January 16, 2023 • 37 mins
'Rick Rubin is a decades-long creative force in the music industry - Co-founder of Def Jam, and winner of seven Grammys. Rick has discovered, mentored, and produced artists such as: Adele, Eminem, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run DMC, and for me, most movingly, Johnny Cash. His values, principles, and kindness guide everything he does.
Though, Rick Rubin is up there in the clouds and I am firmly on earth, we look at our work in a similar way. Keep it simple, keep it honest and admire, respect, and love the people you work with.'
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home.
On Ruthie’s Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers.
Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks.
Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation.
For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/
Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/ruthiestable4
Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of I Heart
Radio and Adami's Studios. When I told my friends that
I would be recording a podcast with Rick Rubin this weekend,
the responses were raptures, what, wow, incredible and can I come?
(00:21):
It was the same in the River Cafe the other
day when Rick was there. Grown men trembled, women found
excuses to hover near his table. Chefs could barely grill
the sea bass. Rick Ruben is a decades long creative
force with a voice and influence that carries immeasurable weight.
Co founder of def Jam, winner of seven Grammys. As
(00:42):
a friend in music told me, Rick is unique together
with discovering, mentoring, creating beautiful music with artists such as Adele,
eminent Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run DMC, and for me
most movingly Johnny Cash. His values, Prince of Balls and
kindness guide everyone he comes close to. Rick is in
(01:04):
London with his family for his brilliant radical book, The
Creative Act. We are at home sitting around a table,
a cook with a passion for music and a music producer,
writer and philosopher with a passion for food. Though in
his achievements he is up there in the clouds, and
I am firmly on earth. We look at our work
in a similar way. Keep it simple, keep it honest, admire, respect,
(01:30):
and love the people you work with. That is exactly
what I feel about Rick. So beautiful. Well, it's true,
(01:53):
you know, we just just recently became friends, and it's
so nice to be here together to talk about what
we love most. And so I think what we usually
do is to ask you the gas to read a
recipe from any one of our cookbooks, and there are
quite a lot of them, and quite a lot of
recipes spanning the years. And you chose a dish that
(02:14):
I love, which is also very easy, called chicken with nutmeg.
Would you like to read the recipe Chicken with nutmeg?
Preheat the oven to on nine degrees. Wipe the chicken clean,
Trim off all excess fat, cut lemon in half, grate
the nutmeg. Rub the chicken with the lemon, squeezing the
(02:35):
juice into the skin. Season the skin and inside the
cavity with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Tuck the pursiuto slices
into the cavity. Put the chicken on an oven tray,
breast side down, Drizzle with olive oil, and roast for
one and a half hours, basting from time to time.
Add wine after half an hour, turn the bird breast
(02:57):
side up for the last twenty minutes. Serve the juices
from the pan. So why, of all the recipes did
you choose this? Is there something that you particularly like?
Do you eat a lot of chicken? The reason I
picked the chicken dishes. It's particularly simple dish, and in general,
the foods that I like tend to be the best
version of a very simple thing. If the sauce is
(03:20):
too complicated, if the chef is trying to impress me,
I tend not to like it. What gets me is
the quality of the produce, the quality of the food,
the quality of the meat, and the perfection of the preparation.
Not necessarily the innovation involved. It's more the craft of
the best version of the regular thing. It's my favorite.
(03:42):
I always worry when somebody says I have an idea
for you know, cooking chicken or fish or meat or vegetable,
because for me, it's not suddenly you have an idea
to do something. It's the last time you made chicken.
It might have been with tucking the pishutto under the skin,
and then the next time we had a not make
Do you feel that way? Yes, it's an iterative process.
(04:03):
We try different things and then something like that was
good last time. Maybe we'll try it that way again
and then add something else and eventually get to a
point where this is the way I'm going to do
it now and it feels good. Are you talking about music,
cooking everything? I'm talking about everything. Yes, it makes That's
what the books about really is how we do anything,
is how we do everything, and it all is of
(04:24):
a piece. All the choices we make are essentially are
the way we live. Our life is an artistic choice.
The cooking and the ingredient and the music. I suppose
it is also knowing that if you're going to cook things,
simply the ingredient has to be superb, same as true
music that the individual. If you're doing work that has many,
(04:46):
many instruments, in a way, they almost the sound of
them cancel each other out. Yes, they do make something
new when they add up. That said, I like the
personality of each of the individual ingredients and music. If
you have three ingredients, it's easier to understand them. It's
also harder to get them right because there's only three.
(05:08):
They're not being it's not being masked, it's not being hidden.
I remember a producer friend saying to me, you know,
I don't know how you have the patients to make
the records you make with so few things going on,
because he'll put down one thing and then put something
on top, and put something on top, put some on top,
and he makes a great sounding, you know, very successful producer.
But it's a different process, and mine is, Okay, let's
(05:32):
take everything away and what's left. Are each of these
elements the most interesting version of themselves they can be,
and are we presenting them in the best light that
we that we can? And that's that's how I like
to do it. For me, it was a revelation to
go to Italy because I grew up in upstate New York,
where everything considered Italian food was very rich. You had mozzarella,
(05:56):
you had parmesan, you had breadcrumbs, You bake it, you
boiled it, you did a whole process. But then if
you go to Italy and they put a piece of
fish on the grill with a few fresh herbs and
the drizzle of olive oil, and you know that the
fish has to be really fresh, the olive oil has
to be really recently pressed and very strong, and the
(06:18):
herbs have to be of the season because you can't basket,
as you say, so maybe there are real parallels, as
you think. I think so, I think it's all related.
And I remember the first time I went to Florence
and I remember asking and what's the best fish restaurant?
And they're like, we don't have fish here. It's like,
what do you mean, it's a it's a city. It's
like and by the way, like an hour and a
(06:40):
half from the sea. Well that's what they said, They said,
if you want fish, the fisher is an hour and
a half away. So that's how fresh it is. An
hour and a half is too far to travel with
the ingredient for it to be fresh in Italy. So
I so, Italy is my favorite place to eat and
uh and I spend as much time there as possible
(07:00):
and eat quite a lot. It's delicious. I agree. So
how was it actually growing up when you grew up
in Long Island? Long Island, Long Long Beaches, about an
hour outside of Manhattan, small beach community. Not so unlike Malibu,
where I've lived for a long time. Was it a
multicultural It was. The different parts of town were mixed
(07:23):
in different ways. And it was tiny, little town, but
there were these little subcultures. And we lived on the bay,
and we had a boat, and you could walk six
blocks and be on the ocean side and you know,
swimming the waves. It was. It was a mixed community.
In my high school was a multiracial high school. And
what was it like growing up there? What was it?
The food was not great and my mom was not
(07:45):
a good cook. We ate out pretty much for every meal.
We never we almost never ate home, almost never. What
I left home maybe in nineteen eighty one to go
to college. So we talked. I ate the worst food,
you know, I ate fast food on a regular basis.
(08:06):
I would say it's pretty limited. There were a couple
of Chinese restaurants. There was a couple of Italian restaurants, delicatessen, pastrami,
sandwich type places, but all of the restaurants were more
like mom and pop restaurants, tending to be heavier in
the way they prepared the food, you know, like the
Italian food would all be covered in bread, crumbson deep
(08:29):
fried and lots of mazzarella and lots of sauces. Do
you think you had a healthy relationship with food or
you know you said your mother was overweight. Yes, we
we ate lots of food and good tasting, low quality,
high carbohydrate, high calorie food. Also lots of you know,
seed oils and just terrible stuff. It was always an
(08:50):
argument because I didn't like to sit for a long
time in a restaurant. I still don't like to sit
for a long time in a restaurant. I like to
eat and go, and my parents would like to eat, sit,
smoke and drink coffee. And as a little kid, and
I'm an only child, so I had no one else
to play with, I did not want to be there.
