« June 2006 | Main | August 2006 »
I didn't until sometime this weekend. Now you do!
I'll probably be contributing some longer pieces to over the next couple of weeks. Or at least until they discover that I'm faking all of this and toss me to the wolves.
I actually do read mainstream comics, contrary to popular belief. Here's a couple worth talking about:
BATMAN #655
It must be great to be Grant Morrison, because I can't see any other writer getting away with what's required to tell this story. Batman wins the war on crime. The Joker is taken off the board by a crazed police officer who dresses up like Bats and guns him down. The end. Now what?
Well, you practice being Bruce Wayne again. You go to benefit galas with Lichtenstein-style prints and giant inverted Godzillas suspended from the ceiling. You have to stop growling all the time.
You've seen this coming, but it's the best Batman book since GOTHAM CENTRAL/CATWOMAN came on the scene and actually did something with Bruce Wayne other than have him as Batman in drag. This isn't just Batman wailing on badguys in the final fight for his life again. It's actually trying to do something with the essential character, even if that means him not appearing in the cowl for more than five pages.
Go read what Jog and Marc Singer have to say on the book, because they're actually smart about it and not all knee-jerk and rambly like me. But the short, sweet review comes down to the fact that it's worth your time and money.
DAREDEVIL
Ed Brubaker's first story arc on DAREDEVIL is complete and I have to say I'm pretty happy with it, though it seems like it wrapped up pretty quickly. I almost feel like there was another issue's worth of Murdock in Ryker's material, but maybe it was wise to move things along more quickly. Maybe I wanted more of it because it worked so damn well. It felt like it was based in reality, with authentic con dialogue, even though things go off the rails very quickly. Daredevil in the same prison as the Kingpin, and Bullseye gets transferred in, just as the Punisher gets himself thrown behind bars!
Totally unreal, but makes for great reading. The bit where the con screams at the Punisher "Righteous cons gonna shank you, man!" and Frank casually breaks the guy's arm just made me cackle with unholy glee. Brubaker knows what works with the characters and it all seems to gel much more solidly than his run on CAPTAIN AMERICA (sorry, Ed). And some of that probably comes from the fact that I'm old and cranky, but that I first read DAREDEVIL as a gritty crime book by way of Frank Miller and CAPTAIN AMERICA as a technicolor daydream by way of Kirby.
Oh, and to answer Ed's question in the back of the book this month "Yes, I did expect you to kill Foggy, actually." Though I pegged Iron Fist as the fake DD the second he came on after Foggy's funeral. Anyways, I'm liking this enough that I'll actually pick it up in monthlies and not wait around for the trade, mostly because the team knows what gives a single chapter enough punch to stand on its own. You'd be surprised how many don't know how to do that...
Okay, back to the salt mines now.
Found this while poking around Guy Gonzalez' transplanted Comic Book Commentary - Say What?. There's an interesting collection of links to other articles there, but this one jumped out at me.
Comics Shops Turn to Book Distributors for Graphic Novels - 7/18/2006 - Publishers Weekly.
Granted, I'm not seeing say, Dark Horse, jumping off of the Diamond exclusive anytime soon, but there's certainly a market for books like SIN CITY outside the DM. So what if (and please don't turn this into a rumor--I'm a lousy source for rumors) Frank Miller wants to take SIN CITY to a different publisher who can present more traction outside the direct market, due to it being tied to Diamond? This has already happened with creators like Craig Thompson and Dan Clowes jumping over to Pantheon. Granted, that's not going to make a huge ripple in the DM because those aren't huge DM books. We can debate how large these books actually are, but my guess is there's more copies of SIN CITY in circulation than BLANKETS.
But what happens when a big player in the DM makes that jump? And what if they find greater success doing it with another distribution system? It's going to happen sooner or later, with someone who's got their own property that has a wider appeal than the restrictive genre constraints we see at the top of the DM. Will DM retailers move to a multi-distributor system?
Of course, lots of the good shops already have accounts at more than one or two or three book distributors. But how long until this becomes the norm rather than the exception? And will it ever force some publishers to consider expanding beyond Diamond exclusive distribution for their graphic novels (monthlies are right out, as that's strictly a niche presentation?) I can't prognosticate as to how that'll change things, but you can bet that it'll be big.
And whether this happens before electronic distribution becomes a mainstream phenomena is another question altogether.
And in continuance of the Grant Morrison video love fest (potentially not legal depending on community standards where you hail from) comes footage of GMo (oh, don't tell me you didn't see that coming) at DisInfoCon2000. Courtesy LinkMachineGo!.
Lady, That's My Skull: Deli Zen
Go and read. Succinct genius.
OG Boba Fett hammering everyone in range with his ghetto blaster playing “Trans Europe Express”.
Lee Moder’s hysterical story about how his aunt got peed on by a cranky rhinoceros.
Batman wiping the sweat from his cowl, very intensely, very Batman-like. The picture doesn’t do it justice.
Bob Shreck’s story about getting art from a…pokey indie artist who shall remain unnamed here. Don’t mess with Shreck. He’ll call your mom.
Kody Chamberlain showing off the care and use of the Pentel brush/pen.
Jim Lee handing out boxes of Mrs. Field’s cookies to the Wildstorm panel attendees (they only made it to about the second or third row and no I didn’t get one.)
Watching Graeme’s brain process the magnitude of the show floor.
The Tom Spurgeon/Heidi MacDonald interplay on the blogging panel.
Cameron Stewart showing off his cover depicting the Avengers as MODOKized versions of themselves.
Watching various pros wander into the Hyatt bar, scan the scene in bewilderment and moving on, kinda resigned.
Smugly walking in and not having to stand in the any of the interminable registration lines on any given morning.
Sharing a snack with my son at his first comic-con, huddled against one of those giant concrete columns as the crowds flowed around either side of us.
Talking with Douglas Rushkoff, whom I was flabbergasted to see was sitting there alone and unmolested by fans. But then I figure most of the folks who know who he is aren’t likely comic-con attendees.
Wall of Voodoo was composed of equal parts science-fiction, spaghetti western, electronic rhythm, black humor, edgy guitar, non-traditional percussion, urban anxiety, and a liberal dose of storytelling from the edge. The big surprise was the fact that they ended up in the Top 40 at all. An even bigger surprise was Ridgway's departure from the band after they played the US Festival (remember that?) in 1983. The band continued to function, albeit as a completely different band with the same name. Ridgway embarked on a solo career, releasing The Big Heat in 1986, and composing music for Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish that same year (the memorable "Don't Box Me In", on which he collaborated with Steward Copland.)
A few tracks from The Big Heat became hits, though in the US, none of them approached the position that "Mexican Radio" had taken. Ridgway and his band, Chapter Eleven, toured overseas to support singles like "Camouflage" and later, "Callin' Out to Carol" (which was big in South Africa) from his second solo album Mosquitoes. He continued putting out records (Mosquitoes arrived in 1987, and Partyball in 1991) which received little attention, either from critics or the public at large.
In the past few years, Ridgway has been fairly quiet, playing shows in Los Angeles under the assumed name of Drywall, working on new material. With precisely zero fanfare and support, the first album by the working trio Drywall (composed of Ridgway, his longtime collaborator Pietra Wexstun, and Ivan Knight) was released in March. Drywall played a number of shows in southern California, unsupported by his label or just about anyone else but the band and their friends. Reaction at these shows was mixed, mostly due to the fact that some of his fans couldn't reconcile the fact that Ridgway was playing Drywall-only material, plus one cover song that longtime Wall of Voodoo fans recognized.
Finally released from his label, Ridgway is pleased to be getting back to work, both as a solo artist and as a member of Drywall. Drywall's current album, Work the Dumb Oracle, is the first in a planned trilogy of apocalyptic documents. He has plans to release an album of solo material called Black Diamond, as well as an album accompanying Drywall's short film, The Drywall Incident.
No-Fi tracked him down and cornered him somewhere in Los Angeles this summer.
M: God, now I have to start somewhere....
SR: I was born in a laundromat in Barstow on a dusty road one night as the coyotes howled over the high desert prowl and was spanked by a taxicab driver and thrown into...the back wet laundry bin.
M: Sounds like Tom Waits, who insists that he was born...
SR: Exactly.
M: In the back of a taxicab on Pearl Harbor Day sometime in the Fifties.
SR: It's great, isn't it?
M: Yeah. There's something about taxicabs, I think.
SR: Uh-uh. I'd rather not know the truth.
M: Well. I mean the truth is only what you're going to make up and somebody else will try and verify sooner or later. Actually that was one of the questions I was going to talk about, about the fabrication of...if this was NPR, I'd be talking about fabrication of idedtity via the media. Talking about, y'know, making yourself up in terms of how or what people read about you. I understand that you fed people the line that you started up as ACME Soundtracks or something like that...
SR: It did!
M: That is true?
SR: Yep.
M: You've said on other occasions that, well, that's not true.
SR: I mean, honestly, I don't think people want to know that much about, you know, I guess they do want to know about people...But to me, you're thinking, art and stuff like that, it is really one of the last vestiges of magic we have. And a good magician will never reveal his tricks.
M: Well, not all of them, anyways...
