Photo by NOAH SILVESTRY

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the complete and unabridged version of my 7,200-word Q&A with Black Francis of The Pixies’ for the cover of the March 2014 issue of MAGNET MAGAZINE. Enjoy.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA The year is 1988. I’m a college DJ stranded in the middle of Pennsyltucky. Entranced by the naked boob on the cover of Surfer Rosa, I slap it on the turntable and…they had me by the first 20 seconds of “Where Is My Mind?” They never really let go. Shortly thereafter I got a gig working for a Pennsyltucky daily. They asked me one day if I wanted to interview some guy named Black Francis from the Pixies. Would I? Man, this was a dream come true! I could finally learn the WTF of lyrics like, “He bought me a soda, he bought me a soda/ And he tried to molest me in the parking lot.”

When I got him on the phone, he was no doubt bone-tired from endless touring and weary of answering stupid fanboy questions. He insisted I call him Charles and pretty much refused to give me a straight answer to any question. “Who cares?” he’d say. “We just try to make cool rock music.” I remember thinking: what a dick.

It’s 1993. In the wake of a dispiriting trail of tears across North Ameria as U2’s opening act, and years of low-intensity inter-band strife, Black Francis breaks up The Pixies via fax, rechristens himself Frank Black and proceeds to release a steady string of increasingly irrelevant solo albums. Kim Deal managed to land on her feet, but after a few seasons of success, the Breeders’ career collapses under the weight of the Deal sisters’ substance abuse and related baggage. Joe Santiago managed to eke out a living scoring films you never saw along with the occasional episode of Weeds and the second season of Judd Appatow’s Undeclared. And the drummer gave up music to become…wait for it…a magician.

In some ways — ways he is still not fully ready to cop to — Black Francis suffered the most. Breaking up the Pixies was Black Francis’ original sin. The world — at least the part of the world that had any bearing on the life of Charles Kittredge Thompson — loved the Pixies and decided that he would be punished for his sins with a long twilight bar band exile of dwindling record sales, half-full concert venues and diminished cultural relevance, despite making music that was, almost without exception, as good, if not better in it’s own way, than his Pixies work. “Everything I do as a solo artist will always be overshadowed by this other band called the Pixies,” he says in the documentary Loud Soft Loud. “It doesn’t matter what I do, it’s always going to end in tears.”

The cold hard fact is, people like bands, not songwriters. A band is a narrative – with archetypes, the cute one, the funny one, smart one, and so on — a songwriter, in the public’s imagination, is just some guy who bangs out jingles to make the mortgage every month. Barry Manilow is a songwriter, The Beatles are a narrative. People love good stories more than they love good songs. Frank Black didn’t have a good story.

It would take him a decade to figure that out.

_______

Fast forward to 2004, my roommate from college — who was zonked on acid, as was I, that night at the Ritz (August 4th 1989, to be exact) when the Pixies did “Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf Mix)” and the Earth stood still and then hand of God came down in a ray of pure white light and gave Black Francis a handjob, I swear to you this really happened — calls me up one day to say the Pixies are getting back together. “Just when I stopped caring,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true, not for me or anyone else. The shows sold out in minutes. I was giddy when I saw them in Camden and I know I wasn’t alone. And contrary to what people who weren’t there the first time around said, they were as good as they ever were. The classic songs seem immune to the ravages of age, and besides the Pixies’ strange allure was never based on the hormones and hair of youth. Yeah, they were fatter and balder, but, having settled or set aside the irreconcilable differences of the past, and worked through the addiction-rehab-divorce craziness of middle age, they were also wiser.

And so was I.

Black Francis was right all along. Who cares about all those painfully literal fanboy questions and all that soap opera he said/she said jive? The Pixies are just trying to make cool rock music. Sometimes that’s enough. Besides, the only thing worth knowing is this: If man is five, then devil is six and God is seven. Or to put it another way, the Pixies were just four hard-working kids from Boston whose monkey died and went to heaven.

Something happened while they were away. This cult band with its weird, noisy songs about UFOs, incest and broken faces became more famous in death than they ever were in life. They’d become part of the great collective alt-rock unconscious — like mid-period Cure or the first Violent Femmes record or Thurston Moore’s haircut. By 2004, Surfer Rosa was on every punky bar jukebox. Jocks cranked “Wave of Mutilation” as they raced by in Daddy’s car, flipping-off the nerds. And every cool chick bass player worth her salt had played “Gigantic” until her tits practically fell off. When I saw the Pixies reunion, 20,000 people sang along with every word of “Where Is My Mind?” Judging by the median age of the crowd, most were still in short pants when the song first came out. It would seem that the Pixies have become, dare I say it, folk music. Hell, the following year they did a reverse Dylan — they went acoustic Newport.

By 2012, the re-united Pixies had been together longer than the original band’s seven year run. Then came news that Kim Deal had left the band. The reason for her departure was never explained. Then came news the Pixies were going to carry on with plans to record new music without her.

The morning after the day that Kim Deal quit the Pixies, Black Francis shaved off all his pubic hair. To signify a new beginning, he would later tell me.

_________

Everyone’s always trying to get backstage, it is the Valhalla of the concert experience — the mythical lodge of ecstatic feasts forbidden to mere mortals but anybody who’s ever actually been there will tell you ain’t missing much — a sweaty coldcut plate, warm beer, crab couch, the prevailing sense that you are overstaying your welcome. All of which pretty much sets the scene in the Pixies dressing room backstage at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia.

Guitarist Joey Santiago and a pretty middle-aged blonde are sitting on the crab couch sipping beers. Turns out she went to elementary school with Santiago in the Boston area, where she still lives, and just saw the Pixies for the first time when they played Boston last week. She just happened to be in Philly visiting her son who goes to college here. One friend request later here she is. This is what passes for groupies backstage at a Pixies show these days: Someone’s mom.

Cocksucker Blues it ain’t.

I always thought of the Pixies as harmless looking people making dangerous music. But off stage the band members are, by their own admission, well, boring people. Put it this way, if they had a reality show, nobody would watch it. But who am I to judge? I am currently trying square my relative boredom backstage with the Pixies with the fact that if the 1989 version of me would probably never stop masturbating over the fact that he was even here.

Drummer Dave Lovering is in warm-up mode, his head covered with a towel, tapping out paradiddles on anything that doesn’t move, not talking to anyone. In an adjoining room, Black Francis and new touring bassist Paz Lenchantin are doing vocal warm-up excercises that sound. Through the wall it sounds like a cross between bad opera and the Muslim call to prayer.

Paz is filling the big shoes of the dearly-departed Kim Deal, and has well as her replacement, Kim Shattuck, frontwoman from the Muffs, who parted ways with the band back in November somewhat acrimoniously.

Paz is so cool, if anyone can solve the I’m Not Kim Deal problem, it’s her. Tonight she is wearing a brandy-color velveteen mini dress a friend sent her from Paris — the kind Marianne Faithfull used to wear back before the Mars Bar Incident. She added the white frilly color and cuffs to set it off. Smart girl. Born in Argentina, her family moved to Los Angeles when she was four to escape the brutality of The Dirty War. She’s not just a pretty face, she’s got chops. She played bass in Billy Corgan’s Zwan and Manfred from Tool’s Perfect Circle. She played bass on Brightblack Morning Light’s sultry, self-titled 2006 LP. (All rubbery Rhodes clangor, tremolo-ripple bass, woozy slide guitar, sex-fogged vocals and whole lot of crystal blue persuasion, it is arguably the best fuck-music album since MBV’s Loveless.) Until signing on as the Pixies touring bassist in early December, she was bass player for LA’s bluesy psychonauts The Entrance Band. Tonight marks her sixth show with the Pixies.

When Black Francis emerges from the practice room there is a discernible bounce in his step. He gathers the band around for a combined setlist discussion and pep talk. Throwing air punches at an imaginary foe, rockem sockem robot-style, he giddily calls out the first three songs of tonight’s set, punctuating each announcement Ralph Kramden-style with a cartoonish Pow!

“Bone Machine.” Pow!

“Debaser.” Pow!

And then, as per Paz’s request, “River Euphrates.” Pow!

(Frankly, it’s a strange display,Everyone laughs a little too hard. I can’t tell if they are trying to convince me that they are having fun or just themselves. Either way, they are trying too hard.)

Having seen the Pixies a half a dozen times since 1988, I feel qualified to say the Pixies are as fierce a live band these days as they ever were, absent Kim Deal’s velveteen vocals and infectious yet slightly unsettling perma-grin. The sold out crowd is surprisingly young and, best I can tell wondering the cavernous Electric Factory, way into it. But for reasons unclear they walk off at the end of their set and never return for an encore. This is highly unusual. To the best of my knowledge, the last band to not do a encore was Great White back in 2003. And that was because the club burned down in the middle of their set. I make my way back stage to find out what happened. When I knock on the dressing room door, the Pixies’ manager opens the door a crack and shakes his head ‘no’ and then closes the door in my face. I step outside to grab a smoke and a few moments later the stage door explodes open and Lovering brushes past, bounds down the stairs, lights a smoke, pulls the visor of his hat down low and turns his back to the exiting crowd and scrolls through his text messages and emails, clearly in no mood for company or conversation. I guess there are some things about being a Pixie that we will never understand.

I head back to the dressing room, which is now admitting guests. Black Francis pours me a tall glass of wine and refills his glass and, unbidden, explains why there was no encore tonight. “The crowd didn’t earn it, I’m old school that way, i’m Vaudeville,” he says with a shrug. “I find that when the audience is younger, wants you to hold their hand and smile and kick the beachball around and we don’t do that, we don’t do jazz hands.”

We are not scheduled to sit down for a one-on-one interview until they play Newark in a few days, but a couple more refills later, Black Francis is ready to talk. Right now. Somewhat flummoxed, I tell him I don’t have my questions or my recorder, and my iPhone is almost dead.

“I have an cassette recorder, we can use that,” he says.

A cassette recorder? How would I play it back afterwards?

“I’ll give you the recorder, you can have it,” he says.

This is actually quite perfect. I can’t think of a better person to ask why Kim Deal quit the Pixies than Black Francis with half a bottle of wine in him. We duck into the empty dressing room next door. He takes the one chair and I sit on the sofa, which turns out to be very low to the ground. He looms over me. It’s a small, bare room and Black Francis is using his outdoor/half-a-bottle-of-wine-voice. He booms in the close quarters. He’s wearing a gray, military tunic-style overcoat, not unlike the kind you would expect a North Korean soldier to wear in winter. In the dimly lit room, with his shaved head, considerable girth and that tunic, I feel like Martin Sheen be lectured by Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

(“Are you a rock critic or a music journalist, Willard?”

Um, both?

“You’re neither, you’re a delivery boy sent to collect a bill by clerks.”)

Look, I get the feeling the publicist or the manager says to writers ‘don’t ask about this, don’t ask about that’,” he says. “Fuck that, ask me anything you want.”

OK, let’s talk about the Kim Deal leaving the band. What’s you’re side of the story?

“Well, it’s very simple, she’s been reticent for a very long time to make a new record,” he says.

Now why do you think that was?

I don’t really know. I can speculate. I’m sure some of the reasons were personal and some of the reasons were common sense, like, “Ah, we got a good thing going: if it isn’t broke, why try to fix it.” “Let’s not make that bad move, the comeback record.” She either wanted to or didn’t want to. It wasn’t that big of a deal for us. It was frustrating to me personally at times because I wanted to do that. At the end of the day I just embraced her reticence. But she started giving us a couple of clues with things that she said.

Such as?

“‘Maybe Joe and Charles should makes some demos with Gil Norton.’”

So fast forward, it’s the fall of 2012, your all in a recording studio in Whales with Gil Norton behind the board. Then what happens?

We got to Whales, we got to work, but it was a little slow going, and she was very…my impression was that she was very stressed, or unhappy, or whatever for whatever reason. As everyone would be. People have things going on in their life that doesn’t always…it’s easy to take things personally sometimes but when you get to the bottom of it. They got stuff going on in their life, it’s nothing to do with you.

So we were doing things in a very meticulous kind of way with Gilmore, which he loved, because he was meticulous. Some drums, now some bass. So after we’ve done the four or five big songs that I have tweaked out with Gilmore at his house and kind of brought them to a certain level. Once she saw that we had every intention of going beyond this little batch of four or five songs, that we were going to have a full record, that’s when she decided, “okay, I’m out.”

So, it was too much, whatever the reason. She came to the coffee shop – and to her credit, I mean when I broke up the band for the first time, I just fucking sent a fax to the manager saying, “copy this fax and mail it to everyone, I’m fucking out of here. No confrontation, no discussion, no face-to-face, no let’s kiss and say goodbye; none of that. Just total I’m out, I don’t want to deal with this. She had the balls, anyway – she knew we had our espresso at a certain time of the day, probably earlier than she would have her espresso. So she comes in – we’re drinking our espresso – gets her cappuccino: “I’m flying home tomorrow.” So we were just like, “ugh!” Joey and I didn’t want to get in an argument, so I got up and Joey followed me for different reasons. I wanted to go drink and he wanted to go to the music store and get a slide. Then he went to the bar with me to drink. We just didn’t want any confrontation. So she enjoyed a better rapport with David, so we knew that David would talk to her and maybe change her mind or whatever, or find out what the reason was. We never got to the bottom of it. She called me finally from the airport. She called me right as she was getting on the plane on my cell phone to talk. I think by that point I had calmed down enough to just say, “look, do whatever you have to do, call us when you get to wherever you are, and if you’re interested in coming back…” But she didn’t want to do that, she just kind of left. But she did communicate again, she said, “Hey, if you need any more bass…” But it wasn’t quite…from our point of view it wasn’t committed enough.

I mean, to her credit, she stuck it out on this whole revue thing as long as she could. But when it got to he point where we were going to do it all again — record new content, do all the interviews, do all the radio shows, do all the publicity, do videos, all that full shebang. I think she was just like “It’s too much man, I’m out of here.” But I don’t know, why did she leave? To me, she was unhappy with the situation or unhappy with her life or whatever, just not happy. I mean when someone’s not happy, they don’t want to be wherever they are, whatever it is. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you’re not happy, you don’t want to be there.”

You guys never got as far as cutting vocals before she left?

No, and really, I think that was the real commitment. Whether she knew it consciously or not, I think that’s when it starts to turn into something else. Anybody can come in and play some bass. Can you tell if it’s Kim Deal or not? Not necessarily. A lot of people aren’t going to be able to tell the difference. So, but as soon as the voice enters, just one little line, just one little note, a whole door opens. The whole person – and in her case, she’s a very charismatic person – her whole thing just fucking comes into the room. You can’t remove that, you can’t erase that. There’s no fucking engineer in the world that would do that. “Erase the fucking Kim Deal vocal part? No fucking way, whatever you tell me to do, this is going in a fucking vault.” It’s like The Beatles’. “Erase that.” Yeah right, we’ll erase that, you’re the fucking Beatles, we don’t’ erase anything you do, you know what I mean? I don’t know if she knew, but she must have self-consciously known, having her voice is really what it’s all about. That really just represents.

But the doors still open if ever she decided to change her mind and wants to be in The Pixies again?

Yeah, I don’t think that will ever happen, personally. I think she’s done with it. But, you know, you never know. I can’t say if she called tomorrow, I wouldn’t be like, “oh wow, really.” Yeah, who knows.

What was the last time you spoke with her?

The last time I spoke with her was when she was getting on that plane.

Was the reunion era less frictional than, say, the initial era? As far as interpersonal stuff.

Yeah, in general. I mean, everyone is much more older and much more sober…

Can we go back to 1993, to just before you hit SEND on the fax: why are you fed up? Why do you want to burn The Pixies?

I don’t remember exactly what I said in the fax, but you know, I was in tour all the time. I was trying to hold on to this relationship I had going on. The constant touring schedule was interfering with that and there was some animosity between Kim and I that had just settled into an icy coolness.

A cold war? No shooting or hand to hand combat, just hostility and undermining each other at every opportunity?

A cold war. I mean, not like aggressive, but definitely passive aggressive. It just wasn’t that much fun for everybody. Looking back now, what we needed was somebody in our world who was savvy enough to just go, “Look, these kids are, like, kind of tired. They’ve been doing a lot of work. And they probably need to have a little vacation. They need to take six months off and stop doing whatever they’re doing so they can catch their breath. Then they’ll pick up where they left off.” If someone had said that to us, advised us… “look, don’t throw the baby out of the bath water. Just chill out. Go on fucking vacation. Take a year off!” – we never would have lasted a year – “Take a year off!” If someone would have just said that to us, I think we would have done that and we would have just continued. We would have worked it all out. I don’t know what the other guys were doing, but I was just smoking dope 24 hours a day. I was young, I was cocky. What did I want to do? Touring was okay, but what I wanted to do was go hang in a recording studio and experiment and try to figure out how it all worked. The record company was like, “yeah, whatever you guys record we’ll put out.” So it just kind of fed that. Then that kind of interfered with touring. The agents were constantly encouraging the live touring, which the band I think was kind of into. But I was always interfering: “No, let’s stop the tour and go cut another record.” But nobody’s saying, “hey, let’s just chill the fuck out. Give these guys a little vacation.”

So, I’ve been in bands, I know what happens, I know that when you’re overworked and A. you’re young and dumb; B. there’s alcohol and substances involved; C. you’re exhausted and you lose perspective. There are these slights that never get resolved, they get internalized, these little petty grudges just linger and simmer and you forget after a while why you’re angry with each other, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are angry with each other. Is that about right?

Yep.

I’m not going to make this whole thing about Kim Deal, but I would like to give you the opportunity to respond to this narrative that’s emerged that you were doing the lion’s share of the heavy lifting. Writing all the songs. Singing them. And yet Kim was the one that got all the adulation. People really liked her — she smiled, she had a dreamy voice…

…she’s got charisma.

Right, she’s got charisma…and you somehow resented that. Is there any truth in that? Or is that just kind of people projecting.

Well, there’s truth in it in the sense that the narrative that narrative you referred to, those kind of narratives can be hurtful if they’re not factual. So I’m resentful of the narrative. That resentment can start to effect your interpersonal band situation. The fact of the matter was that I was the writer, we had a band, we had a little thing going. One time, Kim walked into rehearsal we were not psychologically prepared. She just showed up to practice one day, probably because she had to get her nerve up and say, “oh, I have a bunch of songs, also.” We had never heard about these other songs before, it was out of the blue. So the way she did it was a little like, “Woah!” But we went along with it. But the thing is, we’re rehearsing with shitty amps in a really loud rehearsal space. We’re probably bonked out of our mind on marijuana and we’re trying to make some sense out of a din. So she brings in all these new songs or chord structures or whatever and of course it didn’t click. So the rest of the band and I talked about it and went, “Yeah the new stuff she brought in today seemed kind of different. It didn’t seem to really work.” Now whether it was really good or not, who knows? It was a fucking cacophony [when we tried it.] So we just went, like, “Kim…” And she was very bashful and said, “Oh that’s okay, don’t worry about it.” So, that was put aside.

