Interview: James Williamson of the Stooges talks Raw Power (Boston Phoenix, 8/24/10)

Daniel Brockman: So you were a driving force behind the Raw Power album — but as awesome as that album was, it was not successful during its time. I’ve seen interviews with Ron Asheton from the first Stooges reunion a few years ago where he described the Raw Power period as being bittersweet for him — in part due to the album’s lack of success, and in part because he wasn’t playing guitar. Do you find that period to be bittersweet, in retrospect?

James Williamson: No, I don’t think I look at it that way at all. I mean, the band was basically dissolved in 1971 and at that point in time, I was back in Detroit and the Asheton brothers were in Ann Arbor and Iggy went to New York to try to get some kind of a record deal and get something going. And we had had some discussions and our plan was to form a new band. So when Iggy finally did get a record deal, he called me up and we went over to London. And, you know, he was signed with MainMan management and so it wasn’t until a couple of months over in London that we determined that we really didn’t want to work with the musicians that were available. I suggested to Iggy that we bring the Asheton brothers over and have them be the rhythm section. And I know that with Ron, you know, in later years this didn’t sit well with him, but I think at the time he was very happy to get the job. So “bittersweet” is not a word that I would use. I think we all thought it was very sweet: we were working, we had a record deal! I see those times as being very special because, you know, it was my first album and I was able to make up music of my own and work with Iggy and make that album.

When you started working on the material that became Raw Power, did you have a trove of riffs that you had collected, or did you kind of start from scratch?

I had been writing my own music since the beginning, when I first started playing guitar, and I think that’s one of the reasons why my guitar style was distinctive, because it was my natural way of playing. And I found out quite early going on that it was easier for me to write my own stuff than to play other guy’s stuff. In fact, the first time Iggy met me was at a gig where my old band was playing — and Ron Asheton was playing bass in that band!

Was that The Chosen Few?

Yeah, The Chosen Few. Iggy was at the gig, and I played him some of my own material on guitar and I think that that kind of stuck with him — and later on he tapped into that. Even in 1971, I was writing songs with him for the band, although not much of that was ever recorded. So it wasn’t all sort of brewing up inside of me, it was just a continuous effort.

Your time in the Stooges was incredibly prolific, although only eight songs made it onto Raw Power, and the rest has had to make do with being bootleg material.

Yeah, we were very prolific, because we always thought that we would make another record, so we recorded a lot of other songs, wrote a lot of songs that only were played live. So yeah, we were prolific, but we were also very impatient, so as entertainers we would always tend to play the new stuff and not play the old stuff, which is not a very good formula for success because nobody who came to see us ever knew what they were listening to!

James Williamson, circa 2009 (photo: Robert Matheu)

What were Stooges shows like? I mean, for someone my age, we’re used to punk and metal and all — but back when you were doing it, it was somewhat uncharted territory. Who was coming to your shows, and did you guys see what you did as just a variant of rock music?

Well, to us it was rock music, but we had a different sound and a different style. We felt that it was really important, and we felt that we liked it so other people ought to like it too — but it wasn’t like that. There was a hardcore group of people who did like us, and were almost kind of a cult. But outside of that, there was very little acceptance of us, but we just went out and did it anyway. So we played to some pretty hostile crowds — quite often, really, which was really captured on that live album, Metallic KO. Which I’m not really that proud of, I have to say, because I kind of feel like we contributed to some degree to the violence and whatnot that went on in the punk scene, that everyone kind of romanticized. But by the same token, that kind of thing was probably going to happen anyway — after Altamont, everything got kind of… dark.

It’s interesting that you put it that way — a lot of people would probably see The Stooges’ music as dark, but really it’s kind of just life-affirming rock music, even if there are songs like “Death Trip”!

Yeah, I don’t really see what we did as being dark. I think that what The Stooges were about was playing our brand of music and not completely annihilating ourselves in the process. We were more successful at some of those things than in others.

Even though you joined the band after their second album, you knew them from the beginning, back when they were known as the Psychedelic Stooges and were even more primitive than the sound on the first album — what were they like back then? And what was it like joining them and fitting your style into what they did?

Well, you know, I did know The Stooges in the early days, back when Ronnie was in the band I was in, The Chosen Few. We all knew each other when we were in high school and all that, and I had a pretty continuous relationship — well, I didn’t live in Ann Arbor, but I was at their house when they first started the band, and so I’d come sit in on their practices and hear them, and that was the Psychedelic Stooges. Which was just a really really bizarre art thing. I mean, Iggy played a vacuum cleaner and an Osterizer blender, mic it up — he’d do anything to get across to an audience. He was just — the band was like nothing else I’d ever seen before, some kind of weird combination of Sun Ra and, I don’t know, John Cage and god knows what. But then they slowly learned to play their instruments a little bit, and I think it was this showmanship that first attracted Danny Fields, who was the A&R guy for Elektra. When he came to town to sign the MC5 he saw The Stooges and he was just bowled over by that.

So they got an album deal, and you’re right, they played very primitive stuff because they were not that technically proficient on their instruments. But they always had a unique style to it, it was always rhythmic, and a lot of that material was really groundbreaking in it’s own way — so I don’t want to minimize in any way what they did on those first two albums, they really changed the kind of music that people were listening to, and every kid that was trying to playing guitar, it was the first thing that they would learn, because it was something that they could actually play. So a lot of people came up playing that stuff. When I got involved, when I was asked to join the band, I came in with more technical skill. I had been playing guitar a lot longer and I think I had a certain style that appealed to Iggy, so it’s almost like its two different bands, because like I said we were gonna start a different band.

So when we worked up all this new material, it didn’t sound anything like the previous band, even thought the singer was the same and the drummer was the same, and with Ron on bass. It was the same bunch of guys, but all of the sudden, a really different sound.

You and Iggy went to England to find a rhythm section, but you didn’t like what you saw. Why is that– it seems like there was so much awesome rock music coming out of England in those days?

Yeah, we didn’t relate to what other people were doing, we played our own style of music and you know, part of being in a band is being in a gang or something. It’s a family or a gang or a group of people who can relate to each other on a whole bunch of different levels and can stand to be around each other. I mean, you really can’t play music that’s any good with people you don’t like. That’s just a fact! So, you know, everyone in those days was all flowery shirts and poofy frilly big hair and all that kind of stuff, and I just couldn’t relate, personally, to any of these guys that we were auditioning. I think Iggy might have viewed it a little bit different from me, but in the end I just wasn’t having it and I said “I think we oughtta call up Ron and Scott”. And he didn’t disagree with me — if I wasn’t around, he might have picked something differrent, I dunno. You’ve got these guys like Trevor Bolder from Bowie’s band with the big jowels and all this stuff and — it’s hard for me to explain, but this was a much better choice for us.

When you joined the band, during the Raw Power era, it seems that the power dynamic had changed, and Iggy had a lot more control — or at least more focus was on him. Is this the way you saw it?

I think it’s more of a perception thing: you know, the fact is that Iggy has always been a dynamic performer. And really from when I was involved in the band, whoever was managing us or whoever the record company was or whatever, they always wanted to make Iggy a star, and the band was kind of like — oh, I don’t know, like Big Brother and the Holding Company or something. They really wanted to make the singer the star. And that ruined that whole situation and it would have ruined us too, but that’s the way it was. And so even though we never called ourselves Iggy and the stooges, we started being called that by external forces, because it was easier for promoters to promote gigs and all that sort of thing. So even though it was Iggy who got the record deal and got signed to MainMan, that is what MainMan wanted him to be, a David Bowie singer with some side guys, and Iggy never looked at it that way until much later. So I think we were able to survive that, and the unfortunate part of the whole equation is that no one bought the record. It didn’t matter what we wanted to call it, if you couldn’t sell records back then, you couldn’t survive.

But even though the album didn’t sell, you must have known when you recorded it that the album ruled, right?

Oh, we did, we loved that record. But the thing is that we were completely delusional! I mean, really, that record was so far ahead of it’s time that it really literally is pretty amazing to me to see how many people sort of imitated the style and the sound enough so that it now sounds contemporary. Because the sound has been established by so many bands, but in those days it didn’t sound like anything, and actually there’s never been anything that sounds like it before or since, even though there have been many who have tried. So it’s satisfying, at least we get recognition at some time in our life. I like to say that the album was a success, it just took awhile!

It was your first experience in a big-time recording studio, right?

Yeah, Raw Power was the first time I went in for an extended period of time and made an album, so it was very exciting for me. But the only reason that the album sounds the way it does is because by the time we got to that point, MainMan was busy breaking David Bowie in the U.S. and they weren’t paying attention to us, so we got to make it without any adult supervision!

The sound of the album is distinctive in The Stooges’ catalog because of your lead work, and the way it pierces through the mix. What were you going for with the layering of guitar tracks and whatnot?

Honestly,I was just trying to make the other guys happy. We’d go in there, and after the rhythm tracks, I’d be overdubbing solos and just keep doing it until everyone was nodding in the control room, and that meant that it was time to quit and move on to the next one.

How did the situation come about where Bowie was brought in to remix the record — and what was that experience like?

Well, what happened was that we did the album ourselves, and we made lots of mistakes because we were inexperienced in the studio, and Iggy was pushing the envelope with the mix. I didn’t have any frame of reference — like I would now if I was trying to mix that album take a different approach. The engineer, you know, his hands are tied because we’re the client telling him what to do: so we made a mix, and we liked the mix, but MainMan didn’t understand it and couldn’t relate to it and they thought “This is never gonna fly”, so they brought in their golden boy in hopes to salvage it, because we owed the album to CBS. So on some days off from his U.S. tour, David Bowie came over and did it in L.A., and you know, it was a really really bizarre approach to the mix that he did.

But I have to say that if we had actually had something that we thought should have been done differently, we should have spoken up, because we were both sitting there in the mixing room for the whole thing. And secondly, a lot of times you get in the studio and you think “Oh man, that sounds great!”, and then you get outside and think “Oh my god, this is awful!” And David Bowie, he’s very stylized, everything he does — and the thing about the album is that it sounds really different. But ultimately, the beauty in that album is in the songs and the performance, and so no matter how you do it, it still comes through and sounds good.

It must have been weird for you in the ensuing decades to watch the endless debate about the mix of the album, with superfans passing around bootlegs of the alleged original rough mixes, that sort of thing.

You know, it is kind of weird, and frankly I’m happy that Sony/Columbia has re-released the original mix, because I think historically that’s an important thing. But if it was up to me, I’d just release all the tracks and let the guy who buys it mix it for themselves. I mean, it’s like “why are we arguing about this for 30 years?”

How does it feel to be playing those songs now?

It feels great — we’re, I think, all in our 60’s, and I think that there’s an opportunity for a little bit of closure and we’re having fun doing it. I mean, how many victory laps can we do? I don’t know. But we’re having a good time this year and I guess we’re going to see you guys pretty soon in Boston.

Do you think you’ll end up doing a new Stooges album?

We’ve all kind of agreed that we’d like to only release new material if we all really like it. So, you know, The Stooges bar is pretty high, and we don’t want to put out material that isn’t of that kind of quality. We’re working on it, and even if we don’t put out an album, but put out some singles, I’d love to do it, but only if it’s something that we all feel is in keeping with the level of the quality that we’ve done before.

Hercules & Love Affair: An Interview with Andy Butler (Boston Phoenix, 7/29/10)

Making dance music that’s fun is serious business — especially if you make it your life’s work, like Andy Butler, main man/svengali behind Hercules and Love Affair. The Denver native has been honing his dance-music-composition chops since he left the Colorado-leather-bar-DJ gig of his teens to make it in the Big Apple. He found success in 2008 with the explosive debut of Hercules, a rotating line-up of singers and musicians doing his bidding as if he were Neil Bogart running Casablanca Records. Herc shot to prominence on the strength of their irresistible update of the large-band sound of classic disco, and the power of lead single “Blind,” which featured the diva vocalizing of Butler’s old pal Antony Hegarty of Antony & the Johnsons. The band’s homonymous debut long-player had Hegarty guesting on four more tunes, with the bulk of the rest of the vocal duties being handled by NYC über-diva Nomi Ruiz. Butler is gearing up to unveil his sophomore outing this September, with guest vocals by Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke. I caught up with him via telephone from Denver as he prepared to unveil the new material on a tour that brings the band to Great Scott in Allston on July 29.

We don’t know much about the new album, not even the title yet — although your blog describes it with one word: “emotional.”
It is! Well, the record — I mean, the last one was equally emotional, you know. Introspection, self-reflection, confusion, sadness, loss, that sort of thing. There’s definitely a lot of emotionally charged music on it. A song like “Blind,” etc. I guess, though, that the range of emotions on the new record is wider, more dynamic. I dunno, I guess I explored other aspects of my psyche besides just sadness or celebration. There are songs about revenge, about defiance. You know, defiant of people prying into your life, getting people to stay out of your business. I guess I was just dealing with a wider array of emotions: anger, but also intensity, redemption, etc. It’s an emotional record.

