The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Elton John are just a few of the artists that six-time Grammy Award winning producer Don Was has made records for. But outside of the studio, Was is embarking on a tour with the Pan-Detroit Ensemble, a band dedicated to bringing the full-range of musical sounds from his native Detroit.
Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble will make a stop at Babeville in Buffalo this Sunday night, October 11.
He spoke with BTPM’s Ryan Zunner in a wide-ranging interview. From his early days in Detroit and the band Was (Not Was), to his associations with the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, a film project that reignited the career of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson after years of isolation, and what has inspired him to hit the stage with Pan-Detroit Ensemble.
RYAN ZUNNER, HOST: Thank you so much for for joining us here on on BTPM. You're bringing the Pan Detroit ensemble to Buffalo in October. When you're putting this music in front of an audience outside of Detroit, it's very much a love letter to Detroit and the area you're from. What do you hope people hear that they might not expect with the words Detroit music?
DON WAS, GUEST: Well, I just hope we touch people, man. In some way, at the very least, make them happy, make them feel good. They don't have to identify anything as being from Detroit. They got to identify it as being from our hearts, and and that's really what we're aiming for. In our show, we do we do songs from our newest album. It's called "Groove in the Face of Adversity," and then in the middle of the show, we're playing the Grateful Dead's "Blues for Allah" album in its entirety and in sequence, all the songs.
And my hope is that if you don't know anything from our album, and you never heard "Blues for Allah" before, you wouldn't be able to tell where one begins and one ends. You know that that the whole thing has a unifying sound to it. That's the sound of these nine people who happened to grow up in Detroit and speak the musical language of Detroit.
But I just care about making people feel good, and as long as they leave feeling better than they felt when they walked in, it's been a successful undertaking.
ZUNNER: You mentioned the amount of musicians you have on stage. This isn't a four piece band, right? I think you have like nine members in it. That's a lot of people. Where did you find these folks and and bring them together? And what did you say to them when you were when you were pitching this this idea?
WAS: I knew all of them. Some of them I've been playing with for years. Dave McMurry, the saxophone player, who also records for Blue Note. We've been playing together 45 years, and I played with everybody in this band at one time or another. And they've all played in various incarnations with each other, but these nine people had never played together before, and it was really just for one gig. There's a great jazz trumpet player, film scorer composer named Terence Blanchard, and Terence was curating a series for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra about Detroit jazz. About three years before the gig, he called me up. He said, "I'm I'm putting this together now. You you want to do a night? I said, "Yeah, love to, man." Then about six months before, I panicked. I didn't have a band and I didn't have any songs. So I thought, what do I do here?
Well, one thing I knew is don't try to compete with the artists on Blue Note Records. I'm I'm the president of Blue Note, and I work closely with with all of our artists. And don't don't do that. And I flash back to a lesson I learned when I was first getting going as a producer in the early '90s, kind of in rapid succession. I got to work with some of my great heroes like Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson and Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson and Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] and Leonard Cohen, arguably the greatest writers of our time, and it gave me severe writer's block for about five years watching these guys work, and just feeling inadequate by comparison.
Finally, I was in the studio one day with Willie, and I was looking at him again, lamenting the fact that I could never be Willie Nelson. And then something clicked, man. It was like, yeah, but Willie Nelson can never be you. You know, Willie Nelson didn't grow up in Detroit and drop acid and go see the MC 5 and the Stooges at the Grandy Ballroom. George Clinton didn't play a sock hop at his junior high school. In the music business, we kind of tend to think of being different as being a marketing problem, right? And I don't see it that way at all. The way I've always seen it is the thing that makes you different from everybody else is your superpower, and so you you you emphasize that.
So when it came time to put a band together for for this gig for Terence, I thought, all right, don't try to be like everybody else. Go back to Detroit. Get together with your friends, people who grew up listening to the same radio stations as you, people who grew up playing in the same bars for the same audience, and people who speak the musical language of Detroit, which is a thing, and be the best version of. That's who I am, you. So we we got together in a room just about six months before Terence's gig, and you could tell in the first five minutes that that we had there was commonality, and felt like we'd been playing together a decade already, and we were only five-10 minutes in, so I've learned now from experience. If you can get that kind of feeling at the start, don't take it lightly.