When was this, roughly? What album?

This was around Surfer Rosa or maybe after Surfer Rosa. Somewhere in there. I remember a couple years after we were touring around in England. We were doing something at the BBC and she was listening to mixes in another room in the studio complex of her new record for her new band. She invited us down to hear them. So we went down and we listened to them. So really, the fact of the matter is that she was putting together the first Breeders record while The Pixies were going and nobody had a problem with it. She didn’t have a problem with it; we didn’t have a problem with it. That’s the way it was going on. She didn’t really find a receptive space for her material within the band until she started her own thing, and we were all like, “Cool.” So that’s really all that happened. So people that are writing about it trying to figure out…Again, it’s a narrative. “oh, that’s Charles, the guy who screams TAAAAAAAAAAMMMME!!! He’s not letting her write the songs.” And that’s not exactly right. That’s not exactly how it went down. So, you know, who knows what would have happened if we were able to get some vacation time in.

It seemed early earlier on that you guys sang a lot more than you did on the last two records. Was there a conscious decision to stop doing that?

I think that there was probably iciness between us two and then there was probably Gil was trying to always force it or something. He’s trying to force these two people to sing together…

You didn’t really want to?

I don’t think I was against it, I think…you know, people were barely showing up at the sessions and the whole thing starts to turn into the Charles Thompson Show.

By what album?

Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, those two records. It starts to turn into me hanging out at the studio for hours and hours and hours with Gil Norton because I had the studio itch.

And those guys just rather not? Or they already did their parts and they let you finish the record?

I think if you’re not the writer there’s only so much time you can put into the studio. You’re like, “look, I got other shit to do than listen to Mr. Stoner here try to it yet again a different way.”

When did you first start smoking pot?

That was with The Pixies, I think. Not really until I started touring. I didn’t touch it when I was in college, not really.

For what reason? It just didn’t interest you?

I think I was fearful of drugs and alcohol, so I never really went there. I think the first time that I got drunk was with Joey when we were in college. I vomited in the toilet. I was a very goody-two-shoes when I was a teenager. But I think once I discovered pot, I was like, “oh, I like this a lot.” I smoked it quite heavily throughout the whole Pixies.

Do you think this aided you in your creative endeavors?

I don’t think ever wrote a great song when I was high.

When was the last time you got high?

I haven’t really smoked in about ten or twelve years. I got kids now, and stuff, it’s too hard, you know? It’s too hard to negotiate that when you’re baked.

What about psychedelics?

Yeah, sure, we used to do mushrooms quite a lot. We would go on college radio stations and if it was the fall tell people that if they had mushrooms, bring them to the show. We did them a lot. But ‘shrooms never worked out for me. I had a beautiful experience the second time with our lighting guy walking around Cleveland. But when you’re on tour, hanging out in bars and nightclubs, tripping it’s not fun. People’s faces melting, it was just a paranoid bummer so eventually I stopped altogether.

What about LSD?

Couple times. Once I went to a midnight movie and took and one time I was in Vegas and went to see Redd Foxx on acid. But I think I never got over if it doesn’t grow out of the ground, I don’t want to touch it. Cocaine, ecstasy, heroin. I remember somebody giving me a hit of ecstasy like 25 years ago and it didn’t do anything.

So while we’re dealing with the Kim controversies, can we just talk about the Kim Shattuck situation?

Yeah, there’s not much to say, but yeah, sure.

Was she not cutting it music-wise or personality-wise? Or was it the way she was carrying herself on stage? What was the unhappiness?

Yeah, it’s tough being in a band with new people, specially when you’re coming in to replace someone who’s been there for 28 years or whatever. It was a lot of pressure. But, you know, what can I say, it just wasn’t working out. I think we all tried to make it work; she tried to make it work; we tried to make it work, it wasn’t working out. We tried to make it work again and, in the end…

I want to give you an opportunity to respond to the one thing that she seems to put out there: at one of the LA shows, she got excited and jumped into the crowd and you guys didn’t like it, she says, and then the next thing she knows, she’s fired. Is it as simple as that?

No, certainly not. That would have been in the first week of shows that we performed in Los Angeles, and she remained with us until three months later, or whatever like that. So, it wasn’t about that. Is it true that we didn’t care for the demeanor she was projecting? Yeah, but it was an honest mistake – well not a mistake. She wouldn’t have known there was some kind of rule. We wouldn’t have known there was some kind of rule about certain body language or stage demeanor. But, when you’ve been in a band for a long time, you don’t realize there are unwritten rules until some newbie comes in and starts breaking the rules. And you’re like, “Woah, woah, woah, we don’t do it like that! We do it like this.” So, in a way, it was kind of cool that she sort of barged in, so-to-speak, and start doing things that are natural to her. And then we suddenly realized that’s not who we are. There was a certain identity awareness that had occurred within our own band. So we told her no, don’t do it like that, do it like this. And she did, she changed it up. You know, she was just a different kind of personality.

So it was personal not musical, or was it musical as well?

I would say it was probably both. I think personality wise, she’s very West Coast, she’s very extrovert. We’re very East Coast, very introvert. That’s my thinking on it. Now, in terms of her playing, my call was that…the first few times I met her, I really liked her, and I thought, “well, she’s not a bass player. But neither was Kim Deal,” so maybe that’s the magic right there: someone who’s not a trained bass player. So, that was kind of perfect, that she was rough and ready like us. She’s kind of cut from the same cloth. She’s the same age as us, she’s sort of the same kind of player as us, and she’s not a bass player, just like Kim Deal. “Dut I’ll play the bass for ya!” Perfect.

So it worked with my narrative, it worked with my little story. The problem with that is that we were a seasoned band playing a certain way, doing things a certain way, playing things a certain way. David, has the most physically demanding job in the band, he’s the drummer. So, he’s had to keep himself in shape, and practice his paradiddles or whatever he does to keep himself in shape. And I think at this stage in the game, he was like, “Look, I don’t want to play with some lead singer/guitarist, who’s picked up a bass. It’s not happening for me. I need to have someone who’s in the pocket. I need a real bass player. I worked really hard, I finally got to where I am, now you’re giving me some chick who doesn’t even play the bass.” So I think it was frustrating for him. Maybe I didn’t notice at first. I was like, “Oh that’s great, and she’s hitting the notes! She’s singing the harmonies.” Life is beautiful, right? Isn’t she awesome? And Dave was like, “No, that’s not fucking awesome.” It took me a long time to figure that out, but eventually, I was like, “Okay, I get it. He wants someone that’s slamming down on those eighth notes with him, 100%, and that makes for a better audio visual picture. If the drummer is just on the bottom, and everyone is above him, it’s a wobbly building, and it’s like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. You get the two-rhythm section, maybe even the rhythm guitarist down there on the bottom, and you start to have a really solid structure.

So I’ve been listening to the new EPs and I think the material is really, really strong. These tracks could hold their own on Bossanova. And in some ways, I think the songwriting is a lot more fully realized and sophisticated than a lot of the old stuff. The chorus to “Indie Cindy” — it’s got that beautiful, soaring groove and your vocals are about perfect. As someone with 28 years of Pixies fandom under my belt, I feel qualified to declare that prime-cut, top-shelf Pixies. OK, so maybe there’s no “Where Is My Mind” or “Wave Of Mutilation” in there, but I fail to see how the editors at Pitchfork can justify giving it a 1 out of 10 rating. That’s not a fair and balanced critique, that’s somebody with an agenda. And I think what’s going on here is they are sort of recasting you guys into this old narrative where you are the ‘bad guy’ and Kim is the ‘good guy’ and ‘you chased her off again. We love Kim Deal and we want her to be in the Pixies and we want her to be on these new songs, so now we’re mad at you and we have to punish you for being that bad guy again. Here’s a one review, fuck you.’

Yeah, it’s like a whole Lester Bangs kind of thing. It’s like, “fuck you!” you used to be the fucking king, but now you’re a fucking piece of shit. It’s that kind of thing. I get it, it’s cool. I’d rather play in a band than have to do that shit, but I get it. It’s kind of like if you’re not going to do something, you’re just going to critique and talk about stuff. I get it if you want to be like the guy from Pitchfork. The Pixies have a comeback record? Alright, 1/10.

That’s ludicrous.

Yeah, you know, it’s cool.

That’s not cool. That’s not judging the work on it’s merits or lack thereof. That’s a temper tantrum.

Yeah, but it’s always been like that. Even back in the day with the NME.

As I recall they were always tripping over themselves to kiss your asses.

Until they made the editorial decision that, “Now we will remove their crown.”

Well, that is the way British music papers work: One week you’re the savior or rock n’ roll and the next week they are crucifying you.

Yeah, I’ve been through that. So I learned to accept it. I’m not really offended by that. Especially when I don’t make an effort to read this stuff. It’s more of a bummer for the tour manager to come to you and say, ‘Yeah it’s a little soft today out there, a little quiet. We only about half sold the room.’ You know, ‘Hey, the promoters move the show to a smaller venue’. When you start to hear that kind of stuff, that hurts more than a review, you know what I mean?

Assuming you are speaking from experience, when you were deciding you were going to break up The Pixies, had you thought it through, did you tell yourself “I’m not going to be able to operate at the same level I’m currently operating at. I’m going to have to start over again, back to playing bars.”

Probably not. I must have been way too cocky to have that kind of thought process. Yeah, I probably thought it was all going to just continue and I was going to become great or something. I had a good time doing what I did. You know what I mean? I got to earn my dues so I could play my blues. But yeah, I didn’t have any kind of vision. I just continued. I learned pretty quickly. I became humble pretty fast.

Was there a point afterwards that you thought, “Why did I do that?” Did you regret splitting up the band at any point?

No, I held on to that story for a really long time. But I was able to let go of that story because I was breaking up with my wife and that probably had something to do with that. That big part of my life was ending and I was more open to change. I was going to a therapist, and I was becoming older, and I had to confront all these new things I never had to confront before. I had to learn how to talk to women again. I had to go through all this shit. Then you become a lot more open to stuff. “Hey the Pixies are getting back together again!” I didn’t say that. But then I thought, “Well, you guys want to get back together?!”

“Where is My Mind?” is pretty much the unofficial theme song of Fight Club and that movie is easily one of the coolest, most radical and most beloved movies of the past 15 or 20 years. Are you happy with the way the song was used in the film?

Yeah I like it fine, I thought the placement of it was very rewarding and dramatic. What’s not to like? The song has turned into its own small business. I get a lot of requests to license the song and I say yes to almost everybody.

What have you said no to?

There was a pornographic film that was being made that was pretending to be something other than a pornographic film and it was very plain to us that it was just a pornographic film that for some reason wanted to license the music. And I think I said no to that. When we started making music there was a huge aversion to all that. And I admire people like Tom Waits who have basically no to everything and say “No, fuck you. Nobodys going to put my music in their stupid shit and I’m sticking to my guns.” And I admire that at the same time I also admire someone like Iggy Pop that’s like “I don’t give a fuckin shit what you do with my song, that’s not why I made it, that’s not why I recorded it, that’s not why I made the record, but if someone wants to give me money to sell sausages I don’t give a shit.” And I understand that too and I’m stuck between the two.

Did you ever meet Kurt Cobain famously said he was just trying to rip-off the Pixies when he wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Did you ever meet him or have a conversation with him?

Nope, never.

The Pixies have been covering “In Heaven” from Eraserhead for almost 30 years. Have you ever met David Lynch?

Nope. That was a mistake on the part of our old manager. We had heard from [Lynch’s] people, I can’t remember what movie it was [reportedly it was Lost Highway — The Ed.], but they were playing this song from Bossonova, I think “Cecilia Ann,” on set as some temp music for the mood of the scene and they wanted to use it in the movie.

They weren’t necessarily trying to like get away with anything but at the same time their position was like ‘Look, little tiny artsy band we’re the big fuckin, we’re in Hollywood here making a movie, even though it was David Lynch, we want to use this for the movie but were not going to pay for it.’ Obviously they loved the song they were using it already. Our manager took the position like ‘Screw you guys, you don’t want to pay us?’ I get that. It’s like an old school New England like ‘Fuck you, you ain’t givin me zero, no give us a least a token, something! Don’t just do that.’ So he was like, ‘Take a hike. We don’t give a shit,’ and I get that. But now when I think about the origins of the band and our direct connections with David Lynch in terms of us singing a song from the Eraserhead movie. And I remember all of us going to see Blue Velvet together as a band after band practice, all four of us sitting there in a movie theatre together. David Lynch was a revered figure in my world and the manager should have just let that one slide. It is a David Lynch movie after all and that’s forever.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview first published on October 19th, 2006.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Welcome to part two of our bazillion-word interview with esteemed jazz critic Francis Davis, wherein our man Fran will be talking non-smack about Coltrane in Philly, Sun Ra on Uranus and the pre-historic beginnings of Fresh Air. If you are just finding us for the first time, you can find Part One here, along with his illustrious CV. When we last left our hero, he was beaten, bloodied and long haired, handcuffed in the back of Philadelphia Police Department paddy wagon charged with aggravated assault and battery on a police officer. In other words, it was the ’60s.

Phawker: Okay, so you bust out of prison. It’s you, Tom Waits, John Lurie and Roberto Benigni wading through the swamps of Louisiana. No wait, that’s Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. Jumping forward, how did we decide to become a jazz critic?

Francis Davis: Slowly. In 1978, Terry Gross, who, as you know, later became my wife asked me to do a regular jazz segment on Fresh Air. She had a three-hour show in those days. And she needed to fill a lot of time. And she asked me to do a feature on jazz, on out-of-print jazz in particular. I wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t a show by some old white guy in his basement. Like, ‘this record’s really rare.’ I wanted to do a history of jazz paying attention only to the gaps. So I started writing the scripts and working hard to deliver them as if I was just saying these things off the top of my head. And then I got laid off at the record store I worked at which, you know, put me on employment compensation and gave me a lot of time. Terry and I went to England in ’79, and being out of my country for the first time I had kind of metamorphosis in a sense that you had no history. You could be anybody you want to be because nobody knows who you are. [And that was very liberating] So I really started wanting to write when I came back. And I did a few things for the Courier-Post, most of which were not jazz pieces. They paid very badly, but the great part about it was that they didn’t care if you knew something about it or not. As long as there was a Jersey connection, and as long as you remembered to mentioned what high school the person went to.

So I had all this time. I didn’t have a lot of clips, but I had a lot of the scripts, which were very good scripts actually. You know, a little over-written, but it goes with the territory when you first start to write… And I was on unemployment compensation, so I was getting a check every week and I could just sit and write. And do, like, 20 records reviews a day. And sometimes I did. So I built up this body of work and eventually people noticed me…

Phawker: Were you as interested in pop music or rock and roll as you were in jazz?

Francis Davis: Yeah, at one point I was. But writing about music for me meant writing about jazz, you know. And the other thing is that insofar as pop music is youth music, there has to be a point at which — and this certainly isn’t true for Bob Christgau — but for most of us there has to be a point at which keeping up with it, as I put it in the intro of Like Young, becomes as absurd a notion as keeping up with sex, or something. By the way, everybody hates the Killers new CD. I kind of like it, but anyway.

Phawker: How long was your little segment, about five minutes or so?

Francis Davis: Well, that’s what we always joked about. No, it was supposed to be 20 minutes, but because we had all the time in the world to fill, it was ‘Hey, 37 minutes? Fine! The guest isn’t here yet.’ And the show was live in those days too. They had very few things on tape.

Phawker: Was it called Fresh Air then?

Francis Davis: Yeah, my segment was called Interval. And you know, part of the time would be taken up by playing records. I didn’t excerpt records. I played complete tracks. That’s one thing I never liked about reviewing for NPR shows. I don’t know what you get from playing 30 seconds of something. Getting back to your question about pop, I’ve written about pop but usually just because something had interested me for years and years, like the piece I wrote about the Velvet Underground.

Phawker: Where did the Velvet’s piece first appear?

Francis Davis: The Atlantic Monthly. But that was because Bill Whitworth, the editor, asked me if I’d be interested in writing a piece about the Rolling Stones, who were mounting one of their many tours at the time. This I guess this is ’89 or ’90. And you know, no I wasn’t.

Phawker: Didn’t you call them ‘blown-out satyrs’?

Francis Davis: That’s the first sentence of the piece. I think I can write on a very personal level about pop. But I don’t think I have the kind of weight of authority that I have when I’m writing about jazz. And it’s the same thing. Bob Christgau has written about jazz but I think pop critics are treading on very dangerous territory when they write about jazz. And even Bob’s got stuff wrong. I don’t mean factually wrong. Its something I just disagree about. I think opinion is non-negotiable. It’s my way or the highway. But no, I don’t feel the need to sort of share my opinion with’ about the new Beck record, which I haven’t heard, as I do to share my opinion of the new Ornette Coleman record.

Phawker: Just to finish up the Terry thing. Is that how you guys met? Through the show?

Francis Davis: No, I think the first time we met was in the store. I dunno, the first or second time. And I remember we had a conversation about Ella Fitzgerald and about Paul Desmond. Because I really loved Paul Desmond. And she was surprised given my taste for, like, free improvisation and so on, that I liked Paul Desmond. I want to write a piece about Paul Desmond by the way.

Phawker: I don’t know anything about Paul Desmond.

Francis Davis: Paul Desmond was the alto saxophonist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet. And in a way one of the whitest players that ever lived. But in a sense he was the token black in the Brubeck Quartet. At least until before they hired a black bass player. He was a very ‘black’ player. I mean, there are many, many tenor players, including white tenor players, who were influenced by Lester Young. And the influence is kind of transparent. Because Desmond’s playing another instrument, an instrument in a high register, it’s not as obvious. But Desmond is so far behind the beat and so Lester Young-like, but in a good way. Anyway, but that’s how we met.

Phawker: And you sort of hit it off from there and the rest is history?

Francis Davis: Well, she knew I knew a lot about jazz and wanted to do a whole strip of different music features. There’d be one on jazz, there’d be one on folk music or something, and actually I was the only one who did it for a long time because people would lose interest. In fact, I think in the end we weren’t getting paid anything, or maybe $20 a throw.

