#1881 - Rick Rubin

Joe Rogan (0:13)

Rick Rubin, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.

Rick Rubin (0:17)

Same, happy to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

I'm happy to have you here, man. I'm excited to talk to you.

Rick Rubin (0:20)

Beautiful place.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Thank you. And if you see shooting stars across the ceiling, you're not tripping. Every like 40 seconds or something, star sheets across the ceiling.

So what's happening, man?

Rick Rubin (0:31)

Just hanging.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

You wrote a book.

Rick Rubin (0:32)

I wrote a book.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

I'm excited to read it, man.

Rick Rubin (0:34)

Yeah, I'm excited for you to see it.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

You've had a wild life, brother.

Rick Rubin (0:38)

It's, uh, continues to surprise me on a regular basis.

Joe Rogan (0:42)

Does it?

Rick Rubin (0:43)

Every time. It's like one thing after another.

So much of it's unintentional. I would say all of it's unintentional.

Joe Rogan (0:50)

How so?

Rick Rubin (0:54)

From the beginning, I never thought any of the things that I'm doing were possible or realistic. And I just did things out of the love of them, thinking I would have real jobs and you know, like the thing that my passion would be my hobby and I'd have a job to support my hobby.

Joe Rogan (1:17)

Yeah.

Rick Rubin (1:18)

And it just magically turned out different than that without me knowing it was possible.

Joe Rogan (1:23)

That's the best kind of story. I love those stories. Because when someone just follows their passion and it just leads them to being one of the best motherfuckers in music.

How did you get started?

Rick Rubin (1:35)

I just started making, I went to, was in a punk rock band first and I recorded a couple of punk rock things with my band and liked the feeling of being in the studio, it was fun. And hip hop was just getting started at this time.

And I would go to, there was a club called Negril on Second Avenue in Manhattan, downtown. It was a reggae club most nights, but one night a week it was hip hop. And this was when hip hop was, it didn't really exist other than in the Bronx, Brooklyn and it was this tiny little scene of people playing music in parks. Really, it was not a, it's hard to explain how small it was, how much of a sub genre it was in these days. So the fact that you could see it downtown was a big deal because it didn't really exist anywhere, that you didn't hear this music in clubs, you didn't hear, and there were very few at this time, 12 inch singles would come out and there would be, I don't know, I don't know if there were more than 30 or 40 rap songs in the world at this point in time.

But there were these clubs where stuff would happen, and at this club that I went to called Negril, what you would normally only be able to see at a club in Harlem, like there was a club called Broadway International and there was a club called the Disco Fever, was brought downtown and people downtown could see it. So I started going every Tuesday night, that's when I was going to NYU, and I just loved the music and then I would buy every 12 inch single that would come out when it would come out and none of them sounded like what it sounded like at the club. It wasn't related at all. How so? Live, it was much more of a raw, it was like DJs and break beats and it was harder. Whereas the record sounded more like an R&B record, but with somebody rapping on it. But it wasn't what we know as rap today. That's not what those records sounded like.

They were live bands, they were made by people who made other kinds of music. So they made them the same way they made other kinds of music when hip hop was really different. So I started making hip hop records really with the idea of I just wanted as a fan to hear what it sounded like in a club. So it was more almost like a documentarian style.

And I would just start documenting what I heard and making things that sounded more like the energy of a club, which was again, different than these slick records. And part of it was because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any training or skill, but that allowed, that was what allowed it to be new, was it wasn't doing it the regular way. It was doing it the way of hip hop, which didn't yet exist.