Today's Eye Weekly has a moderately in-depth story I wrote about independent promoters in Toronto.
The crux of the argument is that while the U.S. is largely dominated by Clear Channel subsidiary Live Nation--which acquired many of the country's largest indie promoters as well as main rival House of Blues--Toronto (and by extension, Canada) has a thriving indie promoter scene with no fear of a monopoly taking over any time soon. And those promoters are responsible for increasingly bigger shows, including this week's Arcade Fire gig at Massey Hall, and this September's V-Fest.
One of the people I interviewed for the piece was Elliott Lefko, who started as one of the city's most successful indie promoters in the 80s before being hired by MCA Concerts (later Universal Concerts, then House of Blues) in the early 90s. He's a giant in Toronto concert history, and more than one of my other sources credited his 2001 flight to L.A. as opening up the indie promoter scene in Toronto, and loosening House of Blues' grip on the market. Lefko now works for Goldenvoice, the company that puts on Coachella--who, not uncoincidentally, usually has quite a few Canucks on the roster.
I first spoke with Lefko in 2000 while researching Have Not Been the Same. Most of the book focused on interviews with artists, with very few industry voices. But there are few people with more experience in both the underground and the mainstream in Toronto/Canadian rock history between the years 85-95, and Mr. Lefko was a great help.
It's funny, of course, to see how many of his memories are based on how much money certain artists cost, and whether or not he was able to eat that night. But his was/is a high risk business, and he took chances on a lot of artists--especially Canadian ones.
At the beginning of this conversation, I don't think he understood what it was I wanted to talk about, but after that, he required little more than name prompting to embark on long tangents for the rest of our hour-long conversation, which stopped abruptly when I ran out of tape.
Elliott Lefko
June 6 2000
Locale: squatting awkwardly on the floor of the hallway of Universal Concerts’ office in the Molson Ampitheatre
When did you start promoting?
I started off being a journalist and a publicist. I was working for my friend Ron Mann, who did the film Poetry in Motion, and so I was doing publicity for him. I got involved in bringing some of the writers to town: Jim Carroll, Ed Sanders. I liked the performance aspect of it. Then I started doing Cdn writers, trying to put a bit more bite into poetry performance, because I thought it was definitely happening, as you can see from watching the movie.
After that, working with Jim Carroll and Groovy Relgion, and doing shows, I liked doing rock more than poetry. I was presented with some theme weeks down at the Bamboo [pivotal reggae club on Queen St. W], they were doing a ‘white roots week’ where it was cowboy stuff instead of reggae, so I got to program that. Then I brought the Del-Lords in. I’m really good at finding things. So presented with the challenge of finding cowboy bands, which nobody liked, so I found the Del-Lords, Kinky Friedmann, the Texas Jewboys, stuff like that. I had a really good time, so I started doing more theme weeks down there, with girl band week, surf band week. It was lots of fun.
When I went down to New York to find some of these bands, I ran into this whole scene where things were happening. Bands like the Replacements, Green on Red, True Believers. All the agents in New York were working on this kind of stuff, it was a beehive of activity for tons of great bands. They said, ‘we need help bringing in these bands,’ and I was more than happy to do it. I started working at RPM [now the Guvernment] doing indie Wednesdays and bridging Cdn bands like A Neon Rome and bands like that with the best of the young American bands, and having success at it. I brought in British bands too, like the Jazz Butcher.
I really grew to love that, and my niche was the American stuff. There were other promoters in town who were bringing in the more corporate stuff and more British stuff. My thing was more young American bands. I had this friend in Buffalo, these Buffalo kids used to come up to Toronto a lot, and we’d go down there for some shows.
There was this girl Cindy Hersh, and she gave me this tape one time with one side of Buffalo bands and Seattle bands on the other side. The Seattle bands were The Fluid, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Nirvana, everybody. I thought, fuck, there’s all these great bands out there I can bring in, and nobody knew about it at the time. I found out who booked them. At the time I was at the Apocalypse Club, and I was able to bring them in for $100. Phone up Niranva. $100. ‘Yeah, we’ll get there somehow.’ They couldn’t make it that time; they got lost in a snowstorm. But Fluid came up, Tad came up, Mudhoney, they all came up for really cheap prices and the kids came out.
I remember doing Soundgarden for the first time there. It was $1000 for Soundgarden. They all came in, they were so quiet, they sat on the bus at the end of the show, very nice and well behaved. At the time Chris Cornell had great long hair at the time so girls wanted to fuck him and the guys wanted to be him. It was like our version of Black Sabbath. It was beautiful, there was this great energy and uncharted territory.
Were you booking local people on the Bamboo series, or mostly New York people? Shadowy Men?
Shadowy Men were there and they were very helpful in playing those kinds of gigs. It was funny because at the time in Toronto there was – and still is – a band called Bunchofuckingoofs. There was a girl I met and we had a fun idea to form a band called Bunchofuckingsmurfs, with a little kid in the band, and it was really funny. We put this band on stage, and the owner came out and started freaking out: ‘you have a kid on stage!’ but it was really fun. It was funny, because Bunchofuckingoofs went crazy, they thought we were making fun of them. I said, ‘Isn’t this what you’re all about? You can’t take a joke?’ There was also the Dundrells from Toronto. There were some really great country bands, too. Prairie Oyster was there, Handsome Ned. It was a cross-pollination.
Where did you see Handsome Ned and what role did he play in bringing roots music to Queen St.?
I loved country music. I don’t know why, but I did. I would go down and see him on Queen St., at the Cameron, and he also had a show at CKLN. He was the nicest guy. I had a poetry show there that I did with Chris Twomey, and I’d see him all the time. He was a real sweet guy. Always willing to help, always wanted to talk. Whenever I wanted to do something, he was there. ‘No problem.’ He was involved, I didn’t have to ask. Blue Rodeo was in its infancy at the time, and they’d be the opening act for some of these weeks, and down at RPM, too. Handsome Ned was the star. I would do shows with him, and he’d be just such a sweet guy. I really like working with him.
Did you see how he influenced different people?
Yeah. (pauses). I guess I did.
That was around the time Blue Rodeo started.
Yeah, he did some shows with Blue Rodeo. (stammering). He was a very sweet guy and I was very sad when he died. When I heard about it, I walked down to the Cameron House. We’d have parties after the shows with the True Believers, Alejandro Escovedo and some of those people, and Ned would be with us. We’d have a lot of fun together. I don’t really see that sense of community now that we had then, where everybody would have a really good time together after the shows.
Was there something about his songwriting that set him apart?
He was a really great songwriter, a really great voice. He had a lot of presence on stage, which is the hardest thing to get. You couldn’t stand behind him (Ned) at a gig, because he’d be wearing his giant cowboy hat. A very sweet guy. I remember riding home from his funeral with Greg [Keelor] from Blue Rodeo, in this really old beat up car. I remember listening to the radio and feeling really sad about it. At the time, Blue Rodeo really wanted to play a lot. There weren’t very popular yet, but they certainly were afterwards.
Did you know Blue Rodeo’s early incarnations?
They had went down to New York and then moved back here, so I started to work with them a lot. They would do anything at the time. If you needed them to do a show, there was no problem to get them to play. They opened some really great bills.
Were there turning points in their evolution that you saw?
When they put out the first record, they had a really good manager at the time, John Caton, who subsequently had some heart problems and had to retire. When he was with them and Outskirts came out, Jim [Cuddy] had experience with video, so they were able to put out a really good video right away. It touched a nerve with a lot of people. The images were very clear. There was one song about Kennedy in a hotel room getting shot, and also “A Good Year for the Roses.” It seemed to touch a lot of people. Really good music, really good words, really good looking guys on stage. There was a time when the Queen St. thing was exploding, and they stepped out of that and into people’s homes, through their stereos.
In the beginning it seemed to be more of an adult thing, and then their audience grew.
The Cowboy Junkies, one of their first gigs was at the Bamboo for one of the country weeks. Michael Timmins gave me a tape with a couple of songs on it, and then they did a show there. Greg [Jim, actually] took those pictures on their record. Michael would lean over his guitar, and she [Margo] was very cheerful. They haven’t changed that much, in a way; they’re still the same band. Success came to them, left them, came back again, etc., but the band has stayed consistent. From the beginning, if you listen to their early music, it was that drugged-out kind of music then that they’re still playing now, with this graceful voice on top of it. The thing I liked about the Cowboy Junkies was they were able to go into the United States and tour, unlike a lot of other bands. They would go into a van. They saw themselves – maybe not an American band, but they never saw themselves as a Canadian band. Never did. That’s why they were successful.
Even before the first record.
Right away, they were touring. They got into the station wagon and toured. These other bands like Green on Red would play all over the world, and that’s what the Junkies were. They realised they wanted to fit on the same map. Even if they were only making 50 cents and sleeping on people’s floors. A lot of the other Canadian bands didn’t do that: they were scared to do that, or didn’t want to do that. That was a good thing about the Junkies.
Another guy was Jeff Healey. I knew him through this friend of mine Joe Rockman, who I grew up with, the bassist. He told me he was playing with this blind guitar guy. I was putting on a show with Dr. John, and I got Jeff Healey to be the back-up band for Dr. John. They hit it off like crazy, getting to play together on stage. They were his band. It showed a bit that he could rise above the level of just playing Grossman’s. Later they did get to see some success.
The Cowboy Junkies seemed an oddball choice for mainstream success. A lot of Canadian companies thought their records were demos.
Sure, if you look in terms of Canadian music and what was going on then, Haywire and the pop music that was coming out of Canada at the time. It was the furthest thing from it. But there was a different strata that was going on there. At the time I couldn’t even buy bands off of Canadian agents, they would laugh at me. But American agents were taking me seriously. The comparative thing with the Junkies was that they were appealing to things that were going on universally, rather than in Canada. Eventually A&R people would come and see them and think they’re really good. Or if they played at Maxwell’s, a place like that in Hoboken, then people would look at them as being a creative, interesting voice. To Michael Timmins’ credit, he didn’t really care. He was going to do it, and if people didn’t come, they didn’t come; if people came, then people came. That’s great.
Was there a point when that attitude changed in the industry?
Perhaps with people like Pursuit of Happiness, when they had some success. Or Chalk Circle. Those kinds of bands would play RPM on Wednesday nights, one of the many bands who would give me tapes. Eventually, they had good videos and got signed – maybe in the Pursuit of Happiness’s case because they made a really good video. At that point the A&R people saw that there was something happening here that they could work with. Still, to this day, though, people can’t really go out on a limb and sign a weird, eccentric Canadian band and think that that’s going to make money. They want more commercial stuff.
As a result, you saw Zulu Records and Og Records and other independents putting out stuff and having a little bit of success; Mint later on. Part of the problem in Canada is that when you leave out a couple of urban centres, people don’t care what’s going on in modern music. Our friends in Montreal and Saskatoon and Winnipeg and Calgary and in Vancouver, you hear this stuff on Brave New Waves, but try to sell a show with the Apples in Stereo outside an urban centre, and not many people are going to come and see it.
There was a lot of stuff going on in Montreal. I know you were a big Gruesomes supporter.
I really liked the Gruesomes. There were certain things in Canada that I would hear about that I thought were a combination of artistic – I thought they were really good – and money; I’d think, this is how I’ll make some money and eat that day.
The Gruesomes were fantastic. When I first found them, it was for one of the things at the Bamboo. I brought them to Toronto. They had really long hair, and all they wanted to do was eat cereal and candy. John Davis’s younger brother Eric must have been about 15 or 16; he got to the Bamboo gig and he didn’t have any drumsticks! He was about to go on stage, and I had to run down to the Horseshoe and get him some drumsticks. The guys at the Bamboo were howling on me: “What is this?” And yet the band would pack them in. People loved it, it was really good.
I’d do combinations like them and the Chesterfield Kings; at the time the Chesterfield Kings were so good, and the Gruesomes just rocked their heads off. They didn’t care about anything. They were really great on stage, so easy to work with, and fun, and people would come out. It was a pleasure for me.
Other bands at the time were the Asexuals. I’d heard the records, and it was as good in my mind as the Replacements. Another band was The Nils. Again, you couldn’t believe how good those records sounded. When they’d play Toronto, I’d offer them $2000 for a show and they’d make it easily, we’d all make a lot of money. Or the Doughboys. The first or second time we did the Doughboys, we did a free show, and it was just packed. There was this big fat doorman at the Silver Dollar who was taking money from people just to get into a free show. It became a carnival atmosphere. People really wanted to see this stuff, the shows would sell, and things were working. The bands were great, made great music. Later on, they became such a great band. Jerry Jerry was also a great band.
A lot of the credit at the time went to Lee’s Palace. Mr. Lee and Craig Morrison. I would do shows all over town, wherever there was a stage. But the best place was always Lee’s Palace. I quickly realized that places would come and go, but that place would always be there. There was one point where I had no money – I’d been fired from the Silver Dollar or the Apocalypse or some place like that. Mr. Lee called me and took me out for lunch, and said ‘Do shows here. We’ll give you money. Don’t worry about stuff like that. You’ll be okay.’ I felt so good. There were all these nights when I’d sit in their leaky basement counting my money and feeling really thankful that I had a place to go and a place for the bands to go.
There was another band in Toronto I used to make money off of called Rare Air, with bagpipes. Amazing band, really good. I used to promote their shows in Toronto, and I’d make $100 and I could eat that day. It was so much fun. Then the Vancouver connection was with bands like Slow. I brought them into Toronto because I’d seen their video, and it was really amazing. It was around the Expo thing, all the hype. I brought them in for a show with Soul Asylum, and then the next night they did their own gig. They were so good, so incredible, but so fucked up.
On drugs or in general?
Not on drugs, no. They were the kind of guys who could walk down the street and get into an accident because they stepped on the wrong thing. They were funny guys. To get to Toronto they spent all their money, so they had no money to go back home again.
So they slept in their van, parked in front of my apartment on St. George for three weeks or something. My friend across the street was like, ‘Hey, is that Slow?’ And he’d invite them in to listen to music at his place. Tom was sleeping in the van, and the inner linings of the top of the van went into his mouth while he was sleeping and he had to go to the hospital because he was swallowing fibreglass. Ziggy got into a fight at a club in Hamilton and broke his arm. Chris and the other guy got into a fight with Bunchofuckinggoofs and hurt himself.
Steven Hamm, we were invited to a party up north for this guy who really liked the song and wanted to impress his girlfriend, so he took us to his parents place. He went into the Jacuzzi when everyone else was downstairs, and he flooded the Jacuzzi, and there was water everywhere. They were that type of band: everything would happen to them, but once they got on stage, they were so good.
I recently saw Tom Anselmi, and the guy still looks like – if there’s a rock star in Canada, it’s that kid. He looks and dresses the part. It’s a bit of a shame that band never achieved the success that was due, because of all the problems they had and the guy was a prima donna. It’s only now that he’s able to act halfway normal, and be nice to people. He was such an asshole to people for so long that people wanted to bury him. When I see him now, I think, that guy’s a star.
Did you see Circle C? [the band that formed out of the ashes of Slow]
I got to work with them a little bit. I booked them when I first started working with MCA Concerts, and he sent me this t-shirt with the Circle C logo based on the Chanel thing. It was one of these Spinal Tap things, where they got the wrong dimensions, and it was too little [he holds his fingers three cm apart]. We had all these t-shirts we couldn’t do anything with. When I heard A Neon Rome’s record or the Circle C record, I thought these were grandiose, beautiful records that deserved their place in the whole thing of Canadian rock. But those records never really did anything. I loved the Circle C record, but they weren’t able to do it live at the time. Maybe their story will come out one day.
A Neon Rome.
