I Think I Saw That Flying Squirrel Suit on eBay

{... this is another version of the version of the version I misplaced somewhere on my hard drive, so until that gets re-transcribed, enjoy this one. I was still wobbly from surgery and more than a tad zonked on Vicodin when I made it through a cold February rain to her loft. What with the French roast, the green tea cookies, and the smart conversation, I really hated to leave. Stay tuned for an update ...}

One day the phone rings. Laurie Anderson picks it up. It’s NASA, a voice says, and we want to hire you as our first artist-in-residence.

Now, Anderson, a performance artist who has hitchhiked to the North Pole and experienced near-death in the Himalayas, is as intrepid as she is insatiably curious. But this threw even her for a loop.

She hung up, thinking it was a prank. And a pretty damn good one. NASA called back, and Anderson spent 2002 doing all kinds of things she never imagined. “They never had one before,” she says. “So I said, "What do I do?" And they said, "We don't know. What do you think you should do?"

What Anderson did was create The End of the Moon, her current one-woman show that comes Nov. 20 to the Art Institute of Chicago. “It was incredibly freeing,” Anderson says. “So I invented the job. The End of the Moon is the story of how I did that - how I thought about where to go, what to do, what to see, what to make. In the end, what to make is totally intimidating.”

We’re sitting in Anderson’s airy, Zen-calm TriBeCa loft, which she calls her “bachelorette pad.” Her boyfriend, the leather-clad New York rocker Lou Reed, is on the road – though that’s his portrait hanging on one of the walls. (An image of the Dalai Lama is its only competition). That’s not the sweet funk of incense floating across the room, but rather the intoxicating, French-roasted aroma from a pot of Peet’s Coffee brewing in the corner. This isn’t Tibet, but downtown Manhattan, after all.

Anderson, at 57, is as pixie-like as ever. Her wide smile produces big dimples, and conversation spills from her with an ease as certain as the encyclopedic whir of her intellect. This is handy, since Moon is scarcely more than 90 minutes of Anderson talking. There’s a few minutes of viola, and some evocative light and stage design, but the show is stripped down to the basics.

Much of the piece reflects on Anderson’s adventures with NASA. “They’re already doing colossal art projects,” she says, “like building a stairway to space out of nano-tubes. This is Jack and the Beanstalk stuff. Biological electronics. I met people I would never meet otherwise: An ex-NAVY Seal, a mountaineer. One of his friends, who was also a mountain climber, had just climbed a mountain and died in a cave in the snow. He went to get his friend’s body in the same snowstorm to bring it down. I don’t know guys like that in the New York art world.”

Anderson’s loft lies in viewing distance of the World Trade Center site. The events of 9/11 lent a strange prescience to her 1982 hit “O, Superman” (“Here come the planes/They’re American planes/Made in America”), which sounded eerie to start with. With Moon, Anderson sketches a vivid and unlikely analogy for the catastrophe, one that only begins on that morning in September.

“I've become more and more aware that this is a sad piece,” she says. “And I didn't think that it was when I wrote it. But I understood, touring it, that it's really about losing something. I wrote this when we were going into this war with Iraq, and what I lost was my country. I think that I am not alone in feeling this way: this feeling of uneasiness and sadness and loss.”

These are things Anderson finds hard to put into words. “I don’t want to say things in words like ‘terror’ and ‘torture’ and ‘loss’ and ‘sadness.’,” she says, explaining why the violin and viola have become important to her work again, as they were when she began in the 1970s. “But a violin says that right away and right to your heart. And it doesn’t do it in a rhetorical way. It does it in an emotional way. It comes in through your skin.”

Something Anderson’s peers might lament is that she was the first – and last – artist to receive the NASA seal of approval. The program was a one-shot deal. We have to wonder though, now that Internet millionaires are ponying up long green for day trips to outer space, if Anderson considered taking the big ride.

“I’m such a cheapskate,” she says. “No. But there’s an incredible ride near Dollywood that I would recommend over that. It’s a large cylinder, right in the road to Dollywood. Big cylinder, a net in the middle. The cylinder is about 100 feet in diameter, padded. You walk onto the net suspended in the middle of it in a kind of flying squirrel outfit, and they turn on a giant fan and you start to fly. Wow. I did it all day. I went back again and again.“

It’s not just another roadside attraction?

“It’s a big roadside attraction. Ask anybody. Go flying in a squirrel suit. Unbelievable!”

Clance!

{... for the Oxford American, now revised ...}


Nobody fronts on Clarence Fountain.

Sixty-three years as a gospel singer, a man learns something, and what he doesn’t learn he’s crafty enough to convince you that he knows anyway. You’ve got to believe him, just as he believes in Him. Sure, he’s a mere mortal vessel – like all the members of his group, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the most widely heard and flat-out exuberant of extant old-time houserocking black gospel harmonizers. But the man has trace elements of Tabasco in his blood. He is blind, yet he has seen. He gets up there every night, and he hollers, and he moans,
and he vamps, and he prances, kicking up a leg and swerving around on one foot and then the other, placing his hands on his hips in a gesture of playful defiance – getting sassified – a regular dandy for the Lord, with those lapels as wide as dove’s wings, that growl swelling from deep in the back of his throat only to become subsumed into the ether of praise.

