bands that were playing at the time were the Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedy's, Minor Threat, Black Flag.

And was the-Was it the Ramones, though, that got you psych?

The Ramones were the king of everything. But I'd seen the Ramones even before. Because the Ramones were, they're really the first punk rock band. The Ramones were before the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I went see the Ramones all the time. But then the wave that I felt more part of, the people that were my age were the people in that next wave of rock where the Ramones happened, then Sex Pistols and the Clash happened, and then this American hardcore scene happened.

Like the dead Kennedy's and the Black Flag and such. But Tell me about that first concert. Was the first concert you went to Ramones, your first punk?

First punk concert I saw was the Crampss at Irving Plaza.

What was that like?

Coolest show I've ever seen in my life.Unbelievable.Unbelievable..

Were Are you seeing people bumping in? I always think they had the Mosh pit.

Yes, but it wasn't about that. It was really just about the energy of the music and the personality of the people. The energy that came off the stage was really palpable, and I loved it. Before that, I listened mostly to, I would say, hard rock music like Aerosmith and Ted Nugent and AC/DC. Then shifted into... Because punk felt even more... Had even more energy than the hard rock that I listened to.

A little more in your face. Yeah. And then... So that must have worked in two directions where people were like, what's this punk rocker kid? And also you end up developing friendships because other people were punk rockers. So in other Or did you started to feel like you belonged in a sense, or did you?

A little bit. I still felt like an outsider, but I felt like here are other outsiders. I still didn't feel like I was in the group, in the I didn't feel like I was part of that group. But I related in that none of us belonged. Oh, right. I had that feeling of connection.

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What year was it you started Def Jam. You were senior in high school?

No, Def Jam started once I was in college.

Oh, you were in college? Yeah. Right. That's what I had thought. And then I read another thing saying you started at your senior year. I thought, okay, great. So you were in college But what year were you in college when that started? I think I was in college '81 to '85, if I remember correctly. I know you shifted into hip hop. You started loving hip hop.

I felt they were really close. I felt like punk rock and hip hop were both the current music of the street. They were both high energy, charged, aggressive music. Neither of them involved going to Juilliard or being a virtuoso. They were music made by people in the street, both, and the same age. The kids would be in the same classroom, the classroom I would be in. It felt more like our music because it was the music of the time, even though stylistically, they were different, they were really coming from the same place.

What was the path toward doing It's Yours? Because It's Yours was your first big thing. It's Yours was the first thing. You had the band yourself that you were in.

I had a punk rock band called Hose, H-O-S-C. Hose, right. We made a seven-inch single and a twelve-inch ERP, and it was noisy punk rock. That's how I would describe it.

That's an interesting description.

Noisy punk rock. It wasn't fast. It was more noisy than fast. Most punk rock was fast. This was more noisy.

You played bass?

I played guitar. You played guitar? Yeah. I mean, when I say I played guitar, rudimentary guitar. It was a noisy band, so I could make noise on the guitar.

How did you feel about it, though, getting up on stage? It was fun. I just don't see you getting up on stage.

It didn't feel like it was me. It felt like it was a performance.

Tell me how you got to It's Yours.

Started going to a nightclub called Negril, which was a reggae club that once a week had hip hop music. At this time, you could not hear hip hop music. Couldn't hear it on the radio. There were very few records, no albums. Maybe 12-inch singles for DJs might come out once a month, maybe. That's how much hip hop music there was. Most of the parties where you'd hear hip hop were in places where I wouldn't even know what was happening, which would be like in the projects, at a party in the park at the projects, not promoted or announced. If you lived in the projects and you heard the sound system, you'd come out. That was the degree. I had no connection to it then until Negril started doing these nights. I would go to Negril every Tuesday night and just listen to the music and love the energy of the club. Because these hip hop records would come out every month or so, I would buy the new one that would come out every month, and I would listen to it, and I would be disappointed every single time because none of them sounded like what I heard in the club.

The energy in the club was so alive and so kinetic and raw and punk rock in its way. I loved it. Because I was not an experienced recordmaker, I didn't technically know what I was doing. That really worked to my advantage because here's this new form of music that the people who were professionals who tried to make records of that music made them using professional methods of the past that were designed for other kinds of music. All of those watered down what it was and made it less what was new and exciting about it. The only reason I started making the records was really out of wanting to have them myself. It was like a documentarian documenting something so that I would have the thing to listen to that sounded like the reason I was going to the club.

But how did it come about? You met Jay.

I went to Negril and I spoke to one of the DJs. My favorite of the DJ's names was Jazzy Jay. Jazzy Jay, yeah. I met Jazzy Jay, and we became friends. I remember he had a car with a big sound system in it, which in those days, nobody had. That was a new thing. He had me bring my Long Island car to the Bronx, and he helped me install a sound system, what would be considered later a booming system. I had a crazy booming car system before there was really... That maybe some people in the Bronx had, but nobody else had. You had to be insane. You'd buy real components for PA systems and install them into the car. There was no market for this equipment yet. No one was making what became powerful car systems. It didn't exist. So it was made with bits and pieces of things you could get.

