A Conversation with Rob Wasserman – HuffPost 9.19.11

Mike Ragogna: Rob, thank you so much for joining me. What got you on board for the project Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie?

RW: Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie approached me when I was doing a Robert Johnson tribute concert at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. I was doing a solo bass piece for Robert Johnson, and she came up to me afterward and just out of the blue asked if I would work with her dad’s words from journals — not lyrics, but words from journals. They were mainly unpublished, and she wanted me to bring them to life again with the bass. I was really surprised and happy at the opportunity to do it, so I immediately said yes.

MR: How did you assemble the artist roster and, in general, what was the process like working with them?

RW: Basically, I’d find the artists and invite them. Nora would suggest words that she thought would work for them and that they might be interested in, and then, before we got in the studio, they would choose words to work with. So, that’s sort of the process. But musically, some of the time, it was created in the studio between me and the different artists, and other times, people would bring in music. I kept it pretty flexible; I just wanted to have everyone carry their enthusiasm and be passionate and true to the words, and it was challenging because they’re not lyrics. The piece with Jackson Browne was 30 pages long in the journal, and the challenge was, how do you turn that into a song?

MR: I guess it was Nora who had the most input as far as the editing process?

RW: With the words — not the music, but the words. Most of the time, it would be the artist asking if they could have permission to do that. Sometimes, she edited too in advance; if it was really long she added her own edit. But most of them just did it on their own with her permission.

MR: What is your approach when you’re actually in the studio with your artists? Like, when you did this album, was it a little more structured?

RW: It was track by track. Some were really structured. With Jackson Browne, it was pretty spontaneous. We just sat down and started jamming, and the sound came out. Lou Reed composed before he came into the studio. Chris Whitley was really a raw jam. You know, everyone was different. Michael Franti and I just did it from scratch. Tom Morello prepared something. With Studs Terkel, Nora went to him, because he was already ninety-something, and she recorded him in his home… his kitchen, I believe. And then I just set it to music, like a film score.

MR: By the time you were approached by Nora, I’m sure it wasn’t the first time Woody Guthrie crossed your mind. Did you admire him and his body of work?

RW: From the time I was a teenager, actually. I read one of his books and was very inspired by him. He speaks to the passion and the joy and suffering of humankind. He gives a voice to those who often have no voice. I always loved that. To me, he was an inspiration. It wasn’t that big a surprise to me that I actually got to do this. It was a surprise that I met Nora like that, though. But before I even played music I was listening to Woody’s music. He was way more than a singer/songwriter; he’s an inspiration to a lot of people. He helped them. His music offered courage to a lot of people in the whole country. He was very courageous.

MR: A real contributor and cultural icon.

RW: Yeah, he was courageous. He just said what he felt, and loved people. A lot of his albums reflect that, and the words Nora chose, I think, reflect that. The timeframe in which he wrote the words was from the early ’40s to the mid-’50s when he was living in New York. He actually was very mature as a writer. Nora wanted us to be more challenging than other projects she’d commissioned by offering something that wasn’t just pre-fabricated. It’s a lot easier to write the lyrics. We had all these words, and they had stories and messages, and they speak to what’s going on today, which is really interesting. With destructive cyclical things, often, we’ll find ourselves in times where voices are not being heard as they should be, and it’s like Woody’s songs for the future.

MR: Beautifully said. You talked about the Studs Terkel experience, and a little bit about the Jackson Browne experience. Can we talk about what it was like being in the studio with a couple of the other artists, for instance, Lou Reed?

RW: That’s someone I’ve worked with a long time. He goes into the old friends category. He prepares. He jams, but he comes to the studio very prepared for the session. He did the music, and he and I arranged it together. We made up string parts and all that, but it was just the two of us, which was really fun. I’m used to working with him. He’s a longtime musical connection and friend, and I thought he’d be really great on this, and it turns out he really found some words that he wanted to sing. He actually edited it and added some more of his own words to it, so it’s more of a fusion. His are the most personalized of all the words.

MR: You guys go back to the Duets album that featured artists like Bobby McFerrin, but I’m assuming you have a longtime friendship with them now as well.