That’s what it’s all about. How much is there to know, really? Fountain and his surviving original bandmate – George Scott – who first sang together at the Talladega Institute for the Blind, and Jimmy Carter, who came along later, are in their 70s now. Pop culture, with its unpredictable warp and woof, has embraced them with an enthusiasm no one could quite have expected. Sheer longevity and relative good health seems to have guaranteed the singers some of that, as if they were indefatigable emissaries from some now-intangible theme park of Southern consciousness: Jubilee Land! But instead of declining into, say Branson, Mo., cheesiness, the Blind Boys sharpened their vision. They got game. Twenty years ago, when they performed as a Greek chorus in Bob Telson and Lee Breuer’s off-Broadway hit The Gospel at Colonus, they were part of a conceptual coup: How clever to hire a blind gospel group for a downhome retelling of the Oedipus myth? Even there, though, that fusion of bedrock New Testament gravitas that the Blind Boys represent, pre-Christian tragedy, and the composers’ pop-R&B sensibilities was a touch prophetic. The audience for so-called “roots” music wasn’t as focused then and jam band culture was still the nearly exclusive province of the Grateful Dead. The gospel tent at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, where the Blind Boys were as eminent and electrifying as the Rolling Stones, still felt like a well-kept secret among the hung-over rock fans who gathered there among the genuinely faithful, sheepishly pulling on a cold Dixie Beer and calling it a sacrament.

These days, the Blind Boys bring the gospel tent to the beer drinkers. They record for Peter Gabriel’s label. They’ve won back-to-back Grammy Awards. They cover songs by Tom Waits and Prince and even the Rolling Stones, with an ear for the spiritual message – the yearning, perhaps – embedded in the secular. Or, at least, they find the most gospel-friendly material from performers whose absorption of gospel feeling is evident, even as they walk in sin.

This is not a big thing to Clarence Fountain. This is the natural thing. “I’m singing gospel and that’s the end,” he says. Fountain is propped up in bed, as lunchtime nears in a Day’s Inn hotel room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’s still in his underwear – the silky stage duds are stashed in the closet – but he’s got those pitch-black hundred-dollar wraparound shades that only a blind man can wear with such authority. (Two-thirds of your onstage presence, he insists, “is how you dress.”) He’s dragging a bit. A head cold has littered gravel over his red-carpet baritone, and a late night at the Jammy Awards -- the Oscars of post-hippie rock – has him off to a slow start. The Blind Boys shared the stage with Robert Randolph, the astonishing sacred steel guitar player who backed them on last year’s Higher Ground album, and that amplified whine was too loud for Fountain. “Ooooh, God,” he says, making a shushing noise. “I’m not singing rock’n’roll. You might hear a rock’n’roll tune. But listen to me. See what I’m singing about. I’m not singing about ‘Darling, I love you’ or ‘Bring it on home to me.’ No. I’m singing about the Lord. So ever how I turn a song around, it doesn’t matter, I’m still singing about the Lord. Pick the right song at the right time and you hit the jackpot. You can make a song. Make sure you’re singing the right words, and singing them at the right time, and singing about what you singing about. My forte is to sing about God. He said the cattle of a thousand years belonged to him. So if he can keep the cows going, I know he can keep me going.”

He might be right. One thing that’s immediately obvious, comparing the group’s older recordings to more recent collections, is the greater complexity of arrangements and instrumentation, and the blossoming variety of the vocals. These albums, with their phalanxes of special guests and session aces, risk the “all-star blues revival” syndrome in which elder “legends” who have never claimed their due are trotted out with rock stars du jour. The legends get a nice paycheck. The rock stars fulfill an adolescent fantasy. The music stinks. Not so the Blind Boys. If, at times, the productions are a touch over-calculated, the singing always brings it back home. And Fountain is too danged ornery for it to be any other way.

Look at Sam Cooke, he says. Sam Cooke, a memory, a moment of eternity on an all-night oldies station. Sam Cooke made his choice. Clarence Fountain made his. “Me and Sam was buddy buddies. We recorded for the same label. When the man gave him a contract he gave me one too. He offered me one, I just didn’t take it. I thought it was a thing that he shouldn’t have done. But listen, you can’t control people. Y’know? They have a mind of their own. And I think that the Lord gave me a few more years, just for that particular thing that I did. I ain’t saying it’s true! But I’m here, and he gone. Sound like I could be right, y’know. So, I’m here. He give you longevity. He give you what you deserve. Hezekiah prayed to him to give him 15 more years. He was sick on his deathbed – heh! – God gave it to him. Y’know. I feel like he done the same thing for me. Yeah.”

In a few hours, Fountain will be back onstage. There’s a big show at the Bowery Ballroom. Randolph, an ordained minister who favors cornrows and sports jerseys, will be back rocking that pedal steel for the jammy constituency. The Blind Boys will be in their element. And Clarence Fountain will be laying down the Word. He’ll sing Mick Jagger’s words, too, and cut up when you ask if he ever broke bread with the man who begged “Sympathy for the Devil,” as he has with another British rock star, a man named for an archangel.

“I never met Mick Jagger,” Fountain says. “If I did I’d tell him give me some of my money!”

He’s tickled now. Gospel, the singer will tell you, was the first music. But Clarence Fountain is having the last laugh. He incarnates something we all feel and know, those of us who are given to feeling and knowing, those of us who are never more vulnerable and wise then when the speaker cones tremble and a mighty voice tumbles from on high. When that happens, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that gospel and blues and R&B and rock’n’roll – and by extension hip-hop, even when it’s all abstract Timbaland bleep-blip -- are all guided by an essential transformational energy. It’s that alchemical flash of the spirit that takes an ordinary observation – “Bring your sweet loving on home to me,” “Don’t wanna walk and talk about Jesus, I just wanna see his face” – and makes it gigantic, the heart’s loudest thrum of desire, and whether it’s carnal or spiritual, it feels very much the same. The Blind Boys stay grounded in the Rock of Ages, but they found a way to satisfy those of us who still subscribe to the way of all flesh. And make our hearts thrum, just a little bit louder now.

Omni Omni Omni Omni Omni Beer!

Hit it or quit it.

An Interview with Half a TomKat

Edicion Espanol, y'all I remember that she was very, very late and that we barely had enough time for her tea to arrive and it was over. She did have a cute way of wrinkling her nose to express disfavor, but otherwise did little of great interest. Plays better now, though ...

Banging on a Can

{... written a couple of years back for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ...}

Classical music is not what it used to be. Recently, the often alarmist British critic Norman Lebrecht declared that the field's recording industry, already in decline, would actually collapse by the end of the year. That's an extravagant prediction, but indicative of a crisis.