So would you say that you’re dealing, in part, with the changes brought about by the success you found with the first album?
That’s definitely part of it, but part of it has to do with the emotional place I was in when I wrote those songs, whilst in the midst of a brutal touring schedule, lots of prying interviews, some uncomfortable moments, all sorts of issues between all sorts of people. So it was definitely formed by the experience of the last few years.

It’s interesting, the way you describe your music as so emotional, and at times pained, since it is, broadly defined, dance music, and most people see dance music as just about having fun and being happy-go-lucky. Does dance music mean something else to you, something deeper?
Oh sure. I mean, I have always liked dance music. I remember so well one of my favorite lines from an old classic house track by Murk is “Just like my momma said/If you ever get misled/Forget about your lover/You must always keep your pride/In order to survive/There will always be another/” And just that, in itself, is a very powerful life lesson that is summed up very poetically and simply, on a deep-house track. And even just, sometimes, simple vocal loops that are repetitive, very post-modern. Like, you know, “lift me up lift me up lift me up lift me up.” These kinds of things have more significance, at least for me, than just like “I’m at a party and it’s just a sound.” Dance music has always spoken to me on a legitimately serious emotional level.

That said, I also find it hard sometimes to get people to listen to my music and take it seriously, lyrically. Like, there is a song on the new record called “Falling.” And it’s a really joyous song, and from a sonic perspective, it’s a song of joy and happiness. But if you actually hear the lyrics, it’s essentially a re-telling of the story of Theseus. And it’s a really tragic story: this young man is sent off to save his city from a curse, and his father says to him: “When you return from this mission, please change the color of the sail on your mast so I know that you’re alive and that you’ve done what you said you wanted to do.” And the son makes this one mistake and he forgets, and his father throws himself off of a cliff. And the song is called “Falling” because it’s from the perspective of the guy falling. So, while the song is like “I’m falling/and I’m free,” I wanted to write a dance song from a different perspective! From the perspective of someone looking down at a raging ocean with rocks in it, thinking to himself, “At least I know now what happened to my son — I’ve walked around for three weeks wondering if he’s dead or alive, and in some ways, now I’m free.” And that’s just a re-telling of a myth that’s enchanted me since I was a little kid, but there’s other stuff that’s more personal, that deals with topics in my own childhood, which was at times hard and abusive, and trying to escape from it, trying to find shelter.

I have another song, “Blind,” with the lyrics, “As a child I knew the stars could only get brighter/That we would get closer, leaving this darkness behind.” I was writing that because when I was four or five years old, it was one of the darkest periods of my life. I did not understand why I had been born. I thought that being gay was — like, I didn’t know what it was but everyone around me knew that I was gay. I was terribly confused, and I thought that things could only get better. And this was from the age of four! So the songs aren’t just happy-go-lucky disco songs.

And even classic disco songs aren’t just happy-go-lucky disco songs.
No, they’re not!

It’s interesting that you refer to your usage of the Theseus myth as a “re-telling,” because it seems like something more than that, the same way that naming your band Hercules and Love Affair takes an allusion to Greek mythology and puts it in a totally different context.
Yeah, it’s not just a re-telling, but a re-contextualization of these things that have been passed down forever. The same stories that have been told in all cultures, you know, in different ways. And on some level, we all have that moment where we forget to change the color of the sails and let someone down, make a simple mistake. And those kinds of life lessons are told in many many different cultures in many many different ways. And I just happen to think that music is a fun and powerful vehicle for telling those stories.

You seem to focus a lot on lyrics and lyrical themes, which in dance music is something that people don’t tend to focus on.
I don’t know — there’s definitely a lot of room for instrumental dance music, for track-y dance music that’s great for mixing for DJ’s, I love that kind of music. But for me, and in my own art, lyrics are — I try as much as possible to make them stand on their own as a body of work, so you could look at those words on a piece of paper and acknowledge them as a poem or a text, aside from the music that those words are put to. To me, lyric-writing is a whole separate thing that is really important to me and has to be taken seriously — I’m not interested in throwaway lyrics about cell phones and, you know, sex and dumb stuff.

You have always had awesome vocalists for your songs — especially your material with Antony on the last album. Did you write those songs for specific singers? And how did you get Antony in the first place?
That was just a blessing from the heavens. Antony Hegarty happens to be one of the greatest voices on the planet, and he happened to be one of my best friends. So I was lucky enough to be like, “Hey, guess what, dance music-haters? Here’s some real legitimate singing and thinking for you, so fuck off!” You know? So that was a real blessing.

When I first worked with Antony, I had just written “Blind.” And the original version of the song has a weird synthesized voice of me singing it. And Antony thought it sounded cool, and he was like, “You should just do that!” And I was like “No, I want to hear your voice, I want to see what you would do with it.” And he went into the studio to sing it, and that was that. But after that collaboration, there were a few songs that I wrote specifically for Antony’s voice. Like “Easy,” for example: there were moments that I thought would be perfect for his voice.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Hercules and Love Affair has a different lineup now than on the first record.
Yeah: on the recording we have more live instrumentation than we did on the first record. We have strings, we have trombones, trumpets, clarinets, the whole nine yards. I really tried to involve as much live musicianship as possible. For the live show, I wanted to get a much clubbier, more hard-hitting experience — something more akin to what I used to experience as a 15 year old!

That’s an interesting change, especially since so much of your band’s thing was tied into the large-band format you had when you toured the first album.
I was really happy with what we did as a nine-piece live band on the road. And I was really into the whole wonky live feeling where we felt like we were recreating something very special from the late-’70s/early-’80s kind of no-disco kind of punky-disco thing. But it never ever hit the way that my favorite club tracks hit. And that was always a problem for me. Because inevitably your bass player’s going to hit some stanky notes, and your horn players are going to forget their cues, and your drummer’s going to go out of time with the drum machine. And not that I have that many issues with imperfection — I love live music! — but I wanted to present something with more of a real deep-club emotional experience. And what we were presenting was more of a hoot, a fun lively no-wave thing, like more of a Bush Tetras kind of thing. And I want it to be more physical, like when that bass drum hits, you feel it in your stomach, and your heart, you know?

It’s weird: I have a lot more to think about now than I did with the old show, because I used to have people who covered this area and that area, and now I’m having to cover a lot of areas! But I’m much happier with the sound, the crowds are much more frenzied, much more rabid and insane. I think before it was a little bit more of a show that you watch and enjoy and clap clap clap, and that’s not what I want.

The other thing is that I met a singer [Aerea Negrot] six years ago when I was on tour with Antony, doing merchandise for him. And she was really curious and I was talking her and she told me, “I live in Berlin cuz Berlin’s the coolest techno place blah blah blah, but I’m classically trained in ballet. And I sing and kind of have an operatic voice.” And I thought “Wow, this girl is weird — and kind of amazing!” And I told Antony, “We’ve got to have lunch with this girl who came to the show last night, she seems really interesting.” So we did, but then I lost touch with her, until years later I found someone from Berlin who knew her and had her number. So I called her, and got her in the studio. And she was awesome, she took it to a place that I could never have imagined. So once again I was blessed with someone awesome who dropped from the heavens.

And the other new singer, Shaun Wright, who I met in New York, who’s just been born and bred on house music. His mother was a singer in an R&B group — it’s in his blood! And so he brings to Hercules this kind of more gospel-tinged African-American voice, which I’m really happy about. His voice is really powerful and I’m really excited about him. And when I first saw him I was taken aback because he was covered in sparkles and braids and just reminded me of Rick James and Sylvester.

All of that is interesting, because you probably could have just as easily put out another album of ’70s/’80s-sounding disco music, and everyone would be perfectly happy.
Yeah. No, no, this is a completely different thing, a completely different beat. That said, there are moments on the new record that are very . . . “Herculean.” You’ll hear a horn arrangement that sounds like the first album, or a string arrangement, so there’s some consistency. But this record was much more about honing and displaying my compositional voice as opposed to relying on references. It’s much less referential, and more about songwriting.

Do your records have a message of any kind? Is there something thematic underlying your music, album-to-album?
I think if there if there was a message on the first record, it was “Dance music is legitimate music.” You know, there’s a history to it and it’s not just throwaway trash. On this record it’s more varied, but at the same time it’s kind of the same deal: “If it’s a dance track and it’s coming from Hercules and Love Affair, you’re gonna have to respect it as a song, and not just as a track.” I’m saying it loud and clear: dance music is legitimate music. It’s the real deal.

Your music with Hercules has really given you a reputation as someone who really knows his stuff when it comes to vintage disco and dance music — but do you keep up with new music? Is there current dance music that you love?
Yeah, of course, especially because I DJ so much. I have to! I have to tune in to what’s going on, and I have my favorites, definitely.

Yeah, I was just curious because when one gets into the whole ’70s-disco thing, there’s a tendency to get into the mindset of “Oh, it was so much better back then” and “No one makes music like this nowadays.”
No, I definitely do not think that that’s the case. I mean, I don’t think that music was necessarily “better” back in the ’70s. Although, I do think musicians were treated differently then, and the music industry was different then. There was a respect for songwriting and musicianship that’s changed a bit in pop music. But I don’t necessarily think it’s better or worse or anything.

HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR PLAY GREAT SCOTT ON JULY 29

SALEM (Boston Phoenix, 7/13/10)

L-r: Heather Marlatt, John Holland, Jack Donoghue

Salem are a hard band to pin down. We recently named them the best band from the state of Michigan, mostly because of growing hype surrounding their particular brand of mysteriously mournful dirge-crunk. Their music kind of slips through your mind’s fingers as it attempts to get a grip on what is exactly going on: murky and gauzy synths, washed-out and elegaic vocals, and oddly whumping and skittering beats. Salem’s music can sound like a hopeless anthem with all human feeling drained out in a rainstorm, or like the most blisstastic vision of redemptive hope, or both at the same time. Moment to moment slips from a menacing vortex to a wash of sun after the rain.

Two-thirds of the group hail from Traverse City, Michigan (John Holland and Heather Marlatt); I got the chance recently to sit down with the one member who isn’t a Michigan native, Jack Donoghue, who had some interesting comments on being in a band with such a decidedly ambiguous aesthetic. Salem are currently gearing up for the fall release of their debut lp, King Night (IAMSOUND)— and figuring out how to rise to the challenge of presenting their bizarre music in a live setting. After all, most music scene know-it-alls only know the band for having been been boo’ed off the stage twice at this year’s SXSW, and not for their string of powerful self-produced singles and ep’s that stretch back to when the band members were all school-aged. Ladies and gentlemen: Salem.

BOSTON PHOENIX: Hey! So I saw you live last week (at the Creator’s Project in NYC), and I was surprised to see that all three of you take turns on vocals. On record, it’s hard to tell that different songs are sung by different people…

Jack Donoghue: if you listen to our music, the songs sung by all three members, it’s obvious that we’re all interested in similar feelings and aesthetics and stuff, but the focal point I think is different. Mine is more like rap and juke and weird house or some shit. But I mean, I was making music in high school that some of the beats we’ve used are weird lifts of. And John has been making things like that before he was in grammar school, making it on cassettes, same with Heather. You couldn’t, like, call us out for making something that doesn’t fit, all three of us, everything we make fits in the Salem aesthetic, but not until we’re all together does it sound the same. does that make sense?

Sometimes people will ask us: “So there’s three separate sections of Salem?” And I’m like no, there’s different things going on but it’s not sectioned out.

Yeah, I had no idea who sang what, aside from a few tunes that obviously had a female vocal.

It’s almost a bit disillusioning, almost like that’s what it is when we play live, just like visually, you know, “that’s this person’s song, and that’s this person’s song”, and that isn’t the way it is at all. i dunno– we’re still figuring it out.

Your music is really ambiguous, and on record it’s almost as if there is an intentional distance between the music and the listener. Is this intentional, and if so, what are you guys trying to do with this approach?

Rather than saying that we’re trying to hide, or that we’re masking something, I would say that nothing is necessarily more important than anything else in our music. So where someone might bring the vocals super-loud over everything else in a normal song, we don’t do that. The feeling is what our songs are about, we try to make affecting music, like it’s supposed to be affecting. And not necessarily with the words, with lyrics, you know? It’s just not something that we– I think it would almost distract people to think that they could relate to this thing based on some words that mean one thing to me and one thing to someone else. We’d rather give it to people raw and pure, and make the music almost universal.

That’s a really interesting concept– and especially unusual since a number of your songs feature your rapping on them, and even the rapping is somewhat indistinct.

I think we’re more about the big picture, you know? We’re trying to express ourselves, and it’s more of a painting than a poem, you know what I’m saying?

Totally. Another thing I find interesting about Salem is that you guys use elements of what would be considered “goth” and “crunk” and a bunch of other genre touchpoints, but it would be kind of a disservice to really use those terms to define what you do.

You can analyze our music all day and say “Oh, it has elements of this and elements of that”, but whatever– it’s just what we’re drawn toward. And so if I’m been exposed to this drum hit in a rap song, and i liked it, I’m going to try to emulate that, that one drum hit. If I like this thing in this other thing, I’ll use that. We’re just three people doing our part to collaborate in a way that– we’re definitely not thinking about where we’re taking things from, we just care about the content that needs to be there in the end.

