Live Fast, Die Young

by Chris Price

  We recognised her immediately from the videos we had seen on the Internet. Inevitably she was smaller than we'd expected. (What's the web equivalent of 'you look smaller than you do on the telly'? In fact aren't people supposed to look bigger than they do on the Internet?) Attractive with striking features, she had long, dark hair and wore a black, short-sleeved blouse with a ruffle at the neck and translucent sleeves which revealed an intricate, swirling tattoo on her upper left arm.

  We exchanged kisses to both cheeks – it seemed like the right thing to do when greeting LA cyber-royalty, though to my knowledge there's no established protocol here – and I ordered drinks for us all.

  'Do you guys have any money?' she enquired.

  Good lord, this one didn't waste any time. I know struggling musicians find themselves short of a dollar from time to time, but hadn't she just pulled up in a Mercedes? And, come to think of it, hadn't she just signed a lucrative publishing deal with Universal?

  'The ATM was broken and I don't have a cent on me. I'm so embarrassed.'

  Fair enough. Broken ATM or not, I suppose it wouldn't do for a lady, much less a popstar, to be entertained by two gentlemen and have to buy her own drinks.

  We sat down and explained how the idea for the trip had been born, talked through our rough itinerary and what we planned to do along the way. Fortified by the booze, Joe and I slipped into what would turn out to be a familiar and well-trodden schtick before we even knew we were doing it. Tonight, as on many others over the coming weeks when faced with a willing American audience, we adopted the patter and dynamic of a TV comedy duo, but with long, overblown anecdotes instead of actual jokes. Out came the favourite about The KLF burning a million pounds of their own money in the name of art, the one about Bill Drummond's travails trying to sell a Richard Long photograph for $20,000 (and how thirty, dollar-sized pieces of it ended up hanging on my living room wall – more of which in a minute), even the one about Joe's mum being a professional chocolate taster who counsels anorexics in her spare time. Our audience was enraptured and we were playing to it, pulling out only our choicest yarns and spinning them out with hilarious asides and amusing bonus content. We were literally the two funniest, most engaging people on earth.

  Joe, to give him his due, is a wonderful raconteur. When he's in 'oratorical mode' – usually after no more than one-and-a-half glasses of rosé – you can wind him up, let him go, and settle in for several hours of gripping, ripping entertainment. His capacity for memorising names, dates, quotations, entire speeches, lists or anniversaries, and then weaving them into an exhilarating narrative, is astonishing. Conversationally he can hold his own on any subject you care to throw at him – music, cinema, technology, travel, literature, sport. From Rush to Rachmaninov, Swayze to Scorsese, quantum theory to Timothy Leary, Harland not only knows things that you don't, he'll impart them with all the timing and precision of a seasoned toastmaster. You name it, Joe knows stuff about it. And he's going to tell you.

  (What's more – and this delights me and enrages others – he talks like he's on the radio more or less all the time, most often, but not limited to, Radio 4. Give him a call on his mobile some time and have a listen to his voicemail greeting. It has all the hypnotic, undulating timbre of the shipping forecast, rising and falling with the ebb and flow of his carefully constructed message. Or watch his fingers on the table as he's chatting away in a bar and you'll notice him reflexively fading records in and out of his own amusing repartee. He can't help himself.)

  Allow me at this point, if you will, a brief excursion into the crazy world of art terrorist and avant-pop artiste Bill Drummond of The KLF. It is necessary here I think because, first of all, the reference above to the $20,000 Richard Long photo probably needs a bit of background. Secondly, it might give you some idea of how unutterably bored Terra must have been by the time we were through with the story. And lastly, it might just give you some sense of the spirit of arty stupidness in which this whole ridiculous enterprise was conceived. It was the same spirit of arty stupidness that led Chris and me to becoming the only two men on the entire planet driving across America to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of a virtually unknown country rock artist. Drummond, after all, was a man who once drove around London's orbital M25 motorway for twenty-five hours in order to find out where it led.