ZUNNER: I saw you guys went on NPR's Tiny Desk. The chemistry there, it's like you've been a band for for years and years together, and in a way, you're probably all finding your roots there and that connection.
You spent a lot of your career, we mentioned before, producing other people's records....
WAS: Yes.
ZUNNER: What's different about being on stage and presenting music that you feel is like more part of your story?
WAS: Well, when you're making records, you're in a bubble. You're in the studio, really protected environment. It's fun. It's nice to be in a bubble. You feel safe, secure, and what a great time with all these wires and microphones and tape and all this cool stuff going on. But the artistic process is about communication, right? So it's not really complete until someone receives the message you you send out, right? And when you make a record, it could be a year before the album comes out, and then people listen to it on their own. You don't really get to enjoy that exchange. if you're lucky, they send you a check and and a trophy. but you don't you don't really get that immediate exchange of energy.
But playing live, you really do. In 2018, Bobby Weir from the Grateful Dead called me up, and he wanted to start a band called Bobby Weir and the Wolf Brothers. Asked me to be the bass player, and when I started playing in front of Grateful Dead audiences, I got really aware of that energy exchange between the stage and the audience. You could see that if you played something, you could see people's faces, but you could feel the collective energy coming back at you when they responded to what you were doing, and it actually impacted your choice of the next notes. the audience becomes part of the band.
So when you get this conversation going between all the musicians on the stage and the audience, you can blow the roof off a place, and it's immediate and it's adrenaline. It stimulates dopamine production. I actually don't know a better feeling than that, so lately I've been leaning towards getting out there in front of people and playing with them.
I always felt when I was younger, I felt guarded, and I'm like maybe a little scared of the audience. And playing with Bobby warmed me up, man, and I realize they're your soulmates, man. So now I go out and sign records afterwards, and I stay and talk to people, and that's part of the experience too of getting the feedback. That's how you know the artistic process has been successful. Is when you hear from the people on the receiving end that they got the message.
ZUNNER: It's a connection with the audience.
WAS: Yeah, for sure. Actually, you just said it in three words. It took me 20 minutes.
ZUNNER: Well it's better for the radio if you explain it, though.
[LAUGHS]
ZUNNER: Don, with a lot of musicians you hear about the legends from like the 60s and 70s, and they have that that moment for them of when they knew they wanted to be a rock star. You you think of the stories of, they saw Elvis on on the Ed Sullivan Show, they they saw Buddy Holly or something. For you, I wonder if there was a moment in your track to get into producing, was there a similar moment there? As far as a moment or experience you had where you're like, 'I want to be a producer, I want to be behind the board?'
WAS: It's weird. I used to listen to records, even as a kid, as a young teenager. I listened to them with an ear towards production. I was aware that there was a process, I guess, for lack of a better term, that went on in the studio that had to do with making the records, and that it wasn't just documentaries, you know, a black and white documentary. It's a factual statement of what it sounded like. There's an art and craft to making records, and I used to listen from that from that that vantage point.
Maybe I was just born to do it. I don't know. That was always my inclination.
It was really people like Felix Cavalieri and Todd Rundgren, who were musicians who made their own records, and I loved their records.
ZUNNER: Felix of The Rascals, right?
WAS: Rascals, yeah, they made great records. And then I saw him producing a Laura Nero album, and I thought, 'whoa, man, this guy-he's got it all covered.' Todd Rundgren was producing other bands. He engineered The Band's "Stage Fright" album, and that had a lot of allure for me. So I always saw myself as like a performer, musician, producer.
ZUNNER: It's such a unique role when you're in there [producing]. You have the band, you have the technicians, and then here you are, kind of in the middle of all this, which maybe can be chaotic sometimes. We talked about Dylan, we talked about the Stones. Specifically about the Stones what did you see out of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards inside the studio that fans wouldn't be able to pick up seeing them on stage, what is that experience in the studio like with those two guys?
WAS: It was great, man. We all had really good times making those records. Probably the greatest misconception about them, and they're probably responsible for creating this impression, is that people talk about their differences because they have talked about it in interviews so much, and everyone thinks they're at each other's throats, and it's this tense thing. I've played with them a lot when Daryl Jones wasn't available, I'd come in. I'd play at a rehearsal, or play even on a couple of tracks. I played because he couldn't be there.