I didn't want to be there. When you see them
lifting up the coffee cup and then they don't put
it to their mouth and they put it down in
(09:11):
the saucer. That's what used to kill me as a kid,
is that I'd sort of think we're just about to go,
and then they'd sort of get it up and put
it down and said, no, drink that coffee. I want
to go home. So I feel really interested in women
who don't cook. Mothers who didn't cook, you know, and
I feel so respectful towards them as well. Was your
(09:32):
mother did she work? She did not. She raised me.
That was her full time job, and food was not
an important part of that. Although everybody in the house
loved to eat and she loved to eat, and she
was overweight. She was the youngest of four sisters, and
I think she was always like the child and her family,
so the idea that the child would be the cook
(09:54):
didn't didn't make sense in her family. But the one
thing that my mom cooked well is turkey, and only
made it maybe twice a year, but it is to
this day maybe my favorite meal. It had onions, it
had lemon, salt and pepper. It was it was simple,
but it was seasoned and it was cooked to where
(10:15):
the skin was crispy and the meat was dry, but
there was lots of ojou. So the combination of the
dryer meat, which I prefer, with the wet ojou was
the perfect combination. You could moisten it to taste. And
I wonder if that there's some psychological meal that home
a simple roasted turkey that was incredible, incredible, And now
(10:37):
we made it a habit at home to do Thanksgiving
dinner once a month, and we do Thanksgiving once a
month and invite friends and it's great. Yeah, it is
the best American meal once a year, absolutely and why
And so this is how you grew up And did
(10:57):
the music start in high school? My love of music
started before that, from the time I was probably three
years old, you know, listening to the Beatles as a kid.
My parents played music in the house and somehow there
was a lot of music around and I can't, I
can't put my finger on it. Usually friends had older
brothers or sisters who had record collections or extended family,
(11:19):
and they were all really different. And one cousin, Mitchell,
who liked Bruce Springsteen and more rock music. And I
had another cousin, Marris, who liked things like kraft Work
and more experimental music. And I would spend every weekend
with my aunt Carol, who was like my second mom,
and she would take me to the theater and take
me to museums and play classical music for me. And
(11:41):
it was a whole another world. Whereas my parents were
it was different than that. My dad liked Latin jazz
and Frank Sinatra and my mom like the pop music
of the day, and maybe Barber Strides and certain certain singers.
And do you think when we were just talking about
music and food and about the simplicity and the layering
and they ingredient, did you feel that growing up or
(12:02):
did that come later? I would say I probably liked
simple food. And I probably never had great simple food
when I was young, but I tended to like simpler foods,
I think always. I always had a cleftic tasted music.
I would hang out in record stores forever to learn,
you know. I would I would befriend the people who
work there, and I like the Stooges. What else would
(12:25):
I like? And they're like, oh, you might like the
MC five and they play it for me in the store,
and uh, just had an education in the things I
was interested in. And so I would get home from
school and she and my mom would say, Kay, where
are we going today? And she would be my driver,
and let's go to the Magic Store. So she would
drive me to the Magic Store and she would sit
in the car and wait, and then I would come
out and she'd be reading, you know, she would just
(12:46):
read in the car, and I would be in the
magic store for probably three hours, because from nine years
old until probably sixteen, I was really into magic, and
I would spend a tremendous amount of time in bookstores
as well. I love bookstores and just hang out out
and read. And I spent a lot of time in
the library also, I love the library. You talk about
going to the magic shop very endearingly, describing your mother
(13:09):
sitting in the car for three hours, three hours in
a magic shop. Do you think there is a link
between the transformational process of magic, of music and a food.
The thing with magic is you learn to be skeptical
of everything. Once you understand how tricks work, you see
(13:32):
that the same methods used by magicians are used by
advertisers and by the newscasters, and you start to be
able to see the layer of what's really going on
behind this facade. So I would say it affects everything
going on, and you look at things in a deep way,
(13:53):
and not necessarily in just a skeptical way, in a
more based in reality versus an narrative way. When I
go to a show of any kind, I'm always paying
attention to the mechanisms at play as much as the content.
You know, My favorite trick was called metamorphosis. It was
a trick made famous originally, I believe by Houdini. I
(14:16):
never did it, but I I liked seeing it and
I liked the idea of it. The magician gets found
put in a sack and put in a a steamer trunk,
sealed in a trunk, and then the assistant would stand
on top of the trunk and raise the curtain and
drop the curtain, and it happens instantaneously. The curtain comes up,
(14:40):
the curtain comes down, and when the assistant raises the curtain,
the magician lowers the curtain, and the magician is now
standing on top of the box, opens up the box
and the assistant is inside. And I love that. I
love that. I love this feeling of this instant transposition
the same as true in me? Is it in that
(15:00):
a certain person plays a guitar piece and it's beautiful,
and another person plays the same guitar piece and there's
this other magical dimension to it that you can't put
a finger on. You don't know why it's I don't
even know if it better is the right word. You
don't know why it's different, because technically it looks the same,
(15:23):
but one of them you want to hear over and
over and over again forever and you're filled with wonder,
and the other one it's the same notes in the
same order. It's the same speed, played with great dexterity,
but it doesn't have this other life to it. And
I would say the same with food. It's the same
with the recipe is and that you can say I
always say that a recipe is part poetry and part science. Yes,
(15:47):
and that the science is the court of a teaspoon
of baking powder or three tablespoons of sugar. And and yet,
as you say, the way it's stirred, in the way
it sifted, in the way it's put in the So
I have a question for you, how difficult is it
to keep the consistency of the quality of the food
with different people involved over time. Yeah, that's a good question.
(16:09):
I think that we have very few chefs, so it's
not a big kitchen, and we don't have like you're
doing in Los Angeles. When I was in kitchens that
you have one head chef and a lot of chefs
on the line. So there is a kind of communication
really of of how you do it. But that is
the That is what I look for every time. If
(16:30):
you come to eat, my fears is that you know,
I'm grilled sea bass coming to the table going to
be the way it was the night before. And you know,
and very often when you're in the past, the head chef,
I don't know how it is in music, but the
head chef is the last person to easy to see
the plate that goes out. And it's tricky because sometimes
you just keep sending it back to the chef who
(16:51):
didn't quite get it right, and you're taking away their confidence,
you're diminishing them, and you're destroying them. But on the
other hand, you know that you don't want to send
something out, so it's constant, you know, judgment. How can
you tell a musician who's just the one that didn't
play the guitar the way? What do you do with
someone who's played something that isn't How do you give that?
(17:13):
I do my best to cast the people that I
that that can do the work, and if not, I'll
do it again with someone else. Tell me what happens
when you go into the studio. You've eaten definitely something
I've eaten before, and now the way it used to
work for the majority of my life. I would wake
(17:34):
up do whatever I would do before going into the studio,
but once I would go to the studio, that would
be it for until I was time to go to bed.
So I would spend the majority of my time, and
which also means in those days working in New York,
it would be a small room with no windows, and
I would be there for as long as you know,
(17:55):
until the sun came up, and then I would walk
or take a taxi home. So the major do you
in my life, I would say for at least twenty
five years, was being in a in a small dark room.
