AN OFFER HE COULDN’T REFUSE!

BLACK COFFEE at 4.30 in his Shelbourne Hotel suite, a 41-year-old American is readying himself for his day’s labours. But since he lives in the rock ’n’ roll time zone which shares its nocturnal affinities, afflictions and addictions with janitors, taxi-drivers, 24-hour petrol-pump attendants and the staff of the Manhattan, this is 4.30 p.m. not a.m., as Don Was gathers himself to oversee the last of six weeks’ sessions The Rolling Stones have spent recording in Dublin.

Curly-haired and Los Angeles youthful at 41, this is his first outing with the Stones but Don Was has an enviable list of former production clients – Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Paula Abdul and the B-52’s to name only those most likely to be found in anyone’s record collection.

We can and will talk of them and also The Rolling Stones who’re finally recording in the land where they’ve regularly socialised since the Sixties but Don Was also has his own other strings to his bass. Like a number of today’s most stimulating producers, Brian Eno, Hal Willner and Daniel Lanois for example, the man originally christened Don Faginson back in his native Michigan has his own artistic hinterland in his other guise as one of the two masked men who lead those sceniarists of subversion, Was (Not Was).

Their speciality also lay in landmining the walls of perception. With Out Come The Freaks in 1981, Was (Not Was) with a uniquely savage glee, combined all the musical styles of Detroit. But just Motown but also P-Funk; not just the proto-punk guitar squall of the MC5 but also free jazz. But these retrospectives weren’t undertaken with paralysing respect. At their furthest out, Was (Not Was) always chose the most clashing contrasts. On their second album, Born To Laugh At Tornadoes, they’d employ as guest vocalists both Ozzy Osbourne and the crooner once dubbed ‘The Velvet Fog’, Mel Torme and later, they’d recruit Leonard Cohen to lay his most graven tones on a song about “Elvis’ Rolls-Royce.”

Last time, long long ago, when I met an American in a Shelbourne Hotel room, he kept a copy of Dante’s Inferno in the loo and Don Was’ breakfast table is also impressively arrayed – a bulky paperback history of the USA sits alongside a copy of Robert Calasso’s The Marriage Of Cadmus And Hamony with a dedication from its presenter, Marianne Faithfull. And on top of it sits a CD of Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone classic for Blue Note, Speak No Evil. It reminds me when we first met.

“Can we not deny the ship of state is out of control?” Ronald Reagan intoned through the speakers of a studio high in Black Rock, the CBS skyscraper in New York. It’s early ’81 and Don and David Was together with Michael Zilkha, the generalissimo of Ze, are teasing out the final mix of ‘Out Of Control’, the track on their debut that chops up and completely reverses the flow of the President’s spurious sincerity.

I’m meant to interview them but there’s one spectacular distraction. Somewhere below us, Miles Davis is recording The Man With The Horn, his comeback album after a long illness. Myself and Don take an old-fashioned lift down to the bowels of the building and sit on the couch outside, listening like pilgrims who’ve reached the last door before the Holy of Holies to the playbacks of the Davis trumpet that still penetrate through the panelled door of the studio.

As a uniformed black woman passes us with a tea-trolley, I’m personally enacting out a scene of total star fetishism. We aren’t just that close to Miles Davis; we’re even closer to the woman who will serve him his tea.

A decade later, Don Was now tells me the day was even more star-crossed. Simultaneously Bob Dylan was finishing Saved and according to Don, “there was something about that night, as if we were punching through this wall, this massive separation between the two artists that I most admired in my whole life. And I’m not saying we were crossing into that dimension but the wall was breaking down and we were seeing how these records were made. That was the major thing going from record fan to participant . . . it was like going into the world of the Gods.”

Certainly you could perceive Was (Not Was) as the mutant offspring of Dylan and Davis, combining the beat sarcasm and steam of consciousness of Dylan’s Sixties’ lyrics with an understanding of black music that didn’t decouple jazz from rhythm ‘n’ blues. And yet even in the innovative aftermath of punk, Was (Not Was) probably wouldn’t have gained exposure on any other label but Ze.