SR: No, and there are certain things that are good to not know. And mystery is still so much a part of what's interesting that's left in the world. I'm attracted to it. I don't like to meet people backstage and go back and find out what they're doing.
M: You'd rather just watch them onstage doing their thing and enjoying what they do and leave it at that.
SR: And then I applaud loudly. If you happen to mee somebody, and there's ways that you happen to meet. Or you meet someone at a supermarket or something. I'm reticent to examine and turn over the stones and find out what people I admire, what they're doing. As much as I might say, "God, wouldn't it be great to hang with them."
M: So, you think the whole sort of "fan" thing is just kind of weird? Okay, I'm wanting to know everything about this person once they get off the stage.
SR: Well, fan is fanatic. I would prefer people more as admirers of somebody's work. Knowing that they're working at thing, that they're admiring it. To look at some people's work and say "That is good work."
M: But that doesn't mean that you want to sit down and be their bestest pal.
SR: Yeah, I'm not ready to claw through their trash or invade their privacy, or imagine my life molding with theirs. You know, a lot of people have a very active fantasy life, which is good, but...
M: As long as it doesn't spill over too much.
SR: Yeah.
M: Well, I suppose another thing that kinda ties in with this, is the whole idea of being...I mean with Wall of Voodoo, and to some extent when you're performing with Chapter Eleven, there's definitely a difference between you being the frontman up there as opposed to you just being a component of Drywall. To some extent, there's still a bit of the showmanship, but not nearly as much. A lot of it is toned down.
SR: Well, a lot of it is presentation. The medium, the meduim is really the message. You say "You're a band" and you're up there with a band, and people say "It's a band, Boy but that guy up there is sure jumping around alot." It puts my brain in a different perspective as to what I do. I like it that way. It's just a switch, just a change. But I also see nothing wrong with someone just being solo. Here's the record, and here's the songs that I'm doing, and that's just fine too. Why not? I think that all that's important is you're getting to the point where there's an emotional truth that you're dealing with. And that's the record, or the music that you need to be making at that point.
M: That you're not trying to force yourself into a role because that's what's worked before.
SR: Yeah, but it's also very easy to fall into all kinds of spots like that. To be honest, anybody that's an artist will always have an abstract audience in his head, usually, mirror images of themselves and their friends. So, you are thinking in terms of an audience most of the time, even when you think you're not. It's a human condition, you know, no man is an island kind of a thing. And whether it be an abstract, kind of primitive crowd that you're conjuring up in your head to then go light your torches in front of; it still is an audience that you're thinking of. So when I hear people saying "Oh, I just make it for myself, and that's all that I make it for." Well, they really haven't studied Jung or anything.
M: They haven't thought about it, because seriously, nobody does this just for themselves.
SR: No.
M: They all exist as part of a larger whole, so...
SR: That's where the uniqueness comes in. Because everybody, really, at the bottom of it all, everybody...really wants to be loved. It sounds corny, but it's true. There's all kinds of complex issues that go into that, of being human, that bring about "Well, how do you want that to happen. And when that does happen, how do you take it?" I have a very ambivalent relationship with my abstract audience. I want to make them applaud, and then other times, I want to make them leave the room.
M: At least provoke a reaction, whether it's adoration or disgust.
SR: Yeah, but sometimes to the detriment of my own enjoyment of what I'm doing. Because I have...oh, I don't know...like most Americans, I have a problem with success. I really don't think that I deserve it.
M: Well, not that it comes easy, but you're doing what you would do anyways, and maybe not hugely, you're still being rewarded for it nonetheless.
SR: The things that I work really hard at, nobody seems to notice, and the ones I toss off, everybody goes "that's great." And then I go "gosh, that's not hard. That's no fun. I have to have pain."
M: That's right. You must suffer for the art thing.
SR: Right, and you wonder where that comes from. So, there's all kinds of things that you get into issues with when it comes to why you do something, why you make it. The real fun, and this sounds like a cliche, is the doing it, is the getting there. Once it's there it's like, "Now what do you do?"
M: Time to move on...
SR: Uh-uh.
M: There's always a lot of comparisons with your music, and I think this refers more to your stuff with Wall of Voodoo, and your earlier solo stuff. A lot of it seems to be almost a reporter on the crime beat, not really... You always get thrown in with Chandler and Elroy. It's noir with a twist in some ways. Do you think that's accurate, or do you think that people are missing the point when they do that? Or is that a easy way of putting a handle on this Ridgway thing?
SR: Well, I think that it's all the things you said.
Both: (Laughter)
SR: Well, I mean, I do like detail. I like to find the things that are under the layer of the onion. How you find that is through the details. I tend to write with kind of an observer's point of view, standing just to the side of the subject. I don't know really why I do that. Probably because I really don't want to jump right in and proclaim myself involved because I'm still observing.
M: You're with the subject, but you're not taking all the same risk that the subject is.
SR: Well, you might say that. At the same time the risk factor is, it sometimes lacks irony for me. And I am attracted to irony.
M: (deadpan) I hadn't noticed.
SR: It's what really, I think all great art is made of. When you don't have irony, what you have is declaration. And that can be art to, and it is; it's declaration, or you can get into realms of ecstasy with profound prayer, and things like this. It's just that I'm not that good at that. I'm okay when they come up naturally, but most of the time, it's something and I'm trying to figure out how it works. Then I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself once I find out how it works.
M: And finding out how figuring out how things work changes your view of things...
SR: Right. I'm just attracted to that.
M: I guess kind of a sidelight to that is...You've described Drywall as your "loveletter to LA." Or maybe I've heard someone else describing it, putting words in your mouth like that. Obviously, LA has had a fairly huge impact on most of your work.
SR: Well, you know, people say that. I've seen that. I don't know who these people are, but I guess I wonder to myself what person's locale doesn't have an influence on what you're doing. It's hard for me to really figure out what these people are doing, how they analyze something in that way. Kinda like people need a handle on what I'm doing. And I'm not so sure that it's solely about a locale or something. Because I haven't had a "hit" somewhere else that someone knew about. It becomes, and I don't know if you've noticed, but Los Angeles is really a closed off place, egocentric, to everyone involved. They all think that this is the place, that's it's all happening here. It's as if they don't even know that there's a Europe and that things go on over there.
M: Much less a Midwest or...
SR: Exactly. I think that I've always wanted to write about what I know, or write about where I'm at. But then I've written a number of things that weren't about sitting in an office chair, in fact I've never written one like that. You know, looking out the Venetian blinds...the cliche journalistic way of putting things. Along with that, I think that a lot of it has to do with what I named my first solo record.
M: The Big Heat?
SR: From there, there was so much press generated from that record that people just tend to regurgitate it. But I really feel like I've moved way past that definition. It's just hard for me to jump up on my soapbox and proclaim myself...
M: Something else?
SR: "Maybe you didn't hear Partyball." Which a lot of people didn't. And a lot of people didn't hear Mosquitos, but the people that mattered did. But there is that. I'm not cynical, but I am sarcastic. And that really comes from my family and my father, and my uncles and cousins and things like that. That's really how we communicated. Some people don't understand it. Most people, I do think, do understand.
M: Some people have distinct difficulties picking up on sarcasm.
SR: Yeah. Well, America has a problem with irony in general. They just don't have the gland for it. Most people here are just emotions like sadness and melancholy and happiness and things like that.
M: Sorta the far ends of the spectrum, but nowhere in the middle.
SR: Yeah. Y'know it's not like, I enjoy all that too, but you're stuck with what you have. I have a limited range, but I try to make the most of it. The singers I like are Johnny Cash and Moes Allison, Ray Charles, where they have a color to their voice and a very strong persona from where they are, and to how they sing. A very strong personality, like Jerry Lee Lewis that's coming from. Although they may not be technically "great singers"...
M: There's a power there, that they have an individual voice.
SR: Right, and they take that persona into to very different contexts and are still themselves. I think of Miles Davis, he always had that sound, but he played it in different contexts. You listen to him in like the old days when he was 21 and playing with like Charlie Parker and be-bop, and you take that sound up to say, Bitches Brew and beyond that, and when you strip it all away, he's still the same person. I would say that isn't any different for any artist. The idea is to see how many rounds you can go, how many times you can go down for the count and do some more.
M: Pick up and go somewhere else with it.
SR: Yeah. This is actually the gauntlet that every artist crosses after awhile. You know you're bullshitting yourself if you do the same thing over and over.
M: It's funny, though, because that's a lot of what the business wants you to do. Like, "Stan, let's hear 'Mexican Radio', part II."
SR: Sure. If they heard that, they wouldn't have wanted it anyways. They think they want it, because that was successful. If they heard it again, they wouldn't be able to tell that was what they wanted anyways. But it's always the way things go like that anyways. But what you're saying is that it's now like that more than ever before. Right now, Summer 1995. I would say "fear" is they key word that's permeating the music business right now.
M: (Laughter.) Stark, gibbering terror.
SR: Absolutely. On all levels. And I'm so glad that I'm sitting outside of it at this point, this summer.
M: Just kinda watching it, selling tickets...