So I had very little life outside of a recording
studio because I worked so much so long. Now I've
found a way and just through doing it enough understanding
(18:17):
what's important for me to be there for, what's not
important for me to be there for. And now I
tend to have lunch, go to the studio, work from
maybe one till six. And what do you do when
you say you were listen to music and then talk
about what we can try next. Sometimes we do it
right then, and sometimes we're making a list of things
to try after I leave in the evening. It depends.
(18:39):
I always have anxiety when a project starts because I
never know what's going to happen. We don't go in
with any script. I prefer to go in when we
have songs, but then there are a million ways to
present a song, so there's always this sense of what's
going to separate this body of work from the rest
of the artist body of work and everyone else's work.
And I don't know what is going in. So it's
(19:02):
a real experiment and we come in and I'm nervous
until something good happens, like ah, And then if that
thing that's good, even if it's a even if it
doesn't end up this way, if it's a clue of
what the whole vision of the project can be, even
if it's not the what it is, I feel better
(19:23):
because at least there's a solution. Even if it doesn't
end up being the solution, there's a possible solution. And
that feels good because I was reading about the way
you work and you said that you start with an
empty sheet. You know that you basically start with nothing,
and then you move from nothing to what you're what
you're going to record that day or work. In my
(19:45):
own little way, in my own little restaurant. We come
in with an empty sheet of paper. Can we write
the menu? Of course, there are things that we always
know we'll have months of realm. We always know that
we'll have four pastas, and we always know that we'll
have two dishes on the grill, two dishes in the
wood oven, then two dishes to roast. But it does
start with with an empty sheet, and do have a
parallel in that. Absolutely. I come and we usually start
(20:10):
by listening to any ideas that the artists have. Whatever
they are, they could be. It could be a song.
They may play a whole song and then talk about
how to do it, or they may play a demo
of a whole worked out arrangement of a song with
with musicians and everything. They may come in and with
a riff, you know, just a little a little snippet
(20:31):
of a song, or a melodic idea or a lyrical idea,
and then we talk about ways of fleshing it out
and what are the next stages and what can it be.
Um sometimes they'll come to me with a whole, uh
you know, body of work, like an album's worth of
things that are in various stages of completion, and then
we listen and see is this something that we can
(20:53):
Is this a starting point that we could build off of,
or is this almost like a recipe that we could
use to start from scratch. You never know, it really
is um and then the experiments begin. We try different things,
and I like the idea of in the case of
where someone brings in something, I like the idea of
stripping back the elements and listening to what's there and
(21:13):
even if it wasn't done, you know, in an intentional
way for the way that it's going to be used.
Sometimes you find very interesting things that if you were
trying to do it you might not do. It could
be very interesting to listen to. And that goes back
to what we're saying before, is that neither you nor
I've ever had an idea really that it is the
(21:37):
progression of what you did before, what you're doing now,
to what you do tomorrow. But it isn't. You don't
come in and say I have a great idea for
this song. Rarely rarely, and the times that I do,
I still hold them lightly because it's until an idea
is fleshed out in when it goes from the the
(21:58):
the idea stage to the in the world stage, it
might not be what the idea was. You know, you
don't know it until you try it. Or in the
studio we demonstrate everything because if if if a, if
I tell an artist an idea or they tell me
an idea, what I envision and what they envision are
completely different. Like the two chefs preparing the same we don't.
(22:19):
We don't language isn't um. We don't have a way
of communicating to where we actually know what each other
is saying or feeling. That's also trust. Isn't it that
they trust what you're saying to them? Where they trust
what your thoughts. It's like if I gave you two
dishes of food and I asked you to taste them
and ask you which one you like better. The only
(22:42):
right answer is the one that you like better. Do
you know what I'm saying? There is no right answer.
It's with taste. It's you taste this, You taste this,
tell me which one you like. There's no same there's
no there are no wrong answers in taste. It is
I've been lucky that when I'm true to my taste,
(23:03):
other people have liked it. It's not the case for everybody.
But that's the best chance we have is to make
the thing that we love and hope that someone else
loves it. If you do something that you don't like
with the idea that someone else might like it, what
are the what are the odds that's going to be good?
Then no one might like it? At least at least
(23:23):
I like it, you know, and I can go to
sleep knowing it's the best I could do. I love it.
If no one else likes it, it's okay. And when
(23:44):
you just talk about musicians, we were talking about Johnny
Cash before you showed me that film, which actually shows
an enormous amount of food on the table. You know,
it shows a kind of vision of someone who loves
to sing. And how are the various musicians that you
worked with, how their attitudes food? Foods a big part
of the process. And one of the something I learned
(24:07):
early on is that if you're working in the studio
and the music doesn't sound good, order pizza, and there
you order pizza. And then if you when you're eating pizza,
the music sounds better, And is it because it is better?
That it's just a psychological and so how like the
world is better when you're eating. Musicians eat before they
(24:28):
start playing, or before. Most musicians eat before they play,
with the exception of some singers who find it hard
to sing or maybe their voice isn't as clear after
they've eaten. Tell me about some of the musicians and
their food as a musician, that you actually that they think.
One of the things that because the nature of the
(24:50):
recording studio is this place you go to and sometimes
you spend a long time knowing what you're doing, and
sometimes you spend a long time trying to figure out
what you're doing, or waiting for thing to come that
you're there to do, but you don't know what it
is yet. So eating in the studio is a standard.
And one of the things about Shangra Laud, the studio
that I have in Malibu is most studios have one runner,
(25:12):
maybe two, and we have lots of runners. And when
people come and order food, food comes very quickly, which
historically in studio you'll order lunch and it might not
come for two hours, whereas for whatever reason, at Changer,
lads very creature comfort oriented and we get really good
food really fast, and sometimes we even have a chef
because there's the kitchen. If you ever saw the movie
(25:34):
the last walls the band are in the kitchen at Changer. Law, Um,
that's the You came into my house today and the
first thing you said was let's eight. Yes, he did
quite quickly. It is the habit. A friend of mine
once said that his family had to rule that there
should be no longer than forty seconds when someone walks
into your house that they have a drink in their hand.
(25:56):
And actually, what I think that does is actually very nice,
because it means you're opping what you're doing and you're
giving somebody something when they come in the house, you know.
And I think that means something, and so are the
artists that you do associate more with food than others.
But that Johnny Cash did he eat? Johnny Cash loved
a restaurant in Los Angeles called the Ivy, and whenever
(26:16):
he would come to town, we would always go to
get into the Ivy. That was his favorite place. Because
also the way someone eats, it tells you about the person,
doesn't it. I think I think so. I think if
you go to a restaurant, A lot of people say
to me that they wouldn't never hire anybody unless they
took them to a restaurant first. Are they kind to
the waiter? Are they impatient with the way to do
they share their food? Bloomberg teld me that if he
(26:38):
took somebody out to lunch for a job interview and
they ordered a glass of wine, he wouldn't hire them.
Interesting friends sitting next to him said if they didn't
order a glass of wine, and wouldn't hire I heard
a story about Horston Wells that he would finish his
plate of food and as soon as his plate was empty,
he'd hold it out next to him and count to five,
and if no one took the plate, you would drop
(26:59):
it on the floor. Really, I will say a pet
peeve is I do not like to see an empty
plate in front of me for any length of time.
As soon as I finish eating, I really hope someone
takes it away. What if the person next to is
still eating, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, And I'll
often move my plate in it and maybe you rude
(27:19):
managers away from me. Yeah, I don't know why it is.
