But Richard Meltzer, whose magisterial Aesthetics of Rock (1970) fashioned part of its reputation by undertaking, e.g., to transcribe the entirety of “Surfin’ Bird,” by the Trashmen, has only matured, deepened, grown  as writer and thinker. He has been a lyricist of note (for Blue Öyster Cult, among others), he has been a poet, a novelist, a spoken word artist, never content to linger long at one vocational way station. At one point in this commendable journey, Meltzer became acquainted with the great California punk band The Minutemen. The members of The Minutement were, as is well known, keen fans of Blue Öyster Cult. In fact (as you will soon hear), The Minutemen were in discussion to record an album with Richard Meltzer at the moment in 1985 when D. Boon, guitarist for The Minutemen, untimely perished in a car accident. It took Mike Watt, the bass player, a long time to make his way back to the Meltzer project—more then fifteen years. But after the turn of the millennium Watt did approach Meltzer anewto complete the project, at which point Meltzer assembled an omnibus of lyrics, some old, and some new, and recorded himself in performance. Then Watt, along with members of the Japanese band Cornelius, made music to enhance and embrace and antagonize and celebrate Meltzer’s funny, wry, prickly words, under the Watt-esque name Spielgusher.

In this album-length suite, Meltzer has a fair amount to say about gerontology, the Merchant Marines, loneliness, cunts, things that start with the letter S, and penises. His voice is not so far from the voice of your strangest bus driver of childhood, except with vision in surfeit. “Did I kill somebody/Tell me if I did/Because I just don’t know.” The music, on the other hand, in small pointilistic bursts, skitters restlessly from genre to genre from piece to piece. The playing is loose, irrepressible, and inspired. And the conjunction of the two things—words and jams—in one long undifferentiated track, is luminous, memorable, and more suggestive of The Minutemen and of the hardcore period of American indie rock than anything that has been recorded in more than a decade.

Watt’s playing, above all, is avuncular and melodic, and the one-sheet he wrote for the album is these things too: “I found d. boon all red w/fever, he had a sickness. damn, he was like a lobster and thought he should stay home but he said he wouldn’t be driving and anyway, I said look here’s the richard meltzer spiels and he was so happy – like me, he couldn’t believe it and face lit up w/a light that was nothing like the fever one I had found him w/when I got there – man, it was a righteous glow and we looked at each other as if to say “fuck yeah!” or something like that. he said he would take them w/him and work on ideas for them like me. that’s the last time I saw him.”

The result (on Watt’s own ClenchedWrench label) is one of the strangest, most attenuated, and most beautiful records of the new decade. Which led me to what follows. I approached this Richard Meltzer interview with a great deal of trepidation. Few are the American writers who really intimidate me, but this one does, for his philosophical chops, his zero tolerance policy on bullshit, and for his unsparingly earthy instincts. This interview was conducted over Skype in December of 2011, and I was shaking a little and scratching myself nervously throughout. 

 ***

The Rumpus: Weather in Portland today?

Richard Meltzer: The 20s. Are you in New York?

Rumpus: I’m upstate, and it’s sort of overcast and creepy looking. Could snow. Okay, so may I ask you some questions about the Spielgusher record?

Meltzer: Please ask.

Rumpus: I’m so impressed with it, I think it’s really strange and beautiful and singular. Intensely anachronistic in some ways.

Meltzer: Thank you.

Rumpus: I’m curious how you feel about it?

Meltzer: My issues with it are that simply in terms of my own work. It represents 30 years of output. And some of the things, some of the pieces I’ve used there, when I first wrote them, they seemed probably very menacing, and I hear them now, and they’re just kind of pleasant, if that’s the word. And then the stuff was recorded, my stuff was recorded, about 2002, ’03, those years. And so it’s basically, when I hear it now, I don’t recognize myself directly in a lot of cases. I was expecting more menace. And the fact that it didn’t seem menacing at first troubled me. Then I thought, What the hey, you know? I’m 66 years old, and I could just crack open a beer and listen to it, and it doesn’t trouble me that it doesn’t kill. Once upon a time, it probably would have.

Rumpus: What was the process for you in assembling this particular body of lyrics? Considering that it’s from the expanse of 30 years? How did you decide what to include?

Meltzer: Some of it is from as far back as when I was going to be doing a recording with the old Minutemen. Ari Cohen was going to buy us some studio time for us to record, I dunno, 19 or 20 short pieces. Those pieces were on paper, and apparently D. Boon had them in his pocket when he died.

Rumpus: That’s really incredible, and very sad.

Meltzer: I don’t remember exactly what those particular pieces were. You know, I don’t read as often in public as I used to, but I used to read 10, 12 times a year, and so I would say at the time that I recorded these words, this time around, I was still part of this crappy Portland band called Smegma. I was their so-called vocalist. They were a band that was formed in Pasadena in 1972, and they moved to Portland in a school bus. In the ’70s, and they were a so-called “noise band.” And they provided noise. You know, anywhere from five to 17 members at one time. So they asked me, in ’99, if I would like to be their vocalist, and I could do anything I wanted to do with my voice. I could yell, I could whisper, I could sing.

So a lot of this stuff was material that I was doing with them. It was getting very tedious being with them. At first, there was some novelty to it, and this guy Rick, who was running the show, he ultimately didn’t care for the fact that I was using the same material all the time. He says, “Write us a rock opera.” Yeah, right. I just wasn’t going to do anything original for them, and after a while I just used either some of the perennial stuff, or snippets from recent books. Like, uh, what was it that came out that year? Autumn Rhythm. The pieces in that were written from, uh, anywhere from ’97 to ’01, I guess. And so I used some items from Autumn Rhythm in Smegma. And they were still nearby when I did these recordings. Ultimately, it was just whatever stuff wasn’t just completely overused, whatever I had in my satchel that I wasn’t sick of. I think everything in there was something I had read live.

Rumpus: Can you talk a little bit about how you generate texts like this? Do you write everything down? Are you a compose-by-hand guy, or do you ever improvise the texts?

Meltzer: If I’m very drunk, I can improvise. But generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, almost all of my work is material that was first done on the printed page. And the shorter ones that you might call poems, I had a stretch from ’79, ’80, for five or six years, where I wrote a lot of poetry as such. Simply because I was asked to. Somebody said, “Would you like to do a poetry reading?” I said, “I don’t have much poetry.” “Well, write some.” So I did, and up to that point, a lot of things were written in one draft. A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy about every syllable. I wouldn’t allow the work to be seen unless it felt perfect. Not clunky at all, no clunky syllables. So, really, for the printed page, it had to have a feeling of rhythmic and syntactic verisimilitude or something. I didn’t mind writing incoherently, up until about 1980, occasionally. But after that, I decided, might as well be articulate. And I found, though, that writing poetry affected my prose to the point where I never again wrote in one draft, and my prose just took longer and longer and longer. It took longer and longer to come up with an acceptable text. And that’s probably one of the reasons that my output has slowed down.

If I looked at some of these pieces as if this project was not spoken-word but just short anthology, I probably would have fussed with some of the sentences, you know? Syllabication and prosody and such crap. Because the printed word is etched in stone. But for reading purposes I accepted this book of texts in the manner in which I wrote them, no need to fuss. Most of the shorter stuff was written as poetry. Meaning lots of white space on the page.

Rumpus: In what circumstances did you record the pieces?

Meltzer: I had this friend Michael who has a little studio in his basement. And he used to get one day off from his job, and  we’d hang out on Mondays, and over a period of a year or two, these were recorded.

Rumpus: You would do one at a time?

Meltzer: Well, you know, there were very few that I’d do multiple takes on. Some of the stuff didn’t sound plausible, the versions I had just weren’t, once I replayed them—but most things I recorded were one or two takes. Very few as many as five.

Rumpus: There are spots here that sort of remind me a bit of those amazing Captain Beefheart home recordings, you know? Like you were flipping the button, making it up, and then turning off the recorder as soon as you finished the thought. And that would be the take, you know? That level of kind of, um, purity and self-sufficiency, I guess. But is that totally illusory?

Meltzer: It’s a sonic outcome of just doing it, doing it, doing it. And, uh, you know, I don’t know that there was a consistent system to how we approached it. I think I remember on occasion resting my pages on an ironing board. Usually I had a beer alongside, but not always.

Rumpus: When you listen to the whole thing now, what kinds of thematic concerns do you think bind together the lyrics?

Meltzer: A lot of it is smut. It’s just a lot of testosterone, a lot of, you know, excesses of penis. Portland is a very tolerant place, and everybody’s an artist and blah, blah, blah. But I would say, in general audiences in Portland have winced and blushed from some of the penis texts.

I mean, what’s thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I’d even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it’s like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff.

When finally I’m reading it’s like coming up for air and taking a breath. I’m sort of, you might say, celebrating the fact of having actually created these trifles. I mean, in a way, at my age, I’ve been writing for 45 years or something, and now I look back and find pockets of delight. The first five years as a writer, I didn’t know how to write at all. I couldn’t write my way out of a white paper bag. And yet, I did some remarkable things. And later on, there were periods where I got this mission to find an articulate voice with rewrites and all. There were periods where I was as dense as Faulkner. And from those periods, there are also little pockets of delight that I get. No matter what, I’m never going to get an anthology from an actual publisher, though I could always score another music anthology. But if this is going to be a document of a multiplicity of my writings, it’ll do. It feels like a birthday party or something.

Rumpus: I think there are moments on the album that startled me for how romantic they were. Relatively ardent love poems or . . .

Meltzer: Oh, yes. Certainly.

Rumpus: Or what would pass for that in your work.

Metlzer: In the same sense that the testosterone level is high or used to be in my writing I’d say there’s a goofy romantic, as well. And also a white-bread-toast-and-butter version of philosophy. You know, I’m a philosopher and a romantic and a smut hound. And just a general all-around fool. A purveyor of folly, as such.

Rumpus: Are there ways that testosterone and romance are particularly appropriate for an album that would be a collision of your words with music?

Meltzer: I guess. I mean, what is rock and roll? Rock and roll is a text evolving over the course of the last 50 years or whatever, 55 years. First time I encountered rock and roll, I was fortunate because I was 11 years old and Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan Show. And it changed my life. It was, for me and most middle-class people my age, white people in New York, it was beyond our experience. It was whatever it was that Elvis on TV was, we couldn’t even figure out what it was. And to think, I remember in the years that followed thinking, Oh, it was sex. Is that all it was? No. I mean, looking back, it reminds me more of  monster movies in the ’50s  than sex. Whatever it was, it was just something big. Something was really going on in the gamut of the human nervous system.

My sense was the lyrics had no place in it, until 1965, let’s say. This original rock and roll kind of model was boy-girl music. I mean, what The Beatles did, nobody any longer regards The Beatles as having been innovators of anything, and they were innovators in 50, 60 ways, and one was essentially, they were a white band that figured out how to do boy-girl songs that weren’t stolen from country, Tin Pan Alley, or R&B. And The Beatles did very good boy-girl stuff for a stretch of three, four years, and their time came and went. The British Invasion was to me the most significant cultural event in my lifetime, and then suddenly that was gone and you had, you know, a few U.S. bands, like The Doors. Most of the ‘60’s U.S. bands were low testosterone, and so The Doors struck me, still strike me, as having been the most maximum-testosterone band ever.

And I saw the, uh, I was writing for Crawdaddy, let’s call it the first rock mag, and four or five of us went to see The Doors. There was a club called Ondine under 59^th Street bridge in New York, and the bands played four sets a night, and The Doors played like two months, three months of bar-band sets. But every time we went there, we’d just look at each other—I mean, no one regards the Doors as important anymore . . . But the first night that we saw them, we looked at each other and said, “Is this the greatest thing ever or is this the greatest thing ever?” And it was just something, so, so, of the night, and of menace. And looking back, it seems to me what my impression of Jim Morrison was, my initial impression was that it was the music of my own penis. It was like universal heterosexual testosterone overkill.

And he had, you know, the greatest line, “When the music is your special friend, dance on fire until the end.” You know, dance on fire. That’s it, you know? It’s ritual music of, you know, whatever it is. Live in fire, die in fire.

The Doors probably didn’t have more than ten or eleven good songs, but that’ll do. So that was the beginning of my interest in writing lyrics, was The Doors. And you know, we had, “Horse Latitudes,” which was probably the first example of spoken-word recording. And, I just, everybody I knew would make up phony neo-Beatnik Jim Morrison poetry. I used to read that and just get sick of it. Something like, “Get down. Get with it. Teach your dog to swim.” I forget the rest of it.

But anyway I would say essentially by 1980, I was starting to read. By 1981, I start, I gave myself the warrant to read, and, you know, I read Faulkner and Joyce and the whole thing, and the Beats. And so, uh, I’m much too young to call myself a Beatnik, but, Anne Waldman, who is only three months older than me, no, one month older than me, she calls herself a Beanik. But, basically, I collect Beatnik books. Old chapbooks and poets like Ray Bremser and Jack Micheline, and to me that stuff still informs my life, feeds me. Bands, I mean, since the mid-eighties, I have played very little new music, and people have had to tell me, “Oh, you should listen to The Replacements or Guided By Voices” And, uh, okay, that’s nice. But generally, I’d say the music I’ve absorbed since 1985, I still play in my head. And I don’t even know if I have room for anything else. I actually opened for four or five Guided By Voices shows in Portland, and only because Robert Pollard, it’s his band and he says he likes my stuff. He read me in Creem when he was in high school. So he says to the audience, “This is Richard Meltzer, pay attention to what he’s doing, don’t boo him off the stage.” Because usually when I open for bands, I’m booed off the stage.

Rumpus: I’ve done a couple of those gigs, and I always have found it really not very much fun. Opening for bands.

Meltzer: The kids say, “Get off.” They want music.

Rumpus: They want music. And then they start talking in the back of the room, and they you’re trying to kind of get over on the front row a little bit, but you can’t concentrate.

Meltzer: The most fun reading I ever had was Dave Alvin from The Blasters arranged a reading called “The Night of the Macho Poets.” This was in ’86 or ’87, and, uh, at the, uh, where what was it . . .? Some club. And it was Dave Alvin, John Doe, Mike Watt, me, Christy from Flesh Eaters, and Henry Rollins. And Henry insisted he had to be the closer, and he was so macho he wore a dress. And it was really a good show. And it was a full house and everybody was so concerned at the end: “Did they like us? Did they like us? What do you think?” So everybody’s standing around stroking everybody else, so by the time we actually went to greet the audience, they’d cleared the house. So we never got to ask them how they felt. It was actually a great night. Unrecorded.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Meltzer: Hard to say. I wrote a novel that took me seven or so years to do. I guess I finished in 2004 or 2005. And it’s proven unpublishable. It’s as good as anything I’ve done. Half the book is boy-girl stuff. It goes back and forth from boy-girl, to a reality that doesn’t exist. It just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and I can see why some would consider it hard to read. But basically, I’ve reached the point where I’ve lost any direct relationship to any of the editors I used to have. I suspect I’ll have to pay to publish this myself, and I think a lot about about putting out fifty copies. I used to think about hogwash like my legacy and silly things like that. But I feel like if I never have another book out, I’ve done okay, I’ve had like twelve or thirteen little books, and I won’t be upset about this on my death bed.

When I was living in New York in the ‘70s, early ‘70s, people would set it up for me to meet these guys with the three-day stubble, these editors from the 1920s who were still around. They’d have a bottle of whiskey in their desk and they’d smoke a cigar in the office. And these guys they’d take me to lunch, and they’d say, “Well, your stuff looks good, kid. You know, uh, it needs a lot of work, but when you finally got it figured, you come back and there’ll be a place for you.” At Scribner’s or Random House or whatever. And by the time my work was up to snuff, they were all gone. No replacements for those people.

And the whole online thing is like, I just, that to me is a world that doesn’t exist. It’s not something you could touch or lick or smell. And as my eyes get worse, it’s very hard to read. And there’s no money in it. I mean, it’s like they pay, like the best you can go is 1970 prices.

One of the things about me is that I actually had marginally middle-class living from writing. For years and years, I actually wrote so much through the ’70s and ’80s that I made a living. And very rarely have I had to take another job. And now it’s impossible for anybody coming up to make such a living. They’ve pissed in the temple, you know?

Rumpus: What part is philosophy playing in your life these days?

Meltzer: An old Asian thinker said that things happen in seven-year cycles, you know. You know, when you’re seven, you can piss and you can shit, but that’s it. When you’re thirty-five, you can you do something. And the age for philosophy is eighty-four. When you make it to eighty-four, then you’re ready to sit back and think universal and systematic. I was a philosophy major a long, long time ago. At Stony Brook. You had something to do with some state university school?

Rumpus: I taught at SUNY Purchase for a little bit.

Metlzer: I went to Stony Brook just when it just opened, I had four or five great teachers, all of whom were denied tenure or fired outright during the time I was there. They were the only good teachers I had, and they were all dumped. But they all encouraged me to basically, it was basically, think for yourself or perish. Not only think your own thoughts, but develop your own systems. And so I was doing this from pretty early on, and when I wrote The Aesthetics of Rock, it was an extension of what I wrote for an undergraduate class, and some unreadable junk, basically, but I kind of still appreciate the, just the groping for something there. And these days I find, all these years later, I don’t remember much of what I read, Hegel or Kant, but I still have a certain rigor. And I’ve gone, I think I’ve gone from being a Platonist to being something of an Aristotelian, I’ve become more of a pluralist in recent times. And more and more, I’ve seen the relationship between philosophy and poetry, which began in the same place, and at some point, philosophy tried to combine what is interesting, poetry, and what was true, science, and I think did a decent enough job. But the poetry side is what appeals more to me today. Metaphor, just absurd linkages and coming up with categories, labeling, taxonomy, and I’d say that I do have some tools left. There are days I can’t make a sentence out of anything, and anything I make looks clunky to me. But I still have a general grasp of the cliché, of the generic sentence. And if I didn’t have that, I’d be a blob of putty on the floor.

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Bella Santorum is the eighth child (one prior child died when just two hours old) of presidential candidate and Internet punch line Rick Santorum and his wife Karen Garver Santorum. Rick Santorum, though charming and Midwestern on the campaign trail, though given to a humbling fashion tendency—the sweater vest—that has gotten most men a beat down in the middle school years, is among the more doctrinaire and dangerous politicians of the moment, right up there with Sam Brownback or Jon Kyl or Mitch McConnell. He never met a social issue that didn’t require from him a knee-jerk one liner that would turn heads with its oversimplification and vacuity. He never met an earmark he wouldn’t try to bring home to Pittsburgh. Though he is not as preening and narcissistic as Newt Gingrich, he is just as willing to say anything. And Karen Garver Santorum once wrote a book on children’s manners, called Everyday Graces. Before that, though, before marrying Rick, the guy whose last name also refers to a frothy mixture of lube and fecal material etc., she was living out of wedlock with an obstetrician who provided abortions. I’m betting that in those days she was a different Karen.

I find hypocrisy and mendacity among politicians somehow reassuring. It goes to show that anyone can be bought, and that in politics the price for which people can be bought is usually rather low. These things make the grim politics of the present less surprising.

However, when I think about how much contempt I have for Rick Santorum and how sure I am that somewhere in him lurks an anally-compulsive disco boy—why all the comments about how horrible it would be if people were allowed to do anything— I then start thinking about Bella. Bella is three years old and was born with Trisomy 18, which is a genetic condition not unlike Down Syndrome, but with more serious health complications. The list of potentially lethal effects of Trisomy 18, in fact, is rather terrifying. Half of children born with Trisomy 18 die upon birth, and 90% die within the first year. Santorum himself has indicated that while he was campaigning in Iowa at the end of 2011, Bella was having a lot of trouble breathing and had to be sent home to Virginia to be cared for by a nurse.

Now: when Bella was in utero Santorum and his wife presumably were able to have an amniotic fluid test to determine that Bella had a genetic abnormality, which Bella was more likely to have, because of Karen Santorum’s age at the time of the pregnancy, and they were able to decide to carry Bella to term because that is consistent with Santorum’s positions on abortion. More power to them. When my daughter was in utero, my wife and I decided not to get the amniotic fluid test because of the risk of miscarriage for “geriatric” moms, and because we agreed we would be content to have a child with Down’s Syndrome (Trisomy 21), if it came to that, which it did not. I commend the Santorums for carrying Bella to term and for caring for her now that she is here. Some people are not physically like the majority of us, and yet we can still love them deeply.

This is the sort of thing that bears repeating. Even when you are Pro Choice in all cases.

Still, Just as I found Sarah Palin’s use of Trig on the campaign trail in 2008 slightly sinister, so have I found Bella’s appearances in Iowa sinister, and I’m glad she is back in Virginia where her breathing problems can be monitored carefully. But as a parent myself I am afraid I am also thinking about how keen is the absence of a child especially during a professional year as demanding as what Santorum is going through now, assuming Santorum is capable of human emotions. Yes, he has six other children, one of whom, an older daughter, acts as a spokesman for her dad. This daughter recently indicated that the family carries around lapel buttons depicting Bella, so that she is uppermost in their thoughts no matter where they are. Publicity stunt? Or grief manifested?

And what does Bella think about exactly? And how often is she affixed to the breathing apparatus? Does she think about the discomfort of the mask? Does she miss her parents? Are there certain repetitive images, screensavers, let’s say, that are capable of keeping her mesmerized for hours? Will there ever be an age when Bella Santorum can understand party politics? Will she respond to love? Will she, like a friend of mine who has Trisomy 21, love Elvis? And when they say that those kids who survive a childhood with Trisomy 18 will “live into adulthood,” what does that mean? Will she live out a complete term? Or will she devastate her parents and her siblings down the road? Does she realize that there is something about her that is unlike other children? What will the Santorums do with her if her dad wins the nomination? (Unlikely, I know.) Does Bella feel the pressures of the campaign? Does she care what her dad does? Will she welcome him home when he loses? How did she feel in that one impressive publicity photo she did with her dad, where he seems to have John Boehner’s tan on? Was that love enough for her? And is she named after Queen Isabella? Or Isabella Adjani? Wouldn’t we all love Bella? If Bella were sitting in our lap?