Ze was and still is inimitable. Distributed through Island, it has never quite attained the retrospective glamour of other pioneering indies possibly because its releases always emanated an air of self-consciousness and cultured self-regard, as if Ze would never let itself be soiled by any vulgar notions of rock populism and authenticity.

Its signings paraded its sensibility. John Cale, Lydia Lunch, The Waitresses, James Chance and Suicide represented those regions of New York and American art-rock unconcerned with punk laddishness while Kid Creole And The Coconuts arranged a dazzling cosmopolitan marriage of theatre and Latin music.

Like Creole, Was (Not Was) represented Ze’s subversion of dance, both groups appearing with Material and others on Mutant Disco A Subtle Dislocation Of The Norm, a six-track compilation that took disco into realms its various successors still rarely venture next or hear.

The Was (Not Was) track, ‘Wheel Me Out’, a fierce collage of urban anxiety, pulsating funk, sour cream horn lines and nasty guitar lines was their Ze calling card. How, I ask Don, did Was (Not Was) make their Ze connection?

“We sought them out,” he explains. “We’d already recorded ‘Wheel Me Out’ as a 12-inch and we knew it wouldn’t be going to CBS. So it was really a matter of who would be crazy enough for it and Michael Zilkha seemed the logical candidate. I called him up but I couldn’t get him on the phone so my partner, David, who was then the jazz critic of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, talked to him in the guise of the interview and played him the tape. And fortunately August Darnell, who happened to be hanging out in the office, said you’ve just got to put this out.”

“What was going on was the destructuring of disco music. Breaking the music down to the essential grooves and then layering the least obvious, bastard textures. That was a very exciting thing because at that point, dance music seemed to be the frontier, the great unexplored terrain. How far could you take it and still keep people dancing? How much content could you fit in?”

But what was the peculiarity of Ze? He laughs: “The peculiarity of Ze was that the president of the label had absolutely no concern about selling any records.”

But then Michael Zilkha was unique – and probably unrepeatable. Once theatre critic for The Village Voice, he apparently didn’t need to sell records because, as heir to the Mothercare fortune, he seemingly had wealth to burn. So Ze could seem a rich boy’s toy, a vanity label, a snobbish socialite club, bemusing and peeving New York music biz versions who’d fought their way into Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queen’s.

So as Don Was now tells it: “The discussions were always reversed. We’d say maybe we should have a single. The wise president is always supposed to talk some sense into the artist and, in this case, he was the wildest of them all, willing to break every convention.”

Michael Zilkha must also have been the only record label head to quote Samuel Beckett’s line, “I can’t go on; I must go on” as his maxim but eventually financial reality did intercede and Ze didn’t go on.

Don Was: “I still see Michael. Ultimately he realised he was in the music business whether he wanted to be or not, so he was going to have to deal with the business end of it or he was going to cease operating. So the fantasy ended and once he accepted that, it was just as easy for him to accept his father’s offer to go into the oil business. It was the same thing. You find these wells and either they yield or they’re dead. If you hit, you hit and he hit and now he’s living in Houston.”

“Michael,” he concludes “was a Medici. He helped a lot of people. I’d certainly be playing back at the Holiday Inn in Pontiac, Michigan, if it weren’t for him.”

Don and David had produced Ze albums for Cristina and their own singer Sweet Pea Atkinson, but after Ze folded and Was (Not Was) moved to Geffen, the career crisis arrived that forced Don into a serious production career.

According to Don: “Geffen, not out of maliciousness or racism but out of cold-blooded marketing, said “Look, we have these two white guys going out and doing all the interviews and we’ve got these three black singers and it doesn’t make any sense and nobody knows how to market this thing.”

In consequence Geffen demanded they replace the black singers with whites and Was (Not Was) was refused. Don Was now mildly believes “that as a cold-blooded marketing decision, there was probably some wisdom in it, but it was unthinkable for us. Just on a personal level, it would have been hard to sleep at night. We didn’t do it so they put us on suspension and we couldn’t do a record for about three years.”