The way that your music has rap beats taken out of context, and used with somewhat ethereal textures almost gives the music this menacing feel-

I mean, I don’t know that I think that rap is menacing, or that that element of what we do is menacing, but i think that i personally connect with rap music because- I don’t know, I just think that I like how rap beats sound better than drum beats, you know?

Interesting– it kind of raises the question of whether you guys even see your music as “dark”– because that’s how it’s often described. And yet, there’s so much about it that isn’t dark at all, that’s almost hopeful or blissful. What are you guys going for, if anything, specifically.

I’d say first of all, as a precursor, that we aren’t going for anything, ever. But between all of us, we’ve had a fair amount of sad things happen to all three of us. But we’re not trying to be dark– if that’s a part of us that comes out in the music, then that comes out. But other parts come out as well, so it’s not exclusively dark. I mean, there’s sensitivity, a lot of things. I don’t necessarily know what “dark” means. I guess we see our music as enveloping a full spectrum.

Someone just said something to me recently that I’d never thought about before. He’s a friend of mine, and he said “When you first brought me your music, I didn’t know how to listen to it”. I think that people don’t know what to compare it to. But just listen to it, it just is what it is. Like, you don’t have to put it in the whole thing where, you know, “This kind of music is supposed to make you feel like this”. We’re just making music, and if it’s new or interesting to people, that’s just a by-product of us trying to be honest, not following in the footsteps of someone. Does that make sense? We’re not trying to emulate a specific thing, which is why it is not a specific thing. We don’t even know what to call it.

Yeah– I mean, so many bands today come across as so calculated–

-And we’re not! We’ve played bad live shows, we’ve done things because we’re just figuring this thing out. You’d be hard-pressed to find a band more painfully honest than us.

When was your first live show?

It was in Chicago, maybe a year and a half ago.

But you’ve recorded a ton of stuff before that, right?

We’ve been recording for three years, but we haven’t been playing shows that whole time. The number of live shows we’ve played is pretty small, there are a lot of gaps there where we didn’t play. We get asked, but, you know.

Playing live is a challenge for us, to be honest, but I’m positive that we’ll find a good way to make it work. It’s only a challenge in trying to do either the most basic thing or the best thing. There have been shows where it was like “let’s just do the most basic thing and get paid.” But we’re just working towards really figuring out a more hard-hitting aesthetic for the live show.

Like what?

I dunno, we’re working it out! That’s what we’re doing right now, trying to figure out how to present things live. Cuz we have this new album coming out, and it’s totally sick, and we haven’t figured out how to express it live, so that’s what we’re working on now.

So far, all of your music is self-produced, right, even the new album?

Yep. We did it all in Michigan, in Traverse City.

Is Michigan, and Traverse City, significant to your music, as a presence?

Oh, most definitely. Michigan has a really high unemployment rate, and for John and Heather, you know, they’re just from a really different than the rest of the country, just a different mood. They know people who were in weird desperate situations, and they don’t have a lot of people to judge what their actions are around, they’re isolated but still around people, and– I dunno, it’s hard to say, but it’s definitely interesting components for a situation. Traverse City is a really cool beautiful place, but there’s definitely some very strange things going on there.

Sleigh Bells (Boston Phoenix, 7/20/10)

Note: Sleigh Bells performs Thursday July 22 at Royale with Die Antwoord. Check the accompanying feature on the South African rap sensation here.

Let’s face it: Sleigh Bells are heavy. Heavy heavy heavy. Oh sure, they sugar-coat it for all the kids out there who don’t normally listen to metal and whatnot. But one listen to their recently released debut long-player, Treats (N.E.E.T./Mom & Pop) and it’s clear that they are trying to pull a fast one with the stealthily smuggled heaviness moves folded into their distorto-dance thing. And who can blame them– how many metal albums do you see here, or here, or here? But I dunno: when I caught them a few weeks ago at the Creators Project show in NYC, Derek Miller started the show by playing the demonic opening riff of Slayer’s “South of Heaven”. Were devil horns appropriate? I say: hell yeah.

Earlier in the day, I caught up with the dynamic duo, wearing sunglasses indoors as they did the press slog, repeatedly answering questions about how awesome it was to work with M.I.A. and how neat it must be to be so hyped and to have gotten so huge so quickly, etc. Yawn! I wanted to know how a boy and girl armed with nothing but a guitar, an amp, a microphone, an iPod blaring beats, and some glitter, manage to squeeze so much raucous throbbing rock out of so little:

Derek, you used to be in Poison The Well, who were really heavy. With Sleigh Bells, do you feel like what you do is kind of slyly super-heavy?
Derek Miller: Yeah, definitely– and it’s actually getting kind of heavier, what Alexis and I are doing. Like with the newer songs on the record, like “Tell ‘Em”, which has a more overt metal influence. I was afraid to do that stuff for so long because I left Poison The Well and didn’t do anything heavy for about seven years. “Ring Ring”, which is now called “Rill Rill” on the record, is real minimalist and electropop, and that’s kind of what we were doing when we started making music together. More “traditionalist”, for lack of a better word. But the will to do heavy music was always there in the back of my mind, you know, and it just took awhile to roughly understand how melodies and whatnot were going to work over a heavier framework. But I see us going further in that direction.

Further into heavy?
DM: Yeah– not muted E’s and double kick, but just sort of… heavier.
Alexis Krauss: But I guess in sort of the way that “Tell ‘Em” has so much heaviness going on, but the melodies are still very present and kind of take it to a completely different place–
DM: Yeah, and I really like that, because the melodies just really kind of castrates the metal. Because that was the problem I had with heavy music: the scene, the aesthetics, and all the fights and all that macho bullshit. It just got so boring. And, uh, I dunno, I just feel like we’re getting there! We both love confrontational music, especially in a live setting, it’s like, you know, for some people what we do isn’t really headphone music and just works better in a live setting.

Alexis, was it a struggle to find a way, initially, to fit what you do within this heavy framework?
AK: Yeah, not really. I innately have this very light pop voice, so that’s what I was instinctively bringing to the table, and I found a way to bridge things to make it work. But yeah, I mean, no doubt, there were times when I had to push myself to a place that I was not necessarily comfortable. And I mean, we’re both still figuring it out–
DM: We’re both still learning, and will continue to. But it’s definitely getting heavier, for now.

Interview: Glenn Danzig (Boston Phoenix, 6/17/10)

There was a moment, while I was on hold on the phone as Glenn Danzig was being summoned by his publicist, where I was a tad intimidated. And not just because I was about to talk about one of the more legendary and divisive figures in the history of punk and metal. No, it had more to do with the fact that, having seen and read numerous interviews with the man, I knew that he doesn’t suffer fools. In the end, was I a fool? Well, I probably should have known not to use the word “occult” to describe his lyrical bent (that is, unless I wanted to get a few awesome tirades to spew forth).

Glenn Danzig is a busy man, even as he works his way through his mid-50s and his fourth decade in music. He has a new Danzig album out this month, the band’s ninth, the oddly titled Deth Red Sabaoth (Evilive/The End), as well as a book of song lyrics titled Hidden Lyrics of the Left Hand, illustrated by UK comic-book legend Simon Bisley. He is also touring for the first time in six years, a quick nine-city jaunt that sees him coming to Boston’s House of Blues on the 21st. For such an active rock warrior, I kind of expected Danzig to be somewhat blustery and aggro. But Danzig was a lot more soft-spoken than I thought he’d be; he also tends to chuckle to himself quite a lot. This last part I was prepared for, having seen it in action in all the interview sections of the 1988 Danzig home video that came out on VHS around the time of his first solo album. In these segments, Danzig tends to come across as cagey and confrontational, but always laughing at the absurdity of other people’s opinions. Such it was with my conversation with him, which I hope comes across here — it’s not so much that he’s funny, as that he finds everything around him so absurd. It is clearly the driving force behind so much of his artistry: essaying human civilization and having an internal guffaw at how everyone is getting it wrong.

Oh, one last thing before I get to the interview: I talked to him for a bit about his book collection, which is a reference to a scene from the 1988 home video. In the scene, Danzig lets his guard down as he gives a tour of his personal book collection. Inexplicably lit as if next to an indoor swimming pool, Glenn walks the offscreen inquisitor through tome after tome, cracking himself up over the obscurity of such concepts as the lost books of the Bible and the existence of werewolves. Don’t laugh, folks: have you done the research Danzig has on these topics? I’m going to guess not.

BOSTON PHOENIX: OK, I’ll cut right to the chase: with your new album, it seems that you have a different approach, what with you playing bass and drums on a few tracks—
GLENN DANZIG: I do that on all the records.

Excuse me?
I do that on all the records. That’s nothing new.

So for these songs, what was the process like in creating them, how long did these songs gestate–
Did you say “gestate”?

Yeah.
Are you a journalist?

[Laughs] Um, I guess …
You’re a real journalist! Oh, okay.

I suppose, I dunno …
Well, no one uses that word ever, at least not the people I talk to. Okay, this is cool. Well, I go into the studio now, and I’ll do a couple tracks, sit back and listen, start laying overdubs, do a few more tracks later, and that’s how I did this one. I kind of like it better that way. It’s even how I did all the Black Arias [note: Glenn Danzig’s classical music series] and stuff.

Right! It’s interesting, because you do all sorts of stuff — classical albums, even. I’m just kind of curious how you approach each project, how you know “This is going to be a Danzig album” …
What happened was once I was done doing Lost Tracks— I’d been doing sporadic touring, but 2005, I stopped touring. So I just did some local shows — a few East Coast shows, fly home. In between, I experimented with trying to find some way to be happy on the road and still do it, and started doing it for longer periods of time, and in between I started doing this thing where I’d listen to some songs that I laid down, and that’s the way I did this record. It worked out pretty good.

I had a specific idea to do an old school early-’70s kind of record, but with a contemporary feel to it. That’s what I set out to do—I even got some old gear, old phase shifters, and when I wanted to use reverb or tremolo, I’d go and get old amps that had reverb and tremolo in them, instead of using a computer plug-in because those things don’t sound right. They never sound right, especially if you want some kind of chamber reverb, you know what I mean, or a real tremolo, you have to get the real stuff, because the computer just sounds like crap.

What was your ’70s influence? What were you going for?
Well, it comes back to what I always done with records, which is that I want to make records that people are going to listen to 20 years down the line, and that’s what I attempted to do. And so far everyone seems to be digging it, telling me how thick the sound is, how warm it sounds, and that’s good—I purposely went out and got these bass cabs to play through, even playing guitar through them: big old Kustom speakers with 15- and 18-inch speakers. And a lot of these new bands play bass through teeny speakers, 10-inch speakers, this tinny crap that sounds like guitar. I want a bass that, when you’re listening to those old songs, it rattles your dashboard — you know, the bass hits certain notes, and the whole dashboard goes “brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmm,” and that’s what I want! And I think a lot of people listen to music while they’re driving, anyway, you know?

When you work on a new album, do you feel like you have a lot of expectations? Is it a challenge?
I’ve been doing it so long that it’s a challenge just to write something exciting and try and top what you did before. Especially coming from the whole punk thing, which is like, you know, you don’t want to do the same record over and over. And you want to keep it exciting, keep it interesting, but you still want to improve what you do — yeah, after this many records, it’s a challenge, but I think I’m up for the challenge.

I imagine that once you’ve been around for a while, it must be a pain because people want the new stuff to sound like this old song or that old song–
I don’t want it to sound like one of the old records, that’s for sure. I want it to be better, so I’m actually kind of happy. When this record came out, I didn’t know how people would — well, I knew the fans would be digging it, but of course the press are so weird anyway, what they’re gonna like and all. And I don’t really care, so much, but I’m just curious to see, and so far everyone’s really digging it, so maybe I did what I was supposed to do. [Laughs]

I’m curious what inspires you, song-wise — because I think a lot of people don’t realize that you’re a songwriter, right?
Yeah, totally. I get questions all the time, like, “Why don’t you let other people write the songs?” Uh, because it’s my fucking band and I’ve written all the songs since the Misfits, you know, and I’m not going to change now. And it’s — I dunno, I lost my train of thought …

What inspires you as a songwriter …
Right. It’s always just frustration with people, the government, all that kind of stuff. All those things but on a sociological level — all the things that our fucked up government makes happen, and how people then react to each other because they’re so frustrated with the government. I don’t think anyone thought it could be any worse than Bush, and yet here we are, 10 times worse than Bush! An oil spill that no one has clogged up in a month and a half, right? Just sitting there spewing jillions of gallons of oil a day, and people are just sitting there going, “Oh no, what do we do?” But the bigger thing — and I don’t want to get too political — but all these people’s lives are now destroyed who rely on that coast, you know what I mean? That, and it’s probably just some ploy to raise the price of gas. “Oh, we can’t rely on offshore drilling,” and that now that all this oil is wasted now, they’re going to jack the price of oil up. So, you know, it’s probably the Bilderbergs are making tons of money now, and Obama wants to get in with them — and there you go, he’s in!