SR: As a free agent, and all future-product-free, and finally out of my long-standing contract, away from all that stuff. This summer is just gibbering fear all over the place. All these A&R guys have signed up all various acts that they signed up 2 or 3 years ago, you know. Some grunge act in seattle that was hanging on the corner by the hot dog stand, just as the guy is leaving town with nothing he's saying "God, I gotta bring something back to the company. What about those guys?"
M: "Hey, you! You guys have a contract?"
SR: That's right. And they've been polishing this record for three years and they're gonna sell it like they recorded it in three weeks, and they're gonna market it like "Hey, these guys is just hanging out," while they're really shaking in fear saying "God, I hope this works."
M: They'll do their one record and they'll maybe have their one hit and then disband, or the public will move onto something else.
SR: Y'know, hopefully they will have something happen. I don't wish ill will on any musician. If you get a chance to do it, then do it, take it But to make a long-term vocation out of it, there's a lot more to deal with. There's no way that you can get everybody to like you. It's very simple, but people deal with it their whole lives. In the realms of art and entertainment, everybody's career has ups and downs, valleys and mountains. There's more dead burnout geniuses on the side of the road....
M: Kinda like all the ripped-up tires you see on the road to Las Vegas.
SR: Yeah. What I'm thinking of is that there's so much music now is that it's literally polluted the atmosphere. That the atmosphere is polluted with music from all levels. From commercials to the media to this to that to the shrillness... And I'm not even talking about popular music, but music in general. More than ever before, and things are moving so rapidly, that the only thing left that has any value is an integrity that can be built over time, where you can trust a person after a while for a person to do their thing. That they're doing their thing and will always be doing their thing. It's good that he's doing that thing and it's different from that thing over there. I may not even like their music that much, but I admire that person because he knows what he's doing and "he knows his limitations," as Clint Eastwood said.
M: I think that was from The Enforcer, the second one.
SR: And it's a very important thing for any artist. The other aspect of that the "Reba Mackentire" thing, "I'll act! I'll dance! I'll sing! I'll skate!"
M: "We'll do anything!..."
SR: Very few people can do that, talking about the Reba Mackentire thing. One thing that Backminster Fuller said, before he died "at the end of the century, the one thing that will be worth it's weight in gold will be integrity; because no one will have been able to manufacture it."
M: But it's something they'll keep trying. They'll keep working on it.
SR: Oh, yeah. And the only way you get it is by saying "no." That's the only way it's had. There's so many people today willing to say "yes."
M: And they're never gonna have it, from the get-go.
SR: You and I are sitting here, is there any difference whether we care or not? Does it make any difference if we value integrity or not? here's my cyincal side: maybe not.
M: But it does to us. At that level.
SR: And we'll keep those values and keep going along. On the worldwide thing, a lotta people, and more people every day, it just doesn't make any difference. "They sold their song to the hamburger company? Oh well." "This guy's doing that? That's fine." Then there's the other side of the coin. There's younger people who have totally been sold down the track by Madison Avenue in the anti-market kind of marketing. Like a band will sign to a major level, and everybody will desert them, because they figure they're not independent...
M: "They've sold out!"
SR: What they don't understand is that the music doesn't change unless you want it to. All they've done is taken out a bank loan. That's all it is.
M: They've changed location.
SR: There's so little integrity in the families and the lives of these people, kids and fans and whatever you want to call them. That they'll flock to any kind of even made-up integrity that they can, and that's one of the things in the 'major and indie' thing. It's really a non-issue, but to them that's integrity. And that's so sad that they have so little example of integrity in their lives. From the whole world to: "that's what I'll hang onto, it's so important that the band be independent, on an indie."
M: It's like the people, and I'm sure that I'm gonna make a few people mad here, is the whole vinyl versus digital thing. "Well, damn, it can't be good if it came out on a little aluminum disc. Period, end of sentence."
SR: (Laughs) Are there people like that?
M: There are lots of people like that.
SR: Funny, because at my age, I have a whole room full of vinyl. Old vinyl. And I like CDs fine, but I think that vinyl sounds better, but you've gotta have a really expensive and really good turntable. And there are things about digital that are kind of sterile, but what you gain, is what you've lost. You gain a really superior storage medium; you can't melt it, it will break and scratch, but it's not like vinyl which will wear away. You lose a little bit. It's a very voodoo science, the audiophile world. People will imagine hearing things when there's no difference. I think it's good, and there should be vinyl. But that's very much of a, something that turns my stomach. Just a little, and I'll use the word, roody-poot.
M: Kinda reactionary.
SR: Kinda precious. When people stick their noses in the air and stuff. If everybody had said that about the new Howlin' Wolf record that was recorded in 1954 with the needle pinned into the red, they would have thrown it out. And thank God that they didn't. Because it was recorded wrong and sounded shitty and whatever else. Well, guess what? That shitty sound became part of the vocabulary of modern music.
M: Yeah, it's all these weird accidents. People think that they can carefully manage and steer the course of music or whatever, and they don't understand that the accidents are what's more interesting 99 percent of the time.
SR: I would say that more than 50 percent of the time when I'm looking at the Net, and I'm looking at the posts, I'm swearing.
M: (Laughs.)
SR: I'm usually saying things like "What a jerk!" I can't believe these people are arguing about this, that they're flaming on each other over this. It's all made up. or is it? And the amount of misplaced propriety, that people think they know about a certain thing or a certain person. I mean I read a thing on a Beach Boys page, and I thought, I'mll look at these posts. I know for a fact that Van Dyke Parks is making a new record with Brian. And I've worked with Van Dyke Parks and he's a really nice guy, and he's one of the true eccentrics in the world. And not a lot of people know about him any more, but he's a southern gentleman and wrote "Heroes and Villans" with Brian and did a lot of production work with Brian way back in those days, and who Brian went to for lyrics a lot of the time and things like this. And here I am reading this list and suddenly here are these guys going (snide) "yeah, looks like Van Dyke Parks is going to cash in on Brian. Who is this guy and why does he want to cash in on Brian's thing?" They want to treat Brian like the genius, and 'oh, I whish Brian would do Pet Sounds again.' It made me want to write in and go "You fucks. You don't understand a fuckin' thing. It's people like you that drove Brian insane. You don't get it, you fucks. You don't get it because Van Dyke Parks is Brian's friend, he's not cashing in on anything." That's another level of fantasy I find amusing, but on the other hand it really hurts creative people. You know, Brian doesn't need all those sycophants.
M: He's got enough pressure as it is. He doesn't have to appease his perfectionist fans.
SR: And what does Brian have to prove? Nothing. He's got nothing to live up to. He's done it all. He's done everything. Just stone cold, one of the best, if not the most accomplished melodists. He has a stone cold, God-given melodic gift and a harmonic ear that just is totally unique. People have just heard so much of it that they say "I guess that's just what he does."
M: They don't get that this wasn't happening before and that he's the reason that it's happening now.
SR: That's right. So anything that he does, as far as I'm concerned, I just say "God, this is great." There are some things that are greater than others. But I'm not sitting there, counting up the brownie points about this and that. One of the things that the Internet does, and a lot of this interactivity stuff does is allow a lot of do-nothing people to suddenly play Siskel and Ebert.
M: Yup. Someone had once described UseNet, the news articles on the net, as the "letters to the editor column without an editor to sift through it all." It's just basically everything.
SR: You got it.
M: It's John and Jane Q. Public out there.
SR: Somehow it empowers them, makes them feel more powerful. When actually they're living a live that, to an extent, is abnormal. It's got a pathology to it. Human beings are naturally creative, but when you take that creative energy and turn it to criticism...
M: You've got a problem. It becomes...
SR: It becomes all kinda illusionary. It isn't real. These people think that they have a handle on things: this is right and this is wrong, this is good and that is bad.
M: It's all just opinions. I'm sure that we could go for hours on critics and criticism, but...
SR: Let's just not. Let's not give them any more ink.
M: Although I will say that I think it was Raymond Chandler who said, "Never answer your critics, ever, good or bad." There's no percentage in it.
SR: I think I've read that same thing. There are instances where somebody has got something totally wrong.
M: Right, and then they need a boot to the head...
SR: At the end of the day, nobody really remembers the critics anyways. Man, we're really hot to trot...
Both: (laughter)
SR: But really, nobody does remember much of critics. I mean, historically, you look back, there are things that Robert Hilburn wrote about the doors, that I remember even then "This band is horrible" and "who are these people and why are they so vulgar? and whatever?" And now he writes...
M: You know, Jim Morrison is God, whatever.
SR: These people have far too much power. You know, the artist has always been like a shaman. He goes out and says to the tribe, "Hey, guys, the buffalo, they're coming up from this direction." They sit there and watch and they don't show up. "They're not showing up. Hey, man, let's throw this guy over the cliff."
M: (laughs) "This guy's wrong! Over the cliff!"
SR: "Let's throw him over the cliff and right onto this pile of cactus." And then you end up on the cactus saying "Oh, god they didn't show up. What do I do now? I can go to another tribe." You end up wandering around, or go back and try it again, and then they show up this time. Then everyone says "Look! They showed up! God, this' guy's really got it!"
M: And then they celebrate you for a little while until you get it wrong again...
