DR. LUKE WAS TURNING forty. He liked to say that he loves the songs he makes because he has the musical sensibility of a twelve-year-old girl. But how long could his golden preteen taste endure? Hit making is a young man’s game. At some point, even if you’re Paul McCartney, you stop writing hits. And when the hits go away, they almost never come back.
But Dr. Luke didn’t seem too concerned about losing his edge. Or at least the prospect made him no more paranoid than he already was. He did allow, forebodingly, that “all your instincts that make you successful, at some point in anyone’s life, those instincts will be wrong.” But did he really believe that would happen to him? His manic energy was devoted to making sure it did not.
In the summer of his fortieth year, Dr. Luke was living and working at his beach house in L.A.; his mansion in the Hollywood Hills was being renovated. He’d bought the beach house from Ozzy Osbourne, the Black Sabbath front man, several years earlier, and set up his studio on the second floor, in the formal, wood-paneled room that used to be Ozzy’s library. That’s where he spent his workday, which began around noon and ended at three or four in the morning. There’s a window, which was open slightly, and the ocean could be heard faintly outside.
Dr. Luke is a born hustler, and he always will be, no matter how much money and power he accumulates. He has investments in real estate, in a high-end water brand called Core Natural, and in Summit Series, a company that organizes business conferences. Of course, he has his own label, Kemosabe Records, backed by Sony to the tune of some $60 million. He had also made a lucrative deal with Doug Morris, the head of Sony Music, to serve for five years as an exclusive in-house hit maker to the superstar artists on Sony’s major labels—Epic, RCA Records, and Columbia—who include Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Miley Cyrus, and Britney Spears.
His publishing company, Prescription Songs, consists of some fifty songwriters and producers, with Cheiron-like specialized overlapping skills. At this stage, the writers were still dispersed in studios across Los Angeles, from Venice to Hancock Park, but the plan was to create a physical factory—Dr. Luke was in the process of renovating a building in Brentwood for that purpose, with twelve studios for Prescription writers. Dr. Luke describes his songwriting roster as “a combination of artists, producers, topliners, beat makers, melody people, vibe people, and just lyric people.” Vibe people, he adds, “know how to make a song happen, understand energy, and where music is going, even if they can’t play a chord or sing a note.”
Dr. Luke’s ultimate ambition is moguldom—Clive Davis and Doug Morris–sized success. But could Dr. Luke continue to do what he does best as a writer-producer, which is to create a hit song for the artist, while also running the label the artist is signed to? Clive Davis succeeded by bringing the artist the best possible song, regardless of who wrote it; Dr. Luke had succeeded because of his songs. A label chief has to at least pretend that the artist has creative input into the music. Pretending wasn’t one of Dr. Luke’s strengths. And his relationship with Kemosabe’s biggest star, Kesha, was in trouble, and the trouble was about to get much worse.
DR. LUKE SAT IN AN AERON CHAIR, at an array of computers. Dressed in T-shirt and jeans, no shoes, slightly silvered with Hollywood stubble, he stared into his Pro Tools rig. He got up, paced, and stretched his arches, yoga-style. (His girlfriend, with whom he has two children, is a yoga instructor.) He is zero-body-fat fit, although he never seems to exercise. He lives in paradise, but he almost never goes outside.
Dr. Luke checked Twitter, retweeting a couple of tweets from his artists. He was edgy because he was expecting a call from Katy Perry’s manager, Bradford Cobb, about a song for her forthcoming album, Prism, which Dr. Luke and Max Martin had written seven songs for and also executive-produced. Their previous album with Perry, Teenage Dream, had tied Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” for most number ones on a single album, ever—five. Now, with Prism about to appear, they were set to extend their amazing run of hits. Or not.
