“When you’ve reached the end of the frontier and you’ve
explored everything, where do you go?”
A discussion with The Roots’ secret weapon: the late, great Richard Nichols
by Brian Coleman
I conducted this interview on March 16, 2012, a couple months before I became aware that Richard Nichols had become ill. As usual with Richard, I was talking to him about something completely unrelated and things went off into a myriad of incredible tangents. There are a select few people in the world who you never want to interrupt once they start on a thought, and Richard was at the top of that list. As an interviewer, you just pray that you have enough cassettes standing by to catch it all.
As his illness progressed, I wrestled with whether or not I should pursue publishing this interview. Honestly it wasn’t incredibly timely when I did it, at least not as it related to the Roots’ most recent album at the time, late 2011’s Undun (Def Jam). I had in actuality been interviewing him about Creativity, not even directly about the Roots or any specific record.
Richard passed away on July 17, 2014, and it hit me pretty hard. I was not a close friend of Richard’s, but we had a good rapport. I think he knew that I understood at least some of what he, Ahmir, Tariq and the Roots crew had been trying to accomplish since the early ‘90s. And I realized that I didn’t — maybe couldn’t — understand the full scope, and, more importantly, I never pretended that I did. The Roots’ music, then and now, is a journey. And it is still in process. A process that will be more difficult now that their moral and musical compass has moved on from this Earth. Thankfully, they don’t let obsctacles stand in their way; never have, never will.
I hope the interview below gives readers a glimpse into one of the truly great musical thinkers of the past 30 years. And I hope it brings a smile to the faces of the many people who knew Richard a lot better than I did.
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There are a lot of reasons why the Roots have been successful over the past two decades. For starters: talent, hard-work, group chemistry, and the desire to make music as art, versus simply selling records.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter are unique, singular talents. On that we can all agree. But for those who aren’t compulsive liner notes readers, there is one element in the Roots mix that is all-too-frequently overlooked. That would be the group’s secret weapon and — as Okayplayer’s Ginny Suss says — “The Man Behind The Curtain”: manager, musical executive producer and professional tough-love guru: Richard Nichols.
Nichols isn’t your typical manager. Or your typical human being, for that matter. He does not crave the spotlights and he doesn’t seem to want attention, except from those he respects (it’s a short list). His job description is simple but at the same time ridiculously complex: keeping The Roots afloat and successful and — when necessary — reminding group members, usually with a generous sprinkling of profanity, to steady their eyes on that important “keeping the group afloat” part.
A “compulsive over-thinker,” he is a third yin or yang to the duo of Questlove and Black Thought. He is an hourly sounding-board, their daily dose of tough love, the guy who makes sure Questlove’s various projects get finished almost on-time, and the one person they trust more than anyone else with their obsessively-tweaked studio sound.
The Roots originally linked up with Nichols in the fall of 1992, at a time when he was helping produce local Philly talent under his Urban Music Project moniker, videotaping legal depositions to pay rent, and having put in just over a decade as a late-night avant-garde jazz DJ on Philly’s WRTI (Questlove was a loyal listener). Original group co-producer AJ Shine told Nichols that there was a new group making noise in town that he needed to check out. After seeing an early gig at the Chesnut Cabaret, Richard eventually agreed with Shine’s assessment. And aside from writing them up in his Philadelphia Tribune column, he invited the rag-tag crew to his makeshift studio to mess around on some demos. The rest, as they say, is Roots history.
Ahmir and Tariq were drawn to him for the same reasons that they rely on him today: because Richard knows his shit and has a unique and singular vision about black music and the ever-shrinking number of artists who are trying to push the continuum forward. Twenty years later, he cares even more about the group than he did before Organix, when the group was still busking on South Street. Together they are all still striving to make the ultimate album to explore the modern black experience, and they won’t quit until they have done it.
I heard that you went to the Grammys earlier this year? [Richard and The Roots were nominated as part of Betty Wright’s album Betty Wright: The Movie]
Yeah, this the first year that I’ve ever gone to the Grammys. But that category [“Best Traditional R&B Performance”] was an off-camera one, so I was in the off-camera seats.
