Maybe interviewing a “Was” was naturally going to frame the chat as a whole lot of looking back, especially when the “Was” was Don Was, the legendary music producer, bassist, composer, filmmaker, radio host and longtime head of Blue Note Records. He’s got a new band, Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble, and they’re headed to Houston to perform songs from a new album, Groove in the Face of Adversity, Thursday, October 1 at Heights Theater.
So, Was is focused on the here and now, the real time reactions to the fresh, jazzy, bluesy, funky music he and a group of talented fellow Detroiters recently released. But, how often does one get a chance to mine the brain of someone who’s worked with everyone from The Rolling Stones to Bonnie Raitt to Bob Dylan? An Emmy and six-time Grammy winner whose credits appear on albums with over 100 million in sales, many of those from his own underappreciated group, Was (Not Was)? A fellow music lover, first and foremost, who found a way to make his passion something that has benefited fellow music lovers everywhere?
In short, it’s not the “was” that steered our conversation to the past, it’s the Was. We did begin our phoner by getting the details on the Pan-Detroit Ensemble.
“I’m having the best time ever, and I’m going to stick with it ‘til I drop,” Was said, giving us the definitive word on what’s happening now. “Basically, what happened was Terence Blanchard, the great jazz trumpeter and film composer, called me up and he was curating a series of concerts for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Jazz, and he asked me if I wanted to take one of the nights and play.”
About six months before the gig, Was realized “I didn’t have a band and I didn’t have any songs to play. And I started to panic a little bit, but I remembered a lesson I’d learned many years before. It came from working with my heroes, like Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson and Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson and Mick and Keith and Leonard Cohen. Great writers, right? And being that close to them working gave me writer’s block for about five years. I couldn’t really come up with anything.
“Finally, I was in the studio with Willie Nelson one day and I looked at him, again lamenting the fact that I couldn’t be Willie, and then it hit me. Well, that’s okay, Willie can’t be you. You know, I thought about all the things that happened in my lifetime growing up that he didn’t experience in Abbott, Texas. Like The Stooges didn’t play at his high school and George Clinton didn’t play a sock hop at his junior high school and I thought, all right, your only prayer really in life – I think it doesn’t even necessarily apply only to music – is that you have to be the best version of who you are.
“So when it came time to put this band together, I thought, all right, who am I? I’m this guy from Detroit, I said, go back to Detroit and get together with some people who grew up listening to the same radio stations as you and playing in the same bars and playing for the same audiences. And that’s what this band is. They’re all musicians I’ve known for decades. It’s just that all nine of us had never played together before at the same time. So, we got in the room and it was pretty clear after about five minutes that we were speaking this musical language of Detroit. The interplay after five minutes felt like we’d been playing together for years. Over time, I’ve learned to recognize that you don’t take that lightly. We just booked more dates and we’ve been playing ever since, it’s been like two years now.”
Was is 74 now and, as he mentioned, has no plans to stop creating new and interesting tales rooted in music. But, we were eager to hear a couple from the past and Was kindly obliged.
“Well, I remember the first concert I went to. My parents took me to see Dinah Shore, in the 1950s, I think it was for my fourth or fifth birthday. And at the time, she was the most popular artist. She was the Taylor Swift of the mid-1950s. She had a weekly show and it was sponsored by Chevrolet, so they did the first show of the season from the Masonic Temple in Detroit. And I remember going to see that. Can I tell you that Dinah Shore touched my soul deeply at that concert? No. But, I can tell you that it was exciting to be in the room with a full audience and a full orchestra and have them playing to you. The vibe was incredible. I wanted more of that for sure.
“Now, the first actual rock and roll concert I went to was probably seeing the Stones come play in Detroit in early ’64,” he said. “No one knew who they were. They hadn’t been on Ed Sullivan yet and it was just kind of like this is like the Beatles, but different. So, I had my parents take me, I was probably in sixth grade or something then.”
Cool parents, we noted.
“Yeah, well, they dropped me off,” he laughed. “They didn’t sit through it, but my parents were real cool, actually. I just remember, even though there were like 200 kids in a place that held 15,000, I was blown away by them. And, that definitely spoke to me.”
Was wound up working with the Rolling Stones, producing their Grammy-winning album, Blue & Lonesome. It had to be surreal to go from watching the band as a kid to full-circling them back to their blues roots decades later, we guessed.
“It was really something. And there wasn’t a day that went by when, a couple times a day, I’d just take a step back and look around the room and go, ‘Oh my god, look who’s at my fucking house, right?’”
We wondered if there was a pivotal moment when Was knew he was destined for a career in music.
“Well, this might be romanticizing it a bit and I suspect that it wasn’t a singular moment, but I can tell you the most significant moment – and really, if you talk to any musician who was born in 1952, they will tell you the same thing – that sitting around watching the Ed Sullivan show, when the Beatles came out the first time, was absolutely life changing,” he said. “First of all, girls were screaming. Second of all, it looked like they were having a great time. Third of all, the music was awesome. It was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I just looked at that and I thought, well, I’m gonna do that.
“And at 12 years-old, you’re just dumb enough to think that you could actually pull it off. If I was any older, I’d have said, I’d like to do that, but I better get this teaching certification just in case that doesn’t work out. If you do that, you’ll never have a life in music, I don’t think, because it requires your full focus and also a little desperation to make it work, you know?”
We asked Was to thank that 12 year-old since we’ve all been enriched by his decisions. Then we wanted to know if there was a time he learned something salient about music and himself while working as a producer. He offered up pure gold.
