Prolific, in-demand producer and Blue Note Records president Don Was has shared experiences of working with such musical giants as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Gregg Allman, on the most recent episode of Southern Accents Radio on Apple Music Country.
He and fellow producer Dave Cobb cowl many facets of Was’ eventful profession within the present, which might be heard in full anytime on demand right here. He confides, for instance, that when he fulfilled his ambition to work with Dylan, he was in a position to take recommendation from one other of his heroes.
“All my life, I wanted to produce Bob Dylan,” he says. “There got here a day in 1989 once I was within the studio producing [him], and George Harrison got here in to play a guitar solo on a tune. Bob’s messing with him. He strikes the engineer, Ed Cherney, out of the seat, and he sits within the engineer’s chair. He’s working the distant management. George Harrison says, ‘Don’t let him do what he did to me final time, which is he simply recorded me one take, and that was it. I didn’t get to repair the factor.’ I stated, ‘Okay. Yeah. Sure. No problem.’
“Bob, after all, hears that, and he’s going to do the identical factor. George hasn’t even had an opportunity to tune up or to listen to the tune. He doesn’t even know what key it’s in. Bob quick forwards to the solo and is like, ‘Go.’ He hits it into document. George figures out what key it’s in. All issues thought-about, it was a decent effort, however it wasn’t the solo that you simply wished from George Harrison. Bob shuts the machine off after the solo. He says, ‘Okay. That’s nice. Thank you, man.’ George Harrison turns to me he says, ‘Help, Don. What do you think?’ Bob seems at me and goes, ‘Yeah, what do you think?’
“Well, the whole room dissolved in the echo. Time slowed down. I flashed on the time I tried to sell my car to get a ticket to go see the concert for Bangladesh. George and Bob. Here they are, three feet away from me, saying, ‘What do you think?’ I’m in this tough bind. Thankfully, a voice came into my head and said, ‘He’s not paying you to be a fan.’ I thought, ‘All right. You got to tell the truth here.’ So I said, ‘It was good, man. But let’s tune up, try another take. Let’s see if we beat it.’ George was like, ‘Thank you.’ I guess I passed Bob’s test. But that was a pivotal moment, realizing that I’m not there to be a fan and that they’re actually paying me to do something.”
Was additionally spoke about his longtime affiliation as producer of the Stones, which dates again to 1994’s Voodoo Lounge. In 2016, he was with them at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios in London to supervise the group’s return to their roots on the chart-topping Blue & Lonesome album. “It’s absolutely the right record for them to make, and I love that record. But it was an accident,” he reveals.
“We have been at a degree the place we have been making a brand new document, and it was getting a bit of intense. So simply to diffuse the room a bit of bit, Keith stated…I can’t bear in mind which one he picked now, however he picked one of many songs. And they only did it in a single take. And it was like, ‘Wow, that’s actually good.’ And nobody wished to return to combating over this different tune. So it was like, ‘Eh, let’s do one other one.’ So on the finish of the day, we had six nice blues tracks. All of them first takes. And so we stated, ‘Well, yeah. Let’s do it once more tomorrow.’ But nobody ever talked about, let’s make a blues document. It was a bit of like when a man’s pitching a no-hitter, you don’t convey it up within the dug up.
“Everybody knew that, wow, this could be an album. But no one said anything about it. So we did it over a couple days. Eric Clapton was in the other room, and he walked in. Keith handed him a guitar. And he played on a couple of songs. And he had the same look on his face that I had. Because he’s a little younger than them, and he had gone to see them when they were a pub band in Richmond.”
Was shares extra recollections of working with an ailing Gregg Allman, the identical yr, for what posthumously grew to become his closing album, Southern Blood, in 2017. “He knew he wasn’t going to be round lengthy. I knew that he wasn’t going to be round lengthy. But he and I by no means as soon as talked about it. He didn’t need to discuss it or acknowledge it, however you possibly can inform within the selection. I submitted many, many songs for him. But you can inform within the reflective nature of those we ended up recording that he was actually attempting to tie up unfastened ends.
“The final tune we lower was ‘Song for Adam,’ a Jackson Browne tune. And he and Jackson have been previous buddies. They crashed in some residence within the 60s collectively earlier than both of them was well-known. And they remained good buddies.
“And we got to the last verse [and] it seems like he stopped singing before his song was done, basically. And that got Gregg all choked up, and he couldn’t get those lines out. He just left those lines open. But his health declined right after. It was almost like he was holding out to make this record. So all those vocals on that album are the live vocals that we did in Muscle Shoals. He literally stopped singing in the middle of the last song he recorded.”
Listen to Don Was on Southern Accents Radio on Apple Music Country.