What do you mean “off-camera” seats?
When you’re on-camera [to get your award] they have to put you near the front, for when they announce the nominees. But if you’re off-camera, you’re like in the “floor nosebleeds” section. We had to keep standing up for people [trying to get by], it was so fuckin’ wack.
So, let’s start off with an easy one — what music are you listening to these days?
I listen to all kinds of shit. But when you go on Spotify there are 15 million songs. I mean, what the fuck!?! I’m never like “Oh, let me put on a record and scratch my ass.” I don’t listen to music that way. For me there’s no separation between my work and my life, so if I’m listening to music, I’m working. I don’t listen to music for relaxation.
Isn’t that a shame, to not be able to listen to music for fun?
No! What’s wrong with work? I don’t do casual. I probably watch movies more casually than I listen to music, because I’m not an active filmmaker. But even when I see a movie, I’m thinking about the camera angle. What is the narrative arc of the story? It’s just a way of looking at the world, a deconstructive approach, looking at everything. You could say that’s sad, but it is what it is. I don’t sit back and do anything. I don’t put on a record and clean the house, someone else cleans our house. [He starts laughing, talks to someone else in the room]. My wife is bitching about that last statement [laughs]. Now I’m in trouble.
OK, let’s dive a bit deeper. I wanted to get your thoughts on putting out art (for example, Roots albums) via corporations, and any constraints you generally encounter in the art vs. commerce equation.
A lot of times it’s about picking your battles before you even begin, by knowing the type of situation you’re getting into. At this point we have it down to a science about how we pick a project. And honestly we don’t do many outside projects.
We don’t do records for the sake of doing records. It’s always about branding, even if it might not seem that way. We’re out there now, and people know the Roots as the house band with the dude with the afro who plays drums. And they do snippets of music and sometimes they call elected officials bitches. And if they know the Roots from that, they don’t know much beyond that. So with the records [we make now], I feel like they have to be more political and more left-leaning to compensate for the perception we have on the show.
One thing we are always faced with is that there’s a dearth of anything remotely resembling black public intellectualism out there. I mean, what happened to the Richard Wrights and Ralph Ellisons and James Baldwins? So much black music and black culture has defaulted into hip-hop, it has taken on a lot. And the [Roots] might not think about it like that, but I do.
Black music is in a state of disarray right now, just like overall black culture. Pop music is in a funny place. And those Pitchfork [alternative / indie rock] groups might not sell shit either. I think with other groups there is more freedom to come up with an idea and a concept and do what you want. Not as much with the Roots, because we are tethered by peoples’ perception of us. Luckily, I don’t want to do Brazilian shit like David Byrne.
Tell me a bit about your process once you decide to do a record, either by the Roots or a side project.
I prefer to be involved with projects before the idea even starts. I mean, what will the sound say about [the artist], philosophically? How does this make sense in the world, you know what I mean? Before you even start playing a note. Once we decide it’s time to do a Roots record, then it’s a Rubic’s Cube at that point. So we need to say this, and how can we say it and how creative can we be? How far can you push it? It’s not the record company asking these questions, it’s us.
Music these days is all about personas and empathy. Art isn’t a stand-alone thing. Art is like cigarettes. With cigarettes it’s really about the nicotine. The cigarette is a transport device, a mental construct. You get people hooked on nicotine, everything else is just theater. Album artwork and the chords are just window dressing. So when it comes to music in the equation, the nicotine is empathy. Ultimately you want people to empathize with the person up there [on stage]. Empathy is at the core of all art.
I always talk to Ahmir about who we’re looking to reach, but that’s not specific to any record. It’s an ongoing conversation: who are we speaking to, who cares about us, who are these people who supposedly care, who buys the records, what does the band mean to them? That’s the subtext of everything we do.
In the ‘90s there was a perception that there was a movement that was happening. At the end of every decade there has been a progressive black thing that has happened. 1940s was bebop, ‘50s was hard-bop, then Ornette, then second-wave avant-garde [jazz], the political movements of the ‘60s, then other politics in the ‘70s, then the whole Public Enemy thing in the ‘80s, and at the end of the ‘90s you had this neo-soul /other shit. And maybe that was all over by 2010. When you’ve reached the end of the frontier and you’ve explored everything, where do you go?