Michael Gordon is not worried. The composer is rolling with the new. "Orchestras will become more like museum pieces, focused on repertory alone," says Gordon, who co-founded the contemporary music organization Bang on a Can in 1987, with fellow composers Julia Wolfe (his wife) and David Lang. Since then, they've produced more than 150 concerts, including the annual Bang on a Can marathons of new and untested music; launched a successful independent record label; and spawned a chamber outfit, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, which performs their compositions and dozens of pieces commissioned from an eclectic variety of other composers. "Ensembles like Bang on a Can are a whole different thing. The only connection between the two will be technique," Gordon says.

Boasting a repertoire of (mostly) newly minted pieces, the six-piece Bang on a Can All-Stars weds conservatory chops to vividly imaginative music. It's the kind of sound that reflects the influence of both 1960s minimalism and amplified rock, the improvisatory flair of jazz and the ambient whir of modern life.

While the Kronos Quartet has pioneered a similar approach in a conventional string quartet format, the All-Stars flaunt a more diverse instrumentation and a grittier East Coast attitude. The ensemble's roster suggests a crazy quilt of affiliations: Guitarist Mark Stewart tours with Paul Simon; cellist Wendy Sutter has backed up Baryshnikov; percussionist David Cossin was a key player on the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack. And so on.

"The energy of the group continues to really excite me," says Evan Ziporyn, the clarinetist, whose own passions, for instance, run to the Boston-based gamelan orchestra he leads. "Normally, there are two paradigms in Western music. Chamber music produced an incredibly disciplined, exact thing, which is amazing when it works. And then there's the jazz model, where you have this amazing empathy between the players. You have this latitude. We always wanted the precision of chamber music and the complexity of that -- we wanted to do composed music -- but we really wanted the players to be individuals. There is no one way that the cello is going to sound."

The band's liveliness extends to its choice of material. Because the Atlanta concert is the only stop on the tour where the All-Stars won't be joined by minimalist godfather Terry Riley, the concert will feature works by more composers. There's a piece each by Wolfe and Gordon, as well as salutes to Dutch heavyweight Louis Andriessen and American visionary Conlon Nancarrow, whose music -- deemed too difficult for human hands to play -- was composed mainly for player pianos. There are works from jazz musicians (Don Byron's "Dark Room"); a composer who notoriously concocts pieces for armies of boomboxes (Phil Kline's "Exquisite Corpses"); and discoveries from the Bang on a Can marathon (Zack Browning's "Back Speed Double Marathon"), a kind of American Idol of the new-music world in which composer/players get 10 minutes in the spotlight.

"I'm a pretty good example of their mission," says Kline, known for his yearly "Unsilent Night" gatherings in which participants march through downtown Manhattan with boomboxes on their shoulders, all playing tapes made by the composer. Eventually, Kline's work came to the attention of Bang on a Can , and he wound up in the 1992 marathon.

"That was the beginning of my big break," continues Kline, who has moved onto song cycles, such as the one on his new album, Zippo Songs, which was released on Bang on a Can 's Cantaloupe label. "The All-Stars are the first chamber group that to a large extent really got it both ways. They've got no trouble with the flyspecks -- those complicated pieces of modernist music -- but if I give Mark Stewart a rock riff, he has no problem with that, either."

Perhaps, as Gordon suggests, it's all part of a healthy paradigm shift. On his forthcoming Nonesuch album, Light Is Calling, the composer works with producers known for their expertise in electronica. That's the sound of the dance club now, but 40 years ago a minimalist pioneer like Steve Reich was doing pretty much the same thing -- splicing tape loops by hand rather than using a Powerbook. "Popular music is consumed so quickly," Gordon says, leaning forward in an armchair in the TriBeCa loft he shares with Wolfe and their 8-year-old daughter. "But in classical music it's always been possible for someone to be ahead of their time. Things are moving at a faster pace now."

The challenge for enterprises like Bang on a Can seems to be one of walking the line: to capture that of-the-moment cachet of the next pop wave while resisting instant consumption. It makes for the best kind of creative tension.

Gordon, who points out a view of the former World Trade Center site from one of the generous windows in his apartment, is nothing if not optimistic. Classical music as we know it may be in trouble, but it's far from an endangered species. "Even that girl in the Dixie Chicks who plays the violin has done an incredible amount for the instrument," he says. "My daughter plays violin, and she saw her picture in the paper the other day. She got very excited."

No Stone Unturned

Improvisation is the soul of jazz and blues, but what happens when the spontaneous act of musical invention is freely embraced for its own sake? There's a broad wing of the contemporary music scene devoted to finding out. These artists may draw from any sort of tradition, and performances - such as the summit staged Friday at The Stone in the East Village - can become occasions for playful, bold excursions. Indulgence loomed, but was tartly dimissed.

The concert, billed as a "John Zorn Improv Party," was a benefit for the tiny, artist-run venue. Zorn, who runs the newly opened club, is a downtown New York composer and fiery advocate for new music. He straddles the worlds of jazz, classical, and experimental rock. Often, he scrambles them all together, working with dozens of musicians within his considerable orbit of influence. Several of those performers got together for the first of two hour-long sets, playing brief pieces in groupings of two, three or four.