“Then,” he recalls, “some people realised they don’t sing, they can barely play so they must be producers and songwriters. They went: Let’s get them and it was a natural progression to start producing.”

But it was basically journeyman work with, as he tells it: “A stream of white English bands who wanted to make the soul pilgrimage to Detroit. But I lived off it for two years.”

And yet, as his reputation grew, he got a surprise hit with one act, few would have associated with Was (Not Was). Reviving the B-52’s career and helping Paula Abdul makes sense but Bonnie Raitt seems far removed from the sophisticated codes of Ze.

“I suppose so but in a broader sense it’s not,” he answers carefully. “Was (Not Was) was about creating something new out of existing textures. But Bonnie’s basically a breakthrough artist in terms of someone deeply and authentically rooted in American, black blues and rhythm ‘n’ blues and yet is essentially a folk singer who can incorporate black phrasing, vocally and in her slide guitar playing into this white folk idiom.”

“Remember she’s been making records for 25 years. What she’s doing is not so unusual today but when her first album came out, it had a profound influence on me. Not just because of these two styles coming together but also just in its production values. Her first album is magnificent, just recorded on a 4-track. It’s so live and you just get all the interplay between the musicians.

“It’s the same with Willie,” he continues with the sole expletive of the interview. He still appears awed, “What the fuck is Willie Nelson? He appears to be a country singer but if you spend half-an-hour with him, you realise this guy is some universal character. To me, he always seems like some Tibetan monk who got misplaced and dropped into Texas.

“He doesn’t change his style. He fits into all these different milieus because he belongs to this larger chemistry,” Don proposes, not long from the experience of recording Across The Borderline, an album of duets that included such unusual alliances as Nelson and Sinead O’Connor replaying Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s parts on ‘Don’t Give Up’. What’s the inside story of that teaming?

Don says it was one of the few welcome consequences of the barracking Sinead received at the Bob Dylan anniversary concert. “Willie felt this instant kinship with her,” he recalls. “He always sides with the rebel, regardless of whether he’s an axe murderer or a renegade congressman.

“Actually, there’s a goofy story to this,” he expands, “because the first time I heard ‘Don’t Give Up’, it didn’t have any album credits and I wasn’t familiar with Kate Bush so I thought it was Dolly Parton, and I thought what a brilliant thing for Peter Gabriel to get her and what a lovely job she’s done. So I thought Dolly Parton would do it but she cancelled at the last minute. I’d even forgotten Sinead’s connection with Peter Gabriel but Willie liked her and we did it the next day.

“I think she’s a great singer” he adds “and she was certainly wonderful that day. She came into a room full of strangers with a 9-piece band with Willie Nelson, who though he’s one of the nicest, most calmest people around, just looking at him in the same room, he’s a larger-than-life character and a little intimidating. She sang great and the whole thing was done live. I’d work with her any time.”

We’re slowly proceeding through the pantheon, gradually climbing to the American peak and Don Was’ self-acknowledged “main man,” Bob Dylan. Years after he witnessed the mastering of Saved in New York, Don got to produce Knocked Out, Loaded.

Dylan remains an enigma only to those with misplaced expectations. His later career doesn’t lack for follies and blind alleys, like his comic turn with the Grateful Dead but both Dylan’s cavalier disregard for his immediate reputation and his critics’ nostalgia for his Sixties’ work mask the quality of his later songs. Not surprisingly, Don Was makes a persuasive and intimately detailed case for Dylan’s defence.

“He’s a man,” he says, “who would rather fail than be caught standing in the same spot.”

Critical and audience disaffection seems to reside primarily in the fact that Dylan’s own judgement of his work and ambitions can often so spectacularly diverge from even his allies. For instance, it’s hard to comprehend the reasoning behind his hoarding of stunning masterpieces like ‘Blind Willie McTell’ and ‘Series of Dreams’ till years after their recording.