It’s interesting that when you talk about this frustration as being the inspiration of your music, you tend to couch these frustrations within a lyrical framework that’s kind of, well, occult—
Well, Christianity and Islam, that’s the real occult to me. I mean, look how many people those people kill. I mean, any other religion here in the States, if they even killed 100 people, they’d shut ’em down. Killing hundreds of thousands, millions of people, over, you know, and nothing happens to ‘em, just a slap on the wrist. People have been talking about this priest-abuse scandal thing since the ’80s, and nothing’s happened to them. If that was a Scientology church, they’d be shut down in a second. Do you know what I mean?

Totally.
Yeah, so it’s a double standard, it’s a load of shit, but will people call that a cult? I mean, do you believe Jesus walked on water? Do you even believe Jesus existed?

Do I? Not really.
Yeah, so there you go. That’s far-fetched, to me; that’s a fucking story. I think in one of my records I put a quote from Celsus in there that says that they worship a dead man. I mean, Jesus! That is somebody who’s dead and came back to life, which in everyone else’s terminology is a zombie. [Laughs] If he dies and comes back to life, he’s a zombie, so you’re worshipping a zombie! Whatever. I mean, you don’t even know if he existed or not; it’s a regurgitated story from pre-Egyptian times, and it’s just crazy. So whenever people say, “Oh, you’re singing about the occult,” I’m like [laughs] “Well, let’s get that term straightened out: the occult, what’s that?” I think it’s a catch-all phrase that people have used to discredit stuff.

I can agree with that.
Yeah, and so — and it’s like other stuff too, like when the drug companies conspired with our government to put natural homeopathic cures out of business at the turn of the century, and bang, they started calling it “snake oil,” and this and that. And it’s really just a disinformation campaign to discredit this stuff so that people will stop using it. The government has gone so far as to create phony homeopathic remedies so when people use them and they don’t work, people lose interest in them.

I read somewhere recently that you said that when you go on tour, you go to a lot of bookstores; so I’m curious what you’ve been reading lately.
Hmm … I read so much — and of course I read tons of different stuff which some people would call the occult. But of course, not only have I always been interested in the families that run the world forever, that people know now as the Bilderberg Group. But there’s an older book called The Committee of 300 which tells you all about it. I mean, I got in trouble for this back in the ’90s, talking about this kind of stuff — how the United States is based on a Freemason thing, and I got so many government files on me from that one.

And now it’s the basis of National Treasure 2 …
And all this stuff on A&E and Biography, but they always change stuff so it’s like a disinformation campaign. “You know what, we’ll do a show about this, but we’ll change this and that, and then people will think this is the real thing—and they won’t know any better, because they’re never gonna read a book.” [Laughs] Cuz, you know, that’s how everyone gets their information now.

But to get back to the question: when I’m on the road, I’m hitting all these bookstores — and I’m not hitting Barnes & Noble or any of that bullshit. I’m going to the old bookstores and walking through all these places and looking for all these books and cool books, whatever interests me. There was this one place I stumbled upon in Detroit the last time, this guy I knew was like “You’ve got to go here”, and this place is crazy, like a gigantic warehouse—

Oh yeah, I’ve been there! I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah, this place is gigantic, and it’s like four floors of a warehouse that they converted into this bookstore, with aisles of books. I found for my friend Russ, the guy who does security for me, this biker book that’s really hard to get on the Warlocks, really hard to get. On eBay it’s like two or three hundred bucks, I think I found it for three bucks. It’s cool finding these books, and I like digging through stuff and finding stuff. I’m really good at that.

Do you find that it’s a solitary activity that really suits your disposition?
[Laughs] Maybe! I never heard it that way, but that’s a really good point to bring up that no one ever brings up — yeah, I think it does suit me really well. I would always like to hope that people would be smart, but unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t. It’s one of the things I like about my fans: they seem pretty intelligent, you know, and they’re really cool, and I’m pretty lucky in that aspect, because it’s not that they’re dopey mindless people — they’re really cool and smart, and they get into stuff, and it’s pretty wild. Yeah.

Yeah, I was curious about your book-buying also because of that scene in the home video for your first solo album, which has that scene where you show your book collection …
It’s much bigger now. [Laughs]

I can imagine — that’s such a great scene in that film. I’m also curious if you’re still a big comic book fan. I know you were kind of involved in making them —
I’m not “kind of” involved, I’ve had my own comic line since 1993, the first book was out in ’94, but — yeah, I put a lyric book out along with my record label and my comic company just put out a new Verotika, which is pretty wild. Yeah, so Bisley and I are getting ready to do a Jaguar God if he ever … answers his phone!

Simon Bisley?
Yeah, it took forever to get him to do the lyric book illustration. He does a really good job — he’s out of his mind, but he’s really talented — and the fans are digging the book. So I’m happy, he’s happy. He actually called to tell me, “Wow, this came out great!”

DANZIG | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | June 21 | 7 pm | $25 | 888.693.2583 or www.houseofblues.com.

La Roux: Interview with Elly Jackson (Boston Phoenix, 10/21/09)

La Roux is a duo, and a wildly successful one at that; their homonymous debut album blew up in their native UK (with singles “Bulletproof” and “In For the Kill” pushing it to #2 over there) and worldwide fame seems only a few short centimetres away. But you’d be forgiven for thinking of them as a one-woman show: 21-year old Eleanor “Elly” Jackson is the face of La Roux, as well as its voice (co-producer/collaborator Ben Langmaid is not part of the live La Roux experience). Jackson cuts a striking figure, her voice and presence both icy and yearning, and her delivery as in-your-face and prominent as the cantilevered rouge mane that frames their album cover. I caught up with Elly on the phone while she is in Old Blighty preparing for La Roux’s upcoming North American tour:

You have both a striking visual theme and a distinctive musical attack.  Which came first?
The look was definitely inspired by the music, it came much later. Basically, we’d been in the studio for years working on songs, until it was finally time to start playing live, and then we had to think of things differently, you know?  When you’re in the studio, you’re not necessarily thinking about the aesthetic, you’re just thinking about the sound and the songs. And then when you have to tour the record, you know, you start doing album shoots and whatnot and it all becomes a bit of a bigger thing. You have ideas about things during the record but they don’t materialize until afterward.

Right — but the band is called la roux, which is French for “the redhead,” so you must have has some idea when forming the band what you would be shooting for, right?
Well, that’s only referring to my hair, you know? I’ve always been a redhead and I suppose I always will be, right?  But that’s just referring to who I am, and now people perceive it almost as a brand, or something going along with the visual image. In the end it’s just a band name.

You and Ben recorded this album by yourselves, not in a big studio with a big producer, and now that album is huge and has spawned chart hits, etc. Given the album’s success, how do you feel about its humble sonic origins?
Well, the thing is that I don’t like records that sound really shiny and overproduced and stuff. In my favorite records, you can hear the room and the atmosphere of that day of the recording. You know, recordings where you can hear little things in the background. We also really liked having it be, at times, a bit cheap sounding. Me and Ben are big fans of that, we’d talk about how we could make things sound really cheap and tinny, we were definitely kind of putting that on; you know, in addition to the record being made in a, well, a shit situation where there was no soundproofing and it was just some small dirty room.

Now we have options and we could go into big studios with a big producer, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t look back on the album and see it as being a demo, as some people do. For me, the album is still a bit overproduced, there are still parts that I wish could be a bit cheaper and tinnier sounding!

Your voice on this record is really distinctive; it’s raw and unnerving and not afraid of sounding that way.
Yeah, I think my voice really sets me apart. People can hear a real kind of natural thing about it. It’s not perfect, and I think people really respond to things that aren’t perfect, or things that sound raw, instead of things that sound shimmery and shiny. Those kinds of voices sound great on the radio and whatever, but at the end of the day they don’t sound like anyone in particular, and they lack character and real feeling and real emotion. I think a lot of people have just gotten quite used to that kind of sound, and that’s definitely something that Ben and I have tried to go against with this album.

The vocal timbre isn’t the only thing that’s raw; the lyrics are full of all sorts of anguish. Is there any pressure now to re-enter that kind of world to reproduce those feelings for the next album?
No, not at all. You know, when we did this album, I didn’t want to make a really melancholic album — I just felt like that then. But I wouldn’t try it again, that would be boring, to repeat the same feelings and emotions. And more importantly, I don’t feel like that anymore, I’m much happier now than when I wrote that record. I think the next record will be more . . . observational, mainly because I think writing about any personal emotion would be difficult. I’m just too busy to focus, and there’s not much to write about right now in those terms, because I spend all of my time in hotels and touring — although a lot of rock bands have made a lot of money writing about that!

In your presentation and in your music, is there a sense of confrontation? Do you feel like you have to be unusual to be distinctive?
Well, the thing is that it’s not about being unusual, you know — in a lot of ways this whole thing is just a character. I mean, it’s not like I’m some kind of flame-headed freak! And it’s not like I’m trying to come off as unusual because everyone else is just so plain-Jane or anything like that. It’s just sort of how I am.

LA ROUX + YES GIANTESS + MISTAKER | Paradise, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | October 27 at 7 pm | $13 (adv.), $15 (dos) | 18+ | 617.562.8800 or www.thedise.com

Crooked X: Your New Favorite Teenage Rock N Roll High School Metal Music Machine (Boston Phoenix, 1/9/09)

Before I climb onto the enormo tour bus of Oklahoma modern rockers Crooked X to conduct an interview under the watchful eye of their management, I meet up with them at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and witness their drummer, Boomer, ask his road manager, with a straight face, if they have Egg McMuffins here. Now, I suppose you could be rolling your eyes here at Spinal Tap excess and common-man-out-of-touch-ness and whatnot, but keep in mind that Boomer (and the rest of Crooked X) are all 14 years old — so pardon them for their child-like naivete. Because really, what did your freshman-year high school rock band sound like? And had you done tours with Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper before you were Bar Mitzvah-age? Like I said, management (and parents) were in the room when I talked to the band, so I couldn’t get the skinny on any illicit tour activity — but honestly, these kids seem way too focused on rocking the world and making it big, in that order, to really be distracted by the high life. They’ve been doing this since they were 8 and 9 years old (!) — so while other kids their age are playing Rock Band, they’re recording songs that get on to Rock Band. And rocking the nation one auditorium at a time.

DB: Tell me how the band started.

FORREST (vocals, guitar): Me and Boomer knew each other since we were in the womb. We’ve grown up together: we played on the same football team, and we hadn’t won a game all year. Both of our dads coached the team, and they were talking and they were like “Well, my son plays guitar, does your son play drums? Let’s get them together and let them have some fun.” So we went back to Boomer’s garage and learned some Metallica and AC/DC songs.

JOSH (bass): The whole thing slowly built, and we didn’t know it while it was happening. We were just having fun.

JESSE (guitar, vocals): We weren’t really thinking about, you know, getting songs on the radio, when we started. We were just getting together, on the weekend, you know– I don’t know, man, we just love it, we love playing together.

DB: What was your first show like?

FORREST: Our first show was my sister’s birthday party, four or five years ago, I think it was fifth or sixth grade. After the show, we thought we did awesome, we thought we were the stuff. Then we saw the video and we were like “Oh, we have a lot of work to do.”

JESSE (guitar, vocals): We’ve definitely grown together as a band — we practice now four, five, six days a week, three to four hours a day. The longest we’ve ever taken off is 10 days in the last four years.

DB: Tell me about your first single, “Rock And Roll Dream”: it sounds a lot different than your other, more metallic tunes.

FORREST: That song, that’s kind of our singalong song. We have a lot of heavier stuff on our album, kind of Southern metal, but we needed some song that would give us some leverage, and “Rock and Roll Dream” is kind of the song that all the little kiddies will sing along to, so that’s what that song’s about.

BOOMER: We wrote that song needing, like, a hook, because every big band out there needs a hook in their song to at least make it on the radio, so I guess you could say that that’s our radio song.

JOSH: We’re hoping that song will get our other songs out there, you know?

DB: You guys are 14 years old and you do this band full-time: what was the decision like to take the band seriously at such a young age?

FORREST: It was tough because we had to sit down and say “Is this what we really want?”. We knew that there was gonna be a lot of sacrifice, and there are a lot of things that we’re not able to do that most kids do, like have a social life at school! But on the upside, we’re doing things that other kids may never do, so we’re growing up in a different way.

JESSE: We’re very fortunate to be in our position.

BOOMER: When we were first starting out, my dad and Jesse’s dad told us “Alright, if you guys want to get serious, do it now and we’ll book you shows and stuff; if not, you can be a garage band and make it like that.” And we all agreed that this is what we want to do, this is how we want to make our living.

Amanda Palmer (Boston Phoenix, 9/25/08)

So it’s the eve of the release of local sensation and Dresden Dolls vocalist/pianist Amanda Palmer’s solo debut album (produced by Ben Folds), and I’m sitting in her bric-a-brac-filled South End apartment drinking herbal tea. We’ve just taken a moment to notice a remarkable spider web forming in the open window of her kitchen; closer inspection reveals a spider in the center packaging up a helpless victim for a later lunch. I interrupt the moment to ask the obvious question:

Okay, so let’s get the biz out of the way first: your new album is Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, and now it’s like “Ooh, are the Dresden Dolls finished, what does this mean?”  What do you think people will read from this?
I don’t know what people want my answer to be. I think the fans probably want to hear that the band is going to go on forever and ever. And I think in some incarnation, it will. But Brian and I are also really happy doing our own projects right now, and we haven’t nailed down what’s going to come out after this.

