{"podcast":{"title":"Living for the City","slug":"living-for-the-city-7841880","podcast_index_feed_id":7841880,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/IMP4672743019","website_url":null,"image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/6b7515e8-427d-11f1-b52d-13d6ecf715d9/image/f530e40772799dd2009def36c97a5891.jpg?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"Side Stage","episode_count":22,"summary":"Before Detroit gave the world Motown, techno, and hip-hop, it gave the world something harder to name: a feeling that music made in basements and backrooms and borrowed spaces could become the soundtrack to an entire generation's life. That is the story Living for the City is here to tell, and nobody alive is better equipped to tell it than Hanif Abdurraqib. MacArthur Fellow. New York Times bestselling author. The most gifted writer working at the intersection of music, memory, and American identity today. Hanif brings his singular voice to a new video podcast series that goes inside the streets, venues, and neighborhoods where iconic sounds are born, talking with the artists, DJs, producers, and community architects who built these movements from the ground up. Season One is Detroit. Eight episodes. The full arc of how one city became the unlikely origin point for some of the most influential music ever made, told by the people who were actually there, and the writer who understands better than anyone what it meant. This is not a music history lesson. This is a front-row seat to the moments that mattered. Living for the City premieres May 13th, with new episodes dropping weekly.…","last_synced_at":"2026-09-30T18:17:41.745766+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/living-for-the-city-7841880"},"episode":{"title":"Don Was on Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, and His Own Voice | Living for the City Full Interview","slug":"don-was-on-willie-nelson-bonnie-raitt-and-his-own-voice-living-for-the-city-full-interview","published_at":"2026-09-30T15:50:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/living-for-the-city-7841880/don-was-on-willie-nelson-bonnie-raitt-and-his-own-voice-living-for-the-city-full-interview","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/living-for-the-city-7841880","url":"https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1468/tracking.swap.fm/track/GShUDppPATUMmMhYllkv/traffic.megaphone.fm/IMP2912016926.mp3","audio_url":"https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1468/tracking.swap.fm/track/GShUDppPATUMmMhYllkv/traffic.megaphone.fm/IMP2912016926.mp3","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…","meta_description":"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…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2476,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/living-for-the-city-7841880/episodes/don-was-on-willie-nelson-bonnie-raitt-and-his-own-voice-living-for-the-city-full-interview/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/living-for-the-city-7841880/don-was-on-willie-nelson-bonnie-raitt-and-his-own-voice-living-for-the-city-full-interview.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}