Those guys were almost the house band down at RPM when I was doing shows there. They were very popular at the time. They were a great band live, they’d go off and do these long songs. One day I was sitting somewhere and I saw their record, which was put out by New Rose Records in France, who put out Replacements records, and I said, ‘I really, really want to put this record out.’ So I formed a record company called Rightside Records and I put the record out in Canada. I loved that record. I thought, how can anybody not put out a record like this, such a beautiful record, beautiful cover? What a great record! But the singer at one point stopped talking [literally: he took a vow of silence]. You wonder why a band like that never got signed or nothing ever happened with them, because they were incredible live.
I’ve heard they were also dangerous live, hurting people in the audience.
I believe that they were to a certain extent, and they also were dangerous to themselves, too, at the time. From wherever they came from in Toronto, they knew that they were making sophisticated, universal music that was coming out at the time. I don’t know from what place inside of them it came from, but it was amazing. It’s incredible. Nowadays, you have guys like John Borra, who’s still one of the nicest guys around, playing really excellent music. He eventually became part of the lineage from Handsome Ned, in terms of cowboy stuff. But at the time he was doing psychedelic music.
Ian Blurton [Change of Heart, C'mon] was their drummer for a short period of time.
I remember Change of Heart always being around. There was a scene at the Beverley, and they would play there with bands like Vital Sines, Breeding Ground. That guy probably started when he was 16 years old or something. He always put out really great records, did really good live. If you’re going to have scene people who you recognize as the Toronto music scene, there’s Ian Blurton, Handsome Ned, Jim Cuddy. Faces to the music, those were the guys. Ian Blurton, you wonder how the guy ate for all these years, because there was never any money coming in, but he’d always be playing gigs.
There seemed to be a glass ceiling for that band.
There certainly was. They were the quintessential traveling-across-Canada-in-a-van-for-$100 band, back and forth, they did it so many times. And tried to probably go to the United States. He never had the attitude; or, he never had attitude, really. That was the good thing about him; he just wanted to play.
How did people find out about those Montreal bands that drew so well? Where did people find out about them? CKLN? BNW? Nerve?
I think it was a combination of all of those things. And once they did a gig, they were really good. If they were shit, it wouldn’t matter, they’d be come and gone. But they were all really good bands. They came out of their circle; Foufounes Electrique was a really great club at one point. There was a really great scene going on with people in Ottawa like Eugene Haslam, and in Hamilton there were guys doing shows, and in Kitchener and London, James McLean was there. And Suffer Machine was coming out of there. Disappointed a Few People were an amazing band at the time, too. There was a whole scene where bands could come in and do ten gigs in a row and do very well.
L’Etranger [early 80s Clash-y new wave band with Andrew Cash and Charles Angus]. Was that before you started booking?
A little bit before, so I wasn’t involved with them very much. I worked with Andy Cash a lot after that. When he signed a deal with Island, that was a little bit of a milestone, for someone plugging away for a long time, had really good songs, had a really good personality on stage, and got recognized by a major record label. It’s funny, because Island recognized him, an independent in its own way. When he got his deal and his songs were getting some radio airplay, “Time and Place,” that was a really good thing going on there. He was a guy who always wore his heart on his sleeve and was political, but always was a face that you could recognize Toronto rock by.
Rheostatics.
I used to work with Dave [Bidini] at the Excalibur when I was a writer at York University, and he was too. He told me he had a band, and I did some shows with those guys. (pauses) There are some guys who are the good guys of Canadian rock. I’d look at Bidini as being one of those types of people. And all the people with him, like Dave Clark and all those guys in the group. They made you feel so good whether you were in the audience or wherever.
On stage, or professionally?
Professionally, for me. Sometimes it was not so much the music. For some people it was the music, and with others it was being associated with really great people, and for me the Rheos were more like that. They never had a bad word for people, they always had a smile for people. They were always going out of their way to help other people. The way Don Kerr or Dale Morningstar [owners of Gas Station studio] are now. That’s what those guys were like then. Bidini loves Canadian rock, like Max Webster and stuff like that. He sees them as the older brothers, like Led Zeppelin would be England. He treated them with respect. Rush, and people like that, he loved those bands. They would help him, and then he would help out the littler bands. That was the nice thing going on, a sense of community.
Barenaked Ladies. Was that a fluke of time and place?
Yvonne used to book them at Ultrasound and do really well with it. At one point I became aware of them and decided I had to get involved. They had really good songs, just excellent, excellent songs. Their father would sell the tapes out of the back of his car and do really well.
Jane Siberry paved a lot of roads for non-commercial music that did really well.
I really loved her. I first saw her when she was doing her folk stuff. I thought she was really beautiful and very talented and very poetic. I started to work with her when I was taking musicians and getting them to do poetry and spoken word and performances, and she fit into that well. She was very into the whole Laurie Anderson thing, and wanted to evolve out of that. She appealed to people and worked really hard to get her own thing going.
She was really smart. She had her band, she was the leader of her band, she put up her posters all over the place, and she worked her way up the ladder one rung at a time. From a little club to a bigger club. She had both things, which was the best thing about her: she had a firm understanding of what it takes to be successful and all the hard work she had to put into it, and she and Bob Blumer went into the United States early, and worked hard to get the level of recognition going. Subsequently, 20 years later, she can still go to places like New York and Los Angeles where she has a following, because she worked it back then.
She took a lot of chances, too, and sometimes she’d miss the mark. But because she did that, she stayed ahead of the game and didn’t get lost, whereas so many other people just got lost and became clichés afterwards. She never did become a cliché. Even now.
Why do you think her music became so accepted, beyond just her hard work?
People like her and, say, John Critchley [of 13 Engines], they have a very broad sense of what’s going on in the world. They look at you when you talk to them, but they don’t look at you totally in the eye. You can see that the wheels are always moving in their head. They’re always thinking about how they can change things, how to do something different from what everyone else is trying to do. With her, she always knew how to change things and make things different. She was never going to let anybody tie her down. It all came from within her. And she was an artist, too. That’s how her head worked, like Joni Mitchell. They were always going to change. I don’t think she even thinks about it; I think it just happens.
Mary Margaret O’Hara.
Again, there’s somebody to an extreme, though. She’ll be so popular that Michael Stipe announced her from the stage here.
And that’s 12 years later.
Yeah. People are still knocked out by her. With her, though, it’s her beauty and her fault that she can’t understand the mechanisms of commerciality. She won’t go down that road. In a way it’s artistically really good, because she’s able to put out a record like she did, and play with the Glass Orchestra or whatever she does, an evening of love songs, and then you won’t see her again. That’s the positive. The fault is that if she’d learn to take a step towards the centre of the road, she could be huge. But she won’t, or she can’t, or she doesn’t know how, or whatever it is.
Did you see the Go Deo Chorus? [O’Hara’s first band]
Yeah. There was this place in Toronto called the Blue Angel, where Ultrasound was, and it was kind of this white elephant of a place. She’d play there, and she also had her way of writing, and she did the logos for the Rivoli and posters for people. She would do those kinds of gigs. Very much a Queen St. diva at the time.
You mentioned Critchley, and there was another band who went to the States right away.
Critchley realized what was going on with Husker Du and the Replacements and all these bands, and he went down to Minneapolis to record and play in the States. He was doing something which a lot of people failed to do, which was just go down there and knock on some doors and eventually they would open. But they were hard.
I remember trying to get gigs for the Gruesomes in the United States, and there was nothing happening, nobody wanted to know. One time this girl sent us a letter saying she wanted to invite the Gruesomes down to New York to play and we drove down there, did the gig, and afterwards she had no money to pay us. That kind of stuff. For a Cdn band, it was very difficult, and difficult to draw across Canada because it was so huge. There were daunting tasks. You could sit down with Ian Blurton and he could probably list a million reasons why things never happen and why it’s so difficult.
Were you managing the Gruesomes?
I just booked them and was friends with them. I never did any managing, I was always just friends with people. There was this band, Rang Tango, at the time when Blue Rodeo was starting. They were such a big band in Toronto at the time, and she was so good, they were making great music and packing houses. That was the one time I went to someone and said, can I manage you? I guess they looked at me and said, ‘you’re too scruffy’ or ‘you’re not enough of a businessman’ or ‘we think we can do better.’ They said no. That sort of frightened me after that; I didn’t want to put myself on the line for people and ask their permission to work with them. I know I’m good and I know I can make money off of what I was doing, so I went back to that. I never managed everybody after that.
They got signed to a deal and then fired the band, is that what happened?
They got signed to a deal and got a lawyer to manage them. It was ridiculous. They’d be playing the Silver Dollar and this lawyer would be running around backstage, telling everybody what to do. And everything was fine beforehand. Then the record company said, ‘we want to sign you but fire the band.’ She had to make this hard decision. She made the wrong decision. It would be like saying to Blue Rodeo, ‘Fire that fat bass player! Fire that postman drummer! You don’t need all that stuff, just use your two beautiful singers.’ But that’s why bands are bands, it’s that intangible quality, and it also keeps the lead singer’s head down to a reasonable level, by having everybody in the band, and having band meetings and band practices. That’s what was wrong in her case. She made a lot of moves, but she’s paid everything back in spades in subsequent years. She realizes she made a mistake, and if she could take it back she would. Again, she’s one of the nicest people in Cdn rock.
The east coast explosion in ’91 with Sloan.
People were going out to the east coast and coming back and saying, ‘there’s this amazing band called Sloan down there.’ I brought them to Toronto to do gigs. They were not unlike the Gruesomes in that, um, they were totally naïve in the way they were. They were making really fresh music, really good music. They did very well when they played gigs. And then Eric’s Trip, they came down to open for Sonic Youth at the Concert Hall. Again, that started rolling. They were really good, they draw people, and all the other bands followed suit coming out of there. For a while there, there were a whole lot of really good bands coming out of there.
I seem to remember some Toronto snobbery towards those bands at the time. Or was it all hyped up too much?
I think those bands were really great bands. They had a lot of confidence. Because they came from so far away, they travelled 15-20 hours to get here, they built up a bit of protection around themselves and self-confidence. They did very well.
Edgefests.
The shining moment for me was when Dave Bookman and I booked an Edgefest at the Ampitheatre. I had done a few of them, and things went well and people came out. Lowest of the Low, Violent Femmes, the Rheos. One time [1995] we just wanted to do a show, it was the show with no fat, we called it; we didn’t want any bad bands on the show. We had so many great bands, 40 bands or whatever. Bookman’s girlfriend at the time did a poster and a t-shirt. There was only one bad band we had on the show, that we were forced to put on. What were their names—a funky bass player from Toronto, I forget.
But every other band was amazing. From Montreal there was Merlin, from the east coast there was Thursh Hermit—the Steve Miller set! [Thrush Hermit’s entire set that day was spent covering Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits album.] That was such a beautiful moment. To have the sense of irony that they had, and for the biggest moment in front of their biggest crowd, instead of going for it and playing a set to do that, that’s when you realize you have a sense of community here and a band with a guy like Joel [Plaskett], a superstar singer like that who said, ‘You know, I don’t care if I sell a million records. This is my moment and I’m going to enjoy it.’ And for him to make the audience enjoy it that much, everybody understood the joke at that point.
No bad bands on it, really good bands, people came out that day, about 4000 people. Bands like Cub and Pluto from out west, bands of every single kind, and Sloan was doing sort of their farewell gig at that time. That’s when you saw, there are 40 amazing bands in Canada doing really good and who can take their place with anything. A lot of credit goes to Dave Bookman, too, for thinking of the whole thing, and helping a lot of bands along. And Sloan for leading the charge with all these bands.
Any other highlight moments for you like that? Seminal shows or bands?
Well you know, all the marijuana smoked clouds my mind a lot. I really liked the Lowest of the Low. When you see a band like that achieve the commercial thing too, with people lining up to see them, that was exciting to see. [Lefko coaxed them out of retirement a year after this conversation, for three shows at the Kool Haus that sold out instantly. It was his last hurrah in Toronto before moving to L.A.]
Doing my first show at Massey Hall with Grapes of Wrath, and having John Critchley's 13 Engines open. Doing shows at the Concert Hall with Skinny Puppy, or Sarah McLachlan at the Diamond Club. Having giant line-ups and doing really well with those things.
-end-
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Jeff Tweedy November 02
More five-year old files from the Wilco dossier today.
This one was done for Exclaim's year-end issue of 2002, where the magazine's critics picked Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as the top pop album of the year. (Narrowly beating dark horse Spoon, with Kill the Moonlight.) The blurb this interview was commissioned for is buried somewhere in the black hole of Exclaim's current website re-design; I'll post the link when it becomes available.
Here, Tweedy isn't selling a new record or explaining its tumultuous birth; he's reflecting on the vindication of its success, even though he's too humble to play I-told-you-so.
Part of the reason I wanted to post these was because of this excellent interview in Pitchfork that ran a couple of days ago. It features my favourite Tweedy quote of late:
Jeff Tweedy, Wilco
November 15 2002
Locale: phone interview from his Chicago home
How did your fall Canadian tour go?
A lot of years we only get to play the coasts, the places that are easy to get to, like Vancouver and Toronto. It was really fun trip to get to go do more of the country again than we have in the past couple of years. We made it to Montreal for the first time ever. We had a tough time getting in there before. [ed note: I have trouble believing this.]
I heard about the Vancouver show, and I don’t know whether it was conscious or not, but that you split the two nights into an upbeat night and a moody night. Did you do that kind of thing often?
I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. We do, however, make a conscious effort to play two different shows if we’re playing the same city for two nights. We’re definitely going to have a lot of the same people there both nights. Maybe that’s happening less, but even for our sake we’d rather not be spinning our wheels. So we change the set every night, and that got better as the tour went on. When we move things around the overall feel of that is going to change with it, and that’s not a conscious effort. Unless we decided the night before that the crowd was really noisy and we didn’t want to play the subtler material and get talked over again, so we might throw a bunch of rock songs in. I don’t remember that happening.
When I saw you in Toronto, it struck me as an all-encompassing show: the rockers, the folk songs, the experimental stuff, the new material, it seemed to cover pretty much everything I’d want to see in a concert. Is that what you get out of the live shows?
I enjoy playing more than I ever have, and I feel like as a band that pretty much started on some shaky ground a little over a year ago – not shaky ground in that we felt we weren’t doing a good job when we went out there, but it was a big job to undertake. We were learning all the old material and the new material at the same time and [trying to] incorporate the stuff that we felt best about, which was the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot stuff and do a good job with it, which was challenging with four people. I think we were sucked into our own minds early on in tour. Basically, each of us had more musical responsibilities than we’d ever had.
Some of those shows I felt like they were a little stiff for a while. I don’t think we did too many complete dog shows. But we came home and realised that it’s a fine line between wanting to play music and playing music in front of people who are just happy to see us play music. You have to remember that we’re representing this eclectic body of work. There’s no telling what percentage of any given audience is there to see Mermaid Avenue or Being There. Maybe the last eight or nine months we looked at the main set as sticking to our guns and establish what we feel like we’re doing best right now. After that, we blow everything off and play some music with the idea that there are definitely some older things that people want to hear. Both halves of the set have been really rewarding.
If Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the most collaborative you’d been with Jay Bennett, what role does the new band play in this new material?
It’s no different than any other record as far as songwriting credits go. Jay happened to leave the band, or was asked to leave the band, before the record came out. If you look on Being There, it says ‘all songs by Jeff Tweedy’ and that didn’t feel right to me. So, because I want there to be a band sensation about recording and creating stuff, on Summerteeth it says ‘all songs by Wilco.’ It would have said ‘all songs by Wilco’ on this record if it wasn’t for the fact that the situation came up with Jay. So whatever Jay’s percentages are of any given song, it comes out reading: ‘Jeff Tweedy plus Jay Bennett,’ which makes it look like a 50/50 collaboration, which it really – that’s fine if people believe it. I’m not trying to sound bitter, and I have nothing to gain by diminishing Jay’s contributions, which were always welcomed and embraced by the band. But that’s a little misleading.
