Don Was wasn’t Was when he was gigging around Detroit, a high school kid who played bass and nurtured interests in deep blues, progressive jazz, and the sleek soul music for which his hometown was renowned. He was Don Fagenson at the time; a shorter surname and a long history of musical accomplishment still lay before him.
Today, Don Was is a rock & roll survivor and a highly accomplished record producer. His group Was (Not Was), formed with a friend named David Weiss a.k.a. David Was, released four albums in the 1980s, scored a series of hits that included “Shake Your Head,” “Spy in the House,” and “Walk the Dinosaur,” and nurtured an ambitious concept that involved collaborations with artists of a variety so bewildering that the only thing they had in common was a willingness to try something different. Hardcore rockers MC5, proto-punk Iggy Pop, galactic R&B innovators Parliament/Funkadelic, jazz hipster Mel Tormé, and poetic balladeer Leonard Cohen all hooked up with the Brothers Was at one time or another; the results were always intriguing and occasionally drew significant public notice as well.
But by 1989, the exploratory nature that had drawn Don Was into this project was stirring his interest in record production. His first efforts put him on a fast track toward the top of his profession, as measured now by one of the most impressive catalogs in the business. The Was production credit has appeared the Grammy Award-winning Nick of Time and three other albums by Bonnie Raitt, five albums by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan’s Under the Red Sky, Willie Nelson’s Across the Borderline, and many others by artists as diverse as Garth Brooks, Elton John and Ziggy Marley with the Wailers.
Presented with a Grammy Award as Producer of the Year in 1995, Was has earned distinction as well in areas beyond record production. I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, a film about Brian Wilson directed and produced by Was, earned the Golden Gate Award from the San Francisco Film Festival, and as a composer he received Best Original Score honors from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for his music for the film Backbeat.
The breadth of Was’ achievements testifies to the diversity of his background, which combines hard-knocks lessons learned as an artist with hands-on instruction in studio techniques that began for him as a student at the Recording Institute of Detroit. For Was, however, the successful producers are the ones who are able to pull from all of their experiences in order to attain a single paramount goal.
“The goal is a soulful performance on a great song by whatever means necessary,” he insists. “What you do to make that happen changes from artist to artist, or even from song to song by one artist. It’s like a jazz solo that evolves as you create it – and it’s a long solo, ‘A Love Supreme,’ not a three-minute thing.”
To illustrate, Was points to his work with Raitt on Nick of Time. For this artist, finding the best possible material is perhaps the most important step, regardless of whether it was written by her or someone else. “So we spent a year and a half looking for songs,” he says. “We listened to probably 10,000 cassettes. And when we narrowed it down, I had Bonnie demo the final cut with just acoustic guitar or piano, the premise being that if you can’t sell that song with just one instrument, the best band in the world isn’t going to make it a great record. That’s what I mean by ‘any means necessary.’”
This conviction carries over to the work Was has done as a music consultant on films such as Days of Thunder, Honeymoon in Vegas, Hope Floats, Phenomenon, Thelma and Louise, and Tin Cup. “After I saw Slum Dog Millionaire, everyone asked me, ‘Didn’t you love that music?’ And I said, ‘I was so engrossed in the film, I didn’t even notice the music.’ That’s the correct response: The music is not supposed to take you out of the story. You support the story, just as you support the artist’s vision on an album project.”
Was makes it a point to include time in his schedule to speak with people within and outside of the industry on current issues related to the arts. Recent appearances at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, for instance, address the complexities of commerce – the buying and selling of music – in the digital age. “I talked about the history from the beginning of the 20th Century,” he says, “how there was a burst of technology followed by tremendous creativity and independent entrepreneurs who were ultimately co-opted by big business. That cycle has repeated itself three or four times and it’s happening right now. You have to address that because it comes down to this: If no one actually gets to hear the music you make, it’s like a tree falling in an empty forest.”