  I'll try and keep it short. A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind was a landscape photograph, taken by Long and bought by Drummond, of a small stone circle somewhere in Iceland. Bill decided one morning that the photo, which hung on the wall of his Buckinghamshire home, needed to complete a circle of its own. He planned to sell the photograph for the exact amount he paid for it, bury the cash under the stone circle which featured in the original work, take a photograph of it, and then hang the resulting work – under the new name The Smell of Money Underground – in precisely the spot that the original had occupied in his house. You have to admit it has a certain illogical symmetry to it.

  How To Be An Artist is a book by Drummond which tells the story of how he tried to find a buyer for the photograph by placing placards in hundreds of unremarkable locations around the country: attached to motorway flyovers and road signs, tied to parking meters or garden gates – you get the idea. Unsurprisingly, he didn't have any takers. The book was also a present from Chris on my thirtieth birthday, the same year as the Butch and Sundance card which started all this.

  Undeterred by his failure to flog the photograph by unconventional means, Drummond's next tack was to go one better; he cut it into twenty thousand evenly-sized pieces and tried selling them individually for a dollar each. When the last of the pieces had sold, he would take the cash to Iceland as planned and complete the work of art he had held in his head since he removed it from the wall of his house.

  Which is how thirty tiny pieces, or precisely 0.15 per cent, of A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind came to be hanging on my living room wall – framed, individually mounted and certified by Drummond himself. Continuing the Drummond-related exchange of gifts, for my thirtieth birthday Joe had bought thirty dollars' worth of the fragmented photograph, one for each of my years, and in doing so completed a little circle of our own. This was the table-sized work of art I was concerned about not losing when I 'mislaid' Joe's home-made birthday card. It is the nicest, most thoughtful present anyone has ever bought me. It's also the only piece of 'real' art that I own. So you can see a sort of pattern emerging: a tradition of marking ridiculous anniversaries in ever more ridiculous ways. You can also sort of see why we sort of had to spend nearly a month of our lives driving 4,500 miles in search of rock and roll America as a sixtieth birthday present to a musician most people have never heard of. After all, who else was going to do it?

  And there was one more Drummond dictum which had stuck in our minds back in the planning stages. Another of his books – The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way – had asserted that being a Radio 1 producer was one of the fastest ways of losing touch with whatever finer qualities your soul may once have had. We weren't sure whether this was true of us – what would we know, we were Radio 1 producers after all – but surely a quest to find the soul of American music might help us hold onto what few fine qualities we had left.

  Several hours and a good deal more Jack Daniels later, Terra finally got a word in edge ways.

  'Those guys, the ones that burned a million dollars…'

  'Quid,' blurted Joe. 'A million quid. That's nearly two million dollars.'

  'Right, a million quid. Why would they do that?'

  'Art,' I burped, slamming my glass on the table top for emphasis.

  'Art?' replied Terra, incredulously.

  'Yep. They made a film called Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid.'

  'What, and then sold it to a studio?'

  'Nope.'

  'So how did they make the money back?'

  'They didn't. That's the whole point. If they had, it wouldn't have been art,' I explained, as if it were the most obvious thing i
n the world. And it kind of was the most obvious thing in the world, to Joe and me at least.

  'But… I don't get it. How is that art?'

  'How is anything art?' said Joe, as though by simply asking the question he had settled once and for all a matter which has been taxing the finest minds in the world for centuries.

  'It just seems like such a waste,' said Terra. 'Couldn't they have just given it to charity?'

  'Of course they couldn't have given it to charity,' I jumped in, 'otherwise it wouldn't have been art.'

  'And beshides,' added Joe, his sore throat now a distant, bourbon-tinged memory, 'isn't it fun to do something just for the shake of it shometimes?'

  'I gue-ess…' said Terra, with a weary look suggesting she was actually thinking '… and I'm going to spend a whole day with these losers tomorrow?'

