I'm Lazy, So I'll Torture You With Unpublished Liner Notes -- Hah!

{For a pending release on Table of the Elements. These have been lingering for a few years, all 3,000 words. Just to get us kick-started ...}



Few experiences in life are as emphatic and direct as the hour spent in a dark room when Tony Conrad is on stage. Instinctively, you want to reach for some epigram to qualify what happens, because what happens demands a rationale – an explication, a tidy summing-up. But that’s elusive, much as Conrad’s own history of recording and performance. Say this though: Tony Conrad has been kicking the violin’s ass for longer than most of his contemporary audience has been alive.

Curiously, though, it may have been necessary for Conrad to wait until now to find an audience as keen to appreciate the particular brand of whammy he lays on it. There is a quality that is thrilling and absolute in the way that it thoroughly reasserts the primal nature of sound. It smacks you in the gut, as all such encounters should, but never ever lets up, never lets you catch your breath. Instead, that immediate physiological response to the massively amplified bowing of Conrad , and the dream cathedral of overtones this generates, becomes profoundly psychological as well. Consciousness-altering, even. You think that it's just washing over you, but those oceanic tremors might as well be a map of your own nervous system. To pull a concept out of Thomas Pynchon, that tight knot gathering in the belly is the beginning of a knotting into:a logical reaction to the quickening jolt of the infinite that announces Conrad's arrival. The best strategy for riding the storm out is to ride the storm in. All that mile-high oscillating resonance, all that extremism in the pursuit of liberty, erupts into hearty metaphor. This is the belly of the beast, in a lost time, under a full moon. And the beast is roaring.

Here's the catch, though. It's easy enough to make romantic claims for an artist like Conrad. He's one of those guys. Ur-Sixties. Quintessential cult figure. Resident outsider. Rebel angel . He's got the kind of immaculate credibility that can't be bought and can't be sold.[And how else, otherwise, could he have persevered?] Rumbling under the cultural radar since the Kennedy Era, Conrad is at once first cause and last laugh, a covert operative who can stand as a primary influence over succeeding generations, while pretty much conducting most of his business in obscurity. That is, until about 10 years ago, when he began re-materializing as a live performer and started recording a series of releases for the Table of the Elements label. Because he'd kept such a low profile, when Conrad did pop up, the impression made was a good deal more spectacular by sheer dint of surprise. Who, exactly, was this guy? It was an unusual weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, when people began to ask -- again. Conrad was having one of his first "coming out" parties, and despite some of the odd circumstances, it could not have been staged more memorably. The Manganese Festival, which doubled as a kind of avant-garde debutante ball for, Table of the Elements, went down April 23 and 24, 1994, at the exact same time as Freaknik, the "spring break" for students from the circuit of predominantly black colleges. Atlanta became an urban version of Daytona Beach for about three days, with traffic grid locked, boom boxes shouting, and provocatively ample derriere-shaking for mile after mile along Peachtree Street -- the main stem that runs into the heart of "The City Too Busy To Hate." The festival was sequestered in a complex of art galleries off an industrial side street intersecting Peachtree (and thus, cut off in such a way that anyone who managed to drive in could not possibly hope to drive back out until the traffic jam subsided many, many hours later). This was ideal, for anyone hoping to maximize the singular nature of the experience. You could check out any time you liked, but you could never leave. Perfect for a first encounter with Tony Conrad. He cut a curious figure, Tony did, in his bowler hat and his shorts, prowling the premises with a video camera, documenting the goings-on as if at some family reunion. In a sense, it was: The gathering tribes included Thurston Moore, Lee Randaldo and Steve Shelleyfrom Sonic Youth, harpist Zeena Parkins, avenging Japanese guitar hero Keiji Haino, the anarchic artistes of Faust -- Conrad's long-ago collaborators on "Outside the Dream Syndicate" -- and Jim O'Rourke, wonder boy. From Europe, the trioAMM, godfathers of free improv, was in the house, as was New Zealand’s rare-to-such-shores Gate. This was an unusual assortment of performers, a Lollapalooza for fringe-dwellers, and a model for further electrical storms – such as the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival – that would light up the skies into the new millennium. By the time Conrad finally came to perform, sandwiched between the jet-engine decibel bath of Haino and the ritualized freak-out of Faust, even those not in the know were primed for a paradigm shift. The city was in a gridlock, as surely as if suffering a collective panic attack or celebrating a coup d’etat. What better moment to pump up the volume, and tune in to those strange frequencies?