RW: Actually, that was a fairly long time ago. I met him in the mid-’80s, a few years beforeDuets came out, and we ended up working together all these years, from the New Yorkalbum to various other albums, and we just did a long tour of Europe. Some of the artists I wanted to invite because I knew them and I felt that would create really strong songs, and with others, it’s part of the joy for me to also bring people I haven’t worked with into the project. That makes it challenging and fun also.

MR: And there’s your Trios project that also features a lot of great artists — Neil Young, Elvis Costello, Bruce Hornsby and Edie Brickell whose track is my favorite on the album.

RW: That’s great!

MR: I want to get into your musicianship at this point, your creativity. Are you able to pinpoint how it happens, how it flows out of you?

RW: I’ve always started from my perspective as a bass player, and I think that being a bass player, I often tend to connect to the people I’m working with in a supportive way. That’s what makes these things work. I think that I’m trying to make the song better and not just make myself look better, but actually support someone. But some of these things I’m thinking of are many film scores. Actually, I just moved to LA, where I’m pursuing my lifelong love of composing music for film.

MR: I imagine with you it’s just a matter of word getting out, knowing that you’re available to do that. I imagine they’d be knocking on your door.

RW: If they can find my door, yeah.

MR: (laughs) Are there movies that are out there where you see them and you go, “Oh, yeah, I could’ve done the score on that one.”

RW: Yeah, there are many more movies that center on acting and screenwriting, rather than effects, and a lot smaller, more artistic films. Woody Allen would be great. I like to write based on what you’ve heard my records to be. I like to write for small ensembles and feature the upright bass a lot as one of the voices. That’s my plan. My wife Veronica and I have started a new production company, so we’re going to be doing the film scores and storytelling projects. Creatively, I’ve always approached it from the bass first and thought of the bass as a voice, and that’s often why it sounds like that when I’m doing duets and trios and things.

MR: To me, your voice always comes through the instrument without it ever overshadowing whoever your vocalist is.

RW: That’s really important to me. Sometimes, you really have to let your ego or your self disappear because otherwise, you can’t do a great tune. That’s challenging because everyone I’ve ever worked with wants to be featured in some way, but it’s best if the producer and the musician know the right balance. And in this record, it’s as much about the words, if not more about the words and the message of the words.

MR: On Note of Hope, you recorded a song with one of my favorite artists, Ani Di Franco. What was that like?

RW: She chose those words. We had a couple choices, as many as we needed, but she settled on those words. I went to her place in Buffalo. I often went around to different people’s home studios to make it more conveniently comfortable for them. Ani DiFranco and I created the music from scratch in a couple days. That was a really fun session, I remember that. It was very experimental and avant-garde, and I thought she helped paint a really good picture of the words.

MR: You also feature Madeleine Peyroux.

RW: Yeah, she’s perfect. She wrote the music before we got in the studio, and we put it together in the studio. Some of the artists, like I said, really wanted to come in with a couple of comfortable recordings, being prepared and having the music come from them so they could sing it, and I decided that’s fine. I wanted it to be the best record it could be. I like to collaborate the most; that’s my favorite thing, so on songs like that, I collaborated more on the bass playing — some instrumental stuff, and just arranging. But she’s great. Has a great career, I think. There were some really great musicians who came in.

MR: Rob, has there been a project that approaches someone’s works — in this case, Woody Guthrie — that’s even close to something like this?

RW: Well, none of Nora’s projects. She wanted something really different, and that’s why she picked me — she wanted to come more from an upright bass perspective. But I didn’t want to limit it to that; I wanted it to bring the words alive and not make it a spoken word record, because that would’ve been easy. The challenge is, how do you turn thirty pages into a song? That’s my big question. Somehow, with Jackson Browne, we were able to do that, and with all of the other pieces. But I don’t know if there are any other records like it.

MR: Yeah, I can’t think of another project that took this approach. What advice would you give to new artists?

RW: Just be true to music. In this case, it was starting with words. Think about the flow. I see a lot of musicians traveling that are more into presentation than the actual concert. Just focus on what you’re trying to say. In my case, a lot of it’s been instrumental music, starting with the solo bass record, and now I’m going for film scores. I just focus on the actual music for film, telling the story of the film. Don’t focus on how shiny the bass looks or how fast you can play; focus on the feeling of the music.