SR: Wonderful way of making a living. Better than lifting heavy objects.
M: Most anything is.
SR: Hey, I'm gonna go get a cigarette...
Pietra Wextun (Drywall's keyboardist) gets on the phone.
SR: We're just ranting here about the business.
PW: Which part of the business?
M: The whole thing.
PW: Capitalism?
SR: How we're glad to be away from the whole thing right now.
PW: We're just happy we're not playing Lollapalooza.
M: Most everybody who isn't playing it is...
SR: We're sad Sinead had to leave.
M: Sinead had to leave Lollapalooza?
PW: Playing in hundred and eight degree heat...
SR: Surrounded by thousands and thousands of troglodytes.
PW: Dusty...
MM: Lemme guess, you weren't glued to the TV watching Woodstock II?
PW: We were.
SR: Lemme tell ya, you're wrong.
MM: Oh, no...
SR: We paid for it. It just happened to fall on a day that we weren't doing anything and said "I just wanna relax."
PW: I don't mind watching it. I just didn't want to be there.
SR: Because we weren't there... I'm just amazed at Carlos Santana. He's got a great guitar voice.
MM: Yeah.
SR: It's corny, but he's got a great guitar voice.
MM: I don’t know why he doesn't just stand up there and do it himself.
SR: Too many people. He's an international act, goes to South America a lot. He does everything, they play everything. He was great.... But then there was Green Day and all that...
PW: My personal favorite was Perry Farrell... He and Henry Rollins.
(for some reason the subject abruptly shiftst -- I dunno why, it was a long time ago)
SR: The three most important people in the world are Sam Phillips, the inventor of youth culture. He saw it coming, saw the crossover of black and white and he saw the potential attraction of the taboo element, of the nature of the music and how it commented on social structure.
MM: And the other two?
SR: Tesla for inventing electricity and Henry Ford for the assembly line.
MM: Without these things, we would not have rock and roll as it is?
SR: That's right.
MM: Kind of an interesting holy trinity there.
SR: It's certainly changed a lot. From our perspective, it's changed a whole lot. MTV for instance.
MM: I remember that had a huge impact. When MTV came along I was 13, I was just coming into their perfect little demographic.
SR: Before that, there was far more mystery in music.
MM: Yeah, you heard these voices on the radio, and once in a while, if you were really lucky, they came to your town.
SR: Wolfman Jack just died recently.
MM: Heard about that.
SR: And I used to listen to Wolfman Jack. We thought he was crazy. We though "What is this?" And then to find out that he was just some guy from Brooklyn. But that was a time in radio that was really exciting. He was playing things that nobody else was playing and that he wasn't supposed to play and he wasn't supposed to broadcast with that much power.
MM: Yeah, he was thousands of times more powerful than all the other stations. And people are getting it all the way in Utah, it was amazing.
SR: A real outlaw. Of course if you judge him on his last 20 years, you'd be wrong. He became like a TV host. But in the old days of radio, Wolfman Jack was one of the guys who started the whole thing. You talk to like, Tom Donahue, and other guys in "hippie radio"--all free-form, they'd all talk about how he was really exciting radio. He'd get up from the mic -- "I'm going in the other room now!" It was really different.
MM: He gave it personality. Well, I guess you had radio personalities before, but...
PW: But not as wild.
SR: And now, radio is so lopsided on DJs, and they all have the same damn personality, at least the "alternative" ones. They're all very snide, they talk as if nothing fazes them.
MM: They are too cool.
SR: Too cool. I think that they mirror a certain attitude that did come from the visual elements of MTV. It's part and parcel of its monopoly on culture. Too bad that there aren't three or four other channels of media broadcasting.
MM: Well, even MTV is getting out of the video business and getting into half hour and hour long shows because they found out that videos don't hold people's attention. The video ends and then they don't stick around for the commercials, they wander on to something else.
SR: And now they make game shows.
MM: It just makes the outlets for videos that much smaller, because they're only playing them half the time, and maybe even a lot less.
SR: And videos haven't really changed at all from the times when they just made films of bands and just put the band on stage like Hulabaloo, which were kind of calling cards to get you to check out more of the band. They're helpful in that they can go places that the artist can't go. I'm not so cynical to say that videos are a lot of shit, but they hold too much influence, or have held too much influence.
PW: They put out too much information.
SR: They take out the underground thing, the "have you heard?"...
M: They [videos] seem to dilute the whole impact of the song. You can make a video for a song, but if you make a video for a strong song...I don't think that it needs any help.
PW: One of my most cherished adolescent memories is sitting in the dark and listening to records and being able to have the music take me somewhere.
SR: And watching the pictures in your head.
PW: Exactly. Without having someone to map it out for me.
SR: Or free-associating on all kinds of memories and projections and whatever else your brain ends up doing. When you're watching, your eyes are in a position where they're king and they dictate the meaning. And that's what's kind of disconcerting about the whole idea of a video culture. It becomes far too eye-oriented, where we become concerned with what people are wearing.
M: The music becomes ancillary to the whole thing.
SR: When you're watching, it becomes "I really like that band with the nice hats..." You can start with things like that, but this can become the whole thing.
PW: That's kind of what Jean Mireault said about films. "Why aren't people making the same kinds of films that they were making in the sixties?" It was a totally different experience, sitting in a darkened theatre. Now, it's just so pressured...
SR: The aura of contemplation was very high...and now everyone is trying to scream louder.
M: Right. They're trying to squeeze more and more into 90 minutes onscreen.
PW: And everyone has to become more and more outrageous...
MM: That's another thing that people seem to be missing out on, is the simple beauty of black and white. I mean, we're just bombarded with color, color everywhere.
SR: That's another example of having too many choices that you can't do them all. You can take an artist to an art store and say "make me something, with anything in the store," and he'll be sitting there practically all week. But if you give a real artist a piece of clay, he'll have something for you. And Spector, and Stravinsky, all the people like that, worked with the limitations of of their medium. You give them everything, and there isn't really any freedom at all.
MM: Total chaos.
SR: They won't know what to do. It's like what Orson Welles said about film...
PW: That there were no great performances in color.
SR: Right. Why he said that was that there was too much information. The performance and the actor were diluted by the color. If you look at it, all the great performances are in black and white. You think about it, and he's right. There's a whole different type of poetry that happens in black and white; there are elements left out. The eye and the frame process the information in a way that is poetic. It's enjoyable, because your brain is doing something that you're not quite aware of.
MM: And it's really sad that nowadays it takes somebody with the clout of Steven Spielberg to shoot a feature film in black and white.
SR: Tim Burton was almost not able to put out Ed Wood. They didn't want it in black and white. There's a guy like Tim Burton and you'd think he has a bit of power, but they almost pulled it from him. Ahh, they're all fucks. Put that as the slugline.
PW: Like that bust we saw in the Vatican. This scowling guy...
SR: There was a line of them. It was a tradition in ancient culture to have a bust made of yourself. Instead of photographs, everyone had a bust made of themselves.
MM: It's like having a webpage now.
SR: Exactly.
PW: Then you had your little pithy inscription under it, that summed up your philosophy. And these Greek guys behind us came up to one and they were laughing...
SR: This guy's face looked like Curly Joe.
PW: Like a mean Curly Joe. And these guys transcribe the inscription for us. "Most men are bad."
(Laughter ensues...)
SR: After having read the other inscriptions, which were things like "The night is beautiful", and here was this guy who said "Most men are bad."
MM: There's somebody who knew what he was talking about.
SR: Things haven't changed much.
On Drywall's second apocalyptic document....
SR: And where is it all going? It's all going into the second apocalyptic document.
M: Are we moving back to the Drywall hucksterism and salesmanship again?
SR: It is untitled at this point, but we are in the studio, recording the second one. We don't know what it's going to be called yet. It will be different from the first one. And it will contain the song "My Head is a Big Balloon."
M: That sounds like Robyn Hitchcock, who did a song a few years ago called "Balloon Man."
SR: Mh-hm. Whoops. Someone did it. We'll have to scratch that. Perhaps "My Head is a Big Toenail." No one's done that.
M: That doesn't have the same ring.
SR: Oh, well. Well, you know, you've gotta be different.
PW: Or get your own web page.
SR: You know "You've gotta have your own web page..."
M: I have one... Did you want to talk about the film at all, in it's place as an apocalyptic document, or did you want people to figure it out for themselves?
PW: I think that you should take a Frenchman to lunch and have them explain it for you.
SR: I will tell you this. I think that it is the thing that put the final nail in our coffin over there at our old record label, IRS.
M: Would you dare classify it as an 'art film' or just a flim?
SR: I'd classify it as a piece of shit. It's just trash. It's just time-wasting.
PW: It's jus the piece of shit we've tossed at the other apes who are throwing their shit around.
SR: Yeah. It got us off the label, but having done it, we want to do more.
(another topic drift -- conning the Greys...)
M: Flying saucers, conspiracies, black helicopters. You think that's mythology now? You know how the Greeks used to have Zeus on Olympus making things the way they were.
SR: Oh, sure.
PW: Carl Jung actually wrote a book on that...
SR: Called The Myth of Circles in the Sky. He wrote it during the first big flap.
