“To live as an artist is a way of being in the world.”
Rick Rubin has lived an artistic life, working in collaboration with some of the world’s greatest artists, guiding their creative energy through the chaotic and unrelenting world of music production for over 40 years. Few if any producers have had the range and output of Rubin. It would be a rare soul indeed who has not heard a Rick Rubin-produced song in their lifetime, so prolific and impactful is his musical output.
In this interview about his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, we travel back in time to discuss how he founded Def Jam with Russell Simmons while still living in his NYU college dorm, and how this changed the course of his life. In those early years, Rubin produced hit records for LL Cool J, The Beastie Boys (Licensed to Ill), Run-DMC (King of Rock, Raising Hell) and Public Enemy (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back). He grew up listening to punk and heavy metal, and so it was no surprise that he ended up working with Slayer (Reign in Blood) and then The Cult (Electric, his first rock album). Physically, he’s always had a big presence: tall and broad-shouldered with a short dark beard in the hip-hop years, that just grew with fervour as more albums were made and more awards collected. But it’s his lack of presence in the music that has allowed him to endure as a producer and work with such an array of distinct personalities from Jay Z and Tom Petty to Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. He is known for creating space in the music, distilling ideas, allowing songs to find their way as opposed to prescribing a way.
We also talk about a frightening moment when he first met the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and passed on working with them because they were too wasted. Years later, they regrouped and together made six of their biggest studio albums, starting with Blood Sugar Sex Magik. And we dive into the making of Walk This Way, the incredible rap/rock crossover hit by Run-DMC and Aerosmith as well as his powerful resuscitation of the career of Johnny Cash, with a series of six albums under the American Recordings title which saw Cash mix covers with original material written for him or by him, creating instant classics like Hurt (a cover of Nine Inch Nails) and Solitary Man. It was truly Rubin’s vision, and passion for Cash’s mythology that drove that end-of-career creative crescendo for him.
Rarely has a book felt so original and necessary as The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It’s a book that makes you want to create, forces you to take notes, makes you stop to screen-shot epigrams and share them with friends. Its deeply relatable stories unpack in granular detail the creative process in a tone that is generous and anti-intellectual but loaded with experience. It feels like Rubin is in the room with you, helping you on your journey just as he would Adele or Anthony Kiedis. It’s this transference of spiritual energy and a natural sensitivity that hits you as you turn the pages.
In only a few months The Creative Act has become a book for the ages. In the cannon of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, this book will see creativity being re-valued as core to our humanity and core to every aspect of a healthy and harmonious life, regardless of which field you operate in. At a time when creative classes are being squeezed out of the curriculum, the arts are being defunded and a narrative around rationalism, technocratic thinking and machine learning is taking hold of popular culture, it’s no wonder Rubin’s book of deep philosophical exploration about what it means to be human and create in today’s hyper-accelerated world has resonance. In dark times we look for the light, and Rubin – through this book, prolific podcasting on Broken Record and his new channel and podcast Tetragrammaton – is a vital torch bearer who shows us that the way out, begins by looking inward.
Jefferson Hack: How did you come to write The Creative Act: A Way of Being?
Rick Rubin: My friend Robert Hilburn, who was a music critic for the LA Times for 30 years, set out to write the definitive book about Johnny Cash. The final chapters of that book were about my time with Johnny, the last ten years of his life. So I spent several days with Hilburn, and he asked questions, and we listened back to some of the recordings, which is something I never do.
Through that process, I learned a lot about my relationship with Johnny Cash. I thought, “OK, if this is what the process of working on a book could be like, what do I feel like I have to offer?” In the past, I’ve made as many as eight albums in a year and I’ve done that for a long time. What happens in the studio is very interesting, and often not about music. And I don’t really know how it works, in the same way that I didn’t really understand my relationship with Johnny Cash until I went back and examined it. I thought if we could distil some of those experiences into principles from the studio process, it could be of use. So that started the eight-year research and writing process.
JH: Was that a solo process? Or were you bouncing it off other people?