Easy to loath Santorum. Easy to love that Internet buffoon that Dan Savage has made of him. But what about Bella? Have you thought about Bella?

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And that’s not to mention Music For Airports (1978). It’s difficult to talk about Music For Airports, because it’s like trying to describe the sky, and trying to describe the sky is difficult because the sky is always there and its envelopment is beyond where language can profitably transport us, and then again it is difficult to describe the sky because which sky are you going to attempt to describe, and the one always shades into the other, if, in fact, you can use the word shade to describe what the sky does, and I have been listening to Music For Airports for so long and in so many contexts and with such unspeakable devotion to it that I can’t really tease apart the impressions and I can’t find a way to detail my loyalty to it, in all of its manifestations, in all of the situations in which I have been devoted to it, and if it had been Eno’s only album, and even if there were not an abundance of writing to describe the great reward of listening to Music For Airports, I would still be certain that it was among the very finest recordings of music ever made, and when I say this, I say this without respect to genre, I would stack Music For Airports up against Glenn Gould and Sgt  Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Colin Turnbull’s recording of those pygmies and Alan Lomax, and all of that. Music For Airports makes the world a finer place, makes the people in it more palatable, and we really should launch it out into space and prove to the people on those distant planetoids that we are not just warlike simians bent on auto-destruction.

For the purposes of this essay, my hypothesis is: Eno had a Sweet Spot. And in addition to his appearance of unvarying confidence, his track record, his ability to pick collaborators well, his knack for understanding what might happen next, he had history on his side in those early years. This is the ineffable quality of the Sweet Spot. It somehow coheres with what history requires. There’s the inevitable feeling about artistic accomplishment when it happens in its appropriate historical epoch. There is inevitability. This has something to do with whichever artist you are talking about, but also has to do with how history happens—in fits and starts. History and artistic merit meet and fall into some adolescent love and death embrace, and it seems as they were always meant to be married together in this way, even if it’s the individual talent that appears to be somehow possessed of mystical perfection. The individual talent gets the credit. History effaces its role in this, at least until history, that fickle thing, turns its attention elsewhere. The Sweet Spot is the Rolling Stones on Exile on Main Street. Everyone agrees it’s a masterpiece, but is it really a better album than, say, Let It Bleed? It was the right album for the moment. As was Some Girls a few years later. Exile sounds exactly right for its moment (1972). Some Girls sounds right for its moment (1975). Pet Sounds is right for its moment. London Calling is right for its moment. Loaded, by the Velvet Underground, sounds right for its moment. In some of these cases, the work under scrutiny is so excellent that you would have a hard time saying the reputation of the work is owing to anything other than its excellence. But excellence also has to do with cultural history, the history of technology, and so on. Thriller, to my ears, is a frequently boring album, but its smooth and perfect arrangements caught something of 1983 as no other album seemed to be able to do. Hotel California seems to me utterly dreadful, excepting that guitar solo at the end of the title track, and yet is any other record as suggestive about American culture at the time? History is what people need to hear, and when they need to hear it, they need to hear it enough that they are willing to revise their aesthetic standards to cohere with the juggernaut of historical necessity.

The nearly instantaneous dissolution of The Clash after their finest work is, in a way, a merciless example of this politics of the Sweet Spot. From London Calling through Sandinista!, the Clash were so far ahead of their peers, they were so adept at hearing what was going to happen, as opposed to what was happening, that it was hard to think of them as anything but supremely gifted oracles. But then there was the precipitous falling off of Combat Rock, with its mere covering of the bases, its slightly warmed over funk, and its leftover bits of glam, and suddenly they sounded tired, dissolute, perhaps drug addled, even worried, and then they were gone. Which led some listeners (me, at least) to go back and listen to what came before. And what came before (especially if you’ve heard the expanded edition of London Calling) was not always as perfect as we’d been led to believe. Great lyrics, I will agree, but not necessarily the pinnacle of creativity, in the musical department, that you might have imagined was there when you first heard the album. The Sweet Spot meant that some of the cannabis-enhanced qualities of Sandinista! do not quite now seem like the visionary white-musician refraction of Lee “Scratch” Perry that we thought they were then.

Or: sometimes things fall out of fashion simply because history (or technology) has moved on, and there’s almost nothing the musician can do, again, to reacquire the reputation from which he or she has been sundered. Think of David Bowie, after Let’s Dance. For a solid decade, he could do nothing, not a thing, to redeem himself, through the Tin Machine period, through the Buddha of Suburbia period, right up through Outside. Not until Heathen did people again pay any attention, though there was no shortage of good music in that lost decade. Sometimes there’s a snowballing effect after the Sweet Spot, and a loss of confidence goes with the loss of attention, and the artist casts about in a sort of desperate way. Lou Reed had a long spell after Coney Island Baby where he made almost nothing remarkable, until The Blue Mask, and then, after couple of reasonably good albums (mostly good because of the presence of lead guitar player Robert Quine), he went back to making music that was, in my view, not terribly interesting. Recently, freed from all historical concern, Reed has been making a lot of abstract instrumental music, not even bothering about the songs, and that has been interesting, because here he appears to be utterly post-historical and therefore free. (And yet one only has to listen to the single, for example, from the Lou Reed/Metallica album, already derided as one of the worst songs ever committed to tape to see how brutal the exile after the Sweet Spot can sometimes be.) Paul Simon between Still Crazy After All These Years (1975) and Graceland (1986). David Byrne for much of his solo career. The B-52s after Whammy! George Harrison after Living In the Material World. Joni Mitchell after Mingus. It is merciless out there, in the cold, where they give you no budget to make your recordings, and yet you are expected to sound as you once might have sounded when you had record company support, when you played with the finest musicians in the world. Now you are relegated to making records entirely on your own.

What, therefore, of Eno after the Sweet Spot? He certainly went on to produce more successful and highly profitable albums, up to and including what I think of as one of the most unlistenable bands of the present moment, Coldplay, whom he has nonetheless managed to make more textural and thoughtful than they deserve to be. These productions are likely highly remunerative, and are enough to insure that Eno’s more adventurous artistic activities of economically secure. But of Eno’s own albums there have appeared to be more missteps than we hitherto imagined, which is to say it’s possible that there have been missteps since 1985 or 1986, as opposed to the decade prior in which mistakes were none. But is this really the case?

I for one love everything up to The Shutov Assembly (1992), an album of highly abstract pieces made for a Russian artist friend. The sounds on Shutov incorporate some more dissonant harmonies, and a lot of music that is frankly ominous, an approach that is certainly at variance with the ambient period that preceded it. Shutov seems to be one of the first of the Eno albums to abundantly feature digital synthesizer, perhaps the Yamaha DX7, or the DX11, which were really good on bell tones, much favored by the later Eno. Moreover, the album, like many of Eno’s most adventurous pursuits, was made entirely by the artist. And much of it may have been fashioned for sound and video installations for Eno’s sideline as a fine artist (for which, he was, in fact, trained in college). The same is true of the very lovely Thursday Afternoon (1986), which is a musical piece that dates to one an earlier video work (of the same name,1984). Again, Thursday Afternoon, to me is highly listenable, if totally abstract, and it follows upon the ambient series (which includes not only Music For Airports, but some albums he produced for Harold Budd and Laraaji, as well as his own On Land, an album I love very nearly as much as Music For Airports), and has something in common with those abstract albums in that you can enter in Thursday Afternoon anywhere, at any point in its course, and have a musical experience, in the same way that you can do so with Cage, or with Morton Feldman, or with La Monte Young.

Meanwhile, something rather monumental happened during the later eighties, and it should be obvious. Eno had stopped singing. After Before and After Science, in 1977, Eno didn’t sing in public at all, throughout the high ambient period, feeling, apparently, that the figure/ground problem in the popular song was somehow non-negotiable for him—the way in which the lyrics were always considered the foreground—perhaps because he had exhausted his lyrical approach, which involved a lot of randomness, nonsense-singing, anagrams, and the like. And yet toward the end of the decade, he tried to make an album of songs again, which was to be called, as I understand it, My Squelchy Life, and this album didn’t find favor with the record companies, or so it is said, and he was sent back to the drawing board, which resulted in a mostly instrumental album, Nerve Net, which was percussion heavy in ways that are somewhat surprising to longtime fans. Some of the Squelchy Life tracks made it onto Nerve Net in a different forms, and some were later to be heard on the Eno vocal box set (a work that I was so obsessed with obtaining, back when it was very hard to get in the United States, that I made use of a trip to England to procure a copy). Nerve Net was a louder, less tuneful, and slightly aggressive album, one that had very little of the gentle, meditative, and paradoxically tender electronic music that Eno had been making for about five years. This likely by design.

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• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #27: All Things Must Pass
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS: Black Napkins
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS: A POST SOMEWHAT ABOUT JAZZ

Mike Doughty

It was not exactly a surprise for me, then—as someone who has followed Doughty’s work since the 1990s, since the ascendency of his band Soul Coughing, a hip-hop inflected jazz-funk outfit that served as an alternative to everything grunge—to learn that Doughty has composed a memoir of his time in the limelight thus far, entitled, appropriately, The Book of Drugs, coming to you in winter 2012 from Da Capo. Doughty’s life, as chronicled in these pages, is not so much a revelation for its narrative arc (kid makes the big time, starts in with the dope, the band breaks up, kid is redeemed), as it is for the astonishingly vital, energized, and natural voice contained in its pages, one which never once had a ghost writer presiding over it, likewise its acerbic and sometimes lacerating honesty. If that weren’t enough, if a volume of genuine autobiography weren’t enough, Doughty also has a new album out, one that finds him heading back in the direction of a band, albeit with lots of strange electronic noise adorning its lovely rock and roll surface. The new album is called Yes And Also Yes, which title Doughty came up with while trying to write a profile for himself on an online dating site, and is released on his own label, Snack Bar/ Megaforce. Available just about everywhere.

Our interview occurred in early September at Mike Doughty’s apartment, which is on the other side of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and which has a great many guitars in it.

***

The Rumpus: I want to start by talking about the memoir. What was the impulse? At what point did the impulse arise?

Mike Doughty: I just felt I had a lot of stories. It wasn’t like I had an idea for a book. I had all these stories and I kind of wanted to do something with them. And I guess I wrote a book because I’ve always sort of been threatening to write a book (laughs), and finally somebody called me on it. Also, there’s an economic impulse, which is that there’s not a lot of money in making music anymore. Once you’ve been putting out records for a long time, even people who are super-positive about it are like, Oh, look, it’s that guy. Oh, there he goes, he’s putting something out! Great! He’s doing it! And nobody pays attention to it.

Rumpus: Does that mean that Da Capo came to you and said, Hey, we’ll put out a memoir if you write one?

Doughty: No, I started working with Jamie Kitman who manages They Might Be Giants and who also is an acclaimed automotive reporter. He said, Why do we try to do some other stuff? Why don’t you try to write a book? And I said, Oh, that’s a lovely idea. He was just running by names of publishers, and I was like, Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know, who are they? And then I was like, Oh, yeah! I know Ben Shaeffer at Da Capo—he was the bass player in my best friend’s band. I just called him up.

Rumpus: Once you had interest from Da Capo then you began organizing the material? Or was some of it already written down?

Doughty:  As soon as I was signed I asked: How long does it need to be? And when do you want it? And Ben said, Oh, just do whatever you want, you know, take as long as you want. I said, Great. I’ll call you in two years. Or rather, you’ll call me in two years and say, Hey, we gave you a bunch of money, did you write the book yet? Then I’ll write it. Eighteen months later, he called and started breathing down my neck, so then I wrote it. Took me four months.

Rumpus: Describe the work process, if you are able.

Doughty: I tried to be nonlinear. I just tried to write what I was interested in that day. And then I compiled what I had. And then there were a few connective-tissue type things I had to write. But mostly it was just like, you know, I’ll write the story of the meeting with the band where they took away the publishing money, I’ll write the story of the Cop and Go on Delancey Street, I’ll write the story of robbing a store when I was twelve. And then I kind of put them in order.

Rumpus: Is it true what Keith Richards said, that one would rather make five more albums than write a memoir?

Doughty: Actually, I really dug it! It was really great. I mean, I read Pnin, Nabokov, while I was writing it, and then, at some point, I was like, hmmm, how much better is this guy than me. You know. And then I decided I really could not think like that.

Rumpus: You picked an intimidating example.

Doughty: But I really loved doing it. In fact, once I turned it in I kept thinking of other stuff I wanted to put in there. And, you know, Ben said, You’ll be doing this for the rest of your life—that’s what everybody does who writes a memoir.

Rumpus: How many hours were you putting in a day?

Doughty: Oh, four or five hours.

Rumpus: So it was like: I’ll do the book in the morning, and maybe I’ll work on something else, or go to the studio or to a gig in the evening?

Doughty: It was really hard to sit down and, like, start. Just every day, I’d be like, Well, you know, I should read the Times, and I should do this one thing, and I should call this guy, and then, sort of late in the day, I’d finally be like, All right. Not late in the day, but maybe, 1 p.m.. You know, not the, I’m going to get up and make the coffee and eat a hard-boiled egg and start creating litera-chuh.

Rumpus: Would you write another book? What about fiction?

Doughty: I mean, I’ve thought about fiction, but I don’t know the first thing about it. I have an excuse for not being an amazing memoirist. It’s a thing you can start at forty and not be the greatest in the world, but, with fiction you got to put in a good twenty years before you’re super-great at it. Now if I had an idea…

Rumpus: Tell me about the title¸ The Book of Drugs. Did you come up with the title before beginning?

Doughty: I just wanted something with drugs in it. You know (laughs), basically, I just wanted something so that people would walk into the store (although nobody’s going to walk into the store anymore) and go, Drugs! I like drugs!

Rumpus: So when you began the project, then, you weren’t thinking of it necessarily as being the before-and-after drug book?

Doughty: Oh, no, I was totally thinking of it being the before-and-after drug book. The only thing was—speaking of a second book—I was like, well, I’ll write one that is just about drugs, and then, if that works, I’ll write one that is about music. And then I was just asking different friends of mine, like, What should I tell? What are the good stories? They were all saying music stories. So it became an omnibus. But yeah, initially I was trying to write the drug book, the drug narrative.

Rumpus: And did you have in mind particular rock-and-roll memoirs or rock-and-roll books that served as precursors?

Doughty: I don’t read a lot of rock books. I’m not like—a lot of times, I just get really mad reading rock books. I don’t like rock-ism: I hate to use some stupid term that Robert Christgau came up with in 1980, but, you know. There are the tropes that I don’t like. Oh, you know what’s great? The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones. Do you know that book? I think it’s Stanley Booth? Story of the 1969 tour, from the death of Brian Jones through Altamont. Amazing book! And really, it’s just his memoir of being in the entourage. But it’s so great.

Rumpus: Can you talk a little bit about the differences between songwriting and prose writing that might be illuminating for us? I was wondering about how you work, in general?

Doughty: Well, um, I sort of, I came up with the way I write songs now kind of when I got sober. Because I couldn’t really write for a while. I was writing really terrible things.

Rumpus: Ten years ago, now?

Doughty: Eleven years ago, 2000. I took the spiritual part of the 12-step thing very seriously, so I’d write prayers. Because I couldn’t pray. So I would just sort of write, you know, sometimes extremely sincere, sometimes super sarcastic prayers. And then, eventually as I started to write guitar parts, I went back to the notebook and started plucking things out. In general, though, guitar parts suggest something melodic, the melody’s got a few words to it, you know, and then I’ll grab the notebook—and I’m talking about phrases. Or, you know, a couple of words. And they suggest something, and you sort of throw them all together. Then, when you need a record, you really kind of focus on making all these pieces into something. That’s what I’ve been doing for, like. eleven years.

Rumpus: And how does this compare to the agony of prose writing?

Doughty: It’s harder to begin, with the prose. Because the music, you can just, like, pick up a guitar and think about something else, and then ten minutes later, you’re writing something without even noticing it. But with prose, sitting down and thinking in a linear fashion . . . You know what? This is a very weird question. How is prose writing different from songwriting? What’s the difference between swimming and climbing Mount Everest? It was really scary writing the prose, very scary.

Rumpus: I’ve done both, too. And, yes, they are very different exercises for me, as well. I’m just always curious to see how other people manage their creativity.

Doughty: You have to try not to make a song about something. You have to kind of write it, and then not think about what you want it to be. Let it be what it wants to be. Which is super New Age-y, but you know, you work for the song, as opposed to trying to get it to do what you want. I always get into this situation where I write something way too vulnerable. Then, you know, I try and throw it away and unfortunately (laughs) it just has to be there: it is there. It belongs to the song.

Rumpus: Can you talk a bit, if you’re willing to, about the effect of sobriety on writing? Is it the case, for example, that the memoir had to come in a period of sobriety, as opposed to something you might have written back when you were still using?

Doughty: Oh, yeah! I mean… the obvious answer is that I didn’t have a story back then. I mean, the story is a clichéd rise and fall, and then the story of the band. If I was still getting high and I had a story, could I write it? Probably not. I mean, just ability-wise. The thing that makes me so angry about the songs that I wrote when I was high is that they’re not done. There are like lines in there that are fudged. There’s some words in there, and I’ll figure it out later. But then I never figured it out, and it ended up on the record.

Rumpus: Are you willing to give an example of such a thing?

Doughty: Um, I’m not. Well… there’s a song called “Fully Retractable,” which is almost such a good song! But then, like, one line of every verse is just like, And muuhs mum muh muh… you know, just mumbled.

Rumpus: So what’s been the effect of increased sobriety on the composition of songs?

Doughty: They’re better. I like everything that I write. Pretty much everything I’ve made since I got sober, I listen to, or I look at, and that’s what I meant to say, that is done. It is perfect for what it is, you know? It’s not like, Oh, why did I do that? And, you know. Part of it was just that there was so much compromise being in Soul Coughing, so much compromise that I was just like, Man, this is not a good idea, a lot of the time. So I have no idea what that music would’ve been like, if I had made it what I wanted it to be. So it might just be coincidence that I started liking what I was writing better sober than wasted.

Rumpus: Can we talk a little about how Soul Coughing’s depicted in the book?

Doughty: Absolutely.

Rumpus: I admire your solo work without reservation, but I knew you first as a member of Soul Coughing. And to this day, I like Soul Coughing. So I’m interested in how you approach writing about that period? I mean, it’s sort of a kind of jostling awake for a Soul Coughing fan to read this book—.

Doughty: Like you didn’t suspect any of this stuff?

Rumpus: Call me naïve.

Doughty: Who would suspect any of this stuff?

Rumpus: I mean, the rabid fan of a band has delusional partial ownership of the band—.

Doughty: Yes! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rumpus: And what happens in that process of delusional partial ownership is the projection of ideas onto the material, and onto the narrative of the band.

Doughty: This thing happened to me the other day. I saw Bill Cunningham (fashion photographer) running around, which just thrilled me, because I loved that movie (Bill Cunningham, New York), and he’s so awesome. I saw him, like, making a beeline somewhere with his blue coat on, and I was like, I’m going to get my picture with Bill Cunningham! It was just like (snaps finger) the mission, so I headed straight over to him, and I was like, “Hey, Bill, can I take a picture with you?” And he was like, “I’m working.” And I just realized, like, fuck, I just did what everybody does to me. Which is like, you’re not a person. And here’s another example: I was at a rest stop on tour, just like standing outside or something, and this guy comes up to me and says, “You know, I bumped into you at the same rest stop ten years ago, it’s really weird.” And then he just walked away. I mean, it was just like he was talking to a Coke machine.

Rumpus: All right. I was totally naïve about the band, as an outside observer, and that’s totally natural. And in a way it shouldn’t be revelatory that there was internal tension and a lot of struggle in Soul Coughing. There always is.

Doughty: Yeah.

Rumpus: I mean, look at Keith Richards’s book. Even two guys who’ve been playing together for fifty years, and who have accomplished a great many things, it’s possible that even they kind of hate each other.

Doughty: But there is something about Soul Coughing which is unique. All the guys were like ten years older than me. I was like twenty-three, and I had a bunch of ideas, and they took part in it because they had nothing better to do, and maybe it’s another thirty bucks a week, or whatever it was. And suddenly, we got a record deal. So there’s one level on which they’re getting to that point where they’re like, I may not be able to be an artist for a living. Like in your early thirties, when you’re worried something’s not going to happen. So there was a lot of pride involved in it for them. I mean, can you imagine being with a twenty-three-year-old kid who is more talented than you—.

Rumpus: And who is the source of all the song ideas.

Doughty: Exactly! Right. And, sidebar, through recovery and therapy and all this stuff, eventually I would say to people, like, “You know, it has really occurred to me that I actually wrote those songs.” And they’re like, “Yes. You did.” And it really was a revelation to me, because, like, basically the band told me, People aren’t really into you, they’re into us. Or: you’re really lucky to have found us. And they believed this to a great extent. If it were a con, it’d be easier to take. For example, I got a communication from one of my old bandmates recently, who is maybe poking around for a reunion, I don’t fucking know. I certainly wouldn’t do such a thing: there’s no money in it, and even if there was, I don’t want the money. But he was like, I really want to talk to you again, you know, you’re okay. You can be a part of this. I thought, well, perhaps not. They don’t see me as being particularly gifted or interesting. At one point, they actually wanted to fire me and start auditioning singers. We had an extremely wimpy manager at this point, really just a pushover. It was just terrible working with this guy. But this was his one moment of having a spine—when they went to him with that plan—and he was just like, You can’t do that. You really, really can’t do that. You need to stay with Doughty, that’s what it’s all about.

Rumpus: This was all painful to read. That’s the thing that I feel honor-bound to tell you, as a person who’s followed your work for a long time.

Doughty: You mean the fact that he really doesn’t like this?