PW: The whole solar disc thing...
SR: Right. Jung had an angle, that the circle is the self. The symbol of the circle always points to the self. Back through history, we've had this symbol. Perfect closure. I'm not a psychologist, of course, but when people are seeing circles in the sky, at a time when the modern world is filled with chaos...
MM: And they're seeing themselves up in the sky.
SR: Somehow wanting to have transferrence...I think that it is modern mythology. Something that the brain has conjured up. But that's not to say that there isn't..something going on.
MM: Of course. The greatest conspiracy is that there is no conspiracy, which really hides all the conspiracy, and so on.... You could start in on this and get lost in all the loops.
PW: Do you know Jacques Valée?
MM: Messengers of Deception? Yeah.
SR: His angles are a lot different. Actually, the guy I'd like to check out on is Whitley Streiber.
MM: He's been pretty quiet nowadays.
SR: He's got a new book out. Now, he says that he's really comfortable with the visitors. That they don't bother him anymore. The new book is supposed to have brought together a bunch of people who are not into it at all, and they all saw the visitors. I don't go along with the angle that this is all made-up stuff. It has to do with the way their brain is working....Basically these people are crazy. Just crazy. (Laughs)
MM: A friend of mine has a theory that everybody is actually crazy, just that most people are crazy in ways that are manageable.
SR: There's a guy that wrote about being crazy. He wrote a book called Knots. Ran an asylum for awhile. He took opposition to the whole idea that anyone was really crazy. He allowed his patients to have full play. And they actually got better.
MM: It was something that they needed to work through, rather than something that needed to be squashed.
SR: Absolutely. It wasn't something that was cured with drugs. Certainly, he drew the line at them hurting themselves. "You think that you are Napoleon? Sure." He would jump right in it with them.
MM: There's another question that ties in with this whole craziness thing. This whole milennial madness thing. Is there going to be an Apocalypse, or will everyone just get so worked up about it that we'll have one anyways?
SR: There's something to be said for imagining the future. "Be careful what you dream of..."
MM: "Else you just might get it."
SR: I think that the populace at large is incredibly attracted to these sorts of roadside accidents.
MM: Part of it is amusing, that people are getting so worked up over this whole thing. It is just a number after all.
SR: And there's a problem with talking about it or printing it up. People say "Who does he think he is, Nostradamus?" It's interesting. It's a good time for artists, because there's a lot of stuff going on.
Someone went and video'd the only panel that I'm kicking myself about missing at the Comic Con last week. Yay!
EDIT - That someone in question was , writer and bon vivant, spotted at the engine. Though the video was actually shot by Tone Milazzo, who I'd never heard of before this. Credit where credit is due.
I'm burnt. I've written enough script pages and one-page pitches this week to throw myself into an absolute tizzy. I hate writing pitches. Hate it. Hate it so much that I'm cleansing my palate by going through a bunch of old writing and seeing if there's anything worth keeping. And look what I found.
This is an interview that I did with musician Karl Precoda, guitarist and one of the chief sonic architects of The Dream Syndicate, whose DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is one of the supreme albums to come out of the 1980s. Even if the rest of the album had been abject crap, "When You Smile" would have lifted the album to transcendent heights. Luckily, the rest of it is just as good.
A little context. At this point, Karl had been out of the public eye for more than a decade, having left the Dream Syndicate after their second album was finished. He'd finished his doctorate and was teaching Literature back east. And somehow, my good friend Chris Barrus had found out that he had a band and was recording new material, all improvised. Chris, by way of his label No-Fi Records, put the album out in 1996, under the eponymous title THE LAST DAYS OF MAY. I was honored to provide the cover art for it.
Anyways, I offered to interview Karl for THE PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE, a venerable UK-based magazine focused on psychedelic music (both contemporary and historic). He agreed, and I went ahead and interviewed him. It was long. Very long. Very very long. They ran only bits and pieces of the interview. Don't think it's run in full anywhere. Hell, I'm sure there's only a few people on earth right now who actually care, but I think that it's still an interesting examination of...various subjects. But then I *would* think that.
Set the wayback machine for 1997...
Confess. You thought that rock was dead. You actually believed that it had been killed off by all those kids with their samplers and their sequencers and their bedroom 4-track studios. The spark and verve and kick of rock was stolen away and you were left this product in its place, lifeless and flaccid. Don’t point any fingers. We all know who the culprits are; they don’t need to be named here. What you want is some reassurance, some proof, that bone-crunching, brain-wrecking, heart-pounding music is out there. Well, I’m here to tell you that it is. It never went away, really. Some of its practitioners did, though, hiding out in subterranean mazes beneath the major cities of the world. Some of them quit their bands and become university professors, occasionally ‘outed’ by their students. Before that, who knows? Though you can rest assured that none of them ever pumped gas in lieu of working sounds out of their guitars.
This is a conversation with one of these practitioners, these acolytes. You might know him from a Los-Angeles based band who attained some notoriety on both sides of the pond during the years of 1982 and 1983. The band in question is the Dream Syndicate who were rightly known for their sound, especially in live settings. Today they’re probably known more for their debris, for the bands that spun out of the various comings and goings of its membership. For the most part, all the former members of DS are still out there making music. However, one member of DS, in particular, has gone some 13 years unaccounted for. That was until reports from Virginia noted that one Karl Precoda, had surfaced in a band called “Last Days of May,” performing in various venues around one of the state universities there. It was reported that they never played the same song twice.
I spoke with him (under the aegis of PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE) on a myriad of subjects, in a handful of sessions. Here is what we could best translate of our conversations. It is divided into roughly three sections, but going far and afield in each of them. Enjoy.
Process -
Art Versus Craft; Production, the Hidden Nature of Rock and Riding That Line
K: This is why these interviews take a long time. I was talking about this to Joe before you called, long before you called. I was meditating on my inability to do interviews.
M: It’s not an interview; it’s a conversation.
K: Yeah, but what it amounts to is a complete disinclination to talk about myself. It’s like what T.S. Eliot said: you want an extinction of personality. You don’t have good poetry or good art unless you first extinguish the artist’s personality. I mean, that just gets in the way, right?
M: Right.
K: I mean, that’s just hype and nonsense. It obscures the work, or it stands in for it, in too many cases. So this extinction, I was just meditating on it today. I’m completely disinclined to discuss myself.
There’s just way too much personality out there, and I just can’t contribute to that. The last thing we need to do is hear about another person write their own take on things. There’s too many narratives.
M: So, is that something that you’re trying to do with LDOM? Get away from narratives, stories? More like taking pictures, right?
K: Painting. We’re action painters.
M: The Jackson Pollocks of the music world.
K: We’re essentially illustrating linear time. That’s what it amounts to. The old-fashioned way of making music is to construct it according to some other framework, like a ballad form or anything.
M: Or a symphony.
K: Right. That’s just old-fashioned. The whole notion that music has anything to do with narrative as we understand it seems utterly passé. And you know, it seemed that way to me a long time ago too.
This is why there’s so much crummy stuff that you have to listen to, because people are confused: they think that they have to work in traditional forms, because that’s what they dictate. So you have artists presenting songs that are all verses and choruses.
M: And bridges and...
K: And it’s all designed. But it’s so incredibly rigid, and actually foolish. Not to slander anyone, of course. I’ve heard songs I’ve liked. But it doesn’t make any sense to me as an artistic endeavor.
M: “I’m going to ape this form...”
K: Right. It’s craft! Do you want to do art or craft? It’s craft when you copy a form. That’s why a crafty artist isn’t all that admirable to me. There’s certainly lots of people are good at it, practicing this craft, this song craft. I think that there are enough ‘songs’ out there. Rock, or music in general, is nothing but energy. And people who don’t realize that make records that reflect that, I think.
M: All too plainly. Okay, in terms of the process of doing music with LDOM, it’s all just happening right there. You’re not working from a framework where “you’ll do this” and such.
K: It really starts the minute we get into the space, and it ends when we leave. And it involves (at the beginning and the end) some thuds and some swearing as you maneuver heavy objects into place. The real key is to be able to just start playing music.
M: Right.
K: There is no discussion, and we don’t talk at all. You don’t do anything, you just start to play. And you don’t even just start to play. It’s the nature of the medium, the instruments, the tools, that they play themselves.
M: You just happen to be there at the time.
K: Essentially, you’re channeling bio-electric currents that are swirling around. Obviously, there’s eddies and chaos and phenomena like that. But essentially, the instruments are the ones doing it. I found myself in the situation that there was some music in the air, and it just so happened that there were some people out there who could help me grab some of it. And they understood how to do it, without being lectured.
M: I have a feeling that if you had to lecture them on it, in this process, then they’re probably not going to be able to do it.
K: You might be able to simulate it. Which is why there’s certain guys out there, older jazz guys who we respect, who are able to go around and to tell a bunch of white guys what to do. And they’re sometimes able to simulate it, with some success. But the real question is “is your music simulated music, or is it real?” Most of it out there, is simulated. Just by the very nature of it.
M: Well, and the emphasis on production, as opposed to recording.
K: Production! Good grief!