I can really picture you with that.

It was so much fun. That's so cool. It was so interesting.

But with It's Yours, you heard him play that in the club and you were like- No, there was no song.

I just liked him as a DJ. I said to him, Let's make a record. I said, There's another piece because there was a rapper named Special K. Special K was... My favorite rap group was called The Treacherous 3. Special K was a member of the rap group. From the very beginning, the way it happened was, Treacherous 3 were my favorite group. They had made a couple of records that I really liked on the Enjoy label, and then they got signed to Sugar Hill Records, and then they made new records, and they weren't as good as the ones on Enjoy. Now, I'm super fan, and I meet Kumo D is the lead rapper in The Treacherous 3. I meet him. I someone him to a meeting at the dorm room. He comes from Long Island. He lives on Long Island. He's going to college in Long Island, but he comes to the dorm room. But to me, he's a superstar He's Cool Mo D of the Treachers 3, my favorite rap group.

But he comes. Yeah.

He comes and I say, I love these records you made, and I named the ones that were on Enjoy, and this new record, it's It doesn't do what the early ones did. Let's make one together. He said, I can't do that. He's like, We're signing Sugar Hill. I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn't know there was any... I didn't know anything about the music business, about contracts, about I think. I just thought, like in a punk rock band, if you want to make music with someone, you ask them if you want to make music together, then you make music. I said, Let's make a record together. He said, I can. I'm signed Sugar Hill. I can only make music with them. He said, But to Special K, who's another guy in the Treacherous Three. Special K has a brother who's really good, Tila Rock. I met Special K. He connected me with Tila Rock. Then Tila Rock wrote the Rimes for It's Yours. I programmed the beat. I probably programmed the beat before I met him just because I programmed a lot of beats. That was one of the things, one of the ways that the earliest forms of rap were rooted in drum machine beats.

There was no sampling yet. There were no samplers. There was no such thing. So there was drum machines and there was DJing, but that's all there was. Other than that, it'd be regular instruments. But if it was regular instruments, then it just sounded like an R&B record. It wasn't a hip hop record, really. Those were the rap records that came before, sounded like R&B records or club records with somebody rapping on But if you went to them- But when you first heard, I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast. That was a band. That was played by a band. If instead of rapping, if somebody was singing, it would sound like any other song you'd hear in a night.

Would you add an instinctive thing of, How can we make this sound?

Well, I experienced it at the club. It wasn't, How can we do it? It's like, at the club, you didn't see a You saw a DJ cutting break beats, so playing little snippets of records in a really angular, aggressive way. Not musical. It was not musical. It was very rhythmic and not musical, and I loved it. That was the marching order. It's like, there's this very rhythmic, nonmusical music, and I want to make that. It's being made already, but that's why I'm a producer. It's like, I see this thing happening. Now, how do we document that so other people can hear it? That's what the producer does. It's formulate this thing that may already be out in the world, but you can't get it.

You put together It's yours with those lyrics and Jazzy J.

Tila Rock did the lyrics over the beat that I'd programmed, and then Jazzy J came and scratched on the record, which was an essential piece of the music of hip hop was the scratching. If you listen to the Sugar Hill Gang record that you mentioned, there's no scratching on that. It's a band playing and guys rapping. But that's because it was made by people who knew how to make records in the old way. Now in this new world, it's about the drum machine, the scratching, the scratching. And it's supposed to sound glitchy or raw, not polished.

Something of the imperfection is what makes it great.

Absolutely. It was real. You could feel it was real.

And this already started your style, which is you have this paired down, what would you call it?

I'd say minimal or essential.

The essential. Yeah. So you're the opposite of Phil Specter, who is a wall of sound type of producer.

You like the- The least amount of information to get the point across.

Right. So do you like the Beatles records where they take out all the... I love the Beatles.

Beatles are my favorite.

Right. But I'm saying when they take out all this George Martin added stuff, do you like that pared-down version?

I love the George Martin stuff. No. I like the Beatles perfect. The Beatles are the Bible. That's it. The beetles are perfection.

Right. But they are pared down in the sense of you can hear every instrument. Everything is... It's not like these huge freaking... Anyway, yeah, I agree with you about the absolute apex.

I don't know how anyone could ever approach it. I think it's just that's the measuring stick and then forevermore, that'll be the case.

Yeah, forever. Tell me about when you met Russell Simmons.