You’ve been doing a lot of improv stuff with this band, and I imagine that’s helping to shape the new songs.
When we get together, for every song we record, we’ll do at least an hour of improv and towards the last two sessions we did, we just play through whole entire reels of tape set at the slowest speed so we can get 35 minutes of music on each tape. I play through five or six songs, whether or not anyone else knows them or knows they’re coming next, and we’ve been training ourselves to improvise records with songs. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s really exciting and it’s working well. I think that grew out of the recording environment where we were doing a traditional, straightforward recording of a song and then destroying everything and improvising over it. We thought, ‘Why don’t we do this at the same time?’ It’s been really good.
In April, you expressed hope that the music would overshadow the story. At that point, the story was what most people were writing about. Now that the album’s been out so long, do you think the music has risen above the drama?
(pause). Yeah, I think so. It depends on who you ask. I’m sure there will always be people who will say that we’ll never be able to separate the story from the music. As far as we were concerned, that was over with a long time ago. For us to be able to keep playing the album in front of audiences that seem to be excited about hearing those songs, it never felt like we were playing stuff that people would rather hear us talk about. (laughs).
One of the most interesting things about the film that came out this year, was the last frame, the coda card that said that the album came out and Rolling Stone called it the best album of the year. That’s kind of a no-brainer, because first of all David Fricke’s talking through the whole movie, but because of the story and the past discography it’s kind of an obvious critic’s pick. To me, the real story is that real fans bought it and voted for it with their dollar. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it the best selling and fastest selling Wilco record?
Oh yeah, by far. It’s our biggest selling record by far. It did feel like election day when it finally came out, and in the first week it was #13 on Billboard, which is a lot higher than we’d ever been. I don’t ever remember being on Billboard, but apparently we had been. I was informed later, but before I guess it wasn’t significant enough for anyone to tell me. It was weird, it did feel like people were voting for it, and for a lot of different reasons. For some people, they voted for it because they already got it for free and they wanted to thank the band for allowing it to be out there without worrying about that. I don’t know that there are enough people who care about record industry struggles to put an album at #13 on Billboard.
I do think that something Reprise missed that makes the story look even worse, is the fact that Wilco has been touring and playing and putting out records over the years that resulted in a slow momentum, a very organic, grassroots fan base. Every time we go out – if we take a six month break – it really feels like it’s grown whether we have a record out or not. That’s something I don’t think Reprise ever saw or understood, that it’s unusual for a band without any radio hits or any huge selling records to be selling out the Fillmore in San Francisco four nights in a row. Things like that don’t seem to matter to them.
But surely it must be validating to take this kind of musical leap and have people buy it not only in the first week, but continue to buy it and love it. People I know who’d never heard of the band before love this record.
I’m really excited that a lot of new people [are there] – [but] I don’t know if validated or vindicated are words I would use to describe anything. It’s really dangerous for any of us in the band to talk about it, because it appears to be self-congratulatory in a lot of instances. A lot of times when people read things, if a writer says something they think we say them.
We’re most happy and excited that at the end of the year we feel better than we did at the beginning of the year about playing music together and about our band and the idea of our band. If any of the theories or philosophies about how we make music together were put to the test, they all survived.
We did a few signings this year, where you sit in a stupid folding chair while record store employees parade people in front of you to write your name on their CD, and it was really sweet. I actually loved it. I couldn’t name a stereotype or an idea I had of a typical Wilco fan. But if I had one, it was more than shattered by the sheer misfit nature of our fan base. Which is great – not misfits like knife-toters, but four-year-old kids and biker dudes and indie rockers or whatever.
What do you make of the intense interest there’s been in the bootlegged demo sessions and early incarnations of the record? Would you make that available on the internet?
I think it is available. I think if people look hard for it they can find it. I’ve been pretty used to that for a long time. As long as we get to have some outlet – and if we didn’t have a record label we’d have our website – to generate in our minds our official catalogue, then I don’t care if people find stuff somehow. The only way I could be bitter about demos getting out is that I know somebody close to me at some time has gone away with something and let it into the wrong hands. Not necessarily the wrong hands, but hasn’t been very protective of it. But the live thing, we’ve totally welcomed that. For a while now, we’ve embraced the taping/trading community. We let people set up mics and we’re not hardcore about photo passes or anything like that. I get pretty used to the idea that any show we play, someone’s going to have a CD of it. Hopefully it’s a good show. If not, I’m sure there’s plenty of bad music out there it can sit alongside.
If people are interested in the demo versions, would you make it available the same way you made the real album available last September? Then you can control what people here, there’s no money exchanged…
You know, there’s some talk about doing that. I’ve seen very official looking bootlegs of our demos, and there’s some stuff I still wouldn’t want to put out, even though it’s out. There is some talk of us doing our own version of an alternate Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I don’t think we’d do it as something for sale, but an official download. That’s come up recently. We’ve taped every show we’ve played over the last – well, almost every show, period. We’ve done countless radio shows over the years, and so sometime we’ll sort through that stuff and put out a freebie EP.
Any reflections on the [Wilco documentary] film [I Am Trying to Break Your Heart]?
I think [director] Sam [Jones] did a good job. I get asked about the film a lot, but I don’t feel I have much to do with it other than being its subject matter. I’m still friends with Sam! It’s weird any time any portion of your personal life – some people would say it’s not that personal – but there are definitely things in there that are more public than I ever would have imagined. I guess I didn’t really think about how permanent film is, in terms of people’s perceptions of you and the band. A little bit of that has been strange, but it hasn’t weighed heavily on the band. And for the most part, the movie’s been really well received and hasn’t done anything to take us off track.
It’s coming out on DVD soon, isn’t it?
I don’t really know, but that’s what I hear. I’m assuming someone will tell me!
Just like those Billboard conversations.
Exactly. I should really keep my finger on the pulse a little more.
This one was done for Exclaim's year-end issue of 2002, where the magazine's critics picked Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as the top pop album of the year. (Narrowly beating dark horse Spoon, with Kill the Moonlight.) The blurb this interview was commissioned for is buried somewhere in the black hole of Exclaim's current website re-design; I'll post the link when it becomes available.
Here, Tweedy isn't selling a new record or explaining its tumultuous birth; he's reflecting on the vindication of its success, even though he's too humble to play I-told-you-so.
Part of the reason I wanted to post these was because of this excellent interview in Pitchfork that ran a couple of days ago. It features my favourite Tweedy quote of late:
Pitchfork: Why do you think people consider Wilco a more experimental act than they really are?
Jeff Tweedy: I don't think they listen to enough records. I think that's probably the biggest reason. There are elements on our records that aren't on every other record they have.
Jeff Tweedy, Wilco
November 15 2002
Locale: phone interview from his Chicago home
How did your fall Canadian tour go?
A lot of years we only get to play the coasts, the places that are easy to get to, like Vancouver and Toronto. It was really fun trip to get to go do more of the country again than we have in the past couple of years. We made it to Montreal for the first time ever. We had a tough time getting in there before. [ed note: I have trouble believing this.]
I heard about the Vancouver show, and I don’t know whether it was conscious or not, but that you split the two nights into an upbeat night and a moody night. Did you do that kind of thing often?
I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. We do, however, make a conscious effort to play two different shows if we’re playing the same city for two nights. We’re definitely going to have a lot of the same people there both nights. Maybe that’s happening less, but even for our sake we’d rather not be spinning our wheels. So we change the set every night, and that got better as the tour went on. When we move things around the overall feel of that is going to change with it, and that’s not a conscious effort. Unless we decided the night before that the crowd was really noisy and we didn’t want to play the subtler material and get talked over again, so we might throw a bunch of rock songs in. I don’t remember that happening.
When I saw you in Toronto, it struck me as an all-encompassing show: the rockers, the folk songs, the experimental stuff, the new material, it seemed to cover pretty much everything I’d want to see in a concert. Is that what you get out of the live shows?
I enjoy playing more than I ever have, and I feel like as a band that pretty much started on some shaky ground a little over a year ago – not shaky ground in that we felt we weren’t doing a good job when we went out there, but it was a big job to undertake. We were learning all the old material and the new material at the same time and [trying to] incorporate the stuff that we felt best about, which was the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot stuff and do a good job with it, which was challenging with four people. I think we were sucked into our own minds early on in tour. Basically, each of us had more musical responsibilities than we’d ever had.
Some of those shows I felt like they were a little stiff for a while. I don’t think we did too many complete dog shows. But we came home and realised that it’s a fine line between wanting to play music and playing music in front of people who are just happy to see us play music. You have to remember that we’re representing this eclectic body of work. There’s no telling what percentage of any given audience is there to see Mermaid Avenue or Being There. Maybe the last eight or nine months we looked at the main set as sticking to our guns and establish what we feel like we’re doing best right now. After that, we blow everything off and play some music with the idea that there are definitely some older things that people want to hear. Both halves of the set have been really rewarding.
If Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the most collaborative you’d been with Jay Bennett, what role does the new band play in this new material?
It’s no different than any other record as far as songwriting credits go. Jay happened to leave the band, or was asked to leave the band, before the record came out. If you look on Being There, it says ‘all songs by Jeff Tweedy’ and that didn’t feel right to me. So, because I want there to be a band sensation about recording and creating stuff, on Summerteeth it says ‘all songs by Wilco.’ It would have said ‘all songs by Wilco’ on this record if it wasn’t for the fact that the situation came up with Jay. So whatever Jay’s percentages are of any given song, it comes out reading: ‘Jeff Tweedy plus Jay Bennett,’ which makes it look like a 50/50 collaboration, which it really – that’s fine if people believe it. I’m not trying to sound bitter, and I have nothing to gain by diminishing Jay’s contributions, which were always welcomed and embraced by the band. But that’s a little misleading.
You’ve been doing a lot of improv stuff with this band, and I imagine that’s helping to shape the new songs.
When we get together, for every song we record, we’ll do at least an hour of improv and towards the last two sessions we did, we just play through whole entire reels of tape set at the slowest speed so we can get 35 minutes of music on each tape. I play through five or six songs, whether or not anyone else knows them or knows they’re coming next, and we’ve been training ourselves to improvise records with songs. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s really exciting and it’s working well. I think that grew out of the recording environment where we were doing a traditional, straightforward recording of a song and then destroying everything and improvising over it. We thought, ‘Why don’t we do this at the same time?’ It’s been really good.
In April, you expressed hope that the music would overshadow the story. At that point, the story was what most people were writing about. Now that the album’s been out so long, do you think the music has risen above the drama?
(pause). Yeah, I think so. It depends on who you ask. I’m sure there will always be people who will say that we’ll never be able to separate the story from the music. As far as we were concerned, that was over with a long time ago. For us to be able to keep playing the album in front of audiences that seem to be excited about hearing those songs, it never felt like we were playing stuff that people would rather hear us talk about. (laughs).
One of the most interesting things about the film that came out this year, was the last frame, the coda card that said that the album came out and Rolling Stone called it the best album of the year. That’s kind of a no-brainer, because first of all David Fricke’s talking through the whole movie, but because of the story and the past discography it’s kind of an obvious critic’s pick. To me, the real story is that real fans bought it and voted for it with their dollar. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it the best selling and fastest selling Wilco record?
Oh yeah, by far. It’s our biggest selling record by far. It did feel like election day when it finally came out, and in the first week it was #13 on Billboard, which is a lot higher than we’d ever been. I don’t ever remember being on Billboard, but apparently we had been. I was informed later, but before I guess it wasn’t significant enough for anyone to tell me. It was weird, it did feel like people were voting for it, and for a lot of different reasons. For some people, they voted for it because they already got it for free and they wanted to thank the band for allowing it to be out there without worrying about that. I don’t know that there are enough people who care about record industry struggles to put an album at #13 on Billboard.
I do think that something Reprise missed that makes the story look even worse, is the fact that Wilco has been touring and playing and putting out records over the years that resulted in a slow momentum, a very organic, grassroots fan base. Every time we go out – if we take a six month break – it really feels like it’s grown whether we have a record out or not. That’s something I don’t think Reprise ever saw or understood, that it’s unusual for a band without any radio hits or any huge selling records to be selling out the Fillmore in San Francisco four nights in a row. Things like that don’t seem to matter to them.
But surely it must be validating to take this kind of musical leap and have people buy it not only in the first week, but continue to buy it and love it. People I know who’d never heard of the band before love this record.
I’m really excited that a lot of new people [are there] – [but] I don’t know if validated or vindicated are words I would use to describe anything. It’s really dangerous for any of us in the band to talk about it, because it appears to be self-congratulatory in a lot of instances. A lot of times when people read things, if a writer says something they think we say them.
We’re most happy and excited that at the end of the year we feel better than we did at the beginning of the year about playing music together and about our band and the idea of our band. If any of the theories or philosophies about how we make music together were put to the test, they all survived.
We did a few signings this year, where you sit in a stupid folding chair while record store employees parade people in front of you to write your name on their CD, and it was really sweet. I actually loved it. I couldn’t name a stereotype or an idea I had of a typical Wilco fan. But if I had one, it was more than shattered by the sheer misfit nature of our fan base. Which is great – not misfits like knife-toters, but four-year-old kids and biker dudes and indie rockers or whatever.
What do you make of the intense interest there’s been in the bootlegged demo sessions and early incarnations of the record? Would you make that available on the internet?
I think it is available. I think if people look hard for it they can find it. I’ve been pretty used to that for a long time. As long as we get to have some outlet – and if we didn’t have a record label we’d have our website – to generate in our minds our official catalogue, then I don’t care if people find stuff somehow. The only way I could be bitter about demos getting out is that I know somebody close to me at some time has gone away with something and let it into the wrong hands. Not necessarily the wrong hands, but hasn’t been very protective of it. But the live thing, we’ve totally welcomed that. For a while now, we’ve embraced the taping/trading community. We let people set up mics and we’re not hardcore about photo passes or anything like that. I get pretty used to the idea that any show we play, someone’s going to have a CD of it. Hopefully it’s a good show. If not, I’m sure there’s plenty of bad music out there it can sit alongside.
If people are interested in the demo versions, would you make it available the same way you made the real album available last September? Then you can control what people here, there’s no money exchanged…
You know, there’s some talk about doing that. I’ve seen very official looking bootlegs of our demos, and there’s some stuff I still wouldn’t want to put out, even though it’s out. There is some talk of us doing our own version of an alternate Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I don’t think we’d do it as something for sale, but an official download. That’s come up recently. We’ve taped every show we’ve played over the last – well, almost every show, period. We’ve done countless radio shows over the years, and so sometime we’ll sort through that stuff and put out a freebie EP.
Any reflections on the [Wilco documentary] film [I Am Trying to Break Your Heart]?
I think [director] Sam [Jones] did a good job. I get asked about the film a lot, but I don’t feel I have much to do with it other than being its subject matter. I’m still friends with Sam! It’s weird any time any portion of your personal life – some people would say it’s not that personal – but there are definitely things in there that are more public than I ever would have imagined. I guess I didn’t really think about how permanent film is, in terms of people’s perceptions of you and the band. A little bit of that has been strange, but it hasn’t weighed heavily on the band. And for the most part, the movie’s been really well received and hasn’t done anything to take us off track.
It’s coming out on DVD soon, isn’t it?
I don’t really know, but that’s what I hear. I’m assuming someone will tell me!
Just like those Billboard conversations.
Exactly. I should really keep my finger on the pulse a little more.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Jeff Tweedy April 02
The new Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky, comes out a week today. I haven't heard it yet; I'm one of those ultra-rare breed of music fans who prefers to wait until the intended release date to hear a new album (unless I'm writing about it, obviously).
But I'm ready to jump back on the bandwagon. I loved the Jay Bennett trilogy: Being There, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but when I heard the druggy mess that was 2004's A Ghost is Born I was frustrated with the whole who's-in-Wilco-this-week game and ready to give up hope. Maybe Tweedy did need Bennett after all; I was never an Uncle Tupelo fan, and the Bennett-free Wilco debut, A.M., continues to gather dust on my shelf.