Brevity encouraged wit. One of the most enjoyable encounters featured Min Xiao-Fen, who plays the pipa - or Chinese lute - with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, and Ikue Mori, a percussionist who uses a laptop and a processor to generate blurts, bleeps, blips and other sci-fi soundtrack effects. At its fleetest, the trio blurred definitions: they played a mirror game in which sounds created by one instrument glimmered in the others, stringed resonances whizzing through the air like a jai-alai ball. The Brazilian percussion master Cyro Baptista commanded ear and eye in his appearances. In a trio with bassist Shanir Blumenkranz and drummer Matt Wilson, he wielded a crazyquilt succession of bells, shakers. poppers, and whizzers, turning often child-like instruments into vessels of shaman-like intent - and absolute fun. And with Min Xiao-Fen he found a conspirator in humor. The musicians held their poker faces while tossing their far-flung cultural heritages into a zesty sonic mash: A mad scientist of rhythm versus a nimble-fingered mistress of ancient Chinese strum,

Zorn, himself, gave listeners familiar with his alto saxophone sound a "greatest-hits" display of extended techniques for stretching the instrument's vocabulary. He used circular breathing maneuvers that puffed his cheeks like an adder, pursing his lips and pestering the horn's valves to create squelchy volleys of notes, or an Audobon's gallery of bird cries. Even though it is old hat for insiders, it's always fun to hear Zorn in this mode, since so much of his current work is composition for other musicians to perform, or presented by his erstwhile jazz quartet Masada. It's a reminder of grittier days in the 1980s, when much of this music lacked a venue as accommodating as The Stone. (Named after the late jazz benefactor Irving Stone, known well to regulars at such venues as Tonic and the Knitting Factory).

Perhaps the most penetrating moment was provided by Courvoisier and Wilson. Their succinct duet, in which disparate strikes of the keys (and finger-traces across the piano strings, Henry Cowell-style) were interspersed with the bleats of car horns along 2nd Street, taught the value of silence as a sound itself. Wilson's squint at the presumptive end of the piece held the attentive audience silent on the cusp of applause. Honk! Then Courvoisier began a final trill.

Something's Rotten in LA

{Johnny Rotten, aka Lydon, Q'n'A'd for playboy.com, prior to the Sex Pistols reunion tour a couple of years back ... Yes, I'm temporizing until I churn up some of that "fresh meat" I keep promising to throw on the grill ...}

He proclaimed himself an anti-Christ in the first sentence of his first record. “Anarchy in the U.K.” was a snarling smash-up that made the once and future Johnny Rotten not merely a reviled or adored iconoclast, but a cultural symbol that transcended the brief, chaotic and abortive career of the Sex Pistols – which ended in January 1978 with a calamitous American tour. Bassist Sid Vicious was dead just over a year later, victim of a heroin overdose while awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. It was an ugly, scandalous, blood-spattered ending to “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle,” as the band’s apocalyptic art project was termed. But, over the years, the Sex Pistols never really went away, their saga recurring in films (such as Alex Cox’s “Sid and Nancy” and the Pistols-approved documentary, “The Filth and the Fury”), books (Greil Marcus’s epic “Lipstick Traces,” Jon Savage’s “England’s Dreaming”) and song. “The king is gone but he's not forgotten,” Neil Young once declared. “This is the story
of a Johnny Rotten.”

The story isn’t over. The offstage John Lydon, now a happy resident of Los Angeles and former television persona (he enjoyed a brief run as the host of VH-1’s “Rotten TV”), is up to his old tricks. The Sex Pistols have reunited! Actually, it’s the second time around on that front, as the band also reformed in 1996. Then as now, original bassist Glen Matlock fills the Sid-slot, while guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook assume their old roles. With a 12-city U.S. tour
Beginning August 20 in Boston, the band is keeping it nasty, brutish and short. That’s just as their fans – whom Lydon insists now includes a good number of angry middle-aged housewives – would most likely prefer it. But there’s another twist to the tale: Lydon plans to take Baghdad. That’s right, the Pistols are campaigning to play an Iraqi charity gig. Politics occupied his thoughts as much as the punk-rock legacy left in the Sex Pistols wake: a legacy Lydon views as thoroughly dubious. He speaks in a constantly modulating voice, shot through with the rough wit of working-class England and a highly animated quality that inflects many of his comments with knowing mockery and exaggerated attitudes. He is, perhaps, the most Swiftian of rock stars, an intractable wrench in the star-making machinery.

Me: John, how’s it going?

Lydon: Well, we got this little’ tour coming up. But it’s quite amazing the bleedin’ obstacles put before us. We’ve gone through tour managers at a relentless pace. They seem to come in, look at it, and run. Record companies, no interest at all from them. As far as sponsorship goes, nobody wants to have a tax cut on our name. Even Tampax turned us down. Sanitary napkins? We’d be more than happy! I know I’m one of the disenfranchised and always will be. And so what? I don’t care. That’s our audience also. And there are many like us. We’re the majority.

Hasn’t it always been thus?

Yeah. I don’t expect no help from this industry, I don’t care for it. You’ve got your Rock and Roll Hall of Shame, and if that’s what people are going to judge reality by, that’s a world I don’t need to live in.

I’m surprised you haven’t scored a sponsor.

It’s the way we are. We tend not to give a shit. And I suppose we went fishing a bit too late. The second they heard I was ferreting into playing in Baghdad, wooo. We’re talking some unreturned phone calls.

Was there a political backdraft there?

I don’t know. What do any of us know? I’m not going over there to play for the troops. I can play to the troops in their own countries. I’d be going there for the people. I don’t see a problem in it.

How tricky is that to set up?

You wouldn’t believe it. You would not believe it. I don’t mean to be paranoid. Hello, we’re probably being monitored right now. And so what? Tits! Tits! Tits! Let’s just talk tits and cunts!

Can’t you ring up your friend Tony Blair to sort it out?

Ah, ha ha. I do not see eye-to-eye with that man. I don’t like socialism. We’re not all equal. We’re not supposed to be.

So, then, do you prefer the British class system to the more Darwin-like American –

I cannot stand the class system. I’m not talking that. I don’t like that kind of oppression. Right? But I don’t think to fight that you say, “You’re not spasticated. You’re just vertically challenged.” I think you’re not facing up to something when you talk like that. And that’s a hypocrisy.

You’ve been in Los Angeles for a long time. There must be something here you like?