It's been a lifelong I don't know what it is
a good discussion with the therapy. What is it about
the empty plate that you don't want to sit behind.
It's interesting, though, what about the days of Death Jam
In the beginning, it is known that you created this
(27:40):
incredible music recording company by nurturing artists, by being brave,
by being radical, by seeking them out, by being kind
to them. What was that like? I would say the
recording studio that we worked in most I dubbed it
chun King House of Metal, which is still what it's
called to day, although the studio moved to a different
(28:01):
location and it was in Chinatown and we would eat
like Chinese food because we're in town New York. Food
is great. Was that when you became vegan? No, I
became vegan right when I moved to California in college.
The first thing I gave up with soda. I used
to drink a sixty four ounce Pepsi with every meal, insane,
and then I gave that up and I switched to
(28:21):
a picture of iced coffee, and without knowing I was
trying to replace the caffeine with the caffeine. I didn't
know that, but I drank a lot of iced coffee.
And then I gave up caffeine at that point in time,
and then I was only drinking water. Then I gave
up red meat, and I got to the point where
I was basically eating chicken and vegetables. I never really
(28:43):
liked fish, so I didn't eat fish. I never really
liked eggs, so I didn't eat eggs. So it was
chicken and vegetables. And I remember a friend of mine
gave me a book called Diet for New America, which
was an anti meat book, and they said, if you
read this book, you're never gonna want eat chicken again
at the and I decided before I read the book,
I'm an experiment with not eating chicken, just to see
(29:05):
how long I can go. And then I ended up
and never eating chicken for twenty something years. So at
that point, you would and what made you stop? In vegan?
I weighed a hundred pounds more than I do now.
I was terribly depressed, bad skin, I was sick for
a long time. I worked with a performance expert who
(29:27):
really wanted me to eat animals, and I wouldn't because
I was a vegan and that was not an option.
What is a performance expert. It's a person he worked
with Olympic athletes or heads of companies, different people. He
was a doctor, and I heard about him. I read
a book. This is when I was really big, and
you know, could barely walk to the end of the
(29:47):
block without being out of breath. And I read a
book by a guy who ran a thousand miles in
eleven days, and and I just thought, it's like, I
can't walk down the block, yet there's a human who
can run a thousand miles in eleven days. Some things
I'm doing something wrong. I'm doing something wrong. And in
his book he talked about meeting this guy named Phil
(30:09):
Maffitone who changed the way he trained. And I sent
him a message saying I'd like to hire him as
my doctor. He was based in Florida at that time,
and I was living in California, and he sent me
back an email saying I've retired. I've stopped my medical practice,
and he and mentioned he didn't know who I was
at all, and he said I gave up medicine to
write songs. And I wrote back, well, if you're interested,
(30:33):
I can mentor you on the songwriting if you can
mentor me on the health stuff. And then I saw
him several times. They ended up living in my house
for two years and I did everything he said. He
got me to eat eggs and fish, neither of which
I ever liked, purely as medicine. He said, just think
of this is this is the medicine you need. I
know you don't like it. You're not eating it for pleasure.
(30:56):
You're eating this because you need this animal protein. So
I did that and I got much much healthier, but
I didn't lose weight yet. And he said, I watch
everything you eat. I'm with you every day. I see
how you exercise. He said, ninety nine out of a
hundred people, all the white would fall off. For some reason,
it's not falling off. And then I thought about, well,
(31:16):
my mom was obese eventually in a wheelchair. Maybe it's
just a genetic thing. It is what it is. And
then I went out to lunch one day with Mo Austin,
you know, passed away years old. He was one of
my mentors in music and maybe the most beautiful person
in the music industry, really beautiful person. And if you
(31:38):
knew his wife, Evelyn, she was incredible, a light being,
really beautiful, beautiful people. And we went out to lunch
one day and he said, you know, I'm really getting
worried about you. You're really big. I know you work,
I know you walk, I know you care. You know
you're diligent about what you eat. But you're really getting big,
and I'm worried about your health. I'm gonna get the
name of the nutritionist. I want you to go to
(31:59):
my guy, and I want you to do what ever
he says. And I said, final, I'll do it, knowing
it wouldn't work because I've tried everything, but I'm I
love him. I'll do whatever he says. And he sent
me to a weight loss specialist at U C l A.
And he put me on a diet of seven protein
shakes a day and it was just water and egg protein,
(32:21):
and then one meal a day at the end of
the day, a meal which was fish, soup, salad, very
low calorie, low carb, high protein meal. And I did
that and in fourteen months I lost pounds. That's it's
like a whole like a whole person probably, so at
(32:41):
that point in time, I was eating drinking egg shakes,
still eating eggs, still eating fish, but not eating any
other meats. And then I read a book called The
Paleo Solution, pretty explained how all the different foods work
in our body, and I believed every word of it.
And it talked about how timately red meat is the
single best thing that you can eat. And I was
(33:04):
torn because in my mind, I'm still a vegan. I'm
eating fish and eggs as medicine. I'm drinking these egg
shakes to lose weight, but I still don't eat flesh.
You know, I don't need animal flesh. And I believed
in the book so much that I bought a hundred
copies and I was giving them people, but I wouldn't
do it because I was a vegan, so I could
(33:25):
you know, it didn't I couldn't do it. And after
about a year of giving this book away, it just
felt like it's disingenuous to be sharing this information and
not doing it myself. Doesn't seem right. And it was
on my birthday. Modiella and I. Modielle was a very
I was a vegan, she was a vegetarian. We went
out to dinner one of our favorite restaurants in Los
(33:47):
Angeles called Capo. If you've been a Capo in Santa Monica,
spectacular restaurant, maybe the best in l A. And they
grilled meat on an oakwood fire. Really, I think it's oak,
might be Pecan in its oak. Incredible meat place, although
I always went there and eight fish and they had
great fish. So we both ordered fish like normal, and
(34:08):
we ordered a steak and we had it in the
center of the table between us and we ate our fish,
and then each of us had one bite of the meat.
And it was a terrible experience because if you haven't
eaten meat for in that point twenty three years, it's
like eating human flesh. It's it's an insane thing to
(34:30):
get over the way our brains work. Even the smell
of meat cooking was a hard thing to be around
back then. But I believed it was what was healthiest,
even though I had been weaned off of it through this,
through this process, and we did that maybe every week
or two we would go to Capo and have a
bite or two of meat, and then after about six
(34:52):
weeks we were able to just order a steak. We
were just talking about your house in Italy. So you
chose to live in Italy, which has passes every few
times a day. Do you eat carbs? Now? We eat
in Italy? All the rules change said certain things, there
are certain there are certain rules at certain times, have
one called travel day, which is on a travel day
(35:13):
where you're flying. I don't really like to fly, so
one of the rules of travel days you can eat
anything you want. Most of these things have more to
do with what you do all the time. So on
a on an all the time basis, we eat red
meat and some vegetables. That's our that's what we mean.
And I'll say I'll eat meat, I'll eat chicken, but
(35:34):
I think it seems like grass fed beef seems to
be the best. Or wild game will eat, will eat
a good amount of wild game bison. Um, that's pretty
much what we care. My last question to you, Rick Rubin,
(36:03):
is what would be your comfort food? Pizza? And I
try to do it as infrequently as possible, but it
is the one that's the default. Too much going on, tired,
bad mood, nothing, you know, nothing feels like it's going
to make it better. Maybe pizza, okay? And and I
(36:25):
hope you don't need that awful I don't. I want
you to have. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.
