“In the music business, people think that if you’re different, it’s a marketing problem,” says Don Was, who’s in the sixth decade of a one-of-a-kind career: producer for superstars, bass player, Blue Note Records president, and co-founder of the eclectic band Was (Not Was). “Instead of being a problem, it’s actually your superpower.”
Was, a Detroit native who’s worked with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Brian Wilson and Willie Nelson, among many others, just released his first album under his own name — the jam-friendly, funk-and-jazz-influenced Groove in the Face of Adversity, featuring his Pan-Detroit Ensemble. The tracks jump genres, from a 10-minute version of Hank Williams’ “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But Time” to a timely take on Curtis Mayfield’s “This Is My Country” to the jazz cover “Nubian Lady.”
Was put the band together after a friend, trumpet player Terence Blanchard, invited him to play as part of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s jazz series. “I was thinking, ‘Oh man, I don’t have any songs and I don’t have a band,’” Was says. “But then I thought, just go back to Detroit. Get some people who grew up listening to the same radio stations as you.”
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Was talks about his new album, and then discusses his long journey through the music business, going deep on Dylan, the Stones, and much, much more. hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Some highlights follow:
There are at least a dozen “great” Rolling Stones songs, with the late Charlie Watts on drums, that are still unreleased from Was’ time with the band. “There’s stuff that’s been left off of those albums that should have been finished,” Was says, referring to the Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon, and A Bigger Bang sessions. “I’m just waiting for someone to ask. I already know what to do… I know that there’s stuff that should have been finished.”
Was came to an important realization while in the studio with Willie Nelson. “I was thinking, ‘Man, I can never be Willie Nelson,’” he recalls. “And then it hit me: ‘But Willie Nelson can never be me.’ You are just the sum total of your experience. And he didn’t drop acid and go see the MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in 1968. George Clinton and the Parliaments played at my junior high school. That’s a unique set of experiences growing up in Detroit at that period of time. So I thought, just be who you are and be different.”
The Was (Not Was) hit “Walk the Dinosaur” is actually about nuclear annihilation — and Was still doesn’t know how they wrote it. “It’s actually a pretty dark song,” Was says. “It’s about mankind blowing itself back to the Stone Age.” The 1987 song changed his life but created what he says was “a creative nightmare, because after that the pressure’s on — we need another ‘Walk the Dinosaur’. And it’s like, I don’t know how we did the first fucking one, man. It’s not like anything we ever did before or ever did again.”
Was played bass in a folk group backing legendary Detroit musician Ted Lucas — and when they opened for Black Sabbath in 1974, they got pelted with beer bottles until they had to run offstage. “There’s a bunch of 14-year-olds on amphetamines,” Was says. “And a folk group was not what they came to hear.” Third Man Records actually found a cassette recording of the gig: “You can hear the beer bottles breaking as we were just pelted with debris from song number one. .. We didn’t make it through the set because the drummer was bleeding so bad that we had to flee the stage. We actually lasted longer in the ring than I thought we did. I thought we didn’t make it through the first song — we did three or four songs.”
Ozzy Osbourne and Madonna both sang on a track by Was’ band — but Madonna turned down the idea of making it a very unusual duet. In 1983, Was (Not Was) recorded an initial version of their song “Shake Your Head” with a pre-fame Madonna on guest vocals. “She did a great job… but it didn’t sound like Was (Not Was) to me anymore,” Was says. So they brought in Ozzy Osbourne (who first met Was at that Sabbath gig) to give perhaps the weirdest performance of his career, essentially rapping over the electro track. “We realized about eight years later that we had Ozzy and Madonna on parallel tracks,” Was adds. “So we gave it to a remixer… and he turned it into a Ozzy/Madonna duet.” Madonna, understandably, nixed the release, and Kim Basinger stepped in to duet with Ozzy instead. The remix somehow never came out in the U.S, but it was the band’s biggest hit overseas.
Garth Brooks’ infamous The Life of Chris Gaines project, where he created rock and pop songs in the persona of a fictional artist, started as “a really cool idea,” according to Was, who produced it. “He was gonna make a movie,” Was recalls. “And he had a deal at Paramount with Babyface producing. He was gonna play a rock & roll singer who gets murdered in the first act. And he was worried that his fans were gonna have a hard time accepting him as an actor in another role, so he wanted to set the stage for it. ‘What if we do this fictitious character’s greatest hits, and it comes out a year before the movie?’… We had so much fun making the record.” But the movie never happened, and “it just made no sense without the movie,” Was adds.
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