I like Americans very much. No problem. [Belch]. I like England, but I don’t like the government. And the government here is as wack as anywhere else. Ain’t no different. I don’t know where that lot [the Bush Administration] go to breed. It’s ridiculous. I suppose in England they vote in idiots that can talk clever or sound clever, and have a bigger vocabulary, but it’s still an idiot. At least your idiots can’t spell potato.

So you’re still untangling the red tape to get to Baghdad?

Gawwww. [Laughter]. Last week, I was asked that. I said, yeah I got bigger scissors. It’s now a fucking chainsaw. There are internal and external negatives coming at me. But that is not a silly novelty trick. I don’t do things for those reasons. I would like to see the Sex Pistols become the Iraqi Water Pistols. They’re still thirsty!

Are you sure it’s not going to be like Sting waltzing into the Rain Forest, glad-handing the pygmies?

No waaaaay! I’m not doing this for publicity! I don’t mind telling you though. And I don’t mind it being filmed. No, this isn’t one of those sanctimonious – this is not a fund-raising expedition. This is charity gig, mate, off our own back. And we can hardly fuckin’ afford it. That’s the difference between us and the rest of the pack. You might see the Sex Pistols as negative, nihilistic and a bit of a con and a swindle, but you’d be wrong! The whole point, when we told you those things, you were supposed to understand irony.

I think a lot of people got it.

I think so, too. But a lot of journalists don’t.

After “The Filth and the Fury,” the Sex Pistols documentary that came out a couple of years ago, it would all seem pretty clear, right?

There’s an entire cottage industry out there that’s turned into actually a city of rip-off merchants. This entire punk movement: Look, this is a title given by Caroline Coon in Melody Maker. Years ago she called me the King of Punk. I had a blazing row with her, because I didn’t like that term. And ever since then, that term’s been applied to a genre of music and it’s transformed into a uniform and a list of rules and regulations, and rigid attitudes, and humorless, and bland outright copying, and fake – and I don’t like it. It’s the enemy.

When was the first time you realized that was the case?

Probably two days before I started the band.

Do you feel like you – yourself – have continued to be swindled over the years? I mean beyond [former Sex Pistols manager and self-styled svengali] Malcolm McLaren, whom you sued and beat in court?

I was swindled the first day I signed the contract.

We all know that part.

I’ve had a very serious learning curve! At a very, very early age. Seventeen, 18, to be thrown in to that. It’s like this: I don’t go along with all these junkies in this business, blaming the industry for the pressure. I’ve got even worse pressure than anyone, really. Being Mr. Rotten was a fucking heavy load to carry at 18. And I’m here, and I’m no junkie.

What was the hardest part of that?

Loneliness. You do get yourself isolated. ‘Cos who do you trust? Everybody’s out to steal from ya. But you get used to anything, I suppose.

Last time the Sex Pistols toured, the slogan was “Fat, Forty and Back!” --

That was because the British press were very negative before we started – and still are –

They’ve never been nice to you, have they?

No, they haven’t, and in a way that’s been really useful. Whether they like it or not, they’ve given me a wonderful career and it hasn’t cost a penny. I knew at that press conference that they were going to go into whatever, so I initiated it. I just stood up and said, look: Fat, forty and back. We’re here for the money. So what? And the joke is, how could we be? Really? There’s something more in it, there has to be. There’s a deep loyalty between us, to each other. We know what we’ve gone through. We don’t like each other, but there’s something better going on.

Has your relationship with the other band members
ever approached friendship?

It’s everything all at the same time. Human beings are volatile creatures. We’re all over-selfish at times, and we’re all over-generous. Hate to me is such a waste of time. It just requires too much energy.

Would you say anger is more useful?

Anger is, yes. Anger you can work out and see more clearly. This isn’t for everyone, this is just how I work. I’m a victim of meningitis in a coma! A six-month coma when I was 7. So, I have to get my brain to do something right.

Do you enjoy getting on stage, still?

Not the process beforehand. I’m nervous all day, and panicked.
Always will be. Can’t eat. Shakes. Stage fright, I suppose you call it. But one song. Cor! Love it. Love it! And why not? Someone like me given a chance to say what they think, it’s incredible.

What did you think the first time?

Well, I never thought that Kelly Osbourne would be describing herself as a punk all these days later. That one’s difficult to come to terms with.

See what you wrought!

I know. Daddy must be turning in his … drug dish? It’s kind of silly. What do they think it means? What’s the joy of grabbing at a category like that, and calling yourself something that someone else has done?

Given all the mediocrity out there –

Good word! That’s a very good word because it’s led by “media.”

And followed by “crit.” Is there anyone you respect musically?

Probably. Not off the top of my head. Every now and again there’s a little gem. Even if there’s highly corrupt, formulated boy bands or girl bands, every now and then they make a really great record. What’s the harm in that? You can’t yin without a bit of yang.

The Rev. Horton Heat’s on your tour? He must be OK.

Yes! Raging nutcase. Love him. Kate Bush I respect. Always will. Tori Amos, confused about. I don’t get it. To me, she’s like an American Kate Bush but without the content, without the genuine heart. Things that move me, people screaming about wanting to die, things that sound like they mean it. You can tell emotion, and emotion doesn’t come note perfect. Never does. Listen to someone crying.

Of your lyrics, which lines would you like to be remembered for?

“Could be wrong. Could be right.” It’s up to you. It’s not for me to judge myself. I just do the best I can with it. I don’t do no wrong, but if you wrong me, you got a fucking enemy for life. And that’s how it should be. There’s a line, a wall of respect, and if somebody trips over that – kill ‘em.

In that case, how would you resolve the Iraq situation?

