Steve Sanduski, as he is wont to do, got me all fired up about Rick Rubin and how people talk about him. He did a wonderful job interviewing me, if you’re curious, and you can read about it or watch it here. But I’ll add my own footnote on something that has been driving me nuts for the past few years.

There’s a story about Rick Rubin from his NYU days that I think is important to bring up any time I hear people quoting him like he’s a Zen monk.

He may well be a Zen monk in his own way. You just lose the richness that makes him interesting when you reduce him to gray book platitudes (as if they were co-ghostwritten by the friggin’ pickup artist guy, which they were. Ahem).

So the story is this. The young woman in the dorm room above his couldn’t study because Rubin was running a label and playing his nightclub-quality PA at full tilt at all hours of the night. Her complaint was more than valid. Rubin responded by turning the volume up and, for added effect, vacuuming the ceiling. The complaint went to a student trial, where a student court ordered them both to move out. But Rubin had friends in the right places, who actively campaigned against her during the trial (he called her “a hell-bitch,” so yeah), and she was the one who ended up having to leave. He totally stayed, like the monk that he is. It’s all in Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback, and Stacy Gueraseva’s Def Jam, Inc. has most of it too, if you’re curious.

The point is not that this type of behavior is remotely admirable. To be abundantly clear, I don’t think it is in any way. But it goes a long way to highlight the range inside this guy.

It’s like his love for professional wrestling and Deep Purple. To me, this is all core to balancing his Zen koans. At his core, he somehow can be both of these things. That is, strangely, impressive? Maybe a little terrifying, but mostly, color me impressed.

I am fascinated by people with a wide range of input AND output. That is why I am so drawn to Rick Rubin, and also why I only partly admire him outside of the work he does in music.

I think the world is so big that curiosity can overwhelm you unless you know how to be creative with all of that noise. Rubin is on a short list of people who seem to have figured out how to do it for themselves and help others do the same. When he calls himself a reducer, this is what I see. This is what I want to borrow, emulate and steal from his ethos.

What makes me mad is the people who regard him as some sort of philosopher king without acknowledging just how broad his range is, including all the strange bits. My hunch is most of those people would not like a lot of the details about the person he is (or at least was) in some of those stories. Or they’d just like his cheap, fortune cookie pickup artist stuff, so they can get a cool artsy halo effect without reading Pema Chödrön or something (which I’m sure Rubin enjoys, and like with music, he has just picked the best packaging to express the message).

So maybe I’m getting a little ranty here, but that’s what I think.

People love a golden calf. They’re pretty easy to manufacture, especially if there’s enough social proof to get attention on it as the finished product. But the messiness of the breadth is what makes it interesting. Steve cares about this too, and his line of questioning helped me better express it within myself. For that, I am grateful.

ps. I’d love it if you gave this interview a listen.