  Now don't get me wrong. Neither Joe nor I had any pretensions that what we were doing was art. We were under no illusions that this was anything more than two friends on the road in search of rock and roll America, hoping to learn a little something along the way. What we were doing though, was making a grand gesture for the hell of it, because if you can't find a good reason for doing something, then a stupid one will have to do. In our own little way we were burning a million quid, or at the very least circumnavigating the M25 for twenty-five hours. And we didn't care whether people got it or not.

  19 OCTOBER

  OUR HOUSE IS A VERY FINE HOUSE

  The music that moves Chris fills a canyon. Laurel Canyon, to be precise – the location for today's film shoot with Terra. But the magical musical spot for me in this part of Los Angeles is somewhat smaller. It's a house. Well, a mansion really, built in 1918 and owned at one time by Harry Houdini. There's a lot of security around it, and it looks tricky to get into. (But presumably there's a hidden key somewhere nearby so that you can pick the locks without anyone in the audience seeing.)

  The Houdini Mansion is now owned by Rick Rubin, a man who has shaped my – and, chances are, your – music collection. On the one hand, Rubin's achievements in music are so extraordinary that he, more than anyone else in the field, is deserving of the prefix 'a man who needs no introduction'. On the other, he is such an enigma, and his work so mysterious, that an introduction is precisely what he needs.

  Frederick Jay 'Rick' Rubin, was born on 10 March 1963 in New York and started growing a beard on 11 March. Whilst serving in high school band The Pricks he founded a record label and gave it the rather magnificent name of Def Jam Recordings. In 1984 he met an entrepreneur called Russell Simmons and Def Jam evolved into the most exciting and dynamic record label on the planet. With Rubin handling much of the production work as well as the A&R ('artist and repertoire' in record company speak – the person who says 'Don't record that song it's crap; do record that song it's good' in normal speak), Def Jam signed LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and Beastie Boys. 'Walk This Way'? Yep – that was Rick's idea. Hell, he's even responsible for The Bangles' version of 'Hazy Shade of Winter', one of the most extraordinary cover versions of all time.

  Having pretty much brought hip-hop to the mainstream – not a shabby first day in the office – he fell out of love with Def Jam, moved to LA and founded Def American Recordings. Which is where he decided to reinvent heavy metal. Rock music was in good health at this point: Metallica, Anthrax, Maiden, Guns N' Roses were all having considerable success, so the genre wasn't crying out for a new dimension. Clearly no one told Rick. Or for that matter Slayer, a band noted for their recurrent themes of death, deviance, warfare, suicide, religion, necrophilia, Satanism and Nazism. Cliff Richard's a big fan. Impossibly loud, devastatingly thrashing and staggeringly technically accomplished, their masterwork – and their first album with Rubin – is called Reign in Blood. It's a classic.

  So, having done rap and metal (oh, and having completed an Aerosmith revival by producing the brilliant Permanent Vacation album – so that's classic rock ticked off as well), he turned to the fusion of genres being peddled by sock-sporting funk-rock chancers the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Which is where the Houdini Mansion comes in. You see, Rick's vision for them involved recording at his new gaff in LA. The subsequent record, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, beat the sales and acclaim of anything the band or Rubin had produced before. No matter what the hip, sneery journos might say – Blood Sugar is a masterpiece. From the mono AM radio-style opening of 'The Power of Equality', through the world-dominating 'Under the Bridge', all the way to the Charleston skip of 'They're Red Hot', it's a record of impeccable musicianship, ingenious production and truly awful lyrics.

  When I first heard it I found it awkward and terribly long. Yet their tattooed, beachside ne'er-do-well appeal prompted me to do something I had never done before. I tried harder to like it. So when the summer holiday came, I decided I would listen to one album and one album only, so that by the start of the school year I'd have a new favourite band. It worked. I planned to apply precisely this logic to item number one on my to-do list for the trip – learn to love the music of Gram Parsons. A month locked in a car with several albums and a Gram obsessive bleating in my ear was sure to do the trick.