The psychic frontier of the black man has been explored. That’s where we’re at now. Maybe hip-hop was the final frontier. People are now like, “We know niggas.” People might not say it, but I think white people feel that they know black people. They saw Juice, they have Snoop Dogg albums, Jeezy, Gucci Mane. I mean, is there anything that black people have that they haven’t sold?
With that in mind, how are you then going to approach the next Roots album?
Well, it’s fuckin’ difficult! Forget about music for a second, what aspect of black people are we interested in showing to white people? Black culture was aspirational, but somewhere in the whole Reagan Era it all got messed up. Aspirational black culture with hardened, winner-take-all / yuppie shit, with crack culture and then hip-hop. And it all became a giant speedball of shit.
Since Game Theory [2006, Def Jam] we have been striving for thematic unity with any record we do, so that it operates as one continuous statement. We want people to understand our philosophy and that philosophy will help people empathize with us. I don’t separate the Fallon Show work with a Roots record, it’s all Roots shit. They might look like two different things, musically, but when you look at it as a whole, you see how the records protect us against other shit.
Being on the TV show gives us certain visibility, although it makes us visible to people who won’t buy our records and won’t come to our live shows. And that’s tricky, but it does open us up to certain kinds of tastemakers and allows us to have certain relationships with people. They interface with you because of the Fallon show but they respect you because you have the record. Without the TV show they might listen to the record, but those tastemakers wouldn’t know you. So it’s a weird balancing act.
Looking back, do you think the Roots have ever attempted a concept in a song or on an album that was too “way out”?
It’s never about whether it would be too “out there” for fans, it’s about what makes sense to us. With Undun, it was just supposed to wash over people. That’s what annoyed me about [the response to] it, some people saying that the concept wasn’t clear. I guess people want an A, B, C story. It was more of an impressionist kinda thing, it was about how it would feel at moments to be this guy, snapshots of his life. It’s like walking into a movie and not necessarily needing to know what happened before you walked in. I didn’t want people to have a regular storyline, that didn’t matter. Even though he was a criminal, the kinds of decisions he was facing are shit that happens to anyone. It’s about uncertainty, it’s an everyman thing. Really what we’re trying to do is define this black everyman-ness or everywoman-ness, and that’s really difficult.
Was Undun a success, then?
I was pretty happy with how it was received, except for Spin, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. Most of the other shit was actually pretty cool. Success to me would have been what we have sold before, and for a good overall Metacritic-ish rating. The guy from Spin really came after us, he said, “The problem with the album is…. Black Thought.” [Laughs] And I’m like, “What the fuck?!?!” The Pitchfork type of writers don’t fuck with Tariq, they think he’s boring. But if Guru came out now they would think he was boring. There has been ten years of southern intonation that people have just gotten used to. Jay-Z even uses it. The Roots don’t do that persona so they get penalized.
OK, well, was Undun an artistic and creative success?
Success to me is slam-dunkin’ the shit. If we went platinum and every critic loved it, and it shut the game down. It’s hard to really judge any individual effort since we’ve been around so long. It’s all bobbin’ and weavin’. Survival is its own kind of success. Clearly we’re forward-thinking and we want to represent black people in a certain light. As far as it being one piece of a larger thing, I think it’s a good cog. I would have felt better if it sold what the last album sold, or more. So I certainly can’t be cocky about it just yet.
What mistakes have you and/or the group made from which you have learned the most?
[Long pause, thinking…] I don’t think there were ever mistakes, the shit just changes in time. I’m a compulsive over-thinker so pretty much everything is just a calculated risk. I mean, can you call a calculated risk a mistake? It is what it is. Everything is always in flux, and everything we do is so calculated that even the downside of everything we do is figured in. So we would never even attempt something that would have a detrimental effect. I don’t do daring, I swear to God. My job is to make super-calculated shit look daring.
For example?