I said, Made It's Yours. It came out and it got... Over time, it ended up becoming successful. When I say successful, a successful rap record means the three places in New York that would ever play a rap record might play it, and some DJs would buy the 12-inch. In In those days, if you sold 5,000 12-inches, that would have been a successful rap record. So it's a tiny pool. Now, there were some things that had broken out, like the Sugar Hill Gang, even Run DMC had broken out by that time. They became the first superstars. Run DMC were the first superstars of rap. But it still started very small. That was just happening then. It was like that was right in that moment of where rap first started breaking through in any way. There was a party. There was a TV show called Graffity Rock, and The Treacherous Three, who were my favorite group, and Run DMC, who were my new favorite group, were on this TV show, and they had a party in a loft in the 20s in New York, in the 20 streets. I can't remember what street, maybe 21st Street. I went to this party because it was a rap-related and I was excited to just in any way to be part of it.

So I went to this party.

You're like 19, 20.

Something like that. I met this guy, Russell, who I didn't know who he was. I didn't know him at that time. He met me and someone introduced us and said, Rick made It's Yours. He looked at me and he's like, You made it? It's like, Can't be. He said, It's yours is the blackest record I've ever heard in my life. Now, And this time, there are no white people involved in hip hop at all. Right. So his mind was blown. Then I came to learn he was Run's brother, and he represented Run DMC, and he represented most of the artists in hip hop. He was a very big fish in this tiny little pond of hip hop. And then I started going to his office to just be where it was like hip hop central, his office. Started going there and hanging out. Because it's yours was successful and it was on the Def Jam, I had the Def Jam logo already, and the address on the record was 5 University Place, which was my dorm room at NYU, and the phone number was the phone number of my room in the dorm. I started getting demo tapes being sent to the dorm because people liked It's Yours, so people perceived it as actually a record company.

Adam Harvitz from the Beastie Boys was living with me in the room that summer, and he would go through all the demo tapes and listen to them. He heard a tape that said, Ladies Love Cool Jay, and he played it for me. We loved it, but it was his... He was the one who picked it out of the pile. It was like, You got to hear this. We listened to it. Then I called LL and asked him to come meet. He came, and he was 16 at the time, and he came to the dorm room. Then we made our first record, which was called I need a Beat. I programmed the drums, and I looked at his Lyric Book. The way he wrote lyrics were, he didn't write them like songs. He wrote them like monologs, like just pages and pages of words that rhyme all on topic that just kept going. Because I grew up on the Beatles, I grew up with song structure. I grew up with verses and choruses or A and B part. If you listen to a lot of the hip hop records before Death Jam, they're more like toasting records where it's not so much of a hook.

There's more of a rap story that might go on for six minutes. Do you know what I'm saying? It's just a different format. I would say one of the things that really was different about the Def Jam records, in addition to the raw production, the raw incompetent production, really, was putting the songs into song structure because up on the Beatles, that's how I understood that songs worked. That's what was normal to me in a song. For I need a beat, I would look at all of his words and say, Okay, maybe this part could be the first verse, and maybe this chunk could be the second verse, and this chunk could be the third verse, and then in between, you can say, I need a beat.

You had the concept of I need a beat, or he had that?

He probably had the concept. I wouldn't have come up with the concept.

But just that line, I need a I might have come up with the way it worked as a song, but he wrote all the words. You did that, and that really blew the lid off.

That got really popular.

When that came out, he was only 16 or 17.

Yeah, with the first single, the first single we put out, we were still an independent label. He was 16.

That was I need a beat.

I need a beat.

Then radio.

That was his first album, and that came out probably-You did that shortly after? Yeah, probably straight through. Probably every once in a while, we'd get together and do another song, and then eventually got to the point where we had enough for an album. So maybe a year later, I'm guessing.

But how did you know how to put that out? How to get people to listen to it?

Well, I didn't know how to get people to listen to it. I still don't. I don't know that, but I found out how the manufacturing process worked. There was a record store called Nine Nine Records on MacDougal Street. They sold mostly European dance music, like import records. It was a tiny little store, smaller than the room that we're in, the whole store. The guy who ran it's name was Ed Balman. In addition to the store, 99 Records, he had a label called Nine Nine Records, and he put out some group called the Bush Tetras, group called ESG, cool downtown New York music, not rap music, but music you'd hear in a cool... Like a dance interior or the cooler Dance Club, the Mud Club, the cooler night clubs, you'd hear the records that Ed would make, Nine Nine Records. I used to hang out in the store because I would always, even before making any records, growing up, I would just hang out in record stores. I would hang out in either magic stores because I like magic stores, bookstores because I like bookstores, or record stores. I would just spend hours and hours in record stores listening to what they were playing, to the people who work there.

It's usually the people who work in record stores in those days were heads. They were like Quentin Tarantino in the video shop. There were people who...

The true experts in a way.

Yeah, the real experts. The real fanatics got to the point where they worked in the store. That's all they did all day.

So what did you just take your record into these stores that you'd already been- No, once I met Ed at Nine Nine Records, I said, I want to make a record.

