The band that made Rick Rubin love punk: “The energy of punk rock”
Let’s face it, you can’t sport a long white beard that falls down to your chest without having been a punk at some stage in your life.
Sure, Rick Rubin can now be found permanently barefoot and meditating in the green hills of California, but there was once a time when that beard could be found moshing amidst New York’s most raucous punk shows.
Before he formed Def Jam in his New York University dorm room, Rubin was just another music mad kid like the rest of us. Born in 1963, by the time he reached adolescence, he was in the midst of New York’s counterculture heyday. The streets of Manhattan were certainly scary in the mid-1970s, with high crime rates, deep economic problems and a palpable feeling of societal decay; the only positive was the music.
As always, the music flourished in the trying times of those years and in particular, punk. While the root cause of the punk movement can be traced all the way back to Link Wray in the 1960s, there was something about the cold world of 1970s New York that allowed it to flourish. The iconic club CBGB in Bowery became a breeding ground for disillusioned dwellers of the downtown scene to have their say, and one band arguably did it better than any others: the Ramones.
“When American bands started doing music inspired by English music, talking about class struggle, it didn’t really resonate with me,” Rubin explained of that early New York punk movement, which is entirely unsurprising given how the remainder of his career panned out. In his pomp, Rubin was producing records that were pushing at the very edge of culture, and so clearly had a pre-disposed aversion to anything that just sounded like a re-hash. He wanted innovation, always.
He continued, “Whereas the Ramones were my band. The Ramones had the energy of punk rock, but lyrically, they weren’t an overtly political band, which made sense for the world that we grew up in. Where I grew up was not so far from where the Ramones grew up, and it made sense for our world.”
But it wasn’t that the Ramones completely abandoned the punk styles made popular by British bands. It was in some ways a reinterpretation, but done with a distinct sense of nuance. Sure, punk was about a raucous sonic spirit, but more than that, it was about an attitude, a sentiment, something for young and confused fans to latch on to. The Ramones understood that.
John Cooper Clarke distilled their greatness down to a single essence, best, stating, “Much was made of their snotty asocial stage manner and the speed and brevity of their songs. I bought the LP. The Ramones were and are an enthusiasm of mine. They understood that it was better to have clever lyrics about moronic subjects than the other way round.”
What Clarke identified is ultimately what made Rubin the producer he was. His lucid skill set, which means he can produce records from a host of different genres, was informed by The Ramones and their ability to capture their own voice. It’s not so much about the execution of the ideas so much as it is the authentic clarity, which both the band and Rubin have made the focus of their work.