The River Cafe look Book is now available in bookshops
and online. It has over one d recipes, beautifully illustrated
with photographs, from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
(36:48):
has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a
host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted
for new cooks. The River Cafe Look Book recipes for
cooks of all ages
Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of I Heart
Radio and Adami's Studios. When I told my friends that
I would be recording a podcast with Rick Rubin this weekend,
the responses were raptures, what, wow, incredible and can I come?
(00:21):
It was the same in the River Cafe the other
day when Rick was there. Grown men trembled, women found
excuses to hover near his table. Chefs could barely grill
the sea bass. Rick Ruben is a decades long creative
force with a voice and influence that carries immeasurable weight.
Co founder of def Jam, winner of seven Grammys. As
(00:42):
a friend in music told me, Rick is unique together
with discovering, mentoring, creating beautiful music with artists such as Adele,
eminent Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run DMC, and for me
most movingly Johnny Cash. His values, Prince of Balls and
kindness guide everyone he comes close to. Rick is in
(01:04):
London with his family for his brilliant radical book, The
Creative Act. We are at home sitting around a table,
a cook with a passion for music and a music producer,
writer and philosopher with a passion for food. Though in
his achievements he is up there in the clouds, and
I am firmly on earth. We look at our work
in a similar way. Keep it simple, keep it honest, admire, respect,
(01:30):
and love the people you work with. That is exactly
what I feel about Rick. So beautiful. Well, it's true,
(01:53):
you know, we just just recently became friends, and it's
so nice to be here together to talk about what
we love most. And so I think what we usually
do is to ask you the gas to read a
recipe from any one of our cookbooks, and there are
quite a lot of them, and quite a lot of
recipes spanning the years. And you chose a dish that
(02:14):
I love, which is also very easy, called chicken with nutmeg.
Would you like to read the recipe Chicken with nutmeg?
Preheat the oven to on nine degrees. Wipe the chicken clean,
Trim off all excess fat, cut lemon in half, grate
the nutmeg. Rub the chicken with the lemon, squeezing the
(02:35):
juice into the skin. Season the skin and inside the
cavity with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Tuck the pursiuto slices
into the cavity. Put the chicken on an oven tray,
breast side down, Drizzle with olive oil, and roast for
one and a half hours, basting from time to time.
Add wine after half an hour, turn the bird breast
(02:57):
side up for the last twenty minutes. Serve the juices
from the pan. So why, of all the recipes did
you choose this? Is there something that you particularly like?
Do you eat a lot of chicken? The reason I
picked the chicken dishes. It's particularly simple dish, and in general,
the foods that I like tend to be the best
version of a very simple thing. If the sauce is
(03:20):
too complicated, if the chef is trying to impress me,
I tend not to like it. What gets me is
the quality of the produce, the quality of the food,
the quality of the meat, and the perfection of the preparation.
Not necessarily the innovation involved. It's more the craft of
the best version of the regular thing. It's my favorite.
(03:42):
I always worry when somebody says I have an idea
for you know, cooking chicken or fish or meat or vegetable,
because for me, it's not suddenly you have an idea
to do something. It's the last time you made chicken.
It might have been with tucking the pishutto under the skin,
and then the next time we had a not make
Do you feel that way? Yes, it's an iterative process.
(04:03):
We try different things and then something like that was
good last time. Maybe we'll try it that way again
and then add something else and eventually get to a
point where this is the way I'm going to do
it now and it feels good. Are you talking about music,
cooking everything? I'm talking about everything. Yes, it makes That's
what the books about really is how we do anything,
is how we do everything, and it all is of
(04:24):
a piece. All the choices we make are essentially are
the way we live. Our life is an artistic choice.
The cooking and the ingredient and the music. I suppose
it is also knowing that if you're going to cook things,
simply the ingredient has to be superb, same as true
music that the individual. If you're doing work that has many,
(04:46):
many instruments, in a way, they almost the sound of
them cancel each other out. Yes, they do make something
new when they add up. That said, I like the
personality of each of the individual ingredients and music. If
you have three ingredients, it's easier to understand them. It's
also harder to get them right because there's only three.
(05:08):
They're not being it's not being masked, it's not being hidden.
I remember a producer friend saying to me, you know,
I don't know how you have the patients to make
the records you make with so few things going on,
because he'll put down one thing and then put something
on top, and put something on top, put some on top,
and he makes a great sounding, you know, very successful producer.
But it's a different process, and mine is, Okay, let's
(05:32):
take everything away and what's left. Are each of these
elements the most interesting version of themselves they can be,
and are we presenting them in the best light that
we that we can? And that's that's how I like
to do it. For me, it was a revelation to
go to Italy because I grew up in upstate New York,
where everything considered Italian food was very rich. You had mozzarella,
(05:56):
you had parmesan, you had breadcrumbs, You bake it, you
boiled it, you did a whole process. But then if
you go to Italy and they put a piece of
fish on the grill with a few fresh herbs and
the drizzle of olive oil, and you know that the
fish has to be really fresh, the olive oil has
to be really recently pressed and very strong, and the
(06:18):
herbs have to be of the season because you can't basket,
as you say, so maybe there are real parallels, as
you think. I think so, I think it's all related.
And I remember the first time I went to Florence
and I remember asking and what's the best fish restaurant?
And they're like, we don't have fish here. It's like,
what do you mean, it's a it's a city. It's
like and by the way, like an hour and a
(06:40):
half from the sea. Well that's what they said, They said,
if you want fish, the fisher is an hour and
a half away. So that's how fresh it is. An
hour and a half is too far to travel with
the ingredient for it to be fresh in Italy. So
I so, Italy is my favorite place to eat and
uh and I spend as much time there as possible
(07:00):
and eat quite a lot. It's delicious. I agree. So
how was it actually growing up when you grew up
in Long Island? Long Island, Long Long Beaches, about an
hour outside of Manhattan, small beach community. Not so unlike Malibu,
where I've lived for a long time. Was it a
multicultural It was. The different parts of town were mixed
(07:23):
in different ways. And it was tiny, little town, but
there were these little subcultures. And we lived on the bay,
and we had a boat, and you could walk six
blocks and be on the ocean side and you know,
swimming the waves. It was. It was a mixed community.
In my high school was a multiracial high school. And
what was it like growing up there? What was it?
The food was not great and my mom was not
(07:45):
a good cook. We ate out pretty much for every meal.
We never we almost never ate home, almost never. What
I left home maybe in nineteen eighty one to go
to college. So we talked. I ate the worst food,
you know, I ate fast food on a regular basis.
(08:06):
I would say it's pretty limited. There were a couple
of Chinese restaurants. There was a couple of Italian restaurants, delicatessen, pastrami,
sandwich type places, but all of the restaurants were more
like mom and pop restaurants, tending to be heavier in
the way they prepared the food, you know, like the
Italian food would all be covered in bread, crumbson deep
(08:29):
fried and lots of mazzarella and lots of sauces. Do
you think you had a healthy relationship with food or
you know you said your mother was overweight. Yes, we
we ate lots of food and good tasting, low quality,
high carbohydrate, high calorie food. Also lots of you know,
seed oils and just terrible stuff. It was always an
(08:50):
argument because I didn't like to sit for a long
time in a restaurant. I still don't like to sit
for a long time in a restaurant. I like to
eat and go, and my parents would like to eat, sit,
smoke and drink coffee. And as a little kid, and
I'm an only child, so I had no one else
to play with, I did not want to be there.