Phawker: Lets jump ahead. You have been working on a Coltrane book for 10 years…

Francis Davis: Yeah. Fitfully. It’s long overdue. I don’t mean it’s long overdue in the market, I mean, in terms of the contract, it’s long overdue. Yeah, I have a very indulgent publisher. It’s a straight bio. But the publisher would be horrified to hear it described as a critical biography because they always fear that. In the marketplace that means it’s a kind of dense book that’s not really a biography but really a book of criticism. But you know, these things weave in and out. And I don’t know how you can write a biography of an artist without it being a critical biography in some ways. There have been numerous Coltrane biographies, but I think what’s missing, really, is Philadelphia. Because there were a lot of people, there still are a lot of people here, who are kind of important to the story who nobody really bothers talking to very much.

Phawker: What role do you think Philadelphia played in his art?

Francis Davis: Well, what was he, 18 when he came here? I dunno, he had finished high school. He studied at the Granoff School. I think in Philadelphia there were two things that had an impact on him. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a Philadelphia sound. I think there’s a Philadelphia mind set, or sensibility or attitude or whatever. The other thing, the thing he became caught up in, musicians will tell you, and it’s funny, some people intend it as a criticism, that there was an obsession with technique in Philadelphia. And it’s funny, with Coltrane that technique becomes a form of mysticism. It’s almost as if like, the deeper you get into chords, the better of a musician you are, the better person you become. It’s such a discipline. Its almost like this zen kinda that. And that’s Philadelphia. And Coltrane came to epitomize that.

Phawker: When was Coltrane here?

Francis Davis: Well he got here about ’44, ’45. Again, he didn’t come here for the music. He came here for the work, along with his mother, who had recently been widowed. When he left it’s kind of hard to say. He left gradually. He maintained a residence here. Which is still there, but I’m not sure when he last actually resided here. But he was gone by ’57. He joins Miles [Davis] by ’55 and he’s kind of gone by then really. Sometimes you read things and you think Coltrane lived his whole life here or something, because Philadelphia is very possessive and it has a king-sized inferiority complex because of its proximity to New York.

(At this point, Terry calls and Francis excuses himself to make a dinner date with his wife at Zeke’s Deli. If you go, try the whitefish. Dynamite whitefish. Lastly, apologies for false advertising, there was a fairly lengthy Sun Ra discussion that must have wound up on the cutting room floor. We’ll look for it and slap it on the end if we find it [We never did.–The Editor]. We blame the intern. That’s the beauty of having an intern. At Phawker our motto is: We’ll get it right, eventually.)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published back in 2006. It’s still a fascinating read.

Welcome to the second installment of our Grumpy Old Men series, wherein we learn from our elders and soak up their salty yarns like Bounty Quicker Picker-Upper. Yesterday we had Robert Christgau, today Francis Davis. Tomorrow? The Pope. What’s that you say? You never heard of Francis Davis. Oh buddy, it’s good thing you found us! Check out his CV:

He has written about music, film, and other aspects of popular culture for The Atlantic since 1984 and was appointed lead jazz critic for the Voice in 2004. He was jazz critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1996, jazz editor of Musician from 1982 to 1985, and a staff writer for 7 Days from 1988 to 1990. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Arts & Leisure and Book Review sections, The Nation, Connoisseur, Rolling Stone, Wigwag, The Oxford American, Stereo Review Sound & Vision, High Fidelity, the Boston Phoenix, The Absolute Sound, ARTicles, Cadence, Down Beat, Jazz Times, Elle, Audio, The World & I, The Wire, The Black American, the Village Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, and The Times Literary Supplement (London).

Yow! He is also married to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. We talked to him about his 10-years-in-the-making John Coltrane bio, Sheets of Sound, what it’s like to get beaten up and thrown in the hoosegow by the Philly cops for being a smartass hippie back in the Sixties, and who’s on top in bed. Just kidding. He wouldn’t answer that question.

PHAWKER: Say your name please…

FRANCIS DAVIS: Francis Davis.

PHAWKER: You’re Philly-born and -bred. Lived here your whole life.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: Where’d you grow up?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Southwest Philadelphia. Around 58th and Elmwood Ave.

PHAWKER: And what kinda neighborhood was that back then?

FRANCIS DAVIS: At the time it was a very ethnic, Catholic neighborhood: Italian, Irish and Polish. In fact, many of the kids who I went to school with who were Polish still had parents who spoke, you know, Polish. Spoke Polish? Is there such a language? [laughs]

PHAWKER: Are you Irish stock 100%?

FRANCIS DAVIS: No. But Celtic. I guess my father was Welsh.

PHAWKER: And your mom?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Irish. Very Irish.

PHAWKER: And where did you go to high school?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Bartram. It was an integrated high school, which was very rare in Philly at the time. Well, I believe, anyway. And this would have been 1964 when I graduated. So not only was it very integrated, it was also the height of the civil rights era. So it was kind, of you know, hip for black kids to invite white kids to the parties and vice versa. Not that I, you know, threw any parties myself. We also had a great influx of Jewish kids, and then we even had an Indian kid, who wore, you know, a turban. And the black kids used to call it his doo-rag. So you know, I think now to find such a high school you’d have to watch a television show. I mean I think they’re only high schools like that on TV. And we had, like, hoods and National Merit Scholars.

PHAWKER: And is that what first opened you to black culture and music and things like that?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, to jazz, in a way. At that time there was a commercial jazz station in Philadelphia: WHAT-FM. In those days, not everybody had a FM radio yet, you know. And certainly kids’ radios tended to be transistors, which were little AM radios. So the hip thing to do was to listen to FM. In particular to listen to WHAT-FM, the jazz station, 96.5 I recall. So it probably was black kids who first taught me about that, including a kid I went to school with who was Bill Cosby’s cousin.

PHAWKER: How old were you?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Seventeen. I was reading Saturday Review and Evergreen Review and things like that. And they covered jazz in those days. There was a critic that I liked named Martin Williams, who I especially liked who also wrote for Evergreen Review and Saturday Review. Because I was reading poetry I knew about the then-named Leroi Jones, who, you know, I knew him as a poet before I knew him as a jazz writer or jazz critic. But anyway, it was a short step from reading them and those magazines to buying Down Beat and a magazine called Jazz and so on … and I noticed there were people I was reading about who weren’t being played on that station. So I would save my pennies, sometimes literally, and buy, usually cut out records that were on sale for $1.98 or so by Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman. So between that station and stuff I was buying I was hearing lots of stuff. And that’s how I started.

PHAWKER: And what got you into reading these fairly mature literary magazines as a teenager?

FRANCIS DAVIS: I don’t know. I always read. When I was a kid I was never treated like a kid in my family. In the house where I was growing up, I was the only male in an otherwise female household with my mother, my grandmother and an aunt. In some ways I was a little bit spoiled. My grandmother lost her son in World War II and I was named after him. And in some ways, this is sort of a a black concept, in some ways I was the replacement child for her. And also because grandmothers spoil ya anyway. But the person I was named after was smart. He was the only person in the family that had graduated from high school. Because I had his name, it was just assumed that I would be smart, too. There were never kids books around, per se. So the books I read when I was a kid were, you know, the same things my mom was reading. Which meant a lot of Mickey Spillane. I was fascinated by the look of type on a page. When I would write stuff on my own, if it wasn’t for school, I would get a piece of loose leaf paper, which was wide ruled, and do two lines in each one because it looked more squished together, like typeface.

So, you know, I was just interested in writing. My senior year in high school I got a job at the Free Library branch at 51st and Kensington. Essentially it was a minimum wage thing where you put books away. That was all you were allowed to do if you weren’t union. But during the summer it was a dream job because hardly anybody came into the library. So there’d be three or four to put away and then I had all the time in the world to read. And I could also check any book out that I wanted and not have to worry about bringing it back. There was one stretch in particular when I was a senior in high school. Right around the time of the Kennedy assassination. My grandmother died not long after that. And there were a lot of arrangements to be made. Relatives were coming from different places and nobody was paying much attention to whether I went to school or not, so I would just stay home and read. And I know that in my senior year of high school and the beginning of freshman year of college, I read probably 90 percent of everything I’ve ever read. [Laughs] That’s when I read Lolita, The Invisible Man, Rabbit, Run, etc. Pretty much everything Norman Mailer had published up to that point. And I was just digesting all this. And I was just reading these things the way people watched television shows, you know. And also not having to do papers on them or anything or discuss them in class. Again, I probably started reading say, Saturday Review, because a writer who I had read and liked was on the cover. And Evergreen I started reading because in the very first issue Norman Mailer had a piece in there. And I was kinda obsessed with Mailer back then. Especially the way he wrote about writing, how he changed this word and replaced it with another word because it was more masculine, and so on. So I started to write a novel myself. It was more or less The Great Gatsby, but with teenagers, you know?

PHAWKER: What was it called?

FRANCIS DAVIS: It had various titles. The one I remember was Let Him Be Foolish. Never finished it, by the way. It started out as a short story and became a never-ending novel. It just got longer and longer. I’m glad it no longer exists.

PHAWKER: So then you went to Temple?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah, yeah. I started at Penn State. Then I went to Temple.

PHAWKER: Oh, freshman year you went to Penn State?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah then I transferred to Temple. You know, Penn State seemed too rural to me. I had never been out of the city in my life. And I was used to having, like, a newsstand at ever corner. At Penn State there weren’t even corners. I used to get lost trying to find a classroom that I had just been to a few days before .

PHAWKER: There’s no grid to follow.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah, to orient myself. It was also, at least in the fall of 1964, Penn State was overwhelmingly white. And suddenly I was with all these kids from small towns from Philadelphia who were the most casually racist people. They were not bad people, but the racism was just something I wasn’t used to.

PHAWKER: And what was this sort of racial mix at Temple?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, it was still largely white. I had classes that didn’t have a single black person in them, for example. But it wasn’t quite like Penn State. And I guess gradually it got more integrated. It’s funny, I think sometimes there’s this perception of Temple having a much larger black enrollment than it does because it’s in North Philadelphia and because of the basketball team and because of WRTI, the jazz station. But it was predominantly white when I got there. But I don’t think, outside of a historically black college, that there would have been a college I could have gone to that wouldn’t have been predominately white at the time.

PHAWKER: Tell me a little bit about what you remember of white flight in the city and how the whole city changed in that whole time period you described.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well I never witnessed it. It was just a fait accompli. If I went back to my neighborhood today, you know, it would be completely black. I should clarify: there’s West Philadelphia and there’s Southwest Philadelphia. Back then it was very Italian, so much so that if you weren’t Italian… (laughs). Forget being black. If you were Irish or Polish you were taking your chances walking through there. Cause there were always great rivalry between the Italian kids and the Irish kids. But you know, within a few years those neighborhoods were black, predominately black. But it’s not like I witnessed it. I was gone by then.

PHAWKER: Your dad is out of the picture?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah, yeah, I never really knew my father.

PHAWKER: Do you recall that big race riot that happened in North Philly in ’64? From what I’ve read it was crazy. It went on for three days!

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah yeah. Well, you have to remember that it seemed, between that and the next year, that there were riots all over the place.

PHAWKER: What was your reaction to all of that?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, dismay. Dismay. And I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why at the time. But I think looking back everybody had a sense, that the civil rights movement was relinquishing the high ground. Relinquishing the moral high ground. And certainly I think in retrospect, whatever other benefits it had, that was also true of Black Power. I mean, the moral high ground is very important. I couldn’t articulate it any better at the time. But, you know, sadness. But also comprehension. The Phillies’ ballpark used to be at 21st and Lehigh. So, I’d seen enough of North Philadelphia to know why people were fed up. I don’t know if it was smart to do what they were doing, nevertheless I could understand, you know?

PHAWKER: Okay, so you graduated from Temple.

FRANCIS DAVIS: No, I never graduated. I dropped out. After about five years. [laughs] It was the Sixties. That’s how I usually explain it.

PHAWKER: Ok. Tell me, when did you get Sixties-fied?

Francis Davis: Well, I dunno. Just in terms of the academic career. I had a habit all along of only paying attention to and going to classes that I was good in and blowing off the rest. And you know, essentially I was very good in the English courses, the history, political science, and religion courses, because mostly what you did in religion was read novels anyway, you know. Temple had a great religion department back then, by the way. I believe it was the first secular religious department in the United States. It was headed by a guy who turned out not to be all what he was cracked up to be, named Phillips, I think his first name was Bernard. But he was DT Suzuki’s translator. Suzuki is the guy who exploited…the Salinger collection Nine Stories. He was pretty lofty academically, but he wasn’t a good classroom teacher. But they had great people in the department. I remember a guy named Murray Goldman who was, in addition to being a religious professor, he was a Jungian psychiatrist, a rabbi and a songwriter, you know, who wrote songs for a short lived band that had Kevin Bacon’s brother in it. It was called Good News. So Murray would be in class and he’d quote like George Santayana and Otis Redding in the same sentence. That blew me away.

PHAWKER: But you dropped out..

FRANCIS DAVIS: I dropped out. It’s sort of like I dropped out gradually. I stopped going to classes and then I didn’t enroll for the next semester. And I was able to get a job in a bookstore. It’s not like we had a lot of money in my house, so that helped. And it’s not like I thought of…this is a long digression and I won’t get into the details, but I got arrested one night in 1968.

PHAWKER: C’mon, it’ll up your street cred.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, I got arrested essentially for questioning the cops. We were in West Philly at the time. They were stopping people and searching people who they thought looked ‘suspicious’ and very often that translated into anyone with long hair, really, cause they thought they’d get a drug bust or whatever. So, I actually got along really well with the cop who stopped me and searched me, we were kinda joking together, I think we smoked a cigarette together or something.

PHAWKER: You had long hair?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah. So I made the strategic mistake of calling the precinct and complaining about the policy when I got home. Because the cop had more or less told me that’s what the policy was. So they sent cops to my door. And there was this whole charade of like, ‘Did somebody here call for the police?’

‘No, I called the police station.’

‘But did somebody here call for the police?’

‘No, I called the police station.’

And so on and they kept inching their way in the house. I probably wise-cracked or something. And they beat me up. And if they touch you they have to charge you with assault and battery. It was a bad case because they had charged me with assault and battery — ‘aggravated A and B’ as they put it — you know, on a police officer, but they forgot to charge me with anything else. So it’s just like, ‘So what happened? You just went up to a cop and started punching him? That’s hard to believe.’ But anyway, that night, my mother in a panic called a lot of people including my boss at the book store and my Uncle Frank the truck driver, and one of my professors, who called two other professors from Temple, so they were all there at my arraignment.

PHAWKER: So what happened? Did the case get dropped?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah. I’ll tell you what was really funny. One of my character witnesses was to be one of my professors, who as it turned out had gotten arrested for picketing Hubert Humphrey because he wasn’t radical enough — boy, those were the days. Anyway, weird twist of fate, his arraignment is the case right before mine. And the judge was not very sharp, definitely a patronage hire. He had a hard time trying to keep everybody straight standing before him in the courtroom. And he points to my professor. ‘And who are you?’ And Henry had just been sentenced by him, just a few minutes prior. Like you know, a fine or something. So he says ‘I’m his professor.’ And the judge says, ‘Professor, huh? I just had a professor in front of me and I found him guilty.’

PHAWKER: And he didn’t even recognize him? Was this guy senile or he didn’t see that well or what?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Senile.

PHAWKER: Turns out, justice is blind. Just to clarify: the cops worked their way into the house and you were being cocky and what? One of the cops just punched you in the face?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah. Of course I didn’t hit them back.

PHAWKER: So how much of a beating did you get? Was it more than one punch?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: They beat on you for a while?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: And then took you off in handcuffs. And charged you for assault and battery. God bless America.

FRANCIS DAVIS: It’s tough being in the paddy wagon in handcuffs because there’s nothing to hold on to.

PHAWKER: Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard about that.

FRANCIS DAVIS: You’re banging around every turn and stop. [Laughing] And you just pray they locked that back door.

End of Part One. Tomorrow: John Coltrane, Sun Ra, climbing to the top of the jazz crit-ocracy and meeting a cute little feminist radiohead named Terry.

[Illustrations by ALEX FINE]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally ran back in November of 2011. We are re-posting it today on the second anniversary of his untimely death. Good night Mr. Bourdain, wherever you are.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Anthony Bourdain is a man who needs no introduction, but for those not in the know or without a consumptive cable habit, understand that he is the enfant terrible of the foodie world who came of age on the Punk Rock Planet of New York ‘77 simultaneously pogoing to the likes of the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, and Patti Smith and shooting smack in the shithole bathrooms of CBGBs. Upon graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, he ran the kitchens of various fancy Big Apple eateries — including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, and Sullivan’s — before winding up the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in 1998. In 2000, he penned the gonzo fin de siecle memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which expanded on his infamous New Yorker piece, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, that begins thusly:

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger–risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese and shellfish. Your first 207 Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your 208th may send you to bed with the sweats, chills and vomits. Gastronomy is the science of pain.

Kitchen Confidential soon occupied the New York Times best seller list and led to Bourdain hosting his own show on the Travel Channel, No Reservations, wherein he trots the globe sampling the outre customs and exotic cuisines of various indigenous peoples and, for fear of offending his hosts, and in the pursuit of damn good television, bravely chomps down just about everything put in front of him, including: sheep testicles, ant eggs, seal eyeballs, a whole cobra with its heart still beating, and, most disgustingly, a warthog’s anus, which required him to take Cipro for two weeks. In my book, he is pretty much The Coolest Man On Earth. Given that chefs are the new rock stars, I hereby dub him ‘The Lou Reed of Food’ — just remember you heard it here first, folks. Recently, Phawker got Bourdain on the horn to talk about eating dog, shooting smack, dissing Philly and, of course, hating on Billy Joel.

PHAWKER: You caused a bit of a ruckus a few years back when you sort of dismissed Philly as a “two-horse town,” Stephen Starr and George Perrier. Would you take that back if you could? Do you still feel that way?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I certainly would take it back in a hot second. The only thing that’s in my way is there are increasingly large numbers of really good restaurants there or interest places for sure, a large number have come to Philadelphia since I made that comment. But having great restaurants only is not generally what I do. I’m looking for something different. If you had a huge Cambodian community, that would be interesting. Good fine dining which Philadelphia has, good Italian food which Philadelphia has, that’s not making a show for me yet.

PHAWKER: Aside from the fancy-pants restaurants in town, which there are more and more of these days, there is interesting stuff out in the neighborhoods.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I don’t know anything about it. It’s a personal failing that we haven’t found a way into yet. We will, there’s no doubt about it.