Ten years on, and some four decades since he began making trouble from a fourth-floor walkup loft on Ludlow Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Conrad is back in New York. He visits fairly often, to work on collaborative art projects, or take a gig at Tonic, a renovated former kosher winery on Norfolk Street that has become a kind of trans-genre performance salon: an engine room for 21st century musical imagineering. Conrad is 62, and he’s enormously fun to watch, even now, even when he’s not onstage, teaching that violin what’s what. He’s circled around nicely, from pre-this to post-that, at once the guy who anticipated (with former roommate John Cale) the whip-song feedback drone rock of the Velvet Underground – which then anticipated everything else, polluting young minds who formed generations of rock’n’roll bands to follow – and someone it is enjoyable to think of as the Jerry Lee Lewis to La Monte Young’s would-be Elvis of All Things Minimal. ‘Course, Conrad did not show up drunk afterhours at the Church Street entrance to Young’s drone-sweet-home, the DreamHouse, waving a pistol and cajoling his former colleague, though Jerry Lee once pulled that stunt at Graceland. But the debate over authorship of certain musical ideas and properties shared with Young and other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music has sparked much of Conrad’s intensive activities during the past decade. And in marshalling his minority report, he’s had much better aim than the so-called Killer.

Conrad’s been both the frying pan and the fire. He’s a reminder of what early Sun Records phenom and cottonpatch bad-ass Charlie Feathers said once – about rockabilly, of course – constituting “the beginning and the end of music.” And, in both his sonic fundamentalism (which is to say, an insistence on hewing close to a nearly indivisible root) and insurgent idiosyncrasies, Conrad’s in league with a whole pantheon of American visionaries – figures variously perceived as cranks, weirdos and aliens before their names graced boxed sets and they were feted on the White House lawn. Think of Johnny Cash, or Harry Partch, or Cecil Taylor, or Don Van Vliet. Conrad has those essential qualities we prize in our iconolasts. He’s ornery, , but he’s crafty, too, like that slippery cartoon wabbit who always finds a way to turn his antagonists’ weapons back on themselves.

In the process of challenging the very history he helped to create, Conrad has the good fortune to revel in its aftermath. He’s looped. When he mounts his bicycle, as he does for a tour of old Lower East Side haunts on the DVD included in this package, he conjures a flashback to a 1965 Look magazine spread that identified the artist as an archetypal happener. Behold! The young urban explorer whose bohemian enthusiasms defined a certain way of life – an aesthetic code that was also an ethical position – which New York City, in its fathomless churning, its insatiable hunger for fresh meat, at once compelled and fostered. It’s a different New York now, in many sad and irreversible ways, but Conrad can still feel that thrumming at its core, can still feed on its boundless appetite. He fits right in. When he rides up the street, the gunmetal gray bicycle chain he drapes around his neck registers as an unconscious hip-hop gesture. (And Pythagoras becomes another sucker MC, getting the beatdown from Tony C.) The sounds on the street are a midday downtown babelogue: salsa rhythms blaring out of modest taquerias; Hasidics murmuring over their knishes as they slouch towards Williamsburg; the blunt thud of car-trunk subwoofers rattling windows with the new Nelly single; kids screaming; garbage trucks loading their haul, grinding and clanging without end; somewhere, a bird. You don’t have to spend very much time with Conrad to see how he enjoys this ruckus. It’s his candy shop. And business is better than ever.



“It amazed me that in the 1990s, for the first time, you would go to a club and find an audience that was just ready for anything,” says Conrad, sitting across the table in a Mexican restaurant on Rivington Street on a late summer afternoon. He’s sincere, clearly buzzed about the idea that his own assault on the Western canon, on received notions about -- well, have you got some time? Pull up a chair. Conrad is insistently inclined towards cultural investigation, and not someone who takes much for granted. Rather, he digs for the back-story in any given scenario. Even, in this case, his own prominence on the latter-day performance circuit, which might include anything from an art gallery to a rock club. He’s caught on, and if, so far, “official” histories of the 1960s minimalist movement relegate him to a footnote, that same outsider status is a big part of what makes him matter to listeners who aren’t likely to be shelling out the Jeffersons to catch the new Philip Glass opera. Thus, with “Slapping Pythagoras,” Conrad took advantage of a pool of kindred spirits from Chicago’s indie music scene – including stalwarts like O’Rourke, guitarist Kevin Drumm, and engineer Steve Albini – to bridge a generational divide. It gave him currency. The kids are alright, right? But, um, why? “That still has to be thought through,” he continues. “Like, what happened? Was the young audience simply untrained and gaga? Are they completely so overexposed to everything they're just jaded to death? Are they so saturated with the pop-market that they’re ready to hear anything else that just doesn't sound like the shit on the radio? Or is it a combination of the above? No one has really diced this out that I know of, but the result is that there's a whole sea of people who really are hungry to be exposed to sound in a different way.

“Once at the Kilowatt in San Francisco, my performance was preceded by a wind octet playing contemporary sounding wind octet music, composed by academics. The audience comes in and sits in the thrash pit and listens patiently to the octet. Ten years before people would be fleeing. Or screaming for relief. So, were they there because they didn’t give a shit what they heard? Or because they had absorbed the lessons of John Cage, and found they could adapt their senses to anything that came along? Or were they so grateful to hear something very strange and focused?”