RR: A combination. Most of it came through verbal interviews. The daily conversation would lead to an opening of thoughts, to deeper enquiry over time.
JH: What’s amazing is the openness of the book; the space it allows for the reader to reinterpret those stories or those ideas into their own practice. I love this quote: “We tend to think of artists’ work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.” Can you describe your way of being?
RR: I pay as close attention to the things that are going on around me as possible. Noticing when something doesn’t make sense, when something’s unusually beautiful or takes my breath away, and trying to understand why. Going for walks in nature and really paying attention. More than anything it’s that focus on what’s happening and paying attention to what’s going on inside me at the same time. If you get good at it, you’re good at being yourself. There is no right or wrong – when I see something and it speaks to me, that doesn’t mean it’s good. That doesn’t mean you’re gonna like it. But I know truly how I feel about it. Having that confidence in what’s going on in me turns out to be powerful and has proved to be constructive in my life.
JH: There are two titles. There’s The Creative Act, and then there’s A Way of Being, the subtitle. It feels to me that when you started writing the book, it was very much aimed at the creative process. And as you wrote it, you realised there was a bigger story.
RR: I had the name The Creative Act before I had built A Way of Being. But it came through in the process, and I liked the fact that the title and the subtitle don’t really fit together well. One doesn’t follow the other. There’s a tension. It’s pulling in two directions, and I think that turns out to be a good thing.
JH: I wanted to pull a quote from the book: “Self-expression is not about you.” I love that line. Often creativity is about stepping out of your own way. I think these direct actionable lines become tools that help people escape creative blocks or overcome hurdles, to allow them to make their best work. Can you explain your thoughts on that to me?
RR: We tend to be our own worst enemies when we’re making things and when we aren’t making things. We second-guess ourselves, we overthink, we are concerned with what other people think. Instead of focusing on the quality of the thing we’re making, we may jump to think about how it’s going to perform commercially, which is really undermining. Also, “I’m not good enough, this isn’t good enough, I can never do it.” The self-doubt. I work with very successful artists and I see it all the time. Or you’ll see the opposite, which is simply the mirror image. It’s another version of insecurity: “Everything I do is perfect, I’m untouchable.” That’s just the other side of the same mask. It’s either overcompensation or under-compensation, but either way it’s not just ourselves being here, now.
“We tend to be our own worst enemies when we’re making things and when we aren’t making things. We second-guess ourselves, we overthink, we are concerned with what other people think” – Rick Rubin
JH: So what were some of the dynamics that affected you in writing the book?
RR: One of my favourite quotes in the book is “the audience comes last”. It’s funny – it’s true, they do come last. If the ultimate goal is to have someone else like it, the best thing you can do is not consider them in the process of making it. I decided not to make a publishing deal before the book was finished because when I explained to editors at publishing houses early on, it wasn’t a book about me, there were no stories of my experiences in the recording studio, that it’s a philosophy book really, they would either have a blank look, or the ones who were enthusiastic thought I would still put in stories of the artists I’d recorded. Since the creative act was not the book expected from a record producer, I had no idea how people would react to it. I wouldn’t change one word if I thought someone would like it more. I wasn’t insecure about the material in the book because it’s the book I want it to be. But the fact that people are responding to it is surprising and exciting.
JH: What were you reading? What were you subconsciously influenced by?
RR: I love the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao. It’s a very small book, 81 little verses essentially. It has an openness, and every time I read it I feel like I’m getting new information. I wanted the book to be open enough, so it’s not telling you things but inviting you to participate so that as you change, it changes. It’s a collaboration with the reader. That was a key point in not wanting to have stories about famous people in it. If I tell you a thought about songwriting, and I say Tom Petty wrote songs this way, you don’t think, “Well, that’s how I’ll do it,’ you think, “That’s how Tom Petty does it because Tom Petty is a genius.” There’s no room for the reader in this story about Tom Petty. There’s no room for the reader in the story about Jay-Z. They’re ’special people’ and we’re people reading a book. It creates distance. I always wanted the book to be for the reader and about the reader. It gives you something to think about to then form your own opinion or conclusion. It invites you to find your way.
