Episode
Don Was on Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, and His Own Voice | Living for the City Full Interview
- Podcast
- Living for the City
- Published
- Sep 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2476
- Processing state
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Summary
Don Was is a Detroit native who went from playing bar gigs and gypsy weddings around the city to producing the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, and Bob Dylan, and eventually running Blue Note Records. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Was traces the raw, unpretentious sound of Detroit back to the city's one-industry economy and the immigrant communities, Mexican, Arabic, Eastern European, Southern, who brought their music with them after World War II. He talks about coming up broke in the 1970s, working bar gigs for ten dollars a night, and the strange turning point that came from an involuntary Dale Carnegie sales course after he took a job repairing copy machines. He also explains why Detroit's lack of a mentorship culture in engineering and production, unlike the scene around players like Marcus Belgrave, forced him and his peers to invent their own methods, and why that isolation became a creative advantage rather than a handicap. He also breaks down the Detroit radio landscape that shaped him, from the Grande Ballroom and the Amboy Dukes to Electrifying Mojo, the DJ whose genre-blind playlists reshaped how Warner Brothers marketed Black and white artists and helped give rise to Detroit techno. He talks about producing Bonnie Raitt's Nick of Time as a turning point for women in rock, the studio access that only a broke city like Detroit could offer him, and why he eventually moved back home to record his own album with Don Was & The Pan Detroit Ensemble. CHAPTERS 00:21 - Detroit's Blue Collar DNA and the Rawness of Its Music 03:26 - The Musical Jambalaya: How Immigrant Communities Shaped Detroit's Sound 04:40 - Broke in Detroit: Bar Gigs, Debt, and the Dale Carnegie Course That Changed Everything 08:51 - No Mentorship, No Cliches: How Isolation…