PHAWKER: Where are you planning to eat when you get to Philly?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m in the middle of a tour so generally I pull in late in the afternoon, all I have time for is to check into the hotel, throw some water on my face, take a bite of cheese from the complementary cheese tray, do my gig, by the time I’m doing the signing and the picture taking afterwards I collapse into my bed at 1 AM, wake up at 4:30 or 5 and I’m off to the next city. So unfortunately this time around I will shamefully not be getting around.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk about some of the stranger things you’ve eaten – sheep testicles, ant eggs, seal eyeball, whole cobra with it’s heart still beating, warthog’s anus, which required you to take Cipro for two weeks – where do you draw the line? Is there anything you wouldn’t put in your mouth?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I try to avoid dog, that’s for sure. I’ve managed to gracefully avoid having that presented to me. I try to be a good guest. I try to eat whatever’s put in front of me. But at the same time, I’ve made efforts to not find myself in a position where my host is surprising me with dog.

PHAWKER: There is a Mexican place here in Philly called Los Taquitos De Puebla that sells eyeball tacos.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Oh yeah, that’s very classic, I’ve had a lot of that in Mexico. That’s very ordinary food. I’ve had a lot of it. It’s good.

PHAWKER: Touché. Is it cow eyeball?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yes.

PHAWKER: A couple things here I wanted to check off in the true/false column. Did you really tell your kids that eating at McDonald’s causes retardation?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I wanna be careful for libel purposes here, but I may or may not have suggested that there might be some linkage.

PHAWKER: Fair enough.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: That was hyperbole I think. I have definitely said that it’s icky and might have suggested a link with cooties.

PHAWKER: How do you stay so trim while cooking and eating for a living?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: It’s really something to think about. If I’m shooting in Italy for ten days, the crew and me we’ll all gain ten pounds. If I’m shooting in Italy or south of France I try to schedule a shoot some place where the food’s not very good or we don’t have much expectation of eating heavily, maybe a noodle and broth culture or someplace like a very poor country. We try to mix it up, cause you know, if I’m shooting in Italy, France, and Spain all in a row, I will come home and find myself 15 pounds heavier. With me, if I put on six pounds it feels like a ton.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk a little about your take on vegetarianism, which you have labeled a “first world luxury.”

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: What I mean by that is, personal choices people make in their own homes and their own communities, I have absolutely no argument with. If you choose for whatever reason, reasons of conscience or personal preference or for whatever reason, if you live in Philadelphia and choose to live a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I hardly argue about it. It’s your choice. In fact, if you’re traveling to Rome or Paris or the industrialized world, again, these are restaurants you can generally call ahead and inquire if they have vegetarian options and you can eat reasonably well. But I have found from my personal experience that many of the most of the most interesting and amazing places in the developing world, it’s very awkward and will not be understood when you say, “I cannot eat what you’re offering me. I will not eat what you’re offering me.” First of all, it strikes me as being curious when one would go to Thailand or China, these amazing countries with these amazing cuisines and not wanna find out as much as you can about their culture, especially their cooking culture which is so extraordinary, but you would again and again find yourself having to offend often very poor hosts who are very proudly offering you their best. Like it or not, they will just not understand and not accept it, they will be offended and in some cases disgraced in front of their neighbors. I just see it as rude, with traveling, to be many of the places I’ve been, to insist on eating in your preferred style would force you to be rude.

PHAWKER: When in Rome, right?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I believe when in Rome, eat as the Romans. Otherwise, why bother to go? Most of the relationships I’ve made around the world are to my willingness to accept with good grace and good humor and with gratitude what’s offered.

PHAWKER: What is your take on the whole ‘buy local’ or the slow food movement?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m all for it. Who could possibly be against it? It’s wonderful that we increasingly have these options. Even at its silliest and most ideological it’s certainly a good thing.

PHAWKER: Not that you’re an expert on these matters, but what do you make of this notion that the only way to feed the world is through factory farming?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: That is an inescapable fact, an unavoidable fact. We’re not going to revert to an agrarian society where every foot of real estate in the entire world is arable land. There are millions of Indians toiling on farms now working their fingers to the bones so their kids can be engineers. Who will work these farms of the future that we’re talking about? It’s the sort of thing that people who already envision this, like Berkeley, where they’re getting plenty of good delicious local vegetables and live in a fertile area, feel free to say. Many of the people in the world who work on farms are working hard so the next generation doesn’t have to. It’s hard to be a farmer. Also, a rice farm struggling to make a living for his family in Vietnam is probably pretty damn happy with pesticide. It’s inconceivable. There aren’t enough fish in the world to feed the whole world. Unfortunately, fish farming is a way that a lot of the world can eat. Hopefully we can do it in a sustainable and non-toxic way, there aren’t environments contaminating some of the few remaining wild fish. I don’t like Big Corn, I don’t like the system as it is, but there are a lot of hungry people out there. That’s what has to balance these things. I’m very happy any time I hear of a small farmer doing organic local seasonal food and forming relationships with chefs and restaurants, a real community of growers and some providers, people cooking and selling food – that’s great. But we have to be realistic about what our planet is. All these things are interlocked. In order to change the world, it’s not just our food supply we’d have to change, we’d have to change our entire socio-economic structure worldwide. Unless the Khmer Rouge get back to power as an international force I don’t see that happening.

PHAWKER: What do you make of the whole Occupy Wall Street movement?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I understand the anger. My understanding of what their message is, I don’t know what it is, it’s not so well defined in my head but I certainly understand the anger and frustration. I’m generally supportive of that anger, a banking system that’s privatizing profits and socializing losses. I’m against that. Who wouldn’t be? Except the bankers.

PHAWKER: You’ve been very frank about your appreciation for recreational drug use over the years. If there was one drug you could take now consequence-free out of all the drugs you’ve tried, what would it be?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Oh, heroin. Consequence free? No health effects?

PHAWKER: No health effects, you can’t get arrested.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: When I had the time, and I didn’t have any personal responsibilities, or the responsibilities of being a father – I certainly enjoyed that part for a while until it ruined my life, as it always does.

PHAWKER: No one ever seems to beat heroin. Heroin always wins.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yeah, that’s kind of the point. It’s a death-trap of sorts.

PHAWKER: I know you dig music, what you’re listening to these days?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m obsessed with the Rome album, the Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi album. I think it’s awesome.

PHAWKER: I wanted to confirm this very hilarious Billy Joel story, that you banned the playing of his music in your kitchen, that he heard about this, came to your restaurant, snuck into the kitchen and posed for pictures with your cooking staff, then emailed the photos to you and said “See, I’m in your kitchen” —  that is all true?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: We had had dinner previously, he called, made a reservation and he came in and we had dinner together, and we got along very very well. He was well aware of my position on his music before he came to dinner. We’ve had dinner a number of times. But yes, he did sneak into my kitchen once and sent me a photograph saying, “I guess you do let Billy Joel in your kitchen.” It also said, “PS, I also hate the Grateful Dead.” I like him very much by the way, I’m just not a fan of his records.

RELATED: In 1965, Tacoma, Washington’s The Sonics released a debut album of raw-boned, hemorrhagic garage-punk and maximum R&B called, simply, Here Are The Sonics. Exponentially louder, wilder, and weirder than their woolly-bully frat-rock brethren on the SeaTac teen club/roller rink/armory circuit, The Sonics sang about witches, psychopaths, Satan, and strychnine as a social lubricant, along with the more standard themes of hot girls and fast cars, or, even better, fast girls in hot cars. The 12 tracks on Here Are The Sonics capture the needle-pinning, speaker-blowing, tonsil-shredding, balls-to-the-wall mating call of five hormonal mid-’60s teenage savages forever in hot pursuit of Mad Men-era booze-cigarettes-sex-magic and the glorious din that made it all possible.

Fifty years after its release, Here Are The Sonics still sounds, as one wag aptly put it, “as raw as a freshly scraped kneecap.” On the continuum of rock ’n’ roll as a 20th-century art form, Here Are The Sonics remains a vital and important relic, the aural equivalent of a prehistoric cave painting, as primitive as it is seminal. It changed music. More accurately, it changed the people who would change music. Jack White called it “the epitome of ’60s punk.” Kurt Cobain said it had “the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard…it sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever heard.” On “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy concludes his itemized list of the essential artists in the definitive hipster record collection by invoking The Sonics four times in a row, as if casting a spell.

Feeble national promotion and ham-fisted distribution may have ensured that few outside of The Sonics’ Pacific Northwest stomping ground heard Here Are The Sonics when it was first released, but in the fullness of time its sphere of influence now transcends generations and spans continents thanks to the Esperanto of electrifying noise. Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN’s Parts Unknown, used “Have Love, Will Travel” in promos for the current season. He emailed the following when I asked him why: “The Sonics were true originals, garage before garage, the way rock and roll should be: loud, dirty and dangerous.” MORE

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Joshua Ostrander, aka singer-songwriter-producer and one-man-band Mondo Cozmo, is having a moment. After years and years of dues-paying obscurity grinding out laudable-but-doomed-to-the-cutout-bins music in bands called Laguardia and East Coast Conference Champions, Ostrander is finally enjoying a turn in the sun. Born and raised in Bucks County, and a resident of Philadelphia until 2006 when he pulled up stakes and headed to L.A. in search of fame and fortune, Ostrander spent the better part of the last decade working dual landscaping gigs by day, and feverishly recording in his bedroom at night, living on little more than ramen, fumes, and faded dreams.

In 2017, he released Plastic Soul under the nom de rock Mondo Cozmo, and on the strength of infectious, anthemic singles like “Shine,” “Plastic Soul” and “Hold On To Me,” made the world finally sit up and take notice. Because sometimes nice guys do finish first. In advance of the June release of New Medicine, the follow-up LP to Plastic Soul, Ostrander is playing a string of East Coast dates that includes a completely sold out trifecta local residency. He plays the Ardmore Music Hall tomorrow night, next Tuesday (March 17th) he’s at Johnny Brendas and then Friday March 20th he’s at Boot N’ Saddle. Last week we got him on the horn.

DISCUSSED: John Waters, rescue dogs, his pal Anna Farris, growing up in a retirement home in Southampton PA, The Velvet Underground, cruelty, dementia and empathy, Bruce Springsteen live albums, Fishtown, his pal Chris Pratt’s house, mellotrons, Joshua Tree, “Bittersweet Symphony,” Erma Franklin, three-legged cats, the apocalyptic Malibu fire, Semisonic, David Bowie’s Young Americans, and why Aesop was so right when he wrote that “no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” Now more than ever.

PHAWKER: Let’s start with your hometown connection. You are born and raised in Philadelphia, tell me about that — where were you born and where did you grow up?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Sure, I was born in Bucks County Pennsylvania, in a town called Southampton. And I was there til about 17 and then I moved to north Philly and then I went to South Philly for a little while.

PHAWKER: I read in an interview that you grew up in a retirement facility or near one?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: (laughs) Yeah, I did. There was this gigantic estate and my father was the administrator at a place called The South Hamptons Estate, it’s right there on Street Road in Southampton and we had lived there, so like, you know we would have dinner with the old folks. It wasn’t weird to me at the time because I was so young and we did it for so long and I thought it was a normal thing. But looking back when I tell people that they’re like “Oh, that’s so weird” but I don’t know, it was nice.

PHAWKER: So, tell me about your first band, Laguardia. When was this, 2003?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, yeah that sounds about right. That was the first band I got on board with and stuff. We signed to Republic Records and we put out one record, and man, we were probably on the road for three years, we went out a lot with bands like Brian Jonestown Massacre, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Yeah, we were gone for a long time, it was fine, but I think that is when I started writing my own stuff and that’s when I quit that band and started my own band called Eastern Conference Champions.

PHAWKER: Right, okay, that was my next question. Before we move on from Laguardia, was there a Laguardia album that was out there or released on the internet.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Man I don’t even know if it’s on there. I assume it is on Spotify and stuff but that’s a good question, I don’t know.

PHAWKER: Since you were touring with Brian Jonestown Massacre I assume you guys were doing some variation on the heavy swirly psych dream-pop kinda stuff?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Man, Laguardia I didn’t really . . . I was just trying to essentially mimic whatever I was listening to at the time which was a lot of Radiohead, Ok Computer was such an influence on me.

PHAWKER: I hear the Radiohead in some of the ECC tracks I’ve heard. Well, one last question about Laguardia, wasn’t the brother of Kevin Morpurgo of Dandelion fame in the band?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yes, Mike Morpurgo. Hell of a dude, he’s great. Yeah, that’s awesome I love hearing that. It was after Mike left Dandelion, or I guess they just broke up, and then we started writing tunes with Mike.

PHAWKER: Right on, and Eastern Conference Champions, where did that name come from?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: So, my drummer and I were huge sports fans, obviously growing up in Philly you are monster Eagles, Phillies, Flyers fans, you know. So, when the Flyers would win their conference or whatever they were called the Eastern Conference Champions, and we just thought it was a great name. But it became such a drag because it was so long, and people could never remember it. If anyone ever Google searched it they were just bombarded with[sports articles]. It was definitely a learning experience with that name holding us back almost in a weird way.

PHAWKER: Maybe it’s because you were the singer in that band but it doesn’t sound radically different from Mondo Cozmo.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: No, not at all. There is a ECC record called Speak-ahh which I still think is really good. It was tough, we didn’t have a label, but the songs on there, that’s when I started coming into my own as a songwriter. That’s when I started writing songs on my own, learned how to deliver the lyrics, that’s when I started doing that.

PHAWKER: ECC went on for almost 10 years?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, man. We released a couple albums and a couple EPs — I loved that band. It got to a point where it was really hard for me, we had been in LA, and around for so long, we didn’t have a label, we didn’t have much money. It got to a point where we were all working day jobs, it was just like, I was writing so much stuff that would later become Mondo Cozmo songs, but I was frustrated in the sense that I couldn’t get new music out, and I couldn’t tour, and we couldn’t do anything. That was really tough for me, quitting that band — it was very much a family situation — so leaving that was tough. It was really hard, but I just felt like I needed to do something on my own without having to go to three other people for a decision. I just felt like it was easier for me to just go and do it, and it was really hard, it still is.

PHAWKER: Understandable. Just so I understand the timeline here, ECC started in the Philly area and eventually translated to LA, or went out to LA and that’s when the band started, I’m not clear on the timeline.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: The Eastern Conference Champions signed a deal with Geffen Records, and that was the first time I ever had any money in my pocket. My drummer and I were just like, “Let’s get out of here,” we had played at every bar in Philly about a thousand times, and we just thought it was a great chance to go somewhere different and try something new, and I’m glad we did.

PHAWKER: So when did you leave Philly?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: I guess around 2006.

PHAWKER: And just to recap on something you had said earlier, you lived for a time in North Philly and in South Philly, like as a kid with your family or later when you were grown up and doing Laguardia?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, no I was living on my own. I mean, I was living with friends with the bandmates and stuff like that in North Philly, and then when I moved to South Philly, I was in an apartment with some friends, but I was mostly on the road non-stop, it just didn’t make sense to be paying rent. So I might as well live somewhere warm.

PHAWKER: Do you remember where in north Philly you were living?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, it was Fishtown just off of Girard, it was on Hope Street. And it was this huge factory, it was before the town started flipping over, it was really shitty. And then I moved to south Philly, I really liked it in South Philly. It was nice down there, I liked it.

PHAWKER: So let’s move on. At a certain point you’d become Mondo Cozmo, were you calling the project that when you had recorded/ had your first break-out?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, so what happened when I quit Eastern Conference Champions, I was working two landscaping jobs, I didn’t really have a plan I just knew I wanted to get music out. So, I started recording music and I think the first song I recorded was a song called “Higher” and then I did “Hold Onto Me” and “Plastic Soul” and that’s when I was like I got a couple tunes I want to send this out, but I needed a name. And I just wanted something simple, especially coming from a band name that was Eastern Conference Champions, it was so long, and no one remembered it. So I wanted something that rhymed and that would look cool on a T-Shirt and I was watching a John Waters movie called Mondo Trasho and I was like “Ah, man that’s such a cool name” and my dog’s name is Cozmo, so I thought “Oh, I’ll just call it Mondo Cozmo.” I just picked it out of the air.

PHAWKER: Okay, so tell me about Cozmo, is he a rescue dog?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, he’s the greatest thing in the world. We rescued him and it was my wife and I’s first dog, and he’s just the greatest thing in the world, and since then, I’ve become a really big advocate for adopting dogs.

PHAWKER: What is his backstory before you got him, did you get him at a rescue proper, did someone just abandon him, they couldn’t take care of him anymore, how did he get to the rescue?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: I think they found him on the street, and it was sad because we didn’t know it when we got him, but he had had a broken leg, and we didn’t have a lot of money when we got him, and the first thing you do when you get a dog you run them into the ground, you get a ball . . . and after a couple days we were like “Man, his leg is gimpy” so we took him to the vet, and they said he had a broken leg, he must’ve gotten hit by a car while he was on the street. And a hip surgery costs about 10 grand and we were like “Oh my god, like what are we going to do?” But they had this other procedure where they can just cut off the bone connecting to the hip joint and that only cost like a thousand or so, we could afford that one, but yeah he has been great ever since.

PHAWKER: Is he walking and running okay now?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, he does great. It’s funny since there is no bone connecting it is just all muscle, and if I take him to the park and he’s really running hard you see that leg kinda just go flying.

PHAWKER: And what kind of dog is he?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: We don’t know. We did one of those DNA tests on him, and he is just a pure mutt of every dog known to man.

PHAWKER: Those dogs are usually the best dogs. Moving on, I have some very specific questions I wanted to ask you about the song “Plastic Soul” and some of the sounds you created on there, but before we get to that, is it true that you recorded your debut LP, also called Plastic Soul, in just two weeks in the desert?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yep, I did it in two weeks. I mean, most of the record was already finished, I had 5-6 songs completed, and then we released “Shine” and that just started to blow up on the radio, and my record label were like “This is going to go to #1. We need a record now, how much time do you need? Can you do it in two weeks?” and I was just like “Fuck. Yeah, I can.” so yeah I went out to Joshua Tree and turned it around in two weeks.

PHAWKER: Yeah, so tell me about that, why did you pick Joshua Tree?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: I just think I really needed to focus and not be distracted, because the studio I have — it’s not even a studio. I record everything out of the guest room in my house in LA, and I usually stop around 7-8pm because I don’t want to drive the wife nuts, or the neighbors nuts. So I was like “Fuck man I need to go non-stop and get this done, and I need to not be distracted” I rented an Airbnb in Joshua Tree were I knew I would be alone and secluded and I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been there, but after you’ve been there for three or four days in complete seclusion it starts to get a little wonky out there. You know, it helped me focus and get it done.

PHAWKER: It’s really sounds beautiful out there. Almost Biblical.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: It is man. It’s gorgeous, especially at night when the wind starts going. Yeah, I love it.