Rumpus: No, I don’t begrudge you that at all. What’s painful to read is that a band that you actually cared about could have been that dysfunctional and hideous to one another.

Doughty: It was hideous.

Rumpus: And that someone should suffer as much as you apparently suffered as a result.

Doughty: It was horrible! And again, like I’ve known lots of bands that don’t get along, and their trip is usually like, We met in high school, we met in college, and at one point we were equals on some level. Once we were, you know, Mick Jagger talking to Keith Richards about a Lightning Hopkins record he was carrying on the Tube. But this was a different case. It was people from a different universes colliding.

Rumpus: And then you were stuck with them for five years.

Doughty: Yeah, I was stuck with them for five years. Sometimes I’d think, What if I just fired them and made a record with the Dust Brothers? Because it could have happened. I mean, one thing that’s got to be said is that I always chose the most fucked up person to work with. The most fucked up situation to be in. And I look back on it, and it’s not like I mistakenly went that direction, it’s like: Healthy, healthy, healthy, fucked up. And I always chose fucked up.

Rumpus: Because of addictive illness?

Doughty: Recently I heard a guy define addiction as the most fucked up possibility ringing true. Like, guy hasn’t called me back, his phone’s broken, he’s busy, uh, you know, he got killed in a car accident, or he hates me, and it’s like, Oh, he hates me. And you just look at those possibilities, and you don’t even put any rational thought into it. The one guy who was great, back then, was my booking agent, who an abusive manager hired—without asking me—but who turned out to be an amazing guy. Frank Riley, the guy who was nice to me when I broke up the band. He was like, Oh well. Do other stuff.

Rumpus: Maybe I don’t have a proper question here. Or maybe the question is: do you think that the process of making the book helps in some way to bury the Soul Coughing issue once and for all?

Doughty: No. Because those guys weren’t, if they didn’t believe I was basically—I don’t want to say worthless . . . I don’t know. If I, myself, contacted a bandmate about maybe getting together again, I’d say something like, “I’ve been listening to what you’ve been doing, and it’s really interesting.” And that’s not what happens.

Rumpus: But you must have to work with them occasionally—

Doughty: What I tell everybody—managers, and so on—is: if there’s a license for a TV show or something, I don’t want to know. Do not want to know. Get me the best deal possible. Tell me three months later that the song is going to be in an episode of House. And even that might be too much to know. Because the level of viciousness and disregard is just monstrous.

Rumpus: I want to talk a little more briefly about the new album, because the book doesn’t come out until January?

Doughty: January or February.

Rumpus: But the new album is now. So is there any way that the composition of these newer songs is related to the memoir-writing experience?

Doughty: I don’t think so. Well, but the thing is that I don’t really know what the songs are about until a couple of years later, after I’ve been playing them for a while. Because it’s just about the sonics of the words, at first. There’s a story going on, and there’s a silhouette to the song, but that doesn’t always mean that I know what I’m writing about. So maybe, on that first song (“Na Na Nothing”), there’s a very specific, go to hell ex-girlfriend theme, but that might not even be what it’s about.

Rumpus: Can you tell the story about how that song involves Nikki Sixx?

Doughty: Oh! So, Dan Wilson, who is the guy who wrote “Closing Time” (by Semisonic)—.

Rumpus: Love that song.

Doughty: Yes! Thank you for saying that. (Laughs.) That album is an amazing album!  Anyway, Chrysalis Music Publishing put together, like, a camp. Sort of like a shmancy Yaddo (the well-known and highly regarded artist’s retreat) for their top-shelf writers, their top pop guys and country guys and R&B guys, every genre. And they put them in fancy cabins, around, like, Lake Tahoe or something, and then they just rotated them around every day. And Dan ended up for a day with Nikki Sixx and Matt Gerard (who wrote much of High School Musical). And Nikki Sixx wanted to write a song called “The Blind Date From Hell,” which is a horrible title. But apparently Nikki Sixx is one of those guys who’s like, Oh, the kids are into this. You know, he’s very sort of sheister’y in his song ideas. Which I respect tremendously, by the way. But they ended up writing this song that’s really terrible on which Nikki Sixx raps.

Rumpus: What’s with Mötley Crüe? They all want to rap.

Doughty: Yeah, Tommy Lee! Yeah, yeah!  So, anyway, they wrote the song and Nikki Sixx rhymes “smell” with “Taco Bell.” And “shady” with “Warren Beatty.” And it’s just a horrible song, you just listen to it, and you’re like, I cannot believe . . . and Nikki Sixx had this line—I think it was Nikki Sixx who had this line, like, “You’re like a bad joke that I delete from my spam folder every day.” This is what the kids are talking about! And so I said to Dan: You wrote a song with Nikki Sixx? I need to hear it. And he was like, I’m not going to play it for you, and I was like, No, you don’t understand, you’re going to play this for me. The first line was like, “Nah, nah, nah, you get nothin’, la, la, la, la, la, lucky,” and the lyric was really not happening. It wasn’t very good. But I took it, nonetheless, and I turned it into my song—with Dan’s permission, and swearing to him that I would never, ever, ever play the demo of the song they wrote for anybody. So if it’s on the internet, it’s not from me. At all. And I’m not going to play it for you.

Rumpus: I understand.

Doughty: Because Dan said, Nobody. Nobody, nobody, nobody.

Rumpus: So you had to cut in Nikki Sixx for the publishing?

Doughty: I actually got a pretty good deal. They gave me sixty percent of the song. Which wasn’t bad. I thought it was going to be like that Allen Klein/“Bittersweet Symphony” situation where the Stones got all the money, you know. This one is too good not to perform, so if I had to give away all the money, that would have been fine. But they were really nice to me.

Rumpus: This album seems to be more of a return to the band ideal.

Doughty: The idea was to be more of a rock record. There are three songs in the middle: “Have At It,” “Strike The Motion,” and “Makelloser Man.” That was what the album was supposed to sound like. And Marty Beller played drums, and it was going to be a marked departure. But that’s not how it worked out. I’ve been writing a lot more stuff electronically, just because I became able to. I can use the computer now. So I just started putting sounds on there, and so some of the songs changed as a result. They became hybrids.

Rumpus: Wasn’t the Roseanne Cash duet (“Holiday (What Do You Want)”) later, in the process, because I seem to remember that you gave me a couple of the songs before. And she wasn’t on there yet.

Doughty: Yeah, yeah, that was pretty late.

Rumpus: What’s the story there?

Doughty: I wrote the song with Dan Wilson. I went out to LA—he moved to LA, or his wife made him move to LA, because she’s from Guam. And she’s like, Minneapolis for twenty-five years? No thanks! We’re moving to some place with better weather. Anyway, I wanted to write a Christmas song. The idea was to not write this Christmas-is-shitty-and-this-is-our-Christmas song. But to sort of be, to be genuinely emotional but not corny. To write something that’s resonant and real, and which also has sleigh bells on it, because that’s the indication of the genre. And so we wrote this thing. I thought it was great. But it had a note that I couldn’t sing. And so I was, like, I’ll do it as a harmony. I’ll get a female singer. And I though why not go for the gold? So I was just like, Hey, Roseanne, you want to sing this song? And she said yes.

Rumpus: You didn’t know her?

Doughty: I met her at a show. Actually, she said from the stage, “I’m a little nervous because Mike Doughty’s here and he’s such a great songwriter.” She’s very conscious of her iconic qualities. So I think she thought: I’m going to freak Mike Doughty out by saying this thing from the stage.

Rumpus: One last topic. Can you talk about your recent Yaddo experience a bit?

Doughty: Yaddo is a great place for listening to records. I’m usually a subway-iPod-on-shuffle kind of guy. And so I spent a lot of time just sitting in this super awesome cabin they gave me with the fire going, listening to Sublime Frequencies radio collages. Which are amazing. I did a lot of listening. And obviously I did a bunch of writing. I wrote twenty-one songs. I looked up and I had written twenty-one songs! And I thought I’d written like five.

Rumpus: And what about being around all those serious writers?

Doughty: The heartbreaking experience for me was the first day home from Yaddo, and you wake up, and it’s like, Oh, I’m going to make myself cereal and sit in my living room alone (laughs). There’s not a bunch of people talking about really interesting shit. There’s no air of gravitas. It’s kind of embarrassing to say that I’m into that, but I guess I’m into that, I guess everybody’s into that. No more having people from every discipline talking about stuff that’s super-interesting. I met one woman there who did an animated video for me. And I just had this amazing time talking to this Russian composer. We’re just sitting at dinner one night, and one of the writers is like, Oh, yeah, I really like listening to Andrea Bocelli, and the composer goes (Russian accent): Excuse me, excuse me: to me, this is not a singer. He just went off.  He was living at that stone tower (on the Yaddo grounds), so later he threw a party in the space, and I made a mixtape, and we were dancing, and he was like, I don’t know how to dance. And I said, Just clap on the two and the four. He said, What’s the two and the four?

Related Posts:

• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #2: Chicago
• The Rumpus Interview with Mike Doughty

Aarhus

***

The Rumpus: When you were growing up did you know you lived in a very unusual place?

Jeanne Tost: Every summer holiday we took a vacation to Denmark, and then to Spain, because my grandparents lived in Spain. I knew there were places other than Greenland.

Rumpus: What was your experience of European civilization?

Tost: Europe had so much. Europe had trees and they had warm weather. I’m not so used to warm. I can’t cope well in warm. So when we were in Spain, it was really, really hot.

Rumpus: How hot is hot? Do you mean twenty degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit)? What do you do when it’s thirty degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit)?

Tost: Then I just can’t deal. I think twenty degrees is really hot for me. In Greenland, you don’t walk around in tee shirts and stuff like that. Shorts. I always felt kind of naked if I had to dress for the warm weather. I’m always hot.

Rumpus: How brutal were the winters back home?

Tost: Well, there’s a lot of snow, and if there’s too much snow, you can’t go to work. In Denmark, as soon as there’s five centimeters of snow, everything stops, because people aren’t used to driving around in the snow. But up in Greenland it would be really wild before anything closed. They had bulldozers driving around. What’s it called when the wind comes, and then the snow piles up?

Rumpus: Drifting.

Tost: Drifts. Often, my dad had to get out and shovel the snow, and he could easily make a tunnel. It was easily two meters. And that was really nice, when you were a kid, that you could just go out and make caves, snow caves, because it was that deep. That’s one of the things I really miss.

Rumpus: Snow caves?

Tost: Snow caves.

Rumpus: What’s the name of the town you lived in?

Tost: Nuuk. It’s the capital city. When I lived there it was about thirteen thousand in population, and I think now they’re up to about fifteen thousand.

Rumpus: What portion of that is Greenlandic?

Tost: I think maybe seventy-five percent? There always have been Danes, and I think a lot of the Greenlandic up there have partial Danish in them. Or German. Almost all the Greenlandic can talk Danish, so. It’s not that hard to live there. Not too long ago, I actually applied for a job up there as a communications worker, but I . . . (she speaks in Danish to Martin, her boyfriend).

Martin Graae Joergensen: Luckily, she didn’t get it. Because both of us kind of, uh, had second thoughts.

Tost: It would be a little bit scary for me to be an adult in Greenland.

Rumpus: Did you ever find it boring?

Tost: Living up there? No. I don’t think so. We looked forward to vacation in Denmark, because in Greenland, movies and clothes are like a year back. When you came to Denmark, you got all the newest clothes. But I never wanted to live in Denmark as such. I was happy there.

Rumpus: And how do you feel about it now?

Tost: Now I’ve lived in Denmark almost as long as I lived in Greenland, and it’s almost like another part of my life, because everything’s changed, and there’s so much more to do in Denmark. Sometimes I actually forget that I grew up in Greenland.

Rumpus: Is Greenland like how Americans think of Alaska? You guys are all driving around in snowmobiles shooting at wolves?

Tost: Maybe.

Martin: Well, they aren’t snowmobiling—well, they are, but mainly, they’re riding dog sleds. They don’t shoot wolves, but they shoot a lot of other animals.

Tost: They shoot reindeer. But in Nuuk, you’re not allowed to drive on a dog sled.

Rumpus:You have to do it out of town?

Tost: It has to be more north. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because of the population, because the dogs are really dangerous.

Rumpus: The dog sleds?

Tost: Yes.

Martin: There’s not enough room in the city where you can have your twelve dogs. Because they are extremely dangerous, the dogs.

Tost: They are really cute as puppies, but they aren’t treated as pets. They are working. The owners, of course, respect them and love them. But you don’t go out and pet them. Small children can get killed if they come too close.

Rumpus: Did you guys have actual sled dogs in your family?

Tost: We actually had a Bichon Frise. And when we walked with it, old people always had to stop and pet it, because it was cute. But in Nuuk, they didn’t really have the dogs, the Huskies. Big dogs, but inbreeds.

Rumpus: Did you go riding on dog sleds owned by your high school friends?

Tost: No. No, I never tried it. In Nuuk, it’s kind of like, it’s something the tourists do. But not a lot of us did it, because we had to go to another city. And to go to another city, you had to take a helicopter—.

Rumpus: No roads?

Tost: No roads.

Rumpus: Any roads along the coast at all?

Tost: No.

Rumpus: You fly into Nuuk, and then you’re in Nuuk unless you fly somewhere else? Or you take a ship.

Tost: And that’s something I enjoyed in Denmark. You could travel from town to town.

Rumpus: Was there a hospital in Nuuk? What would you do—.

Tost: There’s a big hospital, actually. With the latest equipment.

Rumpus: Because they have to, because there’s nowhere else for you to go?

Tost: Emergencies are flown into Denmark, but it’s a four-hour flight. So it has to be really bad for them to come down here. But actually, in Greenland, doctors and nurses are often Danish. Because, I don’t know, they don’t seem to educate enough doctors.

Martin: That’s part of the internship system, one of the places where the Danish doctor—.

Rumpus: Right, Denmark export medical interns to Greenland.

Martin: There’s teachers that go there, too.

Tost: And also, I think that when you come up there as a Dane, it pays really well.

Martin: And there are not as many places to spend the money.

Tost: But it’s also a bit expensive to live in Greenland, if you want to get fresh vegetables. A cucumber could easily cost five or six dollars?

Rumpus: What did you do at night for fun?

Tost: Well, we had a youth club. But in Greenland it was all pretty much about bicycling.

Rumpus: Bicycling?

Tost: You had mountain bikes. And the cool kids, they took them out, in the mountains, and drove them all over. Also, sometimes you met in the center of the city. And then you just—

Rumpus: Walked around?

Tost: Yes.

Rumpus: What about the troubled kids who just wanted to get drunk and smoke pot, where would they go?

Tost: They often had homes to do it in, I have to say, I wasn’t one of the bad kids, but my sister was. In Nuuk, there was a newer part of the city called Nuussuaq. And it was often there that they got drunk. But also usually in private homes because the parents weren’t home, and then they had freedom to do it.

Rumpus: And how about relations between Greenlandic people and Danish people? Did they mix?

Tost: It was maybe pretty separated. A year before I left for Denmark for studying, the Greenlandic people really wanted to be self-sufficient, so in the papers, they actually said, Danes go home. They really wanted their freedom. And I can relate to that because some of the Danes who went to Greenland couldn’t really function there.

Rumpus: They failed out of Danish society.

Tost: Maybe they are little kings up there. But I’m really glad to see, actually, because of Facebook, I can see my classmates, and my sister’s classmates, and what they’re doing. And a lot of them have gotten good educations, and they go back to try and—.

Rumpus: Give back?

Tost: Yeah. To try and help the people of Greenland.

Rumpus: Do the Greenlanders still take money from the Danish government?

Tost: Martin knows a lot more. Because I grew up there, I don’t know a lot of facts. It was just my home. I think they still get some money. But they govern themselves.

Rumpus: They’re officially independent. I think that’s right.

Tost: Yes. And I think there’s something about that if Greenland finds oil, then Denmark wants to be a part of it, and if Greenland doesn’t want to, then Denmark cuts off the aid. I miss the nature very much, you know. But as I’ve gotten older I wonder how it would be to live up there as an adult. I think that I couldn’t do it. When I grew up, there wasn’t even . . . what do you call it? A pool. But now there’s a public pool, and it’s really nice, and the Greenlandic people are learning how to swim, because before we couldn’t learn anywhere. Other than when we got on vacation.

Rumpus: What’s the strangest thing that you thought was normal, when you were growing up in Greenland, which has since been revealed to you as strange?

Tost: The mannerisms? When you thought something was cute, if it was a little child, you took your nose to the little child, and you sniffed. And said, Iggu, igg’ (a throaty, wet sound).

Rumpus: What does it mean?

Tost: It means, yeah, Yum, cute.

Rumpus: You smelled the kid. What else? Any other examples of that? Mannerisms?

Martin: I’m surprised every year on my birthday, when she wakes me up by telling me I stink.

Tost: No, it’s the day before your birthday that you stink. For birthdays, then you kind of, you have a lot of spare change, and then you throw them up in the air, and you yell, Bagga. And then all the little children get to collect the change. Like if you had a piñata and candy, but in Greenland, it’s money. I don’t know why. The kids are really loved there. Especially the boys. The boy is king. But sadly enough it’s also the boys who commit suicide most often. Because they are used to getting really praised at home, and then if they get their heart broken or something, they can’t handle it.

Rumpus: More boy suicides than girl suicides?

Tost: A lot of girls too.

Martin: It’s the highest suicide rate in Europe.

Rumpus: What was the most dangerous wildlife situation you ever got into?

Tost: I’ve had some incidents with dogs, loose dogs, where it could have gone bad, but it didn’t. But also, when we were out sailing sometimes the ice would come, and then you had to be really careful. And also, one time, we weren’t in danger, but there was a whale pretty close to our boat. If it wanted to play, right then, it could have been bad for us.

Rumpus: You couldn’t last ten seconds in the water, right?

Martin: It’s zero degrees. That’s why the icebergs don’t melt.

Rumpus: You never saw a polar bear?

Tost: No. It’s only by mistake they come down. One time, a bear came near on an iceberg, and then it got shot, of course, before it got into land. But that’s the closest.

Rumpus: Do the Greenlanders eat a lot of seal?

Tost: I never got to like the taste. I never liked it. They eat a lot of seal and, you know, the whale skin. I tried it, but I didn’t like it. It’s called Greenlandic gum. The Greenlandic word is Mattak

Rumpus: It’s raw?

Tost: Yeah, it’s raw. And it’s a delicacy.

Martin: There’s another dish in Greenland, where you take a seal and you open it and you catch a lot of boobies, the birds, and stuff them in there, really stuff them in there, and then they bury the whole thing in the summer and dig it up in the winter or at Christmas, or probably in the spring, and it would be a mush of the birds and the meat of the seal and everything . . . And there was actually a Danish explorer, Knud Rasmussen—not just a Danish explorer, but the Danish explorer—who went up there, who had this dish, got a stomach infection and died. After all he’d done that was how he died.

Rumpus: I still feel like you guys are holding out on me, you’re not telling me what it’s really like there. The dark truths.

Martin: Well, there is the alcoholism problem. And it’s also definitely understood there that it’s okay to beat your wife or your kids, for example. Not all Greenlandics, sure, but the number people who do these things is pretty high. I was only up there for two months, as I told you, and there were two murders and, I think, seven or eight suicides, and this was a town where 1,800 people lived.

Rumpus: Alcoholism often creates an environment where that kind of stuff becomes . . . routine.

Martin: There aren’t more alcoholics there than there are in Denmark, but when they do drink, it’s to the extreme, and basically, part of that is they don’t have a gene that allows them to drink. One beer, and they go crazy. And I experienced this several times up there, there would be people screaming at each other in the streets, and it was generally accepted. I was also told that it was generally accepted that if you were drunk, you weren’t capable of making decisions, so you couldn’t be held responsible for what you did. You didn’t need to apologize the next day.

Tost: I could also really see that I was used to it, because when I was a kid we walked around in the daylight, but also at night, that people would be screaming and fighting. And when I came down here, I thought the silence was kind of strange. I thought, They don’t do that in Denmark a lot.

Martin: You also told me once that there were these men in the town who, well, it was known they were child molesters, so you just knew that so you wouldn’t go near them, really.

Tost: You knew where they lived. When you’re up there, that’s just the way it is.

Martin: Like one of the guys who played Santa Claus up there. You know Santa Claus lives in Greenland, or that’s what we think in Denmark, anyway. But he was an alcoholic, right?

Tost: In my time, there were several different Santas. He was one of them. It was down in the harbor, and he had his post office with a giant letter box, and then you could come and visit him in winter. And when it was summer, he didn’t have the beard, and he was just himself, but you knew he was Santa Claus.

Rumpus: Drunk Santa Claus.

Martin: Where I was, when I was working there, there were a lot of young people there who just didn’t feel like they had any future to speak of, because hunting and fishing are more and more eliminated from the economy. You can’t really make a living from it. So despair is widespread in some layers of the society. I mean, still it’s a great place and there are a lot of great people, but there’s just a lot of crime and probably things are a lot more bleak—.

Tost: But it’s really strange, because the Greenlandic people are really shy, but they’re really welcoming. And really happy. They smile and laugh a lot. So it’s only when the alcohol gets involved. But when I grew up, they had, in the schools, they had Greenlandic classes and they had Danish classes, and I went into a Danish one, so I wasn’t that well integrated because I never really got to talk Greenlandic. And I could understand it more than I could talk it, and if you were a Dane and you couldn’t talk Greenlandic without a Danish accent, you shouldn’t talk at all, it was bad to say anything at all, because it was embarrassing. If you couldn’t talk with the right kind of accent. So I was always really aware that I was Danish, but I also still felt like I was Greenlandic.

Rumpus: Not like a regular Dane, because you lived in Greenland? Not a Dane from Denmark?

Tost: I’m not a Dane from Denmark, and I’m not Greenlandic from Greenland either.

In Greenland I always felt more like a Dane, and in Denmark I felt more Greenlandic – especially in the beginning, where I came down to go to school. But I never really have felt like belonging to one nation/country, and that’s not necessarily because of my upbringing – maybe that´s just me as a person. I’m just Jeanne.