Can you walk me through the process? Because he had already done it. And then he said, Okay. He said, There's a studio in Long Island City, and you can record there. And then you can have the labels made at this place in Brooklyn. Then you can have the jackets printed. There's a place you could do them here, but there's a better quality that you can get from Canada, and you could get those there. Once it's recorded, you can master it. I use this guy named Herb Power. He could master it. He just walked me through all the steps to be able to make something. I did that first with my punk rock band. I said, if I make 500 copies or 200, whatever the number, 200 copies or 500 copies, can I give them to you to distribute in the same way that you do the 99 records? And he's like, Sure. So that was how I first started. And then when I made It's Yours, I thought that would be the same pattern. It was the same pattern of making the record. But then when it was time to press the record and put it out, Jazzy Jay called me and he said, I just met this guy named Arthur Baker, who has this label called Streetwise.

I think if you come up and play him, It's yours, you might be able to put it out through Streetwise, and they know how to do that. They know how to put out Rapper, which I had never done. I went to meet Arthur at Streetwise. He had a recording studio called Shakedown Sound. I met him at Shakedown. We became friends, still friends to this day. He's like, I'll buy this from you and put it out. And he did, and they did. And then that's the one that It's Yours ended up becoming popular. And then in the wake of that, I meet Russell, I make the first LL record, I play the first record for Russell, and he's like, This is a hit. I said, Well, what would be the smart thing to do with it? And he said, Well, we could give it to Profile. Profile is the label that Run DMC was on. I said, I'm with you every day, and All you do every day is complain about how Profile doesn't do anything and they steal from you. You're telling me it's the worst experience in your life. Why would we do that?

He's like, Well, you want to put it out, and they'll do that. I said, Why don't we just do it ourselves? He's like, No, I'm going to start my own thing with a major at some point, and I don't really want to do it. I said, Well, how about if I'll make the records, I'll do all the work, and you could be my partner? He said, Okay, let's do that. The reason I suggested that was, I'm a kid in the dorm room. He's someone who's in some ways the heart of the rap music business. If we're partners, it It makes it serious. The music was the same, the process was the same, but if he's connected to it, it's real.

Yeah.

It just seemed right.

But then you took like, I need a beat, and then you filtered that the same way you did, It's yours.

No, I need a beat. We did...

That same.

No, that was the first truly independent release where I did everything myself.

But how did you release it?

Okay, so the making of the records part was the same as everything I learned from 99. Then I met a guy who worked at Profile in their distribution. And illegally, not illegally, but he wasn't allowed to do it because he was a contracted employee, he gave us advice. He mentored us, and we paid him some money to mentor us. He said, Okay, these are all the people who you could There's a place called MS who distributes in one part of the country, and there's CRD. There were like-He hipped you to the various distributors. Yeah, there were like… I can't remember whether it was seven or nine then, but there were these different independent distributors around the country who were doing it since the Phil Specter records. That's what they did was independent music. We set up a little network of these independent distributors, press the records, they ordered them, and they handled each of the territories.

And you stayed with that program for a while?

For 7, 12 Inches, which was about a year, 18 months, something like that. And during that, those got popular. And then, CBS Records, Columbia Records, which was part of CBS at that time, came to us and wanted to do a label deal with us. Right. That's when I'm still in college at this time. That's when you could say it became professional because the major label- Although it was professional before.

But I think I remember you saying they gave you $600,000 or something inconceivable.

Something inconceivable.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, they just signed us for a lot of money to be in business with us. It ended up being a great deal for them because they made a fortune and we made very little, but that's the carrot in these relationships is they give you money up front, but you don't realize that what you're giving away in exchange for that money. But we didn't know. It was fine. Got to do what we wanted to do and have this success. Then the first album we put out was LL Cool J's first album, and that came out through Def Jam, Columbia, first one.

Right. That just went huge.

Very successful.

Number one.

I don't know if it was number one.

Was that the first number one?

I don't remember. It may have been.

Hip hop. But I know at some point you did Walk This Way, and that really It brought with Thrun. That really brought hip hop into the mainstream.

It did.

Yeah.

I can't say I did it with the idea of it being successful in mind, but I did it with the idea of explaining something, which was we were having success making this music. I have already said at the time, it was largely unmusical, but very rhythmic. In our success, I started meeting people in the real record business, the people in the big companies, and they all... They saw our success and wanted to meet with us. I started meeting all these people at these big companies who wanted to do anything we wanted I remember one of them saying, this is someone who's basically wooing me to come work with him. What do you attribute the success to, considering it's not music? This is someone who likes us. That's how much of a disconnect there was. People didn't hear it as music. Knowing this, knowing that to the uninitiated, they hear it not as music, we had recorded the whole rendium album, Without Walk This Way, and I felt like we need one more thing. We need one more thing. That thought was in my mind that people don't see this as music. I wanted to figure out, how can we explain, how can we make a song that would explain to people what this is.