Cirkut, Dr. Luke’s latest protégé and co-producer, worked beside him in the studio, serving both as a collaborator and as a sort of musical scrivener. Part of Cirkut’s job (the more engineering-oriented part) involves taking down the rhythmic and melodic ideas that issue from Dr. Luke day and night (and sometimes well into the next day), and moving them inside the box. Dr. Luke will say, “Let’s redo the ‘right-nows,’ because they should be simple, but everything else should be ornate, like a lead. Do the ‘ooh-oohs’ first. Get eight falsetto ones, then eight full-voice ones, and I don’t know if we’ll Auto-Tune all of them or just some.” And Cirkut gets right to work, fingers chattering lickety-split over the keys, translating the doctor’s orders into Pro Tools, manipulating the colorful rectangles that represent sonic blocks. Then he hits Playback with a flourish, and they listen.
Part of Dr. Luke’s talent is finding talent. Ambitious DJs and beat makers like Cirkut are constantly sending him tapes, and he listens to most of them. When he hears something interesting, Dr. Luke wants to work with that person right away. Benny Blanco, the Dr. Luke protégé who had become a major hit maker by the tender age of twenty-five, was nineteen when he met his mentor. Blanco recalls, “I knew nothing about pop music. I didn’t even think about pop music—that wasn’t part of my realm. . . . I made him a CD of my stuff, and then at the end of our meeting he was like, ‘No, I don’t need the CD.’ So I left, and I was like, ‘The guy doesn’t like me.’ And then he calls me up and he’s like ‘Yo, want to come out to L.A. and make some music?’ And I was like, ‘Uhhhhh, I thought you hated me, man.’ And he was like, ‘No, man, I just liked your stuff so much I knew I didn’t need a CD.’ ”
Dr. Luke said he wanted Benny to come to L.A. the next day. Benny was scared of flying, so he drove across the country. As soon as he arrived, Dr. Luke wanted to get started.
“I had just got there after six or seven days of driving,” Benny recalls, “and Luke goes, ‘Come into the studio!’
“ ‘Luke I’m so tired.’
“ ‘Come into the studio, everyone wants to see you.’
“ ‘But I’m exhausted!’
“ ‘I want to show you this new guitar I got!’
“So I go in, and he was showing me this new guitar, and then he goes, ‘Let’s just start a beat.’
“And I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m so tired!’
“So we made two beats that night, and one become ‘California Gurls’ and the other became ‘Teenage Dream.’ ” Benny adds, “The guy has the best kind of screw loose.”
Dr. Luke keeps half a dozen or so beat-up-looking electric and acoustic guitars propped up around the studio, and noodles on them frequently. He can be heard riffing and shredding on many of the tracks he has produced. The ’80s, when electronic song-making machines became common, are a frequent source of inspiration. “If you listen to Tears for Fears, they had great melodies and less rigid cut-and-paste,” he says, adding, “My problem with eighties songs is they take too long to get to the chorus.”
Working with different teams, Dr. Luke composes about twenty songs a year. They accrue slowly, sometimes over many months and hundreds of tracks, as he and his collaborators tinker with different ideas, putting half-finished projects aside to address imminent deadlines, then coming back to them. That summer he had seven or eight songs in various states of completion. “I’ve got Juicy J—he’s my rapper; he had the biggest urban record last year. We have two songs we have to finish for him. No, three songs. Plus a Justin Timberlake record with Juicy J on it coming in right now. Sometimes I don’t even like to look at the list, because it stresses me out.”
Because of the vagaries of working with artists, Dr. Luke rarely schedules sessions more than a day ahead. “Their plans always change,” he says, trying not to sound irritated. “An artist is sick. Or an artist was going to work this week, but she got a corporate gig in Saudi Arabia and the guy is going to pay her a million dollars. I mean, a zillion things.” His voice goes up high with frustration. “Their boyfriend broke up with them. They met a guy and they’re going away to Hawaii. So planning is sort of useless.”
Dr. Luke prefers to delay finishing projects for as long as possible, “because I might hear something I like over the weekend.” However, label executives need to plan records months in advance. Inevitably, telephone screaming ensues. Downstairs at the beach house, the air is alive with pings and trills and ringtones, as e-mails and texts and calls arrive from various Sony labels and the artists signed to them, seeking the doctor’s medicine. But Dr. Luke, like pop music itself, tends to deal only in the here and now. “I don’t do time well,” he explains. “There are hard deadlines, and I’ve learned to recognize what those are, and I can tell the difference in the calls, by the amount of calls, and the tone of voice on the other end, that this really needs to be done now.” That pointillist awareness of urgency infuses his songs.