I don’t know if I would have started it, quite frankly. Resolve it? There’s only one way and that’s shitloads of money. If you don’t get the UN in to share that burden, you’re really silly. Look at Afghanistan. They’ve been knocked back five centuries. And that’s not helpful. You’re not gonna answer men on the back of donkeys and camels with airport technology and surveillance equipment. I mean the last lot did it with plastic knives! Forget it. They’re attacking you with plastic cutlery! Get wise. If somebody’s angry, find out why they’re angry and solve that. But I don’t think 100 tanks blowing down the street does fuck-all. But sometimes it might. I’m up for getting rid of bad bastards. You ask me which side of the fence I’m on: USA. Because it’s common sense. There’s more better things here than there is there. I don’t want the whole world to be like Iraq. So there’s your reason for being there, and that’s all that needs to be said and all that should have been said in the first place. All this “weapons of mass destruction” – it sounds like a stupid album title for Boyz II Men.

Or Guns N’ Roses.

Oh yes. That new lot.

That album will never come out.

Who’s in that supergroup they’ve formed?

Buckethead, the guitarist who plays with a KFC bucket on his head. A guy from Nine Inch Nails. Tommy Stinson, from the Replacements.

They played here the other week. Their opening song was “Bodies” [one of the more virulent songs from “Never Mind the Bollocks”]. It’s like, oh yeah, right, go supergroup! You need to do somebody else’s song. That’s good.

How was their version?

Their version? Dead slow. [Laughs]. That’s a long train coming, that one.

You should get back on TV.

Fuckin’ right, I miss it. I miss it. I miss it. September 11 screwed a lot of things for everyone, but particularly anyone that had something going – or raised a point of view that might not be the official line. At the same time, I see opposite points of view as not being a threat at all but highly bloody useful.

You should get on The O’Reilly Factor.

I’d like to have a word with him. He still hasn’t shaved his hair. He promised didn’t he? How everybody quickly forgets. But I don’t. I’d like to bring the shaver. [Laughs]. What’s the opposite of a Mohawk?

A tonsure? A landing strip?

O’Reilly couldn’t make it in politics, he couldn’t make it with the Kennedys. So he went Republican.

It’s always there. You can always convert.

And I see [“Politically Incorrect” host] Bill Maher heading that way, too. It’s very odd.

Maybe he’s just chasing Ann Coulter.

They need to be liked, so they do whatever is required. If you can’t question your own philosophies, and you have to – daily – then they’re not philosophies you should be following. Rules are for fools.

I think a lot of people who purport to be some sort of political firebrands are playing a part, but I don’t trust their integrity.

You shouldn’t. When I met Newt Gingrich, I really liked him. He’s one of the very few politicians who outright said, look, I’m a politician. I’m a liar by trade. Great. Thank you. Watch him, he’s way clever that one. He’s always making moves. Margaret Thatcher, her politics were everything that I ever despised, but I really liked her because she stood by what she said.

She was honest, right, even if she was a bitch?

She would give you a word back. Fantastic.

How did you meet Newt?

It was the last Rotten show. I went to the Democratic and Republican conventions. I think because I went to the Republican, VH-1 were angry. It’s all very much Clinton World there. They were fearful I would come out of it a Republican. And I said if I did it would be because they’re right. Why are you worried?

Hoo boy.

It’s a silly world we live in. So do I get a free subscription to the porno?

I’ll inquire on your behalf.

I’d like to keep abreast of the situation.

I can’t imagine why not.

Oh, stop.

The Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O

{... if anyone really wonders about this "skronk" business, read on. From Stereophile ...}


Nothing exceeds like excess. It’s wisdom not lost on Revenant Records, the over-the-top archival label that specializes in definitive compilations of artists whose work shimmers outside the frames of convention. “Raw musics” is what its late founder John Fahey called it. And after recent, exhaustively detailed box sets devoted to such American originals as Charley Patton and Captain Beefheart, Revenant has found its ultimate subject: the titanic tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler. The square root of skronk, Ayler barreled through the 1960s, a forceful and singular figure even within the revolutionary context of the free jazz scene – which never lacked for outsized personas. Beginning in 1962, when he left the Army to follow his calling, and ending in 1970, when his body was found floating in the East River, Ayler epitomized jazz as unfettered, ecstatic expression.

Across nine CDs (and a brief, bonus disc), Holy Ghost illuminates Ayler’s creative life as a series of passionate excursions. Laid out as a crazyquilt of amateur-taped concert recordings, European radio broadcasts and other scarce ephemera documenting a dozen different performances and several interviews, the package is swollen with historical significance. Ayler was distinguished by many things, including a penchant for green leather suits and cosmic pontifications. But his importance as a musician often has been overlooked. Despite inventing an enduring template for collective improvisation in jazz and staking claim on a whole range of harmonic phenomena on the reeds, he’s never been invited into the canon; instead, he’s became the patron saint of jazz rebels, cited by the burliest saxophonists as their Godhead, no matter how intemperate their howling.

Yet, as this box set proves, Ayler commanded much more than the Vibrato That Ate Cleveland (his hometown). Though he was the most extravagantly “out” saxophonist of his day -- even pushing John Coltrane toward bold, late-career epiphanies -- Ayler forged a sound that drew explicitly from jazz’s most traditional elements and influences. His compositions pulsed with the polyphony of New Orleans parade music, whether exultant or dirge-like, and evoked the primal shouts of holy-roller gospel services, which also inspired the Pentecostal themes of his melodies, with names like “Saints,” “Spirits,” “Ghosts” and “The Truth Is Marching In.”