I thought, okay, if I could find a song from the past that's already familiar, and if we perform it as a rap song, but even in performing it as a rap song, you can hear it's exactly the same as the original, then people would understand it's music. Not only is it music, it's just like the music they've been listening to. That was the idea. I started looking for songs to do that with. The best song I could think of was Walk This Way. It all has to do with the vocal phrasing, Backstroke Leverose, Hyden. I can't remember the words. But it's not a melodic verse. It's a rap phrasing verse. But it's an Aerosmith song that people know. There was a hit. If Run DMC does it and deliver it like a rap song, it still walk this way. It still sounds like the Aerosmith song. That connected the dots for people who before thought it wasn't music. It ended up becoming very successful. But I saw it more as a way to communicate an idea.

Well, it sure did that. Okay, I'm sorry. I just have a couple of things I want to ask you because fucking hour goes by quick.

It's all good.

I know we got the pizza downstairs. Okay, I I'd have to ask you about the Beastie Boys. You already knew you had been roommates with the...

There was a guy named Dave Skilken, who was singer of a band, a punk rock band called The Young and the Useless. Adam Harvitz, a guitar player, was in the Beastie Boys, but he was also in Young and the Useless. I was friends with Dave Skilken, and Dave introduced me to Adam. Then through Adam, I ended up meeting the other guys in the Beastie Boys. I was a DJ, and I DJed at NYU at the dorm functions and loved rap music and was an aspiring rap DJ. They made a song called Cookie Puss before I met them, which was like a prank rap song. They wanted to perform it more like a rap song than like a rock song because in their show, they played like a punk rock band. They played instruments. They asked if I would DJ to play Cookie Puss with them. That's how I first started working with them.

You came in to do the DJ part of that. But you were like, Man, these guys, they got something.

I felt like we all came to rap music from punk rock. It seemed like we'd been listening to punk rock for a long time, but now hip hop was dominating our lives. I remember just saying, It feels like maybe really be a rap band, just be a rap band instead of continuing on with what was happening before. It just felt like it was the right thing to do at the time based on how we actually lived.

Also maybe based on the way people responded to Cookie Puss or whatever.

Maybe. Cookie Puss was by far their most successful record at that time. Right.

People were really digging it. Was it you who said, Why don't we just make this rap? Just do rap.

I suggested, Why don't we just let's do rap? But it wasn't because people like it. It was something that was truer to who we were in that moment. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like, yes, we saw the Dead Kennedies a bunch of times over the last probably five years, and we loved them. But now getting to see Run BMC was a much bigger deal. It felt It felt like a new wave. To continue doing the old wave, we could have, they could have. It felt like we weren't being true to what was really our experience.

I just want to jump to, because they're good buddies of mine, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yeah.

Okay. Long before I worked with them, they asked me to produce an album. I was still living in New York, and I came to California to meet with them. Adam Harvest from the Beastie Boys came with me, and we went to a rehearsal at this, a place on Sunset Boulevard that was owned by EMI. They were on EMI at the time, and it was this little dirty rehearsal room. I went in with Adam, and they played music for us for a while, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. I didn't really understand what was happening, but it felt like this is not good energy. It felt like this is dark energy. I didn't understand it, but it felt like You know how when band members look at each other, there's a sense of camaraderie or trust? That wasn't in the room. It was something else. It was more like a weariness between them that was It was strange. I didn't know what to make of it. So ended up not working with them at that time. Then I came later to find out because I'd never been around drugs, they had serious drug problems.

That's what was going on. But I'd not I hadn't been around anyone who was having serious drug problems. The lack of trust was based on the things that happen when you do a lot of drugs, you can lose trust. You can do things to warrant losing trust. That was apparent in the room. Again, I didn't know it. Just the instinct was, something's happening here that doesn't feel good. Then they made that album, they made another album, and then I got to meet them again. I had just moved to California, and I stayed friends with Flea the whole time because Flea was one who originally invited me down, and I stayed friends with Flea, and I met them again two albums later, and it was a whole different thing. That was when they had gotten sober. Again, I didn't know why, but you could see this sense of brotherhood, let's make something great. All All the things that the energetics of something good coming was there. Then we made... The first album we made together was called blood, sugar, sex, magic. We recorded it in this old mansion on Laurel Canyon that people think is the Houdini mansion.

It's not, but it's diagonally opposite the Houdini mansion. I had the idea to record it because they had made four albums. I think they made four albums before, possibly five. I I remember maybe four in an ERP. I can't remember. But they had made albums before. When I asked them about the recording experiences, none of them were great. They were all made in traditional recording studios in in professional ways. I thought, Okay, I want this to feel like the first of something new. Instead of going to a corporate recording studio, let's rent a big house, live in the house, record in the house, and it won't be like any experience they had before. It'll feel more like a first than a fifth. That was the idea. They loved the idea. We found this house in Laurel Canyon, rented it, set up there, and it was super fun. Really great experience. Loved working with them.