Making music is by no means the only thing that Dr. Luke does in the studio. He is constantly checking on sales, radio, and social-media impact. He pores over Mediabase, a widely relied-on industry database for tracking radio spins. He scours the ever-expanding number of charts purporting to measure a song’s popularity, parsing such mysteries as how songs that trail in traditional measurements (sales and spins) can still come out on top of the Hot 100, based on YouTube and Spotify streams, which Billboard now counts. “I’m a bit of a numbers junkie,” he admits.
His biggest concern at the moment was the upcoming release of Prism, the new Katy Perry album. Most of the songs had been written the previous spring, in Santa Barbara, where Perry lives. “Luke and Max came to Santa Barbara,” Perry recalls, “and we’d hang out, go to the ocean, have nice dinners. There’s this really amazing studio we like to work at called the Secret Garden, and it’s in the woods of Montecito. We go there and listen to music, we do a lot of YouTubing; we drink some Chablis. Luke and his protégé Cirkut make these little beds of music for me to listen to—not too long, just kind of appetizer-size—and then they’ll do the full entrees if I like them.”
Finally the call from Perry’s manager came through, and Dr. Luke took it on his cell.
“Hey, man,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to sound relaxed. “What’s up? Talk to me.”
They discussed the idea of getting Drake, the Canadian superstar rapper with an easy-like-Sunday-morning appeal, to write a rap for the bridge on one of Perry’s upcoming singles. Neither was sure he would do it, but they wanted to have the track ready so that if Drake were to come into the studio, he could listen to it and record something on the spot.
Hanging up, Dr. Luke instructed Cirkut how to prepare the track. Then, saying, “I will make sure this is what Katy wants,” he left the library to call Perry in private, closing the wood-paneled door softly behind him.
IN 1982, WHEN LUKASZ GOTTWALD was nine, he was living with his bohemian parents in Manhattan—his mother, Laura, an interior designer; and his father, Janusz Jerzy Gottwald, an architect born in Łask, Poland. They had a loft on West Thirtieth Street in Manhattan. Welfare hotels and brothels dotted the neighborhood, and there were crack heads in the lobby. His parents listened to jazz, which he grew to despise.
On Saturdays, his father took him down to the checkerboard stone tables that used to occupy the southwestern corner of Washington Square Park, where the young hustler would challenge adult players to rounds of speed chess. The pace of the games, many played in less than three minutes, suited the boy’s OCD-like concentration. (It is no coincidence that his adult life would be consumed with making the best possible three-minute song—a sort of sonic speed chess.) The standard wager was five dollars, and he won frequently.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s song “The Message” was playing everywhere in the city that year. The funky rhythmic effects and the range of strange electronic sounds, created on a reverb-drenched synthesizer, delighted him. He started playing drums, but his parents wouldn’t allow them in the house, so he picked up his older sister’s guitar. Soon he was practicing six hours a day. Allan Grigg, who met Gottwald in New York, and is now the Prescription songwriter and producer known as Kool Kojak says, “Whether it was playing chess or learning guitar, Luke always had this almost inhuman focus.”
When he was fourteen, Gottwald attended a camp run by the National Guitar Summer Workshop, held at a boarding school in Connecticut. Jarret Myer, a fellow camper, says, “Everyone was, like, ‘You got to meet this kid Luke. He shreds—he’s so amazing!’ ” Myer was particularly impressed that for his end-of-camp recital Gottwald considered playing a medley of Run–D.M.C. songs on the guitar. This kid was fresh.