Don acknowledges the inside industry lore that “he’s known for that. He’s got all sorts of things. The thing that really shocked me about the Biograph set was the tracks he’d withheld from Blood On The Tracks and went and recut. I mean, they’re absolutely magnificent. He had his reasons that are not evident to me and I don’t think he did them better.

“But I will say this,” he expands, drawing on his own experience of Dylan’s artistic conscience, “he is a real good listener and a really intuitive musician and he obviously felt somehow at that time that he missed the point of the songs. He’s pretty sensitive to that. He’s not haphazard, he really knows what he’s doing. And if he didn’t put them on the record, although we may enjoy listening to them, they missed the point for him.”

How did you produce him?

“Frankly I hope I get to do another record with him because I feel more qualified now. I was a little too in awe to be as helpful as I could have been.”

He moves onto a statement of his own production philosophy: “All artists are the same. Everybody loses perspective in the middle of making their album. In essence, the producer’s gig is not to dictate to the artist but to help figure out what the artist’s vision is. And at the beginning of a record, that may be very amorphous and they may not be able to articulate it clearly. You have to get some understanding where they’re trying to go and then take an objective step back and do everything you possibly can to see it goes there and implement the completion of the project in a proper fashion. And that means feeling free to say ‘you’re really fucking us up’ because that’s why they have you there, not to sit by themselves and be confusing.”

So returning to the Dylan theme, he reflects that “to be able to tell Bob he could sing or play something better, that was a major turning point. I was terrified, first of all, because I’d heard so many stories about him walking out and throwing tapes in the trash and it just wasn’t true. “People,” he acknowledges “may not like the record and it’s not one of his most regarded albums but it’s what he intended to do at that point of time. To me, it’s not so much a poet’s album as a musical feeling.

“I think if people would give Bob the same leeway as they give John Lee Hooker and not necessarily have him have every sentence jam-packed with meaning and significant lines. Because essentially I think he’s a bluesman, a highly intelligent and well-educated bluesman. And yet he doesn’t always have to be as articulate as he was on say, ‘Gates Of Eden’ to make legitimate art.

“So I think that album was really about a blues kind of feeling and it’s a good album in that context. But if you’re looking for ‘Gates Of Eden’, you’re not going to find it there.”

And then I figured we’d talk about the Stones except Don Was sidetracks by mentioning his connection with Brian Wilson. Furthermore he isn’t relaying some tenuous social anecdote. Don Was has actually signed the bewildered and bewildering Beach Boys mage.

I hardly know how to react. The tales about Wilson’s tortured and erratic psyche and the decades of infighting within the extended Beach Boys family are so fraught and contradictory, only the most headstrong would risk making authoritative judgements. But Don Was insists Wilson is not a burnt-out case.

“It stems from a couple of gigs I played with him,” he explains “just me on bass and Brian playing piano.” To think of such a sheltered figure whose most glorious music was doctored in studio, exposing himself in a duo is disorientating enough but Don takes the scene even further out . . .

“During the course of a half-hour set, he would just destroy two or three Beach Boys classics, just terrible, perfunctory versions .There was really a specific moment when I played a gig with him and it was embarrassing. But then we got to ‘Love And Mercy’ and it was the most transcendental performance I’ve ever been a part of.”

He speaks as if still awestruck: “He just absolutely cut to the essence of the song and delivered it so succinctly and so beautifully that I almost forgot to play. It was just this magnificent thing where he connected with the deepest forces at play in music and I thought ‘Man, if people could just see this’.”

This revelation led Was to make Wilson the first signing to his own label, Karambolage, and set up a project with BBC, directing an Omnibus film on the Beach Boys’ fallen angel in 1994. He concedes the hazards but still believes Wilson can make special music.

“Unfortunately people don’t think about that, they think of all the tabloid bullshit. The general perception is that he’s insane or incapacitated and I’ve seen him do some magnificent music. Now I don’t know if he could replicate this moment on stage 200 nights a year for an hour every night but if I could capture that on film, it would be a great thing.”