(laughter)
M: Sounds like I tapped a nerve.
K: (laughs) That’s exactly right. I mean, a producer is just a middle-man. And that’s useful if you’re making a commercial product. You need a producer to get the dog-biscuit shaped right. Art is a little different. Maybe a producer can help, but usually not.
M: The performers into the recorder, screw-ups and all, that’s what shows up on the tape. That’s more interesting than what you can do when you sit in a million-dollar studio for a year and a half.
K: How about a week and a half?
M: Well, even that.
K: Yeah, it’s a disaster.
M: There’s a lot of very celebrated recordings that have been mixed and mixed and endlessly remixed and mixed some more, until they’ve basically had the life squashed from them.
K: And even the ones that they didn’t squash the life out of, they didn’t need to work on all that much.
M: Right.
K: It’s the accidents that are good. That’s a cliché.
M: It’s the cliché. But that wouldn’t be a cliché if it weren’t mostly true.
K: LDOM is taking that a step even further, though. We don’t even know what we’re going to play. We don’t even know what key we’re in.
M: You just do what sounds right.
K: Well, it’s all just swirling around out there. All you have to do is reach out, transport some of it, channel some of it, though those cords, those glass vacuum environments, that themselves change with heat and time. There’s absolutely too many things going on to even begin to articulate some kind of meaningful plan or plot. Or to even argue that anything’s been superimposed, or imposed.
I guess what we are is an extremely primitive, barbarian entity. We’re outside of the gates of civilization and kind of burning stuff just to keep warm, and the campfire of our horde varies, as with any chaotic phenomena. You have a genuine, primitive thing going on here. Primitivism, no calculation. Only rock.
M: I was about to say, but it most definitely is rock.
K: I can’t think of anything else that it could be. Rock is rock because it’s physical music. It’s physical, not intellectual. That’s the essence of it, that it’s physically moving. It’s physiologically altering. What’s that word? Transductor?
M: Transductive.
K: Transductive?
M: You’re turning the energy from the music into the energy of moving yourself.
K: Right. Even if you don’t appear to be moving. Okay, you’re re-orienting things. And this is, itself, a pretty theoretically-grounded idea.
I just have only one thing that I’m able to do, which is to channel sound. I can’t get the least bit interested in songs or forms or standard forms.
M: Well, they’re a little restrictive, for one thing.
K: I guess so. What we’re doing, though, is we’re riding a line: that line between “sound” and “music.” We’re along an edge, and it’s not a straight, hard edge. It’s a fractal and infinitely-varying kind of edge. It’s always there, but it’s always eluding precise capture. And that’s the line that divides ‘sound’ from ‘music.’
M: Okay.
K: So, LDOM is poised, or is surfing that line, right? It’s a constant process of varying back and forth across it. You can’t actually inhabit the line, since the line is nothing but a collection of points with no dimension.
M: You’re riding above it and the line is changing course beneath you.
K: Right. The idea is that you have to somehow balance, and you’re plotting your own course, which is just on either side of it. On this constantly snaking thing. Everything that you hear by the group is riding that line. In fact, it wants to not be music.
M: Right.
K: It wants to be pure sound. But then there’s this musical impulse, which I can’t tell you where it comes from in my own case. And certainly there are other musicians involved in this, and they have their own thoughts, but here’s what I was putting together in regards to this:
You can certainly see all modern, and some pre-modern art (but modern particularly, because of its self-consciousness) is playing with the dichotomy between imagination and reality, or in our case, ‘sound’ versus ‘music. ’ It takes a great modern poet, like Wallace Stevens, to find that line and ride it a little bit. His most common poetic figure for that is the waves on the beach. It’s not any surprise why waves are seen as a poetic image, though I don’t think that it’s understood why that is. You have this fractal edge, this constant flux of “Where is the shore?” You can measure it, but the closer you get, the longer it gets. The fractal principle. There’s a high degree of fractility in LDOM’s music.
It’s prickly, and extremely tactile. The psychic track, the bio-electric track, it leaves is extremely tactile. We’re not talking about imagination versus reality, though, we’re talking about sound versus music.
M: Instead of “tactile”, you might use “visceral” to describe it, to really get at the sort of gut feeling that you seem to be pursuing.
K: I like “tactile” because it rhymes with “fractal.” You know, dancing right on that edge, just playing along. Sometimes it goes too far in one direction or another. LDOM can be too musical sometimes. In which case, we need to take a break, do something else. But then we can also be not quite non-musical enough, if that’s ever possible. And I’m not too sure that it is. As long as there’s one tiny musical element, it counts. Although my next album is going to be cricket sounds.
M: Cricket sounds or short-wave radio?
K: Either one. Whatever I pick up best in the backyard.
M: Doing some field recording?
K: I was thinking about it. The problem generally with that, is that this stuff doesn’t rock out too much. So, you gotta have that component, the physical, demonic thing.
M: Related to this, there’s the clichéd figure, talking about John Cage and 4’56”: music is what is around you, it’s not a construction.
K: I completely believe it. But I, even if I were a consumer, could not be induced into buying a record of what was going on around me. It’s already there.
M: That’s selling you what you already have. But where does that put LDOM in the scheme of things?
K: There are a lot of elements in LDOM; they might pop in and out at various times. But they’re kind of randomly retransmitted or picked-up. In other words, [musical] tradition is like the radio, the aether, in which you’ve got millions of competing signals at varying strengths. And some of them just happen to be picked up by my fillings at certain times, depending on my orientation. And then everyone else’s are doing the same things, too. Then you have this sort of clash of the dental patients sort of thing. That’s what the band is like. That’s how tradition gets assimilated into LDOM, by random re-transmission, having to do with the vagaries of antenna placement or transductive locations. And this of course, continually changes, because you’ve got this organic machine sort of stumbling over its wah-wah pedal, or getting a cramp or whatever.
M: Which could open another door, or triggers another association.
K: So that’s how traditional elements go. Tradition comes in when the receptors are clear.
M: So, tradition is when you’re thinking about it?
K: No, no. Tradition is an element which comes in. Rather than starting with tradition and fitting yourself into it, like bricolage. Rather than doing that, what you do is get to the point where you have the empty head and simply start to activate the device, and then various traditional elements filter in and out. This is why you can hear sort of a Cuban bit at the end of the first track [“Mercury Rising”], this sort of “hijacking to Cuba” episode. (laughs) Somebody’s world beat thing somehow gets triggered. But it wasn’t by me, not consciously.
M: “That wasn’t me. I didn’t make that happen.”
K: But it happened. However, not in a million years, did anyone go into the situation saying...
M: “And we’re going to have this little Cuban bit at the end....”
K: Right. Or that it’s even a possibility. That’s why we don’t talk. We just start playing.
Tangentalia -
The Famous Opposition of Lester Bangs, Dub, Irony, Drone and Muzak
M: I know this is all ego-formation, but did you want to talk about any records that moved you, but not necessarily influenced you.
K: Well any good record, any record that I’ve ever liked is an energy record. It’s a vibe. It’s physical, rather than intellectual.
M: It’s the Dionysian vs. the Appolonian.
K: Well you know, that’s an excellent opposition.
M: To steal from a famous rock critic.
K: Which one was that?
M: Actually, Lester Bangs used it first and used it best, talking about the Velvet Underground.
K: Well, I’d certainly agree with that. There’s no question that Appolonian is dullsville, baby. There’s no point in doing art that isn’t Dionysian. Otherwise you become... I mean, Appolonian art is didactic art. The last thing we need is to be instructed in what to do by our art. There’s enough instructions floating around out there that we can pick from. Most of them being wrong. You won’t discriminate any better between them if you put a beat to them.
(laughter)
M: We can talk about, and we’ve talked about this earlier, about how you were a big listener of Dub music. Not necessarily the early, early stuff, but the stuff that was coming out in the late seventies/early eighties.
K: Yeah. Well they knew exactly what to do. I didn’t realize that then, of course, but I unconsciously connected with it. I mean, it’s purely environmental what they do. I’m not particularly into the dance culture of any sort, but hat’s a perfect example of removing content and creating an environment.
M: Where they’re taking this thing that has a context, this pre-recorded piece, and utterly messing with it.
K: Yeah. You de-contextualize it, to be fancy. Exactly. That was the best music in the world when it was coming out. The Clash knew it. They tried to do something with it. And obviously a lot of other people did, but not that many at the time. It was pretty offbeat back then. But dub taught me how to use space, or at least how to conceptualize space in a sonic environment. And, not to get too specific, but you can hear the effect of that on a lot of things that I might have done.
M: What about some of the other places you were coming from when you first started out? Some people have pointed out that it sounded like you were coming from much more of a punk attitude than a lot of other people were.
K: Which is absolutely right. That’s what made things crazy, was primarily not giving a shit. That’s the attitude that I’m trying to bring across in this whole discussion of tradition.
M: So, tradition is there; it’s something over which you have no control. But then it doesn’t have to be a strait-jacket.
K: Right. Punk is essentially an anarchistic or nihilistic take on tradition. And it’s a destructive criticism of tradition, though what I’ve done in the past can’t necessarily be described as ‘punk.’ I ain’t gonna hype the other stuff that I've done, though.