JH: It’s not prescriptive. I think that so many artists make the creative act look easy, which is part of their magic. A master makes what they do look easy to make it accessible for people, but nothing’s easy, even if you’re extremely talented, and you have worked with some of the most extremely talented people.
RR: And it’s not easy for them.
JH: That’s very reassuring for a lot of people to hear. But there’s also a myth that a lot of great artists are high when they make work. Drugs aren’t directly referenced in the book. What’s your take on drugs as part of the creative process? Can they be as enabling as they are destructive? Is there room for experimentation? What are the boundaries?
RR: There’s room for experimentation with everything always, because we don’t know. You can’t rule things out until you try them. My understanding from reading Ram Dass is people use drugs to have a shortcut to what a spiritual experience is actually like. It seems like what we’re really after is this spiritual experience. For some, drugs are the shortcut to get there, for some meditation is the way to get there, for others it could be fasting, or becoming vegan … There are many ways to deepen your spiritual connection. Whatever helps you deepen your spiritual connection will probably have a good effect on your art. The downside of drugs is it may not be a sustainable path.
JH: Anthony Kiedis tells an amazing story of how you first met the Red Hot Chili Peppers when they were in the basement of the EMI building. He said that you passed through for a visit and they were all out of it, completely high, and he described it as a very dark place.
RR: It was. I had not been around drugs at that point, and I just felt like something was really wrong. I saw four people who were in a band together, and the way they were looking at each other when they were playing music – I could see they didn’t trust each other. It felt bad.
JH: He said you didn’t call them back?
RR: I didn’t work with them at that point in time.
JH: Later on in conversation with him you described that scene as if someone was going to die.
RR: I felt like someone could. There was a dark, heavy energy that I didn’t understand and a real lack of connection between the people because they weren’t present in themselves so they couldn’t be there for each other. It felt like a disconnected scene, and it felt dark and uncomfortable. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
JH: When you come across artists who are in that space, do you back away?
RR: I did in that case, it’s very rare. I don’t think any of the artists that I’ve worked with are high on a regular basis in my presence, maybe with the exception of marijuana.
JH: I wondered about your own personal darkness. What was the lowest point for you and what was the breakthrough?
RR: When I was about 33 years old, I got very depressed. I was in a business relationship with Warner Brothers. I had a personal relationship with Mo Ostin who was the greatest ever and he built the label and grew it for more than 30 years. It was the crown jewel of the music business. And he was forced out by corporate politics, [which was] out of my realm of understanding. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t have a relationship with the person who took over – he called me and said, “I’m reading your deal. I don’t really like this.” I had been an only child protected by my parents, started Def Jam while I was still in college, had great success right away – had great success all the time – and I didn’t have the musculature to deal with any kind of conflict because I never experienced any over the course of my life. So a phone call, which would have been insignificant to anyone else – and in my case only led to better things – triggered the feeling that the rug had been pulled out from under me. For the first time in my life, I felt vulnerable. I remember I was on vacation over Christmas in Hawaii for the first time in my life. I couldn’t sleep, and I didn’t know what it was called at the time but I started having panic attacks. I thought I was dying, I had never had any of these issues before. It came on very strong.
JH: What did it feel like?
RR: Can’t breathe, can’t sleep. Racing thoughts that don’t stop. It went on for about two years. I’m not much of a Western medicine person, so I would talk to therapists, but also healers, acupuncture, herbalists, all different modalities. I was probably seeing two healers a day, five or six days a week, for years. It was hard to get out of bed, hard to do anything. And nothing fixed it. Eventually, a friend told me about an antidepressant he was on. I’d never taken drugs in my life, but I was really getting desperate – I found a woman who was a psychopharmacologist so she could prescribe antidepressants, and she was also a psychic. She recommended a drug, I tried it the first night and it was one of the worst nights of my life. I think it was Prozac. I took the drug before going to sleep as recommended, went to sleep and woke up an hour or two later feeling like there was an energy race in my body, feeling like there was a current moving all around inside, a terrible feeling. I just laid in bed terrified until the morning. And then she kept prescribing different drugs and each of them made me sick. Eventually, it may have taken ten months, there was one drug that was like a miracle. The night I took it it was like the light in the room turned to candlelight, and I felt like I was being cradled by a loving presence. I took that drug for about six months. A side effect of that particular drug was I gained about 50 pounds, but at least I was able to function.