Conrad’s not merely dishing rhetoric. He’s puzzling over the paradigm. What are the political implications of performance? What happens when art music becomes fuck-art music? What happens when it’s not dry but humid? What happens when it’s raw and dirty? What happens if you kill off the myth of the composer and roll dem bones?


“When the music got very loud it meant that it took on this identity of its own that required a kind of handshaking,” Conrad says. “You could think of that engagement with the sound in a couple of different ways. You could think of yourself as submitting to the sound, and that evokes a whole discourse of sadomasochistic analysis. Another way of thinking about it is that you flow with the sound, you go into it and inhabit it and interweave your space with it. That’s a completely different power dynamic. That’s very fascinating because there's this paradox between those two things. I was always inclined to prefer the second approach. I guess in the way that I enjoyed Cage, and the challenge of being confronted with a situation and assimilating it and controlling my responses to it. There's a contest of some sort. You rise to the occasion, so to speak, and I always thought that was bracing and challenging. Like you test yourself in a sporting event. You see how much weight you can lift or how fast your can pedal on your bicycle. There's just this great rush of energy that comes with the omnipresence of the sound: The sound being all around. For me, this was a way of dealing with the problem of the composer.”

Punk rock, with its volume and intensity, and its anti-virtuosic, DIY credo, brings up similar issues. But Conrad makes an important distinction. “What’s different, say, between this music and punk rock? In punk rock there's a gestural element of ‘I'm jazzing my guitar so it will spit cum all over you.’ The feeling you get is very, very masculine fucking power trip that's supposed to really damage you. That's quite different. It's interesting. But it’s not the same. This has a more neutral power flow, but it does go into a space that is recognizable from that. That’s one reason why there could have been such a powerful crossover to New York rock in the '70s. The New York punk movement was a little less – originally, at least -- focused on that kind of football mentality. There was plenty of blue-collar feeling in New York, too, displaced into alienation. Think of Lydia Lunch for example. That was alienation turned into articulateness. So there’s a shriek there but it’s not supposed to destroy you. It’s supposed to get your attention and deliver a blow in a meaningful way. It’s ancient music now. I’m 62, and when I started doing music I was 22. That was 40 years ago. When I first came here I remember finding out through Jack Smith -- he was into a kind of nostalgia trip -- I began to find out about the pop music of the ‘30s and ‘40s, old 78s and stuff like that. It struck me as so alien, and so bizarre and weird and distant and remote from my life that it was thrilling, and intriguing, but also just coming through the pipe from some other universe! And that was, let's say, the sounds from 1942, and that was 20 years earlier [in 1962] and now looking back 20 years I'm finding myself looking at 1982! For today's younger person things that were going on in 1980 must seem completely weird and irrelevant and strange and alien.”



Yet, in a funny way, what Conrad is doing now is utterly timely. It has to be, and in a more specific way than merely the ease with which it provides a youthful audience an opportunity for reinvestigation of performance tactics and philosophies they were not alive to experience the first time around. His refreshing populism makes me wish we could elect him to public office, because Conrad grasps the essence of democratic thought in a way that is heartening. He sees through the Big Daddy posturing that’s gotten us ass-deep in the jaundiced miasma of contemporary times, and argues persuasively that’s there is another way. But history is sometimes the dream we DON’T want to wake up from. Because history is familiar, makes us feel secure even if its nipple succors only with spoiled milk. The body of Conrad’s work, much of which has come to light through a series of releases initiated by Table of the Elements, not only makes an immediate demand on the listener – strap yourself in kids, we’re going for a ride! – who must negotiate his own terms with the music, but has stealth implications as well. These are something like, for lack of a more appropriate or immediate comparison, the parallel worlds of “The Matrix.” Do you want the red pill or the blue pill? Do you want the crime or do you want the punishment? Must ignorance always be bliss? Or can’t bliss signify its own self-evident truths?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, but the very axis our lives spin around. And they’re part of the paradigm whose shifting is Conrad’s enterprise. It’s there in the drone, the switched-on throb of alpha and omega, earth and ether, that fills the room when the strings are stroked. Conrad’s predilection for playing behind a billowy white curtain, while his shadow is projected – and magnified – against it, lends many of his performances an air of some arcane mystery theatre. Time unhinges. The mind wanders. You begin to think about Bill Monroe, hollering high and lonesome, or a frayed traveler moaning in the Delta night of 1931. You being to think about a thousand choirs massed in a Biblical prophet’s hallucination, or a ritual staged by some lost tribe in a forgotten part of the world, whose secrets no tongue will ever again speak. You begin to feel strangely connected to a world of experiences you can never possibly know. Which is funny, because Conrad doesn’t come off as a mystic, and he’s no shill for anyone’s hogwash. If anything, he’s a born debunker. But in liberating this music from orthodoxy, he also unleashes it for democratic free association. Not much, these days, can do that. Tony rocks. And, maybe, that’s epigram enough.