Rumpus: Last recollections?

Tost: In the winter when we played outside there would often be Northern Lights. I remember we always took the time to look up and watch the Northern Lights move in the sky. Which was both beautiful and frightening because it really made you feel so tiny, and also because we couldn’t help ourselves to test the ‘spirits’ by whistling. A local myth says that the northern lights are deceased spirits who are playing a kind of soccer with a severed head–if you whistle while they play, they will come for you.

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• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #31: Reunion Fever
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I suspect, in music, this wish doesn’t have that much to do with the music, at least not at first, but then the reunion happens, and we have all that luggage to contend with, from an era of luggage without casters. We fall prey to the second thoughts, the resistance to reunion. Which is why, during that brief Sex Pistols reunion, during the Filthy Lucre tour of 1996, John Lydon used to say: “We’re fat! We’re forty! Get used to it!” Because, when so much time has gone by, the musicians are not the musicians in question, and their motives can justifiably be questioned, and they may not be able to write anymore (c.f., Sex Pistols, above), and they may detest each other (see LoudQuietLoud, the documentary about the Pixies reunion tour), or they may not give a shit (Pavement, arguably). There are many reason to be suspicious about reunions, but does that make us desire the reunion any less? In fact, is our suspicion not a manifestation of our certainty that we do want them, if only to evaluate what happened then and what’s happening now? If only to grapple with time, avenger and revelator?

Yes, for me there have been a few reunions in recent years that have genuinely seduced me, against my will. I’ll admit it: the reunion of the original Gang of Four in 2004 was something that moved me, and I bought Return the Gift, a nicely perverse re-recording (and a re-re-recording, if you also bought the remix album) of songs that had already been perfected once. Likewise, I really admired the Rocket From the Tombs re-recording of their earlier “hits,” called Rocket Redux (2004), which, I think, was actually better than the very obscure original recordings in some ways. In 1995, I went to see the lineup of Big Star that included members of the Posies. And: I watched the footage of Pink Floyd from the recent LiveAid 2008 show, because I felt certain it would never happen again, and I was right. I am probably one of the few people who listened closely to Endless Wire, by the never-quite-retired Who. I have seen The Pogues play on or around St. Patrick’s Day twice in the last five years.

Now, let’s get the heart of the matter: the Holy Grail of reunions for me was always the Feelies. Love doesn’t even describe the relationship I had with the Feelies; I had nearly religious perceptions about their second album The Good Earth (and if you want confirmation of my level of obsession, check the introduction to my not-very-good first novel, Garden State, where the subject comes up at length). I even tried to get them to blurb my work, dogged them with fandom, interviewed them once, and generally have taken every opportunity to assert the breadth of my Feelies-related knowledge in public, sometimes in a way I regretted afterward. One’s relentless obsessions are sometimes embarrassing to behold.

Frankly, I never expected them to reunite, because I assumed that Bill Million’s departure to Florida, circa 1991-1992, to work at Disney World (in the computer department), represented some kind of irreparable breach among the band, which, after a change in the rhythm section between the first and second albums, had been mostly stable for seven or eight years. Without Bill, and therefore without the creative push and pull between Bill and Glenn Mercer, the singer and lead guitar player in the band, I wasn’t sure there could be a band at all, and, moreover, the period in which the Feelies had most successfully done what it was they did, the period of independent music of the middle and late eighties, was and is long gone, and so there would be no need for the Feelies. History, I think, has moved on, and it’s not just the Feelies who have been left behind by it.

I followed the travails of the various post-Feelies projects, Mercer’s bands, drummer Stan Demeski’s time in Luna, bass player Brenda Sauter’s efforts, and, excepting Luna, in no case did any of this music do much more than suggest how distant and far away and perfect the Feelies were in memory. This just seemed like one of those bands that we would never hear from again, because perfection, sometimes, should just remain perfect. In memory, this was especially my perception upon hearing Glenn Mercer’s solo album Wheels In Motion, from 2007, which has almost every member of the Feelies on it (except Bill Million), but which nonetheless doesn’t sound like the Feelies, or perhaps, it sounds exactly like the Feelies except with something missing. Something very important missing. Wheels In Motion was a good solid record that sounded a bit empty somehow, like wheels in motion that might be caught in some muddy rut. I liked the album but didn’t play it a lot.

What did they do, besides make fitful splinter recordings, in those intervening years? The question of what the Feelies did, how they filled their days, was one I asked myself a lot, because the Feelies were always from a working class place, Haledon, New Jersey, a place with a real tradition as a working class town, a place with union roots, and the people who lived there were not trust funded or relaxing around the pool. The citizens of Haledon were working. So the Feelies played, initially, on national holidays because, presumably, they all had day jobs. Bill went to work at Disney World in computers. But the rest of them were working too. So in the ten or fifteen years between when Bill left for Florida and when they opened for Sonic Youth in Brooklyn in 2008, they were doing what people from a solidly middle-class town would do: raising families, working, living lives. the Feelies are now in their later fifties, and so they have absolutely no resemblance to what you might consider rock and roll personalities (see, for example, the remarkable and splendid photograph of them in the New York Times article on their first reunion: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/arts/music/01feel.html?scp=2&sq=The%20Feelies&st=cse). They look like middle-aged people from New Jersey! This is much in their favor.

They reunited because they reunited. Because they weren’t doing much else musically, because what they did never surpassed the Feelies, and because they had a good offer, to open for Sonic Youth at Battery Park, and though it involved, as I understand it, Bill driving up from Florida to do the gig, they played, and one thing led to another, and soon they were reuniting on a nearly regular basis, or, at least, on holidays, as they used to do back around the time of their first album. Which means that they were playing pretty much they way they had always played for, well, about thirty years. Million and Mercer, that is, have played together for thirty years, or more. And the band that reunited, which included Million and Mercer, Stan Demeski on drums, Brenda Sauter on bass, and Dave Weckerman on percussion, has played together since 1986, or, now, for more than twenty-five years.

Of course, playing live is one thing, and making new music in the studio is something else altogether, as you will have noted from every other major band reunion. The Feelies are a great live band, a jittery, provocative, elusive live band, one that has covered enough oddball material (Wire, Brian Eno, R.E.M.) for there to be a very comprehensive bootleg consisting of just the covers. They have a deep catalogue now, in that the first two albums are nearly flawless, and the latter two (Only Life and Time For A Witness) are intermittently excellent, and so there is plenty of material, material enough to play for a few hours at the kind of tempos that people used to love back when people still really loved music (as opposed to machines simulating it). Moreover, the particular lineup of the Feelies that we are speaking of has two drummers, and the two drummers have never been quite as surprising in the studio as they are in a live setting. Dave Weckerman, the percussionist, is one of the indisputable secret weapons of the Feelies (in addition to being the lead vocalist and writer on a Feelies side-project, Yung Wu, which I believe just came out of retirement too: http://www.thefeeliesweb.com/), in that he makes the rolls and accents in the song moments of hortatory bliss, and that comes through best in the live settings. Then there is Bill Million’s rhythm guitar. The thing that the Feelies perfected, in their outsider-artist way, was a particular attitude about strumming. Excepting the strumming of the Velvet Underground, which is an obvious source for some of what the Feelies are, there are few examples of two guitarists locking together the way Million and Mercer do (though I can think of one other band that strums as well: the Wedding Present), with the particular emphasis on a very clean electric guitar sound. Million and Mercer seem to finish one other’s ideas about rhythm guitar, and they manage to do it while sitting in tandem in the drum section where there’s room for the treble in the guitar parts because of the absence of too many cluttersome high-hat parts or ride cymbals. The strumming and the rolls and fills work together, and the guitars have room to lock together, and the drums lock together, and it’s like a very well-oiled device.

And: I haven’t even gotten to Brenda Sauter. To my way of thinking, Brenda Sauter is one of the very best bass players in American rock and roll. Whereas Kim Deal has made a virtue out her totally unsyncopated eighth notes, Sauter instead migrates toward melodic fills on the bass, often up the neck where they can really be heard, flights of melodic fancy that don’t relentlessly end up on the root notes or the tonic fifth, but which perform a lead function during the verses, when Million and Mercer are often involved with the relationship between the rhythm guitar parts. Sauter is sort of the Peter Hook of American indie rock, which is to say a great thinker about melody, and the band would be much less without her.

All of this to say, in a live setting, where the Feelies push the tempos a bit, toward punk rock haste, the band appears to have a great many remarkable strengths: a stunningly good rhythm section in Demeski (a light, but exacting drummer with a perfect timekeeper’s sensibility) and Weckerman, and Sauter’s melodic bass lines, and the spooky twinning of guitar parts between Million and Mercer. You can only get this, I suspect, from playing together a lot for a really long time, and by avoiding diluting the band sound by going far afield. The Feelies have done one thing really well—they have played postpunk, and have included in it a great many early rock and roll influences, and they have done it relentlessly and refined it and given everything to it one band can give. They are lifers.

But that doesn’t mean they should be able to write again! Writing is where these frail attempts to repair the ravages, the disaffiliations, of time, usually fail. What to make of the recent Gang of Four album, e.g., Content? When I interviewed Dave Allen, the original bassist for the band, who, with Hugo Ball, was one very central reason the early Gang of Four also had such a remarkable band identity, he said he was never sure that writing again, after the reformed band has toured for a couple of years, was something that the world wanted from Gang of Four, and while the resulting album has some really strong compositions and sounds superficially like the band called Gang of Four, by virtue of the singing, it’s hard for me to think of it in the same terms that I think of the band that made “Outside the Trains Don’t Run on Time.” The retirement of the original rhythm section has made the band something quite different from what it was.

The same is true of Endless Wire, the aforementioned album by “The Who,” a collaboration that has Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey in it, but which is not a band, exactly (Townshend played nearly the entirety of the thing himself), and which certainly lacks, without Keith Moon and John Entwistle, most of the things that made The Who distinctive in the first instance. There are some very interesting songs on Endless Wire, if you set aside Pete Townshend’s conceptual apparatus, which always feels de trop, and excessive. But it’s not The Who! Nor could it be!

For these reasons, there was plenty of reason to suspect that Here Before, the new album by the Feelies (released not long ago on Bar/None Records), would be a record that would not provide complete delight to the devoted, nearly religious Feelies listener, such as myself. In fact, I was afraid to listen to it. Too much has happened to me, as far as the Feelies go, too many days listening to the albums by myself trying to figure out what happened, too many days teasing interpretations from completely oblique lyrics, too many days trying to fathom why songs that are so easy in terms of chords are so hard to duplicate, too much. Too many projections of my own struggle onto something, so that I feel, erroneously, like I have partial ownership. It’s so rare, these days, that I have that perception at all, that partial ownership perception. Nowadays, if I like back-to-back albums by someone, it’s nearly a miracle, much less five or ten or twenty years of believing in a musician or a band. And it seems, and this is perhaps one of the implications of reunion fever, you have to have partial ownership, or the illusion of partial ownership. Such was my feeling, and to such an alarming degree, that I was afraid to listen to the Feelies album. Afraid! I didn’t want it to suck! I didn’t want it to be merely good! I wanted it to be unimpeachably great! I wanted it to be a genuine contribution to what makes the Feelies great in the first place! I wanted it to be the Feelies, but with a certain grizzled middle-aged thing! A slightly uglier version of the Feelies, possessed of certain hard-won truths that one associates with bodies in decay! I wanted it to be somewhat balding, a little fat, covered in wrinkles, and desperate to tell! I wanted it to seethe with the foreknowledge of decrepitude and death! And to do that while preserving the tempos and the jittery, intense qualities of the Feelies, the ones that they first concocted when they were in their early twenties! In short, I wanted an album that was impossible, that couldn’t be made by anyone, and which especially couldn’t be made by older guys who all have kids and jobs and who didn’t even have a record label anymore, such that they would have to make this one for, you know, $8000 or something. In two weeks’ time. Impossible! Can’t be done! What is likely in this case but total disappointment! Disappointment is the norm, it’s to be expected, it’s the air that you breathe!

And yet, here it was, arriving in the mail, and I played it in the car first, as one ought, and the first track, “Nobody Knows,” does, in fact, start exactly like a Feelies song, in particular a Feelies song from the Good Earth period, with some robust acoustic guitar playing, probably played by Bill Million, and all the hallmarks are there, the extra percussion, the very elegant drum fills, the beautiful melodic bass playing, the Glenn Mercer lyrics, which have the same number of stresses almost all the time, “Nobody knows/nobody says/anything really/that hasn’t been said/well, you never know/how it’s gonna/no one ever knows/how it’s gonna go.” The words mean almost nothing, is what I thought at first, and if this were 1986, and we were playing this for the first time, the vocals would have been mixed way back, the way Peter Buck mixed them back on The Good Earth, the way Bob Mould always mixed his vocals back on the middle period Hüsker Dü albums, so that you almost couldn’t hear a word of it. I was a little thrown by the lyrics at first, or by the fact that Mercer’s voice, not in the least worn by the years, was up front where you could evaluate the lyrics, which, for a singer who wrote the line “I don’t talk much because it gets in the way,” are perhaps not in the category of things over which one should spend too much time. And yet I have. I was still thinking about them, the lyrics and the singing, though, when the guitar solo started, after the break in the song. Such a beautiful guitar solo, such a little explosion of lyricism. A guitar solo that has the virtue of not overstating its welcome. Yes, the Feelies apparently write their guitar solos out ahead of time, which is maybe what you have to do when you only have two weeks to record the album, but they are no less beautiful, these solos, for being written ahead of time. And maybe this is a class thing—bands who have the luxury of staying in the studio for months, for writing and editing and comping solos in the studio, are the people who are perhaps getting paid for being in the studio. Whereas bands who have day jobs, and who have something to prove—e.g., that it is possible to come back from the dead—don’t have the time to write a guitar solo at great length in the studio, so they make sure they have a solo.

The subsequent songs, the songs after “Nobody Knows,” especially “Should Be Gone,” with that great backing vocal choir, which I imagine consists of Brenda and Bill Million, are all consistent with the Feelies as we know them, with certain Feelies-esque gestures, like e-bow, a guitar effect they have always favored, tiny bits of slide, heavily strummed passages that are coincident with punk while nonetheless sounding delicate somehow, as in “When You Know,” and this would perhaps be a reason to resist the album, though the double bind of the reunion is that the band both wants to sound exactly like itself and not be repetitious, and this bind has slain many a reunion, but the thing about Here Before, which is really a reunion album about making a reunion album, as you will see if you pore through Glenn Mercer’s utterly abstract and basically impenetrable lyrics, is that the more you listen, the more the album sounds like now, and sounds like a band who is completely able and ready to prove something, anything, even in their fifties, that you can come back from the dead, that the place of the dead is a place that you had best flee from while strumming with great energy. The thing about the record is that despite the occasional clumsy moment (and these I blame on the great haste with which the thing was made), such as “Bluer Skies,” which has the temerity to be a love song, this is an album that gets better and better with repeated listens, which was made by people in a room playing with each other, people in a room playing with each other for twenty-five years, who, even if they aren’t good at talking to each other (this is a logical thing to suppose in the case of reunions), nonetheless have a spooky ability to predict where one another are going and to think as unified front. Here Before improves with attention, gets better and better and better, as music does when it is really good. It is the rock album that I have listened to most consistently in the last few months. It is moving, sad, weary, adult, beautiful, relentless, gentle, outraged, old, and new.

Only time will tell (which is a Glenn Mercer sentiment—and which would fit perfectly in his tetrameter-esque lyrics) if this is a reunion that can keep being creative, especially as the band’s members move toward their sixties, but for the moment it’s the kind of reunion that you imagine and hope for when you are thinking about the bands you love making records again. Bands that I would like to hear again like: Fear of Music-era Talking Heads, or Young Marble Giants, or The Smiths (with original rhythm section, which, in fact, was kind of a great rhythm section), or Hüsker Dü, or Black Flag with Dez Cadenza, or the Bad Brains, or Suicide, and I’m leaving out all the reunions that can’t come to pass because important people are dead, and that is what a reunion is, right? It’s a way to beat back death, and so the reunions that can’t happen now because some of the principals are dead (The Minutemen), they all make the case that the ones that can happen should happen, because who is going to regret having reconciled with the people who have fallen away so distantly? Who is going to regret reconciliation? Reconciliation is what you’re supposed to do before you die, right? It’s sort of what the last song on Here Before is about: “It’s okay/it’s all right/now it’s time/to say good night/and we’re waiting/a little longer/and the feeling/getting stronger/so long/so far/how long/how far?” The groove feels a little like the kind of perfect sleek thing that Sterling Morrison and John Cale (one of the world’s great bass players, whether he liked it or not) and Mo Tucker used to find in those Lou Reed songs, and here’s it’s worth saying again how Bill Million is the glue that makes the Feelies the Feelies, because of his absolute commitment to the groove. So here it is: reconciliation. Bill Million welcomed back into the band and willing to be welcomed back in, and the result—it’s about love and endurance even when the songs aren’t about that, because the album embodies love and endurance. There’s so much that remains to be done in life on the reconciliation front, but an album like this gives you a little hope. In fact, it gives you a lot of hope.

And: perhaps we have, in the foregoing ruminations, inadvertently derived some rules for effective reunions of a rock and roll bands:

1)      The maximum number of original members should be present in the reunion.

2)      Or: the maximum number of members from the period of greatest effectiveness should be present for the reunion.

3)      The band should be able to play, without additional players, their preeminent works.

4)      The band should tour first—before heading into the studio.

5)      The band should play the major works on the road, though obscurities are also reasonable.

6)      After touring, the band should attempt to write and then record new material with the same lineup as during the reunion tour.

7)      The reunion should not be concerned with what is happening now, as much as it should be concerned with what was happening then.

8)      The new material doesn’t need to sound exactly like the old material, but it should be aware of the old material.

9)      The band does not need to love one another in order to conduction a reunion, but the band should be aware that the reunion itself is an expression of love.

10)  The reunion does not need to proceed indefinitely. Knowing when to stop a second time is as important as knowing when to stop the first time.

If you follow this template, your reunion is bound to be of interest, at least dramatically, to the audience that initially spent time with you when you were here before . . .

Related Posts:

• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #33: The Sweet Spot
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #29: The Museum of Broken Things
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #27: All Things Must Pass
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS: Black Napkins
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS: A POST SOMEWHAT ABOUT JAZZ

Tad Friend’s profile of John Lurie in the 8/16-8/23 issue of The New Yorker from last year starts thus: “From 1984-1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face.” A curious and disheartening opening. Hard to think otherwise. And the profile does not improve in the column inches that follow. If the operative words for the magazine profile generally are “seduce and betray,” then Friend, whose eager surname might have tipped Lurie off, has done us all a service. He has fashioned one of the surpassingly obvious examples of seduction and betrayal—so straightforward as such that it should serve as a template for those considering profiling or allowing themselves to be profiled. Friend slyly alludes to the seduction part of the profiling job in sentence two, as shown above, and he completes the betrayal part of the job in sentence three—with fisticuffs. Then he finishes the graph with a bit of slang that is not quite slang—“He was the man.” Which means what exactly? What does this sentence ever mean? That masculinity consists in the foregoing, in punchability and fuckability?

Let’s be clear about why I’m writing about this profile, before going further, this profile about which I have been thinking about for a some months: I’m writing because I am a very partisan adherent of Lurie’s music, and an acquaintance of the man himself, and, I suppose, because I am a person who cares about what Lurie stands for: art, aesthetic ambition, sensitivity, openness, generosity, unpredictability. I’m writing about this profile, because I think this profile is a failure. It fails to do justice to its subject (opting instead to be clever and arch in that New Yorker way, clever, condescending, self-satisfied, off-handedly cruel, lazy, elitist, devoid of bona fide literary purpose), and actually supplants reasoned consideration of Lurie’s life as a whole for a willingness to do him genuine harm. It does him harm in ways that I will adduce below and which are unmistakable. And it does harm while neglecting Lurie’s music, an absence which is for me emblematic of Friend’s carelessness, especially when this is music by one of America’s few genuinely original composers in the eighties and nineties, who, with his insight into his form, changed much of the New York music that followed him.

Music would be a natural place to start a consideration of Lurie the man, but Friend does not start there, with music, he starts, as he must, since his piece is preoccupied with celebrity, with the movies.

But let’s begin again in the first paragraph, and think through the implications carefully: “From 1984-1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face.” First, we learn that everyone in “downtown New York,” a.k.a., “the known universe—basically,” thinks and behaves in exactly one way, in lockstep, has, identically, the same opinions, and the same opinion on the subject of Lurie and his reputation—and presumably this “everyone” necessarily includes Tad Friend himself, or at least this must be is the implication (because he is able to speak for the more general “everyone” without fear of opposition). We are all of us sitting around “the known world, basically,” and thinking about John Lurie and consumed by, well, envy.

Invention of Animals

Yes, what is the feeling delineated in wanting to “be” John Lurie, as indicated in Friend’s opening, what is the nature of that feeling? There’s no other word to describe Friend’s feeling, but envy, specifically something like professional envy, based on Lurie’s film roles, at least as articulated in the profile, in two films by Jim Jarmusch, Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law. Movies. A barometer of success in a degraded culture. That industry beloved of those preoccupied with lengthy IMDB résumés or with the numbers of clicks on this or that web site. Maybe Lurie’s success is enviable in the fact that at one point he finally had money to dry clean his suits, which Friend adduces as the sine qua non of achievement in the eighties (though as a graduate of Shipley and Harvard, his father, one-time president of Swarthmore College, it is hard to imagine that Friend was ever far from the blessings of PERC).

