Golden Soul: the gig Rick Rubin called “the greatest musical experience”
Rick Rubin was always a producer who relied on performance over anything else. Yeah, producers like to add in the bells and whistles after the fact to make sure every instrument sounds pristine, but there are just as many who want to capture the vibe of the band playing live. Half of Rubin’s greatest records came from him working with the live mindset, but really, he knew that nothing he worked on was going to surpass what he saw with James Brown.
By the time Rubin had started, he was far removed from the energetic soul music that Brown was working on. He had grown up in the seedy underground of New York punk, and that was more about trying to capture the feeling of anger and frustration whenever he got to the stage.
Once he realised that his life would be much better coaching stars to make their greatest hits, he started studying all kinds of music. Once he started becoming a prominent figure in the world of hip-hop thanks to Run-DMC, the lessons of James Brown were already etched into his psyche.
Despite being one of the most rhythmic people to touch a microphone, Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ has been used in some of the best hip-hop songs known to man. Much like Rubin, Brown was known to be coaching his band throughout every show, earning the title of the ‘Hardest Working Man in Show Business’ by playing until he was drenched in sweat.
Although Brown didn’t catch on to Brown until the 1980s, he remembered seeing him play as a life-changing experience, telling Rolling Stone, “I first saw James Brown around 1980, between my junior and senior years in high school. It was in Boston. It was in a catering hall with folding chairs. And it was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. His dancing and singing were incredible, and he played a Hammond B3 organ tufted with red leather, with ‘Godfather’ in studs written across the front.”
While it’s hard to really connect Brown to the sounds of metal and punk that Rubin started working on, they behave in a very similar way if you know where to look. Both genres rely on only a handful of chords, the performance is normally about how much passion you put into every note, and more often than not, you’re going to put your body through its paces to make sure that everyone has a good time.
In fact, the simplicity of many of Brown’s songs probably drove Rubin to work with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Despite coming from the world of hip-hop when he started working with them, he was known for breaking things down whenever they played, asking them to play just the basics to take the audience with them on tracks like ‘Give It Away’.
Brown could have easily put any musician to shame with his backing band, but he didn’t need to. He just needed to put the grit of life into his music, and that kind of intensity has been a part of Rubin’s production style ever since.