That all changed with the 2005 double live Kicking Television, the first Wilco album to feature guitarist Nels Cline. There, the Ghost songs came to vivid life, and the back catalogue never sounded better, thanks to the fully confident, conflict-free new line-up. I put it up there with my favourite live albums of the last ten years (Lyle Lovett's Live in Texas, Rheostatics' Double Live), and the show I saw last year at Massey Hall bolstered my born-again relief with the new Wilco. They're certainly the only band I'll tolerate that many guitar solos from.
I've interviewed Tweedy twice, both for the same album--2002's artistic and commercial breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Once was when the album first came out, and once when Exclaim picked it as its top pop album of the year in November. This is the former conversation, conducted for this Eye article.
At the time, all anyone wanted to talk about was Jay Bennett's acrimonious departure, and the record company drama that saw the band getting dropped and then... well, I don't have to tell you all that again. But I wanted to talk primarily about the music, because that to me was more interesting than any behind the scenes drama.
First, though, a quick story about the first time I heard YHF.
I'd heard that it was noisy and somewhat experimental--certainly weird enough to get them dropped by Reprise. I picked up an advance copy from Eye's Toronto office and was driving home to Guelph. I put it in my portable CD player, which was hooked up to the car stereo with one of those cassette adapters. Driving up the 427, opening track "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" unfolded beautifully, and I was immediately enchanted with how the abrasive soundscapes were interwoven with the acoustic folk song and surrealist lyrics.
As the song collapsed towards its conclusion, I heard a sharp blast of white noise. Interesting, I thought. I can see why they got dropped. I waited to her any kind of rhythm or alternate texture to emerge from the white noise, but it never happened. Somewhat bewildered, I listened to this static sound for about ten whole minutes before I realised that a bump in the highway had jerked out a connecting cord, and in fact I wasn't hearing any sound from the CD at all, but something entirely arbitrary--which was somehow fitting. After that introduction, the rest of YHF was easy listening in comparison.
And an interesting note about this conversation: Tweedy doesn't admit that the radio signals that give the album its name were lifted directly from The Conet Project. Wilco were busted for this, and had to pay up--which funded a new pressing of this fascinating cult recording.
Jeff Tweedy
April 9, 2002
Locale: Horseshoe Tavern
How do you feel right now that the album is finally out: is it relief? Frustration? Vindication?
I definitely haven’t been frustrated. When the record comes out it will be a relief. We’ve moved on. The whole time we’ve been working and playing and recording and doing another record and doing records with other people. We’ve been really busy and using the time. The current line-up and the way we all feel right now is the way I’ve always pictured a band to be. We’re really communicating well and really supportive and have a lot of energy to work at it. We’ve definitely rehearsed more than I have in any other band in my life.
Why do you think that is?
There’s more excitement about it, and it’s more satisfying to rehearse when there are things that are changing and getting better. There are visible, tangible things happening.
New blood?
There’s that, but Leroy’s been with us since Summerteeth, he just wasn’t in a lot of the pictures. And Glen and I have been playing together for a couple of years now in other projects and doing things. We all know each other really well. It’s more unified all the way around. There doesn’t seem to be contrasting agendas that were problematic in the band for a period.
People talk about this as a departure, but it seems more like a progression both thematically and sonically.
The way our records are, every one of them could be looked at as a departure by somebody. I consider that a compliment. I want each record to be a departure and its own thing and identity and create its own universe. But at the same time, we aren’t reinventing our entire musical language every time, that would be ridiculous and hard to do.
On Being There, there is a lot of lyrics dealing with dreaming and escape. On Summerteeth, a lot of those dreams turn nightmarish and there are a lot of darker themes, and on this one that dreamstate takes a sonic level. I don’t know if that’s just my own theory or…
No, it’s a great one. Honestly, I don’t know how conscious we are of all the different things that come out in people’s imaginations on our records. I think we do our part to try and be creative and then invest a lot of ourselves in making something has a feeling. My concerns? I’ve changed a lot, but maybe a lot of my basic concerns haven’t, as a person. I’ve always been curious, musically. And lyrically, rooted in a relationship with music that is maybe the prime source of spirituality in my life. It doesn’t surprise me that those things could come out.
I think this record is the least interior of all the records I’ve made. Rock’n’roll was the main subject of Being There, but in a very interior life way, introspective. Summerteeth was someone complaining about their personal problems in Niagara Falls or something, in this sonic environment that’s so ornate and glorious but sort of synthetic at the same time. This record is more relaxed, more space and more patience and more concurrent commentary from the music about what the words are. Cohesive. That’s the only thing I can honestly say that I think we’ve become better at. Overall, for whatever reason, I like this record the best.
You use a lot of keyboards to achieve that effect here. The only electric guitars are either squalls of feedback or the Lou Reed-like solo on “I’m the Man That Loves You.” Were keyboards a more appropriate way to capture that mood?
I write a lot of songs on acoustic guitar, and those are at the core of the songs for me. I have to play them and feel like I’m communicating a song with just voice and guitar. But whenever I’m imagining songs, since Being There, I always picture piano voicings and voicings you can’t reach on a guitar. That’s exciting to me, because they elevate it out of pure folk song status and I like seeing what other environments happen. Pianos and keyboards are something I’m completely naïve about, but that I’m also most excited by.
Do you ever write on keyboards?
I’ve written a couple of songs on keyboards. I come up with parts, but I can only really play with one hand.
The opening song “Break Your Heart,” which on the one hand isn’t that much more strange or disorienting than “Misunderstood” or “Sunken Treasure,” but the fact that there are all these swirling keyboards and melodic drum parts – I wonder if there was an intention in placing that song first on the record, as kind of a throw-down.
Aside from Summerteeth, where the first song…
Was commissioned?
It was commissioned, but it was something we liked and we put it on because it didn’t disrupt the flow of the record that we had already sequenced and made and were happy with. And we liked the idea of starting with almost a theme song, and it was conceptually validated or rationalised. I don’t feel like we compromised ourselves in that experience, which has been pretty well documented. I like the idea of opening with orchestra bells. But in general, we try to open with the most compelling track to open the doors, whatever opens the door the widest to the musical universe we’re trying to create.
That one kicks it down. In that one song are all the possibilities of the entire record you’re about to hear. I also love the final bleep at the end of the song’s deconstruction, it’s almost like, ‘Are you pissed off yet? Here’s one more!’
(laughs mischievously) Yes, that was quite misanthropic.
Reading about the history of this album over the last year, it’s somewhat frustrating that all professional discourse about the album’s release or music in general is a history of opposition in order to make a good story: “This is the record they didn’t want you to hear!” And that discussion also paints audiences into a tribalist, anti-pluralist niche. Does that ever get frustrating, or do you just try to rise above the noise?
I just try not to be too concerned about the fact that I, like everyone else, have a really narrow perception of time. There’s no way around that. If this music, if any music survives from this culture, this past 150 years or whatever will be looked at as the rock era. Even in a couple of months, I know that this will be the story told about this record – being turned down by a record company – and I understand how compelling that story is. It’s a good David and Goliath story, there’s a lot of things about it that are interesting. But I also know that it won’t be that interesting in a couple of months, I don’t think, it will be a footnote. Maybe the record won’t be as interesting to people after they hear it. But maybe it will transcend all that. I don’t have any control over it. The world defines those things. I’m happy with our record and that’s all I can ask.
This is also the second time you’ve had a film crew document the making of a record. Is that distracting?
The first time was weird, because it was this commissioned thing that Billy Bragg was paying for. His wife produced it, and when I saw the movie I thought it was really strange. There’s no real explanation why we’re there. This time around we allowed ourselves to be the subject matter of this guy’s movie, and he was really excited about that. We thought he was a really great photographer, and if nothing else it would look beautiful.
How did it effect work in the studio?
When it was an interview situation, it’s hard not to be self-conscious, and I think we overcame that most of the time. But in the performance area and in the studio, I didn’t think about it at all. If I was thinking about it, then I wasn’t doing my job.
Have you seen it yet?
It’s not done yet, so no. I’ve just seen little clips on the website.
What does the title of the record mean? There’s a European woman’s voice intoning it over the end of “Poor Places.” Is there any significance to the phrase? [as noted above, I later learned it's from The Conet Project]
One of the things we’ve been interested in doing since Being There is finding random elements. “Misunderstood” is almost all random elements. We filled up an entire reel of us jamming in the key of D, just noise, and then played the song as a ballad with piano/acoustic guitar/ vocal, and then played them both back and that’s what happened. We tried to keep ourselves excited by doing stuff like that, undermining our authority over the creation of something. Recognising that cooler things can happen without any profound intentions. Something always happens when you put a random element over something. Whether it holds up over time, you have to be the judge of that. That track had morse code and radio transmissions through the whole track. At one point it became obvious that it was the cool part of it, where it really worked, and we left it there because it was like she named the record. “She” – it was probably a machine.
With all the line-up changes, what is John Stirrat’s role in the band exactly? Is he an anchor for you?
John’s roles are he plays bass, sings background vocals, and has ideas and parts for keyboards and guitars and we collaborate on a lot of levels. We haven’t figured out a really efficient way to collaborate on the songwriting process, it’s been more in the recording process. John’s huge to the band in that our sensibilities are complementary and I trust hearing things with him. It’s amazing how important that is: even if he didn’t play a note on the record, how important it is to have him around the studio. I think we’ve tried to acknowledge things like that, whether or not everyone played on a track, whether or not everyone helped me write a song. The songs are made and produced by Wilco, and that’s why I feel that way. Everyone helps create the environment, which is just as important as the act of it.
I understand most of Wilco are on the new Autumn Defense album.
I just played on a few tracks, and everyone else was involved too.
I’m curious what the difference is between that and Jay Bennett wanting to do his own thing.
I don’t think Jay Bennett wanted to do his own thing until he was aware that he was out of the band. There’s something very different about it. I get the sensation that one of the ways John has really grown is by sticking his neck out and finding another outlet for his songs, and it’s one of the things that hurt Jay in the band, that he had never done that. Whether he admitted to himself or not, he wasn’t really sticking his neck out in that way. Better to ask him, because I’m speculating.
I don’t think he would have been so quick about [releasing his solo record] if it wasn’t for the fact that he wasn’t in Wilco anymore. In that sense it seems a bit more commissioned to me, like something to prove. And not to make judgements on Jay’s contributions to Wilco – I think he was always embraced in the band and acknowledged as a major contributor in different periods in the band and elements of the band’s growth. But it’s not what you did: it’s what you do. There are loyalties that exist in friendships and music. Loyalty cannot supercede passion. You can’t tolerate indifference playing music with people. It’s also an unfair situation to put people in, in a group dynamic, who have agendas that revolve around maximizing credit, being given credit.
Now, I’m speaking very diplomatically. But there’s a lot of credit I can’t give other people, even if I wanted to. And even if it was the truth or accurate, it would be impossible for me to do that. If I said, ‘Jay, why don’t you sing and write every song on the next record.’ The reality of the situation is that a lot of people for a long time would say, ‘Why did Jeff say “you sing…”’
It would be like the last CCR record.
Yeah, right. I wish him nothing but the best, and I’m really happy that he’s finally made his own music and done it and I hope that he does well. But I see a very distinct distinction between John’s solo work and Jay’s. I hope Jay’s evolves into something that – and this is just my interpretation of it – that is more purely motivated.
A lot of bands reach a certain level – I don’t want to say plateau – but they master something they’re good at, and then they embark on a process of unlearning, unravelling, letting things go. Did that inform this record as well?
I don’t know. We’ve either never gotten so confident that we’re good at something, or we have an inability to remember how we did something, or we have a real curiosity and passion for finding new ways to be exciting. I admire bands like CCR who can do the same thing; they were more of a singles band, though, not albums. Or like Jay Farrar. I admire that he does his thing and he’s confident in it, and his latitude has maybe expanded recently, but it’s still very confident and secure in its foundation, in what he does. I’ve just never been that type of person or artist. I’m not compelled to approach things that way.
So there are about three or four things coming out soon, including the soundtrack to that film [Chelsea Walls] you did with Glen…
The soundtrack comes out the same day our record comes out, which I’m not very happy about. If I can avoid giving them any press, I would avoid it because they’ve been bastards to me. It’s a work for hire, I understand that, and I enjoyed doing it, but the album is the mixes for the movie and I was never given the opportunity to mix it for the album, which is very different. I’m a little dissatisfied with that, and also dissatisfied that they’ve seen the opportunity to be as crass as they have been in trying to piggyback it: ‘Oh, everyone already has [downloaded] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, let’s put this out.’ I don’t think it’s going to matter.
The only people who have ever treated me like that are independent labels, isn’t that interesting? Reprise, you can say that they were completely forthright: ‘We’re a big business, and this isn’t a big business record.’ Fine, fair enough, that’s your decision to make.
But Glen, Jim O’Rourke and I made a record last year that should come out this summer on Drag City. Scott McCaughey made a Minus 5 record with us as the band called Minus 5 Down With Wilco, and that should be coming out later this year. Glen has tons of solo stuff he’s putting out, like minimalist drum-oriented records that are really cool. The new Autumn Defense record is shaping up really nice. Everyone in the band is really engaged and inspired musically. It’s a very exciting time.
[we wrap up, and I give him a couple of Canadian albums, including Royal City's Alone at the Microphone, which I describe as being part Wilco, part Handsome Family]
Oh wow, thanks a lot! That should be amazing, then. Well, the Handsome Family part, anyway.
Listen, I certainly don’t want to tell you what to write, and it’s obviously your article to write whatever you want. The only thing I ask respectfully is that I don’t really care to have a lot to say about Jay’s departure and his record. I know I just gave you a bunch of quotes about it, but feel free if you see necessary. I personally don’t want to get involved in it that much, in any kind of dispute. I understand people are interested in it, and there’s always a lot of speculation around this band. ‘Jay’s the Svengali behind the idiot savant Tweedy’…
Have you heard that?
Oh yeah, I’ve heard all kinds of things like that. From Jay in interviews. ‘I wrote this song, I wrote that.’ I don’t want to participate in all that, and that’s why I’m being diplomatic and I’m just asking you to be sensitive to that – if you can at all. If not, no grudges would be held at all. I certainly gave you enough information.
I’d rather dwell on the record, to tell you the truth.
Well, thanks very much.
-end-
But I'm ready to jump back on the bandwagon. I loved the Jay Bennett trilogy: Being There, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but when I heard the druggy mess that was 2004's A Ghost is Born I was frustrated with the whole who's-in-Wilco-this-week game and ready to give up hope. Maybe Tweedy did need Bennett after all; I was never an Uncle Tupelo fan, and the Bennett-free Wilco debut, A.M., continues to gather dust on my shelf.
That all changed with the 2005 double live Kicking Television, the first Wilco album to feature guitarist Nels Cline. There, the Ghost songs came to vivid life, and the back catalogue never sounded better, thanks to the fully confident, conflict-free new line-up. I put it up there with my favourite live albums of the last ten years (Lyle Lovett's Live in Texas, Rheostatics' Double Live), and the show I saw last year at Massey Hall bolstered my born-again relief with the new Wilco. They're certainly the only band I'll tolerate that many guitar solos from.
I've interviewed Tweedy twice, both for the same album--2002's artistic and commercial breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Once was when the album first came out, and once when Exclaim picked it as its top pop album of the year in November. This is the former conversation, conducted for this Eye article.
At the time, all anyone wanted to talk about was Jay Bennett's acrimonious departure, and the record company drama that saw the band getting dropped and then... well, I don't have to tell you all that again. But I wanted to talk primarily about the music, because that to me was more interesting than any behind the scenes drama.
First, though, a quick story about the first time I heard YHF.
