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“The Beatles are proof of the existence of God”: The moment Rick Rubin fell in love with music

Mon 20 March 2023 20:30, UK

Rick Rubin has built up one of the most impressive rap sheets in music history. Aside from being the cornerstone behind Def Jam Records, he’s had his hand in records by Slayer, Beastie Boys, Tom Petty and Johnny Cash. It’s impossible to keep one’s head straight with that much diversity, but for Rubin, all roads circle back to The Beatles.

When asked about his musical upbringing, Rubin mentioned his intro to music came from listening to ‘The Fab Four’s cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’, recalling in Newsweek: “I was probably four, and I can remember feeling electrified. That was the first real rock ‘n’ roll I’d ever heard”.

Outside of his own circle, Rubin always held The Beatles in high reverence, saying that their music “transcends everything. It’s much bigger than four kids from Liverpool. For me, the Beatles are proof of the existence of God. It’s so good and so far beyond everyone else that it’s not them”.

After being ignited by The Beatles, Rubin made music his life-long pursuit and was originally drawn to the sounds of punk rock. While the raw aggression of punk resonated with him at an early age, his local music scene crossed over towards hip-hop.

Although Rubin felt like an outcast being into punk rock, the novelty of him attending hip-hop shows helped ground him. He remembered: “I think that the oddity of me being there made it OK. Like, something about it was so strange that I was in these places where there were no white people at all”. After getting into the local scene, Rubin launched Def Jam out of his dorm room at NYU.

The Beatles’ influence on Rubin led him to hip-hop

Despite all of the hip-hop morphing out of jam sessions, Rubin was always focused on the power of a song, which was directly taken from The Beatles’ model. As Rubin tells it: “I think the reason I did it was really just my having grown up with the Beatles. That’s how I heard music—in a song format”.

Using trial and error in the early days of producing, Rubin was able to get down to the specifics of what makes songs great. Even though he was never a great musician, Rubin’s skills always lay in knowing what the song needed or where a song’s power was, explaining, “I don’t think you can define what it is, but you know it when you hear it. It’s amazing that sometimes you might hear a song that, knowing what you know, won’t make sense—and yet it will still be great”.

It’s that simple approach to production that led him to produce Tom Petty’s late-career renaissance Wildflowers and eventually led him to work with Johnny Cash when turning his final performance: ‘Hurt’. Whenever he approached any of these acts, Rubin always talked about looking at the song from a fan’s perspective, gauging a good song by what speaks to him and encouraging his artists to amplify those moments.

Rubin’s roots also came full circle when he teamed up with Paul McCartney for the mini-series McCartney I II III, where he talked to McCartney about the history of The Beatles and the intricacies of what made those songs electrify him when he was a kid. Rubin may have started as a kid with an innate love of music, but his infatuation with The Beatles led him on the miraculous journey from a New York dorm room to one of the most revered producers in the industry.