MR: That’s interesting. Here’s another name I was going to throw out earlier: Joni Mitchell, who I love dearly. This album kind of does the reverse of how she approached her Mingusproject.

RW: I love her too. Mingus actually was the first upright bass player I ever heard, and my original inspiration for playing the bass, so it’s interesting you said that.

MR: Will you be part of the concerts that the Woody Guthrie Museum is setting up?

RW: I believe I’m going to be, but I don’t know much more than you do about when or where or anything. But that’s the plan. We’re trying to get some of these artists involved in those concerts.

MR: How do you think Woody Guthrie going to be remembered, let’s say 50 or 100 years from now?

RW: He not only saw the present, but he did see the future, and the things that we’re talking about in this record, that he wrote about, are definitely going to be the challenges of the future too. People having a voice in the government, and not losing that. He was one of the first to stand up against corporate takeover of America when it was just starting; it wasn’t even defined. He wasn’t afraid; he was fearless, and I really think that he’s always going to be an inspiration. He gives courage to a new generation of voices that need to be heard. I think his words do that, and I’ve only seen a fraction of what he wrote; he wrote like three thousand different things and pieces, and in a short life he saw so much, but he was really present and there with people. I think he’s just really vital, not just in his vision, but as a spokesman for America.

MR: Are there any Woody Guthries out there now?

RW: There probably will be, but that’s something that time will tell. Some of the artists on this record are certainly inspired by him. But that’s a big thing to say. You could definitely say that Studs Terkel and Pete Seeger are right up there with him. As for the younger generation on this record, Michael Franti and Ani DiFranco speak to the people in that sense.

MR: It seems that currently, Bruce Springsteen has taken on that role a bit.

RW: He was very inspired by Woody Guthrie, and so was Bob Dylan. There are other people. If you’re talking about the younger generation, I don’t know. But we need it sorely right now. These are pretty dark times.

MR: Well, that bring us to the question is there anything in particular catching your eye in the news?

RW: Just about everything we’re all worried about. I’m not a political person, but I appreciate all this stuff. My main concern is that we’re going for people that say they’re for the people but really are just running corporations that don’t care about people, and I don’t want that. I think that’s the one thing Woody hated and despised. Now, we’ve got all these people who say what people want to hear, but they don’t mean it at all. I’d love to actually see Woody’s reaction to some of this if he were hear right now.

MR: And there are people who invoke his name who actually have the nerve to do that when they can barely spell his name.

RW: He was very popular in that he was very unpopular because of his affiliations, and he was called all these things — you know, socialist, communist, and all of that. But he was just a brilliant observer of what was going on. I don’t think he’d think things have changed much, except for maybe automobile styles and computers…you know, technology. One thing that was neat about this record is that I got to work with his notebooks, and he drew sketches on almost all his lyrics. It was really beautiful. It wasn’t just the words that were beautiful; it was the pictures, and that’s something that really helped bring the words to life for me, to see what he was thinking, what he was sketching on his typing and his handwriting.

MR: What kind of sketches?

RW: Cartoons, little figures. They’re all going to be in the packaging. We copied all that.

MR: Nice. I have to confess I’m a huge fan of Woody’s son Arlo also, and he seems to have disappeared from the culture. He has a song called “Massachusetts” from his brilliantAmigo album that, I think, is one of the most inspiring anthems I ever heard. I thought he was going to inherit the reigns, but everybody gets to choose their own lives, you know?

RW: Yep. Yeah, I don’t know Arlo really. I’ve met him a few times. He’s great he’s terrific. He does his own thing, and he’s really true to himself. Nora’s a brilliant caretaker and curator of her dad’s words, and the fact that she’s creating these projects with all kinds of people — it’s really terrific, because it’s a way to get the words out there in a way that would have never happened originally. One other thing I should mention is the title track, “Note of Hope.” Nora suggested that I listen to those words — actually, she gave me a couple options, but I liked those words — and write a solo bass piece just from being inspired and reacting to the words. So, I wrote that piece, and then I thought I’d take it one step further and collaborate with Van Dyke Parks kind of orchestrating, so that’s why I have it. That’s the one piece of pure instrumental.

MR: It’s beautiful. I really appreciate your hanging with me today. All the best, Rob.

RW: Thanks for the interview.

Transcribed by Devala Rees