M: Actually, it would be a pretty dull interview if that’s all you did, really.
K: That’s almost all anybody does.
M: I know.
K: Okay, sorry. I know how many people you interview every day.
M: Actually, the only other person that I’ve really interviewed is Stan Ridgway. And it’s funny, because he described the early Wall of Voodoo stuff as being the same sort of thing as you've talked about LDOM being. You know, primitives not knowing... He learned a little music from David Lindley, who you might know.
K: Of course. Kaleidoscope. [the band]
M: But I don’t think that he had any formal training. They just had some guitars and electronics and beat boxes.
K: On the other hand, there were certainly a lot of sort of recognizable elements in that group. Certainly the Morricone-styled guitar is extremely clear. And the, I guess you’d call him “Lord Buckley for an Era of Limits,” kind of thing that he used to do. He had a lot of antecedents, and they were very much a collage act. A lot of traditional elements collaged together in new ways.
But see, I never had the option of playing Morricone-styled parts.
M: I don’t think that’s something that you could do.
K: I can’t. Or any other kind of part.
In other words, they had the ability to actually select these units. And obviously, there was a lot of primitivism, a lot of unconscious accidents that went into the conglomeration. But, me lacking those elements, or access to those elements, I couldn’t channel them. It caused, a rather more purely primitive folk art to emerge, in LDOM's case. Whereas I have to say, if you think of anything in regards to that group, you have to think self-conscious and ironic. Dripping with irony. Back before irony was cool.
The worst, of course, are those artists without the capacity for irony. That’s what’s always troubled me: artists who seem to lack the capacity to see themselves with any kind of detached objectivity. I mean, irony stems from your own relationship to tradition, and your own consciousness of that ironic relationship. So what do you do if you’re James Joyce? You reduce Ulysses to a day in the life of a guy walking around the city.
M: You take the grandest epic and make it the most prosaic occurrence.
K: Right. That’s obviously your thing. But what is particularly amazing are those who lack irony entirely.
M: Whether its a willful practice or just a complete inability.
K: I think you have to have a certain degree of intellect to have irony. I mean, irony is smarter than no irony, and it can be smarter still to get past it.
M: Too much irony isn’t very smart at all.
K: That’s certainly true. It can be a reactive mode if applied indiscriminately.
M: You’ve mentioned some music that you’ve liked, and you enjoyed. But this isn’t the same thing as the “transcendent” experience of music, which gets talked about a lot.
K: Well the problem that people have with rock is that every couple of years or whatever, there seem to be a whole bunch of bands that appeal to a lot of kids, but basically stink. In fact, what they’re doing is meeting a very simple, programmed need. Rock has always had a bad reputation of being a bunch of noise. For some reason, there’s a need to keep feeding certain age groups product with a certain potential of actual Dionysian, liberatory rock. Thus you have a industry which exists to cater to that market. It’s not all that different from muzak.
M: It’s just different programming, or a different flavor.
K: Different programming, but it’s the same thing. That isn’t particularly rewarding to be part of. You may as well be in any industry.
But, yeah, it’s foolish. Anybody can do it, almost. And somebody will, whether or not you do it. And that’s the key. Why not do something else? Do something of actual use. And that may not be music at all. Maybe that should be the only comment about the missing years that I should actually make. Maybe that what’s actually useful to do may not be...
M: May not be doing music or anything like it?
K: ...may not be trying to impose your music on other people just for the hell of it. Just for the reason that your ego-formation demands it. There’s certainly many other things out there. Somehow I sensed, many years back, that doing the music for the sake of doing it was not an essential act. It wasn’t essential to the world. That’s what Eliot was getting at, I guess. The essential personality is irrelevant. The world’s gonna be there whether or not that person expresses themselves. (pause)
What was I supposed to talk about? The Dionysian experience? (laughs)
M: Actually, another thing I wanted to get at was the inability of many people to articulate, on a rational level, the sort of experience that they undergo when feeling music, when actually experiencing it. Or creating it.
K: Well, is it more accurate to try to capture it metaphorically, with language? Is that better and more accurate to approach it from a musicological level, in terms of facts and dates and names? I mean, musicology is essentially the history of commodification. That’s all it is. The history of turning music into commodity, and good grief, who needs that? I mean, once you sense the absurdity of that, and a lot of people haven’t and in fact, like it. Once you sense the absurdity of it, you can’t get back.
M: It’s like you’ve been shown the other side, and now you can’t get the image of the dog biscuit factory out of your head, when you’re supposed to be experiencing ‘music.’
K: Well, this accounts for my relative non-fandom. It’s not disdain for other bands and musicians. It’s just an objective disinterest, almost a Buddhist disinterest. Having no desires for any kinds of commodities, which I picked up many years ago. Because of that, musicology and the music industry just doesn’t seem like something worth putting effort into perpetuating for its own sake.
M: I’m not sure that I’d totally agree with that, because there are people within the “industry” who are still... Commodification is a process that they have to go through in order to continue to get more money to put out records to etc. I know people at a handful of labels, and none of the labels really makes money, because it all goes back into some release that they want to put out, but will only sell a hundred copies worldwide. But it desperately needs to be out there.
K: But in effect, they are working in an industry.
M: Right. I make no bones about that.
K: It’s more meaningful than making soap, certainly. There’s no question about it being better than that.
M: But, it’s still the commodification process. Still putting it into a bin to sell at your chain record store.
K: But who wants to talk about that?
M: Well, then how about being lumped into another category? Like maybe some of that drone stuff that I sent you.
K: The drone music seems to be an attempt to map a psychic topography. The idea of the drone is this kind of fuzzy, warm thing that exists from A to B over this period of time. And over that time, other things happen around it and with it....
M: But it itself is unchanged...
K: Yeah, but of course it’s completely changed, too. Maybe not completely changed, but it’s like a brain thinking from A to B with the random electrical flashes, that consciousness amounts to, going off. When I hear a lot of the drone stuff, particularly when it’s one guy playing into a 4-track, playing to a sequenced... There’s still a rather mechanical quality, or rather a bio-electric quality. You’ve got these pulses. You’ll hear a little of that in LDOM, that kind of pulsation. But what you have in LDOM is a psychic topography that approaches the level of complexity that you’d expect in a consciousness. A lot of the drone stuff, the one-guy unit drone stuff doesn’t have a lot of that going on.
M: Because there isn’t much chance for interplay between musicians.
K: Rock and roll in general is about psychic topography. Drone is just a particularly refined way of doing that. The reason that I like musicians playing with each other is that then you get that complexity, random clusters of impulses colliding with each other. So when I listen to that [LDOM] record, I hear it as a sort of drone record, oddly enough, in that it’s doing the same kinds of things that seem to be at the center of the drone esthetic. But it’s also got a level of neural complexity, that these others don’t have. We’re after a more complex psychic topography, but the music itself is pretty simple. Maybe even more simple than a lot of the drone stuff. In general with drone, or at least the stuff I’ve heard, is that things are more calculated. And they have to be if you’re playing to your own tracks.
M: Working by yourself it has to be.
K: Having said that, it seems like there’s a lot of people out there that are looking for some organicism instead of the urban-programmed digitally-sequenced sounds of something like Trip-Hop...
M: They’re calling it “Electronica” now. But that’s another conversation.
K: ...but at the moment, they’re caught up in some rather childish-sounding indie music.
M: And a lot of it, that’s how it’s sold. It’s a regressive....
K: Yeah. Wow. It sure is. It’s a relinquishing of maturity. I’m completely horrified.
M: But isn’t a lot of Rock the same sort of thing?
K: Whew...
M: It gets back to the same sort of thing. One’s Dionysian. One’s regressive.
K: Is being Dionysian being regressive?
M: It could be.
K: It could be.
M: It could be that you’re regressing past being a teenager, past childhood and gettin’ right back to the animal. You’re back in the cave.
K: But there’s an awful lot of technology involved in our case. Not that we use sequencers or anything. But we still use fairly sophisticated tools in our primitive cause...
Tradition -
Surpassing the Narrative Urge, Why Karl Precoda is Absolutely Useless, and the Dog Biscuit Factory
M: So, LDOM is trying to surpass the narrative tradition of music, so to speak. Getting past telling stories through music, and just making sound.
K: Think how spurious the narrative actually is. It’s a confusion of realms, right? You confuse the sounds that they make with some linguistic sensibility. Content, right? Content basically sucks.
M: (Laughter)
K: Why impose content, when every human being imposes content on everything they observe? In every perception that they take in, they impose content.
M: Now we can interchange ‘content’ for ‘meaning’?
K: Absolutely. This is just going back to Aristotle and Plato, content vs. form. When you try to impose your content on the form of rock... The fact of the matter is this why people mishear lyrics. This is why nobody actually gets the lyrics right. Or at least good lyrics right. There’s this complete miscommunication. It’s as if no two individuals even speak the same language. In an abstract way.
M: Right. But somehow we manage to muddle along.
K: Look around. Listen to all the stuff that you have to hear. That’s muddling for sure.