To bring up movies first (and dry cleaning), is to underestimate intentionally the music. How might one do otherwise? And yet: if one had parsed the available facts of the case a little further than what is commonly available, one would know that the “fake jazz” of the original Lounge Lizards, a term which Lurie himself abjures and has regretted publicly (and he is one of the men I know of who is best able to admit when his thinking has changed, or when he is wrong, and this seems to me a genuine sign of the masculine, this aspect of Lurie being but fleetingly caught in Friend’s description of his “lacerating candor” before the profile goes back to its cuteness), the term lasted the duration of exactly one album (the eponymously titled first album, produced by Teo Macero). The hip crowds who liked the swagger of “fake jazz” dematerialized in New York City rather quickly when the Lounge Lizards became more complex. The fault here would seem to lie with the audience, with the “known world, basically,” with the kinds of audience members who wanted to “sleep with” Lurie or “punch him in the face,” which is to say the heartless and artless and celebrity-afflicted, the profile writers, the would-bes, but nevermind. As Lurie himself has been quick to point out, the period in which, according to Friend, people wanted to be Lurie, was the period in which Lurie did not much want to be Lurie himself.

Here’s a composition from that very period: “I Remember Coney Island.” Allow me to say that some of the album, The Lounge Lizards, with its remarkable Cool Jazz black and white album cover, was a sort of shuck for people who thought jazz was all about a veneer of seriousness but didn’t really understand the work. There were compositions for these shallower listeners on the first album, like “Harlem Nocturne,” which has a sort of film noir feel to it, full of flatted fifths and sevenths and which you can imagine playing as the moll pulls off her stockings. But “I Remember Coney Island,” which is among the very earliest of Lurie compositions, refers both in title and in performance to something much more antic, and much more demanding. Its jazz shuffle is sped up to an almost unplayable velocity, and the drum part (by Anton Fier) is full of rolls and fits, and the arrangement careens through some keys and moods, and, with its skronk guitar part (Arto Lindsay), and its Vox organ (courtesy of Lurie’s brother Evan), it summons what was most demanding about No Wave (not punk!), that incredibly fertile NYC neighborhood ethos, while at the same time doing, arguably, some of what Dizzy Gillespie was doing, if Dizzy, e.g., was on crank at the time. You can’t imagine the cool audiences, the Steve Rubells and Rick Jameses of the period, thinking they were going to listen to this just for fun. It’s for people who give a shit about music, about how music is imagined, about what music can do, about how composition can reflect place and history and attitude.

Not included in the profile! At all! What is included, after the not very attractive opening about sleeping with and/or punching John, and then some rather sycophantic stuff about Lurie being the man, is a very thorough misunderstanding of what we will now refer to as John’s deadly serious and chronic illness.

What kind of sick is sick, according to Friend? Friend refers to the Lurie’s prolonged neurological malady first as a “mystery illness,”[i] which it is not, except for the fact that the long-term effects of Lyme Disease were, at an earlier point in medical history, somewhat in dispute—for the simple reason that all the mechanisms through which Lyme lays waste over time were not yet entirely understood. Tell that to the sufferers. As the disease continues to make itself felt in the Northeast, it continues to lay low some portion of the people who get it in very dire ways, and unluckily John Lurie is one of these, having by now been diagnosed by eight different purveyors of contemporary medicine with chronic Lyme Disease. Still and all, Lurie has had no end of difficulty in attempting to get reliable treatment—at least until very recently, when he began to have some modest improvement—and some of this despair about his physical well-being is native to him in conversation. I have seen a few of his bad days, and they are really bad. As I have written elsewhere, I was once lucky enough to read with Lurie (he’s working on a memoir), some years ago, and as part of the reading, he attempted to play his harmonica, and because of the intensity of the harmonica playing, he got up, from his stool, when finished, and immediately collapsed. It was one of the saddest things I have seen in my performing life, and I say this because I revere John Lurie the musician, and to see a world class musician play so briefly (and this expertly, I should add) and then walk out of the room and collapse, is not only sad, but you can tell immediately what the music costs, likewise what it costs not being able to do the thing you once loved to do, by reason of: mystery illness, as Friend puts it.

Cleopatra

And so: John Lurie was really sick for a very long time (though he did improve quite a bit in 2008), and I have seen him be really sick. “Mystery illness” sounds a great deal like it is blaming the victim, an interpretation that becomes increasingly obvious when the day on which Lurie fell ill is more noteworthy, in Friend’s profile, for his concerns about penile size than his illness. Friend correctly alludes in part to Lurie’s own later feelings about his plight[ii]—but in refraining from quoting Lurie directly about the illness, in refraining from putting the questions to him directly so as to get a journalistically credible quotation on this point, he makes this all sound more like a crazy, funny disease—the acronym, the use of “lame” to describe the acronym, when Lurie is precisely “lame,” or unable to walk easily, among other complaints. Is there no attempt, by the reporter to look into chronic Lyme and to attempt to understand it? Are all sufferers with “fibromyalgia” just neurotic women who need to lighten up and enjoy life?

The answer to this, the answer to why Friend so consistently misunderstands Lurie’s own accounts, supplanting the facts with clevernesses, with a sprinkling of the kinds of details beloved not of artists but of media workers, has partly to do with some primitive attempt to understand Lurie’s own gifts as a storyteller, Lurie who favors the eccentric detail. The eccentric detail also has something to do with what is great about Lurie’s music. Because strange details are a kind of modesty, they are Lurie refusing to dwell on the painful stuff in conversation. It’s in the music, yes, high feeling is always in the music, is always confronted there directly, not in words, but in music and its capacity for high feeling, and that is lost on Friend, because the music is lost on Friend, who considers it “borderline annoying,” and undestined to sell lots of copies. More copies would mean more interest would mean closer to the movies, or a cinematic level of cultural penetration, which would mean bingo! So before we go on, let’s pause here briefly to consider some more of the music entirely left out of Friend’s piece.

“Voice of Chunk” is from an album by the Lounge Lizards of the same name that is absolutely not “jazz-punk,” which was terminological shorthand. “Voice of Chunk,” is something quite other than “jazz-punk,” something quite astonishing and rare. “Voice of Chunk” began as a saxophone solo, as many of these later compositions did, this one being composed while Lurie was working on a movie with Roberto Benigni in Italy, after which it was fused to a Gnawa rhythm that Lurie had heard and admired. Lurie’s alto solo, which features some of the sounds he was developing in the middle and late eighties, far from the madding crowds of the professionally envious, has beautiful bent quarter tones, and a sort of wah sound he got out of the horn in those days, and the first iteration of the theme is done in call and response with (Roy Nathanson), which is followed by a furious and memorable guitar solo by Marc Ribot, who like almost every other jazz player of note in the nineties spent some time in the Lounge Lizards, and this solo is followed later by a sort of a Cuban rhythm played on piano by Evan Lurie, John’s brother, which in turn allows the saxophones to come in front again for the gentle and soaring theme, in unison at the end. The sound of “Voice of Chunk” is this sound of joy and determination and mild sorrow and bowling shoes and maps of the Orient, by which I mean “Voice of Chunk” is lost in the Casbah, smoking something dangerous, catching a glimpse of woman unveiled.

One thing that I have not said about Lurie’s later playing, is how it utterly avoids jazz cliché. There aren’t a lot of Ellingtonian music school harmonies, or the noirish melodies of the first Lounge Lizards album. Nor does Lurie, in the later iterations, race through a lot of modulations, the way a soloist might have done in the hard bop days. He makes key changes count, rather than exhibiting a sheer mastery for the sake of it. He sounds more European than American, therefore, which is perhaps why the Lounge Lizards were so popular in Europe. But what else does this pure tone imply? It implies a kind of delicacy, or the sort that we associate with the most incisive jazz players. Miles Davis with the mute on, for example. Or the John Coltrane of “My Favorite Things” or “India.” Yusef Lateef, playing his flute. The Lounge Lizards were capable of making an ungodly amount of racket—I know, I saw them play—but they were also capable of exceeding gentleness, and it’s in this way, perhaps, that they were more masculine than, a lot of, let’s say, cock rock bands, who needed distortion boxes and black leather and tuning their guitars down to the key of C, in order to lend seriousness to their endeavor. Lurie’s tone is pure, and almost world-music vernacular, as if he were a trained singer who eschewed vibrato, and it’s the capacity for this purity, and the beauty with which he wrote his themes in the eighties and early nineties that makes him the man that he was and is.

The “mystery illness” section of Friend’s profile is ungenerous and unforgiving about John’s illness, things Lurie never is himself (he is excessive, sometimes, he is touchy, he is despairing, he holds people to a high standard, but he is never ungenerous), but this writing about the illness is nothing compared to how the article treats Lurie’s stalker. In fact, the account of Lurie’s stalker, according to Lurie (and he is the man of “lacerating candor” after all), was intended to be only incidental in the article.[iii] The profile was going to be about Lurie’s burgeoning career as a painter (the medium that best suits him right now), but instead the stalker takes up two-thirds of the whole, in column inches, and maybe three-quarters of its spirit, which is part of why the whole is undeniably grinding and unpleasant.

Among the crimes of this portion of the profile, beside its inclusion in the piece in the first place, was the decision to use the name of the person doing the stalking in this, a national magazine. What led Friend to think this was the correct approach? Lurie himself was nervous about using the name of the guy in question[iv] and urged Friend to consider another solution. Lurie’s concern was not entirely about how using his name might enrage the stalker, rattle him, and thus make him less likely to abandon his campaign. Nope. Lurie was against using the name of the stalker, because he was really worried about destroying the guy’s life. This is the kind of impractical generosity that I associate with Lurie: he found using the name of the stalker unjust.

And yet: Friend seems to have been unable to resist the allure of the gossipy part of this grim story, the story of two acquaintances who fell out dramatically and the dramatic consequences thereafter, and if you think like a tabloid writer, or like a hack, it’s perhaps possible to understand why this would seem like the meat of the story on John Lurie (ostensible subject of the profile); it’s the meat of the story if you are a meat-and-potatoes guy, a fetishist of parodistic ideas of the masculine, but it has nothing to do with who John Lurie is among family and friends. And once Friend makes this decision, to use the name of the stalker (I will refrain from using it here), the story just plunges off the cliff into unremitting tawdriness. It is more than painful to read. It is long, boring, and devoid of insight.

Let’s pause over some of the mistakes, for there are a great number of mistakes. For example, Friend talks around the word “stalker,” using it mainly when quoting Lurie himself, although he does say that P—- “stalked” Lurie, in the past tense, in contradistinction to Lurie’s catalogue of harassments that continue unabated to this day.[v] Which implies, right from the outset, that Friend’s account structurally, functionally, and affectively gives P—- equal time. Friend’s account gives Lurie’s stalker equal time. Imagine, for example, if an article about David Letterman’s ongoing problem with Margaret Mary Ray invited her to have her chance to defend her position, I just really loved him!, and then followed up with a few of Letterman’s detractors and gave them some time on the show, too, in order to bolster Ray’s claims. Or imagine if the article on Sarah Palin allowed the disturbed guy heading up to Alaska with his gun to have a full airing out of his life story and his ambitions for the future, whatever the cost to the Palins. Because of her politics she must die! This is the effective methodology here, and it has an even more invidious effect, an unconscionable effect, over the course of the piece. By giving equal time Friend effectively makes Lurie sound crazy, or like he’s overreacting, or like he is on trial for being on trial, and thus in the unenviable position of having to defend himself twice over, not only from P—-, but also from Friend.

Here’s a digest—and if you already know the story feel free to skip ahead, because it is a very long story, and a story entirely less interesting than Lurie’s work. P—, a visual artist of not significant notoriety, wanted to make a how to draw instructional video, and asked his acquaintance John Lurie to be the first subject for the series, this despite the fact that P—- claimed that Lurie’s fame was of no great importance to him (thereby indulging in the lie that tells the truth), “It would be natural to assume that we all felt John was the man,[vi] the way he had been, but the truth is that, downtown, we were the famous ones, in a sense, and John was like our little brother.” And: “I didn’t need John to get in anywhere, or to get laid. There was nothing John had that I wanted, except more recognition for my work.” The last perception apparently accounts for P—-‘s engaging Lurie’s services for his promotional video, a not-terribly-good idea, right from the outset—drafting your very ill acquaintance as your first subject.

It is probably legitimately the case that: P— paid a fair amount for a crew and worked hard to borrow a suitable apartment from a friend. But Lurie’s illness (as I know myself) flares up capriciously, and especially under bright lights. And so during a shoot that was supposed to take forty minutes and took four and a half hours John got really sick (Friend, having apparently seen the video, concurs on this point), and could not finish. In fact, Lurie collapsed outside the apartment, upon attempting to leave, as I have seen him do elsewhere. He required P—- to help put him in a cab. The video went uncompleted.

In the days afterward, Lurie volunteered to complete the shoot, but not to forgive the grim circumstances thereof, but P—-, after having given some mixed signals about who was paying for the shoot, demanded that Lurie foot the bill. This seems to have had a great deal to do with Lurie’s refusal to look at a rough cut of the video. This portion of the story, even in Friend’s version, does not reflect well on P—-, who it’s worth mentioning had already been involved with the law, episodically, beating a bouncer in 1998, holding off two policemen with a baseball bat in 2008, etc. There was an abundance of accounts to this effect that Friend did not include, in fact, though he certainly managed to include a great number of inaccurate hearsay about Lurie (including remarks in the article that were either largely or entirely fabricated about Matt Dillon, Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe, Woody Allen, etc.; in fact, almost none of these remarks about “famous people” checks out, unless you believe unsubstantiated third parties, or J— P—-).

The Anchor Is Stuck. I Cannot Go Anywhere. Time For a Sandwich.

Now, if you accept the idea that P—-effectively stalks Lurie, if by stalking we mean, to pursue or follow in a stealthy, furtive, or persistent manner, and if you accept that stalking amounts to compulsive, sociopathy of a certain kind, in which deceit and fabrication are fairly normative activities, a conclusion that seems difficult to controvert, then you have to accept that Friend, by interviewing P— gave a rather large platform to P—- in which, on the one hand, to make himself look reasonable, and, on the other, to make his case seem much less ill and obsessive and lethal and imaginary than it in fact is. Friend goes at length into P—‘s early life, and in the process, by giving him the full benefit of a magazine profile that was ostensibly about Lurie, ennobles him to a degree, to the point of, and this I find rather shocking, giving P— a full page photograph, which includes, in the rear of the image, a painting by P—. Meanwhile, though, Friend alleged to Lurie that he loved his paintings and that these were such as to lead him to write the profile in the first place, no image by Lurie is included. From the profile, what you would know about Lurie’s paintings is that, well, they are often very funny.[vii]

So: after the shoot, according to Friend, P—- walked across the Queensboro Bridge and contemplated plunging in (because a video shoot didn’t go well!), and, not long after, he called Time-Warner cable, pretending to be Lurie (is that legal?), to see if he, Lurie, had left the shoot early to watch a boxing match. And if he did, what of it? Is Lurie meant to guarantee that he set aside time after the shoot to gnash his teeth and rend his garments? When Lurie didn’t immediately compile a response to the seven-minute edit of the video shoot, some days later, P—- went, according to Friend, off the deep end, and began “speed-dialing” Lurie.

What does this mean? What does “speed-dialing” mean in Friend’s account? Apparently there is some discrepancy between Lurie and P—- about how many calls consists of harassment. P—- apparently says he called “thirty or forty” times, which is the figure Friend uses, whereas Lurie says more like a hundred, or, more precisely, “He called me on speed dial every few second for seven hours.” If true, let’s say three calls a minute, to be judicious, which would be 180 calls an hour, times seven hours, or something like twelve hundred calls. A constant stream of calls. But this is madness, this splitting of the hairs over how many calls constitutes harassment, just to entertain Friend’s reductive version of the story. One call is not harassment, arguably, or perhaps two, just to make sure the message is received. But any number above three is disturbed, and anyone who calls you thirty times, much less a hundred, unless to tell you about a death in your family, is not your friend. At some point, Lurie picked up the device and encountered P—- on the line, and what P—- said to him here is, well, in Friend’s supposedly fact-checked version it is, “Come down and talk to me, cocksucker,” and presumably the cocksucker is included in order to insure the masculinity-verging-on-gayness theme soon to be promoted by Friend. Lurie’s version has P—-, he of the code of honor, saying something like “Come get what you deserve.” After this exchange, Lurie got out of town. He had, it bears repeating, done nothing wrong, unless your idea of wrong is suffering with a neurological complaint and growing fatigue under bright lights.

Next day, P—- went to the police, and filed harassment charges against Lurie, so that whatever P—– did to him, Lurie, next would seem like “self-defense.” Pay close attention here, because P—- is still alleged to be a friend of Lurie’s, the kind of friend who calls thirty, or twelve hundred, times the night after Lurie collapses during a video shoot, demanding that he cover the cost of the shoot, and who then files a spurious harassment charge with the police the very next day. The question before us, for the sake of the story, is, again, what constitutes stalking? To pursue or follow in a stealthy, furtive, or persistent manner? Stalking, generally speaking, at least when it is practiced upon celebrities, is a kind of veneration, and desire for exclusivity that is utterly inappropriate, and relentless, and which may end in violence, has ended in violence. There are specific aspects of the criminal charge of stalking, and by nearly all of these accounts, what P— did in the months following, repeated calls, veiled threats, hacked computer accounts, and so on, qualifies, and P—, while using what appears to be remarkable capabilities enabling him to pass as a civilian when it is essential to do so, is still able to admit to the utterly bizarre, as though it is normal: “I decided then to embark on a course of using the demons of [Lurie’s] own mind coupled with his lack of character to share with him the fear and frustration he had dispensed upon me.” Note the overwriting here, especially dispensed upon me. It’s almost enough to cause the casual reader to forget: You mean you were trying to make your former friend fear for his life because you lost $6000 on a slightly desperate idea for an instructional video?

The calls, the hacked computers, and so on, made sure that the demons remained active. P—- called, and had his voice masked as Michael Jackson, P—- called, when Lurie fled to Granada, somehow apparently having learned of his whereabouts, and managed to suggest as much on the phone, It would be nice to sleep down there in the sand, though no one knew of Lurie’s whereabouts except his assistants. Lurie, you recall, was very ill, prone to alarm and to cognitive glitches as a result. He was scared.

The Skeleton In My Closet Has Moved Back Out to the Garden

Here’s another really great song, a very strange song in the repertoire of The Lounge Lizards. “Yak,” from Queen of All Ears. A rare vocal moment from Lurie, who usually lets the horn do the talking. Apparently the song began as a bass line first, a really great bass line, half funk, half mathematics, a bass line then joined by a Vox organ sound, an organ sound of the kind that we associate more with ? and the Mysterions, or with the No Wave period of club music in New York City, and therefore with the first Lounge Lizards album. Once we have the bass, and some slippery drum fills, and the organ, and a bit of slide, the horns come in, and the horn charts are luscious and ebullient, not like the horn section in a soul song, but like the horn section in Fela Kuti, or in certain ska bands. It’s an infectious groove that we have here on “Yak,” but that is nothing, when compared with what happens when the story begins. Originally, as Lurie tells it, “Yak” was a vamp that he used to introduce the band in certain live shows, before the encores. And you can see why: high energy. But then the composer was in Japan with jet lag, and was in the state of mitigated consciousness that goes with exile, with lack of sleep, with abundant managerial responsibilities, and in this state of mitigated consciousness he, Lurie, woke, and found, scribbled on a pad beside his bed, the word “Feed a fever, starve the yak.” Almost immediately Lurie introduced, from whole cloth, the story of the yak, live, onstage, to the delight of the band (it begins, appropriately enough: “This is a story about a small but strong and proud man, who woke up one morning and looked at his ceiling and said, ‘What I love in this life is God, my farm, and my family’”), and in the process the story began to extrude its cloven hooves, its additional material (“the strange and unusual beast called the yak”), sometimes improvised, but eventually accruing a certain shape, a shape in which the farmer, ultimately, is killed by a rake left out in the yard, after which the yak insists on taking over the farmer’s property, with a series of completely outlandish cries, avowals of devotion to the farmer’s wife, “Come to me on the hill! Come to me on the hill! Come to me on the hill!”

It’s all about the vocal delivery here, but it’s also about the mixture of comedy, and, somehow, a strange earnestness, a folkloric shape of the story, but also the improvised delivery. Is Lurie counting the numbers of repetitions of the rhythm section? Does he have a fixed amount of text to get through? No, he’s just telling the story, “Give the yak some toast, give the yak some toast, give him, some, uh, there’s some oatmeal here, give him some Raisinets.” What makes this jazz—if in fact that is what it is (and it’s worth using this word precisely as a variant on “punk-jazz,” or “fake jazz”)—is not the horns, which are great, and which are, ultimately, John Lurie’s secret weapon, but the way the story gets told, in line lengths that are improvised, crammed in, raced through, and the kind of devotion to this improvised, provisional, but deeply felt expression that we find in Lurie’s storytelling. The story is like the alto or soprano solo in this song, and in Lurie’s work, generally, since he stopped playing his horn. There is great earnestness in him as a storyteller, and “lacerating candor,” but there is also a lot of humor, and a lot of commitment to a line because it sounds good as a line. As if the story is the medium now, but the influences are still Mingus, Monk, Ornette.

Friend tries briefly to understand what motivates a piece like “Yak,” but it’s hard for him to get there. The best he can do is: “Yet Lurie’s former manager Sara Rychtarik observed that ‘with John, the doing of the art is a flow, but there’s an obsessive perfectionism about its presentation,’” and, in some backward way, the centerless profileless profile that Friend has written about Lurie does, formally speaking, seem to amount to more a contribution to flow than it amounts to the truth of the matter, especially when the best Friend can do to describe the music that comes out of Lurie’s flow is “a brassy, exuberant, borderline-annoying pulse of sound.” Somehow pulse really rankles here. Above all the word pulse seems unjust, since the whole notion of pulse is a strictly minimalist idea, an idea made seminal in Glass or Reich, music that wants for the slippery unpulsed rhythmics of jazz, and of Lurie’s beloved West African music. The Lounge Lizards did a lot of different things, but they never pulsed.