I didn't want to be there. When you see them
lifting up the coffee cup and then they don't put
it to their mouth and they put it down in
(09:11):
the saucer. That's what used to kill me as a kid,
is that I'd sort of think we're just about to go,
and then they'd sort of get it up and put
it down and said, no, drink that coffee. I want
to go home. So I feel really interested in women
who don't cook. Mothers who didn't cook, you know, and
I feel so respectful towards them as well. Was your
(09:32):
mother did she work? She did not. She raised me.
That was her full time job, and food was not
an important part of that. Although everybody in the house
loved to eat and she loved to eat, and she
was overweight. She was the youngest of four sisters, and
I think she was always like the child and her family,
so the idea that the child would be the cook
(09:54):
didn't didn't make sense in her family. But the one
thing that my mom cooked well is turkey, and only
made it maybe twice a year, but it is to
this day maybe my favorite meal. It had onions, it
had lemon, salt and pepper. It was it was simple,
but it was seasoned and it was cooked to where
(10:15):
the skin was crispy and the meat was dry, but
there was lots of ojou. So the combination of the
dryer meat, which I prefer, with the wet ojou was
the perfect combination. You could moisten it to taste. And
I wonder if that there's some psychological meal that home
a simple roasted turkey that was incredible, incredible, And now
(10:37):
we made it a habit at home to do Thanksgiving
dinner once a month, and we do Thanksgiving once a
month and invite friends and it's great. Yeah, it is
the best American meal once a year, absolutely and why
And so this is how you grew up And did
(10:57):
the music start in high school? My love of music
started before that, from the time I was probably three
years old, you know, listening to the Beatles as a kid.
My parents played music in the house and somehow there
was a lot of music around and I can't, I
can't put my finger on it. Usually friends had older
brothers or sisters who had record collections or extended family,
(11:19):
and they were all really different. And one cousin, Mitchell,
who liked Bruce Springsteen and more rock music. And I
had another cousin, Marris, who liked things like kraft Work
and more experimental music. And I would spend every weekend
with my aunt Carol, who was like my second mom,
and she would take me to the theater and take
me to museums and play classical music for me. And
(11:41):
it was a whole another world. Whereas my parents were
it was different than that. My dad liked Latin jazz
and Frank Sinatra and my mom like the pop music
of the day, and maybe Barber Strides and certain certain singers.
And do you think when we were just talking about
music and food and about the simplicity and the layering
and they ingredient, did you feel that growing up or
(12:02):
did that come later? I would say I probably liked
simple food. And I probably never had great simple food
when I was young, but I tended to like simpler foods,
I think always. I always had a cleftic tasted music.
I would hang out in record stores forever to learn,
you know. I would I would befriend the people who
work there, and I like the Stooges. What else would
(12:25):
I like? And they're like, oh, you might like the
MC five and they play it for me in the store,
and uh, just had an education in the things I
was interested in. And so I would get home from
school and she and my mom would say, Kay, where
are we going today? And she would be my driver,
and let's go to the Magic Store. So she would
drive me to the Magic Store and she would sit
in the car and wait, and then I would come
out and she'd be reading, you know, she would just
(12:46):
read in the car, and I would be in the
magic store for probably three hours, because from nine years
old until probably sixteen, I was really into magic, and
I would spend a tremendous amount of time in bookstores
as well. I love bookstores and just hang out out
and read. And I spent a lot of time in
the library also, I love the library. You talk about
going to the magic shop very endearingly, describing your mother
(13:09):
sitting in the car for three hours, three hours in
a magic shop. Do you think there is a link
between the transformational process of magic, of music and a food.
The thing with magic is you learn to be skeptical
of everything. Once you understand how tricks work, you see
(13:32):
that the same methods used by magicians are used by
advertisers and by the newscasters, and you start to be
able to see the layer of what's really going on
behind this facade. So I would say it affects everything
going on, and you look at things in a deep way,
(13:53):
and not necessarily in just a skeptical way, in a
more based in reality versus an narrative way. When I
go to a show of any kind, I'm always paying
attention to the mechanisms at play as much as the content.
You know, My favorite trick was called metamorphosis. It was
a trick made famous originally, I believe by Houdini. I
(14:16):
never did it, but I I liked seeing it and
I liked the idea of it. The magician gets found
put in a sack and put in a a steamer trunk,
sealed in a trunk, and then the assistant would stand
on top of the trunk and raise the curtain and
drop the curtain, and it happens instantaneously. The curtain comes up,
(14:40):
the curtain comes down, and when the assistant raises the curtain,
the magician lowers the curtain, and the magician is now
standing on top of the box, opens up the box
and the assistant is inside. And I love that. I
love that. I love this feeling of this instant transposition
the same as true in me? Is it in that
(15:00):
a certain person plays a guitar piece and it's beautiful,
and another person plays the same guitar piece and there's
this other magical dimension to it that you can't put
a finger on. You don't know why it's I don't
even know if it better is the right word. You
don't know why it's different, because technically it looks the same,
(15:23):
but one of them you want to hear over and
over and over again forever and you're filled with wonder,
and the other one it's the same notes in the
same order. It's the same speed, played with great dexterity,
but it doesn't have this other life to it. And
I would say the same with food. It's the same
with the recipe is and that you can say I
always say that a recipe is part poetry and part science. Yes,
(15:47):
and that the science is the court of a teaspoon
of baking powder or three tablespoons of sugar. And and yet,
as you say, the way it's stirred, in the way
it sifted, in the way it's put in the So
I have a question for you, how difficult is it
to keep the consistency of the quality of the food
with different people involved over time. Yeah, that's a good question.
(16:09):
I think that we have very few chefs, so it's
not a big kitchen, and we don't have like you're
doing in Los Angeles. When I was in kitchens that
you have one head chef and a lot of chefs
on the line. So there is a kind of communication
really of of how you do it. But that is
the That is what I look for every time. If
(16:30):
you come to eat, my fears is that you know,
I'm grilled sea bass coming to the table going to
be the way it was the night before. And you know,
and very often when you're in the past, the head chef,
I don't know how it is in music, but the
head chef is the last person to easy to see
the plate that goes out. And it's tricky because sometimes
you just keep sending it back to the chef who
(16:51):
didn't quite get it right, and you're taking away their confidence,
you're diminishing them, and you're destroying them. But on the
other hand, you know that you don't want to send
something out, so it's constant, you know, judgment. How can
you tell a musician who's just the one that didn't
play the guitar the way? What do you do with
someone who's played something that isn't How do you give that?
(17:13):
I do my best to cast the people that I
that that can do the work, and if not, I'll
do it again with someone else. Tell me what happens
when you go into the studio. You've eaten definitely something
I've eaten before, and now the way it used to
work for the majority of my life. I would wake
(17:34):
up do whatever I would do before going into the studio,
but once I would go to the studio, that would
be it for until I was time to go to bed.
So I would spend the majority of my time, and
which also means in those days working in New York,
it would be a small room with no windows, and
I would be there for as long as you know,
(17:55):
until the sun came up, and then I would walk
or take a taxi home. So the major do you
in my life, I would say for at least twenty
five years, was being in a in a small dark room.
So I had very little life outside of a recording
studio because I worked so much so long. Now I've
found a way and just through doing it enough understanding
(18:17):
what's important for me to be there for, what's not
important for me to be there for. And now I
tend to have lunch, go to the studio, work from
maybe one till six. And what do you do when
you say you were listen to music and then talk
about what we can try next. Sometimes we do it
right then, and sometimes we're making a list of things
to try after I leave in the evening. It depends.