PHAWKER: So I wanted to ask you some questions about the song “Plastic Soul.” First, is the song title a reference to David Bowie’s description of the music he was making on Young Americans or is that just a coincidence?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, it was the weekend that David Bowie passed away, and I was cleaning the house, and I heard this Erma Franklin song come on and it was “Piece of My Heart” which later on Janis Joplin would go on to make super famous, but it was her, like original version, and I just heard it while I was vacuuming, and I was like “Oh, my god!” And I went into the studio, and I just completely plugged my phone into the computer, and just made a loop of the piano, that little piano rift and I wrote the song and recorded it in one day, it was so quick it was like magic. I was reading a lot about David Bowie that weekend, and I was reading the reference where he made the “Plastic Soul” reference and I was just like “Wow, that is so cool!”

PHAWKER: If you will indulge me, I want to ask you about some specific sounds on the recording. That “Woo!” sound? What is that? Is that you? Or is that also a sample?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: No, that was a sample. That was the coolest thing, ‘cause with Mondo it was when I started messing with samples and with drum loops, because I can’t play the drums, and suddenly I am without a drummer. So, it was this really exciting time for me to be going through and finding samples that I liked. And vocal hooks and stuff like that, and yeah, I don’t even know where that is, but I found it, and had to make sure it was clear-able and shit, which was a nightmare. The funny thing is when I turned the song in the label, they passed on it. They didn’t want to put it on the record. And I was like, “Dude, it’s a cool song, you have to put it on!” That song has gone on to become a complete fan-favorite and I’m happy I was right and they were wrong about that.

PHAWKER: Absolutely, and I can kinda understand the label’s response. When I first heard it, I didn’t like it. I think it’s because of that “Woo!” thing, what’s so interesting about that “Woo” thing is that it’s like the lamest “Woo!” ever. And it seems like such an odd choice, but it gets under your skin, you know. And then the second time I heard it, I was like “No, I don’t hate this song. I love this song!” Now I love how lame the “Woo!” is. What about that giggling sound on the song — sounds like a toy that you pull a string and it makes that sound. What is that?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Uh, man, I don’t know, at that time I was kicking stuff up so fast, I don’t know. I would do this thing where I would record my wife making noises and just distort those sounds with pitch shift and stuff like that, that I really don’t know I was moving so quick.

PHAWKER: I love the horns, too. Are they real or also a sample?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Brother, I have an IPad that has a mellotron sound on it…. Yupp, that’s all it is. I just record on that, yeah I love how it sounds like the real thing.

PHAWKER: I also love how the song climaxes with a crescendo of ecstatic noise before the drums kick back in. I know you did a cover of The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” which “Plastic Soul” reminds me of — I mean that in a good way. I know everyone loves that Verbe song but just for the record your song is better than that song.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Aww that is so sweet of you to say. I completely disagree but thank you.

PHAWKER: I also liked the lyric. The song is sung from the perspective of somebody or something supernatural, this ghostly spirit that was around in 1942 and fought in World War II and then in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and then now. And there’s this line that “I shapeshift into that form”; tell me about where you were coming from lyrically when you were writing that.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Again when Bowie passed away my wife and I started this conversation of how cool it would be if the person you fall in love with is the person you keep meeting through every different lifetime, you just keep falling in love with each other and you don’t, you don’t even realize it. So I thought it would be cool to reference certain years within the song, like reference WWII and that is where, like, the two fight in the war, and then another lifetime in 1989, at the Berlin Wall or something like that. And I was like, ah, I just thought it was such a cool idea for a song.

PHAWKER: It is such a cool idea.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Honestly, man, I wrote that in like eight minutes. Man, it just bled through, and I listen to it back and I’m like “How did I fucking do this?” You know, what I mean?

PHAWKER: Aren’t the best ideas the ones that are effortless?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: That is so true. A lot of times with songwriting it is the songs that come really fast are the ones that are meant to be, the ones you labor over forever usually don’t make it.

PHAWKER: I just have a couple more questions and then I’ll let you go. So the “Hold On” video with Anna Farris, shot in a retirement home. Before I saw it, I read about the video and I was like “Oh, I’m not going to like this at all, this sounds so trite and manipulative” and then I start watching it, and by the end — don’t tell anyone — there were tears rolling down my cheeks. It was just so beautiful and so pure and kind and real. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the reason I reacted so emotionally is that we are living in such cruel and inhuman times and this video is the perfect antidote to all the assholery of the moment. This ultra-sincere display of empathy and kindness extended to people at the end of their lives who society no longer has any use for just slayed me. The almost over-the-top, operatic emotionalism feels earned and so much of that is communicated through Anna Farris’ eyes. She’s such a great actress. You wanna tell me a little about where that elder care facility and why you set the video there?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, um, it’s located in Santa Monica and it’s like a daycare center for mentally-challenged elderly people. Like people suffering from dementia or stuff like that. And, Anna was really sweet. When I hang out with Anna, wherever we go, she gets recognized and people wanna talk to her about stuff. But it was interesting because when we went to that place to shoot and there was no script, lets just shoot you interacting with the people, and see what happens. And it was stressful in a sense, like “Oh, I don’t know how this is going to turn out” you know, but when they did the dance, towards the end of the day, everyone would get together and dance. And when she was dancing with that one old guy, we were like “Holy shit, this is just so powerful” and it was all unscripted and completely real and we were just so proud of that.

PHAWKER: I don’t know if you’ve seen the YouTube page for the video recently, but in the comments, that guy’s daughter chimes in and says: “That’s my dad dancing with Anna! THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH!!! 93 years young. Love you, Dad! Keep smiling at all the world. – Julie Gail.”

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Oh, look at that. That’s so cool. Oh, I love that, I’m going to go check that out.

PHAWKER: Yes, it is very cool. And I love that you are barely in your videos, just this ghostly presence on the edge of the frame. You know, you’re all the way in the back, out of focus at the very end of the “Hold On” video. And then in the “Come On” video you’re standing by the pool in the beginning facing away from the camera for like second. That’s you, right?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, yeah. And then at the end, yeah, I really don’t like being in videos.

PHAWKER: Videos are so tired and played by this point, what is there left to do that hasn’t already been done? And do we really need to see another band lip-synching to their recording, playing guitars that aren’t even plugged in? I love that you make your dog and your three-legged cat the star of the “Plastic Soul” video, that you have Anna Farris dancing with the residents in a retirement home, or just have her in a house freaking out on camera. I think those are very effective creative choices.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Thank you man, I really appreciate that. That means a lot.

PHAWKER: So one question about the “Come On” video, it was inspired by the Malibu wildfires?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, yeah I wrote that song with this guy Dan Wilson, I don’t really write with a lot of people. But I like writing with Dan, it’s really low pressure. Most of the time we just sit around and talk about music, it’s cathartic in a way, it’s nice to be around someone who is so accomplished but also is in a low stress situation. And I went over to his house to write a song, and there’s a band called Cracker years years ago and they had a song called, “Low” and that’s the fucking best song. And I wanted a mid-temp rockin’ tune like that, and that kind of led the way to the core progression and the BPM of which we were playing. And we took a lunch break, and went outside, and we were on his deck there, and I asked Danny, he’s kinda up in the woods, “Danny, did you see those fires up there last fall or whatever.” And he was like, “Yeah man, it was coming over the ridge there, we were sitting there watching it” and that is where “Come and watch the city burn” line came from, and I just wrote the song pretty quickly from there.

PHAWKER: Those fires were very apocalyptic-looking on the news, walls of flame on both sides of the highways and entire mountainsides on fire. Again, biblical.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, it’s scary man.

PHAWKER: And this is Dan Wilson of Semisonic fame/“Closing Time” fame?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yes, he is a great dude.

PHAWKER: Yes, and I was reading through the commentary on that video as well. Someone asked if that house where it was filmed was the house Anna Farris shared with Chris Pratt early on in their marriage, is that true?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, so obviously Chris and Anna were married, that was the house they lived in, when we would like hang out with them, and we were ready to shoot this video in a house, and it fell through last minute because they needed some insurance or something to shoot it and we couldn’t afford it, and then Anna was like, “Why don’t we just shoot it at Chris and I’s old house? It’s up for sale, it’s empty right now’’ And we were like okay, but it was the first time Anna had been back to that house since they left, and for her walking around and seeing the house completely different from when they lived there it was super weird for her. It was weird for all of us, but it was extremely weird for her. And I think it really played into her delivery, she was going through so many different emotions, one take she was frantic, and manic, and the next one she was sweet, and we put it together and I edited really quick.

PHAWKER: Yeah, I was going to say if that was the house they lived in, there were probably a lot of ghosts in there, and maybe she was channeling some of that when she is going through the spectrum of emotions on camera.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Totally.

PHAWKER: So “Black Cadillac” — and I mean this in the nicest way — is a great rip-off of The Velvet Underground’s “Waiting For The Man” — and that’s not the takeaway from the originality of your songl.

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yeah, I am a huge Velvets fan. Well, I just wanted to have that vibe going, it’s such a great vibe after the live show. I cut that real quick, I wrote the lyrics on tour, we sang the backups in dressing rooms, it was completely recorded on the road. I was really proud of the lyrics on that one. I thought that was some of my better lyrical writing with the imagery and stuff, and that was our first release from the upcoming record, thought it would be a great little taste-tester for what was to come.

PHAWKER: Now, there is a full LP that’s coming eventually?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: Yup, I just handed it in a few days ago. Ten songs and its coming out I believe in June, I don’t know if that’s being announced though.

PHAWKER: Okay, and is there a name for that?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: It’s called New Medicine

PHAWKER: Okay, last question, and it’s a hypothetical one that requires us to pretend people still keep physical copies of music: You wake up in the middle of the night and your house is on fire, there is only enough time to grab one album and jump out the window. Which one do you grab and why?

JOSHUA OSTRANDER: It’s the Bruce Springsteen’s [Live 1975-85] — its the fucking greatest thing in the world, man! The live performances and how he did different versions for each show, it’s just my favorite thing in the world.

MONDO COZMO @ ARDMORE MUSIC HALL WED. MARCH 11 SOLD OUT

[Photo by JEFF RUTHERFORD]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy shares the bill with Jonathan Richman Sunday night for a sold out show at Union Transfer. Oldham is touring in support of last year’s I Made A Place, his first LP of new songs since 2011. To mark this auspicious occasion, we are re-posting our 2010 Q&A w/ the irascible Mr. Oldham. Enjoy.

NEW YORKER: Oldham remains an elusive figure, but the show is a gentle reminder of why he is often cited as one of the finest singer-songwriters in contemporary American music. Oldham was a student of music history, clearly, but he never sounded studious. He had an eerie, strangulated voice, half wild and half broken. And he sang vivid and peculiar songs, which sometimes sounded like old standards rewritten as fever dreams or, occasionally, as inscrutable dirty jokes. These days, he calls himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and his music is a little bit easier to love and a lot harder to dismiss. He has settled into character as an uncanny troubadour, singing a sort of transfigured country music, and he has become, in his own subterranean way, a canonical figure. Johnny Cash covered him, Björk has championed him (she invited him to appear on the soundtrack of “Drawing Restraint 9”), and Madonna, he suspects, has quoted him (her song “Let It Will Be” seems to borrow from his “O Let It Be,” though he says, “I’m fully prepared to accept that it’s a coincidence”). One tribute came from the indie folksinger Jeffrey Lewis, whose song “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” affectionately portrays Oldham as both a hero and a brute; the joke is that most indie-rock listeners already think of him that way. And a recent, unenthusiastic review in the London Independent nonetheless concluded that Oldham was “the underground artist most likely to work his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Although he has never signed with a major label, and has never risen higher than No. 194 on Billboard’s album chart, his concerts sell out all over the world. If he remains a spectral figure, that is no coincidence. In an online tour diary from a few years ago, he wrote, “It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.” MORE

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PHAWKER: Okay we’re rolling. Can you just identify yourself for the tape?

WILL OLDHAM: You can do that.

PHAWKER: This is an interview with Will Oldham. And you guys are in the middle of a tour and have pulled off to the side of the road; can you tell me where you’re calling me from?

WILL OLDHAM: Washington, Pennsylvania.

PHAWKER: You tour quite constantly, you’ve released hundreds of songs, more than a hundred singles, or compilation appearances, and yet somehow you’re able to maintain this aura of rarity and fleeting-ness, this sense of urgency to “get on this before it disappears.” I’m wondering how you are able to maintain that with such a prolific output.

WILL OLDHAM: Hmm, I’m not sure. That’s an observation, I guess, from the outside, so I wouldn’t know how that happened.

PHAWKER: OK, let me rephrase that. Do you ever worry that you’re ‘flooding the market’ so to speak, that you’re putting too much Will Oldham product out there and that each succeeding release is going to conflict with the one before it? Most bands put out an album every three years, you seem to put out a new one every three months.

WILL OLDHAM: Not really, I mean the makeup of each release unique, the people who are involved, the themes that are addressed, and I feel like most of the things that come out aren’t going to appeal to the same people. There are not a lot of completists out there and I wouldn’t recommend that anyway.

PHAWKER: Do you have favorite albums or favorite songs from your back catalog or are you just kind of always in the moment on this stuff, that what you’re most passionate about is what you’re working on in the moment.

WILL OLDHAM: Again, since they all serve different purposes and work for different reasons. I might have an affection for a particular song or recording session or particular or a particular show that occurred and then it will pass and I’d be on to something else.

PHAWKER: How about this: If the Martians came down today and you had to give them one song or one album to explain Will Oldham’s place on Earth what would you pick?

WILL OLDHAM: I’d just give them one of my testicles, probably.

PHAWKER: (laughs)

WILL OLDHAM: Let them figure it out in their advanced laboratories.

PHAWKER: I wanted to ask you about some of the critics’ perceptions of what you do and what you make of that, especially a lot of the British press, which really seems to love you and your mythos. The Guardian called you a hillbilly existentialist. True, false, indifferent?

WILL OLDHAM: I would have to say indifferent. It would be like if you watched Sanford and Son and tried to describe Red Foxx based off of Sanford and Son. Well, this is the kind of person Red Foxx is: he’s an ignorant, bullheaded junk yard guy. But I don think that’s who Red Foxx was. Nobody has the authority to say “this is who this person is” based on artistic output, which is, you know, just how they make a living. Unfortunately, people feel that it’s okay to describe individuals or imagine they know individuals, and I’m not really complaining about myself. I’m more complaining about other people, when people are lionized or criticized based on their work, and then identified as an individual, saying “this person is great” or “this person is terrible,” or “this person is deep, and this person is shallow,” based on their artistic output rather than just say their artistic output is great or terrible or deep or shallow, or hillbilly or what have you. There’s no hope of knowing a human being based on their output. To say that you do is ignorant.

PHAWKER: I’m sure you’ve been asked to explain this before, but I’d just like to go through this briefly. Why did you elect to record under the name Bonnie Prince Billy as opposed to just being Will Oldham?

WILL OLDHAM: For all the reasons that I just said, so that nobody felt like they had what they don’t have, which is the material with which to define, criticize, or praise an individual. I have just as curious, antagonistic, and compassionate relationship to the lyric, the recording voice, and even the performance voice as the listener has, and I stand apart from that voice more often than not, so by having my mind be there embody something we can all put on the table and discuss as equals.

PHAWKER: Is there anybody else in music, or in art for that matter, whose career you sort of look to as a reference point for how to do things right? Someone that has the career you want to have?

WILL OLDHAM: I don’t think so, especially not anymore because everything’s changed so much now it’s anybody’s game, there’s nothing to compare to music, touring, and acting right now. Many of our heroes from the music business were created by managers and companies and record executives and those positions hardly even exist anymore. It’s kind of more dog eat dog situation for people who are making records right now. If anything, I would look pre-mass media times, or figures that were making books or records or cure-all tonics as a mentor figure.

PHAWKER: Speaking of the evolution of the music business, it’s changed quite a bit since you started making music and I’m wondering if you preferred how things were back then or if you prefer things the way they are now.

WILL OLDHAM: Honestly, it’s hard to say. I like taking the hands that are dealt you. Everything I grew up with in terms of ways of obtaining music, listening to music and finding out about music they don’t really exist anymore. I liked that way. Putting out music was based on those old ways and now it’s completely foreign to me. But I hear as much great music on a daily basis as I ever did.

PHAWKER: Given with the way the music business is so diminished and its ironclad grasp or control of things is also so diminished, doesn’t it seem like a lot more wildcard stuff can get through these days?

WILL OLDHAM: Get through to what?

PHAWKER: Get through to the public, to the people.

WILL OLDHAM: The strength of mass media in the past has been was creating a community. With the diversification that we have it’s not what it’s about anymore. It’s about people having very, very specialized and individual relationship with media, and I’m sort of a fan of community. We’re individuals when we’re born and we’ll be individuals when we die. It seems like the greatest human achievements is the creation and maintenance of community.

PHAWKER: Isn’t it really another  way of organizing into different tribes. Don’t you feel in this new media landscape that there’s ways kindred spirits can connect in ways that they couldn’t before, and create their own little sort of sub-communities?

WILL OLDHAM: Except that the barrage is so constant it doesn’t really create a drive [towards creating a community] or it creates a drive that has a life span of six weeks or something like that, as opposed to a tribe that develops over a year, a decade, 20 years. Because what you observe today, the machinery you use, the music you listen to, is invalid is in six months. The knowledge that you’ve gained, the mastery that you’ve gained of a system of distribution or listening is no longer valid within a year. Your knowledge, you just wasted that brain space and that community that you may have developed with an affinity to a certain kind of music or a certain kind of technology, disappears within a year. It seems we’re encouraged to destroy our relationships.

PHAWKER: But doesn’t your career kind of put the lie to that? I mean, you’ve been able to maintain a steady audience for going on 20 years, and you’ve not made it easy for people to do that either; it’s very confusing and complicated, your career story.

WILL OLDHAM: Well I really don’t know who the audience is and what steady means. You know, I don’t know who’s listened to what over how many releases or how many years, but at the same time I think that in the content and in the ways that we make things and treat things, I think inherent in it is a desire to create, identify, illuminate, strengthen kinds of relationships and the people that come to this music and stay with some of this music are people who find avid need in their lives. It’s a minority, and I think it always will be a minority. It’s a small group of people; it’s people who, for whatever reason, because it was instilled in them by their family, their government, or their inner nature, they have this need and this desire to feel that relationship from one individual to another individual is important, and it’s not as transient, that it’s not desirable that a relationship be transient.

PHAWKER: Does that, in part, explain the motivation for your prolific releases of records, is to continue fighting that transience, and to continue being in the now as opposed to being last week’s story or old news?

WILL OLDHAM: Can you repeat the question?

PHAWKER: Do you release music at such a prolific pace in an effort to sort of do battle with that transience, that sense of how quickly music can become old news or “we’re over that now, we’re onto the next thing.”