Was this solo album intentional, or did it just sort of happen?
It all sort of happened, it started out as a much smaller thing, and originally this was going to take a matter of months.

When was this?
This was two years ago. I was going to record it in my apartment with a local engineer, and record it, master it, put it out, no press, no fanfare. And the collection of songs was different back then, it was this collection of piano ballads. And so that changed. Once Ben Folds got involved, it kind of morphed into this large project. Also, while that was happening, the band was evolving. Evolving and de-volving.

What do you mean “evolving”?
Well, I think that Brian and I were getting fundamentally burned on touring. We had been touring for I think pretty much five years non-stop. We were just getting burned on everything: the routine, each other. It’s really, really hard to maintain a relationship like that when it’s just two people.

Was there ever a turning point or an event where you thought “How can I keep doing this?”
There were a lot of those events. I mean, that’s the sort of thing, when you’re touring together, and you’re constantly — I mean, Brian and I are very different, and —

How so?
Oh god, where do I start? We have so much in common, and so many differences, it was a constant roller coaster. We had incredible musical chemistry, wonderful personal bonds, but when our differences would appear and the emotional turmoil would get high, it would get really really high. And one of the fundamental things, for me, that was hardest, is that I wasn’t used to dealing with relationships like that. Because usually if I was in a relationship like that with a boyfriend or a friend, and the kitchen got really hot, I would just take off and go “Oh, this relationship is too intense, there’s too much conflict, it’s not worth all this fighting, I’m just gonna go”. But being in a band like this is like being married: you have to commit and work through your problems, but it was a lot of work. And I think Brian and I, as much as we love each other, got really exhausted by the constant work that the relationship took to maintain. And that’s the thing that’s so hard to understand is that we love playing music with each other, we love each other, we’re great friends, but we’re so relieved to be doing our own things.

It’s like if you went to a marriage counselor, they’d tell you “You need to find new things to do…”
“You need a hobby now that the kids are out of the house!” My feeling is that Brian and I have such intense chemistry with each and we literally just love playing with each other so much that the chances of the band not playing again together are very slim. But I think it’s going to take us a while to figure out what incarnation that might take.

How did the whole Ben Folds thing happen?
Ben Folds e-mailed me, out of the blue — he sent a message to the band, a fan mail basically, saying “Hey, I’m Ben Folds, I’m in Japan touring, I picked up both of your records, they’re really incredible, I just want to wave and say I’m here.”  After I got over the initial shock of how flattering that was —

You were of course a fan of the album he did with William Shatner a few years ago, I take it.
Well, no! I didn’t even know about that record. I was familiar with Ben in passing — I think I owned one of his records. I knew some of his other hits. But I was by no means a die-hard fan. And I think that was lucky, because if I had been a die-hard fan —

It would have been weird?
It would have been weird. But instead he came to me, like “Oh, I really respect you, I really like your music.” I sort of went back and revisited his music, I bought more of his music, I got more familiar with his stuff, I got the William Shatner record — that blew me away, that really tipped me over the edge. When I heard that he produced that, I thought, “He obviously can produce a great record.”

Did he have any Shatner stories?
His stories about William Shatner were all wonderful, he did a great imitation of Shatner. Ben was just incredible to work with, he was really really easy to work with, he was totally professional, there was no drama. And it was really nice to go into that work environment and — I also put a lot of faith in him. I went down there with a big pile of songs, plunked them on the table and said “I trust you”. He took a lot of my songs that I really didn’t have arrangements for, and he completely arranged them from top to bottom. I had faith that he would do the right thing. I would leave Nashville, come up to Boston, and sit behind my computer waiting for a mix, and he would send something up and just blow my mind. And for that I feel really lucky, I’ve had other creative projects where I naively walked in saying, “Oh, this is going to be great, no problems, it’s all going to be awesome,” and things would really not necessarily work out. But with Ben, he totally got me, he got it, he nailed all the songs.

It’s interesting for me hearing you say that working with him had no drama; it would seem that for Dresden Dolls fans, the “drama” is part of what they want to imagine goes on during a recording.  Do you think “going solo” has led you to pursue a more drama-free situation, artistically?
I’ve got to read you something! Hold on. [Gets up and rummages through other room]  I was just reading this yesterday and, um — oh, here it is, [heads back into room holding book] it’s David Lynch’s new book —

Oh yeah, his book on TM [Transcendental Meditation]…
Yeah, but’s not just about that, it’s also about art, and . . . [thumbing through book] ummm . . .  where’d it go . . . let’s see . . . [continues thumbing] . . . umm . . . I’m going to have to start dog-earing these things . . . [still thumbing] . . . oh, I think it’s here . . . Yes! Page eight, it says, “Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story but they are like poison to the filmmaker or the artist. They are like a vice grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create, you must be able to catch ideas.” And you know what, I was just in the UK doing a bunch of press, and a bunch of the journalists who came to me just assumed that I was this crazy person, like this psychotic fucked-up bitch. But they were really interested in that, and that was sort of their angle, like, “What’s it like to be such a fucked-up person, Amanda Palmer?” And obviously, I was like, “Well, this is great that they listened to the record,” and I guess I can see that, in the record you could pick up on lots of anger, lots of drama, lots of psychosis, whatever — but I always work on the assumption that if you’re able to exorcise all that stuff through your art, that allows you to lived a balanced life as a person. And if you actually are really fucked-up and psychotic, then yes, you can make art, but it doesn’t make it easier, and it doesn’t necessarily make your art better. It’s more about access. And one thing that’s really frustrating, as a songwriter, is that, unlike maybe a filmmaker or a sculptor or a painter, people will immediately assume that your songs are you and that if your songs are, you know, depressed or angry or psychotic, that you must be angry or depressed or psychotic. And definitely in certain cases that’s true with certain people. But I’ve always looked at it as the opposite: it’s like, I’m actually able not to be fucked up and angry and psychotic because I get to write all the time.

I feel like people, in general, don’t want to know that about artists.
They want the romance.

Right, it’s like when I was a kid and I read some thing where Ozzy Osbourne was talking about how his favorite band was the Beatles, and I was like “What? He’s not supposed to be listening to that!”
Like, he’s supposed to be listening to nothing but satanic chants!

Yeah, well, it seems like it’s especially true of artists that develop a defined aesthetic.
Yeah, and that aesthetic can trap you. It can trap you as an artist and as a person. One of the things that is really scary is that you harbor this concern that if there is no drama in your life, you’re not going to have a resource to pull from, because you start noticing that the best songs you write are when you’re heartbroken, and you’re frustrated, and you’re pissed off. And so you are a little more willing to live closer to the edge of drama because it’s seems more interesting. But I think that, at least as I go along, I realize that there’s always going to be drama that you can just pull out and grab. You don’t have to live it, you don’t have to suffer for your art — you have to suffer anyway! Life is full of suffering no matter which way you cut it, you don’t have to go and create it. I think a lot of teenagers do that, I think that’s also — when I was a teenager, writing a lot of stuff on the early Dolls records, I think that’s why it connected with so many teenagers, because you definitely do that. Especially as an artistic teenager, you’re convinced that you’ve got to be this tortured soul, and you’ve got to be full of drama and angst, and everyone will think you’re this interesting person. And if you don’t have drama going on in your life, that everyone will think that you’re this uninteresting person sitting in the corner that no one will take an interest in. And some people never grow out of it, and some people are so, like — it’s doesn’t matter if they are artistic or not. People who are filled with drama are just filled with drama, they’re just attached to that for whatever reason. And I think a lot of the time it is because they think that if they’re not doing that whole “Aaiiggh my life is so fucked up” thing, talking to their co-workers and their families, then maybe they won’t be interesting and and people won’t want to listen to then and they need to skew that way in order to be heard. A lot of that has to do with where they came from, maybe not being heard as a kid. It’s interesting.

Do you feel like, on the cusp of this solo album, you can kind of look back on the Dresden Dolls as something you did as a teenager onward for all these years, and just go “Huh, look at that”?
Yeah, like “That’s what that was!” You know what’s interesting is that I think there are two — no wait, three stories to the Dresden Dolls: there is what happened with our fans and our community and our life; there’s the story of me and Brian and our relationship, which is a different story; and then there’s an entirely separate story apart from that with the public’s perception of what the Dresden Dolls is as an idea. And those three stories are really different — I mean, they’re intertwined but they followed separate trajectories. And one thing that is constantly challenging for me is trying to, umm, what’s the word I’m looking for, sort of negotiate the difference between the Dresden Dolls as it’s own entity and how the fans and the bands interacted, and what we did, and what happened with how the outside mainstream media considers the story to be, which is really uninformed and weird. So, I’m constantly getting feedback from the inside going, “Oh, obviously we did this and this and this,” and I’ll read press like some random magazine from London and it’s like, “Oh, that’s what people thought we did. That’s not right, that’s so strange!” So negotiating those things is really weird. And especially with my new record coming out, a lot of those things are getting dredged up, everyone’s obviously comparing what I’m doing to the Dolls.

Well, I think with the Dresden Dolls if you consider your self-created categorization as “Brechtian cabaret punk,” the Brechtian part implies a breaking down of the wall between artist and audience.
Yeah.

So now that you’re putting out a solo album, there’s this audience that was a part of The Thing, and they are probably wondering if that’s still true, or what their role is now that things have changed.
One of the wonderful things about having such a loyal fan base and a really intelligent one at that, who want to stay involved, is that they just come along. Most of them are really interested to see what i’m doing and they’re really willing to give it a shot.

So you don’t feel a need to give a big fuck you to an audience defining you or whatever?
Oh, no. I don’t really get much of that, so I don’t really need to feel defensive. One of the things that I’ve been really trying to pay attention to, apropos this last thing we’re talking about, is how real and fundamental my relationship with my fans with, and how direct. The internet has made that possible. It used to be totally fucking impossible. With my blog, with the way music is distributed, the way everything happens, our fan’s ability to get the word out instead of relying on marketing and promoting. I mean, it really has fundamentally changed in the last eight years. And for that, I feel insanely grateful, and all I need to do is, if things aren’t doing well with the label, or with some publicity thing, or some sort of detached amorphous promotional something from above, all I have to do is remember that I have a mainline to all of these people, and that that is so much more valuable than getting press in Rolling Stone or being on MTV or, you know — those things, they’re so meaningful. But they’re becoming more and more antiquated. Like I’ll talk to bands at my level, and we’ll have this discussion where I’ll say, “Oh, you get so much more press than the Dresden Dolls, you’re always in Spin magazine,” and they’ll turn to me and go, “Oh, but you’re selling twice as many tickets as we are.” And we’ll sit there looking at each other and go, “Hmm.” Well, who’s actually the lucky one, right? And it’s hard to wrap your head around because you just need to look at the solid numbers and the actual dialogue going on with the fans and remember that what’s being dictated, that we’re so used to the charts telling us what’s going on, and MTV telling us what’s going on back when I was a kid, the radio telling us what’s going on has less and less and less to do with reality. And I said as a child of the ’80s where there were megastars and a very defined pyramid of success and fame and popular bands, that’s all gone out the window, and I just get to sit here and cherish the thing that we’ve built and appreciate it, and that’s been blowing my mind lately, you know?

Yeah, it’s kind of like the recent brouhaha over Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead leaking their own albums, it’s like if you have a certain cult thing going on, you’re relationship to The Biz doesn’t mean anything —
— What it means is profound!  What it means is “You can do it!”  It doesn’t “mean,” in quotes, anything! Except that this is possible, and musicians no longer have to rely on the system and the machine to reach out to their fans. But with that also comes this responsibility of, “You have to run your own business, you have to take care of your fans, you have to create your own entity.” And that whole fantasy of being on a record label and getting in a limo and going to a show, that just doesn’t exist, you have to banish that from your list.

Do you think that this change has affected the general work ethic that it takes to “make it”?
Well, I’ve obviously met tons of bands and lots of musicians of all kinds, and —

You can feel free to trash talk.
Well, there’s no one that I really want to trash, but I — especially musicians that I really, uh, you know, admire. I’ll get into conversations with them about what they’re doing, press-wise, how they’re running their business, and how they’re running their MySpace, and how they’re taking care of their merch, how they’re running the show, and they will sometimes be so clueless, that I’ll feel this sense of desperation for them, because other people can only maintain for you for so long. I’ve definitely hung out with musicians who really weren’t taking responsibility for keeping their show together, and you definitely watch it screw them.

Yeah, it’s like when you watch Behind The Music, all these ’70s acts, “Our manager screwed us,” over and over again.
Yeah, you let your manager screw you! And when you look back at the ’60s and the ’70s, with people literally getting screwed to the wall, making millions of records and not seeing a penny, even from their touring, just nothing nothing nothing, you have to remember that the information didn’t exist. The cards had been stacked against people and there was no world wide information network and there weren’t shelves of books on the music business.