(18:39):
I always have anxiety when a project starts because I
never know what's going to happen. We don't go in
with any script. I prefer to go in when we
have songs, but then there are a million ways to
present a song, so there's always this sense of what's
going to separate this body of work from the rest
of the artist body of work and everyone else's work.
And I don't know what is going in. So it's
(19:02):
a real experiment and we come in and I'm nervous
until something good happens, like ah, And then if that
thing that's good, even if it's a even if it
doesn't end up this way, if it's a clue of
what the whole vision of the project can be, even
if it's not the what it is, I feel better
(19:23):
because at least there's a solution. Even if it doesn't
end up being the solution, there's a possible solution. And
that feels good because I was reading about the way
you work and you said that you start with an
empty sheet. You know that you basically start with nothing,
and then you move from nothing to what you're what
you're going to record that day or work. In my
(19:45):
own little way, in my own little restaurant. We come
in with an empty sheet of paper. Can we write
the menu? Of course, there are things that we always
know we'll have months of realm. We always know that
we'll have four pastas, and we always know that we'll
have two dishes on the grill, two dishes in the
wood oven, then two dishes to roast. But it does
start with with an empty sheet, and do have a
parallel in that. Absolutely. I come and we usually start
(20:10):
by listening to any ideas that the artists have. Whatever
they are, they could be. It could be a song.
They may play a whole song and then talk about
how to do it, or they may play a demo
of a whole worked out arrangement of a song with
with musicians and everything. They may come in and with
a riff, you know, just a little a little snippet
(20:31):
of a song, or a melodic idea or a lyrical idea,
and then we talk about ways of fleshing it out
and what are the next stages and what can it be.
Um sometimes they'll come to me with a whole, uh
you know, body of work, like an album's worth of
things that are in various stages of completion, and then
we listen and see is this something that we can
(20:53):
Is this a starting point that we could build off of,
or is this almost like a recipe that we could
use to start from scratch. You never know, it really
is um and then the experiments begin. We try different things,
and I like the idea of in the case of
where someone brings in something, I like the idea of
stripping back the elements and listening to what's there and
(21:13):
even if it wasn't done, you know, in an intentional
way for the way that it's going to be used.
Sometimes you find very interesting things that if you were
trying to do it you might not do. It could
be very interesting to listen to. And that goes back
to what we're saying before, is that neither you nor
I've ever had an idea really that it is the
(21:37):
progression of what you did before, what you're doing now,
to what you do tomorrow. But it isn't. You don't
come in and say I have a great idea for
this song. Rarely rarely, and the times that I do,
I still hold them lightly because it's until an idea
is fleshed out in when it goes from the the
(21:58):
the idea stage to the in the world stage, it
might not be what the idea was. You know, you
don't know it until you try it. Or in the
studio we demonstrate everything because if if if a, if
I tell an artist an idea or they tell me
an idea, what I envision and what they envision are
completely different. Like the two chefs preparing the same we don't.
(22:19):
We don't language isn't um. We don't have a way
of communicating to where we actually know what each other
is saying or feeling. That's also trust. Isn't it that
they trust what you're saying to them? Where they trust
what your thoughts. It's like if I gave you two
dishes of food and I asked you to taste them
and ask you which one you like better. The only
(22:42):
right answer is the one that you like better. Do
you know what I'm saying? There is no right answer.
It's with taste. It's you taste this, You taste this,
tell me which one you like. There's no same there's
no there are no wrong answers in taste. It is
I've been lucky that when I'm true to my taste,
(23:03):
other people have liked it. It's not the case for everybody.
But that's the best chance we have is to make
the thing that we love and hope that someone else
loves it. If you do something that you don't like
with the idea that someone else might like it, what
are the what are the odds that's going to be good?
Then no one might like it? At least at least
(23:23):
I like it, you know, and I can go to
sleep knowing it's the best I could do. I love it.
If no one else likes it, it's okay. And when
(23:44):
you just talk about musicians, we were talking about Johnny
Cash before you showed me that film, which actually shows
an enormous amount of food on the table. You know,
it shows a kind of vision of someone who loves
to sing. And how are the various musicians that you
worked with, how their attitudes food? Foods a big part
of the process. And one of the something I learned
(24:07):
early on is that if you're working in the studio
and the music doesn't sound good, order pizza, and there
you order pizza. And then if you when you're eating pizza,
the music sounds better, And is it because it is better?
That it's just a psychological and so how like the
world is better when you're eating. Musicians eat before they
(24:28):
start playing, or before. Most musicians eat before they play,
with the exception of some singers who find it hard
to sing or maybe their voice isn't as clear after
they've eaten. Tell me about some of the musicians and
their food as a musician, that you actually that they think.
One of the things that because the nature of the
(24:50):
recording studio is this place you go to and sometimes
you spend a long time knowing what you're doing, and
sometimes you spend a long time trying to figure out
what you're doing, or waiting for thing to come that
you're there to do, but you don't know what it
is yet. So eating in the studio is a standard.
And one of the things about Shangra Laud, the studio
that I have in Malibu is most studios have one runner,
(25:12):
maybe two, and we have lots of runners. And when
people come and order food, food comes very quickly, which
historically in studio you'll order lunch and it might not
come for two hours, whereas for whatever reason, at Changer,
lads very creature comfort oriented and we get really good
food really fast, and sometimes we even have a chef
because there's the kitchen. If you ever saw the movie
(25:34):
the last walls the band are in the kitchen at Changer. Law, Um,
that's the You came into my house today and the
first thing you said was let's eight. Yes, he did
quite quickly. It is the habit. A friend of mine
once said that his family had to rule that there
should be no longer than forty seconds when someone walks
into your house that they have a drink in their hand.
(25:56):
And actually, what I think that does is actually very nice,
because it means you're opping what you're doing and you're
giving somebody something when they come in the house, you know.
And I think that means something, and so are the
artists that you do associate more with food than others.
But that Johnny Cash did he eat? Johnny Cash loved
a restaurant in Los Angeles called the Ivy, and whenever
(26:16):
he would come to town, we would always go to
get into the Ivy. That was his favorite place. Because
also the way someone eats, it tells you about the person,
doesn't it. I think I think so. I think if
you go to a restaurant, A lot of people say
to me that they wouldn't never hire anybody unless they
took them to a restaurant first. Are they kind to
the waiter? Are they impatient with the way to do
they share their food? Bloomberg teld me that if he
(26:38):
took somebody out to lunch for a job interview and
they ordered a glass of wine, he wouldn't hire them.
Interesting friends sitting next to him said if they didn't
order a glass of wine, and wouldn't hire I heard
a story about Horston Wells that he would finish his
plate of food and as soon as his plate was empty,
he'd hold it out next to him and count to five,
and if no one took the plate, you would drop
(26:59):
it on the floor. Really, I will say a pet
peeve is I do not like to see an empty
plate in front of me for any length of time.
As soon as I finish eating, I really hope someone
takes it away. What if the person next to is
still eating, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, And I'll
often move my plate in it and maybe you rude
(27:19):
managers away from me. Yeah, I don't know why it is.
It's been a lifelong I don't know what it is
a good discussion with the therapy. What is it about
the empty plate that you don't want to sit behind.
