Tom Freston

**Rick Rubin** (0:02)
Tetragrammaton.

**Tom Freston** (0:24)
When I was in college, this guy told me, you know, you'll go to Lake George and work there for the summer. I don't go home, stay in a resort town. I was a bellhop first. And it was like a bellhop where all these gamblers from the Saratoga Track would stay. They were big tippers. But I met these guys who came from Aspen. They would be in Aspen in the winter, and they were what they called on the circuit. They would work in resort towns. They were bartenders or they became weed smugglers, or they became just free spirits. I learned from these guys and watching them that they didn't have a career path. Their career path was not to have a path at all. To improvise your life experience would count more than anything else.
I learned more there probably than anything I did in college, and I decided it would be a lot more interesting to live my life on the side of the road than going down the middle and take some years off and trying to master experiences. At the same time, I was consumed with the beat literature.
So that was all about the journey is the destination stuff.

**Rick Rubin** (1:32)
On the road.

**Tom Freston** (1:33)
I was on the road and I went on the road. I mean, when I got out of, I went to graduate school to beat the draft because I was an early baby boomer. I was born on November 22nd. I turned 18 the day of the Kennedy assassination. Wow.
That was like the day people thought the 60s started. So I was going into adulthood then.

**Rick Rubin** (1:54)
What do you remember about that moment?

**Tom Freston** (1:56)
I was a freshman in college. I remember coming out of this class around 130 or something. I was in Vermont and you heard the news and you were just like, what?
We hadn't had assassinations before.

**Rick Rubin** (2:08)
Did it seem impossible?

**Tom Freston** (2:09)
Seemed impossible. Then you don't want to go watch the television. Well, the only television was in a four-story dormitory. There's one black and white TV. That's where you spend the next three days watching this whole thing unfold. But people would say that that's when the 60s began. The whole country went into this profound depression, which was awoken from with the arrival of the Beatles the following February, which was a national salvation. Wow, people are happy. Things could be good again. They brought the country out of this depressive state. Then we were off into the 60s.
I decided early on, I would want to not have a mainstream life. I wanted to have a life of adventure and experience, and largely, that's what I've been able to do, doing different things.

**Rick Rubin** (2:58)
It's amazing. Do you think the guys who lived that life, were they all inspired by the Beatniks?

**Tom Freston** (3:06)
No, I don't think so. They were inspired. First of all, they were all ski freaks, so they loved to ski, so they loved an Aspen. An Aspen in that era was, because when I got out of school, I would work there. I remember I was a dishwasher and I had all these menial jobs when I got out of graduate school. But they weren't inspired, so they weren't like readers.

**Rick Rubin** (3:28)
Yeah.

**Tom Freston** (3:29)
They were like doers, they were chasing girls, having fun.

**Rick Rubin** (3:34)
So they would be like ski bums, which later became surf bums.

**Tom Freston** (3:38)
Ski bums, surf bums, beach bums, they were bums.

**Rick Rubin** (3:41)
Yeah. But then, they were after something.

**Tom Freston** (3:44)
Yeah. They were after and they'd like to make money without having to work in a straight job. In those days, having a straight job was to this crowd. That was like arsenic, man. As the last thing you want to do is give your life up but work for somebody else on some conveyor belt. Life seems a lot more interesting not doing that. So then I moved to New York City in 1967
So I was in the cradle of the birth of the counterculture in a way.

**Rick Rubin** (4:11)
So describe New York City. You arrive in 67 What do you see?

**Tom Freston** (4:16)
I see dog shit all over the sidewalks. That was the first thing that struck me because we didn't have that pickup law yet and that just uses god is a thousand. It's a dog shit and on the sidewalk every day, nobody's picking it up, but it was cheap. It was like such a rush.