And when you play with the Rolling Stones, something becomes abundantly clear, which is that there's no feuding going on, man. When the music starts, the interplay between the musicians is so jocular and relaxed and fun, and they're so alert. Charlie Watts would play a little figure on the hi hat, and Keith would pick up on it, and he'd play in a rhythm that was working off of what Charlie had played, and that would change the way Mick phrased, which would change what what Ronnie [Wood] played, which would inspire Charlie. It was like they were lobbing softballs at each other and just playing a beautiful game of catch, and and the spirit was, yes, jocular man. They were they were having fun.
It's fun and relaxed. That's what the Rolling Stones is. That's the essence of it. All that other stuff is ephemeral. All that tension and everything... that's just burning off some steam. It's weird making records, you know, because well, it's like surfing a little bit. You can learn how to stand up on the board, how to balance better, how to develop some techniques so that you can get a longer ride. But you have no control over the waves, right? You ride what you're served, right? It's kind of the same thing with music.
If you ask any of these great songwriters, like one night I asked Bob Dylan, I said, "How come you can write Gates of Eden and I can't? Bob Dylan said, "Well, if it makes you feel any better, I didn't really write it. I remember moving the pencil over the page, but I don't know where it came from. Came from outside of me, and I received it and wrote it down. But I didn't actually sit there and write it."
And I thought he was actually being kind of nice and trying to save my feelings. But then I heard the same thing coming from everybody else. You know, Mick, Keith Richards. If he's got an idea in the studio, he never says, "Oh, wait a minute, I got an idea." He'll say, "Hold it, hold, incoming, incoming," right? So it's kind of like that. You don't really control where lightning's going to strike, but you need lightning to strike.
So it can be nerve-wracking, man. You can prepare the session. The producer can create a mood, and you can prepare for people to keep their antennae up and and watch for a signal coming through. But you can't force that signal through, so it can it can be it'll make you nervous, especially when you're trying too hard.
ZUNNER: If you got to work, it's not going to work?
WAS: If you try at all, it's not gonna. Yeah, you gotta let it happen. You gotta be just be present and and open up and and be ready to play. So the the fact that nobody controls it that'll make you nervous, especially if you're someone like the Rolling Stones, where people have high expectations, Bob Dylan getting branded the the voice of a generation. I mean, what does that mean, man? What a responsibility, that kind of thing weighs on guys like that? Well, I think they hate it, man. I know Bob hates it, and and I think he's actually gone to great lengths to try to dispel this notion.
He never asked to be the voice of a generation. That just that just was a tag that got attached to him, and not arbitrarily. It's because his music did resonate with a whole generation, but that wasn't his intention. He was just he was just channeling inspiration into notes.
ZUNNER: You seem like a real, true student of music, and a lot of that's your experience. That's a lot of the people you've worked with, people you've been around, music that you've listened to. I want to ask you about your time working on I Just Wasn't Made for the Time, a biographical movie about Brian Wilson. You not only produced the film, but also the accompanying soundtrack, which was co-produced...
WAS: I directed the movie too. It was a documentary.
ZUNNER: Yes, and the soundtrack off of it was co-produced between you and Brian himself. Brian's one of those guys that gets talked about as one of those the geniuses of of a music studio. Did you feel daunted walking into that studio to to work alongside him? And did you learn anything too after that?
WAS: I was in in awe of Brian Wilson. Here's what happened, man. He was going through a rough patch in his life, and the perception of him changed from being this great musician to being this guy who was having issues and was in the care of a Svengali-like shrink who supervised him 24 hours a day, and he was turning up in the National Enquirer more than Rolling Stone, and and then I got to know him a little bit, and then I started playing some gigs with him.
We were doing a duo for a while. Just Brian playing piano. This is, I guess, mid to early 90s. And one time we played this gig for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Charity, and it was a fundraiser at some big mansion, and they set up a stage, and Brian and Jackson Browne were the entertainment. So I went and played with Brian, and it was a family thing, right? So we did "California Girls" first, and it's a pretty bad version of it, and then Brian said, "Oh man, we really effed that one up, right?" And and then people came and got their little kids.