WILL OLDHAM: Yeah. I like the idea of establishing that relationship and attempting to maintain that relationship. I believe we’re past the end of a certain way of making music and making records that probably started in the 50s and ended in the last decade or so. Towards the end of it, it seems that the idea was that certain songs or groups or musicians approach to making music and giving it to the audience and distributing it and how they perform every year and a half or so, or every two years with some of the bigger bands, which didn’t seem enough. Then they would go away and rebuild through such sort of involved labyrinthine systems to figure out how they were gonna begin that process again. And it just didn’t have much to do with daily existence. I think if we can look to our art and our media as something that creates a more regular sustenance it would be more fortunate.

PHAWKER: On a related note, I heard in an interview with Mick Jagger recently, where he was pointing out this notion of recording artists making money, especially money off of albums and recordings etcetera, was really just a very small, anomalous period in the history of making music, that a majority of the time people just went from town to town playing music and earning their keep that way. That it was was just a rare, strange blip on the screen that we just experienced in the last 30 or 40 years, where people made a lot of money selling CD’s or albums.

WILL OLDHAM: Definitely it’s a blip, which in that time it was a blip within a blip. I think, because most people, most musicians, did not make a lot of money off of records, you know, even most of the people we hear on the radio on oldies stations, they didn’t make a lot of money selling records. A recording artist made a lot of money on the recording is a rarity. But in terms of big artists, making that kind of money like The Rolling Stones or Metallica or Bob Seger, I think that’s gone for good or definitely gone right now.

PHAWKER: Couple more questions here and I’ll let you go. I wanted to ask: do you still live in Louisville?

WILL OLDHAM: Yes sir.

PHAWKER: And you have, in fact, two houses; one you call a working house and one you a sleeping house. Is that correct?

WILL OLDHAM: You know, living in Louisville’s enough.

PHAWKER: You mean acknowledging you live in Louisville’s enough?

WILL OLDHAM: Yeah.

PHAWKER: Okay. Well let me ask you, when you’re not on the road could you kind of describe what a typical day is like in the life of Will Oldham?

WILL OLDHAM: There is no regularity. I was technically not on the road Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, but I was coming down from being on the road before that and then preparing to be on the road again. I might be writing songs or preparing to record or taking care of friend and family relationships or mowing the grass, or you know, it’s always different really, and it’s kind of a new place every time I land.

PHAWKER: Fair enough. Did you see the movie There Will Be Blood?

WILL OLDHAM: Yes.

PHAWKER: The character of Henry, the swindler who shows up, claims to be Daniel Day-Lewis’ long-lost brother and and Daniel Day-Lewis winds up killing him when he finds out he’s lying. Are you familiar with what I’m talking about?

WILL OLDHAM: I’m familiar with it. That character was so lame, specifically the actor who played him, that it really was a pain in the ass to sit through those scenes that he was in.

PHAWKER: Funny you should say that, because I totally thought he was channeling Will Oldham or Bonnie Prince Billie and I was wondering if you felt that at all.

WILL OLDHAM: I should retire then. It’s always a pleasure to watch Daniel Day-Lewis but the rest of that movie just seems so contrived, and if that’s how I come across then I really should retire.

PHAWKER: I didn’t mean to insult, sir. I loved the movie, and I thought those scenes with that guy were unsettling and quite gripping, but I guess…

WILL OLDHAM: They were unsettling because the actor was so shallow and annoying, especially compared to somebody that actually puts work into their art.

PHAWKER:  Fair enough. Last question; I just wanted to confirm this lyric from “That’s What Our Love Is,” and I’m gonna make sure I’m hearing this correctly. “The smell of your box on my mustache?” That is what you’re singing, correct?

WILL OLDHAM: Yeah.

PHAWKER: Okay. I don’t think I have any further questions then. Will, thanks for your time.

WILL OLDHAM: God bless.

BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY + JONATHAN RICHMAN @ UNION TRANSFER SUN. MARCH 8TH SOLD OUT

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published in June 2017. We are reprising it now in advance of Kiss’ performance at the PP&L Center in Allentown tomorrow night, the second date on the End Of The Road farewell world tour, with David Lee Roth opening. We will be sending a writer and photographer, stay tuned for a complete report. In the meantime, enjoy.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of his performance at the Trocadero tonight as part of the Wizard World Philadelphia Comic Con nerd jamboree at the Pennsylvania Convention Center (June 1-4), we got Gene Simmons, commander in chief of the Kiss Army, on the horn. DISCUSSED: Trump, Russia, comic books, codpieces, Beyonce, Nirvana, his $300 million net worth, Elvis, Schvetty Balls, Les Paul, Donna Summer, the Jesus Of Rock, Helsinki, The Beatles, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Kant, Wizard World, the death of rock, inspiring This Is Spinal Tap, why he got himself fired from The Apprentice, the mechanics of capitalism, how supermarkets work, and the prospect of making peace with Terry Gross (Hint: Don’t hold your breath).

PHAWKER: Before we get started, in the interest of full disclosure, you should know I’ve been a member of the Kiss army in good standing since 1976.

GENE SIMMONS: Wow.

PHAWKER: You’ve always been my favorite. I remember spending many hours looking at the cover of the Kiss Alive 2. You were legitimately scary, everybody else the band kind of just looked like weird clowns and transvestites from outer space. But you were intense, I just wanted to put that out there. Don’t tell the other guys I said that, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. So, what can the fans expect from your show at the Trocadero in Philadelphia?

GENE SIMMONS: What happened was Wizard World was aware that I’m a comic book geek and that Kiss in particular and I have had a long and proud relationship with comic books going back many decades. I mean the first comic book event that I went to was a sci-fi comic book convention called Luna Con in New York in 1968. This was before there was even a Comic Con. And through the 70’s, we had our Kiss comics, which became the biggest selling comic books of all time, at that point. And through various decades, we’ve had everybody from Image to IDW, and now finally Dynamic is putting out Kiss comics. And so every month, there were kiss comics coming out and including my own comic book company called “Simmons’ Comics Group” which puts out Dominatrix and Zipper as well as Gene Simmons’ House of Horrors. So, Wizard World asked me to do five of their conventions, and I said sure. Question and Answer, talk comic books, all of that stuff. And then they had asked me if I would play a few tunes. And I thought, well gee that’s interesting, I never done a solo tour anywhere but maybe I could put a band together of some rockers I know who love this thing and take over a concert hall someplace and do some obscure Kiss tunes that Kiss will never play, and have never played. And that was interesting to me. So that’s sort of what happened and we’ve done two out of them, I think I have three more to go and they’ve been an awful lot of fun. It gives me the chance to kind of step out of the Kiss boots and get up on stage and just have a lot of fun and some of the things that we do with the Gene Simmons band is bring people up on stage and if you think you can sing, you can hold your own against me on stage we pull you up, and if you think your kid, or child, is a rockstar, send your video of your child singing, performing, or doing whatever to WizardWorld.com and if they’ve got the goods, I’ll pull them up on stage. It’s a lot of fun, people just love it and so do I. it gives me a chance to kind of get much closer, because you know around Kiss, it’s tough to get close to us. There are bodyguards between the stage and the audience, there’s that moat, and with the Wizard World relationship, I get a lot closer to people and it’s actually a lot more fun for me to.

PHAWKER: Excellent, so you guys are on tour and Europe right now, I believe your last show was a couple of days ago in Moscow, or in somewhere in Russia? Yes?

GENE SIMMONS: Yes, we played in Moscow, the first show on May Day. Which is when the Russians bring out all of their missiles and stuff, and we played at the Olympic Stadium there in Moscow, a lot of fun. If you go to Kissonline.com you can see photos and stuff, and I’m sure you can go to Google or someplace and get photos. Packed house, everybody had a ball. Right now we are in Helsinki, Finland and you can actually Google this. The international railway station, in Helsinki there is this huge arc, and on either side of this arc are these fifty foot high statues made out of stone. And what the city of Helsinki has done is paint our face makeup on the statues, really quite something. I was just out there, we took some photos and it just, I’m dwarfed by these huge statues, and of course people immediately got that I was one of the guys. And so everybody crowded around and did photos, but when I first approached it I went ‘What the hell, you started a rock band and all of a sudden you’re on Mount Rushmore.’

PHAWKER: Nice. So tell me, what is a typical day in the life of Gene Simmons. Do you wake up at the crack of noon?

GENE SIMMONS: Well there are no typical days. Almost every day is different, because at the same time I am running two different film companies and I’ve got my real estate venture and a lot of other projects happening at the same time and Kiss has lots of projects. So sometimes — when my partners are overseas when I’m in America — I have to hop on the phone in the middle of the night because it’s noon of the next day for my European partners or in Japan. And so, every day is different. Today, we woke up, uh, I don’t know about 10 AM Helsinki time, and went out there at 11 AM to take photos of the big statues and then, you know, running the gauntlet between the fans. They know exactly which hotel we’re staying in so as I leave, you know, you got to do what you got to do. Be nice to the fans, sign this poster this photo and so on. But it’s a real tug of the heart when you are sitting in the restaurant, we sat outdoors because the weather was pretty good, and a few people came over. One guy in particular very young, he had to go back to school, he told me. And he started shaking and said, ‘You are the reason why I am playing music’ and you know all of this stuff. And it’s a real, it puts a lump in your throat when you realize that yeah you can put out a song or two here and there that people might like but it profoundly impacts people’s lives and that’s an amazing thing.

PHAWKER: So, Kiss turns 42 years-old by my calculations.

GENE SIMMONS: Forty-three.

PHAWKER: Forty-three, congratulations. Is it safe to say that you don’t agree with the premise that rock and roll is the young man’s game?

GENE SIMMONS: You know, well this thing called rock and roll isn’t all that old. You know there was blues and rockabilly and all that stuff before it, but really Elvis was kind of the Jesus of rock. Once Elvis started, it opened up the doors to white folks singing black music. White versions of blues if you get what I mean. Because that’s what rock and roll is. And when Les Paul is playing the Les Paul guitars and stuff he was playing a different kind of music and white kids picked up the Fenders and the Les Pauls and started turning up the volume, and that became rock and roll. But, when you really think about it, the Golden Age, were really the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when there was a music industry, when there were record companies that supported you and all that. And around the mid 80’s, when Napster and that stuff came in, new bands died. I mean you can make a point that rock is finally dead and I’ll show you what I mean: From 1958 until 1988, you’ve got 30 years, during that time you’ve got Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, Jimi Hendrix and all that. In disco, you had Donna Summer and Madonna and all that. And in pop, you had The Jackson’s, Prince, maybe us, Bowie, you know all of that stuff. An awful lot of music. From 1988 until today, give me the new Beatles.

PHAWKER: The closest thing would probably be Nirvana I suppose.

GENE SIMMONS: You mean if you record two records then you become The Beatles.

PHAWKER: In terms of lasting influence and enduring fan respect.

GENE SIMMONS: But isn’t it true that Foo Fighters is ten times as popular?

PHAWKER: I don’t know. Is that the case?

GENE SIMMONS: Yes, Foo Fighters play stadiums, Nirvana never did.

PHAWKER: Well, I’ll grant you that, but then tell me this. If rock is dead, than where does that leave Kiss then?

GENE SIMMONS: Well, it doesn’t affect us. What I mean is the older bands do fine. The Stones, and U2 and us, and ACDC, you know we still play stadiums and arenas and all of that. But the new bands, will never get the chance that we did.

PHAWKER: Well I agree, the music business is changing fundamentally.

GENE SIMMONS: And there is only one reason for that, the fans killed the thing they loved by not paying for it. Imagine you are a supermarket right? You know what they sell in supermarkets, everything. Right? Fruit, meat, eggs, things, aspirin. Whatever you need, you can get it there. How long do you think a supermarket is going to stay In business if people just walk in and take what they want? That’s downloading and file sharing.

PHAWKER: You could be asking this question about any number of industries.

GENE SIMMONS: All industries, religion, rock bands, everything is based on the premise that to stay in business, you got to pay for it. As soon as people take your stuff for free, you’re out of business. Which means that the new bands simply can’t devote full time to doing their stuff. So, they will never have the chance that we did. Which means they’ll have to get day jobs, which means the songs won’t be as good, which means sooner than later, they won’t be in a band.

PHAWKER: Let’s discuss the economics for a second here, you famously said that you didn’t want to be in a band, you wanted to be in a brand. You are well known for your revenue generating entrepreneurship.

GENE SIMMONS: Well let’s call it for what it is. The hippiest of the hippy bands is exactly the same as Kiss. Everything costs money.

PHAWKER: Absolutely.

GENE SIMMONS: And somebody is either lying, or is a complete moron who thinks “oh no no no, we are just a peoples band.” Really? Don’t you sell tickets and t-shirt? Don’t you, what do you play for free? How do you pay the rent? How do you buy gas for your truck? No. Everything is based on a single premise that if you do something, you need to get paid for it.

PHAWKER: So, online reports put your net worth at $300 million dollars, is that remotely accurate?

GENE SIMMONS: No idea. I’m comfortable. I do have an idea actually. I’m comfortable, I do well, but the most important thing is to get up every day and work your butt off. The people that have a tough time getting to sleep at night don’t work during the day time, that’s the problem. Every day I’m exhausted and can’t wait to just drop in bed and shut my eyes. I have no problem sleeping at night, because I’m tired. I think it’s safe to say Kiss is the hardest working band in show business easily. I would love to be Mick Jagger and Stones, or better yet Bono and U2. Wear some sneakers and a t-shirt, comfortable pair of jeans and never break a sweat. Put any of those guys in my seven inch dragon boots, which weigh eleven pounds each, 12 pound guitar and another 20 pounds of studs and leather and stuff, oh that’s right don’t forget to shoot fire out of your mouth sometimes out of your ass, fly through the air and try to catch your breath during a two hour show. Oh and do that by the way in your late 60’s. They wouldn’t have a chance.

PHAWKER: You have been called the rock and roll Donald Trump, what do you make of that affiliation?

GENE SIMMONS: That’s fine.

PHAWKER: You’ve appeared on The Apprentice you’ve been fired by him, most people-

GENE SIMMONS: I’m sorry?

PHAWKER: You appeared on The Apprentice? Yes?

GENE SIMMONS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: And you were fired by Donald Trump, yes?

GENE SIMMONS: Well actually, plain fact I found out during the filming of the show that we were going to Australia for three weeks, so I had to figure out a way to get myself fired.

PHAWKER: I’m not following.

GENE SIMMONS: Well, I got fired earlier on, I was the captain of both the men’s team and the females team. I won the first project or whatever it was, even before we went back into the boardroom in the very first phone call I made. I beat the other team with the amount of money that I had made and that was with the first phone call and so when Donald Trump saw that happen he said ‘You can’t be in the guy’s teams maybe you can be the captain of the girl’s team because it was just lopsided. Look, celebrity is one thing, but understanding the nature and structure of business, the price of goods and how to make money and stuff it is completely different. As you know most people who are involved in business aren’t famous at all. And most famous people don’t do well in business. And everybody from Sting, to Billy Joel, to you name it, has had the rug pulled out from under them and wind up finding out that their wives are their business managers, or everybody else steals money from them. So, the short cut, the end all is that since Information Is free, and you can get it on the Internet, there is really no excuse for not knowing what is going on around you or how to make money, how to save money, how to minimize your estate tax, and your taxes, way to live, how to have the right things at the right place, and at the right time, and so on. So, I’ve got another book coming out called On Power, about a year or two ago I had another one called Me Inc.. And these were more business-oriented books, less about ‘Look at the new song that I wrote!’

PHAWKER: Okay, well to finish up my question, most people would assume that you voted for Donald Trump. But you’ve never really publicly spoken about who you voted for or what you support.

GENE SIMMONS: Well I think my opinion is that most celebrities are jokes umm, I’m as interested in, I mean I know President Clinton, and President Bush, President Trump, but I’m not interested in what they think about rock and roll. I couldn’t think of a reason why I’d want to ask Beyonce what she thinks of politics.

PHAWKER: I’m assuming you’ve seen This is Spinal Tap yes? The movie?

GENE SIMMONS: Sure.

PHAWKER: I’m just curious what you make of it, do you find this funny?

GENE SIMMONS: Oh yeah. That happened to us. The story about This is Spinal Tap guys getting caught in the elevator not finding the stage is actually a Kiss story, that was based on something that happened to us in Newcastle. We played at an old concert hall on our first tour and the concert hall held about, oh I don’t know, four to five thousand people. But it was in an old building and we were on the third floor putting on makeup and stuff. And you know, we heard the crowd going, “where are Kiss”, you know that stuff. So once we put our stuff on we went to the first floor and it was just a floor, we kept hearing the audience. And then we went to the basement and we just couldn’t find the concert hall, which was on the second floor. We walked underground and stuff and finally we found it on the second floor. And that was based on a Kiss story that actually happened to us.

PHAWKER: That’s hilarious. Um, last question, I wanted to ask you about your infamous Fresh Air interview on NPR. Fresh Air is based here in Philadelphia where I’m calling you from. I’m a long time listener, I remember when I first heard the interview, I frankly kind of thought you were being a dick to be honest, but last time I went through and read the transcript and I kind of revised my opinion. I think that both of you kind of got each other wrong from the get-go. I think you both went into the interview with sort of distorted preconceived notions about each other, she thought you were this insufferable vulgarian, misogynistic, cynical, greedhead who wears make up and high heels and makes music for hormonal 14 year boys adrift in a sea of retarded sexuality and…

GENE SIMMONS: Well, let’s say that’s all true. But as a guest in somebody’s home, the first thing you do is be gracious because you are holding all of the cards. You see it’s your radio station. And it was literally done in her home, and I have never done or heard of NPR and I didn’t know who she was and that’s okay. I was led into her living room and uh, she said ‘Please sit over there and stuff,’ and I immediately got the sense that there was a holier than thou’ at work. Kind of, I’m gonna put this in parenthesis because it was just my impression, ‘Oh look at this, he’s illiterate and so on.’ But, truthfully, if she and I sat down I could quote Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Kant and all of the Existential philosophers toe-to-toe with her but I didn’t wear that stuff on my sleeve. I was in a band and you know, I came to promote Kiss, and so when the first, and I got the stiff treatment right away, I didn’t not like her as a person, but I was willing to go through with the interview. But the first question, it sounded something like ‘Tell me about The Kiss.’ And I’m going “Oh The Kiss! Tell me about this thing called NPR which sounds like some sort of communicable disease.’ I said ‘Oh I hope I don’t catch NPR’ and she said ‘Well we’ve been around a long time.’ I said ‘I could give a fuck.’ To me it’s horrible branding and sounds you know, like people who read too many books and never go out and get laid. She played with fire, she got fire.

