Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label kicks off its South African campaign with a loud, rude roar, writes Buddy Bradley
YOU are a young man, only 31 years of age. Once you were fat and ugly. Then you dieted. Now you are merely large and hairy.
But no matter. Nights, you can be seen in your chauffeur- driven black Rolls Royce, cruising West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. On your arm — no, make that on each arm — is a porn starlet called Ginger, or Tori, or Amber.
You virtually invented the rap-metal fusion in 1986 with Run DMC/Aerosmith’s Walk This Way and the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill albums. Since then, you have produced everyone from The Cult and Red Hot Chili Peppers to Mick Jagger and Tom Petty. These productions have sold well over 20-million records.
You are also a record company mogul. Earlier this year, in a mock funeral in Los Angeles’ Forest Lawn Memorial Park (the Reverend Al Sharpton did the honours), you buried the name of your record label, Def American — and created a new one. On it are signed up acts which profess to incarnate that outlaw spirit rock’n’roll long since lost.
“I am,” you say, “a fan of the whole outlaw image of rock’n’roll. I try to make outlaw records and I like to act the part. It’s part of the entertainment of it all, seeing all these characters and living out fantasies.”
Sting is not on the roster. But Beavis and Butt-head love your bands.
You are Rick Rubin, your label is American Recordings, and your product is now available in South Africa, licensed through BMG Records Africa.
Is this — just possibly — your greatest achievement to date?
Well, perhaps not. But American Recordings CDs, with their American flag logos and really neat red, white and black spines, can now be bought at local record bars.
And rock they do. The outlaw ploy is as old as rock’n’roll, but Rubin knows, better than practically anyone else, how rock, rap, country and blues — and their alloys — should sound (in two words, like AC/DC), and how to meld that sound with a large dose of wit and menace.
While American Recordings feature such relatively unknown quantities as LA noise-poppers Medicine, sludge-rockers Thee Hypnotics, brilliant Minneapolis country-rockers The Jayhawks, and rappers MC 900FT Jesus and Kwest Tha Madd Lad (in the US, the iconic Jesus and Mary Chain are also represented), four terrific CDs by the label’s A-list acts — The Black Crowes, Slayer, Danzig and, surprise, the Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash — kick off American’s campaign in this country with a loud, rude roar.
Released locally, The Black Crowes’ third record, Amorica, continues the rebel tradition established by the mad, bad, pot-proselytising sons of Atlanta with their 10-million- selling Shake Your Money Maker (1990) and The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (1992).
If the second album, with its blues, gospel and even reggae overtones, proved that the Crowes were not merely Stones/Faces copyists for the 1990s (a ridiculous charge anyway: anyone who listened from the start could hear that the band transcended its influences), then Amorica takes it one step further with more intricate rhythms underpinned by Latin-tinged percussion and country instrumentation.
The loud songs rock ferociously, and the ballads are the prettiest the Robinson brothers, Chris and Rich, have yet written. And, all the while, Chris Robinson sings — most soulfully (and fittingly: the Crowes are the US’s biggest band) about sin, salvation, hate and greed: all that good ol’ excessive American stuff.
Rubin signed Slayer to his first label, Def Jam, in 1986. In three short, sharp and nasty Rubin-produced albums, Reign in Blood (1986), South of Heaven (1988) and Seasons in the Abyss (1990), these scions of the southern California suburbs proceeded to reinvent the death/thrash metal genre. The new Divine Intervention cleaves to these high standards: like the previous releases (and unlike most thrash, which is muddy, blurry and indistinct), the record is crisp, clear, loud and extremely punishing.
Its 36 minutes fly by — thank your lucky stars, parents — as Slayer jabber on about their usual lyrical obsessions — death, destruction, mayhem and agony (or, as one song title nicely summarises it: Sex, Murder, Art) — also well- reflected in the CD’s calculatedly offensive packaging, the most interesting part of which features newspaper articles about whether or not music incites violence. Slayer are nothing if not knowing. This should not, however, be mistaken for irony.
A gorehound of a different stripe is Glenn Danzig, whose eponymous band Danzig’s Danzig 4 is the third of American’s offerings. Also signed by Rubin in 1986, a typical Danzig song starts out with Danzig quietly and melodically posing a big question — “Am I a demon?” is just one example — and then … the power chords and big drums come in, and Danzig screams — and he can really sing, with a voice compared to Roy Orbison and Jim Morrison — and the song takes off, as the hairs on your neck rise one by one.
As befits the only band to date to have had a video banned by MTV for “theological reasons”, Danzig 4 contains much of its singer’s trademark cartoon Satanism. But Danzig are sui generis: few convey as well, in a mere song, fear, loneliness, emptiness and general loathesomeness. Danzig 4, their best and most accessible record to date, will sell and sell.
Finally, there’s Johnny Cash’s brilliant American Recordings, named after the label. It’s just Cash and his acoustic guitar, recorded live in Rubin’s living room, Cash’s Tennessee cabin and LA’s Viper Room. There are some songs by Kris Kristoffersen, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwright III and Cash himself.
But the song Danzig wrote for the album, entitled Thirteen, perhaps best sums up its desolate mood and, together with Cash’s own Redemption, embodies its ruling themes of sin and salvation.
To the sparse backing, Cash sings in his deep voice, first “Bad luck has been blowing at my back/I was born to bring trouble to wherever I’m at/Got the number 13 tattooed on my neck/When the ache starts to itch then the black will turn to red”, and later “My old friend Lucifer came/Fought to keep me in chains/But I saw through the tricks of 666”. You gril — and then you play the record again.
All four American releases, finally, are great records which fully realise Rubin’s outlaw ethos (en onthou, dis net rock’n’roll). Worthy in and of themselves, there’s also upside festive-season gift-giving potential aplenty. Thirteen-year-old Gary — yes, you, Gary, stalking Sandton City in your Cannibal Corpse T-shirt — will kill (but not literally, we hope) for the Slayer CD.
Smokers of all ages, creeds and preferences (that’s surely three-quarters of our population) will happily “chill” to Amorica. Goat-herders out there will totally smaak Danzig 4.
And those who seek redemption — isn’t that the rest of us? — will certainly want to chew their turkey to the convivial strains of the Man in Black. Go to it, Christmas shoppers.