JH: Thanks for sharing that powerful story. You talked about the early days of starting Def Jam. The world is celebrating 50 years of hip-hop. When did you first hear a hip-hop record? How did you come to discover it?
RR: First thing I heard was Sugar Hill Gang, Rapper’s Delight in high school. Then I can remember kids would record Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack on WHBI on cassette tape and listen to that hour-long show all week on boom boxes. I started recording Mr. Magic at that time too, so that was really where I got into rap music. It felt like A whole new world.
JH: And then you graduated high school and you went to NYU?
RR: Yes, it was lucky I chose to go to NYU as I was accepted to the University of Chicago, which was a better school, but had I gone there my life would have been completely different. Because hip-hop wasn’t happening in Chicago.
JH: And that’s when you started going to clubs in New York and hearing hip-hop being performed live?
RR: There was an English woman named Kool Lady Blue, KLB Productions, who had a Tuesday night hip-hop club downtown. It was at a place called Negril, a reggae club on other nights. She would bring MCs and DJs from the Bronx and Brooklyn down to this club on the Lower East Side. 150 people in a dingy basement, and it kind of looked like an old disco. I think it had a mirror ball.
JH: So it must have been insane to see the attention that LL Cool J got as an artist. Did that happen quickly?
RR: Everything happened pretty quickly. I was probably 20 or 21 years old. We’re doing the things we want to do with no expectations. It was hard to believe. That said, we just continued making more things, so we weren’t really looking at it or weighing it. We were simply in it.
“I feel blessed to have shock moments often when I’m experiencing something in the studio where it’s just a transcendent moment. I’ve experienced it many times, and it’s really addictive” – Rick Rubin
JH: You were in the eye of the storm. Where were the Beastie Boys around this time?
RR: Adam [Yauch] was probably living in the dorm room with me because he would live with me in the summertime.
JH: How did you meet?
RR: We had a mutual friend named Dave Skilken who was the singer of a band called The Young and the Useless, another punk rock band. I knew Dave from the punk rock scene, A7 and East Side punk rock clubs. He introduced me to Adam Horowitz who was also in The Young and the Useless as well as the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys put out a 12-inch record before I met them called Cooky Puss, which was their first college underground hit. But to play Cooky Puss live they needed a DJ, so they asked if I would DJ for them.
JH: Can we talk about Licensed to Ill? That album changed my life, it changed the lives of many people. What was the process? Where were the influences coming from?
RR: From everywhere, all the things we liked. Most of the more rock influences came from me just because I like that kind of music. We would go out to Danceteria every night which was a four-level club. Downstairs would be bands performing. Next level up was the DJ floor and the dance floor.
JH: Would you say that club represented the vibe, the energy?
RR: It didn’t represent the energy of Licensed to Ill, but it represented our life in New York at that point in time. Madonna came out of that club, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Konk, ESG would play there, Bush Tetras … all the cool music that was going on in New York was happening there. It was the coolest club. And we went there every night.
JH: Did you tour with them with that album?
RR: We opened for Madonna on her first tour, The Virgin Tour, and I did the first eight shows and then got an ear infection and had to get off the tour because I couldn’t fly.
JH: Did anything prepare you for the success of that album?
RR: No. And it ended up tearing us apart honestly. It’s a shame because it’s a beautiful piece of work and it represents a beautiful time in our lives.
JH: Walk This Way – I need to understand how you made that happen.