PHAWKER: Let me finish my question here — yes, agreed. She thought of you as being this caricature but you thought of her as being this caricature, too. You thought of her as being this dreary/sexless/bra-burning/man-hating/communist/lesbian folk singer – someone who stepped out of the Shvetty Balls sketch on SNL. She asked you some mildly passive-aggressive questions about your make-up and codpieces and you felt disrespected and got your back up and the two of you went at it like cats and dogs. Now I respect both you people, and I think you two have much more common ground than either of you realize — first of all you both grew up in Jewish households of very modest means on the wrong side of the tracks in New York in the ‘60s and you both worked your asses off to get to the top of the heap in your respective professions — and when you come to Philadelphia, I would like to broker a peace accord. I will be the Kissinger that ends this Vietnam.

GENE SIMMONS: Oh no, I don’t think she saw me as a caricature, I thought your first description of what she thought was probably more a sexist and vulgar and all that stuff — you bet. You know, she pressed the button, and I went for it. You know you waive the red flag and the bull charges. Don’t waive the red flag and you know, yes I’ve got horns but I won’t charge. I’m happy to sit and speak with anybody, but I stand by my words. If somebody is a guest in your home, it is incumbent upon you to put the tablecloth on the table and be a gracious host. And when you are not, you want fire, you get fire.

PHAWKER: Fair enough, my question for you is when you are in Philadelphia, would you be willing to go with me down to the station to shake hands and call it even?

GENE SIMMONS: Well, it’s better if she comes to me.

PHAWKER: Where are you going to be?

GENE SIMMONS: Well, we are doing Wizard World.

PHAWKER: Right, I’m aware.

GENE SIMMONS: Yes, and I don’t know what the schedule is but WizardWorld.com folks know where I’m going and I’m also doing a concert at the Troc with the Gene Simmons Band. That happens to be an off time, and I have a lot of fun doing this stuff, and she is certainly welcome to come there and go “oh you know, what’s happening?” and whatever. But the first thing I do when I meet a stranger, is I go “hello”, I don’t got “so.” As soon as you go “so”, you go “okay.” This is not going to be fun for you because I’ll make sure, you know you set the tone. I’m coming to your home, you’re the one setting the tone. You want to play, I’ll play. And by the way,

I listened back to that thing. I stand by every word I said. I thought she was, well wrong. And you know, there is a similar story, when David Letterman first started on The Tonight Show on NBC, he kept poking fun at people because you know some comedians do that. The sarcastic this, and the sarcastic that. So Cher, who I’d known and lived with for awhile, didn’t want to do his show because she didn’t like the way he treated guests. And you can actually Google this, uh YouTube it rather. He kept coming out in the beginning, ‘So we’ve been trying to get Cher, who does she think she is, she doesn’t want to come and do our show.’ You know it was a routine, you know ‘Oh boy, where’s Cher’ and all this stuff. So she finally appeared on his show and he goes ‘Hey, great to have you here. Hey I just want to ask you, how come you never did our show, we kept asking you?’ And she looked at him in his face and she said ‘Because you’re a fucking asshole.’ Just look it up on YouTube.

PHAWKER: Okay.

GENE SIMMONS: By the way, I had the same reaction. It took him a while to grow into this kind of you know, the sarcasm as a soft touch, but when he had guests on, you know, you try to set the table. But in the beginning, you know, he came from the live, he was a live standup comic, and he would try to press people’s buttons. And some people liked it and some people didn’t. But, it’s worth watching that Cher Interview.

PHAWKER: I will check it out. Listen, please consider what I just said to you about brokering a peace accord and if you are interested, you know how to get back in touch with me. I would be happy to do it, I think it would be good for everybody.

GENE SIMMONS: She is welcome to come down and join the fun. But the idea of packing up my suitcases and going to visit somebody, it doesn’t work like that.

PHAWKER: Fair enough my friend, but like I said, the offer stands and otherwise though, thank you again for taking the time to do all of this. Good luck with the rest of your tour.

GENE SIMMONS: My Pleasure.

*December 21st 1973, earliest known filmed performance footage

KISS + DAVID LEE ROTH @ THE PP&L CENTER IN ALLENTOWN FEB. 4TH

[illustration by ALEX FINE]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally posted in 2007, hence the crappy-looking overcrowded layout. We’re reprising it today to mark the sad passing of Monty Python’s Flying Circus performer/writer/creator Terry Jones. Enjoy.

 BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER In 1969 Michael Palin quit smoking, a pasttime he was quite fond of, through sheer will power. Having achieved a victory for mind over matter, Palin decided to raise the stakes — he would keep a diary for the next 10 years come hell or high water. What makes this enterprise interesting to people like you and me is that the decade he chose to document would also see the rise and fall and return of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In clean, dispassionate prose spanning some 650 pages, Palin documents the trials and tribulations of the daring, off-the-wall comedy ensemble from humble-but-edgy beginnings (the name Flying Circus was foisted on the lads by the bullying BBC) to globally-recognized comedy institution (when translated for Japanese television, it became Gay Boy’s Dragon Show). A promotional tour for Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years brings Palin to the Free Library tomorrow.

Phawker: Let’s start out with a localized softball: You mention Philadelphia rather fondly in the book.

Palin: I was just looking at that. That’s the beauty of diaries — you look back in hindsight and say, “Oh I love New York, I always loved going over there” and then I read the little entry and I couldn’t wait to get out of New York and Philadelphia was like the Promised Land. The good thing about diaries is they remind you of things like that. If I hadn’t written that down I would have just carried on with this misconception that New York was more fun than Philadelphia, which clearly it wasn’t. We came to Philadelphia two or three times, I remember once, which is in the diary, we get flown in to do the Mike Douglass show and the helicopter flight from New York landed on top of a huge skyscraper, we rushed down to the studio and then back up to the helicopter and back to New York. Crazy times, not the way I’d like to travel nowadays.

Phawker: You also write in the diary that you went to the local public television station [WHYY] for a brief a 15-minute interview and it went so well you decided to do a whole special.

Palin: It was [public television who introduced Python to America] and when we went to these stations on promotional tours, it was a little like Beatlemania, albeit it on a much humbler scale. And I think we sometimes found it very difficult to play up to that. It’s one thing writing the show, but being spontaneously witty 23 times a day didn’t always work out. But I seem to remember we had a good interviewer that brought some sense out of us, as well as the nonsense.

Phawker: I was surprised to learn that the name Flying Circus was sort of foisted on you by the BBC.

Palin: Yes, we originally wanted to call it Owl Stretching Time or The Toad Elevating Moment or the Algae Banging Hour. We were determined that the show would be our own creation and that included the title. Of course, the title is very, very important. To have somebody else put a title on this mass of unconnected ideas that was Python was insulting. The BBC was very keen on Flying Circus — actually wanted to call it John Cleese’s Flying Circus. John, very wisely, was not to keen on having his name connected to a show that was untested and could be the end of his career. [laughs] So we agreed we should just make up a character and he could take all the blame if it all went badly. So I remember we all sat around one afternoon in John’s apartment off Knights Bridge. Up came the name Python as a surname. The name Mr. Python seemed very funny to us then. What will we call him? Brian Python? Eric Python? And somebody said ‘Monty’ and it for whatever reason made us laugh uproariously. So we agreed to give it the 24-hour test and see if it was as funny in the morning, and it was. So we went to the BBC and told them we wanted to call it Monty Python and they were annoyed, basically. ‘What does it mean?’ Nothing, we said. What does anything on the show mean? And so they begrudgingly agreed but with the famous last words that ‘in the future people will remember ‘Flying Circus’ but they certainly won’t remember ‘Monty Python.’

PHAWKER: And when the show aired in Japan, the title translated as “Gay Boy’s Dragon Show?”

PALIN: Correct. Oh, the names for skits when translated were hilarious: Upper Class Twit Of The Year was translated as Aristocratic Number One Deciding Guy Show.

PHAWKER: In a sentence or two can you tell me what each of your fellow Pythons, in your estimation, brought to the table that made the show what it was?

PALIN: I’ll have a try. Terry Gilliam brought American-ness, which was very important. The rest of us were all from very similar background, all from provincial English towns and cities so he brought this trans-atlantic perspective. Terry also brought the animation, which before then had never been used like that on television show, and I think in many ways that was the key factor why Monty Python was remembered. Also it enabled us, as writers, to go from one sketch which didn’t connect to another. Very very important, helped the free form.

Terry Jones, well, it’s hard, he’s my writing partner. But he had great persistence and commitment to Python, and like Terry Gilliam, very cinematically-inclined. He wanted to be a film director since the late ’60s and that pushed Python beyond being a TV sketch show. Along with Terry Gilliam and myself, he also worked out the stream of consciousness theory of Python. John and Graham weren’t so interested in the theory, they just wanted to write funny sketches with a group of people that were sympathetic. Terry Jones understood that Python could be different and saw intellectually how it could be different.

Graham Chapman, possibly the best actor of us all and had a very manic kind of inventiveness. His mind would go in directions that nobody else I knew could or would, just all these wonderfully weird connections that brought that surreal quality. Like John, he could also play the straight man. When he plays the Colonel saying, “Stop! This is all getting silly!” You don’t think of him as a comedian doing a TV show, you believe him as a colonel telling you to stop being silly. As with John [Cleese], he had this great ability to look just like the Establishment, yet send it up completely from within.

John had a certain manic intensity in his performances, which I’ve not seen anywhere else except Fawlty Towers where he waves his fist at cars that don’t work and all that. Just wonderful to behold, and a very sharp writer. There’s a lot about John that you would think would disqualify him from doing comedy: this sort of intellectual legal mind and a rather serious way of looking at the world and he could turn that a few notches one way or the other and it would produce the most wonderful comedy writing. Also, and this can’t be underestimated, in comedy size is quite important. It helped in some of those sketches it helped to have two very tall men in the cast, especially when the rest of us weren’t especially tall.

Eric [Idle]? Very quick, very deft, very fast with jokes. Loved puns, loved wordplay and could play those cheeky Cockney characters — “Nudge, Nudge” being the best of those. Outside of comedy he was also the best businessmen amongst us, understood rights and deals, which the rest of us didn’t.

PHAWKER: Funny you should say that, if you were the Beatles I would describe you as The Sensible One. At least that’s the way you come across in the diary — a certain serenity and focus. Everybody else seems to be a little bit of a victim of their own excesses — whether it’s ego or alcohol — and you seem very centered.

PALIN: Well, maybe because it’s my diary and history is written by the winners. I avoid confrontation as much as possible, I prefer to get on with people. And I have a longer fuse than, certainly, John who used to get very irritated at things. Quite early in life I realized there were things you just couldn’t change and you were banging your fist on the wall if you tried to change the way the BBC worked or whatever. Not to say I couldn’t get upset about things as well. But I brought a certain conciliatory side to Python. There were times when nobody wanted to work with anybody else or this one didn’t want to work with that one and I just thought ‘well, I like them all so much’ and I would often act as mediator on these occasions.

There was a centrifugal force that kept Python together from the beginning. I mean, we weren’t the perfect six people to write together or anything like that, we all had different lifestyles and ways of behaving, but if you can control desire to fly out from the center, it actually created something very strong, very powerful and very funny. Because the one thing we all enjoyed was making each other laugh, so I suppose I was responsible for keeping that little group together for as long as possible.

PHAWKER: One thing that struck me was that the book covers 1969 to 1979, which is pretty much Woodstock to Studio 54, and yet there is almost no mention of drug use. I think the most tawdry thing that happens is the SNL cast sneaks into your bedroom at the Essex House for a ‘smoke.’ How is this possible? Its the ’70s!

PALIN: Well, you have to be careful what you say these days — you have to say you don’t inhale. When I was editing I would ask myself, “Do I put in that so and so did a line of coke or not?” but it didn’t happen with Python. Eric knew more people that did drugs than anyone else, but we didn’t really get involved at all. Although I think Graham smoked and we all did some marijuana. But it wasn’t central to the work and I think it’s important to say that because there are people who say ‘You guys must have been high as kites when you did this’ when in fact we weren’t and with the exception of Graham, fairly sober. If anything we used alcohol more than drugs.

PHAWKER: I was a little shocked to see how narrow the profit margins were for the Pythons in pretty much all the deals they struck. And likewise it was a little disconcerting to learn that half the Pythons were bankrupt by the end of the ’70s.

PALIN: Well, we never made a great deal from the BBC shows themselves — we were paid something like 200 pounds a week. The only money we saw was from foreign sales, specifically America when PBS bought the series, but even then it wasn’t a great deal of money. And then in 1974 when we made our first movie, nobody apart from a few rock groups were willing to back us financially. We made Holy Grail for [$400,000]. That’s just the way it was, we had a very strong and devoted fan base, but there wasn’t the big numbers that delivered a lot of money. It wasn’t until after Life Of Brian that Python offered any real financial security. And as the diaries show, everyone was off doing other things — commercials, script-doctoring, voice-overs — just to support ourselves. There’s never been crazy money in Python, it’s now coming along pretty nicely but to be honest Spamalot probably pays us more than anything else we’ve done. And that’s Eric’s show.

PHAWKER: One of the most profound passages of the diary is Terry Gilliam’s explanation for Graham Chapman’s alcoholism and how it was connected to him coming to grips with his sexuality and the courage it took to come out publicly back then. I imagine being openly gay in England in the late ’60s was a pretty tough row to hoe.

PALIN: Oh, yes. There were one or two really outrageous people who had sort of gone public, but Graham didn’t fit into that mold at all. Graham was a pipe-smoking, son-of-policeman — and of course none of these things preclude you being gay, but at the time you just wouldn’t have thought Graham was gay. I mean all his work mates and friend and Cambridge chums were, as far as I know, all sort of boring and British and straight. So it was quite a big deal that Graham declared openly that he was going to live with David [Sherlock]. I mean, you weren’t courting imprisonment as you might have five or ten years prior, but there were a lot of voices against homosexuality in the media. I think it’s mentioned in the diary that The Gay News was being prosecuted and the Pythons contributed towards their defense because we thought freedom of speech was being impinged and all that kind of stuff. But in the first instance, it was brave of Graham to do that. Because of his upbringing, he was very provincial, not London-cosmopolitan at all, and once he made that decision [to come out] it really loosened him up and he said “Now I’m going to live how I want to live.” And unfortunately he’d taken to drinking quite a bit as a doctor in training; apparently the bar was open all night at Bart’s Hospital. And it became quite excessive, really, but he was a lovely, lovely man.

PHAWKER: It says on Wikipedia that the Python cast was at his side when he died, is that true?

PALIN: I was there, and John was there. I just happened to be there. He was very ill and in hospital, and I just thought, “I should go down there, it may be his last night.” And I was there with John when he died.

PHAWKER: The British are notorious for bad teeth and in the in the diary you keep a running tally in the diary of your struggles to avoid the classic “skinny English teeth.”

PALIN: It’s funny the things that wind up becoming a running theme in your life. I discovered I had some kind of periodontal condition right around the time Python was starting and so I associated that lovely time with a certain amount of pain. I’m very serious about my teeth and it was the beginning of a course of treatment that took me about 20 years. And now I know that the last thing you do is have a glass of wine after gum surgery, but in those days we just learned from our mistakes.

PHAWKER: Is is accurate to say that the Pythons were the de facto comedy analogue to the Beatles?

PALIN: People say that, I wouldn’t have said that myself, but oddly enough Python was much liked by rock groups, and it wasn’t just the Beatles. Led Zeppelin was one of the investors in Holy Grail. There was something about us that musicians particularly liked, maybe it was because we seemed a little dangerous, we weren’t particularly Establishment. They thought we were friends, and of course we were. And it wasn’t just George, Paul McCartney would stop recording his album just to watch Python when it first came on the telly back in 1969. Also, the Beatles broke up almost exactly the same month that the Pythons were formed, I think it was October 1969. Also in our material, there was a whimsical side as well as a hard side — there was Jones-Palin material as well as the Cleese-Chapman material, so there was a Lennon-McCartney dynamic. You give them the hard stuff, but mix it in with the surreal and the whimsical.

PHAWKER: How did the recent furor amongst fundamentalist muslims over the political cartoons in Danish newspapers compare to furor created amongst fundamentalist Christians when Life Of Brian came out?

PALIN: Well, there never was a fatwah and I don’t think we had a sense of being vilified we just knew that certain people hated what we did. And it wasn’t just Life Of Brian, there were voices in the media back then that just thought Python was subversive and irresponsible and cruel, and of course it wasn’t. Bits of it might have been, but as a whole it wasn’t. But it was a more benign atmosphere then. Now you see images of people burning copies of Danish newspapers or pictures of the Danish Prime Minister — if they can find one — in continents 7,000 miles away. I mean, nobody knew about Python in Asia. Our opposition were much more closer to home — they were churchmen, or anti-gay, or just thought we were trying to corrupt the youth of the world. And they made it clear they didn’t like what we were doing, but there were no threats. And I think now it is slightly different.

PHAWKER: What is the status of Python, any chance you guys will work together again?

PALIN: No plans at the moment and I can’t really see it happening, but there are different views on this. We have always said that Python was six people writing and performing resulting in a balance which for some extraordinary reason really clicked to produce an enormously diverse range of funny material. So without Graham, it’s difficult. We could get together and write, but then to perform who plays Graham’s parts? And if you bring somebody else in immediately Python isn’t quite what it was and I’m wary of that. Everyone is doing other things and so I don’t see a Python reunion on the horizon, but you never know.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published on July 19th, 2020.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Saints be praised! Butthole Surfers frontman/madman Gibby Haynes will be celebrating the publication of his debut novel Me & Mr. Cigar with a book released party/concert (backed by The Paul Green School of Rock) at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville on Friday January 17th — and we are totally there for this. To help get the word out, we got Gibby on the horn for a wide ranging, no-holes barred interview. If you are new to the Gibby/Surfers’ weird-ass corner of the universe, I suggest you read my beginner’s guide Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Motherf*cking Butthole Surfers But Weren’t Sure It Was Even Legal To Ask before digging in.

One more thing before we get started. We first did this interview last Friday. Saturday I realized it didn’t record for reasons still unclear. Sunday I sheepishly texted Gibby to tell him tragedy had struck but I was happy to do it all over again — “you know, for the kids” — though I would totally understand if he didn’t want to and I apologized for wasting his time. Gibby texted back: “Call me.” Lord knows Gibby Haynes is not a role model, but he is a gentleman and a scholar. Long may he weird.

