How a viral video – and a talented son – changed music producer Rick Beato’s life
Rick Beato’s eldest son Dylan has perfect pitch. It means he can name, with his back turned, fistfuls of his dad’s piano notes. Eleven years ago, a video to share this astonishing gift went viral. Cue Dad’s transformation from musician-songwriter-producer-educator to YouTube commentator with more than 5 million subscribers.
The dad part is something the American jazz-rock veteran wears with a certain stoic bemusement as he weighs the algorithm-fuelled pop of the streaming age against classic writing and performance craft. Video topics such as “I Was Right About A” and “The Spotify Top 10 Got Even Worse” contrast with regular segments like “What Makes This Song Great?” and “The Greatest Keyboard Intros/ Guitar Solos [etc] of All Time”.
Music producer andYuouTuber Rick Beato.Beato’s channel, Everything Music, has grown into that rarest of modern music platforms, one that’s actually about music — which inevitably attracts some of its biggest personalities.
Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Jimmy Page are among the remaining names on his interview bucket list, but others spring to mind as he prepares to bring his live show to Australia for the first time.
“I was a big fan of Midnight Oil and INXS. Kevin Parker [Tame Impala] I think is brilliant,” he says, “but of all the people that I haven’t interviewed, my dream interview has to be Angus Young of AC/DC.”
I play the same song over and over and over. I drive my kids nuts. They’re like, ‘Why do you have to listen to a song more than once?’ What are you talking about? You’ve got to listen to a song 1000 times if it’s great! Ten thousand times!
Losing my love of music. I still feel like I did when I was a kid when I listen to some stuff. I still get the same feeling, no matter how long I’ve liked the song, whether it’s a week or 60 years. When those parts that I love come up, I get the same feeling, and if I ever lose that I will freak out. I asked Alison Krauss about this and she said she saves certain songs for when she really needs them because she doesn’t want to lose that feeling. She wants to make sure that they’re always there for her.
It’s in Two Of Us by the Beatles, and it’s in the bridge. “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead”. It means that the end of The Beatles is near; that everything is behind us at this point. What a profound, simple line that really is about the two of them. McCartney and Lennon singing together. It’s just so poignant.
Oh man, that I didn’t learn how to play the piano when I was a little kid. I mean, I’m a perfunctory piano player. I can play parts on records and things, I can figure out just about anything, but I can’t play a Bach fugue. I wish that I had studied, and I had the finger independence to do that. I think about that all the time.
December 15, 2015, when I made that video with my son, Dylan. It was 4.57 in the afternoon. ‘Dylan, come on downstairs. I want to make a video to show my friend Shane’s wife, Angie’. ‘I don’t want to’. And then I say to my wife, ‘Nina, can you tell Dylan to come downstairs?’… That video changed everything. That’s why I’m sitting here talking to you. Dylan is 18 now. He plays guitar. He loves music, but he doesn’t want to play music, at least right now. But who knows?
The artwork or song you wish was yours?
Angie by the Rolling Stones. It’s one of the first songs I learned to play as a kid, and it was complicated. Nobody knew how to play it when I was growing up so when I played it for people, they were like, ‘Whoa’. It has such a beautiful melody, and it’s got a very sophisticated guitar part and chord progression, and it has two bridges in it, and the piano part played by Nicky Hopkins is so interesting, so melodic. There’s a Tori Amos cover on an EP she did and her version of it is absolutely beautiful.
If you could time travel, where would you choose to go?
There was a concert in December 1808 [in Vienna] where Beethoven debuted his fifth and sixth symphonies and his fourth piano concerto, which is my favourite. It was a six-hour concert with him conducting and playing the piano concerto. His hearing was very bad at the time. I mean, he died in 1827, but he wrote about his hearing loss for the first time in late 1798 or so. It was one of the last times he performed playing the piano because he couldn’t hear the accompaniment. Man, I would love to go there.
Rick Beato is at Enmore Theatre Sydney on October 29, Thornbury Theatre Melbourne, October 30 and Princess Theatre Brisbane October 31.
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