The 1990s band Rick Rubin wanted to walk out on: “I had to leave”
Rick Rubin has always been willing to give every band he works with a fair shot.
He was never a snob about what he wanted out of any band that he worked with, and even when his roster varied from Beastie Boys to Slayer to The Chicks, every single one of his records was defined by what a fan would have wanted to hear out of their favourite band. But one of Rubin’s superpowers was also knowing whether or not a project was going to work out with him from the first moment that he walked into the studio.
Then again, Rubin’s job seems to look like the easiest gig in the world when you look at what he’s doing. A lot of the time he spends in the studio is about him intently listening and giving feedback on what any of their songs need, and while that sounds like a thankless task on paper, it’s a lot more nuanced. Anyone would need a lot of guts to be Rubin and tell the biggest rock stars in the world that what they have sucks or that they need to come back tomorrow with something better, and that applies to everyone from Run-DMC to Johnny Cash.
That kind of disciplinary role wasn’t necessarily the best choice when working with a band like Slipknot, but Rubin didn’t really need to change what he was doing whenever he worked with some of his favourite acts. He knew what bands were capable of, and even if Corey Taylor vowed never to work with him again, the results really speak for themselves when looking at Rubin’s track record.
He was the creative funnel for a lot of bands that needed the right guide in the studio, and Red Hot Chili Peppers have felt like Rubin’s musical brothers after a while. Any of the band’s classic albums over the years usually sound the way they do thanks to Rubin behind the board, and even if they had some great songs to work with, he was the one pulling new things out of them. ‘Give It Away’ and ‘Under the Bridge’ wouldn’t exist in their present forms without Rubin, but the producer wasn’t exactly ready for what he walked into when he first saw the band.
Everyone knows the kind of no-frills band that the Peppers would turn into, but their earliest iteration as a funk-rap outfit was a lot more wild than Rubin could really handle. He had no problem with his bands getting into a little bit of trouble every now and again, but since half the band were strung out on drugs when he first heard them, Rubin didn’t feel like sticking around for too long when he walked into their rehearsal room.
He was still working with bands like Beastie Boys at the time, and the Peppers were something a little too wild for him at the time, with Anthony Kiedis recalling, “Rick brought the Beastie Boys to our dingy little rehearsal spot, and he sat there, and we rehearsed while they watched. They’re on these little dirty couches, watching us, and we went through our songs. And Rick stood up and said, ‘We’re gonna go now.’ I was like, ‘OK, do we talk again? What’s going on?’ He was like, ‘I thought somebody was gonna get murdered in that rehearsal space. I thought somebody was gonna die. I had to leave.’”
And looking at the kind of production jobs that they had before, you wouldn’t necessarily blame Rubin for thinking that. Freaky Styley is one of the funkier albums that they have ever made, but you practically feel the druggy haze surrounding most of the songs, to the point where one of the songs features a cameo from George Clinton’s drug dealer when the funkmeister didn’t have enough money to pay him.
Rubin was right to think that things were going in the wrong direction, and even if we never got to hear what the producer would have been able to do with Hillel Slovak, Blood Sugar Sex Magik was the sound of a band coming back to life one more time. Mother’s Milk was proof that they could make some fantastic songs, but Rubin behind the board gave them their creative guru, who would stick with them for the rest of their career.