And let’s be honest, no one really felt bad for rock stars who weren’t making the millions they deserved or whatever.
I’m sure their mothers did. But it was, you know, musicians were just not as informed. But nowadays, if you don’t know what’s going on with your business, you really just look stupid. Because you can know, and if you don’t take precautions, have a good lawyer, make sure your manager’s not screwing you, all of thsoe little steps — if you don’t take responsibility for that, you just lose. And it’s so hard, I mean, that’s the thing that’s so ironic, it’s that — well, maybe not ironic, but unfair, is that is why is a musician expected to negotiate all of that? Whoever wrote into the rulebook that, “Oh, if you write songs, you also need to be able to like, negotiate lawyers, managers, booking agents, publicists, and labels”?

Well, I guess if you want to write songs, you can write songs. But if you want people to hear them, and you want to get paid for it, and want to get credit for it . . .
Yeah, that’s really — that’s a question that, umm, I think about all the time, because I spend the vast majority of my time not working on music, I spend it behind the Mac [holding her laptop]. We have a much closer relationship than I have with my piano. It can also be very tempting to e-mail instead of write music, because e-mail is very instantly gratifying, and there’s a lot of wonderful feedback and connection and blogging can also give you that wonderful jolt of connection with people, and I think, “Wow, I remember when I used to be a songwriter.” Now, I seek connections between things in the world and I take those images and put them into my blog. I don’t put them into songs — “Songs take so long, no one’s going to hear this shit for ten months, if I do this blog thing now, someone will write back to me on their reflection of it in ten minutes.” And that’s very dangerous, because it can strip you of the private internal intimate relationship you might have with your music-making. And that’s something I have yet to figure out, how to balance these two machines.

Yeah, but that’s kind of the sophomore thing, right?  Once you’ve done The Thing, and you have to do The Next Thing —
Yeah, but there’s this wonderful thing I’ve noticed happening, which is that there is a hump that you do get over where you can kind of let things run by themselves, and also —

Songwriting-wise or business-wise?
Business-wise. Which allows you to step back and breathe a little bit and read books and maybe write more music that you would because you start trusting — not only that things will sort of happen because you set up a team, but you also care a little less. Because when you make your first record, it has to be perfect. And when you make your second record, that pretty much has to be perfect too. But by the time you’re on your third record, you just don’t care as much.

Because you know there’ll be another one?
Because you’ll have another one, but also because you’ve proven yourself to the world and to your fans and you can let up a little bit and experiment a little bit more. This is not to say that I was not a complete anal perfectionist with this record, but I was willing to stretch a little bit more and say, “You know, I’m not sure about this, Ben, but sure, let’s do it.”

Do you think that you were in a different musical head space when you did this solo album?
Oh yeah, totally. First of all, it was a different collection of songs, and it was all about finding a new voice, literally. I was having vocal problems. I think one thing I noticed was that I didn’t feel the need to be as loud.

Yeah, I can hear that. The vocals are different, lots of double-tracked parts.
Yeah, and it’s not as screamy and poundy. It’s a little more, for lack of a better term, more grown-up. When you realize that you don’t need to be scream to be heard and you just back up and speak quietly and go “I have something to say, if you feel like listening, then that’s great,” instead of “Fuck!  I’ve got this problem!” you know? That’s the evolution that hopefully— one of the things that I always fear is that i’m going to wind up one of those terribly boring adult contemporary artists where they music gets really bland and your life is suburban and it’s not fucking interesting and you don’t have anything to talk about and this doesn’t relate to me, and I listen to artists who get into their ’40s and ’50s, and i’m terrified of that. But then you hear other artists, like Tom Waits, or David Bowie, or Björk, people who just don’t go down that road at all, that just keep creating. And I think that gets back to that idea of access: as long as you can access power and drama and sadness and depression and anger, even if you’re living in your little cottage in Ibiza with your nine servants and your boat — fucking right on!  That’s actually all that it’s about, that you can say something interesting to me.

Okay, so earlier you referred to yourself as an ’80s girl. But! Here’s the deal: so I saw you at the Harborlights show a few months ago —
The Death Cab show?

Yeah, and you opened with Radiohead’s “Creep,” and you did Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy,” and you named your new album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? which is a Twin Peaks reference, and you worked with Ben Folds, and you have Radiohead’s The Bends sitting over there on that table, and I was just wondering what is the significance of the early/mid-’90s to you and your aesthetic?
Okay, I have to embarrassingly admit that I missed most of the 90’s [holds up The Bends CD]. I didn’t buy this record until two years ago. My shameful secret is that I didn’t know who Kurt Cobain was when he died. I was out of the loop because I was locked up in my own little bubble of music that my strange circle of friends and my older boyfriend was turning me on to. My favorite bands back then were the Legendary Pink Dots, and Coil, and Current 93, and the Swans, and Nick Cave. And when I went into a record store, that’s all I looked at. I didn’t listen to the radio. Ever. I just wasn’t a radio listener. I didn’t watch TV. I wasn’t hanging out in public places, I was always wearing my Walkman, so my mixtapes and my record collection were my only input. And so, you know, I remember seeing people’s t-shirts, and I’d be like, “Oh, Nirvana, I wonder what that is. Pearl Jam, what a stupid band name.” Sort of absorbing it vaguely. When I started sort of slowing down and letting other music seep in, someone played me OK Computer when I was 20 years old and I thought, “Wow, there’s music like this, this is incredible!” and I listened to that record, but just that record, for like six months. And it didn’t even occur to me to go out and buy other Radiohead records, I was just like, “I’m just happy with this one.”  And then gradually, like I picked up Nevermind and I was like “Oh, this is a really good record,” and I bought a Pearl Jam CD and I was like, “Oh I hate this, this is terrible.” And I bought a Hole record and I was like, “Uh, I kind of like this song, kind of hate these songs.” And I got into it way after the fact. But that’s also kind of nice because the things that stood the test of time that I hear people talking about now, those are the ones that I cherry pick. Brian was really instrumental in turning me on to a lot of ’90s bands that I had no knowledge of. You know, the music that I’m sentimental about and romantic about is the ’80s, and I’ll never be able to feel nostalgic about ’90s music because I just wasn’t there when it was happening, it wasn’t the soundtrack of my life like it was to other people. But if you throw on a Depeche Mode CD from 1987, or a Cure album from 1985, I get all weepy.

Okay, so you were into Nick Cave and the Legendary Pink Dots and the Swans and the Cure; and yet when the Dresden Dolls came out, you had a pretty certain aesthetic but at the same time you defined yourself as “Brechtian punk cabaret,” in part to avoid being labeled the “g” word; so tell me, what is it about “goth” that is so divisive?
You know what’s really interesting about that question is the bands that you just mentioned: The Legendary Pink Dots, the Swans, Nick Cave, they all would have cringed at being called “goth.”

Wouldn’t they? But there’s a code there, and we all know! We can read the code!
Yeah, but even Bauhaus: I did an interview with Peter Murphy and we bonded over our hatred of being called goth: and this is the dude who opened up Coachella by swinging onstage as a vampire bat, and he was like, “Hmph! It’s not goth, it’s art!” Because there really are bands who want to be goth, and especially nowadays: there’s like, I dunno, Marilyn Manson, Switchblade Symphony—

I’m going to guess that Marilyn Manson wouldn’t want to be called goth either. I could see him not self-identifying.
He might not. But it’s sort of like — nowadays, it’s like calling a band “emo.”  It’s actually is a genre, but no one wants to be in it.

Did you think, before you did music, but you were in that whole world, did you think even then, “I’m not goth”?
You know, I have never delved into this in an interview, but I had a really heartbreaking experience when I was in my late teens, and I was just coming out of my hole — you know, I was really sort of an antisocial and isolated teenager. And I never had a social group, but in the distance I’d see groups of punks and groups of goths and I’d think, “Oh, they all look really cool and they must be really happy to all be with each other.” And I assumed, because of the music I listened to, because I liked the Smiths and loved the Cure and x y and z, I assumed that if I met those people, and infiltrated their clan, we would like each other, and we would be friends, and they would be smart and intelligent and because they loved the Cure and I loved the Cure we would have this deep fucking bond. And I was sorely disappointed becuase I did that for a while and I sort of wore gothy clothes and tried to go to Man Ray and I never met a single person that I liked. And I sort of sat there feeling really fucking ripped off, because, to me, it looked like this sort of pre-packaged thing where you could find a set of friends because you have music in common, but all the people I met were kind of jerks and into the fashion of wearing these clothes, and it was just, it just didn’t feel friendly, it didn’t feel smart, it didn’t feel artistic, it just felt lame. And so I didn’t try that for very long, I sort of looked around, brushed myself off, went to take a shower, and said, “Obviously those aren’t the people I want to be connected with or want to be associated with.” Even though there would be individual people here and there who would be friendly or who I would like — as a whole, I looked at that set and I said, “No, that’s definitely not me, I’m not one of them.” And I felt sort of the same way about punks: I spent my obligatory summer hanging out in the pit [in Harvard Square] when I was sixteen with my fucking mohawk and my many earrings and my fucked up clothes and my middle finger out to everyone all day, chain smoking and pretending to be punk. And those people really weren’t for me either: they were so negative and so bitchy and so whiny. A few of them were artistic and friendly, but I just found myself wandering through those years going, “Where are they? Where are the people like me? It’s not these people — where are they?” And Brian and I used to talk about that all the time — he really felt the same way, and I think one of our main objectives in starting a band was, like, “Let’s just gather us all up and get us all in one club, for fuck’s sake. Like, we can’t find us, so let’s bring us together.”

See, this is the lesson of ’80s John Hughes movies: that there are those people, and that kids aren’t really the stereotypes that outsiders think they are.
It really is true! And the people that buy into their own stereotypes just suck. People who really are hipsters, they’re terrible!

You always just sort of think that they’ll grow out of it.
You assume that. People who identify so strongly, like “I am goth, I listen to goth music, da da da, this is what I am,” I’m always really suspicious of them, because sometimes there’s something behind that, but often they’re just really insecure. And especially the modern goth culture, like if I pick up a copy of Propaganda magazine or something, or I see some modern goth band, it feels very joyless, and that feels very antithetical to who I am, the music I make, the fans I have, and how I want to live my life, that I never want to touch it. And when someone calls me goth, I cringe, because I just don’t want them to stick me in that pile, it just feels like it’s such a bad fit. I think that it’s upsetting to see — like these great bands like the Legendary Pink Dots, or Dead Can Dance, they just got literally picked up and plunked into this category, and seriously, that market is such a niche with such a low glass ceiling, that if you get stuck there, you’re screwed.

Yeah, I’m usually shocked if a band that is described as “goth” is actually good. You know, like, someone will say, “Hey, Christian Death is this really great band,” and you’ll think “Really? But they’re supposed to be goth!”
Death in June, for example, the music does not sound goth to me. There’s definitely darkness in it, but you’ve got a guy playing an acoustic guitar singing in a major key!

Or the dude from Dead Can Dance, who sounds like Neil Diamond half the time.
Yeah!  But it’s also a lot like “punk”— that term has just been bandied about, and it’s much more about fashion than about a genre. And the bands and the artists that are literally saying, “I’m going to tap into that crowd,” like Voltaire or Switchblade Symphony, or, what’s that fucking band, oh yeah, the Cruxshadows! The goth band, they are willing to go up there and say, “We are a goth band, you are goth fans!”

It’s like, I dunno, the metal equivalent would be like Manowar I suppose.
Absolutely. They know who they are, they know who their fans are, and that’s the job. But one thing that’s really important to me, though, is that I not alienate the goth fans. Because I love that they love the Dresden Dolls—And they’ll grow out of those other bands, but not you guys!
I would hope so! I would hope they’d stick around, and that as I evolve and they evolve, we’ll all hang out together.

Steve Albini: Excellent Italian Interview (Boston Phoenix, 10/23/07

Steve Albini: a pretty nerdy guy

Steve Albini is a pretty nerdy guy. It didn’t take long in a conversation with him until we were talking about poker chat room culture, CuteOverload.com, and Rick Astley. The rock band that he sings and plays guitar for, Shellac, is pretty nerdy too. But like Albini himself, much of the band’s charm comes from this attitude of not really caring how nerdy they come across. This is a band, after all, that built their own amplifiers and included specs on the amps in the liner notes of their first single. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they make blistering minimal hard rock with one of rock’s greatest rhythm sections (drummer Todd Trainer, bassist Bob Weston) and one of rock’s most singularly distinctive guitarists.

Shellac’s most recent album, Excellent Italian Greyhound (Touch And Go), released earlier this year, was their first in seven years. I thought it would be really cute to interview Albini in Italy, since the album title mentions Italy, and they were playing in Italy, and coincidentally I was going to be there anyway. But like a lot of things Shellac, “Italy” is just some involved meta in-reference, so I might as well have interviewed Steve Albini on Pluto. As it was, I interviewed him in a rock club called Interzona in Verona, setting of part of Romeo and Juliet, the work that, for you internet readers, was the original inspiration for Baz Luhrmann’s classic 1994 film Romeo + Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as star-crossed lovers who packed large handguns and weren’t afraid to use them on each other/themselves. Walking to the venue involved leaving behind the old world charm of the typically exquisitely Italian downtown area of Verona and entering an area haunted by the run-down relics of Italy’s Fascist public works period.