The truth about Ayler, as revealed on Holy Ghost, is that he was an artist constantly in transition, striving to fashion a sound that was as soulful as it was startling, and unafraid of the risks necessary to achieve his goal. The earliest recording here, from a 1962 gig in Helsinki with a group of Finnish be-boppers, shows off the 23-year-old’s grasp of swing, and his debt to Sonny Rollins, whose “Sonnymoon for Two” leads off the set. Just a few months later, though, Ayler is sitting in with pianist Cecil Taylor on a Copenhagen date recorded for television. This is Taylor’s seminal outfit – with alto saxist Jimmy Lyons and pioneering “pulse” drummer Sunny Murray – in a 21-minute run through the piece “Four.” And as it displays the beginnings of fully open improvisation in a group context as a blueprint for one kind of jazz future – a post-swing future at that – it is also the moment we first hear Ayler off and running. His own trio, with Murray and bassist Gary Peacock, was perhaps his most classic. Featured on Discs One and Two, the combo that recorded the landmark Spiritual Unity for ESP comes off as a seedbed of fiery invention. Ayler’s blistering lines are buoyed by the ceaseless rush of Murray’s drums and Peacock’s eerily singing strings, by turns moaning as if to echo Ayler and percolating with percussive intent.

The saxophonist left behind the organic perfection of the trio (plus occasional guests, like trumpeter Don Cherry) to front a variety of quintets, captured in various concert settings from Cleveland to Berlin to Newport, on Discs Three through Six. The results are as mixed as the musicianship, which varied wildly – despite a succession of distinct and original drummers, including Ronald Shannon Jackson, Beaver Harris and Milford Graves. With the additions of brother Don Ayler on trumpet and Michael Samson on violin, Ayler’s performances became more expansive and otherworldly. Their very peculiarity compels interest, as if some mutant marching band were to twist a melody as sturdy as “Amazing Grace” into a pretzel of droning strings, trumpet fanfare, galloping drums and explosive, skyscraping saxophone. It shouldn’t work, and often it doesn’t, but even then it’s somehow strangely wonderful. Less prone to praise was Ayler’s shift towards a rhythm-and-blues/pop-gospel style during the last two years of his life, with girlfriend Mary Parks (Mary Maria) singing “peace and love”-type lyrics that were as awkward as the bands were ramshackle. Even then, as on Disc Six’s “Thank God for Women,” the melodies are hard to shake. At his wobbliest, Ayler maintained a jaunty dignity.

Much the same can be said for his box set. Definitely not for strict audiophiles, the recordings still sound miraculously good given the dodgy nature of much of the source material, such as poet Paul Haines’s cassette made at a 1964 gig at the Cellar Café in New York – in stereo, no less! -- or the mystery tape of Ayler blasting out “Love Cry” at John Coltrane’s funeral. The packaging outdoes Revenant’s impressive prior efforts: CDs in vellum slipcovers are housed in a faux-onyx “spirit box,” along with facsimiles of artifacts like The Cricket, the 1960s Black Arts zine edited by Amiri Baraka. The 208-page clothbound book sets a high standard for scholarship and a kind of musical investigative reportage, detailing the history while leaving the mystery intact.

Hey-La, Hey-La

{The Q&A version of something originally written for Time Out Chicago. I don't think it made the transcript, but Carl Newman told me that the band's name was also inspired by one of my favorite Japanese films of all time, Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers, as well as by the requisite Jimmy Swaggart rant about rock music. Still gotta try that vanilla vodka and Dr. Pepper concoction, but I am currently on the wagon ...}

Boy genius tunesmith Carl Newman is the Big Mamou behind the New Pornographers - that snappy Canadian supergroup known for its surging, sugared melodies, swell harmonizing, quirky lyrics and "Letter From an Occupant," the 2002 bust-out single that features a soaring vocal from our favorite sassy lassie, Neko Case. (Reputedly, Newman instructed the twang-friendly Case to belt out her lines "like a robot," and, over time, her career as a New Pornographer has made an equally compelling case for Case as her countrified solo arc.)

Newman, a gangly redhead, is on tour promoting the most recent Porno epic, Twin Cinema (Matador), an excursion into sheer pop gorgeousness that attempts to keep the band's sound intact while ditching some of the more obvious allusions with which it gets stuck.

Carl Newman: Yesterday was a landmark show for us. It's the first time since Mass Romantic came out that we played a show without Neko. My niece, who was on the record, was singing all the Neko parts. It was actually cool. I knew that Katherine could totally slay them but I was still kind of nervous. Are people going to be: "Boo! We want Neko!" But it wasn't like that at all.

Me: Is she about the same size as Neko? Could you put a Neko wig on her and pretend?

No.

I've always loved your records, without being much of an aficionado. I just liked the super-melodic element, the over-the-top pop and the originality of the lyrics.

We're trying. Pretty much, that's it. Working within the pop song format, and trying to create something that's catchy and will appeal to somebody on a simple, easy level. But hit them in a different way. Those were always the bands that inspired me. Roxy Music, or Love. The Thinker Fellers ... no one really remembers them, they were a Matador band. They had the most amazing combination of amazing melodicism and just really crazy odd music. Sometimes they sounded like a hillbilly version of the Residents. They had mandolins and banjos in a very odd way. But they always sang together and were very melodic. People always talk about the Beach Boys, and that's an influence - sometimes it's hard not to be influenced by stuff that's so iconic. But bands like the Thinking Fellers really inspired me. Or a band like the Fiery Furnaces right now. I like the bands that are really off in their own place and aren't that concerned that their music isn't the style.

Those bands probably find their audience faster in today's environment.Those bands probably find their audience faster in today's environment.

Things have definitely changed.

MP3s.

When our record was finished, even before the record was in the hands of the label, they wanted to put an MP3 on the site so they could beat the leaks. The distance between an album being handed to a label and ending up in the Internet is two or three weeks. I can probably already go see our album being reviewed on a blog. The information superhighway: More so than ever, it's conceivable that bands could just explode overnight.

I still remember waiting for copies of import 45s to make it over from England, and lining up for weeks-old copies of NME.

It's really cool that the NME has become less powerful. Now you have stuff like Pitchfork. I remember being a teenager, and, like, NME seemed like the coolest. Even though you know if you were hanging around with a bunch of NME writers you would probably want to punch them - a bunch of annoying 22-year-old assholes who want to be Lester Bangs.

That describes all rock critics, actually. How did you get into songwriting?