Meanwhile: on and on, Friend’s piece goes, ticking off the evidence for the fact that there is something very gay about all of this stuff, an interpretation of events that is Friend’s,[viii] and which finally gets parceled into a sort of performance art theory of what happened between Lurie and P—-:

“Both men were avowedly heterosexual, but Lurie felt that P—-’s
behavior . . . suggested a rebuffed lover. It brought back to his mind
the time that P—- had walked in while he was taking a bath and
remarked, ‘You’ve got a beautiful penis.’ P—-denies any intent to
imply that he would punish Lurie sexually, saying ‘I knew that
keeping it deliberately vague would infuriate him.’ He adds, ‘I’m
sure I might have said, ‘You’ve got a good-looking cock there, my
friend,’ but I would not have used the word ‘beautiful’ about a
friend’s penis.”

Is this not entirely absurd? This entire passage? Even a bit loathsome? Is not a gay interpretation, or a performance art interpretation which later supervenes on the gay interpretation patently ridiculous, when part of what is at stake is the security and piece of mind of a person and his former reputation as a performer and composer? Is it not reductio ad absurdum?

And here is another of Friend’s even more bogus theoretical adventures in the piece: “The dream of the artist—which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified—is to plant themselves in other people’s heads. By this standard, J—- P—- has created a masterpiece.” And, just below that passage: “The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: P—- because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear death. Curiously, though, the struggle seems to have inspired them both; artists sometimes require an enemy.” This passage is the fame-monger’s idea of what art is. This is a writer of celebrity profiles affecting to have insight into art. Demonstrating again that art is only about audience reaction. That opposition and enmity and domination produce great results. Only a man (and man seems to be an operative word here) who could write the opening of this piece, about sleeping with Lurie, or punching John Lurie, only that writer could imagine that a protracted struggle with a dangerously obsessive-compulsive stalker with an avowed “code of honor,” who has committed violence in the past, could refer to this shameful tale as a work of art.[ix]

This is all more than I can accept from a major national magazine, or putatively the best magazine in the country, and from a writer of reputation. This piece is riddled with mistakes, and they have been fully enumerated by Lurie, who lodged all these complaints with the august New Yorker,[x] without satisfaction. 1) Friend says the person most in tune with Lurie’s needs at a certain point was J— P—-. Of which Lurie observes, “When I was most ill, I did not see or hear from P—- once, between the years 2002 and 2007. He came back into my life for about a month in 2007, when i started to get well. He came back and in the neediest way imaginable.” 2) Friend asserts multiply that P—- lives to paint, but according to Lurie, “The P—- I knew was hawking the same eight paintings since 1995—they made him look like a starving artist. But he never painted.” 3) Friend asserts that P—- taught Lurie how to paint in oils: “He spent part of an afternoon showing me how to mix linseed oil with paint.” 4) Friend argues that Lurie’s girlfriend, Jill, found some postings online by P—- sympathetic or reasonable. Of which Lurie argued, to the fact checking department at The New Yorker: “No one on the planet found what he was posting reasonable. Two people who’d had stalkers sent me messages saying P—- was a pathological narcissist and that he was likely to contact someone close to me—either to make me look hysterical or to make it look like it was all a big mistake. Which he did, with Jill. Jill only met P—- twice—and didn’t like him or trust him.” 5) And Lurie never “mouthed off” to Woody Allen, Tom Waits still speaks to Lurie from time to time, he never disparaged David Byrne, and Willem Dafoe is not “theoretically” Lurie’s friend, he is his actual friend. And on and on and on.[xi]

So: Tad Friend believes that Lurie is “the man,” and offers to profile him with “no surprises,” making special mention of Lurie’s painting, and then belittles Lurie’s illness, names his stalker, interviews his stalker at great length, and then, despite a police order that forbade P—- from contacting Lurie, Friend carries messages back and forth between, in order to dignify the point of view of Lurie’s stalker, rather than Lurie’s more than reasonable worries about his own safety, fails to described Lurie’s paintings beyond saying they are humorous, includes a photographs of Lurie’s stalker’s painting, refers to a mere paragraph of P—-‘s autobiographical ramblings as a memoir when Lurie has written an entire 340 page memoir, implies that the whole conflict has a whiff of the gay about it, implies that the whole conflict is a performance art piece, and fails to describe in any comprehensive way who John Lurie is, as a person, a loyal, forthright, and genuine person, and if all of that is not bad enough, he never bothers to describe Lurie’s music, though music was Lurie’s life, unto the advent of his illness. The result is exceedingly boring. The result is a profile that wanders around in conjecture and half-baked psychological theorizing to no purpose at all, except that Friend, and, by extension, the editorial staff of The New Yorker, must imagine that this salacious and tawdry narrative, whose broad outlines are mostly concocted by Friend himself, is somehow interesting.[xii] It’s not. It’s ugly and dull and perhaps even morally embarrassing, at least if you give a shit about art, music, literature, or the loftier aspirations of man and woman. It’s a shame to help a very ill man out of his retirement, in order to metaphorically “punch him in the face,” or, perhaps, to metaphorically seduce him before punching him in the face, or, perhaps, to subject him to a sort of trial in which it’s he who is untrustworthy, and unbelievable, when all he has been is ill and subjected to the ongoing harassment of someone who is clearly not well himself. All while leaving out the poetry and the art.  And though the piece traffics in the masculine, in this idea that what happens between men is extreme fighting and threats and disquisitions on one another’s penises, it’s precisely what Lurie has, loyalty, generosity, sentimentality, the love of children, that makes him more admirable, most estimable, as a man than the other two men who orbit around him in the piece.[xiii]

One last song, therefore. “Big Heart,” which comes from the album of the same name. Starts with drums, with some talking drum, or some other African drums, admixed with a regular kit, a totally infectious drum part, and Lurie himself enters first, alongside a few arpeggiated chords on piano, and then the bass, which locks in with the drums, but which is exceedingly melodic, too, and after a few measures of this groove and the melody as stated by Lurie’s sax, all the horns dance around in for a while, in the warm, familiar cove of melody, and just when the whole thing seems so joyous as to be almost ecstatic, like the early part of an Albert Ayler song, when Ayler is still playing the melody of some old hymn, the drums fall out and skitter around for a bit, because it’s live, it’s all happening in front of some audience in Tokyo, and the Marc Ribot gets his solo, which reminds me that Ribot once told Syd Straw, who once told me, that it didn’t really matter what notes you played, as long as you played them in a rhythmically satisfying way, and a lot of Ribot’s solo on “Big Heart” is of this variety, completely impulsive, and big hearted, rising from cephalopodical ravings to reprise Lurie’s melody for a little while, Lurie’s beautiful and insistent melody, before the whole thing shifts back to its horn-iteration, and what is the purpose of this song if not to make big-heartedness seem plausible as a musical statement, to inductively prove big-heartedness, if big-heartedness doesn’t have something amphetamine about it, something that makes the heart race, ecstasy and impulsiveness, community, etc.; in this song, masculinity is what’s feminine, melody, coupled with rhythm, the two things make music, music which is about feeling, not an absence of feeling, but a growth of sentiment, and an apperception of movement in the world.

If that’s not enough for you, if that’s not enough heart, here are a couple of final links, the first consisting of just Lurie and two drummers, Calvin Weston and Billy Martin. Lurie playing solo saxophone. It’s brave and moving, this recording, like the man himself. If it’s true his music is lost now, if he has done all the music-making that he’s going to do, in part because of injustices like Friend’s profile, the least we can do is try to preserve its vitality and passion for those who might chance across it in the coming years:

And then this, “Small Car (ck),” from one of Lurie’s last recorded documents (link TK), his alter ego Marvin Pontiac, another brilliant piece of riffology, in which Lurie makes a trip into the Gulliverian land where “very small farmers” drive in “very small cars.” The guitars are all West African, the groove is West African, as is the call and response between Lurie speaking/singing monologue, and the massed women doing the backing vocals, “In a car, in a car, in a small car, in a small car, driving . . .” The birds swoop down on the cars in a friendly fashion . . . These farmers had some fear, but they were strong, these farmers . . . I have only one thing to say to you, I have one thing to say to you . . . At the completion of which there is the bright, irrepressible laughter of a woman.

___________________________________________________________

“One day in June of 2002, Lurie worked out hard to prepare for an expected nude scene in the HBO prison drama Oz. Afterward, he went to the West Village restaurant Da Silvano, still thinking about ways to enhance his appearance—‘I wanted to make my penis look enormous onscreen’—and then suddenly the world was spinning violently and he couldn’t move. ‘I had never been afraid to die before,’ Lurie said. ‘I had always thought either you go to the light or it fades to black. But now this creepy, ignoble, wormlike force rose up in me, saying, ‘I don’t want to die!’”—The New Yorker, August 16, 2010.  Note how happy the profile is to say the words Da Silvano!

“The following weeks brought a cascade of strange and overpowering symptoms: flashing lights and roaring sounds, a sensation like rain pouring on his skin, a Kryptonite-like reaction to Windex, an inability to hold so much as a skillet in his left hand. His condition was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and about ten other things, including postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a verdict he resented because its acronym was so lame. Lurie finally came to believe that he had chronic Lyme disease—a condition whose very existence, as he wryly acknowledged, was fiercely disputed in the medical commuity.” The last bit here, the wry acknowledgment, is more than contested by Lurie, who has never wryly spoken on the subject at all, though he did have to work through the competing agendas of many in the medical community to get a firm diagnosis, which he did by 2006. The wry acknowledgement is in the mind of the profiler alone.

There is e-mail to support this.

“On a human and spiritual level,” Lurie wrote, “this is very hard to figure out what is the correct thing to dobecause by simply telling my story it will have a devastating effect on someone else, someone I once cared about. No matter how grotesque, insane, or detrimental to my welfare his actions have been.” –Letter from Lurie to Friend, 2/2/2011, provided by Lurie.

And the whole public way that Lurie has been harassed by the acquaintance in question is so public now that you only have to go on the Internet for a few minutes to find bitter invective on the subject. For example, on Lurie’s Wikipedia page–interested parties are invited there to read the “edit history.”

Here’s that word again. Italics mine.

Friend does not, for example, include a reproduction of Lurie’s recent imagine that has the words “Somebody please fucking help me,” written on it.

Though various forensic psychiatrists of Lurie’s acquaintance have also advanced it.

It is worth pointing out, however, that P—- and Lurie do in fact agree about thing: they both detest Tad Friend’s profile.

Here are some exchanges between Lurie and the fact-checking dept., to support my observation concerning the high-handed and conjectural way in which the piece was composed:

Passage from article as cited by fact-checking: ‘After speaking with Tad Friend, Stephen Torton called me and said proudly, “I told them what Basquiat said – that you were the only artist equal to him.’” Lurie’s comment to the NY’er: “How did this get turned around? And how did it now get attributed to me? I never said that I was the only artist to Basquiat.”

Passage from profile, according to fact-checking:“[Mutual friends Wayne and Dominic] told you that P—- said he wasn’t going to hurt you, but that he believed you had messed up the shoot and therefore had to pay for it.” Lurie’s comment to the NY’er: “No – no one said anything like that.” –  Wayne said – “He is insane. Call the police.” which he confirmed to Tad.  After speaking with P—-, Wayne said that he had to hurt me because of his “code of honor” and never strayed from this and said P—- could not be reasoned with. He also said that it was not about the video shoot but something that had happened years ago. Dominic insisted he could talk to P—- and get him to be rational—Dom would call me and say it was over, that he had solved it and then an hour or day later I would get another insane call or email from P—-. (And, as Tad knows – Wayne and Dominic can hardly be termed ‘mutual friends.’)”

Fact checking: “That day P—- called your apartment, and Nesrin answered and told him you were taking a nap.” Lurie: “NO – P—- called 30 or 40 times BEFORE nesrin answered and said I was sleeping and that if he kept calling he would wake me.” Fact-checking: “P—- told Nesrin, “Go wake his ass up.” Lurie: “NO -  according to Nesrin  - when she said I was asleep – he said – ‘no! he is not! ‘ and then over and over – ‘go and wake him up! wake him up! go and wake him up!’ SEE NESRIN’S E-MAIL”

Fact-checking: “Some of your friends felt you had grown too paranoid.” Lurie: “No that is not true – people who knew little about the situation just couldn’t believe it was real. But none of my real friends thought I was paranoid. Only people who did not know the facts. But this is what has me very very nervous about the article – I made an assessment of the situation based on many facts and things I was told that apparently are not going to be in the article. If these things are omitted then I assume your readers will also think of me as paranoid. Tad has to take into account that the people who really know P—‘s nature were terrified to talk to him. Pat Dillett’s Spy vs Spy thing really doesnt work for me because it turns out that I had no idea who P—- was – When I called Mo he said that there was a girl named Zoe who moved out of New York because she thought P—- was going to rape her. I understand that the Zoe story is hearsay but that that is what Mo told me and that this affected my assessment certainly is not hearsay. Same thing with P—-’s ex – she told me that he prided himself on waiting longer than his victim before he attacked. That he had a history of doing this to people. I couldnt believe it – I had absolutely no idea. P—-’s reaction to him coming to Big Sur to assist me and that I would  bring someone to shop and cook was just so strange I should have known something was going to happen – he would stamp his feet on the floor like someone had taken a 4 year old’s ice cream away and yell  - no! we have to go alone!!! I think this is most relevant.”

Fact-checking: “You told Tad you wouldn’t apologize because your fault was minor.” Lurie’s comment: “What???I have searched and searched for my fault in this – but cannot find it. I wish i could If I could find it or someone could show me – I would be more than happy to apologize. I have no idea – none – what I did wrong. I have asked Tad if I did anything wrong that I dont see, repeatedly as he is more objective  and each time he has said no. So this is very odd  and surprising to me.”

Also: “I never said – I am the only real artist who survived – nor do I believe anything like that. I am confused what I might have said that was interpreted as such.”

There are many more such exchanges, all of them saved by Lurie, and amounting to an extremely long document of dubious moments creeping into the profile. The vast majority of these changes were not included in the finished piece.

Again, just in case you think it worth accepting Friend’s idea that the stalking and harassment continues to this day, check out this web site, which collects a lot of the threads of the story, including along the way a phenomenally long item-by-item rant by P—-, a rant including lots of adolescent posturing: http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/is_john_P—-_a_phantom_in_john_luries_head/.

As in Friend’s line “Celebrity has the power to rivet.” Huh? This is so TMZ.com.

Astute followers of this story in all its attenuations will recognize that I have left P—-‘s recent hunger strike out of this piece. I have done so for two reasons: 1) because I am writing a piece here about Tad Friend and The New Yorker profile of John Lurie, and 2) because I continue to feel that J—- P—- should have been left out of the Friend profile initially and thus should be ancillary to this essay too. For the record, I feel that P—-‘s hunger strike of May 2011, in which he refused nourishment until The New Yorker apologized for the profile in question, was bizarre, and evidence of considerable disregard for his own physical well being (arguably a symptom of mental illness). Further, because it ended utterly inconclusively, with The New Yorker standing by their story (when has a magazine done otherwise?), and then weaseling around thus: [New Yorker] “Makes No Contention That P—- Has a History of Persecutory Behavior or That He Might Stalk Others In The Future,” which may have been enough for the lawyers, and for P—- to eat again, but which, it bears mentioning, fell well short of saying that P—- has not stalked Lurie. The New Yorker sold Lurie out, again, by appeasing a seriously troubled and dangerous person, but they also did not say that P—- had not stalked Lurie. Ergo, no new ground was broken, as regards the truth of the story. Everything just got a bit more tawdry.

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Rick Moody interviews Moby about his obsession with Drum Machines:

Last year in The Believer music issue (July 2010), I published an excerpt from a long essay I’ve been working on for a year that argues against the use, in contemporary music, of the drum machine. This is a purely rhetorical argument, really, sort of like Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and totally out of date, because few people really use drum machines anymore. They use samples of drum machines. They use computers to play the drums, to play the keyboards, and just about everything else, including, if you’re T-Pain, the vox. Still, I made my argument nonetheless—get a live drummer!—and I am unrepentant. However, my friend Moby (he and I grew up in the same town, Darien, CT, and were marked by it in similar ways) got wind of this piece, and wrote to me not long ago asking if I wanted to see his drum machine collection. Yes, he collects drum machines, but not the really slick ones that hip-hop producers employ, but the early, cheesy, slightly homely ones first used mainly by guys who played in church basements and in the lounges of Holiday Inns. Moby likes broken drum machines, and ones that were built from a kit, and Moby has a dream… Well, he will tell you about his dream himself in the interview that follows here. While Moby’s collection of drum machines didn’t inspire me to revise my arguments on the subject, I do admit that if there have to be drum machines, they should be like these ones in Moby’s collection. Let me, meanwhile, remind you that Moby is best known as a composer of electronica and popular music more broadly construed, including records like the runaway hit Play (1999), and my personal favorite The End of Everything (under the name Voodoo Child). This interview immediately precedes his new self-released album Destroyed, which comes to light next month (on May 9). The photos and videos contained herein—of Moby in his drum machine lair—are the work of Laurel Nakadate, who also has a career retrospective up right now at MoMA/P.S.1 in Queens, which you should definitely see.

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Rick Moody: So when you say you obsessively collect drum machines, just how obsessively do you mean?

Moby: There are seven billion people on the planet, and I realize I will never ever be the best at anything. But I can potentially have the world’s largest collection of drum machines. So when I say obsessively, it’s obsession with a purpose. Ultimately, I want to have one of every drum machine made up until 1982. After 1982, they became more digital, and I sort of lose interest. But the old analog ones, I have always loved them.

Moody: What would the last one be, in 1982, the Roland 808?

Moby: The end point would be the very early digital drum machines, like the Linn Drum. So I collect the early digital ones like the DMX, which is an early hip-hop drum machine, and the 808 and the 909, but then, after that, the digital drum machines started to get a little too fancy, and a little too slick.

Moody: So when you collect all these things is it with the intention of actually using them in your own work or is this a collection just for the sake of a collection?

Moby: I love to use them in my own music. The great thing about a drum machine is that you just kind of turn it on, and it does quite a lot of the work for you. But the old drum machines were never that good. The drum machines post-1982, 1983, actually sort of tried to sound like drummers. But what I liked about the old drum machines is that they never sounded like a drummer, they sounded like a drum machine.

In the sixties and seventies, drum machines were just compared to other drum machines, they weren’t compared to real drummers. And they were never supposed to replace a real drummer. And then, in the eighties, with digital technology they could actually have drum programs that in a crummy sort of way tried to sound like a real drummer. That’s when I lost interest. I liked them when they sounded more synthetic and electronic. Also, nowadays, a lot of electronic music is produced exclusively on the computer, so there’s no physical sound production. So no one makes drum machines anymore.

I’m almost a custodian of these old drum machines that have been in church basements and lounges at Marriott hotels, somewhere in New Jersey. And a lot of them have notes written on them, like this one, I don’t know if it works or not, but someone at some point put masking tape on it, with a little note to himself. This one, down here, see, someone again, someone wrote their own little codes in pencil. Samba, here, they put a red X there, and wrote a note that says, “No.” Clearly, whoever it was hated the samba?

Moody: It’s really the most bad rhythm, isn’t it, the samba?

Moby: Down here, this one, he wrote like the tempos for different rhythms. Like, here, it says, “Fox Lindy.”

It’s not just collecting them, it’s when they arrive in the mail—because I buy most of them on eBay. They’re not being shipped to me by hipsters. They’re usually shipped by a lounge performer, who realized he had a drum machine in the basement that he might have used in the seventies and hasn’t used in a long time. And so it comes in the crummy packing material with the old newspapers and the pencil marks, and that’s part of what I love about them. The winsome anthropology of the drum machine.

Moody: What was the first old one that you bought?

Moby: The granddaddy is the Wurlitzer Sideman.

Moody: Which came with the organ of the same name, right?

Moby: Originally, drum machines were invented to accompany church organs. And the church organist would play at the dance, so they’d bring the organ and the drum machine downstairs for the dance. This one, it actually has built-in speakers, and it doesn’t quite work, because it needs a tube. Most drum machine collectors, and there aren’t many of us, would see this Sideman as being like the first commercially produced drum machine. And I have two, I have one in storage that someone painted black to make it look cool, but I like this one because it’s still got like the original wood.

Moody: That’s one of the first you got, or that’s simply the oldest?

Moby: That’s the oldest I have. The first one I got is probably, is probably the Rhythm King. I remember, years ago, a friend of mine had one of these sitting in his studio, and he hadn’t used it forever. “The Rhythm King.” I was, like, wow, Sly and the Family Stone used it, Blondie used it, everybody used this drum machine. And he was like, “Oh, if you want to, borrow it.” So I borrowed it, and I sampled it, and I just loved it so much, I had to get one for my own. What’s great about it is that you can play the rhythms, but you can also play the individual sounds.

Moody: Can we hear a demo of that one?

Moby: If it works. Let me get it down.

Moody: You seem to have two of them.

Moby: There was a problem. I’ll go on eBay, and sometimes people will take photographs of drum machines from very different angles, and so I’ll think that I don’t have one. You know, like they’ll take a picture of this, from down here, or a close up on the button. And me, being crazy, I will look at the picture and be like, I don’t have that drum machine, so I’ll order it, and it’ll come and I’ll be like, oh, I already have two of those. So I actually have three Rhythm Kings. And there’s the Rhythm Ace, which I have four of.

One of my dreams—because everybody has to have a dream—is I want to have the world’s first drum machine museum. I want to rent a space somewhere, maybe in LA, because rent is cheap there, and actually have a museum.

Moody: But are there enough of them, model-wise? For a museum?

Moby: No one really wants them. There are the cool ones, you know, like the 808. Like the 808s, if you buy them on eBay, it’s like two or three thousand dollars to buy an 808, because everyone wants an 808. Very few people want an Olson Solid State Rhythm Instrument, so you can usually get those for twenty or thirty dollars. That’s one of the other reasons why I have extras.

Moody: People still sample the 808 a lot in electronic music now, right?