Myer and another camper, Brian Brater, attended Horace Mann, the academically rigorous Bronx private school; both went on to Brown University. Gottwald went to eight different schools, including St. Luke’s and the Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village. “We were from different worlds,” Myer says. “I can recall Lukasz coming to our houses and seeing all this homework, and being blown away, like, ‘What is all this?’ And I remember going to his house and he had a duffel bag full of weed. And he was, like, ‘Yeah, I deal, this is how I make money.’ He was fifteen years old and he had it broken down into a science. And I was, like, ‘Wow! I do homework, you do this, but we’re friends.’ ”
Gottwald explains how he got into the weed-selling business: “I started growing some weed in my closet. I got some fluorescent lights from my school, and I hung them on chains, with tinfoil. And every time I watered the plants it would smell like crazy. So one day my dad was, like, ‘Dude, you have to get rid of the plants.’ And it just so happened that Mother’s Day was three days later. And I knew a guy who dealt on Twenty-Second and Eighth. He had a photography studio, but he was really a drug dealer. So I wrapped the weed plants in floral paper, with ribbons on them, and walked right down the street, because he said he’d look after them. A month later, the plants are dead, and he felt bad about it, so he gave me a garbage bag of weed and I could sell whatever I wanted.”
He did not invest the same kind of energy in school. “I never could make it to morning classes. I never felt like I needed to do it. I remember being in class, and saying, ‘I don’t care about this, I don’t need to know this.’ ” (To this day, he boasts, he has yet to finish a book.) He got in trouble for bringing an alphanumeric beeper to class, so that clients (who at one point included his mother) could page him. When he was seventeen, Gottwald recalls, a music teacher of his, the guitarist Adam Rogers, had a talk with him about dealing. “He said, ‘Dude, you got to get serious. If you want to be a real musician, you can’t do this.’ And I stopped. And from then on I made my money playing guitar.”
After high school, Gottwald enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music. Perversely, he decided to study jazz. “The thing that made Luke hilarious back then, apart from the pot smoking, was that he was completely arrogant,” David Baron, a producer friend from those days, remembers. “One night, we were out to dinner with a whole group of people, and Luke starts talking about jazz. He’s like, ‘What is jazz? You learn a chord, you learn a scale, and you just move your fingers up and down the neck—that’s it, right?’ And everyone is like, ‘Um, I think jazz may be more than that. Maybe you should listen to Miles Davis.’ ” But within a year he was good enough to get a weekly gig playing at Augie’s Jazz Bar, on 106th and Broadway.
Gottwald made his first real money writing commercial jingles. He did the music for a popular Nike ad that ran during the 1994 World Cup. He hated it. “I didn’t like the people who were deciding things,” he says. He wanted to be the decider.
In 1997, Lenny Pickett, the Saturday Night Live bandleader, put out the word around music schools that he was looking for a young guitar player for the band. It had to be someone who could sight-read music. As he explains, “We had only two hours for rehearsal, so I needed someone who could pick the music up quickly.”
Pickett, who was the tenor sax soloist in the band (before SNL, he was a horn player in Tower of Power), auditioned about forty young players. “Lukasz walked in,” he recalls, “and—he’s hilarious—the first thing he said to me was, ‘You can stop the auditions right now.’
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’
“He said, ‘Because I’m the guy.’
“So I said, ‘Sit down and read this music!’ He was very sure of himself.”
Gottwald was right: he was the guy. “I liked the way he played,” Pickett continues. “I thought he had a really good rhythmic feel, he played with a lot of confidence, and he had a pretty large bag of guitar-player tricks. And he looked good, which is important on TV. He was thin, with that angular face that looks good on camera.”
“Lenny was the coolest boss ever,” Gottwald says. “He mentored me. Protected me. I think I was fired five times.”
Of his decade-long stint with the SNL band, he says, “I played a bunch of styles—Philly Soul, Booker T., the Delfonics. I learned a repertoire. And I learned about how to be a boss. It was fun, and then for me it became not fun. There was something more for me to do.”