It's interesting, though, what about the days of Death Jam
In the beginning, it is known that you created this
(27:40):
incredible music recording company by nurturing artists, by being brave,
by being radical, by seeking them out, by being kind
to them. What was that like? I would say the
recording studio that we worked in most I dubbed it
chun King House of Metal, which is still what it's
called to day, although the studio moved to a different
(28:01):
location and it was in Chinatown and we would eat
like Chinese food because we're in town New York. Food
is great. Was that when you became vegan? No, I
became vegan right when I moved to California in college.
The first thing I gave up with soda. I used
to drink a sixty four ounce Pepsi with every meal, insane,
and then I gave that up and I switched to
(28:21):
a picture of iced coffee, and without knowing I was
trying to replace the caffeine with the caffeine. I didn't
know that, but I drank a lot of iced coffee.
And then I gave up caffeine at that point in time,
and then I was only drinking water. Then I gave
up red meat, and I got to the point where
I was basically eating chicken and vegetables. I never really
(28:43):
liked fish, so I didn't eat fish. I never really
liked eggs, so I didn't eat eggs. So it was
chicken and vegetables. And I remember a friend of mine
gave me a book called Diet for New America, which
was an anti meat book, and they said, if you
read this book, you're never gonna want eat chicken again
at the and I decided before I read the book,
I'm an experiment with not eating chicken, just to see
(29:05):
how long I can go. And then I ended up
and never eating chicken for twenty something years. So at
that point, you would and what made you stop? In vegan?
I weighed a hundred pounds more than I do now.
I was terribly depressed, bad skin, I was sick for
a long time. I worked with a performance expert who
(29:27):
really wanted me to eat animals, and I wouldn't because
I was a vegan and that was not an option.
What is a performance expert. It's a person he worked
with Olympic athletes or heads of companies, different people. He
was a doctor, and I heard about him. I read
a book. This is when I was really big, and
you know, could barely walk to the end of the
(29:47):
block without being out of breath. And I read a
book by a guy who ran a thousand miles in
eleven days, and and I just thought, it's like, I
can't walk down the block, yet there's a human who
can run a thousand miles in eleven days. Some things
I'm doing something wrong. I'm doing something wrong. And in
his book he talked about meeting this guy named Phil
(30:09):
Maffitone who changed the way he trained. And I sent
him a message saying I'd like to hire him as
my doctor. He was based in Florida at that time,
and I was living in California, and he sent me
back an email saying I've retired. I've stopped my medical practice,
and he and mentioned he didn't know who I was
at all, and he said I gave up medicine to
write songs. And I wrote back, well, if you're interested,
(30:33):
I can mentor you on the songwriting if you can
mentor me on the health stuff. And then I saw
him several times. They ended up living in my house
for two years and I did everything he said. He
got me to eat eggs and fish, neither of which
I ever liked, purely as medicine. He said, just think
of this is this is the medicine you need. I
know you don't like it. You're not eating it for pleasure.
(30:56):
You're eating this because you need this animal protein. So
I did that and I got much much healthier, but
I didn't lose weight yet. And he said, I watch
everything you eat. I'm with you every day. I see
how you exercise. He said, ninety nine out of a
hundred people, all the white would fall off. For some reason,
it's not falling off. And then I thought about, well,
(31:16):
my mom was obese eventually in a wheelchair. Maybe it's
just a genetic thing. It is what it is. And
then I went out to lunch one day with Mo Austin,
you know, passed away years old. He was one of
my mentors in music and maybe the most beautiful person
in the music industry, really beautiful person. And if you
(31:38):
knew his wife, Evelyn, she was incredible, a light being,
really beautiful, beautiful people. And we went out to lunch
one day and he said, you know, I'm really getting
worried about you. You're really big. I know you work,
I know you walk, I know you care. You know
you're diligent about what you eat. But you're really getting big,
and I'm worried about your health. I'm gonna get the
name of the nutritionist. I want you to go to
(31:59):
my guy, and I want you to do what ever
he says. And I said, final, I'll do it, knowing
it wouldn't work because I've tried everything, but I'm I
love him. I'll do whatever he says. And he sent
me to a weight loss specialist at U C l A.
And he put me on a diet of seven protein
shakes a day and it was just water and egg protein,
(32:21):
and then one meal a day at the end of
the day, a meal which was fish, soup, salad, very
low calorie, low carb, high protein meal. And I did
that and in fourteen months I lost pounds. That's it's
like a whole like a whole person probably, so at
(32:41):
that point in time, I was eating drinking egg shakes,
still eating eggs, still eating fish, but not eating any
other meats. And then I read a book called The
Paleo Solution, pretty explained how all the different foods work
in our body, and I believed every word of it.
And it talked about how timately red meat is the
single best thing that you can eat. And I was
(33:04):
torn because in my mind, I'm still a vegan. I'm
eating fish and eggs as medicine. I'm drinking these egg
shakes to lose weight, but I still don't eat flesh.
You know, I don't need animal flesh. And I believed
in the book so much that I bought a hundred
copies and I was giving them people, but I wouldn't
do it because I was a vegan, so I could
(33:25):
you know, it didn't I couldn't do it. And after
about a year of giving this book away, it just
felt like it's disingenuous to be sharing this information and
not doing it myself. Doesn't seem right. And it was
on my birthday. Modiella and I. Modielle was a very
I was a vegan, she was a vegetarian. We went
out to dinner one of our favorite restaurants in Los
(33:47):
Angeles called Capo. If you've been a Capo in Santa Monica,
spectacular restaurant, maybe the best in l A. And they
grilled meat on an oakwood fire. Really, I think it's oak,
might be Pecan in its oak. Incredible meat place, although
I always went there and eight fish and they had
great fish. So we both ordered fish like normal, and
(34:08):
we ordered a steak and we had it in the
center of the table between us and we ate our fish,
and then each of us had one bite of the meat.
And it was a terrible experience because if you haven't
eaten meat for in that point twenty three years, it's
like eating human flesh. It's it's an insane thing to
(34:30):
get over the way our brains work. Even the smell
of meat cooking was a hard thing to be around
back then. But I believed it was what was healthiest,
even though I had been weaned off of it through this,
through this process, and we did that maybe every week
or two we would go to Capo and have a
bite or two of meat, and then after about six
(34:52):
weeks we were able to just order a steak. We
were just talking about your house in Italy. So you
chose to live in Italy, which has passes every few
times a day. Do you eat carbs? Now? We eat
in Italy? All the rules change said certain things, there
are certain there are certain rules at certain times, have
one called travel day, which is on a travel day
(35:13):
where you're flying. I don't really like to fly, so
one of the rules of travel days you can eat
anything you want. Most of these things have more to
do with what you do all the time. So on
a on an all the time basis, we eat red
meat and some vegetables. That's our that's what we mean.
And I'll say I'll eat meat, I'll eat chicken, but
(35:34):
I think it seems like grass fed beef seems to
be the best. Or wild game will eat, will eat
a good amount of wild game bison. Um, that's pretty
much what we care. My last question to you, Rick Rubin,
(36:03):
is what would be your comfort food? Pizza? And I
try to do it as infrequently as possible, but it
is the one that's the default. Too much going on, tired,
bad mood, nothing, you know, nothing feels like it's going
to make it better. Maybe pizza, okay? And and I
(36:25):
hope you don't need that awful I don't. I want
you to have. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.
The River Cafe look Book is now available in bookshops
and online. It has over one d recipes, beautifully illustrated
with photographs, from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
(36:48):
has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a
host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted
for new cooks. The River Cafe Look Book recipes for
cooks of all ages
Host
Ruth Rogers
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