Which you've now done what? 6, 7, 8?

Something like that. We've made a lot of albums together.

Did you have a feeling that Give It Away Now is going to be a big hit? Could you tell?

I can't say hit. I don't know what a hit sounds like, so it's hard for me to say hit. I knew that I loved it, and I remember going to Warner Brothers when they were deciding what to put out and saying, I think this is the song that people will really react to. But again, using the word hit has all these implications that usually a hit sounds like something that's familiar. Or is it something that sounds really foreign and different and weird, that's not a hit. Do you know what I'm saying? And give it away, it sounded different than everything else. Not different from the Chili peppers, but different than anything you heard on the radio.

Yeah, certainly, hindsight's in this. It sounds like a big hit now because it was.

But I love the song. Also, they made an incredible video, but the song was great. I remember going to Warner Brothers and playing it for them. I was also I had a relationship with Warner Brothers at the time, and the band left EMI and were going to sign with Epik Records. Then Epik started getting cold feet because EMI still had some rights, and it was a complicated deal. But this was a very sought-after group at the time because they were a successful band. So all the labels were trying to sign them.

This is after the album came out?

No, this is before. Yeah. Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic would have been the first album for Epik, but then Epik, even though the band agreed to sign with them and everybody was cool with it, it was taking a long time legally because of EMIs. The fact that the band was leaving EMI got complicated. And Epik got cold feet about the deal. I told Mo Austin, who ran Warner Brothers, just so you know, Chili Peppers, the thing with Epik is going south. You may want to give them a call. And he called him and worked it out immediately. The band loved Mo the most, but for some reason, I don't know why they decided to sign with Epik. You'd have to ask for Lee. But it all ended up working out. They signed with Mo, and it ended up being, I think it sold, I don't know, six, seven million, a lot of records.

Yeah, that just broke them through to the stratosphere.

We had the best party at the end of that album. We had a huge party at that house. Thousands of people came. It was incredible. Incredible party. I feel like I remember driving in the car with Owen and David Blaine to the party, and I don't think I saw them once we got there because it was just like a free for all. But thousands of people. It was so cool. Best party I've ever been to.

God damn, how did I not get over in that party? I don't know.

I don't know where you were.

Maybe I wasn't that part.

I'm guessing you were.

I remember seeing them guys a few times before I got to know them. I wanted to ask you about Johnny Cash. Yeah. Did you like working with him?

The coolest man in the world. Really? Yeah, super cool. At the time that I met him, he was playing at a dinner theater in Orange County, probably 200 people sitting and eating while he played. Maybe not that many, maybe 150. I went to see him, and the show was good, but there was some sense of going through the motions. He had been dropped from his label. He was the biggest artist on Columbia Records, and then he ends up getting dropped from Columbia, the label that he was the... He sold more records for Columbia than all of their other artists combined. Really? Yeah. Then they ended up dropping him because he wasn't as successful anymore.

Oh, because when he stopped selling to him. Yeah, later.

They were signed to another label, and then that ended up not working out. In his mind, he was pretty much done. He was still going through the motions of going on tour because that's what he did his whole life, and it's all he knew to do. I would say he wasn't in a great place. He was fine, it was okay, but it wasn't creatively really stimulating. We met and I said I'd like to make records with him. He asked, Why? I said, I feel like we could make some really cool records. He was like, What makes you think that? I said, I don't know. He was like, I just want to hear you play and sing me songs you like. There was no pretension of trying to figure out what was going to work. There was none of that. It was just like, let's listen to music and make some music we like.

You felt strongly, let's do some of the old classic.

The reason I thought of Johnny Cash was I'd work almost exclusively with new artists, like first-time artists up until that time. I had a lot of success. I was wondering, I wonder if these same techniques, I don't know what techniques are, but whatever's happening here that's working, would it happen with a grown-up artist? Don't know. I thought of who could we cast? Who's the grown-up artist? The first person I thought of was Johnny Cash.

Well, that turned out great for him and for you. Amazing.

Just amazing. Life-changing for me, for sure. Yeah. Life-changing.

I mean, you really became real buddies with the man in black.

Absolutely. I love them. Still love him.

I got to mention that, to me, 99 Problems, that is one just phenomenal song. Did you feel when you were making that, Oh, this is something special, or you couldn't tell?

I couldn't tell. I know I like it. I think it's good. I remember Jay, when we finished the song, he's like, Do you know what this is? I said, No. He's like, I'll show you what it is. Meaning, I'm going to show you out in the world what this is. He knew right away. I had no idea. Wow. Then- I can never... Until I think it's good, I don't want to put it out. Once it's good, whatever happens after that is out of my control. I can never guess how anyone's going to react. I think if I like it, maybe someone will like it. I think my best chance of someone liking it is if I like it, but Still, that's it. I don't predict what anyone's going to like.