So what is this place?
It’s actually pretty famous ― during the Fascist period, Mussolini had this idea that he was going to centralize all of the distribution of produce from Italy ― that everything grown all over Italy was going to come to Verona, to a central magazina, and then from there it would be shipped out to all over Italy under state direction. And to facilitate that, he built this big magazina, and there’s a refrigerated train switch yard, and trains cars would come in full of fruits and vegetables, and they would stay refrigerated there and then they would go through the roundabout to get loaded up onto different trucks, all under refrigeration ― so it was all a big socialism of farm production. Of course it was a total disaster and never worked, and by the time everything was built and completed, the Fascists had been chased out so then there were these giant disused buildings that were eventually squatted, and over time the squat became a legitimate venue and organized with the city. The original Interzona rock club was in the big roundhouse, the frigatoria, and it was a kind of commune, left-wing thing. This building has only recently been used as a venue, and this is the new Interzona, but it’s the same compound as the old Interzona, and gradually they are renovating it to become an arts complex.

Yeah, for some reason I thought that this show was going to be you guys in some cheesy Eurodance club or something.
This venue has actually been around for a long time, and every band I’ve ever been in has played here ― Rapeman has played here, Shellac has played here, Big Black played here a few times.

When Shellac began, it had kind of a Canadian theme, which, I dunno, was maybe an elaborate ruse?
Well, it’s kind of a temporary ― like, we get stuck in a loop, and we were stuck in a Canadian loop for a while

Right, Canada, baseball, etc. When did the Italian thing come about?
I’ll tell you what happened: I started communicating with the band Silkworm exclusively in Fake Italian. They sort of started Fake Italian. Fake Italian is speaking English with an Italian syntax and vocabulary, like using unnecessarily florid vocabulary, like [gestures to Shellac bassist Bob Weston and then speaks in fake Italian accent] “Tonight, the hair of Bob, she is like some kind of beautiful octopus, or many squids, and they are all simultaneously they are fighting and they are dancing on the Bob, and it makes from Bob a super-organism these squids fighting and dancing and the Bob.” Which is a way of saying “Bob needs a haircut.”

The nice thing about Fake Italian is that it allows you to say things that you would get punched for saying normally. It’s sort of like, we had a thing about ventriloquists for a while [as featured in the Shellac song “Mouthpiece” from 1997’s Terraform], that ventriloquists are actually just assholes that get away with it because they talk with their hands. And why does anybody actually pay money to go through that experience? It’s so retarded. If he didn’t use a funny voice and use a puppet, you’d deck him.

Right, because some people/most people are into abuse if the right distance is there.
Well, yeah, if it’s somebody harmless enough like Andrew Dice Clay, well then it’s charming. It seems like it would take a special kind of an asshole to try to get away with ventriloquism though. It would have to be a goal of yours to be insulting all the time and also not have to take responsibility for it. So you’d have to be not just a dick, but also a weasel.

Well, if you look at depictions of ventriloquists in popular culture, movies and television, etc., they’re usually creeps, and dramatically it never ends well for them.
Right. Well, that’s just an example of one of the little minor obsessions that the band fell into at some point.

So how did the Fake Italian obsession get going?
Well, it was Fake Italian for me, and then Todd bought this dog, this Italian greyhound, Uffizi ― awesome dog. And he started talking to the dog in sort of Fake Italian, but it was sort of a pet language, it wasn’t really normal Fake Italian, if I can claim authority on what is or isn’t normal Fake Italian. And he would praise Uffizi, he’d say [in fake Italian accent] “Excellent Italian Greyhound”. And then that phrase became kind of a shorthand for anything we wanted to compliment or demonstrate approval of ― “Excellent Italian Greyhound.” Like, you know, “that was a nice meal ― Excellent Italian Greyhound.” And like I said, we just get stuck in these loops.

So would you say that a lot of your lyrical preoccupations are almost in-jokes?
Oh, 100-percent. It’s not that they’re almost in-jokes, it’s that they are in-jokes. And I like to think that there is something beyond just the fact that it’s an in-joke. It’s not like The Spaghetti Incident [as in Guns N’ Roses’ quizzically titled 1994 all-covers album of the same name], you know, something of no value, you know?

So in the sense that your in-jokes are solvable rather than completely inscrutable?
Yeah, but not just that they’re solvable, but that the little turns of phrase of the perspectives have some utility outside the band, you know? Like, there’s a picture of Uffizi, the greyhound, on the cover of out new record. And there’s another illustration that [illustrious illustrator/show flyer maven] Jay Ryan did, which is this army of Italian greyhounds sort of bounding over the hills, and then inside the gatefold there’s another illustration, a sort of decampment of Italian greyhounds, sort of “at ease.” And the dogs, they all look awesome, they’re really cool looking dogs, and I kind of feel like if you can foster an appreciation of these dogs somehow, that’s useful. Like, reading the expressive quality of a dog’s face you’re encouraged to see it as a person’s face. It’s sort of like those things you see on the internet all the time, where there’s the owl saying “O RLY?”

Right, the cats with Hitler moustaches.
Right! Those things, I think, are just fantastic. I think they’re great. They’re incredible. Like that siteCuteOverload.com, it’s all just little fuzzy ducklings, and bunny rabbits, and kittens. Just recently there was this video put on there where there’s this really fat cat laying on a sofa, and bunny rabbits are crawling over him and he’s licking them on the head, and like being mother hen to all of these bunny rabbits. And you really can’t tell if he’s cleaning them or tasting them, you know? So there’s actually kind of this sinister edge to almost everyone one of these things. And the way that these cute pictures are almost always used in internet conversations as kind of putdowns or insults. But totally adorable.

So I like sort of creating articles of language. Like there’s a brand new one that I’m really fond of. I don’t know if it started there, but I discovered it on this poker forum that I’m a member of. Really super analytical poker geeks arguing with technical details of poker playing. There’s a thing called a “Rick Roll” now, where if someone posts a link to something that appears to be part of a discussion, some aspect of the conversation that’s underway, right ― but that link is actually a link to a Youtube video link of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” And that’s a “Rick Roll.” If you click on a link that’s going to take you a spreadsheet page or a relevant article or something poker-related, instead you’re actually directed to this hideous video of Rick Astley, dancing in his ultra-dorky way, singing this song. It’s like someone throwing a stink bomb in the middle of a conversation, and it went from happening once to happening over and over again, and if you look up “Rick Roll” in Wikipedia, it sends you to the Rick Astley video. And if you look it up, there’s a definition of “Rick Roll” on the Urban Dictionary site. And this whole thing appears to have happened in the last week. I think that’s awesome, really fantastic. And if we can make some contribution to the cornucopia of gentle insults and accolades that circulate around the world, we’d like to.

And it’s interesting that you say that, because a lot of your stuff in Shellac is sort of jokey, right? But then what’s weird is that you guys also have a side that’s really emotionally heavy and dark and almost overwhelmingly serious. Like the song “End Of Radio” from the new album ― there are funny moments, but then there’s kind of this Armageddon thing going on.
The song’s a bummer.

What’s the origin of that song, if you don’t mind giving it away?
No, I don’t mind. That song came from a sort of ― not actual science fiction, but our conversations about what science fiction’s probably like, since none of us read science fiction.

Right. [Quietly insulted].
So the idea was that you’re the last guy on earth, and you’ve always wanted to be a radio broadcaster, and now you can be, but it’s really kind of pointless because you’re broadcasting to no one. And it’s a kind of extended metaphor about getting what you’ve always wanted, but under circumstances that make it unenjoyable.

So it’s like a Twilight Zone episode [a very specific one actually]?
Sure! But then, at the moment, there’s also a re-jiggering of the power structure of broadcast, such that actual radio is less important than all of these other media outlets that indicate the behavior of radio. And in a very real way, the way that radio was the first boom market like the way radio stocks went through the roof the same way that internet stocks went through the roof. And the way radio sort of became the cutting edge of technology, the best and brightest were all put to work on solving radio problems. Radio is now a completely orphaned medium, nobody gives a shit about it. And it has this sort of parochial limitation on it, by the natural limitation of broadcasting of radio.

I mean, there are people who are legitimately celebrities, like everyone knows their name and follows their every utterance ― in a sphere of about 400 people in a small town. Or there are people who are local celebrities who literally can’t leave their house without being recognized. Like this guy in Chicago, Steve Dahl, for example, in the ’70s ― he was not just a household word, he commanded a sort of army, a legion of fans. His most famous stunt was that he hosted a day for his followers to burn disco records at Comiskey Park. He was responsible for the Disco Demolition.

And there’s something about the notion of celebrity that is extraordinarily saturated but in a very small market. And then you’ll notice that people that start out as radio personalities that become national celebrities, they become crackpot freaks, people like Howard Stern, Don Imus, Larry King, or what’s his name, Rush Limbaugh ― like, they can handle being a superstar to 10,000 people. And that’s good for them. But when they branch out into being a sort of a cultural icon, they can’t carry that much weight and they crack and they turn into freaks and weirdos.

I guess it’s an odd transition to being all about your hometown to attempting to be “king of all media” and losing the local identity that was what you were all about.
Right and no one has ever done it, other than Ronald Reagan. No one has ever gone from being a radio announcer to being someone of actual significance. It’s never happened otherwise. And the thing is that radio simultaneously sounds super high-technology, super-exciting in a kind of technical way, and you know, it’s the beginning of the modern era, the beginning of long distance mass communication ― or I should say instant mass communication, not long distance? But now it’s like this relic.

Well yeah, it’s like there was radio but then there was television, and then radio persevered as the stepchild of TV.
No, I think radio and television co-existed quite comfortably for a long time, the same way that television and film co-existed. I think that they were different enough that there were still radio networks and television networks. Now, it seems like there are so many different ways for people to amuse themselves that radio is such a small part of that spectrum, that the only significant money to be made is by corralling all these little tiny $100,000-a-year profit making stations into these big conglomerations.

I guess if you mull the idea of radio in your mind, it has many little chicked-off facets of interest on it as a concept, but we may be coming to the end of its use, in that fashion, because a lot of those things are going to historical elements rather than contemporary elements. One of the strongest memories that I have as a child is driving around in my grandfather’s truck in his olive orchard listening to Vin Scully broadcasting Dodgers games. The sound of Vin Scully’s voice relaying baseball in this setting that sort of fixes it in my memory ― for the rest of my life, Vin Scully will be the voice of baseball, I will never be able to hear his voice without being brought into this frame of mind where I want to know what’s happening with the Dodgers. And I haven’t given a shit about the Dodgers in what, 40 years, something like that?

Yeah, I used to listen to baseball on headphones in the dark as a kid, and it’s funny because if you think about “the sound of baseball,” it’s like a tree falling in the woods, right?
Right! There’s the quiet murmur of the crowd, and Vin Scully talking about it, that’s what it all boils down to. And then he was doing the game of the week, and even when I wasn’t around my grandfather, in the ’70s, when I was kind of following the Reds and the Pirates, then Vin Scully was announcing those games every now and again, and I still hear Vin Scully in my head when I think about baseball.

One of the songs on our new album, “Genuine Lullabelle,” has a long talking part in the middle. There’s like the music part at the beginning, talking part, quiet part, and then another music part, and in between the music part and the quiet part is this talking part, and in the talking part we have interwoven, with me doing a sort of character study, there are other people’s voices making commentary on it, and those other people’s voices are all voices that we have very strong memory associations with.

We wanted to get Vin Scully, and his son, acting as his manager, told us to fuck off. But Vin Scully would have been a real coup. Studs Terkel sort of agreed to do it, but then he went into the hospital. He broke his back, and he didn’t feel up to it. Then we got other people we liked, whose voices trigger memories.

It’s interesting that at every show you guys do, and on every album, you have at least one song like “Genuine Lullabelle” that’s really an emotionally heavy downer where the rock action subsides and you kind of take the music somewhere else for a while. Even on songs that aren’t that much of a meandering bummer on album.
I know what you’re talking about, and I kind of feel like we have that option available on quite a few of our songs. We can throw a bummer in, especially live, almost anywhere. Part of that is that just in the conceptual framework of the band, we think that all of that stuff is fair game. We think that we can bum ourselves out, we think we can be jubilant, we think we can be triumphant, we can be slapstick, all of that stuff is fair game, and it doesn’t really feel complete, as an evening, unless we’ve at least taken a stab at most of them. Sometimes you can tell you’re going to get nowhere with the bummer, or the comedy or whatever.

Are you trying to get somewhere though, with the audience?
Oh no, no, no, not necessarily with the audience, but with respect with the way that we’re playing, the three of us. Like sometimes we’re just not in the mood to do everything, so we just want to blast, song song song, explosion, and then done. And then sometimes we just feel like we can play all night, and we’re not at all interested in getting through it quickly, basically we want to relish it, so we end up stretching parts out, even the bummer parts.