I started out because I fell into being a singer. My first band, which we used to call a "fuck band," just for "what the hell," we were called Superconductor, and we were never meant to be a real band. We had six guitar players. We were jamming, a bunch of us playing guitars and making noise, and one day I got bored with playing guitar and I walked over to the microphone and I just started yelling, or whatever the hell, and that's how I fell in and became the singer because nobody wanted to. I became fascinated by it. Then I decided to try writing songs. It was prog-grunge. It wasn't long after that I became fascinated by the classics, like Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson. And I decided to do something more musically sophisticated, so I started Zumpano, and did that for a while. Both those first bands, they got some notoriety but I felt I was just learning. I think I began to figure it out with this band. I finally decided, screw it. I'm tired of band politics. I want to do these songs the way I want them done. And if it sucks, I'll take all the blame. That makes it seem like it's all me, though - but it's not.

To me it all sounds cohesive but there's a lot of push-pull. It feels very collective.

One of the things we've got going for us is we have a monstrous rhythm section. People talk to me like I'm some kind of Brian Wilson. If I made records by myself, they'd probably sound more like the Shaggs. I shouldn't say that, but me, just myself, is more minimal, and John and Curt bring those rock ‘n' roll chops.

It swings. There's a buoyance beneath it all. It helps to see Neko bounce across the stage in some crazy fur hat.

I haven't seen her hop onstage in a long time.

It was the only time I saw you guys, at Warsaw in Greenpoint.

That was one of our best shows ever. That's when all the people were onstage at the end.

My girlfriend at the time showed up drunk and angry, so it didn't work out so well for me. Great show though.

Drunk, angry girlfriends? I feel for you there. We're not such bad guys, do we deserve that drunk anger?

I know! Other than that, I still remember that trampoline feel to the music. But the lyrics take me forever to decode. I like the way they sound. They aren't obvious.

Sometimes I think the lyrics are gibberish, but I don't sit there and study my own work. When I look at them, I don't think they're gibberish. That song "Sing Me Spanish Techno" I basically write for my girlfriend. She inspired the title. She listened to it, and said, "Aside from the line ‘Sing me Spanish techno,' I don't know what you're going on about." So, I had to go through it line by line and explain this means this, and this represents that. And she said "OK, I get it." It's maddening. I sat there in high school and college and had to dissect these stupid poems by these great poets that I didn't understand and I had to figure them out. And I write these poems and lyrics, and nobody even bothers to dissect them, and I had to do that bullshit. I had to dissect terrible Jim Morrison poetry when I was in grade 10. I had an ex-hippie teacher. "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding ..."? It's the one about the dead Indian that jumped into his soul. He also made us dissect "American Pie," which I could get behind. That one's pretty simple, although kind of cheesy.

It has a mystique. A cheesy mystique. So, Twin Cinema, is that a flashback to pre-multiplex days?

It's a metaphor about looking. You ever look at something, you look at the same thing and all of a sudden you see it in completely different ways. It's the idea of looking at the same thing through two different eyes. There's a lot of film and theater imagery to convey this simple idea. On the corner of 16th and Valencia in San Francisco I went through an epiphany. All of a sudden everything looks slightly different. I don't know if that happens to a lot of people. It's also about the things that remain. What seems universal and what changes. It's kind of vague.

I was thinking about actual twin cinemas. It was a big step forward. Now twin cinemas are relics, where they show 99 cent movies.

It must have been revolutionary: You have the choice of two movies!

I used to be an usher at one in my hometown. I didn't last very long.

You made a good career move.

OK, dumb question time. What's the deal with the band's name? I think it's brilliant but some people could easily think it's kind of stupid.

It was inspired by the Japanese movie The Pornographers.

That's a great movie. I thought that might be it.

And then the fact I always wanted to have a band called "The New..." Like the New Seekers. I was fascinated that there were the Seekers, who rule, and they were these square-looking people, and then there were the New Seekers, and the New Seekers were these good-looking hippies. They sang "I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing." I decided it was funny, even though there was no band called the Pornographers. Some names have a portent, and I trust that.

Do you sit around with a notebook and torture yourself?

The music always comes first. "Sing Me Spanish Techno" is the only song on the record that started with a phrase.

Will you sing me Spanish techno? What is Spanish techno?

My girlfriend, I forget why we talked about it, she went to school for a couple of semesters in Spain, and she said the only Spanish she remembered was Spanish from Spanish techno songs she sang along with in clubs. So when she told me that I probably said, "Sing me Spanish techno." And then I thought, "Hey, that's a catchy bunch of words I just said there."

Your keyboards remind me of late '70s new wave.

We got away from that. I was tired of the Cars references. That song doesn't sound anything like the Cars, but the keyboard sounds like the Cars so I guess we sound like the Cars.

I always thought the keyboards were there like little triggers to pull people in. It reminds you of a period, but nothing else does.

It was fun for a while, but then you get sick of it. Some of these songs if they had a synth on it, we decided to use a pump organ or a piano. We're more into using low atmospheric synths or using it for little burbling stuff. We didn't really use synth much. We used a lot of E-bow. The one synthesizer sound we liked to use sounded a lot like an E-bow.

E-bows rock. Are you a beer-drinker at all?

Yeah. I don't feel like one right now.

Have you converted to Anchor Steam since moving to San Francisco to live with your girlfriend?

I haven't been drinking beer much lately. I'm drinking vanilla vodka. I stumbled upon this drink that I totally loved. It was vanilla vodka and Dr. Pepper, which basically tastes like Dr. Pepper. I thought, shit, this drink is tasty. Now it's my drink. It's like drinking pop, and I'm getting wasted.

It's going in the rider now, right? You'll set new standards for rock star debauchery.

Hey, it IS going to go in the rider!

Winter Light

Sometimes, you can float a message in a bottle across a river without even realizing what it is you have done until one day you get the same bottle back with a different note stuffed in it. And then you have to ask: How fast can I swim to the other shore?