Ted Perlman Speaks On Dr. Dre
Check out what Ted Perlman has to say about Dr. Dre as he goes in depth regarding his legendary 1992 The Chronic album and the many other distinguished artists he and his renowned wife Peggi Blu have worked with.
Interview: Will definitely get into that as well. However I do have something else I want to get your take on. You mentioned the music being good and successful when its song based. In hip-hop, it wasn’t about guys in just getting on stage and acting like thugs. Then again, one of the largest and most praised pieces in hip-hop history is Dr. Dre, The Chronic. That album is about as vulgar as a project in hip-hop can get. What’s your take on that? You praised Dr. Dre earlier, so how do you spin that differently?
Ted Perlman: Well I love that album and I worked with Dr. Dre on the [Burt] Bacharach album that we won a Grammy for. I’ve worked with Dr. Dre and he’s very musical. He’s really aware of a lot of different styles. On The Chronic, that was “Nuthin’ but a ‘G Thang baby, death row is the label that pays me” – I remember that because they sampled Leon Haywood. That came from a guy named Leon Haywood who is a great musician and is kind of like a Barry White orchestra, national sounding records. They sampled all of that.
That was really cool for a lot of musicians that got sampled because they made a lot of money. Leon Haywood made tons of money from that Dr. Dre record because it was very successful. [Dr.] Dre was in a band before NWA and it was like a show band. There are pictures of it online; he was in a band with a friend of mine. And they all look yellow, red and so on, very stylistic. They weren’t gangster at all. It was something like a [Las] Vegas show band.
And then all of a sudden they put on Chicago White Sox hats and they changed the language. That’s what they had to do to get over. Lady Gaga couldn’t get anywhere – she was writing songs, playing piano and performing and nobody paid attention to her until she stuck some three sizes too big hair on and went completely outrageous.
With [Dr.] Dre and hip-hop, in order to get where they wanted to go, they had to get more hardcore. They weren’t hardcore from the beginning; [not until] NWA came around. The “bitches and hoes” stuff, that entire gangster rap, at the time, it wasn’t the prevalent thing in music so it didn’t bother me. It was like okay cool, like Lenny Bruce saying “fuck this and fuck that”, or Richard Pryor saying the “N” word and “motherfucker”, it didn’t mean anything because there was other stuff around. You had Richard Pryor but then you had Bill Cosby and it was balanced.
Gangster rap came in and the thing that was really bad was that it dominated everything and there was no room for anything else. That’s the bad thing. When one style of music dominates everything, it’s really bad and the music struggles. Music should be pop based, and it should have reggae and reggaeton, salsa and it should have European dance music, country music, the blues, rock and roll, soft rock, hard rock, grunge, heavy metal – all of these things should be able to co-exist and none of them should be the dominant force, but hip hop took over for ten years and we had nothing else doing really good except “yo bitch motherfucker.” That’s really bad.
I think we’re more balanced now because a lot of the hip-hop artists have moved off. [Someone like] Jay-Z, it’s more highly developed hip-hop in other words. It’s not gangster rap but you don’t find too many guys like that. You got Lil Wayne and [he’s] in jail (laughs).
Interview: As mentioned, you won a Grammy for the work you did with Burt Bacharach and Dr. Dre. Tell us more about the work you did with Dr. Dre.
Ted Perlman: That was a really great record. It started with [Dr.] Dre and his beats, I sat down with Burt [Bacharach] and we started cutting them up and moving them around. Burt Bacharach started writing these songs and we put music to it. It just developed like that. In the beginning, it was just some drumbeats. All the people aware of music would love Burt Bacharach. The first record I heard was “Walk on By”, Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. Even on a little radio, that music sounded so good because Burt [Bacharach] was cool. Even though it was traditional instruments like the cello, the piano and the orchestra, there was always something unique about everything he wrote. He did the Bobby Vinton, “Blue on Blue”, those songs are cool and the rhythms are cool. The way Burt writes his music isn’t like anybody else.
Even all through the years from that stuff to the stringer things like “Raindrops” and amazing things like “Alfie” – he’s the guy who’s done so many things like “On my Own” with Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald. All through the years, all that music is valid and it’s all great and it’s different.
On this album at this time, except for one song with Rufus Wainwright, most of it is instrumental so we really stretched on this. It really was a wonderful thing that they [Grammy’s] acknowledged the brilliance of this guy. Even to this day, he’s always looking forward – this guy never looks back. All the great things he’s done, he doesn’t live on it because he goes forward. Working with Burt Bacharach is like going to the Burt Bacharach College of music. I love it because I understand music and what he does, he loves working with me and it’s amazing. The people I worked with Burt Bacharach, we worked with Brian Wilson, we worked with Elvis Costello, we worked with Phil Ramone – we always had somebody really cool with us.
[Dr.] Dre, he’s always working with somebody. He’s never the snobby type who feels he doesn’t have to do anything. And that’s great because George Burns was always working. I worked with Bob Hope when he was 90 and he was just as interested in making people laugh at 90 as he was when he was 20. That’s great and whether it’s an actor, a musician, a singer, an artist, a journalist, an author – whatever your doing as you get older, you still want to strive for excellence.
Dan Rather, I’m sure if he didn’t get kicked off he’d still be working hard to do the news. Look at Larry King – that’s the way I want to go out; like Larry King, George Burns and Bob Hope – I want to be working.