Moby: Every hip-hop record. The 808 is still used constantly. It’s like an old synthesizer. People collect old synthesizers, because old synthesizers, you can make a tons of sounds with them. This Rhythm King, three sounds. No one really feels the need to buy them, because you can buy a sample disc that has all of these on them, and wire it on the box, and you can just have the sounds.

(Noise in background.)

Let’s see if it works. For some reason… come on… Oh. That. (Sound.)

Moody: Sounds like really early Kraftwerk to me a little bit.

Moby: You can hear where it’s kind of broken down, like sometimes the bass drum sound works, sometimes not.

Moody: What year is this?

Moby: Sometimes you can figure out what year it is based on what rhythms they’re trying to approximate.

Moody: So that’s a disco rhythm. Probably late seventies-ish?

Moby: This one, it might be early, early disco. If I had to guess, I would probably say seventy-three, seventy-four. Maybe seventy-two. Some of the cooler late seventies drum machines only had cool things. Like they had reggae, and country western, and six different types of rock-and-roll beats, whereas this one has slow rock. So that’s the Rhythm King. Do you want to hear another one?

Moody: Definitely. What do you think the weirdest one that you have is? The most unusual?

Moby: Well, my favorite—well, I can’t pick a favorite, because I don’t want to make the other ones mad. But there was a company out of Ohio in the seventies, and they made synthesizers and drum machines, but they sold the kits, they never—so you had to—

Moody: Make it yourself?

Moby: Yeah. You’d spend a hundred dollars; they’d send you the kit, and you’d have to install it yourself. Also, it’s orange. This is someone’s homemade drum machine, I’m guessing from about… nineteen… I don’t know, what would that be seventy? And it’s weird because whoever made it, I think left out some of the circuitry, because it doesn’t (AWFUL PIERCING SOUND!)… That’s not supposed to sound like that. Let’s try again. (Awful piercing sound, again, only not as loud.) Hmm… let’s see what… It might’ve broken even more since the last time, because it used to actually work. (Sound continues.)

Moody: Alas.

Moby: Not bad, as far as feedback goes. Oh, I got an interesting one. And you can just tell me to stop talking—.

Moody: No, no.

Moby: This one runs on batteries. It runs on some weird Japanese-type battery that I’ve never seen before. So, unfortunately, we can’t listen to that one.

Moody: Foot-triggered?

Moby: That’s a foot-triggered one. It doesn’t sound very good, it’s just odd. This one is actually cool.

Moody: All right.

Moby: Which seems like maybe a contradiction in terms, I don’t know. So this is Electro-Harmonix—.

Moody: I had an Electro-Harmonix synthesizer once. A little portable one.

Moby: So they made Jimi Hendrix’s wah-wah pedals, and therefore, by definition, it’s kind of a cool company. So in the mid- to late-seventies, they made drum machines that actually sounded pretty great. Sometimes.

Moody: It’s from the era before the gigantic snare sound. I kind of like this one.  Have you used this one on a recording?

Moby: I haven’t used this one, at least I don’t think I have. But I had a bunch of friends over, you know DFA Records, you know, James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem?

Moody: Yeah.

Moby: Those guys were over here, and we were playing these drum machines, and I brought this one out, and they were like, Oh… Oh, that’s actually… we could really use that. The other ones have a sort of novelty factor, but there were those—this one and the 808— where people realized they could actually get sort of cool stuff out of them.

Moody: When was the first time you ever played with a drum machine?

Moby: First time I played with a drum machine was in high school. Mattel made a drum machine called SynSonic, and my mom bought it for me for Christmas in 1981?  Or ’82? And I actually used it on a song recently—I have a record coming out in May. It’s a very early digital drum machines. So it’s a digital drum machine that just sounds destroyed and messed up.

Moody: Does it have a cheeseball Casio sound? Is it that kind of toyish?

Moby: It’s not even that advanced. Every analog drum machine here, they’re all basically synthesizers. They had one oscillator that would make a sine wave that would turn into a kick drum. And another oscillator would make a noise wave that would turn into a high-hat and a snare drum. The early digital drum machines worked according to a similar sound synthesis. They had a couple of sounds, really cheap sounds that they would modify to try to make them sound like a kick drum or a snare. But the truth is on this Mattel machine, the kick drum, the snare drum, the high hat, and the tom tom all sort of sound the same. It doesn’t sound anything like a real drummer. It just sounds like a weird, broken-down old drum machine.

Moody: At the time that your mother gave you your Mattel drum machine, were you playing with live drummers?

Moby: No, when I was really young I played classical music, and then when I was around thirteen I started playing with punk rock bands. And one of the reasons I gravitated over to more electronic music was so that I could do everything by myself. Because when I was playing with bands, you could only rehearse once or twice a week. The drummer would be drunk; the bass player would be in a fight with his girlfriend, and if I did everything by myself, I didn’t have to wait for real people to show up. That was a huge reason why I chose to move more into electronic music. That sense of autonomy.

Moody: And is there any other model here that you feel a need to demonstrate?

Moby: Hmm… let me see. Well, this one, here is a CR78, I believe it was the first programmable drum machine, and with this model you weren’t saddled with the beats the company gave you. The only problem is it just stopped working. This, if I could turn it on, would sound like Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Oh, and this is one of my favorite ones, aesthetically, and this is possibly the rarest drum machine I have because I have never heard anyone mention it, and I have never seen it for sale except for the one time I bought it. It’s like this beautiful piece of furniture, the drum machine as antique… (shows machine) Isn’t that nice?

Moody: Wow!

Moby: The Thomas Bandmaster. It doesn’t actually work, but…

Moody: It goes with the Thomas organ?

Moby: Yeah. All things considered, probably my rarest one. Because I’d gone online and looked for it and only seen it this one time—when I was able to buy it.

Moody: You need an engineer to be the restorer of all the drum machines.

Moby: Oddly enough, I’m okay with them not working. You know, like sometimes people will have a horse they just put out to pasture, you know? They don’t expect the horse to race or jump or ever make babies. It just goes and stands in the field and is happy. So I don’t know if I’m anthropomorphizing or equestrianizing drum machines, but I’m okay for them just to have a nice little life, sitting quiet, by themselves. And if they work, great, but if they don’t…

Moody: Sometimes their sound is just an interval between beats.

Moby: A John Cage rhythm. Like “4’33.” All drum machines, they all have roughly the same circuitry, and up to1978 or so, they did all kind of sound exactly the same. And that’s why, in the sixties and seventies, the drum machine was the least cool musical instrument on the planet. Like it was only used by the church organists. But then when Sly and the Family Stone, wrote a song around one—

Moody: “Family Affair,” right? I think there’s one on “Family Affair,” and then, at the same time, Can, the German band, uses one, too.

Moby: Some great Krautrock people, and then, of course, Suicide. Suicide loved the really weird sound the drum machine made, but I suspect part of it was just expediency, too. You have a box this big, or you have a drummer. And the drummer was expensive, had a lot of equipment, was really noisy, and if you were playing a tiny little venue, they just thought it was easier to bring this tiny little box. By the way, Echo & The Bunnymen, as far as I know, is the first band named after a drum machine. Because when Echo & The Bunnymen first started, they didn’t have a drummer, because they couldn’t afford one, so they had a little drum machine, called Echo.

Moody: Has your investigation of drum machines ever had paradoxical results, driving you back towards live drumming?

Moby: I do both. Like the record I’m putting out in May, most of the songs have drum machines and live drums. Because drum machines are great, but they’re never going to sound like a live drummer, and live drummers are great, but they’re never going to sound like a drum machine. But if you combine the two it’s kind of interesting. I am usually the drummer on my records. I will sometimes loop a drum program, put it in Pro Tools, get the BPM, and then have a click track from that. Or, for example, Duran Duran, they would play along to the drum machine. I think what they would do is take the drum machine and then process it, and generate a click from the audio track of the drum machine, and that’s what the drummer would play along with.

Moody: Would you ever see yourself completely eliminating the drum machine from…?

Moby: Not to get too odd and esoteric, but there’s the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Do you know what wabi-sabi is? The more entropic something is, the more endearing it is. A bucket that’s forty years old that’s been used by a lady to clean the floors of a house she’s been working in is way more interesting than a brand new bucket from Walmart. A broken down, crummy Wall-E is way more interesting than a brand new robot. And that’s part of my love of these guys, they’re all about entropy. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. They’re all dusty, they have pencil scribbles on them, none of them is cool, and the ones that sort of pretend to be cool are the least cool.

Moody: And this is the last guy, over here?

Moby: So this… is, in many ways, the drum machine that changed everything.

Moody: The Linn Drum.

Moby: The Linn Drum. All of Prince’s early records, like, you know, 1999, Dirty Mind, Controversy, all of them were made with this. And The Human League, and so on.

Moody: Could you sequence on this?

Moby: Yeah. The whole song. And I think that when this first came out, it was absurdly expensive, like thousands and thousands of dollars. Kind of like one of the early samplers, like the Fairlight, those were like a hundred-thousand dollars. And now, you basically have more sampling time on a greeting card. But this is, like, 1981, 1982, right when all the old analog drum machines were sort of put out to pasture, and they realized, Oh! This sort of sounds like a drum set. Like the kick drum actually sounds like a kick drum. So I’m sure Depeche Mode and everybody who made drum-machine-based music in the early eighties. This is what they started using.

Moody: This is the end of the line for you?

Moby: I have this because this represents the end. I’m sure there’s someone out there who has an emotional relationship to bad digital drum machines from the mid-eighties, they can collect those.

Related Posts:

• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #33: The Sweet Spot
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #31: Reunion Fever
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #27: All Things Must Pass
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS: Black Napkins
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS: A POST SOMEWHAT ABOUT JAZZ

It’s hard not to think a lot about Tucson lately, a place where I have spent a lot of time in the last five years, and which I have written about multiply on this site already. (See, e.g., my columns of January 29 and August 28, 2009.) Not long ago I was visiting there and met up briefly with Vicki Brown, a violinist of whom I have written above. She in turn brought along a singer-songwriter from Oregon called Amy Rude. Rude, in the course of the evening, gave me two of her albums,

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The Rumpus: Can you talk a little bit about listening to music as a kid? Were your parents listeners? Were there things out of the ordinary that interested you then?

Amy Rude: I grew up in a Presbyterian family and my first interest in music was oriented around the church experience. I had parents who sang very expressively and passionately in church: my father had a booming, sonic low-end baritone, my mother a beatific voice typical of her generation. My parents valued singing and music but subscribed to the idea that theirs was the generation that had lost the musical gene; my father’s father was a jazz clarinet player in West Point’s band and extended family members played piano and had favorite hymns. A generation before that there was a lineage of fur trading “bluegrass” musicians—as family lore would have it. My father was an academic sort, my mother an artist, so the musical repertoire in the household was not expansive, not commercial and focused around liberal tastes: a lot of Simon and Garfunkel, Elizabeth Cotten, Odetta, Woody Guthrie, a dusty copy of Missa Luba (which I still have), quite a bit of Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi. My friend’s parents listened to a lot more rock and roll and country: Creedence Clearwater, Lynryd Skynryd, Crystal Gale, Neil Diamond. I don’t think my parent’s had any sort of pulse on the current music scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

I went to a small, private liberal school taught by two graduates of Evergreen State College. Most time in school I spent in a corner writing small, illustrated novellas involving twin teenagers and re-writing the lyrics to David Bowie songs. My teacher had a song hour each day and we’d learn about songs like ”The Golden Vanity,” “Midnight Special,” “Freight Train.” This was the absolute most precious part of each day. I also sang in the mirror a lot. I held a lip-syncing contest in my basement where I worked out a routine to every song on Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual. I was in a sense, a typical star-struck kid from the 1980s but with a little more avid focus on what a good song was and was not constructed of. I spent hours taping just snips from the radio of songs that I thought had good hooks and changes: “Ebony and Ivory,” “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” songs by Tom Petty and Huey Lewis. I named a teddy bear after Huey.

In junior high, I first encountered public school and joined choir. My choir teacher happened to be a former babysitter from that same church I grew up in. He was a gregarious piano player who loved to sing the hits of the day. Because of my naturally low range, I was relegated to be an alto in with all the other girl-dorks who wore headgear and had duck prints on their turtlenecks. I resented the popular sopranos who got to steal the melodies but over time learned to love the sideway methods of the alto: the strange and tricky parts that snuck up beneath a song. I think this was the origins of harmony for me.

In high school, I tried out for choir and was told curtly that I couldn’t sing. I gave up then.

Rumpus: What kind of academic was your dad? And what kind of artist was your mom?

Rude: My mother and father both met at a Presbyterian college–set unto a path in ministry or education. After college, my father went into the Peace Corps, in 1967, in Eritrea under Haile Selassie’s reign. My mother attended McCormick Seminary College in Chicago. They married shortly after my dad’s stint in the Peace Corps.

He’s pretty specialized–ended up getting a PhD in Education and Development and has since been a very specialized grant writer for community colleges. So, not an academic as in a career in academia per se, but a very committed educator and thinker. He helped start the private school I attended.

My mother, Emily Sweet (yes, it’s a true story—my mother’s real name is Sweet and my father’s name is Rude) is an assemblage artist in the vein of Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters. She has a menagerie of assorted items that she works with: old baby dolls, foundry parts, found photographs, wings, springs, war-time glass, buttons, spikes, joints, anything that is used, old and dream-like. She’s never found the public recognition she deserves. We’ve had many conversations about self-promotion and share the same hang-ups around promotion. I think her work is brilliant and reflects the kinds of dreamers we both are. I don’t know why I didn’t become a visual artist growing up with her. I became a musician instead.

Rumpus: So what was your conversion experience as regards writing and singing songs?

Rude: I fancied myself a writer as a young girl, as it was my only real academic strength. Reading and writing and music were the only things I showed any curiosity and aptitude for. I’ve kept a journal since 4th grade. (I tote around around a large box of embarrassing spiral bound notebooks archiving my life from age 9 to 18. I have explicit instructions to those closest in my life, upon my sudden death, to find that box and destroy the contents. Conversely, I often think of how that box would be the first thing I would salvage if I found myself in a house fire.) Those adolescent tomes were a way for me to process the confusion, apathy, and reckless anxiety of the common teenager. Now my notebooks (I’ve upgraded from Mead to Moleskin) are less process-y emotion-wise and more focused on songwriting. Of course I still get the schlock out as any writer ought to, but I reserve notebooks and space for more intentional song crafting. Otherwise I’ll run the risk of what I always had adverse reactions to: confessional songwriting. That fear, the fear of penning quirky “Jewel-esque” lyrics haunted me during the girl folk revival of the 1990s. I was more attracted to PJ Harvey grunting about her boyfriend’s motorbike than what I more commonly saw: a plethora of bookish, girls young ladies strumming acoustic guitars and singing softly about love. The result of my early efforts however, managed to neatly combine both influences.

I wrote cryptically as a way to avoid confessing. That got me interested in narratives other than my own, which got me interested in early folk songs–especially The Carter Family, early blues and other folk music archived by Alan Lomax and Harry Smith. I became interested in murder ballads and songs about work, hard times and disenfranchised lives. I was interested in women who sang who were older–women like Hazel Dickens, Malvina Reynolds, and Blossom Dearie (one of my favorites). These became my anti-pop heroines.

The result of writing cryptically was some songs that were a bit more desperate, sad, dark around the edges. Later, once I was writing and recording for Heartbeast, I wanted to come closer to my own experience. I began to write a lot about Oregon and the hometown I grew up in, Salem, Oregon. I wrote about a friend who became a prostitute and drug runner and went missing for ten years. I wrote about the landscape of Oregon, about abandoned mill towns and mental institutions–essentially, the things that I remembered being alive when I was young, that were now derelict upon subsequent returns to home; a slow decay of nostalgia into post-modern, grown-up reality. I’ve never written ballads or stories in entirety. I prefer fragments and missing pieces to fleshed out narratives. This is true in my taste of art in general.

However, heartbreak can do magic and damage for songwriting and the last record was a result of that. I managed to churn out a few desperate love songs for an Austrian with whom I had a fantastic affair in Paris (highly recommend to people an affair in Paris someday, but don’t expect great results for long-lasting unions). So that got me stuck on the metaphor of oceans and water, continents, atlases, the blues built in this new world, the jealous longing for the blues in the “motherland.” Lately I like writing about my poor old ruckus neighborhood. I also am working on a song called “I Miss Your Wife” which is a love song to my best friends who seem to be all married now and sort of a swan song for maidenhood in general. I’m trying to write with a little more sense of humor and less of an edgy, discordant rock and roll parlance. I’m attracted to country-blues, the good ole’ 1-4-5 with a gospel ending. I’m writing quite a bit on piano for the next record and plan on having less dramatic, rock and roll engineering and more of a “this was made in my living room” sound (which is a great living room…it’s an old school house of all things, with high ceilings and lots of space perfectly suited for home recording!).

Rumpus: You’re skipping ahead! Don’t! So were the first completed Amy Rude songs written in college? Did you go to college? What did you study in college? Did you play in bands then? Or were you writing by yourself?

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Rude: The first completed Amy Rude song was written in fourth grade and it was a ripped off version of “Dancing in the Streets”, called “Slipping in the Snow” and it was essentially a fantasized account of rolling around in the snow with David Bowie. The second was called “Give Me My Allowance.” It was a punk song. Also there’s some early musical notation penned on Hello Kitty notebook paper circa 1979 or so.

But seriously, the first songs were written before college, after high school, in a little slacker period where I lived in a small house in Bend, Oregon, and spent my days snowboarding, my afternoons delivering pizzas, my weekends working in a record shop and most evenings honing skills at guitar–leftover from a poorly acquired Spanish/classical lesson period in high school. During this time I was listening to a lot of music, a wide range, from British Manchester stuff like the Stone Roses, to a lot of Fugazi and my usual exploration of female artists (Mazzy Star was a pretty big inspiration and okay, I’ll say it here–I learned a lot about harmony from the Indigo Girls). Whatever chords I learned started to manifest in song right away; I’m pretty sure that the first three strung together resulted in a song that resulted in a performance later that evening at an open mic in a local coffee shop. I was very eager to do the songwriter thing and it didn’t occur to me that being green and naive should impede the process.

In 1995, I was at a small crossroads/crisis pretty typical of my generation (x). I could have continued to live in a small mountain town, snowboarding and whatnot but I did yearn for more. I was taking composition and anthropology classes at the community college, doing okay, not great. My parents were frustrated and worried. (My brother was pretty much in unison with me, but in Utah. He’s a musician too). It was at this time that my dad was involved in the election monitoring process in Eritrea, east Africa. He was going there for the summer and likely as a way to give me some kind of civic-minded wake-up call, offered to fly me over if I could only find something useful to do. The result, made pretty much from some tenuous connections over the internet, was my joining a group of 30 Germans who had some supposed agenda to teach English in the terraced hills of Nefasit, a small village four or so hours from the beautiful city of Asmara. The next two months were spent in these hills; feeling ostracized by a cold league of German youth, I found myself instead joining up with the Eritrean youth doing their national service duty, planting trees and terracing the hills. We talked a lot of Michael Jackson. To their requests, I played quite a bit of John Denver. There were some pivotal moments in the evenings in various places, especially a bar in Asmara, where I was exposed to the beautiful sounds of Tigrenia music. In the last years there’s been a comeback of Ethiopian jazz. It’s pretty clear to see the connections between jazz and African music– frenetic polyrhythms, the twang of a “Kirar” (a four stringed harp of sorts. I’ve seen mouth-watering hybrid Kirar-Telecaster guitars. So jealous anyone can understand how to play that), circuitous pentatonic scales and most riveting for me: the vocal styles of Eritrean and Ethiopian singers (like the most talented Alemayehu Eshete). I fell in love with this music there and it continues to be the biggest aspiration in my attempts at blues and rock and roll.

After Eritrea, I went to a small, liberal arts college in southwestern Colorado. Spending time in Eritrea did make me want to do more although I still was unsure what that was. I started college with my basic interests and studied with enthusiasm disparate subjects: geology, anthropology, women’s studies, queer studies, literary theory, composition and theater. I never studied music, was intimidated by (music) theory and musicology but during this time I did form a bluegrass band with a nice provincial bluegrass name: ‘Amy Rude and the Reds.’ I learned to flat pick a little, sing bluegrass harmonies and was introduced to a canon of traditional music that is still very dear and important to me.

After three or so years of studying and doing extreme sports and trying to piece together a degree, I left with a degree in English Communications. The ‘communications’ part was from three years working for college/community radio and spending time in a clique that pursued a communications degree because the school didn’t offer a cultural studies degree. The ‘english’ was the zygote of a career in teaching that I think I was trying to in part avoid but at the time, felt I didn’t have a choice about.

At the new millennium, with degree in hand, I moved back to Oregon to join a burgeoning workforce desperately seeking fresh English Communications graduates. I didn’t find it. I moved back to Colorado and drove a backhoe for a tree nursery for three years instead, while still playing mostly bluegrass for money and fun, and also writing more seriously country-ish folk songs. I eventually pursued a Masters degree in English Education.

Rumpus: What happened to the punk rock piece of all this? Did it die under the North Star of traditional music?

Rude: Well I think I discovered traditional music is pretty damn punk rock. I wouldn’t call Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words” or Bessie Smith with her pigfoot and bottles of beer as anything else but extremely transgressive.

However, my future studies in education and my interest in music and cultural studies did lead me to a deeper interest in post and pre-punk bands, especially girl bands like The Slits and The Raincoats. In fact my Masters thesis centered partly on work I had done at the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls (in Portland, OR) and researching the dual stories of those two bands. I was interested at the time in starting my own non-profit music education camp here in Tucson, with a focus on music education for girls. I didn’t do that though. I felt that getting behind such an endeavor would distract me too much from my own music. Plus I was just too scared to take on such responsibility (so I started teaching–ha!).