What’s his line on the frustrations that have dogged Brian Wilson’s career? Don Was prefers to answer musically and not comment on the Wilson family’s California Gothic melodrama.

“He’s not without problems as he’d be the first to admit. It scares people off and I’m talking about record executives who could sign a 19-year old kid who’s willing to go out there and be a guest on every ‘Good Morning’ chat-show. So why deal with somebody who, not only comes with some problems, but also is 50. That’s a real problem”.

Now he veers towards the handicaps of the senior artist. Indeed if you look at the Don Was credit list, it’s evident he specialises in redeeming and revitalising the careers of the greying. His own MCA-connected label, Karambolage – it means, more or less, “unavoidable collision” in German – has also signed Kris Kristofferson and the Young Rascals’ Felix Cavaliere and Don Was believes such pastmasters can still find an audience.

His experience with Bonnie Raitt proves the point for him: “ there’s this mysterious audience that’s not being reached by pop radio. It’s an audience that’s not interested in dance or rap music or Mariah Carey. In America, people of my age and I’m 41, will always be in the majority and they still buy CD’s. There’s these adult music buyers and they’re a significant portion.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t like to sign a 19-year old Paul Westerberg,” he claims but Don Was’ recent work definitely inclines towards the great vocal characters. For MCA, he’s nursemaiding an album of duets between country and R’n’B or soul singers with such mouthwatering match-ups as George Jones and B.B. King, Lyle Lovett and Al Green, Conway Twitty and Sam Moore and Little Richard and Tanya Tucker.

“The problem is time,” he exclaims and you do wonder how he can give quality time to all the projects he mentions. En passant, he worked a week with Paul Brady, though he can’t assess how that relationship might develop. And almost as an afterthought, he discloses that he’s toying with the idea of a band including himself, Benmont Tench, Ringo Starr and Merle Haggard.

Perhaps it’s easier for him to circle around the current work in progress. Stones reports are positive but if they’ve cooked the basic meal in Dublin, producer and band haven’t started on the sauces and the garnish, all those later dubbing and remixing stages that really decide the identity and artistic fate of an album. Besides he must be circumspect since no producer can really presume to speak for The Rolling Stones.

Still etiquette allows certain topics to be broached. Like how did Don Was get the gig? In reply, he pleads comparative ignorance:” I’m not quite sure. I’ve known Mick Jagger for a couple of years but I’d never met the other guys. Strange metamorphoses, somehow they felt they needed a producer. It was luck on my part.”

Professional cynics might conclude that any Rolling Stones’ producer would be upbeat about a forthcoming album but it is unusual, if not unprecedented to even talk about one while it’s still unfinished. Certainly it can be safely presumed that Don Was’ availability points to a mood of confidence.

For his part, he observes that “it’s a fortuitous time to work with them. I think that they’re really a band who are serious about making music and who wanted every possible advantage to make a great record. And they’re emotionally ready for it.”

He concedes: “I don’t really know them except for this record but I see them as only sparked up. But from what I understand from people who’ve been around them, there’s a definite vibe . . . Everybody’s showing up for work if you know what I mean.”

He allows himself one anecdote: “We did this record for Marianne Faithfull the other night. And I played bass, whereas on the album, I’ve been sitting up there and listening but not actually playing. And playing with Keith, something really struck me. It’s about how deeply he listens to what’s going on and how he responds to it. He’s such an intuitive player, so aware and so immediate to react to it.

“He’s really like a jazz musician. The Rolling Stones are rock’n’roll beats and aesthetics but the concept musically is very like a jazz group in terms of the subtle interactions and the spontaneity. And that’s the beauty that makes a great band. I don’t know if they always have all the channels open for that kind of band communication musically but they do now. And that’s the exciting thing of what’s going on now.”

But if the baby’s being born, it’s too early to tell us the colour of its eyes?

“Sure but it’s definitely got good eyes”.

