Greatest rock stars

The following is a conversation with Rick Beato, legendary music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician, playing guitar, bass, cello, and piano. Rick, with his incredible YouTube channel, celebrates great musicians and musical ideas, and helps millions of people, including me, fall in love with great music all over again. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Beato. You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey.

I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love with music was listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos. What's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually , musically, where you're like, "Wow, there's magic in this"? Well, the first solo that I learned was Hey Joe. It was actually a good beginner song, you know, when I first started playing the guitar, because it has pretty simple chords, right? So it's like E, C, G, D, A. And I learned the solo, and I figured out this, like, I'll say it's this pentatonic scale, E minor pentatonic scale though. I didn't know that's what it was called, but learned this thing, and it's like, "Whoa, he's just in this one shape here." Now, there was no... You couldn't go look anything up. You just, if you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern to it.

So here, going to Perplexity, Django Reinhardt was, of course, a jazz guitarist and composer, active mainly in France, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history. So, Django was... Well, there's a huge movement right now, Gypsy Jazz Movement, as they call it- ... that is kind of built around this style of music that he played back in the early 20th century. One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire, and he had two of his third and fourth finger, so his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together. He had no use of them. Although he could use them while he was chording, but a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers. And it's amazing.

It feels so free. And fun like swing, and then at least you said pre-bebop. So bebop was a kind of jazz that was also influential on you in your own life journey. And it's this complicated, legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that followed. So what, what was bebop? Well, after the big bands were happening in the, you know, from the '20s through the '40s, people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with. And Charlie Parker, who's really kind of the, one of the main figures of early bebop, really developed the language of it. Usually, the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions- ... that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were AABA form. And Charlie Parker created this language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era. You know, think of people like Benny Goodman of that era. They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic notes.

We're gonna return to Joe Pass. We gotta go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess that's in part one of the origin stories of you putting out videos into the world, is the early videos you did with Dylan, a set of videos on his perfect pitch. And for people who don't know, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means. It's the ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So you can play, it doesn't matter how quickly they are, a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it. Or a collection of notes.

Absolutely. What are the early steps of that journey? What do you recommend people do in general?

So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Another guy you had an incredible interview with: Flea. People should go listen to that. Was a great conversation. One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influenced Flea. And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis T-shirt. That's right.

Yeah, he talked about his practicing routine with you. And one of the things, he's like, "I have to practice the slap." And- ... you know, there's differences in the structure of the different bands. But usually, like, the bassist has a vibe to them. I don't know if we can put words to exactly what that is. There's a kind of energy that drives the band. To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that, when you play a bad note, everybody notices. I started on the bass- ... as a kid.

I have to go back to our, the beginning of our conversation. What do you think are some of the great solos of all time? Can we put a few into consideration? You have a great list of the top 20 rock guitar solos of all time. Yeah, so I put Comfortably Numb as my favorite, as my top one.

Yes. Truly novel, that requires youth. It's just a theory though, but it seems to apply. What do you think about the 27 Club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse.

On the songwriting front, you mentioned a story about Elton John recording. So he's one of the legendary songwriters. But yeah. You've met him, and you know something about the process of his, um- Yeah, 'cause he was recording in a studio in Atlanta that I was working with a band that I was producing. And he was in—I was in Studio B, he was in Studio A. And this band that I was working with, they were called Jump, Little Children. And so, he had his assistant come in and ask, "Hey, is this... Are you guys Jump, Little Children?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And then all of a sudden, I couldn't see out into the live room. Elton walked into the thing, and we were getting ready to track, and I'm, I'm pressing the button. "Yo, where are, where are you guys? What's up? I thought we were gonna start this." And no one's responding. I can hear talking, it's like, "What, what is going on? Where are they?" Then all of a sudden they come back in the studio and they were stunned.

Same here. There is a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that, from that conversation. One is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock. Which is very interesting. Of course, Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean, they've been around 40 years.

So it's like there's a meta aspect to it. But then there's also like, we're talking about this guitar stuff, but Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah. I mean, Leonard Cohen in general. Like these songwriters, they go super simple on guitar. And there, it's just what's that called? Singer-songwriter type. I told you off my one of my, maybe the music guest that's a dream guest is Tom Waits. I've wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time, and I've gone through different periods of... You've met me at a point in my life where I've given up on it a little bit. And I was trying- That's when it's gonna happen. That's-

Gary Oldman ... Gary Oldman. Just a really... it's a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he's written. But then I realized like... and this is early, this is many, many... this is a couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is why they consider it to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time. He went deaf, couldn't hear anything before he even started writing it. And so there's that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can't hear people applauding, so he has to be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean, there's just this whole tragic element.

Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach. They are. The greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time. Even Sting and Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for, like, practice.

All right. We have to talk about this a little bit. You made a bunch of videos about it. There was a, there was a moment in time, it still goes on, but there was a moment where really people were freaking out about the use of AI in music. So there's these, I would say, incredible apps like Suno, Udio. ElevenLabs Music is also great. They can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And a lot of people started freaking out just based on how good it is. And so you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music, and you're going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff. It is legitimately nerve-wracking because these are early versions, so you don't know where it goes. But in your intuition now, you've been thinking about this, you made a bunch of videos. Now, like, being able to reflect, "Okay, everybody chill. Calm down."

Who's doing the songwriting, how's it being done, and all that kind of stuff? I, I was wondering if you could speak to that. In that particular song, Jack Antonoff, who is one of the writers, Amy Allen, Sabrina Carpenter, said in some awards thing that there's an old guy on YouTube that says that Sabrina had very little to do with the song. And so he said in this clip-

Wanna take a quick bathroom break? Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you're facing on a basically daily basis. I think it's a challenge a lot of YouTube folks experience, but you're just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do on your channel is celebrate music, broadly. And so, as part of that process, you have to sometimes show clips of music, and I think all of that falls under fair use, quite obviously. And so you get all these YouTube copyright claims, and for folks who don't know, if you get three of those, each one of those can be a strike on the channel and could take down your channel. And you get some insane amount. You said you got, like—I think I had a similar thing on my Rick Rubin episode—like, I think you said 13. 13. So, what, can you just speak to this whole thing? You've been in a constant battle, WMG, UMG, all the, all, all-

I mean, hopefully, there's a ripple effect also. It's not just your situation. Hopefully, you don't have to deal with this for much longer. How has Spotify changed music? Sometimes we highlight the fact that they changed the nature of music and that the scarcity is not there. But also, a lot of it's like every kind of music is available and so fast and it's so easy. It's easy to explore. It's a commodity. It's like turning on a water faucet.

Come on, but you, then you're really running the risk of not having just the right amps. But you're using emulation, so that's great. I mean, and that... But there's the other side of it which is the guitar. I told you offline, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever. Nobody agrees with me on this. I only have like one... I do have some side pieces but one main... The greatest gi- The Strat? What do you play?

By way of advice, you started your YouTube channel in your mid-50s and found incredible success. You've had essentially multiple careers. Is there some wisdom you can extract from that? So my theory is that somebody's gotta be successful, so why can't it be you? That was my... When I started my channel, I mean, I didn't start it to... It started by accident with the Dylan video. And really, so many people reached out to me. I started it six months after that viral video. So many people wrote to me, "Can you teach me this?" Pro musicians, well-known ones who you'd know. "Can you teach me this?" I can't teach you what Dylan did, but I can teach you relative pitch, develop your ear that way. But then I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world. "How did you teach Dylan this?" 'Cause we made about four different videos, and they got more and more sophisticated.