I got so into The Raincoats actually, that I started a Raincoats cover band with two identical twins here in town and two other girlfriend musicians (Vicki Brown being one of them). We covered about half of their first album for a local performance that was taped. I got inspired to send Ana de Silva and Gina Birch (founding members of the Raincoats) the tape and we actually struck up a nice little correspondence for awhile. It was so inspiring to me that women of that generation, who created such wild, seemingly untrained and playful (but not frivolous) music would be so accessible. This was the early days of myspace.com, where actually I made several important contacts and booked a few successful tours (one being to Europe with a band of Italians, one who died tragically the day I was to leave Tucson for Italy–that’s another story).

I’m not sure if any of my love for that music had a calculated influence on songwriting or guitar playing. I suppose it was around this time that I started to play a Fender Telecaster and got more comfortable working with various distortion pedals and the whatnot. I was inspired to take that sort of post-punk disco funk and infuse songs that had traditional 1-4-5 blues structures. Like “Black Hands” on the recent record. That’s really an attempt at a hybrid blues, post-punk sound. Our band and the way we get booked have changed too. I think most people assume that I’m a shrinking violet folkie until they hear us play live. Things actually get pretty hectic and loose. Over the years I’ve been booked with quieter, folkier bands but lately it’s been really fun to play louder bills with more energetic bands. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t shy from quiet porch strumming music, but I suppose I am a little wary or suspicious of the preciousness of folk songs these days. I like raw, premeditated disorder. And then I like to clean up.

Rumpus: So when did you start writing and recording your first album? And what were your ambitions for that record?

Rude: By the time I moved to Tucson in 2004, I don’t think I was thinking of writing with the concept that an album would materialize. That is to say, I was recycling and refining–both old songs and old styles. The collections of songs on Snakeheart, recorded with my buddies Golden Boots, were crafted over about a two-year time span. Quite recent to that recording were a couple of significant deaths: the death of my Aunt Bonnie of liver and breast cancer and the death of my 15 year-old dog, Chief (from eating a sock, incidentally). If there is desperation, albeit subdued desperation, on the record, it’s about those losses. My Aunt was a beautiful, complicated artist with a great deal of sadness. I wanted to capture the sadness that comes with being born in a time of hardship and depression. My dog on the other hand was one of those forgiving, unconditional loves that comes rarely in one’s life. I wrote the song “White Walls” with the idea of both in mind. The fact that in the end of life, you have all of these tragedies and reasons for having formed the way you did, and in the end, my Aunt’s death was little different than my dog’s death. Both evoked me to see the basic matter and meaning of life as returning to itself (that’s about as mystic as you will ever hear me sound—it astounded me just now).

The reality that we were recording over an old cemetery was not lost on me either. We recorded basically live in one room, all looking at one another. There were times when we might’ve separated into a closet to clap or sing, but all the rest was done with a lot of feeling, with ample eye contact, out of sync singing and plenty of accidents. I had in mind, before we recorded, Howe Gelb’s project, OP8, that he did with Lisa Germano and Calexico. I’ve always loved that record (and not because I’m interested in aping some ‘desert rock’ sound that we Tucsonans are oft accused of) but rather because on that record it seems apparent the relationships between musicians are very distinct and intimate. I felt that way about my band mates and collaborators at that time. I mean, it was actually a bit more naive as one might expect: a band, like a family. Later it became more important to focus on a band more as a permeable social organism, rather than one unit. Being able to be available to play, rehearse, and get on tour began to trump some kind of kindred musical intimacy. Although I do admire bands that have been able to stay together and grow like a family.  I doubt very much of that was going on with OP8. I don’t know. Or maybe everyone was sleeping with another and having a good go at a record. Who can say? In any case, it was a special record, a special “first time” because it wasn’t done in a studio; it was all done live and basically within a weekend. With songs that don’t need a lot of production or arrangements and have been played well over some time, a weekend is all it should really take.

Rumpus: Your mentioning Lisa Germano (an artist I too have prized over the years) reminds me that I wanted to ask about your vocal style. Germano might be one singer I could see as a touchstone for the way you approach phrasing, another would be Lucinda Williams. I would guess a lot of Old Timey singers are mulched in there too. Who do you think of as vocal influences? And how do you approach singing?

Rude: Let’s talk about Edie Brickell for a moment and her Saturday Night Live performance in, I think, 1990. I was really moved by her style. Not only did she have this really brazen way of flailing around…with a mouth as wide as the Columbia Slough, she also had this piercing, almost too-sharp voice that fit her songs perfectly–she lowered and veered her songs down to alto valleys during verses and then fevered her choruses up to crescendos with a frequency one could almost call shrill. It was also super-bad-ass that her band was called the New Bohemians. I mean, how cultured! It was a super authentic treat for a post-tweener girl coming down off the barrage of girly pop idols in the late 80s. Edie crafted SONGS after all, and her voice was tailor fit for them. So check one: Edie Brickell.

There was a host of country voices that I loved in high school and Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, Tanya Tucker, Dolly Parton were among them. Aside from Patsy Cline, most country singers had a higher range than I did, so I applied the smarts learned in choir every dorky alto acquired to get into the game–I learned how to harmonize the low parts. Along with learning how to harmonize, I also learned phrasing that came with country singing. Years after, I had one painful vocal lesson with a teacher who made me sing “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” over and over again, convinced I wasn’t an alto but actually a mezzo soprano. He chastised me for my bending up to notes, a style I’d obviously learned from country singing.

In grade school I also had a tape of Ella Fitzgerald that I wore clean out. I was very obsessed with her scatting and sang over and over again, “A tisket, a tasket, I lost my yellow basket.” I think she helped me to improvise vocally. To work complicated syllabic structures into short phrases, to stretch out syllables when they needed to be stretched. Essentially I discovered a voice could be used like an instrument (duh, that’s what scatting was all about!).

But honestly, by the time I was learning guitar, I had forgotten that I enjoyed singing and moreover, was convinced that I couldn’t. My initial focus was to learn good country guitar and perhaps I could just write songs that other people could sing. It wasn’t until I started playing bluegrass and traditional music that I discovered I had a range and a knack for singing in a certain clear, straight shooting frequency suited well for country and bluegrass music. It was at this time that all the old tricks from choir sprang up. I remembered my diaphragm and breathing techniques, I remembered how to shape my face and sing from the lower part of my body. Much of that was visual and intuitive and it just snapped into place for me.

During this time, the mid-1990s, I was discovering “alternative country” and all of the female balladeers of that genre. Lucinda Williams and Neko Case were incredibly influential singers and composers for me. I felt at home in their range (no pun intended) and memorized all their songs and albums. I spent one summer just singing Lucinda Williams. I never have seen her live although once I am almost convinced I drove behind her for an afternoon on Highway 1 in Northern California.

Rumpus: Okay, so what happened after Snakeheart came out? What was the reaction? How did you release it? And what led you back into the slightly more “rock and roll” directions of the later work?

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Rude: The response from Snakeheart was positive and encouraging. I was managing self-promotion a tad better than I do now and a few favorable reviews, locally and a few nationally and internationally. I do think there is something organic about a record that doesn’t try, that’s made with friends, over a dusty weekend, that bodes well for the, er, well–record of a moment–which is precisely what I still feel a record should strive to be.

After that I went into the studio with some loftier intentions with Heartbeast and because, I don’t maybe, okay, yes, due to some real estrangement or also because of a desire to do a ‘studio’ record (it was recorded at a great studio in Tucson called ‘Loveland’).  It was done sans band and instead with a great and very sensitive drummer friend of mine in Seattle, Jason Merculief. An interesting scene: building an album ground up with just a drummer; I’d spent the summer working on a hunger driven by nostalgia for my ‘youth’ in Oregon. Distance from home and living in a place that poses a set of duel opposites (searing heat in Tucson delivers a reverse atomic winter that drives counter to the biochemical rhythm I’d developed in gloomy climes up North) and also delivered a set of songs designed, not really to evoke, but rather to conjure, just for me, the essence of Oregon to sooth me at the time. Songs about blackberries and penitentiaries, Scottish lovers, prostitutes and rabid birds–It was distancing to an intentional degree. And it surprised me that some kind of gloss appeared in the record to shellac it; it was aided by the sonic trajectories of Mark Kramer (Galaxie 500, Bongwater, Palace, etc), who came to Tucson to do finishing touches and mixing/mastering with me. Over time, I can see that there was a sort of slow build to rock and roll that I was attempting. I was listening to A LOT of Bill Callahan at the time and Will Oldham, who has always been one of my guiding inspirations in songwriting. I was channeling obtuse lyrics but also craving a soft delivery. I think without a band to drive momentum up, I was the architect of my own estranging record.

After some alienating time I started to rebuild a solid band. It first began with songs and sing-a-longs in my home. I got a cheap but playable spinet piano and began inviting friends over to play and sing. Suddenly it was so satisfying to focus less on the construction of songs and a concept and instead, on common songs, words, pitch, harmony, congruity. The love for music as an essence, other than a form, began to solidify. Along with that, and I fear talking about it because it’s hard to describe how a place can foster music but it does—synonyms like “scene” develop and I bristle at that— but in Tucson there is a place with people that I’d call a community, and that community really really loves to play music (we also love to get paid and we’d love to get better known). As simple as this may sound, at a time of extreme personal estrangement, this sort of connection was fundamental to me.

Tucson is a pretty magical place to play music—and I assume any musician in Newark, Enid or Boise might attest to the same of their locale. In the recent past, there’s been a movement to local food (thank you Michael Pollan) but in the death of the compact disc (and other types of digital music) I think there is growing need to reclaim the localization of music. I may be sorely disillusioned and probably am, but I don’t have a lot of faith in producing CDs. I am somewhat caught between a whining old codger and a Mark Zuckerberg sort of visionary, waiting for the definitive response to the consumer’s general nonchalance toward a “record” like we’ve known the last thirty years. I’m optimistic about the results– just lazy to come up with my own. So playing locally has served as a valuable intermission.

I favor now dreaming of juke joints. I also love the idea of affordable 180 gram vinyl. I love even more the priceless experience of four voices in harmony in a living room. I cannot place a price tag or an ambition on a totality of life musical experience. I just wish more than anything else I could convey it to others so life in general became more musical.

Rumpus: So the new album is more band-oriented? And how has that band experience affected the compositions themselves? And are the lyrics any less elegiac and sad than on Snakeheart and Heartbeast?

Rude: Compositions begin in isolation recalling prior observations. Words and chords butt up against old familiar patterns ruts and grooves. In that incubating time I usually urge myself to forget about an “audience.” I give myself all license to write cliché songs, songs that make zero sense, songs that rip off other artists or rip off my own material, cardboard songs, nowhere songs, nonsense songs, fake pop songs, doggerel poetry, fake musicals, an hour or more of loops or a days worth of one made up chord played over on the piano. I consciously ignore all critics during this experimental phase; otherwise I’d get nowhere. That’s isn’t to say that I don’t write with an audience in mind because of course I think that’s any artist’s desire: to connect. But it’s twofold: the artist’s desire to survive the insanity of loneliness and to affect something in someone else through a medium.
What’s great about a band is that after awhile they tend to know you like a lover might–your easy ways out, your loopholes and excuses, your tendency toward shortcuts or your hesitancy toward something new.  I usually compose in a stretch of time–a summer off, a week left to my own devices, a long weekend holed up in a motel (some of my best composing moments) or a long weekend going through old material and notebooks to methodically pick up lines.  The songs themselves remain rather thin and skeletal. Then after a batch of three or five, I bring them slowly to the band.

I’ve had a composing relationship with Vicki Brown, an experimental violinist, for years. She helps me with harmonies and tempo patterns. Naim Amor, a incredibly talented French composer and guitarist here in Tucson, helps with composing new or additional chords and “hooks” and Ryen Eggleston (bass player and one half of Golden Boots) and Johnny O’Hallaran (drummer) help with tempo, beginnings, endings and harmonies. I’ve got a journalist friend in Portland and a writer friend here who helps me with lyrics. It’s very collaborative in the early stages and sometimes infuriating.  I’ve argued for the logic of phrases that hold zero logic. I’ve brought songs to the band with a nonplussed reaction right after I thought I’d written a groundbreaking song. Sometimes I drudge something up from old coffers and am surprised anyone thinks it’s playable.

I guess that’s just a long-winded response to saying something everyone probably knows: no matter how you attest to the fact that art is subjective, no doubt, there’s a balance. Process is key. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, then by all means stop. However, you also must realize that what you provide to the world is a gift and if the world doesn’t get it, or put more precisely, if you can’t convince them how to get it, then it’s a waste of time. No, not time, I take that back; it’s a waste of ego.

In the composing of Can You Hear Me Crying through the Walls? I was in the midst of some turmoil but also was uplifted by all these musical moments I was having. Sing-a-longs at the house were at an all time peak as were weekly gigs playing old country standards with my friend Chris Black at an evening he called “Ashes of Love” at my favorite venue here: The Red Room. In the messy chaos of late-night playing, there came to emerge a real ecstatic urge toward the essence of rock and roll. I consciously approached CYHMCTW? with the hope that I could make a rock and roll record on a more primitive level than I had previously. And what’s with that term? Primitive? I suppose music historians refer to the sort of pre-studio (pre-polished Memphis era) rock and roll recordings that held all the passion and vitriol of youth in an unstudied but syncopated flourish of beat up blues songs. I guess that’s what I wanted. I was listening to the Band’s Basement Tapes at the time. As well as Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Doug Sahm, and Gun Club.

The tone of the record is of distance, alienation and disappointment–but all conveyed through a filter of upbeat reverb heavy guitars, distorted violins and bluesy singing. I wanted to capture the joy and pain of the blues and avoid self-confession again. It changed the way I play live now.

To depart:

I had scheduled sing-a-long at the Red Room this past Sunday night. After Saturday’s tragedy, I was tempted to cancel. On the weekends, fights and guns and knives break out in the downtown bars in Tucson in almost vaudevillian acts of pseudo-violence. In fact, it was at the Red Room three months ago, I was playing piano, so caught up in a song, that I hadn’t noticed that a man had been stabbed at a bar next door, had staggered past the piano into the bar and by the time the police tapped my shoulder to evacuate, I hadn’t even noticed police tape had been put up around the spilled blood. It took me a few days to feel the gravity of that.

A year before that or less, same bar, a man shattered the front windows in a rage; the crowded restaurant/bar dropped to the floor in terror. Briefly before that, same window, same unspeakable rage.

In the last few weeks in fact, someone was accosted by Jared Lee Loughner at the Red Room. Now, it’s certainly a charged atmosphere here and like anywhere else, polarized by division, ignorance, and violence.  But Tucson isn’t a dangerous place to avoid more than any place. I think if anything, despite being a large city, we’re very close and incidents stand out. “Mass” tragedies, like the shooting of 18 people on January 8^th, serve to illustrate the resultant trend of fringe politics going haywire and of youth (whom I teach) getting ill-informed notions of what’s the appropriate agenda in a world that doesn’t appear to offer them much in terms of action or control or agendas. It could happen anywhere.

But I’m hopeful or maybe, naïve enough to think that perhaps music can muster some hope back in people, especially young people. As I mentioned before, despite the violence any city experiences, the community here in Tucson is an extremely tight knit one. To illustrate: last Sunday, the same room (that had recently held Loughner) held a room full of good people: musicians committed to community and art, bystanders not afraid to sing– we sang together for the sake of song and that song was ‘Amazing Grace.’ All thirty of us or so, sang with our mouths and hearts wide open, devoid of any pursuit other than the one of the moment. I’d only wish more people could experience that simple, very innocent, seemingly lost, pleasure. If they could, I think we’d all maybe have more to hope for.

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Nick Delany turned up at a reading I gave at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 2010. He remarked, during the question and answer portion of the event, that he had mostly been reading just one book for the last ten years. By coincidence, this book turned out to be the very work I was reading on the day in question, namely Anthony Powell’s

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The Rumpus: Can you talk about getting into restaurant management?

Nick Delany: I’d been working as a waiter in Manhattan restaurants for a few years, and as a waiter you’d see these managers swanning about in their suits (and, ergo, not having to wear an accursed uniform), ordering their dinners off the menu, and ordering you (the waiter) around. . . so I thought I’d like to break into that occupation. I doctored my résumé a bit, and obtained a (short) interview with the current owner of the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street.  I guess he was adequately impressed, because I was hired as a maitre d’. This happened in the early-fall of 2009.

Rumpus: Russian Tea Room! I guess you saw a lot of editors in chief at lunch time.

Delany: The only literary type I saw there was Richard Price, and he was having dinner, not a business lunch.  It’s strictly a tourist-trap now. However, Rufus Wainwright (after a Carnegie Hall performance) did show up at the Russian Tea Room one night last year around closing time (and so I quite willingly held the restaurant open a bit later for him) with his entourage of six or seven, ordered a lot of caviar.

Rumpus: What were your specific duties? And how long did you last there?

Delany: Well, as a maitre d’ I was mostly a greeter, a seater, a shmoozer, and sometimes a seller of souvenirs (the Russian Tea Room did quite a lot of souvenir business, the place was full of glass cases displaying tchotchkes for sale).  I lasted about three months, I think. I ran afoul of the hot-tempered Albanian owner over the matter of the restaurant’s closing time.

Rumpus: Your next professional destination?

Delany: The Oyster Bar, where I started working in March of this year (2010). I had been a waiter at the Oyster Bar for a few weeks during 2007.  I’d found working conditions there to be very trying, and in fact I quit. Indeed, I quit in the middle of a shift, during a busy lunch-time. So, when I went back to the Oyster Bar in March for an interview (for the manager job), I was quite worried that I’d be recognized from my previous time there as a waiter, and that my quitting would disqualify me.  As it happened, I wasn’t recognized at my March interview, and so I was hired. Still, I somewhat dreaded work there, as I knew it to be place with rather harsh working conditions (not to mention that it’s underground, no windows, no sunlight).

Rumpus: And during all this professional maneuvering there has never been even one week in which you have not dipped into Dance to the Music of Time, the masterpiece of Anthony Powell, correct? For ten years?

Delany: Yes, I’ve reread the series over and over during the past dozen years, every week picking up one or another of the volumes in the series.  The world depicted in the novels is one that I like to escape into.

Rumpus: What is it about that world that attracts you?

Delany: I like the settings: England, Eton, Oxford, London literary scene, etc. — concerning all of which the reader can have confidence that Powell knows whereof he speaks. And most of the volumes have at least a few good laughs in them. And probably most enticing, the characters — just consider the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, where we get superb ones such as Stringham, Templer, Le Bas, Uncle Giles, Sillery (although I’ve never been able to much enjoy the section of “Upbringing” that takes place at the French cramming-school, perhaps I should try harder to re-read that section).

Rumpus: How did you first come upon Powell? And are you similarly afflicted with other British writers of the same period?

Anthony Powell

Delany: I first came upon Powell via one my other writer-afflictions.  I was reading an essay by Evelyn Waugh (in a volume called U and Non-U, a compendium of essays on the subject of class markers and divisions in England), and therein he referred, praisingly, to Powell — whom I’d never heard of before. So, that got me started.  As I recall, Waugh made some point to the effect that the “Angry Young Men” devotees of the 1950s/1960s would be baffled by the rich stylings of Tony Powell.

Rumpus: How many times have you read the whole of Dance to the Music of Time now?

Delany: It might add up to five or six times. It’s hard to estimate, because I no longer read it in sequence.  I’ll just pick up any volume that lies to hand and open it to a random page, then start reading.

Rumpus: I estimate you have devoted somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 pages of reading time to Powell. Favorite section or sections?

Delany: Well, in Volume III (The Acceptance World), the one that you are reading, the Old Boy Dinner at the Ritz — with Widmerpool rising after dinner to talk economic gobbledy-gook –  is a fine passage; and in the same book I really like the dinner at Foppa’s restaurant where Nick and Jean encounter Dicky Umfraville.  The Umfraville character is very endearing throughout the books. The early pages of Volume X (Books Do Furnish a Room) has an amusing passage where Nick makes a post-war visit to his Oxford college and revisits Sillery’s rooms, where the two men plus another former student (“Short,” now a civil servant) discuss Widmerpool’s current fortunes in the political world.

Rumpus: How does all this consumption of Powell and his work, for ten years now, relate to your professional life, if at all?

Delany: In a way my heavy consumption of Powell has quite possibly contributed to my not taking the restaurant business (where I’ve worked as both waiter and manager) very seriously. That is to say, when you read A Dance to the Music of Time, many kinds of occupations are depicted therein — you have politicians, soldiers, artists of all kinds (painters, ballet-dancers, actors, composers), writers and journalists, civil servants, museum and gallery personnel, et cetera. But nobody in the Dance world works in the food industry.  And not only that, food is not even given much attention in Dance. I mean not a great deal is said about the food eaten by the characters. There is some comment, a little, but not much.  Perhaps this has to do with the proverbial insipidity of English food.  But I think it has more to do with, what is probably the case, that in the middle and upper classes of England during the period 1920 – 1970, food and cuisine and the “catering trade” just weren’t taken very seriously, merely as a prosaic necessity of life.  So as I say, absorbing this viewpoint from “Dance” may have been a corrective during the time I’ve worked in the restaurant biz here in New York.  Because when you’re in the restaurant biz in New York during the last decade or so, you’re exposed to a lot of hype meant to persuade you that Chef So-and-So is a great world-historical artist and genius who is revolutionizing modern civilization and culture.

Rumpus: Do you write yourself, or have ambitions in the literary direction? Or are you an actor? Or do want to direct?

Delany:: In the past I had ambitions to write (perhaps those ambitions haven’t left me entirely). Back when I still lived in my hometown of Vancouver, BC, in the mid-1990s, I wrote a rather long (400 pages, tightly spaced) manuscript. As for acting, I can only say that when one is moldering is restaurant work, one thinks about the cliché (I mean it’s a good cliché, really… a good ‘trope’) of spending one’s non-working hours in going on auditions, attempting to escape restaurant-work for the better world of the stage.  And one thinks that if actors resort to restaurant work, why can’t a restaurant worker resort to acting?

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