Yeah. You had a good rapport with him, Jason?

Yeah, we're great good friends still.

Yeah. He's a fascinating guy. Now, I just want to ask you about Neil Young. Yeah. You've also got this anomaly that I think no one else could claim of having had five houses burned to the ground.

That is true.

Is I don't want to say there's some karmic thing because I don't know that you need to burn off karma. But what's the odds of that?

I have no idea. But I'll tell you, it does not feel good. No. It's not a good feeling.

You told me about that time in Marfa, where you were actually in the house. We're lucky to survive it.

Lucky to be here now. Yeah, it's scary. But that That fire and the fact that I wasn't able to travel allowed me to make an album with Neil Young that I wouldn't have been able to make. I was booked to do something else in Europe, but I couldn't come to Europe because of the smoke inhalation. Recovering from the smoke inhalation, I couldn't travel. I was staying home. I'd lost my voice. I couldn't talk. I got a call from Neil saying that he has the to Shangri-la, the studio that I work at, booked, and he's going to make a new album. If I happen to be around, he would love me to produce it. I said, I couldn't say it, but I sent a message to his people saying, Yes, I would like to do that. Then a few weeks later, we ended up recording.

When you first met him, you couldn't talk, right?

Yeah, our first meeting, I still could barely talk. But he understood that I had smoke damage and couldn't talk, so it was cool. He did all the talking.

But that was a dream come true, right?

Neil is one of my top three artists of all time. Always wanted to work with him. Worked with him one time before, but nothing that ever came out. We went into the studio together, I don't know, 25 years before. He called me. I remember he called me. Do you know that Neil only likes to record on and around the full moon? Do you know that about him? No. He records two or three days leading up to the full moon, and then one or two days after. But the focus is on the full moon. All of his albums are recorded on the full moon. I get a message on my machine when I was living in town, the house that you first came to in the Hollywood Hills. Hey, Rick, this is Neil. Thinking about recording in August, and I think there's going to be a full moon in August, so we could record in August. Why don't you pick the studio and set it up and I'll come down and we'll do that? We booked the studio, it's all set up. Then the following week, Neil cut off a piece of his finger when he was cutting a sandwich in half and couldn't play guitar.

Then I imagine we're canceling the session. Then comes the week before the session and he calls like, Well, it I can't play guitar, can't use my hand, but I have an idea. I'm going to play my harmonica through my guitar amp, and let's see what happens. I'm like, Okay. We did a session back then that ended up, just recorded a couple of songs, but they ended up not coming out. I'm sure it'll come out someday on one of his retrospective box sets. There's songs that I think came out in one form or another. But when I saw him when we were making the last album, he told me he listened back and they were great. It was a weird situation because he couldn't play guitar, and that's what he does.

You both were incapacitated at each time.

First time him, second time me.

Then in the making of that album, you were telling me how he had his Crazy Horse. Yeah, Crazy Horse, his original band. Then the first you recorded for the first week and you were like, disaster. I'm going to go back in the second week, re-record. And then the drummer was like, We got it. Yeah.

The first week was so bad. It wasn't that We're going to get it next week. It was, There's a good chance these people can never play these songs, no matter what. That's how far off it was. Then we went the second week to play the songs, and Ralph said, I think we got it last week. Neil convinced him to try it again, and we tried it again, and it was not good. Then Ralph said, I'm telling you, we got it last week. I'm telling you. Then we ended up listening back and just… It's like we were listening through Ralph's ears. Ralph told us how to listen to it. He was like, Well, take that out. Take that part out. Okay, just listen to this part. Listen to what's happening here. Ralph Ralph was right. The thing that we thought would never be an album or the performances that made me think the band could never, ever play them ended up being the majority of the album. It's amazing. That's incredible. Super cool sounding album and a great experience. Even for Neil, he was like, That's never happened to me before either. He's never seen something go from seemingly so far off to really good when nothing changed.

You just pared it down.

A little bit. Reduce? Yeah, just a little bit of cleanup work.

Yeah, yeah. Fucking great. Now, I just want to ask you about your book. It's called The Creative Act, a Way of Being.

Yes.

You started it in thinking, I want to help open people people's minds to how the creative act works and that we're all creative.