RR: We had finished the Run DMC Raising Hell album. I listened to the whole thing and felt like something was missing. I had gone to dinner in Los Angeles with someone from a record company who wanted to be in business with us. The person said: “What do you attribute the success of rap to, after all it’s not music?” In that moment, I had an understanding of this disconnect: there were the people who listen to hip-hop, and there was everyone else. To the people outside of this tiny community it was not music. Many of them hated it, and many of them just didn’t know what it was. I felt if we could find a song that was a known song, and if it still sounded like this familiar song but was done as a rap song by a rap group it would connect the dots for people who don’t think it’s music. So it really had a mission. It didn’t have a mission to be a hit, it had a mission to explain something: “This is music. This is not foreign.”
JH: Who did you take the idea to first? Run-DMC or Aerosmith?
RR: I don’t think I took it to anyone. I probably started making the track. I can remember telling the idea to the band. Toys in the Attic was a breakbeat and a beat you’d hear at the hip-hop clubs, the groove was already in the vocabulary of hip-hop. People who like rap music never heard the song, they only heard the intro beat. The people who knew the song didn’t know rap music. But it was already living in both worlds, just broken into different pieces.
JH: And the rest is history. The video was also a smash hit and that was when MTV was a real powerhouse. It’s an incredible moment in culture. I want to talk about childhood because I was listening to your podcast with Jimmy Iovine. He talked about a shock moment when he saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and how that changed everything for him, and he ended up working with John Lennon in the studio. Was there ever a shock moment for you in childhood?
RR: Run-DMC went from being my favourite band in the world at a distance to being a band I produced while I’m still in my dorm room at NYU. It was unbelievable. I feel blessed to have shock moments often when I’m experiencing something in the studio where it’s just a transcendent moment. I’ve experienced it many times, and it’s really addictive. That’s the thing we keep going back for, those moments when all of a sudden something happens and no one knows what’s different – it’s like magic. Like the spirit entered the process.
“I’m completely open-minded to the idea that anything is possible … I’m always questioning authority and I’m open to the most extreme fringe ideas. I think good ideas tend to come from the edges” – Rick Rubin
JH: Can you give me an example of one such magical moment?
RR: A recent one in the studio was on Neil Young’s last album with his band Crazy Horse, that he’s been playing with for 50 years. Usually Neil would have songs written, he would play them for the band, they would play along and that would be the record. In this case, Neil didn’t yet have the songs. He normally writes with a guitar, but these songs came while he was walking in the fires and whistling, he’d never done that before. So he’s got these whistled melodies, but he doesn’t know how to play them on an instrument yet or what instrument he would play them on. So the band can’t really follow him. It was very intuitive. We recorded for the whole first week, and I remember thinking, “I don’t know if they’re ever going to be able to play these songs.” That’s how far it sounded from being a record. At the end of the week Neil told me, “Don’t worry, next week we’ll go again.” The next week comes, and Neil tells us what song we were going to do, and the drummer, Ralph, says, “We’ve already played that one.” Neil says, “Let’s try it again. Maybe we could do it even better.” They play, and it’s not better. So we went back and listened to that first week. And in that cacophony, this song emerged. Probably 80 per cent of the songs on the album were from that first week.
JH: So what had changed?
RR: I don’t really know. Neil had never experienced it before either. He was dumbfounded. It was like a mystical process. There was work to be done, but if you could weed through what was there, beneath it there was something really good going on. So we just dipped some things or emphasised some things, and it got really good. It seemed like a miracle.
JH: And Johnny Cash: how did you meet him? How did that incredible series of albums start life?
RR: It’s parallel to the Walk This Way story, it had a particular purpose. All the people that I produced up until that time were young artists, everybody was pretty much my age. They’d usually be working on their debut album, or second album. All the people I’d worked with were contemporaries. And I just had this thought – would this work with a grown-up artist?
JH: What was the attraction? Was there a historical connection that you had with him?
RR: I saw him on TV when I was a kid. I was always drawn to the mythology of the man. Johnny Cash, the man in black.