People probably thought it was daring to put Amiri Baraka on a record [“Something in the Way of Things (In Town),” from 2002’s Phrenology], or to have piano smashing sounds on the shit, or Ahmir doing eight minutes of water [“Redford Suite” at the end of Undun]. But it wasn’t really daring, because we put it in a place on the record where people could turn the record off at that point [laughs]. We put it at the end. If people don’t want to listen to it, they don’t have to.
Or on Do You Want More?!!!??!, we had a song about a gang-bang where the woman kills everybody at the end of it [“The Unlocking,” featuring Ursula Rucker]. I guess that was daring.
We’ve never had a creative battle with a label, never. Because we came in on some crazy shit, doing different stuff. I mean, we did our demo tape as a CD [Organix, from 1993] so we were different from the start. But it really all goes back to De La Soul and, to a lesser extent, A Tribe Called Quest. Those guys really opened shit up. Public Enemy opened shit up, too, but in a whole other different kind of way. So De La Soul is really responsible for what we do, more than anything else.
Over the years, what have you learned most about dealing with record labels?
It’s all fuckin’ ropeadope [very seriously, lower, slower voice]. Stick and move. It’s a flow thing. We used to spend more money [on records] but back then everyone had more money. Now it’s a different era, and I know these [labels] are under siege, so I’m more inclined to stay on budget. Back then it wasn’t as big of a deal, I was more free-flowing and easy-going.
We had some creative battles at the beginning of Do You Want More?!!!??!, but since then people who sign us know what they’re getting. And with us these days, it’s about expectations. Like, [when I work with] Dice Raw, I’ll tell him, “I’m not trying to do a hit.” I don’t think we’re even able to have a hit. We don’t look like the motherfuckers who have hits. The Roots are old, they’re black, they don’t have sex tapes. All the non-musical shit doesn’t line up. Plus you’re not gonna hear live drums on hit records, especially EQed the way that Ahmir’s shit is. It’s not gonna happen. And to reach for that fucks your shit up, because then it looks like you want to be that.
I always thought that being in the music game was for suckers. It just ended up working out for me. But pretty much, it still is for suckers.
Would The Roots ever consider putting out records on their own label, to have more control?
Absolutely not! Fuck no. We’re already in control, so it’s not about that. And I’m not trying to write a check to record one of our albums. People say, “But you’d own your masters.” In the internet and Spotify era, what is a master? It’d be different if our shit was getting licensed every other week, but our records don’t lend themselves to being in car commercials. Will “Walk Alone” sell a Chevy? Get the fuck outta here. We don’t have any happy-go-lucky themes. “Here I Come” and “The Seed” are the exceptions, but we’d never make an album full of that type of shit.
Our model, for better or worse, is unlike any other model in popular music. By popular, I mean anything that sells over 50,000 copies. There’s a different logic to what we do, and I’m not saying that it’s better or worse. My ultimate goal is for the guys to make a certain amount of money, which is all relative, of course. I want all their bills to be paid, I want all their kids to be able to go to college, I want their houses to be rodent- and insect-free, I don’t want their cars to have any problems, I want their medical insurance to be paid, I want them to be able to bury their parents and fix their parents’ roof, and help out their nieces and nephews in a pinch. You know? Until they die. And I don’t want them to be 70-years-old and doing Hip-Hop Reunions and shit. I want them to get to the point where they can make money based on this brand, so that it’s ongoing and so they don’t have to do a thing. And everything that we’re doing is in service to that.
And beyond that, I want to figure out how you can present black people to themselves in a way that’s positive, not maudlin, not post-civil-rights and not corny. How can you make the black everyman a heroic figure, or at least sometimes heroic? You don’t have to be a hero every day. A balance between being content and being heroic. I don’t know what that is yet.
I don’t think black people know what they want, it’s an ongoing exploration and dialogue and I hope that what we’re doing adds to that dialogue. How can we help define what it means to be a black person in the 21st Century? And if we could nail the artistic part of it then I could give a fuck about sales. But we’re not there yet.
Are the Roots as creative now as when you started?
I feel even more creative, honestly. Creativity hasn’t ever been the problem, because I’m still trying to work on the idea.