GOTTWALD’S DISCOGRAPHY BEGINS IN 1995, at Rawkus Records, an underground hip-hop label started by his friends from guitar camp, Jarret Myer and Brian Brater, together with James Murdoch, a son of Rupert’s, whom they had met at Horace Mann. Myer, who had not been in touch with Gottwald during his college years, discovered that “Lukasz had applied the same obsessive focus he had brought to the guitar to learning how to make beats.” Gottwald had a tiny studio in the basement of a building on West Twenty-First Street, where he rented an apartment, and he would disappear into it for days at a time, and play music at astonishing volume.
“Those guys came to my studio and heard my stuff and said, ‘Why don’t you put out a twelve-inch?’ ” Gottwald recalls, “and they started asking me to do remixes. And that’s how I learned about producing. I mean, I didn’t even know what a producer was. When I was remixing I realized I was producing, but not getting credit for it. You were just fixing someone else’s production, you know?”
Gottwald also released several records on Rawkus as an artist, under the moniker “Kasz.” His 1998 debut, a twelve-inch single called “Wet Lapse,” combines the Chemical Brothers’ techno sounds with the more lyrical electronic music made by Fatboy Slim. These records weren’t intended to be commercial; at best, they would be heard by a few thousand people in a club where Gottwald was DJing. The idea was to make tracks that one of Rawkus’s lineup of rappers, which included Mos Def and Shabaam Sahdeeq, would want to rhyme to. For some reason, rappers rarely chose Gottwald’s tracks, perhaps because they didn’t sound underground enough. The music was much edgier than his later pop songs—“Wet Lapse” is like the soundtrack to a sci-fi movie in which the aliens win—but it was exquisitely crafted. Myer remembers a remark made by Alchemist, a well-known hip-hop producer. “He said, ‘Yo, this dude could be really big.’ I never forgot that.”
Lenny Pickett says, “He had very good music skills, especially in the areas he needed to have them for producing music. Equally important, he had very good social skills, because if you don’t have those, doesn’t matter how good your tracks are, you’re going to end up being somebody’s helper.” Pickett goes on: “He would bring tracks in on CDs and hand them to the cast people, and say, ‘If you’re writing something that fits this, feel free to use it,’ and so his tracks started making their way into the show.”
It was during the making of one of his last Rawkus records that “Dr. Luke” replaced “Kasz” as Gottwald’s disco name. (It is not true, as legend has it, that the name derives from the hit maker’s talent for mixing Adderall and Ritalin with coke and MDMA to create the perfect studio cocktail that kept you working through the night.) “I would tell people my name was Kasz, and no one could get it,” he says. “And, like, why have a weird name you have to explain all the time? So, one day in the studio, Mos Def just said, ‘Nah, man, your name’s not Kasz. It’s Dr. Luke, man,’ ” and it stuck. Gottwald adds, “The truth is, I don’t even like ‘Dr. Luke.’ I mean, I can’t change it now, but if I could I’d think of a cooler name.”
He began making his own remixes for his DJ gigs. “When I first started being a producer I was a DJ and I would play all the hits, and then I would sneak in one of my tracks and I would just see, is it working or is it not working? I learned a lot from that.”
Could his music succeed beyond the club? “What I thought was, ‘Wow, how can I make songs for the biggest audience in the world? Not just do it for the people in front of me, but for everybody.’ ” That was where Max Martin came in.
DR. LUKE STARTED AS Max Martin’s apprentice. He provided impeccable track-making skills and up-to-the-minute beats; Max offered Luke a path to big-time hit making. David Beal, Gottwald’s old friend, now a media executive, says, “In the early days, Max had a lot to offer him. And Kasz saw that if he latched on to Max, he could take it to another level.” Jarret Myer says, “You can’t overstate the influence Max had on Luke. One day he is remixing underground records, and the next day he is doing Kelly Clarkson. After Max, he had no inhibitions.”
But Dr. Luke was also exactly what Max Martin needed. Gottwald had the knowledge to make the rock sound Martin Sandberg heard in his head. “He’s a better guitar player than me,” Max Martin remarked in Billboard. “He can travel in many worlds,” he added. “With his background as a guitar player, it seems within pop or rock, there’s nothing he’s not capable of. I think he’s more versatile than me, actually.”