JH: How did you approach the concept of having him work with other artists’ material and then looking at historical material?
RR: He was typically writing a song or two per project. He liked recording and he liked singing other people’s songs. He liked it and towards the middle of our relationship, he became too ill to tour which was his whole life. His whole life is recording and touring. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were continuing to record when he stopped touring I don’t think he would have lasted as long as he did. Because that’s his whole life. That’s all he did. All he cared about.
JH: You talk about working with an older artist. Did you feel that deference to his experience and his age? Did that change the way that you approached the recording process?
RR: There was a lot to learn. He knew so much about music, he knew so many old songs, and he would just play me hundreds of songs, and I loved it. I loved being around him. He was just a beautiful person. Humble, deep, spiritual, interesting, he knew a lot about history. He didn’t really like to talk. He was very quiet. We’re both pretty quiet. But if I asked him questions, he would definitely talk and he knew so much, so I just liked to be around them.
JH: In the new issue of AnOther Magazine, Marina Abramović says the best artists are the ones that have more ideas thrown in the garbage than they actually keep on the table. Would you subscribe to that idea, that only a small proportion of ideas have significance?
RR: I think you have to test them. Sometimes you can have 50 ideas, and maybe one will be good. And sometimes you’ll have 50 ideas and 40 of them are great.
JH: So what's the test? If something's good?
RR: It’s an internal metre. You know it when you know it. For one thing, it stays interesting. It doesn’t degrade with time. Most things do. Most things lose their lustre, so time is one factor. When I don't understand something, I tend to like it. I tend to like things when I feel like I’ve not heard it before or I’ve not heard it in that way before.
JH: And how did you discover meditation?
RR: I was 14 years old. My parents took me to the doctor who delivered me, Dr John Pisacano, who looked kind of like a beatnik. I went to see him because my neck was always hurting. He said, “Your neck hurts because of stress, learn to meditate.” I learned to meditate and it changed my life.
JH: Amazing that you kept up that practice. So much of the book talks about belief. What does Rick Rubin believe in?
RR: I’m completely open-minded to the idea that anything is possible. And I disbelieve a lot of things that are accepted as truth. I’m always questioning authority and I’m open to the most extreme fringe ideas. I think good ideas tend to come from the edges.
JH: What’s your favourite, historical Shangri La story?
RR: The first time I was there with Neil Young, he told me the first time he ever played the song Cortez the Killer, he had just written it – we were sitting in the control room and he said, “I went into that room and I played it for Bob [Dylan] right in there.”
JH: Was Bob Dylan living in a tent in the garden?
RR: I wasn’t there. That’s the lore of the studio.
JH: What’s your favourite secret Shangri La story that happened in your time there?
RR: The first thing that comes to mind is we were doing a session for the Adele 21 album, and she was singing in the booth. Chris Davis playing drums, who’s maybe the best drummer in the world. Pino Palladino is playing bass. The combination of how groovy the rhythm section was, and the power of Adele’s voice was so funky, and so thick the excitement on the floor in the room with the musicians was electric. I remember, we were doing The Cure song I Will Always Love You. Adele wanted to do a cover and I remembered there was a threat at one point of me doing a bossa nova album with Barbra Streisand. I actually had a demo made up of that Cure song in a bossa nova style with the idea of Barbra singing it, because I thought, much like Hurt with Johnny Cash, hearing Barbra Streisand sing “whenever I’m alone with you, you make me feel like I’m young again” would have a real emotional impact, different from when The Cure sang it. I ended up not making that album with Barbara, but when Adele was looking for cover songs, I said I had this bossa nova version of The Cure. She heard it and she loved it, and it turned into something completely different with her singing it.
JH: One final question. You’re such a good interviewer in your podcasts – what makes a good interview?
RR: I think I’m just interested in listening, in hearing what the person has to say. If anything, my job is to just stay out of it. What I think has nothing to do with it. My only purpose here is if I don’t understand something to ask for more clarification, just so I understand. My only goal is to learn.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin is published by Canongate, and is out now.