I'd heard that it was noisy and somewhat experimental--certainly weird enough to get them dropped by Reprise. I picked up an advance copy from Eye's Toronto office and was driving home to Guelph. I put it in my portable CD player, which was hooked up to the car stereo with one of those cassette adapters. Driving up the 427, opening track "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" unfolded beautifully, and I was immediately enchanted with how the abrasive soundscapes were interwoven with the acoustic folk song and surrealist lyrics.
As the song collapsed towards its conclusion, I heard a sharp blast of white noise. Interesting, I thought. I can see why they got dropped. I waited to her any kind of rhythm or alternate texture to emerge from the white noise, but it never happened. Somewhat bewildered, I listened to this static sound for about ten whole minutes before I realised that a bump in the highway had jerked out a connecting cord, and in fact I wasn't hearing any sound from the CD at all, but something entirely arbitrary--which was somehow fitting. After that introduction, the rest of YHF was easy listening in comparison.
And an interesting note about this conversation: Tweedy doesn't admit that the radio signals that give the album its name were lifted directly from The Conet Project. Wilco were busted for this, and had to pay up--which funded a new pressing of this fascinating cult recording.
Jeff Tweedy
April 9, 2002
Locale: Horseshoe Tavern
How do you feel right now that the album is finally out: is it relief? Frustration? Vindication?
I definitely haven’t been frustrated. When the record comes out it will be a relief. We’ve moved on. The whole time we’ve been working and playing and recording and doing another record and doing records with other people. We’ve been really busy and using the time. The current line-up and the way we all feel right now is the way I’ve always pictured a band to be. We’re really communicating well and really supportive and have a lot of energy to work at it. We’ve definitely rehearsed more than I have in any other band in my life.
Why do you think that is?
There’s more excitement about it, and it’s more satisfying to rehearse when there are things that are changing and getting better. There are visible, tangible things happening.
New blood?
There’s that, but Leroy’s been with us since Summerteeth, he just wasn’t in a lot of the pictures. And Glen and I have been playing together for a couple of years now in other projects and doing things. We all know each other really well. It’s more unified all the way around. There doesn’t seem to be contrasting agendas that were problematic in the band for a period.
People talk about this as a departure, but it seems more like a progression both thematically and sonically.
The way our records are, every one of them could be looked at as a departure by somebody. I consider that a compliment. I want each record to be a departure and its own thing and identity and create its own universe. But at the same time, we aren’t reinventing our entire musical language every time, that would be ridiculous and hard to do.
On Being There, there is a lot of lyrics dealing with dreaming and escape. On Summerteeth, a lot of those dreams turn nightmarish and there are a lot of darker themes, and on this one that dreamstate takes a sonic level. I don’t know if that’s just my own theory or…
No, it’s a great one. Honestly, I don’t know how conscious we are of all the different things that come out in people’s imaginations on our records. I think we do our part to try and be creative and then invest a lot of ourselves in making something has a feeling. My concerns? I’ve changed a lot, but maybe a lot of my basic concerns haven’t, as a person. I’ve always been curious, musically. And lyrically, rooted in a relationship with music that is maybe the prime source of spirituality in my life. It doesn’t surprise me that those things could come out.
I think this record is the least interior of all the records I’ve made. Rock’n’roll was the main subject of Being There, but in a very interior life way, introspective. Summerteeth was someone complaining about their personal problems in Niagara Falls or something, in this sonic environment that’s so ornate and glorious but sort of synthetic at the same time. This record is more relaxed, more space and more patience and more concurrent commentary from the music about what the words are. Cohesive. That’s the only thing I can honestly say that I think we’ve become better at. Overall, for whatever reason, I like this record the best.
You use a lot of keyboards to achieve that effect here. The only electric guitars are either squalls of feedback or the Lou Reed-like solo on “I’m the Man That Loves You.” Were keyboards a more appropriate way to capture that mood?
I write a lot of songs on acoustic guitar, and those are at the core of the songs for me. I have to play them and feel like I’m communicating a song with just voice and guitar. But whenever I’m imagining songs, since Being There, I always picture piano voicings and voicings you can’t reach on a guitar. That’s exciting to me, because they elevate it out of pure folk song status and I like seeing what other environments happen. Pianos and keyboards are something I’m completely naïve about, but that I’m also most excited by.
Do you ever write on keyboards?
I’ve written a couple of songs on keyboards. I come up with parts, but I can only really play with one hand.
The opening song “Break Your Heart,” which on the one hand isn’t that much more strange or disorienting than “Misunderstood” or “Sunken Treasure,” but the fact that there are all these swirling keyboards and melodic drum parts – I wonder if there was an intention in placing that song first on the record, as kind of a throw-down.
Aside from Summerteeth, where the first song…
Was commissioned?
It was commissioned, but it was something we liked and we put it on because it didn’t disrupt the flow of the record that we had already sequenced and made and were happy with. And we liked the idea of starting with almost a theme song, and it was conceptually validated or rationalised. I don’t feel like we compromised ourselves in that experience, which has been pretty well documented. I like the idea of opening with orchestra bells. But in general, we try to open with the most compelling track to open the doors, whatever opens the door the widest to the musical universe we’re trying to create.
That one kicks it down. In that one song are all the possibilities of the entire record you’re about to hear. I also love the final bleep at the end of the song’s deconstruction, it’s almost like, ‘Are you pissed off yet? Here’s one more!’
(laughs mischievously) Yes, that was quite misanthropic.
Reading about the history of this album over the last year, it’s somewhat frustrating that all professional discourse about the album’s release or music in general is a history of opposition in order to make a good story: “This is the record they didn’t want you to hear!” And that discussion also paints audiences into a tribalist, anti-pluralist niche. Does that ever get frustrating, or do you just try to rise above the noise?
I just try not to be too concerned about the fact that I, like everyone else, have a really narrow perception of time. There’s no way around that. If this music, if any music survives from this culture, this past 150 years or whatever will be looked at as the rock era. Even in a couple of months, I know that this will be the story told about this record – being turned down by a record company – and I understand how compelling that story is. It’s a good David and Goliath story, there’s a lot of things about it that are interesting. But I also know that it won’t be that interesting in a couple of months, I don’t think, it will be a footnote. Maybe the record won’t be as interesting to people after they hear it. But maybe it will transcend all that. I don’t have any control over it. The world defines those things. I’m happy with our record and that’s all I can ask.
This is also the second time you’ve had a film crew document the making of a record. Is that distracting?
The first time was weird, because it was this commissioned thing that Billy Bragg was paying for. His wife produced it, and when I saw the movie I thought it was really strange. There’s no real explanation why we’re there. This time around we allowed ourselves to be the subject matter of this guy’s movie, and he was really excited about that. We thought he was a really great photographer, and if nothing else it would look beautiful.
How did it effect work in the studio?
When it was an interview situation, it’s hard not to be self-conscious, and I think we overcame that most of the time. But in the performance area and in the studio, I didn’t think about it at all. If I was thinking about it, then I wasn’t doing my job.
Have you seen it yet?
It’s not done yet, so no. I’ve just seen little clips on the website.
What does the title of the record mean? There’s a European woman’s voice intoning it over the end of “Poor Places.” Is there any significance to the phrase? [as noted above, I later learned it's from The Conet Project]
One of the things we’ve been interested in doing since Being There is finding random elements. “Misunderstood” is almost all random elements. We filled up an entire reel of us jamming in the key of D, just noise, and then played the song as a ballad with piano/acoustic guitar/ vocal, and then played them both back and that’s what happened. We tried to keep ourselves excited by doing stuff like that, undermining our authority over the creation of something. Recognising that cooler things can happen without any profound intentions. Something always happens when you put a random element over something. Whether it holds up over time, you have to be the judge of that. That track had morse code and radio transmissions through the whole track. At one point it became obvious that it was the cool part of it, where it really worked, and we left it there because it was like she named the record. “She” – it was probably a machine.
With all the line-up changes, what is John Stirrat’s role in the band exactly? Is he an anchor for you?
John’s roles are he plays bass, sings background vocals, and has ideas and parts for keyboards and guitars and we collaborate on a lot of levels. We haven’t figured out a really efficient way to collaborate on the songwriting process, it’s been more in the recording process. John’s huge to the band in that our sensibilities are complementary and I trust hearing things with him. It’s amazing how important that is: even if he didn’t play a note on the record, how important it is to have him around the studio. I think we’ve tried to acknowledge things like that, whether or not everyone played on a track, whether or not everyone helped me write a song. The songs are made and produced by Wilco, and that’s why I feel that way. Everyone helps create the environment, which is just as important as the act of it.
I understand most of Wilco are on the new Autumn Defense album.
I just played on a few tracks, and everyone else was involved too.
I’m curious what the difference is between that and Jay Bennett wanting to do his own thing.
I don’t think Jay Bennett wanted to do his own thing until he was aware that he was out of the band. There’s something very different about it. I get the sensation that one of the ways John has really grown is by sticking his neck out and finding another outlet for his songs, and it’s one of the things that hurt Jay in the band, that he had never done that. Whether he admitted to himself or not, he wasn’t really sticking his neck out in that way. Better to ask him, because I’m speculating.
I don’t think he would have been so quick about [releasing his solo record] if it wasn’t for the fact that he wasn’t in Wilco anymore. In that sense it seems a bit more commissioned to me, like something to prove. And not to make judgements on Jay’s contributions to Wilco – I think he was always embraced in the band and acknowledged as a major contributor in different periods in the band and elements of the band’s growth. But it’s not what you did: it’s what you do. There are loyalties that exist in friendships and music. Loyalty cannot supercede passion. You can’t tolerate indifference playing music with people. It’s also an unfair situation to put people in, in a group dynamic, who have agendas that revolve around maximizing credit, being given credit.
Now, I’m speaking very diplomatically. But there’s a lot of credit I can’t give other people, even if I wanted to. And even if it was the truth or accurate, it would be impossible for me to do that. If I said, ‘Jay, why don’t you sing and write every song on the next record.’ The reality of the situation is that a lot of people for a long time would say, ‘Why did Jeff say “you sing…”’
It would be like the last CCR record.
Yeah, right. I wish him nothing but the best, and I’m really happy that he’s finally made his own music and done it and I hope that he does well. But I see a very distinct distinction between John’s solo work and Jay’s. I hope Jay’s evolves into something that – and this is just my interpretation of it – that is more purely motivated.
A lot of bands reach a certain level – I don’t want to say plateau – but they master something they’re good at, and then they embark on a process of unlearning, unravelling, letting things go. Did that inform this record as well?
I don’t know. We’ve either never gotten so confident that we’re good at something, or we have an inability to remember how we did something, or we have a real curiosity and passion for finding new ways to be exciting. I admire bands like CCR who can do the same thing; they were more of a singles band, though, not albums. Or like Jay Farrar. I admire that he does his thing and he’s confident in it, and his latitude has maybe expanded recently, but it’s still very confident and secure in its foundation, in what he does. I’ve just never been that type of person or artist. I’m not compelled to approach things that way.
So there are about three or four things coming out soon, including the soundtrack to that film [Chelsea Walls] you did with Glen…
The soundtrack comes out the same day our record comes out, which I’m not very happy about. If I can avoid giving them any press, I would avoid it because they’ve been bastards to me. It’s a work for hire, I understand that, and I enjoyed doing it, but the album is the mixes for the movie and I was never given the opportunity to mix it for the album, which is very different. I’m a little dissatisfied with that, and also dissatisfied that they’ve seen the opportunity to be as crass as they have been in trying to piggyback it: ‘Oh, everyone already has [downloaded] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, let’s put this out.’ I don’t think it’s going to matter.
The only people who have ever treated me like that are independent labels, isn’t that interesting? Reprise, you can say that they were completely forthright: ‘We’re a big business, and this isn’t a big business record.’ Fine, fair enough, that’s your decision to make.
But Glen, Jim O’Rourke and I made a record last year that should come out this summer on Drag City. Scott McCaughey made a Minus 5 record with us as the band called Minus 5 Down With Wilco, and that should be coming out later this year. Glen has tons of solo stuff he’s putting out, like minimalist drum-oriented records that are really cool. The new Autumn Defense record is shaping up really nice. Everyone in the band is really engaged and inspired musically. It’s a very exciting time.
[we wrap up, and I give him a couple of Canadian albums, including Royal City's Alone at the Microphone, which I describe as being part Wilco, part Handsome Family]
Oh wow, thanks a lot! That should be amazing, then. Well, the Handsome Family part, anyway.
Listen, I certainly don’t want to tell you what to write, and it’s obviously your article to write whatever you want. The only thing I ask respectfully is that I don’t really care to have a lot to say about Jay’s departure and his record. I know I just gave you a bunch of quotes about it, but feel free if you see necessary. I personally don’t want to get involved in it that much, in any kind of dispute. I understand people are interested in it, and there’s always a lot of speculation around this band. ‘Jay’s the Svengali behind the idiot savant Tweedy’…
Have you heard that?
Oh yeah, I’ve heard all kinds of things like that. From Jay in interviews. ‘I wrote this song, I wrote that.’ I don’t want to participate in all that, and that’s why I’m being diplomatic and I’m just asking you to be sensitive to that – if you can at all. If not, no grudges would be held at all. I certainly gave you enough information.
I’d rather dwell on the record, to tell you the truth.
Well, thanks very much.
-end-
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Slew of Reviews, May 07
More reviews today:
El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead in today's Eye. He plays the Opera House in Toronto tonight. I'll admit that I might have got more out of this record if an annoying voice-over on the advance copy didn't remind me every 20 seconds that I was listening to an advance copy.
A Tribute to Joni Mitchell in last week's Eye.
Dntel's Blind Luck in last week's Eye.
The reviews below appeared in the mainstream daily K-W Record over the past three weeks. To save you scrolling, they are, in alphabetical order: Bright Eyes, Bebel Gilberto, Macy Gray/Joss Stone, Matthew Herbert, Last Town Chorus, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (shoo-in for best-of-07 list), Matt and Kim (my favourite review to write), and Joel Plaskett Emergency.
Bright Eyes – Cassadaga (Saddle Creek/Outside)
Conor Oberst was once a boy wonder singer/songwriter, prone to criticism for his early overachievements: grandiose orchestration, dramatic vocals, and occasionally precocious poetry about the deeply political and personal.
All of that made Bright Eyes albums exciting, even if Oberst occasionally fell flat on his face. As his popularity caught up to his talent, however, edges began to get smoothed over. For a personality that always sounded too larger than life for the recorded medium, here he takes the middle ground and fades all too easily into the background. Cassadaga is a tasteful, mildly interesting and well-arranged, yet it ultimately displays little of the passion that fuelled Oberst's best work.
Recorded in a series of studios across America, there's also lyrical evidence of a restless spirit on songs like Four Winds and I Must Belong Somewhere—no doubt due to the fact that this is the first album Oberst has made outside of his Lincoln, Nebraska home base. But throughout, Oberst seems to be pulling his punches both lyrically and musically, with the gorgeous exception of No One Would Riot For Less, where he touches on everything "from the madness of the government to the vengeance of the sea."
Cassadaga is certainly Oberst's most conventionally pretty recording. The orchestration has evolved considerably from the ersatz high school band he once lugged around on tour, and Leonard Cohen-esque choirs of female backing vocals decorate his countrified folk rock.
Oberst is known for his prolific pen—this is the seventh album for the 27-year old, and preceded in 2006 by a collection of worthy rarities—which makes it all the more baffling when Cassadaga sounds too much like material he used to leave on the cutting room floor. (April 19, 2007)
Bebel Gilberto – Momento (Six Degrees/Outside)
Brazilian bossa nova music is supposed to be weightless and breezy, but Bebel Gilberto pushes our patience on her third North American album. Her voice has always been delicate and slight, but where once it was haunting—as on her superior 2000 debut Tanto Tempo—now she just sounds bored.
