Marissa Roth/New York Times
Can Rick Rubin save the music business?
For 23 years as a producer and label boss, Rick Rubin has applied his Midas touch to rock, hip hop, pop and country music. Now Columbia, one of the world’s greatest record companies, has given him the keys to the kingdom. What will he do now?
Rick Rubin is listening. A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating [at the time of writing, the Gossip had just launched in the US]. His eyes are tightly closed and he is swaying back and forth to the beat, trying at once to hear what is right and wrong about the music.
Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, grey beard, is curled into the corner of a tufted velvet couch in the library of a Los Angeles house he owns but where he no longer lives. This three-storey 1923 Spanish villa steeped in music history – Johnny Cash recorded in the basement studio; Jakob Dylan is recording a solo album there now – is used by Rubin for meetings. And ever since May, when he officially became co-head of Columbia Records in the US, Rubin has been having nearly constant meetings.
Beginning in 1984, when he started Def Jam Recordings, until his more recent occupation as a Grammy Award-winning producer for dozens of artists like the Dixie Chicks, Slayer and Neil Diamond, Rubin, who is 44, has never gone to an office of any kind. One of his conditions for taking the job at Sony, which owns Columbia, was that he would not be required to have a desk or a phone in any of the corporate outposts.
That wasn’t a problem: Columbia didn’t want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.
‘‘The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content,’’ David Geffen, the legendary music mogul, said recently. ‘‘Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music. And there’s no clear answer about how to fix that problem. But I still believe that the top priority at any record company has to be coming up with great music. And for that reason, Sony was very smart to hire Rick.’’
Though Rubin maintains that his intention is to hear music with the ears of a true fan, he has built his reputation on the simultaneously mystical and entirely decisive way he listens to a song. As the Gossip, which is fronted by a large, raucous woman named Beth Ditto, shouts to a stop, Rubin opens his eyes and nods yes.
‘‘Let’s hear something else,’’ Rubin says to Kevin Kusatsu, who would be called an A&R executive at any other record company. ‘‘We don’t have any titles at the new Columbia,’’ Rubin says. ‘‘I don’t want to create a new hierarchy to replace the old hierarchy.’’
Rubin, wearing his usual uniform of loose khaki trousers and billowing white T-shirt, his sunglasses in his pocket, his feet bare, fingers a string of lapis lazuli Buddhist prayer beads, believed to bring wisdom to the wearer. The library and the house are filled with religious iconography mixed with mementos from the world of pop. Vintage cardboard cutouts of John, Paul, George and Ringo circa ‘Help!’ are placed around a multiarmed statue of Vishnu; a framed photo of Jim Morrison stares at a crystal ball. In Rubin’s world, music and spirituality collide.
‘‘That’s why they call him a guru,’’ says Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks. Maines, who has been with the label since 1997, first worked with Rubin in 2004.
‘‘At first, I didn’t know if I was down with all that guru stuff. I thought: We’re making a record – I don’t want to be converted. But Rick’s spirituality has mostly to do with his own sense of self. When it comes to the music, he’s so sure of his opinion that you become sure of his opinion, too. And isn’t that what gurus do? They know how to say the right things at the right time and get the best out of you.’’
Kusatsu puts a CD by another aspiring act into Rubin’s wireless system. It’s the fourth male singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar that Rubin has heard today. The music is heartfelt, spare, poetic.
Rubin closes his eyes and gently rocks back and forth. ‘‘Everything I do,’’ he says, ‘‘whether it’s producing, or signing an artist, always starts with the songs. When I’m listening, I’m looking for a balance that you could see in anything, whether it’s a great painting or a building or a sunset. There's just a natural human element to a great song that feels immediately satisfying. I like the song to create a mood.’’
He also seeks a melody. As a kid growing up in Lido Beach, on New York’s Long Island, Rubin loved the Beatles. From the first hip-hop records he produced for LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, he insisted on classic song structure.
‘‘Before Def Jam, hip-hop records were typically really long, and they rarely had a hook,’’ he said. ‘‘Those songs didn’t deliver in the way the Beatles did. By making our rap records sound more like pop songs, we changed the form. And we sold a lot of records.’’
Whenever he agrees to produce an album, Rubin scrutinises the songs before going into the studio. Currently, he is producing records for the hard rock band Metallica, the nerd power-pop band Weezer (his deal with Columbia allows him to produce albums for acts not signed to the label) and Neil Diamond.
Rubin works slowly – it can take him years to finish an album. ‘‘A lot of that is because of the songs,’’ Rubin explained. ‘‘I try to get the artist to feel like they are writing songs for the ages rather than songs for an album.’’
His responses are instant, specific and constructively definitive. ‘‘He doesn’t even take notes,’’ Maines recalls. ‘‘He listens with his eyes closed, presses ‘pause’ and then says, ‘You need another chorus,’ or ‘There isn’t enough of a bridge.’ He’s really precise, and you go back to work.’’
‘‘I have no training, no technical skill,’’ Rubin says. ‘‘It's only this ability to listen and try to coach the artist to be the best they can from the perspective of a fan.’’
Back in the library, the singer-songwriter’s demo is ending. Rubin opens his eyes, blinks and says to Kusatsu: ‘‘We may have found one. Does he have any other songs I can hear?’’ He listens to the next track — a derivative, meandering song. With his eyes closed, Rubin begins to shake his head slowly. He looks disappointed.
As a producer or the head of a small independent label, Rubin could afford to be very particular. But Columbia, the home of established stars like Bruce, Beyoncé, and Bob Dylan, desperately needs a jolt of the new and Rubin returns his attention to the Gossip.
‘‘That’s the magic of the business,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s all doom and gloom, but then you go to a Gossip show or hear Neil in the studio and you remember that too many people make and love music for it to ever die. It will never be over. The music will outlast us all.’’
Story by Lynn Hirschberg, editor-at-large for The New York Times Magazine