Most important of all, Gottwald was comfortable with hip-hop, and that was where the pure pop mainstream of the future lay. The Swede had nothing like that in his background. “He’s got really deep roots in hip-hop,” Max Martin said. “And that’s something that’s further away from me. Having that in your arsenal makes it cool.” In return, Max showed Gottwald how to make the melodies, and how to arrange and produce the vocals, which Max Martin could do at a genius level. Gottwald was a New York City guitar player who wanted to be a hit maker, and Max Martin was the former “sixth Backstreet Boy” who needed a new sound. They clicked.
“I don’t know, man,” Gottwald replies when asked to describe the chemistry between them. “It happened really fast. It was magical.”
David Baron, speaking of the Gottwald he used to know, says, “Nobody knew that Luke was going to become the Beatles of our generation, or whatever he is. He wrote tracks that were pretty awesome, but they were a lot like other people’s tracks. And then, when he had that first hit with Kelly Clarkson, it still sounded like Luke, but he had become a great songwriter.”
From then on, other people’s songs would start to sound like his.
DR. LUKE AND MAX MARTIN followed “Since U Been Gone,” their first smash, with two hits for Pink, the Bucks County, Pennsylvania–born pop singer. Both “U + Ur Hand,” and “Who Knew,” were released in 2006. “U + Ur Hand” sounded a lot like another song, “4ever,” that the songwriters had done in 2005 for the Veronicas, an all-girl pop-rock group, and Pink didn’t know until someone told her. The artist hasn’t worked with Dr. Luke since.
Dr. Luke and Max Martin had their first number one together with a song they did for Avril Lavigne, “Girlfriend.” This song also proved contentious. The Rubinoos, a power-pop group, accused the songwriters of using part of their song “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” in “Girlfriend.” Worse still, Gottwald ran afoul of Butch Walker, the Georgian recording artist and songwriter. Walker came to believe that Luke had stolen his original idea for “Girlfriend,” which was a gloss on Toni Basil’s ’80s hit “Mickey.” Walker describes the incident in his memoir, Drinking in Bars with Strangers, which includes a thinly veiled portrait of Luke as “Larry.” Larry is a jackass. Walker wrote: “I remember him asking me, ‘So when you write songs for people, do you even bother with lyrics or melody? Or do you have someone come in to help you with that? Because I can’t do anything with lyrics and melody; I need to bring in outside help.’ ” Walker is stunned. “How interesting,” he thinks. “Hearing this, I was offended and appalled. I wondered, ‘If you can’t do that, then what the hell do you do?’ ” Fueled by his rage at the song machine—a rage shared by many of his fellow singer-songwriters, whose melody-and-lyrics approach has been devalued by the track-and-hook method—Butch confronts Larry at a party, but security pulls him off before he can punch him in the nose.
The Asphalt, a rock band, charged Dr. Luke with stealing the hook from their song “Tonight” and using it in Daughtry’s 2008 song “Feels Like Tonight.” The rapper Chrissy claimed that Dr. Luke knocked off her 2006 song “Slushy” in Kesha’s 2009 “Tik Tok.” And “Party in the USA,” Luke and Claude Kelly’s 2009 hit for Miley Cyrus, has a similar drum beat and overall production vibe to the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” and a melody that recalls “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross. There is a logic to this: songs that sound like other, already familiar songs can get a jump on Zapoleon’s Rule of Three. But although lawsuits were filed in some instances—as Dr. Luke likes to tell his Prescription writers, getting sued is a sure sign you’ve arrived as a hit maker—none of the suits were successful. Dr. Luke defends himself against these and other accusations, saying, “A lot of things are similar. But you don’t get sued for being similar. It needs to be the same thing. ‘Almost’ doesn’t count. Close but no cigar.”
Their work with Kelly Clarkson, Avril Lavigne, and Pink established Max Martin and Dr. Luke as go-to hit makers in the second half of the 2000s. But for all of Luke’s striving, they had yet to find that one artist who would put their sound over the top; they needed their Britney.