None of the accompanying music gives her any reason to feel otherwise, despite returning producer (and Bjork collaborator) Guy Sigsworth and help from the misnomered Brazilian Girls.
The more instruments on any given track, the more likely it is to sound like the soundtrack of shopping for furniture. Gilberto’s finest moment here, other than a decent cover of Cole Porter’s Night and Day, is the stripped down Cadê Você, with nothing but acoustic guitar and percussion backdrop. Which, when you think of it, was all her father's first wife Astrud needed on The Girl From Ipanema. All Bebel needs to do is find her own Stan Getz and hit the road as a trio. (April 26, 2007)
Macy Gray – Big (Geffen/Universal)
Joss Stone – Introducing (Virgin/EMI)
Two soul sisters, born 20 years apart, each with a smash success in their past and hoping to follow it up. The UK singer Joss Stone, barely past her teenage years, sold over seven million copies of her first two albums, so it's not clear what exactly she's Introducing this time out. Macy Gray, on the other hand, has been mostly MIA for the past four years, re-emerging here with a new label and a new lease on life.
Stone is technically the better singer, though here she sounds like an amateur going through the motions—a large step backwards from 2004's Mind Body & Soul. Producer Raphael Saadiq gives her a decent live backing band and calls in favours from Common and the reclusive Lauryn Hill, but to little avail. Now that the likes of Christina Aguilera are leaving the bubblegum behind and entering similar soul terrain, Stone needs to find some better material, because she's not going to get by on her pipes alone.
Gray, on the other hand, sounds downright hungry on her first album in four years. "Betcha thought I'd die when you went away" is the first lyric we hear, but from there on in Gray shows that hasn't let her hiatus get her down. With plenty of production help by Will.I.Am of Black Eyed Peas, Big is bursting with huge disco grooves, punchy rock riffs, saucy vocals and her playfully dark view of modern romance.
Natalie Cole shows up doing a Bee Gees impersonation on Finally Made Me Happy, and even Fergie can't derail the swinging ballad Glad You're Here. An invisible Justin Timberlake shows up in a supporting role, co-writing and co-producing a couple of the funkier tracks but staying away from the mic, knowing better than to mess with a personality like Gray's. (April 19, 2007)
Matthew Herbert – Score (!K7/Outside)
Herbert has a reputation for mixing the avant-garde and the dancefloor, constructing house music tracks out of blood samples, the sound of food, and corporate products in order to make political points about consumption and other pertinent issues.
He sounds deadly serious, but what’s always made Herbert palatable is his perverse sense of play, which often involves subverting people’s expectations. That’s what we get with this collection of soundtrack work he’s done for various short films dating back to 1997, which for the most part play it straight with lovely string pieces and brassy big band numbers, with the occasional thumping dance beat underneath. There’s even a medieval-sounding choral piece, commissioned for a dance company.
What makes this work is that Herbert isn’t merely trying on a new hat here: he’s a skilled arranger, and some of these compositions could easily take their place alongside some of the better movie themes of the 60s and 70s. Others are content to be slight mood pieces, accordion-driven Parisian pastiches or dance-y distractions.
It doesn’t always hold together thematically, but Score is as good a representation as any of the breadth of Matthew Herbert’s possibilities. (April 27, 2007)
The Last Town Chorus – Wire Waltz (Hacktone/Warner)
Everyone needs a gimmick. If you don’t have one, why are you any different from every other talented singer/songwriter/instrumentalist/producer?
Megan Hickey of The Last Town Chorus knows this all too well. For starters, she plays a traditional instrument in an untraditional way: she uses the swooping sounds of a lap steel guitar in a distorted fashion far removed from the country music that it’s most associated with. It sounds just as lonely and loping in her hands, though considerably more piercing than its lilting, cleaner counterpart.
Hickey also knows that a surefire way to get attention is to record an 80s pop hit and slow it down until it’s barely recognizable. She does this with David Bowie’s Modern Love, a move that landed her a much-discussed placement on Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a decent cover even if it’s an entirely unoriginal move; M. Ward bested her Bowie revisionism with his ragtime version of Let’s Dance a few years back.
Her own songwriting, however, is far from fruition, and her vocals bear an uncanny resemblance to The Sundays and other early 90s British pop acts. She’s established her own instrumental voice here, but everything else has yet to follow. (April 27, 2007)
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Living With the Living (Touch and Go)
By the time most rock'n'rollers turn 36, they're well out of things to say and ways to say them. Ted Leo, on the other hand, manages to balance a youthful enthusiasm for The Clash albums he grew up on with a literate love of language, while successfully incorporating his catholic musical influences into the power trio format.
On top of that, the man keeps getting better. Living With the Living is the first time he's written 15 songs that stand tall with all of his heroes, combining his political punk rock roots with Kinks-y pop, reggae-tinged soul ballads, Celtic melodies and even some Rage Against the Machine-style aggro agit-rock. Leo's too old to settle for predictability, but none of this sounds like self-conscious genre jumping. It's all tied together with a strong melodic pop sense and Leo's entirely convincing and impassioned vocals, which can be fiery or falsetto, tender or terrifying.
Living With the Living has all the hallmarks of a classic album, the type of work that finally elevates an underground hero to the attention he deserves, and at exactly the right time. (April 19, 2007)
Matt and Kim – s/t (I Heart Comix)
Meet Matt and Kim! They are the happiest band in America! Matt sings like his cheeks are pulled back in a permasmile! Look at their press photos! They’re always eating popsicles or sucking back a Big Gulp! No wonder they’re so happy!
They are both art students from Brooklyn! Matt plays keyboards, and Kim plays drums! Kim plays, like, really good! Matt is not bad either! But Kim does not sing!
That means we get sick of Matt’s voice really fast! This is too bad.
But wait! There’s more! They have a hilarious video! It’s called Yea Yeah and it’s a YouTube sensation! Look it up! It involves a lot of food and is very messy! Apparently it took four minutes to shoot and four hours to clean up! It’s so absurd that you barely notice how utterly inane the song is!
Word is that their live show is just as much fun! Matt and Kim are playing at Apollo Ink in Kitchener on Saturday, May 5! [they also play two shows as part of the Over the Top Festival in Toronto this weekend] (May 3, 2007)
Joel Plaskett Emergency – Ashtray Rock (Maple/Universal)
Joel Plaskett’s time in the sun is long overdue. After scoring a surprise commercial radio hit last summer (Nowhere With You) and suddenly becoming a CBC darling, this album debuted in the top 40 and his current Canadian tour is selling out large venues. (I’d recommend getting advance tickets to his Starlight show next month.) This all comes six years after his bonafide masterpiece Down at the Khyber, a collection he has yet to top.
Here, Plaskett strings together a series of songs about adolescent misadventures at his high school hangout, Ashtray Rock in Halifax. Musically, Plaskett combines his riff-heavy rock fetish, his folkier acoustic side, and his gradual move away from lo-fi garage rock into slicker textures that enhance his songs rather than smooth over his rougher edges.
Case in point is the fabulous Fashionable People, where producer Gordie Johnson (Big Sugar) takes a bouncy pop song with a stadium rock chorus, and adds some retro electro bottom end, a Blondie backbeat, and some falsetto backing vocals lifted from the Stones’ disco period. It’s the first great Canadian single of this summer.
Lyrically, however, Plaskett regresses considerably. Mythologizing the not-so-epic adventures of Drunk Teenagers wears thin quickly, largely due to some terrible rhyme schemes and not-so-clever turns of phrase. Apparently some of this material is drawn from sketches he wrote ten years ago, and it shows. (“Imagine if that lake was beer/ imagine if that rock was hash.”)
Because he’s writing about a wonderfully naïve point in his life, he takes it as a license to indulge in more clichés than he would normally. He’s obviously shooting for some Springsteenian moments of resonance, but the paper thin story line doesn’t really make for rich character studies. And it’s not like he’s an amateur who is aping the greats; Plaskett’s other work achieves this quite naturally.
Most of the missteps are easily forgiven when juxtaposed with his melodic gift and the performances by his power trio. Even though he’s a hot new artist, Plaskett is actually five albums into his solo career, and Ashtray Rock is still a better rock record than the company he’s now keeping in the rest of the top 40. (May 3, 2007)
El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead in today's Eye. He plays the Opera House in Toronto tonight. I'll admit that I might have got more out of this record if an annoying voice-over on the advance copy didn't remind me every 20 seconds that I was listening to an advance copy.
A Tribute to Joni Mitchell in last week's Eye.
Dntel's Blind Luck in last week's Eye.
The reviews below appeared in the mainstream daily K-W Record over the past three weeks. To save you scrolling, they are, in alphabetical order: Bright Eyes, Bebel Gilberto, Macy Gray/Joss Stone, Matthew Herbert, Last Town Chorus, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (shoo-in for best-of-07 list), Matt and Kim (my favourite review to write), and Joel Plaskett Emergency.
Bright Eyes – Cassadaga (Saddle Creek/Outside)
Conor Oberst was once a boy wonder singer/songwriter, prone to criticism for his early overachievements: grandiose orchestration, dramatic vocals, and occasionally precocious poetry about the deeply political and personal.
All of that made Bright Eyes albums exciting, even if Oberst occasionally fell flat on his face. As his popularity caught up to his talent, however, edges began to get smoothed over. For a personality that always sounded too larger than life for the recorded medium, here he takes the middle ground and fades all too easily into the background. Cassadaga is a tasteful, mildly interesting and well-arranged, yet it ultimately displays little of the passion that fuelled Oberst's best work.
Recorded in a series of studios across America, there's also lyrical evidence of a restless spirit on songs like Four Winds and I Must Belong Somewhere—no doubt due to the fact that this is the first album Oberst has made outside of his Lincoln, Nebraska home base. But throughout, Oberst seems to be pulling his punches both lyrically and musically, with the gorgeous exception of No One Would Riot For Less, where he touches on everything "from the madness of the government to the vengeance of the sea."
Cassadaga is certainly Oberst's most conventionally pretty recording. The orchestration has evolved considerably from the ersatz high school band he once lugged around on tour, and Leonard Cohen-esque choirs of female backing vocals decorate his countrified folk rock.
Oberst is known for his prolific pen—this is the seventh album for the 27-year old, and preceded in 2006 by a collection of worthy rarities—which makes it all the more baffling when Cassadaga sounds too much like material he used to leave on the cutting room floor. (April 19, 2007)
Bebel Gilberto – Momento (Six Degrees/Outside)
Brazilian bossa nova music is supposed to be weightless and breezy, but Bebel Gilberto pushes our patience on her third North American album. Her voice has always been delicate and slight, but where once it was haunting—as on her superior 2000 debut Tanto Tempo—now she just sounds bored.
None of the accompanying music gives her any reason to feel otherwise, despite returning producer (and Bjork collaborator) Guy Sigsworth and help from the misnomered Brazilian Girls.
The more instruments on any given track, the more likely it is to sound like the soundtrack of shopping for furniture. Gilberto’s finest moment here, other than a decent cover of Cole Porter’s Night and Day, is the stripped down Cadê Você, with nothing but acoustic guitar and percussion backdrop. Which, when you think of it, was all her father's first wife Astrud needed on The Girl From Ipanema. All Bebel needs to do is find her own Stan Getz and hit the road as a trio. (April 26, 2007)
Macy Gray – Big (Geffen/Universal)
Joss Stone – Introducing (Virgin/EMI)
Two soul sisters, born 20 years apart, each with a smash success in their past and hoping to follow it up. The UK singer Joss Stone, barely past her teenage years, sold over seven million copies of her first two albums, so it's not clear what exactly she's Introducing this time out. Macy Gray, on the other hand, has been mostly MIA for the past four years, re-emerging here with a new label and a new lease on life.
Stone is technically the better singer, though here she sounds like an amateur going through the motions—a large step backwards from 2004's Mind Body & Soul. Producer Raphael Saadiq gives her a decent live backing band and calls in favours from Common and the reclusive Lauryn Hill, but to little avail. Now that the likes of Christina Aguilera are leaving the bubblegum behind and entering similar soul terrain, Stone needs to find some better material, because she's not going to get by on her pipes alone.
Gray, on the other hand, sounds downright hungry on her first album in four years. "Betcha thought I'd die when you went away" is the first lyric we hear, but from there on in Gray shows that hasn't let her hiatus get her down. With plenty of production help by Will.I.Am of Black Eyed Peas, Big is bursting with huge disco grooves, punchy rock riffs, saucy vocals and her playfully dark view of modern romance.
Natalie Cole shows up doing a Bee Gees impersonation on Finally Made Me Happy, and even Fergie can't derail the swinging ballad Glad You're Here. An invisible Justin Timberlake shows up in a supporting role, co-writing and co-producing a couple of the funkier tracks but staying away from the mic, knowing better than to mess with a personality like Gray's. (April 19, 2007)
Matthew Herbert – Score (!K7/Outside)
Herbert has a reputation for mixing the avant-garde and the dancefloor, constructing house music tracks out of blood samples, the sound of food, and corporate products in order to make political points about consumption and other pertinent issues.
He sounds deadly serious, but what’s always made Herbert palatable is his perverse sense of play, which often involves subverting people’s expectations. That’s what we get with this collection of soundtrack work he’s done for various short films dating back to 1997, which for the most part play it straight with lovely string pieces and brassy big band numbers, with the occasional thumping dance beat underneath. There’s even a medieval-sounding choral piece, commissioned for a dance company.
What makes this work is that Herbert isn’t merely trying on a new hat here: he’s a skilled arranger, and some of these compositions could easily take their place alongside some of the better movie themes of the 60s and 70s. Others are content to be slight mood pieces, accordion-driven Parisian pastiches or dance-y distractions.
It doesn’t always hold together thematically, but Score is as good a representation as any of the breadth of Matthew Herbert’s possibilities. (April 27, 2007)
The Last Town Chorus – Wire Waltz (Hacktone/Warner)
Everyone needs a gimmick. If you don’t have one, why are you any different from every other talented singer/songwriter/instrumentalist/producer?
Megan Hickey of The Last Town Chorus knows this all too well. For starters, she plays a traditional instrument in an untraditional way: she uses the swooping sounds of a lap steel guitar in a distorted fashion far removed from the country music that it’s most associated with. It sounds just as lonely and loping in her hands, though considerably more piercing than its lilting, cleaner counterpart.
Hickey also knows that a surefire way to get attention is to record an 80s pop hit and slow it down until it’s barely recognizable. She does this with David Bowie’s Modern Love, a move that landed her a much-discussed placement on Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a decent cover even if it’s an entirely unoriginal move; M. Ward bested her Bowie revisionism with his ragtime version of Let’s Dance a few years back.
Her own songwriting, however, is far from fruition, and her vocals bear an uncanny resemblance to The Sundays and other early 90s British pop acts. She’s established her own instrumental voice here, but everything else has yet to follow. (April 27, 2007)
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Living With the Living (Touch and Go)
By the time most rock'n'rollers turn 36, they're well out of things to say and ways to say them. Ted Leo, on the other hand, manages to balance a youthful enthusiasm for The Clash albums he grew up on with a literate love of language, while successfully incorporating his catholic musical influences into the power trio format.
On top of that, the man keeps getting better. Living With the Living is the first time he's written 15 songs that stand tall with all of his heroes, combining his political punk rock roots with Kinks-y pop, reggae-tinged soul ballads, Celtic melodies and even some Rage Against the Machine-style aggro agit-rock. Leo's too old to settle for predictability, but none of this sounds like self-conscious genre jumping. It's all tied together with a strong melodic pop sense and Leo's entirely convincing and impassioned vocals, which can be fiery or falsetto, tender or terrifying.