  The Houdini Mansion has since been used as a studio for a range of records including such gems as Jay Z's 99 Problems and The Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium. It's also rumoured to be haunted. Now I'm pretty sceptical about the whole haunting business, but there's a big difference between a house that can scare, say, first lady of the paranormal Yvette Fielding, and a house that scares... Slipknot. That's right – Iowa's purveyors of finest thrash metal recorded at the house and to this day will not go back there, due to what Joey Jordison (the death-mask-encased, crown-of-thorns-wearing drummer) describes as 'an unsettling incident in the basement'. The record they made there, The Subliminal Verses, is another of Rick's gems, proving once again that he is a musical alchemist, turning the heaviest of metals into pure gold records.

  Everyone owns a bit of Rubin somewhere. If at this point you're thinking that you don't, then I'd suggest a quick look at his discography and you'll find that you probably do. Shakira's 'Hips Don't Lie'? Rubin. Sir Mixalot's bottom-fetish anthem 'Baby Got Back'? Rubin. System of a Down? Rage Against the Machine? Weezer? Rubin. Lil Jon? Metallica? AC/DC? The Cult? Justin Timberlake? All Rick Rubin. Trust me, it goes on. And then there's the reason I love Rick Rubin. Johnny Cash.

  Today, Johnny Cash is venerated as one of the greats of American music. His dusty outlaw boom-chikka-boom tales are woven into the fabric of the country's musical history. The mariachi horns of 'Ring of Fire' are as familiar to the American ear as the whistle of a distant freight train. They laughed along with 'A Boy Named Sue', cried along to 'Hurt', and broke into spontaneous applause when he said 'Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.' But it wasn't always this way. After commercial success in the sixties and TV success in the seventies, his star lost some of its shine, reaching its nadir with such country-lite nonsense as 'Chicken in Black' (a song about having his brain put in a chicken – really). Shortly after that particular low point he left Columbia records and exited the mainstream. A little while later, enter Rick Rubin.

  In 1993 Rick signed Johnny Cash to his Def American label, and a year later released an album comprising mostly covers, and pretty obscure ones at that. So starts the greatest last act in rock and roll history. Entitled American Recordings, the record reminded listeners of one thing – that Johnny Cash was a singer of songs without equal.

  In the ten years that followed, Johnny Cash would release another three albums in this vein, each one offering a mix of gospel, country and ingenious covers. Much has been written about his rendition of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt', and its quietly devastating video. But for me Johnny Cash did one thing that no one else on the planet could. He made country music sound great. In his hands, with his voice, it no longer sounded like shit-kicking, cousin-shagging fairground music – it was soaring and graceful, evocative and warm. That's why Johnny Cash is the only country artist I love. And that's why I love Rick Rubin.<
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  Not that anyone really knows what Rick Rubin does. I've produced dozens of interviews with people who have worked with him, and none of them – not one – can tell me.

  The Gossip: 'Oh, he's a guru.'

  Yeah – but what does he do?

  Macy Gray: 'He's like a wizard.'

  Seriously – what does he do?

  James Hetfield: 'You know what, I'd often ask myself that exact same question... What does Rick actually do?'

  So after extensive research I can tell you exactly what I think Rick Rubin does. Not much. And that's his genius. Simply by being there, Rick Rubin makes things better.

  Production is often considered a black art. There are many schools of thought about how best to produce a record. Some producers almost become a member of the band, some help write the songs, others just set up the equipment and press record. Rick Rubin can do all of these things, but often he is employed simply because, when you need someone to say 'That ain't good enough yet', he's one of few people left on the planet that a band like Metallica will listen to. When you travel to gigs on a private jet with groupies on standby to service you between encores, there aren't many people left who will say no to you. Because of his success, wisdom and skill, Rick Rubin is pretty much the only guy left. And it helps that he has a beard you could lose a bear in.

  So I was searching for a mansion, Chris was looking for a bungalow.