Highway 62

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.