Well, he was cussing, and it was it was a little edgy, right? And then we did another song, a Beach Boys classic. I can't remember which one, and it was okay. It wasn't great. And then he did the song "Love and Mercy," which was a newer song at that time. And I don't know what he connected to. He said he was watching the sun go down over the mountains, and it was one of the most soulful, stunning renditions of any song that I'd ever been a part of on stage. I was so stunned by what he was capable of summoning up that I think I even stopped playing in the middle. I was just entranced by where he went and how deep his interpretation was, and I just thought if people could just see this, right?
So that that the point of the documentary was to take the take the attention away from all that sordid crap and focus on why Brian Wilson is a genius to explain it. Because if you put on "409," it's like an early Beach Boys song. That's cool, but is that genius? Then put on Pet Sounds and listen to all those textures. Check out the chords behind these things. How what he did to extend the range of of composition in rock and roll, and what he did texturally and arrangement wise. You can hear things where he would have like a harpsichord and someone playing glasses of wine tuned to different notes, and he would combine these sounds. Now we can do that easily with samplers and digital gear, but in the 1960s, Brian Wilson had to sit there the night before and say, "Hmm, I think I hear wine glasses and a harpsichord playing this melody. Let's call up some people who can do this and have them be there at 5 o'clock tomorrow."
You couldn't just throw this thing together. You had to dream it up first. So so much of what he did first, things that originated just in his mind and then made it onto records. So much that has shaped the vocabulary of popular music today. That we take it for granted. We don't understand that coming up at it first is such a mind blowing accomplishment. So he was absolutely one of the greatest artists of our time, and he was really a a sweet guy, and a tough guy, man. He faced a lot of problems that he could not control, that were not his fault, and he survived, man. He made it, you know. So yeah, a year.
ZUNNER: It's beautiful that you had that time with him, that experience at that point in his life and career to help him out and obviously boost a lot of people up too.
WAS: It gave him a sense of being back in the action and that gave him some confidence and then he started playing gigs and then he did some spectacular gigs in the early 2000s, he toured Pet Sounds. He toured Surfs Up. But, back when I met him, man, it was unlikely that he could make it through an hour and a half show, right?
ZUNNER: He was very recluse at that point, right?
WAS: Yeah, so it was wonderful to get to know him, and and you know we were friends till the end.
ZUNNER: I want to hit some other points in your career because there's a lot of stuff there. My news director when he heard that I was going to interview you mentioned your band Was (Not Was) from back in the late '70s, early '80s, and that music was sort of an amalgamation of lots of different sounds and influences and it surprised a lot of people. I watched one of your previous interviews where you mentioned that record companies didn't even know how to market the music because they didn't know what it was. What were you and your bandmates trying to create during that formation and in those years?
WAS: Well, I think we were just tying together all of our musical influences, all the things we grew up listening to. We had Wayne Kramer from the MC5 playing on our first record, and he was in the band on our first tour. We had a great jazz trumpeter named Marcus Belgrave who played with Charles Mingus and Ray Charles. He played trumpet on our early stuff, we had some of the guys from Funkadelic, the percussionist from Funkadelic, Larry Fertangelo, was A guy who played on One Nation and all those records.
So it was just kind of an amalgamation of the music we we grew up on. We never really gave the band enough time. I was young, but it took me a while to figure out that if you want to have a band, make sure you block out five years, or don't bother, because that's how long it takes to figure out who this group of people really is and what they're capable of doing. It improves constantly. You hit new plateaus all the time, and I'm not saying no one should go to a show till a band's been around for five years or that can't do great things, but you really grow into something and hit new levels when you stick with it for five years. And we never did in Was (Not Was). Twelve of us? It was too expensive to take around. There are just a lot of factors that made us stop, and had we kept going, I think we'd have gotten past wearing our influences on our sleeve and incorporated it into a unique signature, which I think we're doing with [Pan-Detroit Ensemble], in a way, kind of picking up where that left off in some ways.
ZUNNER: You're talking about like a big band bringing a bunch of different people together to form it? I mean, I don't want to say it's a spiritual successor to Was (Not Was), but you're taking an approach from what you learned before.
WAS: Yeah, I think that's true. We couldn't have had this band 30 years ago. Things I learned along the way. Learned a lot playing with Bobby Weir, because he was utterly fearless. He was willing to go out there and have no idea what we were going to do and get up in front of 25,000 people and play,
ZUNNER: Thank you so much, Don.
WAS: Take care, man.
