The “most spiritual” musician Rick Rubin ever worked with
For Rick Rubin, music was about more than finding the right hook for a great song. It was about finding that special sound and emotion that no one else could touch on whenever a person sang, and even if it came from hours of hard work, Rubin knew that there was a certain mystical power to the best artists that he worked with.
Then again, that’s not exactly how he started in the industry.
Reign in Blood by Slayer and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy don’t exactly have any spiritual agenda beyond wanting to hit their audience in the face, but when you sit with those records for a while, there was always an X-factor going into it. Rubin felt many of his best artists needed to be more than musicians. They had to be storytellers in many respects, which explains why he eventually got to working with classic rockers like Tom Petty.
Compared to other heartland rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, Rubin could see everything Petty was going for when he heard albums like Damn the Torpedoes or Full Moon Fever. Aside from the massive hooks, the producer saw a musician who was completely in love with their goal of becoming a rockstar, but even when Wildflowers began, the sessions felt a bit different.
Despite writing all the material, Petty remembered being scared that there was so much good stuff coming down the pipeline. That may have unintentionally been a sign of him getting all of his grief out before he eventually split up with his wife, but even Benmont Tench had to admit there was something in the air when working, even remembering that he blacked out midway through tracking ‘Crawling Back To You’.
But if that was their first taste of making rock music sound spiritual, working with Johnny Cash was bound to be a different beast. ‘The Man In Black’ had been on the comeback trail ever since Rubin had signed him, and despite his series of American albums bringing together a lot of covers and old country favourites, Cash always brought his own sense of religious grit to the tunes, even managing to bring Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’ out of its secular context.
Rubin may have been there to capture those performances, but the reason why he knew Cash was special was because of how he saw him live, saying, “He’s probably the most committed spiritual person I’ve ever met. He really lived his life according to his connection with God, really. And he had such an honest and pure way about it. What he believed was so strong that what you believed didn’t matter so much because you were in the presence of someone who really believed and that felt good and that made you believe really in him more than anything else. It was really beautiful.”
Then again, Cash was never one to bat someone down for having opposing beliefs to his. This is the same man who could show empathy to anyone who was different from him, and if the most hardened criminal could have a place in Cash’s heart when playing At Folsom Prison, than it made a lot of sense for him to use his beliefs to help change the world for the better and appreciate the kind of tolerance that many people forego.
Given his love of gospel music, Cash could easily be called a “Christian” artist in the extremely broad sense of the word, but that commitment wasn’t about simply preaching to his audience. He had gone through many hardships in his life, and Rubin knew that his relationship with his higher power is where he found his peace.