Yeah, but I didn't know what that was. It started with the idea of I've worked with a lot of artists over the time that I've been doing this. For a record producer, I've worked with a lot of artists. But as far as artists in the world go, I've worked with a tiny fraction of artists in the world, tiny, tiny fraction. I thought, is there some way to share what happens in the studio? When I say what happens in the studio is the approach. The approach has nothing to do with music. It's not about music. It's a way of being. It's a way of being in the world, a way of paying attention. It took seven or eight years to try to understand why the things that happen in the studio that work, that happen through intuition and without knowing how they work, to try to decipher and decode, are there principles at play that are universal and helpful for someone else? That was the mission of figuring out what the information in the book is. There are no examples from my experience in the studio, but many of the ideas in the book come from real-world things that happened in the studio where something worked, and then I tried to understand why did it work, and then sharing the principle at play.

It was something from the beginning that I felt strongly about, about not referencing my work in the book, because if I told you a story about something that worked creatively, and let's say it's about Tom Petty, and then Tom Petty did this, as the reader, you don't feel like... You don't come away with like, Oh, that's a good idea to do that. You come away with the idea of, Oh, Tom Petty's a genius. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like you don't put yourself in Tom Petty's role when something good happens because he's Tom Petty. By never mentioning the artists, the reader is the artist in all of the stories in the book. All of the ideas are to put yourself in those situations. It's not to know what Jay Zee did or what Kanye West did. It's to know, how would I do? How could I do this? How could I look at this problem? And by leaving the famous people's names out, the sensational aspect was removed on purpose so that you're not thinking about those people. You're just thinking about the concepts. And how do these concepts relate to me?

And you talk about a, this avalanche of thoughts.

Yeah, preponderance of thought. It's a Buddhist phrase, yeah. It's a buddhist phrase, yeah. It's a buddhist phrase, yeah. It's a buddhist phrase, yeah. It's a buddhist phrase, yeah. It's a buddhist phrase, yeah. It's a buddhist phrase, yeah. It's a buddhist phrase. Yeah. And that that is what's interfering with your ability to... Some artists, so much of the creative problems that we have are self-inflicted problems. You told me a story about Getting two different jobs where you were auditioning and the stakes were very high, and in both cases, you didn't care about them because you already were doing something else, so it wasn't important to you. And those Those two things ended up changing your life. Had they been important to you and had you been focused on them, you might not have done as well.

Definitely.

Because it red light fever. When the pressure's on, it's scary. But if you don't care, you're just yourself. It's one of many examples of the things. It can either think, I'm no good, nothing I make is good, nothing I make is any good. That's a real self-defeating. The other one is, I'm great, everything I make is great. Really self-defeating because then you don't question your work. You just settle.

But you don't seem to have self-doubt.

I don't have self-doubt because I know I'm willing to go forever until we get to something good. I have self-doubt something good will happen now. That's out of my control. I don't know how long it'll take, but I know I'm willing willing to go for the ride. I have the patience to wait until it's good and try a million bad ideas and never get frustrated when a bad idea doesn't work because it's just part of the process. In fact, every time you have a bad idea and it doesn't work, you're one step closer to finding the answer because you know you've ruled out something. You've ruled out one avenue. That doesn't work. What can we learn from that not working? In that example, we were trying to make it small. The idea was, let's make it small. Small is going to be cool. Let's make it small. We make it small, it's no good. Okay, we learned making it small doesn't work. Let's try making it big. Maybe big works. Maybe yes, maybe no, we don't know. Maybe making it fly, maybe burying it. What can we do to breathe life into this thing that right now is not good enough?

I mean, there's so many things I wanted to get into, but you know what? I love your thing of savoring each bite since we're going to lunch and we're going to have that pizza. That's something I'm terrible at because I grew up with brothers, and we always got first, but we didn't always get second. So we try to just shove it down our gullets and get to the next... So anyway, let's go.

Sosavor each body. Savor each body. Come down.

Cool, man. Hey, thank you so much, man. My pleasure.

That was great. Anytime. I like talking to you.

I could do this for another five hours. I swear to God, I'm so fascinated with you and your life and your creativity. I consider you a creative genius. I know you would never say that about yourself, but I feel privileged to be your buddy.

Thank you, sir. The privilege mine. I love you.

Love you, too.

That's great. And we'll do it again.

Oh, good. Anytime. Eat your heart out, Teddy. Anytime.

Thanks for that, Woody. What an amazing conversation. Be sure to check out Rick's book, The Creative Act, A Way of Being. If you like this bonus episode, keep on the look out because we might be releasing these every now and then. Thanks to Woody for doing this one without me, and thanks to team Coco. Remember to rate and review us on Apple podcasts and subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We'll see you next time, Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

You've been listening to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Sometimes.

The show is produced by me, nick Liao. Executive producers are Adam Sacks, Colin Anderson, Jeff Ross, and myself. Sarah Federovich is our supervising producer. Our senior producer is Matt Apodaka. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel with support from Eduardo Perez. Research by Alyssa Graal. Talent Booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista. Our theme music is by Woody Harrelson, Anthony Genn, Mary Steembergen, and John Osborne. Special thanks to Willy Mavere. We'll have more for you next time where everybody knows your name.

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