Living With the Living has all the hallmarks of a classic album, the type of work that finally elevates an underground hero to the attention he deserves, and at exactly the right time. (April 19, 2007)
Matt and Kim – s/t (I Heart Comix)
Meet Matt and Kim! They are the happiest band in America! Matt sings like his cheeks are pulled back in a permasmile! Look at their press photos! They’re always eating popsicles or sucking back a Big Gulp! No wonder they’re so happy!
They are both art students from Brooklyn! Matt plays keyboards, and Kim plays drums! Kim plays, like, really good! Matt is not bad either! But Kim does not sing!
That means we get sick of Matt’s voice really fast! This is too bad.
But wait! There’s more! They have a hilarious video! It’s called Yea Yeah and it’s a YouTube sensation! Look it up! It involves a lot of food and is very messy! Apparently it took four minutes to shoot and four hours to clean up! It’s so absurd that you barely notice how utterly inane the song is!
Word is that their live show is just as much fun! Matt and Kim are playing at Apollo Ink in Kitchener on Saturday, May 5! [they also play two shows as part of the Over the Top Festival in Toronto this weekend] (May 3, 2007)
Joel Plaskett Emergency – Ashtray Rock (Maple/Universal)
Joel Plaskett’s time in the sun is long overdue. After scoring a surprise commercial radio hit last summer (Nowhere With You) and suddenly becoming a CBC darling, this album debuted in the top 40 and his current Canadian tour is selling out large venues. (I’d recommend getting advance tickets to his Starlight show next month.) This all comes six years after his bonafide masterpiece Down at the Khyber, a collection he has yet to top.
Here, Plaskett strings together a series of songs about adolescent misadventures at his high school hangout, Ashtray Rock in Halifax. Musically, Plaskett combines his riff-heavy rock fetish, his folkier acoustic side, and his gradual move away from lo-fi garage rock into slicker textures that enhance his songs rather than smooth over his rougher edges.
Case in point is the fabulous Fashionable People, where producer Gordie Johnson (Big Sugar) takes a bouncy pop song with a stadium rock chorus, and adds some retro electro bottom end, a Blondie backbeat, and some falsetto backing vocals lifted from the Stones’ disco period. It’s the first great Canadian single of this summer.
Lyrically, however, Plaskett regresses considerably. Mythologizing the not-so-epic adventures of Drunk Teenagers wears thin quickly, largely due to some terrible rhyme schemes and not-so-clever turns of phrase. Apparently some of this material is drawn from sketches he wrote ten years ago, and it shows. (“Imagine if that lake was beer/ imagine if that rock was hash.”)
Because he’s writing about a wonderfully naïve point in his life, he takes it as a license to indulge in more clichés than he would normally. He’s obviously shooting for some Springsteenian moments of resonance, but the paper thin story line doesn’t really make for rich character studies. And it’s not like he’s an amateur who is aping the greats; Plaskett’s other work achieves this quite naturally.
Most of the missteps are easily forgiven when juxtaposed with his melodic gift and the performances by his power trio. Even though he’s a hot new artist, Plaskett is actually five albums into his solo career, and Ashtray Rock is still a better rock record than the company he’s now keeping in the rest of the top 40. (May 3, 2007)
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
The Blankket
Steve Kado is no stranger to this site, for his outspoken Torontopian theories as well as his role as midwife for Final Fantasy's surprise success.
The founder of the Blocks Recording Club--more about that next week--just put out his second solo EP as The Blankket, his covers project (get it?) which in this case focuses entirely on Bruce Springsteen. Suitably, it's titled Be Your Own Boss. I've been a fan of this idea ever since I first saw him perform it at the Brave New Waves anniversary show in March 2004, though why it's taken him three years to finish four songs is a minor mystery to me. The result, both live and on disc, has baffled both of Toronto's weeklies: here and here.
Springsteen is such a huge and complicated figure to tackle, and of all the recent acts garnering Springsteen comparisons, I think that only Arcade Fire really nail it with "(Antichrist Television Blues)," where Win Butler turns the working class escapist fantasy and gives it an evil twist: there, economic liberation and salvation are directly linked to sexual exploitation and messianic religious fervour.
Kado tackles four Springsteen songs: "Dancing in the Dark" is the sad, self-loathing lament that the lyrics always intended it to be; "Badlands" becomes a jaunty, earnest K Records love song; "Thunder Road" is, well a bit of a shambles; and "I'm on Fire" is a desolate, pulsing drone driven by howling, distorted vocals that appear as if Kado is taking the self-immolating lyrics quite literally... that edgy and dull knife sounds like it's ripping through his skull Pan's Labyrinth-style.
As you can see below, Kado takes this all deadly seriously, as he well should. But for all the talk, Be Your Own Boss is somewhat slight--there's so much more that could be done here. Plus, since I first saw Kado do "Dancing in the Dark" four years ago, both Chad VanGaalen and Ted Leo have also discovered that song's inherent darkness in their live sets.
This interview was conducted for a CBC Radio 3 piece about Blocks, that should be airing shortly, though none of this material is featured there. Some of it will run in the May 10 issue of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, in advance of The Blankket's house show at 130 King St. N on May 18. The Blankket is also performing this weekend in Toronto at the Over the Top festival, Friday May 4 at Sneaky Dee's with Flosstradamus and Yah Mos Def.
If this post leaves you wanting to hear more of Kado's theories, there's a 2006 Wavelength interview here.
Considering my own passion for the subject of Springsteen, I feel like this conversation could have gone on for hours. Luckily, because I was there primarily to get soundbites about Blocks, it didn't. For the sake of my minidisc batteries, I tried to stay out of the cultural theory rants as much as I could--always difficult with Mr. Kado.
Steve Kado
January 31, 2007
locale: Blocks Recording Club office above the Tranzac
In a nutshell, what appeals to you about Springsteen songs?
There’s a sentimental attachment. It’s some of the first music I ever heard in my life. I do actually just like it, in a pretty uncomplicated way. There’s a lot in there that you can access, a lot about it that’s pretty interesting. They’re amazing songs, and they aren’t done the way other songs are done.
Comparing Bruce Springsteen to Neil Diamond, for example, I just like Neil Diamond too—I really enjoy his music, especially his American response to Beatlemania. He occupies an interesting place when everyone really got into British pop music, he did this weird kind of American pop music that wasn’t Beach Boys-y, it was Northeastern as opposed to Californian in orientation, and it co-exists at the same time as the Beatles. It’s very well done, very exciting to listen to. But if you were going to cover Neil Diamond, you don’t have too many angles available to you. You have sincerity or critical sarcasm, and those are the two poses I could see to cover something like “I’m a Believer.” Either you are a believer, or you think it’s stupid that anyone would be a believer. That’s not terribly interesting to me as material to cover. As much as I like it.
“Stepping Stone” has been done a number of times, mostly by punk bands.
But there’s only one angle there: it’s nasty! “You’re a terrible woman.” That’s the point. “You use people.” It’s a great song, but it only has one application. You can be sincere about it; you can’t really be insincere about it. Minor Threat were sincere about it.
With Bruce Springsteen, you don’t have this either/or about being sincere or non-sincere. You have a bunch of emotional categories that you either do or don’t identify with, but at the same time, the songs I especially don’t identify with are these tropes about the automotive and the way freedom is purchased in many of the songs.
Because there are different narrative layers in Bruce Springsteen songs, I don’t think that’s necessarily authorial voice per se so much as it’s him creating these situations, or analyzing the existence of these situations and presenting them for you to consider. Is that just another thing that’s tragic about this situation? That any kind of success or escape is going to have to be mediated by capital? Which ultimately will produce the same effects it creates at the beginning? Inevitably, capital is the crux of the majority of the drama in these songs.
If it’s an interpersonal drama, it’s still a drama that exists because people are in situations that are desperate, and their relationships are created along these lines that are economically predetermined.
“You Can Look But You Better Not Touch.”
Yeah, and “Used Cars.” There are all these songs where the economic has a deep personal meaning, and it’s not just something so simple as, ‘I want money, lots of money.’ That’s been done anyway. The Flying Lizards, who are one of my favourite bands of all time, might even be my second-favourite band of all time, because I think David Cunningham is a genius. The Flying Lizards did an amazing cover of “Money,” but the song itself isn’t the winner with that, it’s the context it’s placed in. It’s on a record where the first song is a Bertolt Brecht cover. All the other things that go on in that Flying Lizards record frame this cover of “Money” that then gives it this whole metacritical…
But most people, including myself, only know that single.
True. It’s a shame. The single is still critical, but the larger critical angle is really subtle, nuanced and interesting. On the single itself, it’s very ‘ha-ha, get it?’ But that joke is the centerpieces of a larger thing. It’s like saying you know what Sartre is about but you only have the ‘hell is other people’ quote hanging around. It’s the good one-liner, but it’s not the (snaps fingers).
I think Bruce Springsteen is really an exemplary songwriter in terms of both personal drama—feeling emotional—but also how he’s framing people’s relationships to capital and the culture industry in his songs. There’s so much in there for people to do. All the Springsteen covers—there’s room to be bad, too, obviously—but there’s so much room to succeed.
He’s writing them for himself to sing, of course, but if you choose to sing them he throws you so many bones, makes a lot of things easy for you, and fun to do. There’s an opportunity for you to sing the song this way, which is completely a part of the way the song is, that will make this feeling happen. Then just by going up by one note, you can make it do this. Those opportunities are all there.
You can see him using them to great effect, when you separate him the writer from him the performer. He takes all these avenues himself, and I can take those avenues too and not have them come out the same way.
To me, so much of his performance is tied into having such an amazing band. Though conversely, no matter how well orchestrated, the songs are just as successful when stripped down to one person. They portray a different aspect of the grand drama in those songs.
I think it’s there to be done. Part of what’s in the songs is that it is able to be done by one person. Ensemble playing, especially on records like Born to Run—or even the first three albums, with songs like “Rosalita”—those songs offer some of the most amazing ensemble playing of the 70s on them. That is one of the things that’s attractive about Bruce Springsteen, is hearing his band slay. At the same time, it’s not what is THE attractive thing about Bruce Springsteen. If you were just in it to hear sax solos, you could be looking elsewhere.
It’s what he brings to them that makes them such an issue. You can tell by how poorly they’ve all fared as solo artists. It’s the material that really stands out above everything else, and the fact that he’s such an able interpreter of his own material makes it all the more amazing, all the more charismatic and exciting. But they are two separate issues.
Why do people not want to believe you’re being sincere?
A lot of people don’t want to believe certain things about Bruce Springsteen. And maybe they have certain ideas about what sort of things I’m interested in or what kind of person I am. They can tell based on how I look and what my concerns are or how I’m dressed, what kind of company I’m keeping and what context these things are happening in. I’m not a steelworker. I’m not some guy from Jersey. They assume that what’s in Springsteen is limited to Bob Seger terrain, but he was better looking and therefore more appealing and that’s why there’s more fuss about Springsteen.
People have certain stereotypes [about me], which are largely correct. ‘Here’s someone who is university educated, has enjoyed a fair amount of privilege in his life, has bizarre academic concerns as opposed to thrillingly visceral Americana Detroit car concerns. What’s this guy doing with this material? He’s obviously mocking it.’
The people who doubt my sincerity are the people who really don’t get it, or the people who are examining what it looks like the project is, rather than how it works. I was on tour recently in the American Midwest and Northeast, and in lots of these places—like in Detroit—the behaviour of capital has been brutal. The collapse of the American manufacturing sector is what’s made Detroit a synonym for ‘terrifying.’ The people there all felt that it was really straightforward. They didn’t feel I was being weird with the Boss. In Detroit specifically, I got a great deal of positive feedback. In other places like Pittsburgh, an old steeltown, in places that are directly a part of these songs, as opposed to Toronto, which never figures at all into Springsteen type stuff. In places that are either like or actually are protagonists in some of these songs, people got it, I think. It was heartening, because I do feel so sincerely about it. I do really care so much about the songs.
Is the Blankket ever going to be more than this?
The Blankket was never meant to just be a covers thing. The covers were easiest. A really good way of figuring stuff out and how you want to do music, is to do a bunch of stuff that already exists. I have an original record that is mostly about Theodore Adorno, that I want to finish by this summer because I plan on touring in Europe. I have to attack that task. I might do another Springsteen record, actually, with only songs from Tunnel of Love. It would be “All That Heaven Will Allow,” “Brilliant Disguise” obviously, and “When You’re Alone.” I got into Tunnel of Love near the end of me finishing this project, and it would have really changed the whole thing had I still been working on it consistently. Maybe it will be a whole separate thing.
It says so much that when that record came out, he had just got married, and the celebrity press spun it as, “Oh, Tunnel of Love! He’s just written this romantic record about his wife! And here’s the first single, ‘Brilliant Disguise!’”
It’s terrifying, eh? He’s so dark on that record. It’s a divorce record to his wife, and if it weren’t for some of those more questionable 80s production choices, it would totally be Nebraska 2. And even better in a way, because it’s so much more personal and the terror is so much more real on lots of those songs. “Brilliant Disguise” is just a horrible patch of sentiment, it’s a terrible realm of doubt to even consider if you’re seeing anyone. It’s all the stuff you don’t want to think about at all. The whole record is like that, except “All That Heaven Will Allow” is a weirdly optimistic song, but the bookends on either side of it, lyrically, are about utter failure.
Can you describe the current state of the Blankket live show?
Ok, well, I cover my head with Vaseline and stick my head in a bag of rice and do mostly Bruce Springsteen songs in my set. That will probably change soon. I just finished a tour where I got really into the rice, but I also feel like I’ve pursued that direction. I want to do interesting performing stuff in general, and regularize it for touring purposes. It’s an interesting process, especially because it’s the kind of thing people do all the time: they rehearse to get things tight before a tour, and I feel like I have other needs. At some point I discovered shop towels and thought, ‘These solve so many of my problems!’ I just transpose what would be normal musician tasks into this surreal Vaseline world.
[Blankket shows in 2006 consisted of Kado inviting the audience to bring radios, which would transmit his backing tacks via an MP3 player, somewhat similar to the Flaming Lips’ earlier experiments with radio performance. Most of the shows were held in unconventional places, like the side of a highway in Brantford.] Are you still working with radios?
I’m not still working with radios because I feel it demanded too much of the audience. I wanted to have this relationship with the audience, but either it wasn’t honestly meaningful for the audience to be backing me, which is fair—they’re making a choice, and there’s more of them. I understand what that means. If it becomes meaningful to them, I’d consider doing it again, because I am very interested in working with that technology. There are some aspects of that, that I left unexplored, which I would explore if radio adoption was high. If people were really stoked, I could have done stuff that would be really, really interesting.
Were you using an iPod transmitter for backing tracks for those shows?
I was using an MP3 player that had two stereo outputs, so basically four channels out of it that I could send, and I was at one point broadcasting two parallel signals from car radio transmitters. They weren’t iPod transmitters, because those are expensive and work in a way that’s no fun to play with. These were very simple, purchased-in-Chinatown things that plug into your lighter in your car. I modified those to take batteries and bought a bunch of kits, radio hobby kits, that have little printed circuit boards, and I built a bunch of those. The radio transmitter thing was a hassle in a lot of respects. I’m not the best electronics guy. My sautering was not the finest. I was doing a house show at Kevin Parnell’s house, and I had to fix the transmitter when I got there. I showed up, plugged in the sautering iron, sautered it, and it sort of worked the whole time. The only person who really liked it was Sandro Perri, who thought it was amazing.
If it’s not working, there’s no shame in moving along. I can’t actually say: “None of you can come in without radios,” when I’m playing shows outside anyway. Part of the goal of playing with radios was that I didn’t want to play in bars; I wanted the freedom to explore areas with people and do fun things in interesting places with a group of people. I can’t really say, “It’s $2 cheaper if you bring a radio,” because I’m not taking money in for it anyway.
And people might spend $10 in batteries to bring their radio.