“Well, there was a moment. This was 1989 and I found myself producing Bob Dylan and George Harrison came in to overdub a guitar solo on a song called ‘Under the Red Sky.’ And Bob was in kind of a jocular mood. He’s actually a very funny cat. He’s got a great sense of humor and he’s actually a lot of fun to hang around with. So, he sat down behind the board in the engineer’s chair. It used to be tape machines back then. He went to the remote control unit for the tape and he fast forwards to where the guitar solo is knowing full well that a) George has never heard the song; b) didn’t even know what key it was in; c) we hadn’t gotten a guitar sound; and, d) he was out of tune.
“And then, he goes to the guitar solo and he kicks it into record and he says, ‘Here, play.’ And George, you know, was trying to figure it out. And it’s kind of a mess, right? And then we get to the end of where that solo goes and Bob stops the machine and he says, ‘All right, that’s great, man. Thank you very much. We’ll use that.’ So, George Harrison was all panicked, right? And he turned to me and he said, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, man. What do you think, Don?’ Bob Dylan goes, ‘Yeah, what do you think, Don?’ And at that moment, time kind of slowed down.
“I flashed back to being like 20 years old, and I was considering selling my car to buy a ticket to go see the Concert for Bangladesh, and now the two principals are sitting there three feet away asking what I think. And finally, a voice kind of appeared in my head that said, ‘He’s not paying you to be a fan.’ So, I said, ‘Well, yeah, I mean, that was good, but I tell you what, why don’t you tune up? We’ll get a sound and let’s see if we can beat it.’
“George was like, ‘Thank you,’ and Bob was, ‘All right, we’ll try another one.’ And, I kind of discovered a methodology. I guess you could just label it ‘benign honesty.’ You can tell the truth, but you don’t have to be an asshole about it. And I think that that applies not just to making records, but it’s probably a decent way to move through life.”
The roster of artists Was has teamed with includes acts like John Mayer, Garth Brooks and Elton John. He produced The B-52s monster hit, “Love Shack.” But, as Texans, we told him we were super curious about his work with regional Mexican legends, Intocable. There seems to be very little proximity between Detroit and Zapata, Texas, we suggested.
“It’s been a while now, it’s probably going on 10 years ago that an A&R man out of Mexico called me and he said Intocable want to make their Achtung Baby. And I said, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Was laughed. “He said, ‘All right, Google “Intocable” and then call me back and apologize.’ By the way, once I Googled them and heard the songs, I knew who they were. I mean, I’d heard the music. And, then I figured out what he meant by Achtung Baby, which was U2 beginning to experiment with different textures while still being U2.
“So, what he meant was that Intocable wanted to find the spot, without losing their fans, where they could evolve musically a little bit after 20 years. So, I flew to Zapata, Texas to hang out with them. And, that’s the thing, you hit it on the head, that Texas is very different from downtown Detroit, but people aren’t that different. Everybody has the same emotional makeup. Basically, we laugh, we cry, we love, we hate, you know, it’s a very narrow band of emotions that every human being’s got in common.
“One of the great things about music, and the real power of music is that genre and certain styles are rendered absolutely irrelevant when you get the emotion of the song, right? You can listen to any kind of music and feel what the artist is going through and hopefully relate to it and make some sense out of your own life. So, basically, working with Intocable was not that radical. I mean, hanging out in Texas, in Zapata, Texas, was a radical thing for me, but once we got to the music, it was just about soul and feeling. They’ve become some of my closest friends now. We just finished a new record and we made it in San Antonio. And I just love working with these guys and I feel like they’re my brothers, you know?”
We circled back to his own music, asking what fans might expect from the current live shows and also about Was (Not Was), the incredibly eclectic band he helmed in the 1980s and ‘90s which had a huge radio hit, “Walk the Dinosaur,” from the album What Up, Dog? We asked about a specific song from that album, “Somewhere in America There’s a Street Named After My Dad,” a haunting, timely, probably perfect song, in our estimation. Lines like “No more bland TV dinners/No ten car collisions/No showbiz beginners/Making global decisions,” are sadly still relevant. The song intro is a pristinely poetic description of the place we’d want our dads’ names to grace: “At night only crickets/No prowlers, no sirens/No pinky ring hustlers/No angel dust Byrons/No bars on the windows/No sabre-toothed neighbors/Just good simple folk/In a rainbow of flavors.”
“Well, I’d be happy to speak to it in the sense that I actually feel it’s the best song we ever wrote,” Was said. “It’s really about the optimism of the 1950s. When we grew up, what we were taught the world and the country would be like versus the reality of what greeted us a little later, and still greets us. And, it’s about not losing hope and remaining optimistic in the face of adversity.
“In general, I think whether I’m working as president of a jazz label or producing Intocable or out playing with my band, it’s about what we’re talking about. It’s about getting people to feel something and to communicate some emotions to them in the hope that it makes them feel better, that you can give them hope and at least the sense that they’re not alone. You know, when you go to a concert, man, you find all kinds of brothers and sisters there who might be strangers, but you’re experiencing this collective euphoria with them.
“I’ll tell you the truth, man, playing with Bob Weir really turned me onto that, because the Grateful Dead audience is so tuned in to what you’re doing, man. They hear everything and you can see it in their faces, and you can feel it in the collective energy that comes back,” Was said, adding that the Pan-Detroit Ensemble will be playing the entire Grateful Dead album Blues for Allah on tour to honor its 50th anniversary. “The audience becomes a member of the band essentially, how their reaction to what you play actually impacts what you’re going to play next. So, you get that kind of exchange going among the members of the band and you add the audience as a member of the band a couple times a night, the thing’s gonna blast off into space, you know, and it’s a wonderful feeling. I’ve never found anything that feels better than that.”
Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble plays Thursday, October 1 at Heights Theater, 339 W 19th. The band will be playing songs from its new album, Groove in the Face of Adversity, and the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah in its entirety. Doors at 7 p.m. for this all ages show. $44 and up.