You guys played a show on 9/11/01, right?
We did. Super bummer.

I imagine. What was the setting of that?
It was scheduled to be the last show of a European tour. We started in Italy with Uzeda, and then we made our way north, finishing in Berlin. And we were in the hotel in Berlin and we all watched the towers collapse live on television. And we were all so bummed out, and whether we played or not seemed a trivial matter, and we realized that we weren’t going to feel better if we didn’t play. The next day is when it sunk in. There was a moment of silence, a public reverence for everyone that got killed. I didn’t know it was happening, but I walked into the big train station as this moment of silence was beginning, and I saw the whole train station, hundreds of hundreds of people, everybody standing there with their heads bowed absolutely silent, and it was one of the most affecting things I’ve ever witnessed. Those people don’t know us, they don’t anyone who was directly affected by it, it was a genuine display of sympathy for a huge calamity.

We ended up being stranded there for almost two weeks, and we got into a kind of routine: we’d get up, go to the train station, get the English language newspapers, read everything, watch CNN, bum out, and go to the Internet cafe and send emails to our girlfriends, and that was basically life for the next 10 to 12 days. And every single person we encountered there was enormously sympathetic, and the feeling of comradeship with those people was so genuine. I think that’s why I was so furious that that goodwill was so squandered. Not that it’s, generally, a bad idea to create enemies out of your friends ― I mean, those people were 100-percent on our side, and our callous and ignorant president managed to turn them against us, managed to take their enormous compassionate empathetic generous nature and nullify it, somehow.

And so quickly too.
That’s the biggest tragedy, yes. Starting a war is terrible, yes. All these people dying is terrible ― but to take what was an opportunity to create a consensus and a framework for cooperation with the whole world, and squander it, just “Fuck ’em.”

Interesting you say that, since there’s pretty much a whole wing of science fiction that deals with the “mad mastermind orchestrating a tragedy to unite the world” gambit.
[laughter]

You mentioned earlier how Shellac as a band has this arsenal of tricks, things that you can do. When you’re working on stuff, how much of these elements are played out intentionally?
An awful lot of it is . . . unfocused. Some stuff develops of its own accord. There’s one thing that happened super accidentally that I’m really fond of. There’s a song we do called “Ghosts,” and there’s sort of an introduction, and the introduction has a break, a moment where we hold the chord for a while, and then go back to the introduction. Out of nowhere, at one show, we just sort of all simultaneously went into slow motion during that suspended chord, and I have no idea why that started ― but it’s now something that we do every time. Like “Oh yeah, we have a slow motion part of the song.” When did that happen? We never talked about it or anything.

So there was no rehearsal, with “Oh hey guys, I’ve got this weird idea for a choreography move?”
Oh no, not at all. It was just like dahdahdahdahdah booooooooooooonnnnngggg, like “Oh, that sounds good, let it go for a while.” And as a result, we realized that we’re all moving in slow motion, and it turned into this thing where we have several extra-musical parts, that aren’t necessarily part of the tune or whatever, but they’re definitely part of the song.

There’s that, there’s a song where we fuck up the beginning a bunch [Greyhound’s “Be Prepared”], and the fucking up the beginning now is a part of the song where we fuck up the beginning, and it’s almost like a game to see who can come up with the best way to fuck up the beginning.

Well, you guys have been a band for 15 years now, so you can work on that level. And since you’re not exactly prolific ―
Yeah, no, not at all.

― And you guys don’t really rehearse a lot, tour a lot, or see each other in a musical context that much, compared to most “real” bands.
Right. It’s unusual for us to get together more than, say, not counting when we get together to rehearse and play a show or tour, for normal rehearsal weekends, 4 times a year, something like that.

When you started the band, was that the plan?
There was no plan, but it has worked out that way. Our lives are kind of demanding, and as our lives get more complex and demanding, the band stuff gets kind of pushed to the margins.

But you still do it.
Oh yeah, it’s still really important to us!  I know that I think about the band ― some part of every single day I spend thinking about stuff I want to do with the band, turning over in the back of my head pretty much all day every day, there’s something to do with the band.

And it’s the same with the other guys?
Probably. And a lot of what we do, aspects of an individual show, an awful lot of that is kind of that we’ve all been thinking about things that we wanted to do in the background next time we’re able to play, and now we have a chance to do it, so let’s do it.

I mentioned before how you can have a little notion that will grab your attention and you’re stuck in a loop and you won’t be able to get out of it. Lately, there’s a thing about monkeys that we just can’t get rid of. Especially the social organization of groups of monkeys. I don’t know why. I’m kind of hung up on it right now. Especially when you see where there’s one tree that’s got a bunch of monkeys in it, and another tree that’s got another bunch of monkeys in it, and they’re like four yards apart ― bitter, sworn enemies ― until a victim monkey shows up, and then they band together, chase that monkey up a tree, tear it apart, eat it, and then they go back to being bitter enemies again. But of course, the females of the bitter enemy tribes still have little liaisons with their neighbor enemy monkey tribes.

So it’s like a monkey version of Temptation Island.
Right.

So do you think that this is the way things will continue for Shellac? Not the monkeys tearing each other apart but the sporadic rehearsing/touring thing?
Seems like it, yeah. It seems like we’ve kind of established a pattern for the band. Definitely. It doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a break in the action for any of us in our normal lives, so…

It’s interesting because from an outside-the-band perspective, if you look at the Shellac discography, there seems to be a gradual deconstruction from the taut nature of the early singles through to the kind of widening looseness of the last several records, and this looseness carries into the live show as well.
Well, we like playing our old songs, but we don’t feel like we have to play them in a reverent fashion. We feel like, you know, they’re ours, we can do whatever the fuck we want with them. And there are ways that we can play them now that didn’t occur to us originally. And there are things that we can do as part of a set of music with a bigger vocabulary of songs, a bigger bunch of ideas attached to them. So we can keep ourselves interested in them. I see a lot of bands where it seems that once they’ve established a method for how a song goes, every time they go out on stage and that song comes up the same way every time. It’s almost like everything about that song is over with except the number of times you hear it.

So this is why bands hate their hits?
Yeah, I guess.

I mean, you’re a big Cheap Trick fan ― are they an example of that? Like Rick Neilson with the five-neck guitar during “Surrender?”
I would, except that every single time I’ve seen them, I’ve been surprised at how awesome their songs are. It must be somnambulistic for them by now, you know? But it still delivers. But you compare that with your average not-awesome band that just has a much shorter menu to draw from, for example, and I’d blow my brains out if I had to, you know, walk out on stage and play the same 15 songs every night for three weeks, you know? I’d hang myself.

There’s a band I did a record with called Bush, and their first record gradually became super-duper popular over the course of about a year and a half-two years, and by the end of their third lap or fourth lap around the United States, they had been constantly on the road, playing the same 15 songs every night for a year and a half. I don’t know how they fucking did it without gargling acid. Seriously, I don’t know how you could do it. There’s a situation, like, they’re a band where the people that came to see them play want to hear that music exactly the way they heard it on the radio, you know? Their audience had kind of a superficial appreciation of that band, so it’s not like they wanted to go and see like a mind-blowing experience, they just wanted to be reminded what it was they liked about the songs they heard on the radio. But they were pretty hemmed in, they were pretty bound by their popularity at that point. I don’t know, I couldn’t handle it. There’s no way I could handle it. I have an enormous amount of respect for them for getting through that and not killing each other or themselves.

I always picture someone at a show like that thinking “What am I doing here, what did I come here for, why did I need to see this live?”
Everyone has a different place for music in their life. Some people have a kitchen radio, and that music is playing while they’re going on with their lives and that’s enough. And every now and again they’ll be a song that they especially like ― Rick Astley, “Never Gonna Give You Up”, for example ― and eventually those people are going to want to buy a record, and what record are they going to buy? “Oh, I really like that Rick Astley song, I think I’ll buy that.” And then once a year they’ll go out to a concert, and they’ll be like “Oh, that Rick Astley that I love so much is coming, let’s go to that.” And you know, the place of music in their lives is different than the place of music in my life. So I cannot expect them to have the same relationship to the aesthetics of it that I do, or even making the same demands on it that I do.

Do you think that the demands you make on music are sane?
I know exactly what you’re saying ―

Sometimes I look at people with a more casual relationship to music and go “Why can’t I be more like that?”
Exactly. “Why does it matter to me?” Because it bums me out so much. Yeah, yeah, like I remember that ZZ Top album with the drum machine on it, and I was like “Why are you breaking my heart right now?” “Why is it not okay for me to just not give a shit about this right now?”

Ron Asheton (Weekly Dig, 4/9/07)

Stooges, circa 2007, left to right: Ron Asheton, Iggy Pop, Scott Asheton

In his seminal rockist bible Rock And The Pop Narcotic, Joe Carducci states “Rock is rock and roll made conscious of itself as small band music.” It is pretty unarguable that no band did more, at least in its infancy and early rise to power, to wave the freak flag of “small band music”, or “Rock”, as Ypsilanti, Michigan’s The Stooges.  Carducci also posits that an artist like David Bowie represents the “Pop Narcotic”, or the way that the biz steals the soul of the band of rock cretins by introducing them to fame, money, and blow the way that, say, 2001 introduced the monolith to prehistoric man. Bowie-damage definitely altered the course of Stooges history forever, for better or worse (both, I’d say); regardless, the original Stooges are back to re-write history and restore order and all of that nonsense. I caught up with Stooges guitarist and co-founder Ron Asheton (“You don’t know him? Shame on you!” – a rockist) on the eve of their impending US tour supporting their new album The Weirdness.

DIG: What was it like getting the band back together, playing again with Iggy and your brother?

RA: For this reunion, I was a little nervous meeting Iggy – I hadn’t seen him in, I don’t know, 25 years. It was like going to meet your ex-wife to talk about your son’s graduation. Or imprisonment. But once we talked and then had some food and wine, it was like all the years disappeared, and it was like “Remember the time we did this!” And that was cool – all the stuff we did together back then really made it easy for us to reconnect now.

DIG: Has it been difficult or odd to revisit a band that so perfectly encapsulated not only your youth, and the youth of so many fans, but essentially the youthful arrogant phase of rock’s third wave?

RA: No, it’s been easy, because now everyone’s caught up, it took the world all that time to catch up! I mean, you know, back then, we didn’t really sell a lot of records. We had some fans, but… well, here’s a good Boston story for you: we opened up [in 1969] for Ten Years After at the Boston Tea Party, and I’m going “Well, it’s an odd bill, but you know, it’s music, and people are hip”, right? So we go on, and we play, we do two songs back to back, and then there’s that little pause, and it was dead quiet. Well, except for three or four people applauding, and those people came from Philadelphia, and they were the president of our fan club and her friends! So we didn’t go over very big – but now, today, all the years have caught up, people are familiar with the songs, etc. It’s really the best of all times, now.

DIG: It’s interesting that you say that, because it seems that when you were at your “heyday”, it was more of a confrontational thing, I guess, but–

RA: Yeah, the world was stiffer then. The 60’s were interesting times because it was still that us-against-them attitude, the rockers against the establishment sort of thing. But still, I mean, at the time, the Funhouse record got dissed! Now, people say “Oh, it’s a classic record”, but back then, not too many people were saying good things.

When we started, we just flubbed along, doing the best we could. We kind of just lived our lives day-to-day back then, see what happens, and everyone hopes to be successful. But you know, in the back of our minds, we knew, you know, that we weren’t Linda Rondstadt. We weren’t really going to score any commercial success. But at the same time, in the beginning, when we started, labels were just signing anyone, everybody got a shot. It seemed pretty easy to get somebody to listen to you and wind up with something.

And then somehow, it became more of a business, in the Raw Power era – Iggy’s management, they had Bowie, they had Mott The Hoople, and that was their little trip, that was Iggy’s deal. Iggy never treated us like we were employees, but we all, James Williamson also, were hired employees of Iggy’s management to be Iggy’s band, and I was like “Wait a minute, that’s business”. [Raw Power] was actually his first solo album. But now, everything’s so bizzed out, with manufactured boy bands, girl bands. There’s just so much business now.

DIG: To me, The Stooges represents, so perfectly, the ideal of a rock band as a democratic populist entity, so of course the rock and roll machine had to come in and pervert it and destroy it. Raw Power is a pretty undeniable rock album – but at the same time, it almost represents a certain fall from innocence.

RA: That’s a good way to put it – I like the record, but seeing the slow agonizing death of the band, being dumped by management, going through managers who just took our money, living on $15 a day, etc. There was no pot of gold, no pay day on Friday. I’ll go back and listen to the album, I like the song “Search and Destroy”, but it’s very bittersweet.

DIG: It seems like for most Stooges fans, you are either a Funhouse fan, or a Raw Power fan; this reunion, for obvious reasons, is for Funhouse fans. Is this reunion a kind of re-conceptualization of The Stooges as being all about the first two albums, the pre-Williamson period, kind of making *that* the definitive Stooges?

RA: This is the good Stooges, the fun Stooges.