Potentially, yeah. If I said there was a cover charge for this event, people would decide whether or not they wanted to go, and if they go they’d pay me five bucks. Whereas, they could buy a radio instead, keep the radio afterwards, and see the show. One of the things that interesting to me, but harder for other people, is that radio is a vanishing technology. It’s in a strange liminal space where there’s this interesting technique of wireless broadcasting we’ve developed that we’re all moving away from, but for no reason—because it works! It does the trick!
It’s the original wi-fi!
It’s going to have to come back around to that anyway. But there was this shift to memory-based stuff, where you make all your choices in advance, and then nothing surprising happens, unless you planned to have a surprise somewhere along the line. It’s interesting. What’s going to be really cool about radio is that at some point the radio will be so depreciated, that it can become extremely local again. The CRTC will back off on regulating it because it will just be nothing to people.
At the same time, the technology is very easy to work with on a hobbyist level: you can build a radio quite easily, or radio transmission parts quite easily. I’m also interested to see what happens when peak oil makes it impossible to ship microcomponents around, or making the manufacturing of microcomponents difficult. The main ingredient in radio is coils, which are just wires that you coil and then it has different physical properties—which I find unbelievably weird, that the shape you put something in gives it a new physical property.
There’s so much that’s so amazing and mysterious about radio as a technology, that it’s so attractive to work of. It’s just whether I’m relying on the audience to work on it with me, or whether maybe at some point I just work with radios and present this crazy stuff to an audience, and say: ‘Come into my radio room, and look at all this stuff that’s happening without wires!’
-end-
note: Radio art enthusiasts near Toronto should know about the Deep Wireless festival, which kicks off this week and runs the entire month of May.
The founder of the Blocks Recording Club--more about that next week--just put out his second solo EP as The Blankket, his covers project (get it?) which in this case focuses entirely on Bruce Springsteen. Suitably, it's titled Be Your Own Boss. I've been a fan of this idea ever since I first saw him perform it at the Brave New Waves anniversary show in March 2004, though why it's taken him three years to finish four songs is a minor mystery to me. The result, both live and on disc, has baffled both of Toronto's weeklies: here and here.
Springsteen is such a huge and complicated figure to tackle, and of all the recent acts garnering Springsteen comparisons, I think that only Arcade Fire really nail it with "(Antichrist Television Blues)," where Win Butler turns the working class escapist fantasy and gives it an evil twist: there, economic liberation and salvation are directly linked to sexual exploitation and messianic religious fervour.
Kado tackles four Springsteen songs: "Dancing in the Dark" is the sad, self-loathing lament that the lyrics always intended it to be; "Badlands" becomes a jaunty, earnest K Records love song; "Thunder Road" is, well a bit of a shambles; and "I'm on Fire" is a desolate, pulsing drone driven by howling, distorted vocals that appear as if Kado is taking the self-immolating lyrics quite literally... that edgy and dull knife sounds like it's ripping through his skull Pan's Labyrinth-style.
As you can see below, Kado takes this all deadly seriously, as he well should. But for all the talk, Be Your Own Boss is somewhat slight--there's so much more that could be done here. Plus, since I first saw Kado do "Dancing in the Dark" four years ago, both Chad VanGaalen and Ted Leo have also discovered that song's inherent darkness in their live sets.
This interview was conducted for a CBC Radio 3 piece about Blocks, that should be airing shortly, though none of this material is featured there. Some of it will run in the May 10 issue of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, in advance of The Blankket's house show at 130 King St. N on May 18. The Blankket is also performing this weekend in Toronto at the Over the Top festival, Friday May 4 at Sneaky Dee's with Flosstradamus and Yah Mos Def.
If this post leaves you wanting to hear more of Kado's theories, there's a 2006 Wavelength interview here.
Considering my own passion for the subject of Springsteen, I feel like this conversation could have gone on for hours. Luckily, because I was there primarily to get soundbites about Blocks, it didn't. For the sake of my minidisc batteries, I tried to stay out of the cultural theory rants as much as I could--always difficult with Mr. Kado.
Steve Kado
January 31, 2007
locale: Blocks Recording Club office above the Tranzac
In a nutshell, what appeals to you about Springsteen songs?
There’s a sentimental attachment. It’s some of the first music I ever heard in my life. I do actually just like it, in a pretty uncomplicated way. There’s a lot in there that you can access, a lot about it that’s pretty interesting. They’re amazing songs, and they aren’t done the way other songs are done.
Comparing Bruce Springsteen to Neil Diamond, for example, I just like Neil Diamond too—I really enjoy his music, especially his American response to Beatlemania. He occupies an interesting place when everyone really got into British pop music, he did this weird kind of American pop music that wasn’t Beach Boys-y, it was Northeastern as opposed to Californian in orientation, and it co-exists at the same time as the Beatles. It’s very well done, very exciting to listen to. But if you were going to cover Neil Diamond, you don’t have too many angles available to you. You have sincerity or critical sarcasm, and those are the two poses I could see to cover something like “I’m a Believer.” Either you are a believer, or you think it’s stupid that anyone would be a believer. That’s not terribly interesting to me as material to cover. As much as I like it.
“Stepping Stone” has been done a number of times, mostly by punk bands.
But there’s only one angle there: it’s nasty! “You’re a terrible woman.” That’s the point. “You use people.” It’s a great song, but it only has one application. You can be sincere about it; you can’t really be insincere about it. Minor Threat were sincere about it.
With Bruce Springsteen, you don’t have this either/or about being sincere or non-sincere. You have a bunch of emotional categories that you either do or don’t identify with, but at the same time, the songs I especially don’t identify with are these tropes about the automotive and the way freedom is purchased in many of the songs.
Because there are different narrative layers in Bruce Springsteen songs, I don’t think that’s necessarily authorial voice per se so much as it’s him creating these situations, or analyzing the existence of these situations and presenting them for you to consider. Is that just another thing that’s tragic about this situation? That any kind of success or escape is going to have to be mediated by capital? Which ultimately will produce the same effects it creates at the beginning? Inevitably, capital is the crux of the majority of the drama in these songs.
If it’s an interpersonal drama, it’s still a drama that exists because people are in situations that are desperate, and their relationships are created along these lines that are economically predetermined.
“You Can Look But You Better Not Touch.”
Yeah, and “Used Cars.” There are all these songs where the economic has a deep personal meaning, and it’s not just something so simple as, ‘I want money, lots of money.’ That’s been done anyway. The Flying Lizards, who are one of my favourite bands of all time, might even be my second-favourite band of all time, because I think David Cunningham is a genius. The Flying Lizards did an amazing cover of “Money,” but the song itself isn’t the winner with that, it’s the context it’s placed in. It’s on a record where the first song is a Bertolt Brecht cover. All the other things that go on in that Flying Lizards record frame this cover of “Money” that then gives it this whole metacritical…
But most people, including myself, only know that single.
True. It’s a shame. The single is still critical, but the larger critical angle is really subtle, nuanced and interesting. On the single itself, it’s very ‘ha-ha, get it?’ But that joke is the centerpieces of a larger thing. It’s like saying you know what Sartre is about but you only have the ‘hell is other people’ quote hanging around. It’s the good one-liner, but it’s not the (snaps fingers).
I think Bruce Springsteen is really an exemplary songwriter in terms of both personal drama—feeling emotional—but also how he’s framing people’s relationships to capital and the culture industry in his songs. There’s so much in there for people to do. All the Springsteen covers—there’s room to be bad, too, obviously—but there’s so much room to succeed.
He’s writing them for himself to sing, of course, but if you choose to sing them he throws you so many bones, makes a lot of things easy for you, and fun to do. There’s an opportunity for you to sing the song this way, which is completely a part of the way the song is, that will make this feeling happen. Then just by going up by one note, you can make it do this. Those opportunities are all there.
You can see him using them to great effect, when you separate him the writer from him the performer. He takes all these avenues himself, and I can take those avenues too and not have them come out the same way.
To me, so much of his performance is tied into having such an amazing band. Though conversely, no matter how well orchestrated, the songs are just as successful when stripped down to one person. They portray a different aspect of the grand drama in those songs.
I think it’s there to be done. Part of what’s in the songs is that it is able to be done by one person. Ensemble playing, especially on records like Born to Run—or even the first three albums, with songs like “Rosalita”—those songs offer some of the most amazing ensemble playing of the 70s on them. That is one of the things that’s attractive about Bruce Springsteen, is hearing his band slay. At the same time, it’s not what is THE attractive thing about Bruce Springsteen. If you were just in it to hear sax solos, you could be looking elsewhere.
It’s what he brings to them that makes them such an issue. You can tell by how poorly they’ve all fared as solo artists. It’s the material that really stands out above everything else, and the fact that he’s such an able interpreter of his own material makes it all the more amazing, all the more charismatic and exciting. But they are two separate issues.
Why do people not want to believe you’re being sincere?
A lot of people don’t want to believe certain things about Bruce Springsteen. And maybe they have certain ideas about what sort of things I’m interested in or what kind of person I am. They can tell based on how I look and what my concerns are or how I’m dressed, what kind of company I’m keeping and what context these things are happening in. I’m not a steelworker. I’m not some guy from Jersey. They assume that what’s in Springsteen is limited to Bob Seger terrain, but he was better looking and therefore more appealing and that’s why there’s more fuss about Springsteen.
People have certain stereotypes [about me], which are largely correct. ‘Here’s someone who is university educated, has enjoyed a fair amount of privilege in his life, has bizarre academic concerns as opposed to thrillingly visceral Americana Detroit car concerns. What’s this guy doing with this material? He’s obviously mocking it.’
The people who doubt my sincerity are the people who really don’t get it, or the people who are examining what it looks like the project is, rather than how it works. I was on tour recently in the American Midwest and Northeast, and in lots of these places—like in Detroit—the behaviour of capital has been brutal. The collapse of the American manufacturing sector is what’s made Detroit a synonym for ‘terrifying.’ The people there all felt that it was really straightforward. They didn’t feel I was being weird with the Boss. In Detroit specifically, I got a great deal of positive feedback. In other places like Pittsburgh, an old steeltown, in places that are directly a part of these songs, as opposed to Toronto, which never figures at all into Springsteen type stuff. In places that are either like or actually are protagonists in some of these songs, people got it, I think. It was heartening, because I do feel so sincerely about it. I do really care so much about the songs.
Is the Blankket ever going to be more than this?
The Blankket was never meant to just be a covers thing. The covers were easiest. A really good way of figuring stuff out and how you want to do music, is to do a bunch of stuff that already exists. I have an original record that is mostly about Theodore Adorno, that I want to finish by this summer because I plan on touring in Europe. I have to attack that task. I might do another Springsteen record, actually, with only songs from Tunnel of Love. It would be “All That Heaven Will Allow,” “Brilliant Disguise” obviously, and “When You’re Alone.” I got into Tunnel of Love near the end of me finishing this project, and it would have really changed the whole thing had I still been working on it consistently. Maybe it will be a whole separate thing.
It says so much that when that record came out, he had just got married, and the celebrity press spun it as, “Oh, Tunnel of Love! He’s just written this romantic record about his wife! And here’s the first single, ‘Brilliant Disguise!’”
It’s terrifying, eh? He’s so dark on that record. It’s a divorce record to his wife, and if it weren’t for some of those more questionable 80s production choices, it would totally be Nebraska 2. And even better in a way, because it’s so much more personal and the terror is so much more real on lots of those songs. “Brilliant Disguise” is just a horrible patch of sentiment, it’s a terrible realm of doubt to even consider if you’re seeing anyone. It’s all the stuff you don’t want to think about at all. The whole record is like that, except “All That Heaven Will Allow” is a weirdly optimistic song, but the bookends on either side of it, lyrically, are about utter failure.
Can you describe the current state of the Blankket live show?
Ok, well, I cover my head with Vaseline and stick my head in a bag of rice and do mostly Bruce Springsteen songs in my set. That will probably change soon. I just finished a tour where I got really into the rice, but I also feel like I’ve pursued that direction. I want to do interesting performing stuff in general, and regularize it for touring purposes. It’s an interesting process, especially because it’s the kind of thing people do all the time: they rehearse to get things tight before a tour, and I feel like I have other needs. At some point I discovered shop towels and thought, ‘These solve so many of my problems!’ I just transpose what would be normal musician tasks into this surreal Vaseline world.
[Blankket shows in 2006 consisted of Kado inviting the audience to bring radios, which would transmit his backing tacks via an MP3 player, somewhat similar to the Flaming Lips’ earlier experiments with radio performance. Most of the shows were held in unconventional places, like the side of a highway in Brantford.] Are you still working with radios?
I’m not still working with radios because I feel it demanded too much of the audience. I wanted to have this relationship with the audience, but either it wasn’t honestly meaningful for the audience to be backing me, which is fair—they’re making a choice, and there’s more of them. I understand what that means. If it becomes meaningful to them, I’d consider doing it again, because I am very interested in working with that technology. There are some aspects of that, that I left unexplored, which I would explore if radio adoption was high. If people were really stoked, I could have done stuff that would be really, really interesting.
Were you using an iPod transmitter for backing tracks for those shows?
I was using an MP3 player that had two stereo outputs, so basically four channels out of it that I could send, and I was at one point broadcasting two parallel signals from car radio transmitters. They weren’t iPod transmitters, because those are expensive and work in a way that’s no fun to play with. These were very simple, purchased-in-Chinatown things that plug into your lighter in your car. I modified those to take batteries and bought a bunch of kits, radio hobby kits, that have little printed circuit boards, and I built a bunch of those. The radio transmitter thing was a hassle in a lot of respects. I’m not the best electronics guy. My sautering was not the finest. I was doing a house show at Kevin Parnell’s house, and I had to fix the transmitter when I got there. I showed up, plugged in the sautering iron, sautered it, and it sort of worked the whole time. The only person who really liked it was Sandro Perri, who thought it was amazing.
If it’s not working, there’s no shame in moving along. I can’t actually say: “None of you can come in without radios,” when I’m playing shows outside anyway. Part of the goal of playing with radios was that I didn’t want to play in bars; I wanted the freedom to explore areas with people and do fun things in interesting places with a group of people. I can’t really say, “It’s $2 cheaper if you bring a radio,” because I’m not taking money in for it anyway.
And people might spend $10 in batteries to bring their radio.
Potentially, yeah. If I said there was a cover charge for this event, people would decide whether or not they wanted to go, and if they go they’d pay me five bucks. Whereas, they could buy a radio instead, keep the radio afterwards, and see the show. One of the things that interesting to me, but harder for other people, is that radio is a vanishing technology. It’s in a strange liminal space where there’s this interesting technique of wireless broadcasting we’ve developed that we’re all moving away from, but for no reason—because it works! It does the trick!
It’s the original wi-fi!
It’s going to have to come back around to that anyway. But there was this shift to memory-based stuff, where you make all your choices in advance, and then nothing surprising happens, unless you planned to have a surprise somewhere along the line. It’s interesting. What’s going to be really cool about radio is that at some point the radio will be so depreciated, that it can become extremely local again. The CRTC will back off on regulating it because it will just be nothing to people.
At the same time, the technology is very easy to work with on a hobbyist level: you can build a radio quite easily, or radio transmission parts quite easily. I’m also interested to see what happens when peak oil makes it impossible to ship microcomponents around, or making the manufacturing of microcomponents difficult. The main ingredient in radio is coils, which are just wires that you coil and then it has different physical properties—which I find unbelievably weird, that the shape you put something in gives it a new physical property.
There’s so much that’s so amazing and mysterious about radio as a technology, that it’s so attractive to work of. It’s just whether I’m relying on the audience to work on it with me, or whether maybe at some point I just work with radios and present this crazy stuff to an audience, and say: ‘Come into my radio room, and look at all this stuff that’s happening without wires!’
-end-
note: Radio art enthusiasts near Toronto should know about the Deep Wireless festival, which kicks off this week and runs the entire month of May.
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