I started the year interviewing Hal Willner; I finish it chatting to Don Was. Perfect symmetry since their sensibilities are similar. Both Willner and Was (Not Was) can make intensely theatrical music with a sour urban glamour; both skew and view rock through a filter of the Fifties that include the Beats and jazz, Miles Davis and William Burroughs before Bob Dylan.

Don Was suspects it’s the consequence of belonging to the generation on the cusp, “being just too young to have caught it, being a little kid when there were beatniks for real and it was actually happening. So I missed the truth and got only the glorified version. And Hal, who I think is the same age as me, was probably in an identical milieu. It’s wanting to carry on a perception of that tradition which is probably not accurate, this romantic perception that leads to the next stage of the game.”

It can also mean belatedly saying farewell to the certainties of the Fifties when the suburban nuclear family seemed impregnable and the ideal male role models were father-figures like James Stewart and Henry Fonda. Certainly Don believes David Was’ best lyric was on ‘Somewhere In America, There’s A Street Named After My Dad’:

“It’s a particular American late Fifties image, this idea of your Dad being the hero. I think films and television have sort of destroyed that. They had a television show called Father Knows Best. It starred Robert Young as this omnipotent father with infinite wisdom and calm. Somehow it was like Dad was going to save us from the Russians.”

Modishly if lazily, you could argue that Was (Not Was) were the first American post-modernist group. But they weren’t slavish replicants since Was (Not Was) manufactured their own wild wardrobe from the thrift store of the past. Sadly though they now seem on hold.

Don says it isn’t the end of the saga. “But what ultimately happened is that we were corrupted by our little taste of success,” he adds. “It’s a perfect example of artists getting lost in the middle of it. People saying if you could just clean it up 10%, you could actually sell a couple of records. But we never intended to do that. It’s a tantalising prospect and unless someone grabs you by the throat and says ‘Wake up asshole, you’re ruining it’ you don’t notice it happening. It happens a millimetre at a time until, one day, I looked up and we were on stage and if we’d just substituted Motown material for our own, we’d have been some lounge act in Las Vegas. It’s these small concessions to commerciality that take their toll.”

He’s most grievously embarrassed by ‘Walk The Dinosaur’: “I have this Clockwork Orange conditioning because all I can remember is being dragged by record company promotion men, well-intentioned but nevertheless misinformed people, who took us into

these clubs in Sweden. And on a perfectly contented dancefloor, nobody wanted to see us. It was: ‘And now everybody, here to teach you The Dinosaur’. And I would stand there lip-syncing with a bass that wasn’t plugged in and it was so depressing, such a painful thing to do. And we did this because there was nobody to say ‘David Byrne doesn’t do that’.”

Was (Not Was) aren’t out of contract and did return to the studio but Don claims “were out of inspiration. We had the creative shit kicked out of us. Not as individuals but just for that particular chemistry. We have no will to live and my feeling is that until we have something legitimate to say, just shut up. We actually started an album but I thought it was mediocre. We finished about 13 songs and there was nothing you hadn’t heard before and most of it you’d have heard better.”

He concludes that: “It went from something we did for recreational purposes to this lifeless business venture and it’s great it lasted for twelve years.”

And yet his feelings can be ambivalent as well as gloomy: “I see no reason why if tomorrow David rang up and said ‘I’ve got some lyrics’, we couldn’t go.”

Full circle again to basic principles, Miles Davis and his creed of constant renewal. We talk about the more commercially sanitised elements of grunge and Don figures it’s another visitation of the ghosts of music past.

“Overall I think it was better the first time. It’s like what happens in jazz. There’s a lot of people in there who could fool you into thinking you were listening to the Miles Davis group of 1965. Texturally, it’s all there. Technique-wise, maybe it’s even more there but, man, that fire’s burning a little dimmer because it’s re-creation.”

“Now there’s a guidebook to all that stuff . . . When Miles Davis recorded albums like E.S.P. and Sorcerer, there was nobody doing that. They were on the frontier and just pushing it. And when you’re recycling, you’re not doing that anymore. There’s a fundamental difference between re-creation and creation.”