But that’s the biggest mistake. People don’t relate to music as sound, but as part of their own ego-formation. Or they relate to it as hype. They relate to it as all sorts of things that are not sound, that are not music. They relate to tradition in how they conceive it. Which is of course why the number one question in situations like this is “What were you listening to when you wrote that?”
M: But all that means is that you happened to be listening to this at the time, but it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on what you’re doing.
K: Well, generally it does. That’s why influence-hunting is profitable is most sorts of rock criticism. Because most people who are doing it are copying other things that they’ve heard. And that’s what it means to be in a tradition.
M: You have specific forms...
K: And this is where LDOM departs from T.S. Eliot. Eliot wants you to exist in tradition.
M: Be subsumed by it.
K: Yeah. The idea of being self-conscious and talking about music in other terms. This is why I personally feel that I’m irrelevant.
M: “Karl Precoda is absolutely useless.”
K: Well, in terms of understanding the music, yeah. You can’t possibly put together what you hear with anything that I could say about anything in traditional terms. Although, I’ve explained to you what’s going on in some nebulous technical terms. But that’s got nothing to do with me, from this perspective.
The related problem, is that most people in bands want to be in bands first. That’s their primary concern.
M: Right. Instead of expressing some sort of... Being a craftsman instead of being an artist, let’s say.
K: Yeah. “I wanna be in a band to: A) Get girls. B) Get famous...”
M: “C) Get rich.”
K: Right. Or it could be as simple as: “my ego formation demands that my identity be of someone in a band. I have to be in a band, or my ego threatens to crumble.” Right? “My sense of self would vanish, dissolve...” And that creates all sorts of rather precarious individuals.
M: Not a good combination.
K: But they’re out there, flooding the marketplace right now. They’re absolutely determined to be validated in that sense. But if you take this other tack, you can easily go for many years without being in a band.
M: Because you’re doing what comes naturally. It’s not even a namable thing. It’s just you being you.
K: Exactly. It’s wholly organic, the situation. There’s no pre-thought here. There is no self-conscious, self-creation going on here. It’s completely by accident, one gets in a band. And that’s been my experience.
M: You’ve not “been in” bands so much as it kind of happened; with LDOM, too? Accidentally, like the music?
K: Right. It’s sort of like the Romantic myth. You’ll hear everyone nowadays saying things like that, right? Everyone wants to be a William Blake or Wordsworth or something. Of course, those guys in fact, worked like crazy over their poems, right. Don’t think that they didn’t struggle and cross stuff out. It didn’t all just flow from the bottle of laudanum...
M: I was about to say it was like, talking about Eliot, the manuscript edition of The Waste Land, which is a mess.
K: Which was worked over from here to forever with outside editors. No question about it.
M: It wasn’t just Eliot by himself.
K: Nope, some future fascists involved in that. But because of this [the Romantic notion of accidents], you have this cliché. So everybody’s going to say the same thing. “We’re into accidents. We just knocked this out in a day.” You’ll hear that sort of thing over and over again. While that is rarely the case, I think.
M: I could name some bands that actually use that as their modus operandi, but really there aren’t too many.
K: It’s funny, because I’ve definitely had a sort of Viet Cong sensibility about music for a long time now. I’ve been down in the tunnels for about 13 years here. With the rest of my cadres. I guess you can say that I play topographical music, and the topography of the last decade or so has been underground.
M: The subways.
K: Quite literally underground. Invisible. Inaudible. But you know, down there, we have a whole civilization.
M: Just a bunch of mole men...
K; We’ve got supplies, ammo dumps, even hospitals. (laughs) Holy cow. Time to get out of the tunnels.
You might say that we play Rorschach rock. It’s a blob, without inherent meaning. But, you can count on any audience that exists to create meaning out of the blob. Therefore to create meaning yourself for it would be an utter waste of energy. If you have to do that, then you’re not playing music. You’re doing something else. You’re creating some other thing. Maybe you’re writing poetry. Maybe you’re creating a musical comedy. It has nothing to do with making music. You can always count on the listener to create what meaning they need. So the idea is to construct an ideogram, an inkblot, that is rich and alluvial.
M: Alluvial?
K: “Composed of detrital material.” Detritus was what I was after, a sense of detritus. Detritus is everything.
M: What Philip K. Dick called “kipple.”
K: That’s right. And William Gibson had that Japanese word...
M: Gomi. “Garbage.” Junk.
K: Yeah. Levi-Strauss called it bricolage.
M: Or bric-a-brac.
K: Like Wall of Voodoo, where these individuals combined and formed out of cultural fragments. But I would be detrital or alluvial. I’m not working with products of culture. I’m working with biologic, bio-electric or even electromagnetic impulses. I mean, I’m actually working at moving air. I’m not working with sampled fragments out of various cultural discourses, as you’d hear on say a hip-hop record.
M: It’s funny how you bring that up. You say that dub music was so interesting because it de-contextualized things, but it seems that rap and hip-hop (which grew out of that, to a degree) are interested in the context of things. They seem to want to make sure that people hear enough of the sample to know what song it came from, and see this whole chain sort of going back in musical history.
K: Well, they’re very consciously working in an Eliotic sense, right?
M: Just don’t say that to their faces.
K: Oh, I’d say that. I mean, Eliot wasn’t so bad. He was a little old-fashioned. But sure you’ve got guys like Amiri Baraka [born LeRoi Jones]. He’s one of your famous black poets. He was a Beat, or associated with the Beats. But then he got involved with the Black Arts movement in the Sixties. Which was an attempt to succeed the Harlem Renaissance, and it was a black nationalist arts movement. He changed his name to Amiri Baraka and became swept up in this sort of maintenance of tradition. He appeared on a great album with some jazzers; I’m thinking David Murray for some reason was on this record, called In the Tradition.
Tradition is more strongly a part of African-American art in a way, then it is for “white” art, for lack of a better term. “White” always pretends to be universal and almost never is. But the fact of the matter is, that the white artist for most of the 20th century, has a primary interest in demolishing tradition. And Eliot recognized this, and as an essentially conservative guy, wanted to preserve tradition. But he’s talking about the same process that everyone was engaged in. So, destroying tradition has been the concern of every significant artistic movement from the beginning of this century, if you want to begin with Dada. Or earlier. You want to destroy tradition, or put such a spin on it that it’s unrecognizable.
M: It’s the whole confrontational mode.
K: Whereas, African-American art has been explicitly, although much of it has been technically innovative, it’s been about assembling, or consolidating, or codifying a tradition. Because, in fact, the history of African-Americans has been the destruction of their tradition. So they’re primarily concerned with re-assembling it. So that’s why hip-hop has the kind of content that it has. They’re really following that same impulse that somebody like Baraka had, or Gil-Scott Heron, or anybody you want to name.
M: So, in terms of this, do you think that LDOM is transcending tradition? Or continuing another tradition, like ‘free music?’
K: I think that there are going to be those who see it as in a tradition of free music. I will only say that I don’t know anything about that tradition other than what people try to argue me into.
M: You’ve taken the position that you’re a folk artist, that you’re sort of a naïve.
K: Not exactly. That just seems the inevitable objective analysis. Simply because, when I started trying to play rock years ago, I wanted to be in the [Rock] tradition. I wanted money and girls and fame. For about a minute.
M: Say it isn’t so...
K: Oh, well. When you’re 16, things look pretty bleak on the other side of that Pink Floyd album cover. You start thinking about ways to re-invent things. But that lasts for about a second until punk rock comes along and blows things away. And then the lifelong project to destroy all music...(laughter)...starts to take form.
I was just contemplating this question of just what LDOM does. And I cannot conceive of it exactly in terms of tradition. Certainly there are going to be people who can listen to it and say “indeed this is in the tradition of free music.” But it seems to me what we’re actually doing particularly, is a very singular thing. But LDOM is not consciously avant-garde. We’re not pushing the theoretical limit of art. We’re not trying to stretch a conceptual boundary, or to challenge a listener in any way.
M: You’re not bemoaning “the tyranny of the 4:4 beat.”
K: Hell, no. We like that. The only reason that makes it worth listening to is that it rocks out. That’s the problem that Rock has, is that stuff that rocks out is really rare. Lots of people plod and some of them thud. A few of them swing a little.
M: But very few rock?
K: Actually, a lot of people rock, but it’s pretty predetermined. That is, you’re not too often surprised. And generally, audiences don’t want to be surprised.
M: No.
K: You’re riding a border: “How do you rock out and still surprise people?” That’s really hard, I have to say. There’s no way to plan it. The minute you plan it, you’re not rocking out. You’re KISS, or something. I don’t want to slag KISS or anything, but, good grief!
M: Not to defend them, but that’s musical theater, not rock. It’s another beast.
K: But there are people who think that they rock. Just as there are dogs that think dog food tastes good. It depends on what you are. If you’re a dog, I guess... (laughs)
M: But if your standards are a little higher...
K: (laughs) If your standards are as lofty as mine, forget it. Forget ever being satisfied with anything you hear. I hate to present myself as a Buddha-figure...
M: (laughs) Well, you know, people are going to forswear their lives and start following the teachings of LDOM.
K: But the teachings are non-teachings. That’s a problem.
M: The same ‘problem’ of Buddhism, then. Or the same situati