DISCUSSED: Fatherhood, penis reconstruction surgery, LSD, how to burn down the Chesnut Cabaret without really trying, the JFK assassination, growing up with a dad named Mr. Peppermint who was in Dealey Plaza when JFK was assassinated, his forthcoming Young Adult Lit novel Me And Mr. Cigar, living with Timothy Leary, the University of Texas Tower Massacre in 1966, the curse words of children, Woody Allen, the Great White Fire, getting thrown out of the Viper Club for heckling Johnny Cash, the future of the Butthole Surfers, the death of the flaming cymbal, the meaning of regret and why playing Butthole Surfers songs with the kids from Paul Green Academy Of Rock is such a gas, gas, gas.

PHAWKER: I actually met you in the late ’80s in the lobby of the now-defunct New York City night club The World where the Butthole Surfers were supposed to play with Spacemen 3, but they were denied work visas because someone had a drug charge or something like that and didn’t play. That is one of the great regrets of my life — that that dream show never happened.

GIBBY HAYNES: Oh, we were supposed to play with Spacemen 3? What a drag.

PHAWKER: Yeah, you don’t remember that?

GIBBY HAYNES: No.

PHAWKER: Oh my god, that was going to be the greatest fucking show on Earth! But anyway, I remember telling you – you had asked where I was from – and I said Allentown, Pennsylvania. And you were like, “Allentown? Didn’t something really bad happen there?”

GIBBY HAYNES: [laughing] I did, uh did it? I don’t know.

PHAWKER: Yes, yes lots of bad things. Lots of bad things happen everywhere. I only mention this because I use that as my go-to ice breaker line when I meet someone from somewhere else and it’s very effective. I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ for that.

GIBBY HAYNES: Right on.

PHAWKER: So you’re living in Brooklyn these days, correct?

GIBBY HAYNES: Yes I am.

PHAWKER: Okay, what is a typical day in the life of Gibby Haynes these days?

GIBBY HAYNES: Oh, well, I wake up. If it’s during the school year, I make lunch for my kid before I take him to school — basically my life revolves around my son nowadays. He’s really my family.

PHAWKER: His name is Satchel?

GIBBY HAYNES: Satchel, indeed. He’s named after – people always say the same thing, “Was he named after Satchel Paige?” And I say, “No, he was named after Satchel Bernstein, Satchel Paige’s manager.” And a lot of times, they go, “Really?” And I go, “No.”

PHAWKER: How old is he?

GIBBY HAYNES: He is nine. And the interesting thing is that Ronan Farrow’s original name was Satchel Allen, but he hated his dad so much that I guess he eventually decided to change his name, and we found that out – we found out that Woody named his son Satchel after we named our kid Satchel. And then we found out that he named his other son Moses. So we named our son after two of Woody Allen’s sons names, without knowing that we did it.

PHAWKER: Yeah that’s some kind of weird cosmic joke the universe is playing on somebody.

GIBBY HAYNES: [laughing] I wonder who.

PHAWKER: Last time we talked you were telling me at the time that kids these days know every curse word in the book.

GIBBY HAYNES: Yeah, they do.

PHAWKER: You told me a story about one of your son Satchel’s friends who was complaining about a mutual friend saying that if his father wasn’t standing there — meaning you — he’d tell Satchel exactly what he thought of mutual friend. You encouraged him to speak freely and he said?

GIBBY HAYNES: ‘He’s a motherfucking asshole!’ or something to that effect [laughing]. He definitely said ‘motherfucker,’ which is like the pinnacle of like – I mean they don’t know what fucking is, but they know that ‘motherfucker’ is a bad word. Like they think to say “Oh, fuck,” but they don’t know what sex is. A lot of them hopefully don’t. But with the Internet, I’m sure they do. You know, I don’t think he’d tell me if he’d seen…he might’ve, well I found, well I’m not gonna say it. One time I had looked at my phone, and it had been googled, “sex in a cab.”

PHAWKER: [laughing] How do parents these days deal with the Internet and small children? I’m curious, what policies, if any, do you guys have?

GIBBY HAYNES: Oh we pretty much let him go at it. We don’t filter anything, and I’m not sure if that’s a good policy or not, but fuck, he’s gonna find out anyway. I don’t know what would be the most horrible thing that could happen. Like, what would he see…I mean it would be pornography or something. He might find a text that Paul Green sent me, which might be devastating to his development.

PHAWKER: [laughing] He could see a penis reconstruction film at a Butthole Surfers concert on YouTube.

GIBBY HAYNES: Yeah, there’s some stuff of me on there too. He could find out the truth about his dad, wouldn’t that be horrible?

PHAWKER: While we’re on the subject of penis reconstruction films, I asked you about this last time, could you just explain what that film that was almost always projected on the band at every Butthole Surfers shows back in the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s – some kind of penis surgery.

GIBBY HAYNES: Okay, yeah I’ll tell you how it happened. It’s really gross, I didn’t tell you about this part last time. But the testicular injury that he got was what they call a ‘de-sheathing.’

PHAWKER: Sounds ouch-y.

GIBBY HAYNES: Which, you can imagine, means his skin got peeled off his weenie. But he was a farmer. Hopefully he still is a farmer. Tractors have the ability to do many things via a rotating U-joint at the rear of the tractor. I don’t know if all tractors have this attachment on them, but it’s just a rotating U-joint that can be used to drive a number of pieces of machinery that the tractor is hauling. And this particular device the farmer had, was long, and he chose the shortcut, which was instead of walking to the rear and around to the other side of the machinery – he chose to straddle the U-joint. And the bottom part of the crotch of his dungarees got caught in the U-joint, and just spun around in there. And I’m sure it spun and caught his weenie in there, and just kind of pulled and tore off his jeans. I didn’t see it, but I can imagine it just tore a big hole out of the bottom of his jeans that just left his bloody stump there. I bet it was just horrific. And not only that, but that was pre-cellphone. That was well before “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” So he probably took his shirt and stuck it in his crotch and got on his tractor and hauled ass across town.

PHAWKER: And what is the origin of that film? How did you come across it, and when was it made?

GIBBY HAYNES: It looked to be sometime from – it was color 16 MM – and it was difficult to tell, it looked like it was probably made in the early ‘60’s. And there was a film library at the University of Texas, that had just a huge directory of films of all sorts, just anything you could imagine. I would go into the film library and bring titles back to the band, and say, “Think we oughta drop a buck on this one?” You couldn’t preview them. There were some losers. There were some that were too mean to show. I don’t know why we thought it’d be funny, but it was an instructional film about toilet training down syndrome kid, and we never showed that one. The title of it did not give that much away. It had sort of an interesting title, but I can’t remember what it was.

PHAWKER: Well, I’m somewhat surprised to hear that there was a line even the Butthole Surfers wouldn’t cross.

GIBBY HAYNES: Well we went for weird, but we didn’t go for cruel. I don’t know, my dad was a children’s television entertainer that most people might know from Dallas, Texas named Mr. Peppermint. And he would go out and do shows, sometimes for money or for private parties, like birthday parties for rich kids whose parents were like “Wow I wonder if Jerry Haynes will come out?” But I remember the family called them personal appearances. He would say “Oh, I can’t I’ve got a personal appearance.” And he would take me out on them. He took me to several of them for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the Buckner Orphanage Home, and I would go with him and hang out with the kids that lived in this orphanage home in Dallas. And it was this horrifying place, probably built in the ‘30s, with all of these dorms for homeless kids. He did a lot of stuff with Dan’s kids and, in fact, just recently, a friend of mine sent me a photograph that his sister found of my dad performing at his birthday party. His parents probably had some dough, and got my dad to perform. He was probably five or six, it looked like, maybe seven. The picture showed my dad playing guitar with a young Bobby Beeman, and a bunch of other kids sitting around watching my dad perform. And the funny thing is that Bobby Beeman played in a band from Dallas, later on, called The Stick Men with Ray Guns. Have you ever heard of them?

PHAWKER: I have, yes, I have.

GIBBY HAYNES: The Stick Men with Ray Guns, I don’t know what it was about Texas. But to have a state in which the Stick Men and the Butthole Surfers and the Dicks in the same state, was pretty fucking cool. I don’t know, there’s something about those bands that I just didn’t find in any other…just really original forms of punk rock, really original expressions. The Stick Men were just a wasted take on rockabilly, and the Dicks were the Dicks. I’m sure you’re familiar with them. Gary Floyd.

PHAWKER: Yep, [quoting lyric from the Butthole Surfers song “Gary Floyd”] ‘Gary Floyd and all his pals are gonna’ come on down to the roundaround.’ In retrospect, you growing up with a children’s entertainer father known as Mr. Peppermint, it was inevitable that you would become the man that you became, that you would make the music and the art that you have made.

GIBBY HAYNES: It was definitely a big part of it, yeah.

PHAWKER: You have a debut novel coming out early next year, what can you tell me about it?

GIBBY HAYNES: Ah, it’s called Me and Mr. Cigar. It’s about a precocious seventeen-year-old rave-throwing MDMA dealer with a supernatural dog. The dog’s origins are mysterious, and his abilities are amazing.

PHAWKER: Could you tell me some of his abilities?

GIBBY HAYNES: Well, he, well there was a cigar that was given to JFK by Nikita Khrushchev. And there was…forgetting the name…the scary long-haired guy that hung around the Czar…

PHAWKER: Are you talking about a Rasputin?

GIBBY HAYNES: Yes! There are pictures of Mr. Cigar sitting on Rasputin’s lap. There are very old photographs of Mr. Cigar. So he is, apparently he lives forever. He does not age. And he basically has the intelligence of a human being. And without giving away too much else, a little bit’s explained, well I don’t want to go too far into that, it’s like the last five pages of the book where you find out some amazing stuff about Mr. Cigar. I can say that Mr. Cigar has always been the vessel for a human, and how and when and where that happens is kind of revealed.

PHAWKER: And this is in the young adult fiction genre, correct?

GIBBY HAYNES: Oh yeah, everything’s fair game in YAL literature these days. And like some of the most important, like librarians are some of the most important drivers of success in marketing books for kids. I don’t know how important they are in non-kid books. But the Texas librarians in particular are influential in that realm. That’s part of the reason I set it in Texas, I thought they might appreciate it. A book like this is a welcome, the teachers really like it, because it’s a good book for the hard-to-reach kids. Like if there’s a kid who doesn’t like to read too much, they’re like “Oh, yeah? Here’s something you might like to read.” It’s got action and it’s dangerous, and it’s kind of funny. But the Texas librarians are really enthusiastic about my book, which was kind of a shock to me.

PHAWKER: And just to be clear, is it set in present day or in the past?

GIBBY HAYNES: Maybe slightly in the future, but not that far removed. I haven’t really gotten to that. I think it’s better not to mention current presidents. I couldn’t do any anti-Donald Trump stuff, which is probably a good idea, regardless, no matter how much I want to.

PHAWKER: You grew up in Texas in the late 1950s. When you were nine years old there was that horrible mass shooting at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman went up on the clock tower and was just picking off kids walking around the campus left and right. Was that on your radar at the time, or was that something you realized later?

GIBBY HAYNES: Oh, no that was huge. It was huge. I was really into all of the, I mean my dad was on Dealey Plaza when JFK got shot.

PHAWKER: No way!

GIBBY HAYNES: And as soon as that happened, they ran to the ABC affiliate, which was who he worked for, WFAA. They were like a hundred yards away from WFAA, and they ran back [and went on the air]. There’s some great YouTube footage of it. My dad is there, and it’s the first television announcement of the Kennedy shooting, and it’s really great. There’s some of my dad’s coworkers and his boss. They’ve got their rolled up sleeves, smoking cigarettes, and my dad’s in the shot. It’s chaotic. And of course, a couple of days later, Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey, and I was just absolutely fascinated with the conspiracy theories from then on.

And yeah, Charles Whitman was a huge thing as well. I was on vacation in South Carolina with my parents, with my family when we heard about it. So we weren’t in Texas, but that was a big one. For some reason, those types of events were really a part of the punk rock scene in Texas. There was a guy in the Austin music scene that was the go-to man for information on Charles Whitman. He knew some of the victims, he knew where bullet holes in some of the places in Austin. But Charles Whitman, he shot some people who were way far away. You wouldn’t have believed how many blocks away they were. I mean that guy…that was the wrong guy with the right rifle.

PHAWKER: I’m actually looking up this JFK footage of your father on TV here right now. It’s amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYmpOjKUrIE

GIBBY HAYNES: Yeah, isn’t that a crazy look?

PHAWKER: Well what did your father think happened? Did he think it came from the Schoolbook Depository Building?

GIBBY HAYNES: He always said with a wink that he heard three shots. And I forget how many there were, what was generally acknowledged, I forget if it was three shots or however many there were. But my dad was like sort of cryptically always said, “I heard three shots and that was it,” in a sort of mock fear of knowing too much.

PHAWKER: I wanna ask you about the school of rock stuff in a second here, but first I wanted to ask you what else besides that are you involved with musically these days?

GIBBY HAYNES: Ehhhh… not a whole lot, I was– we were kind of actively wanting to do another record and I think we probably will…

PHAWKER: The Butthole Surfers?

GIBBY HAYNES: Yeah, yeah — it comes and goes, wanting to do that.

PHAWKER: Well, I hope you do! Any chances there’s gonna be any more live shows?

GIBBY HAYNES: It’s too bad, like in order to play, like we get offers all the time, but in order to play on show, we literally have to prepare– it’s the same amount of preparation as if we were going on tour, right? So, ehh, ehh…. You know, it costs like.. Oh shit, you know? Like, ten grand just to just to get out the door, without even talking about the [cost of the] bus, you know?

PHAWKER: Well, I hope it comes together.

PHAWKER: I read recently that for a time in the early nineties you and Al Jourgenson from Ministry were living with Timothy Leary and he was testing out various experimental drugs on you guys, what can you tell me about that?

GIBBY HAYNES: No, he didn’t have any…no, I was really wishing he had some, like, a stash of like, you know, Sandoz acid you know, whatever, some kind of crazy pure LSD. I asked him, ‘What is really good LSD like?’ and he was like, ‘Well, you’ve done acid, right? and I was like, ‘Yeah, I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out, and now I’m an alcoholic drug addict’ and he goes ‘Don’t lay that bullshit on me, man!’ But I was just fuckin’ with him. He said, ‘Well, have you done acid? and I was like ‘Yeah’ and he goes, ‘Well, did you trip? and I said ‘Yeah,’ and he goes ‘Then you did really good acid. It’s either really good acid or it’s not acid.’

PHAWKER: Roughly how many times do you think you’ve taken LSD in your life?

GIBBY HAYNES: Eh, I was never a big acid head.

PHAWKER: No?

GIBBY HAYNES: I mean I think I tried it on several dozen times.

PHAWKER: Okay, not like John Lennon’s one thousand trips or whatever?

GIBBY HAYNES: No, no, no, probably, you know, thirty, forty times.

PHAWKER: So that rumor that you guys were tripping all the time when you played live, that’s a myth?

GIBBY HAYNES: Yeah, but we did do that several times.

PHAWKER: One last thing on the Timothy Leary front: you and Timothy Leary famously got thrown out of the Viper Club for heckling Johnny Cash — this was right around the time of the first Rick Rubin album, I believe.

GIBBY HAYNES: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Johnny Cash was playing at the Viper Room and we had like the awesome fifteen-seat away from the great Johnny Cash and I sat down in a booth side by side with Timothy Leary. Johnny Cash singing starts and Leary just starts heckling Johnny Cash. And like, I was like ‘Oh, man, NOOOOOOOOO, NOOOOOOOO!’ and Leary was yelling ‘You’re a fraud!’ I don’t know why he had it in for Johnny Cash, but we got kicked out really quick. We got eighty-sixed.

PHAWKER: You famously declared in “Sweat Loaf” that it’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven’t done. What is Gibby Haynes’ greatest regret?

GIBBY HAYNES: That we didn’t start our own record label and don’t own all our music. Ian MacKaye was a genius.

PHAWKER: So let’s talk about the Paul Green Academy of Rock thing that you’re playing with the school of rock kids at Connie’s Rick Rac here in Philadelphia on Friday and Saturday. Tell me about that: how did that come about and what can we expect? You’re doing Butthole Surfers songs, correct?

GIBBY HAYNES: Yes, yes. Paul, I think, picked out a set. Depends on how well they can play the songs, it’s like three practices and two gigs in Philly where– [laughs] Philadelphia– it’s a tough crowd, Philadelphia. They eat people in Philadelphia, apparently.

PHAWKER: This is true.

GIBBY HAYNES: I’ve done it before with kids of this level and they’re really good musicians. And if they aren’t at the moment, they will be soon. They’re just good musicians, it’s just hard to– it depends on how well they’re prepared.

PHAWKER: Last time we talked I made a joke that I was surprised that you were allowed to be around children, but, you know, in all seriousness, I bet you’re great with those kids and I bet they have a blast with you and I bet the whole thing’s gonna be pretty badass.

GIBBY HAYNES: Yeah, they always– I don’t know about the other, you know, they’ve done this– they did it with school of rock in Paul Green’s previous music school and they did it with various classic rockers. Like the guy from Yes. And usually it’s the singer that they get. And most of the time those guys are musicians, but I’m really not a musician. I’m just the guy with the microphone. So the first practice is really rough, cause I’m like.. “You know the part where you’re like..” and the kids are like “you mean the E that comes after the chorus?” I’m like, ‘I guess.’ Yeah, I think I get along with the kids really well, they end up liking me.

Oh, man, they come through. When they’re on stage, they’re like, that’s a big deal, when they get to be on stage and there’s people in the audience. It’s not like a recital and mom and dad are out there, even though mom and dad are there, their mom and dad are like in rock and roll mode. Yeah, it’s a trip that I’m older than a lot of these kids’ parents. Most of ‘em.

PHAWKER: I see. One last question about this performance, the last time I saw you perform in Philadelphia you nearly burned down the Chestnut Cabaret. Will you be doing the flaming cymbal trick?

GIBBY HAYNES: No, the Great White fire was the death of the fire cymbal. But, it looked cool and it’s really harmless. It’d be pretty fuckin’ impossible to light a place on fire with alcohol. The trick was, for those of you that aren’t in the know, is that you’d pour rubbing alcohol on the cymbal and then hit it with the drumstick and a huge gust of flames would like shoot up for a second. The first time we did it, I was at practice and we happened to be practicing in this borrowed practice space, and it was a weird attic that was like maybe five, just under six feet tall, so I really couldn’t stand all the way up or walk around in it very well, and I lowered the cymbal, stomped it inside out, poured alcohol on it, banged it, like as hard as I could, and dude, it shot up like three feet in the air and hit the ceiling and spread out three hundred and sixty degrees and it’s like, it went to the walls. Like, for a moment the ceiling was flames.

PHAWKER: Completely on fire? That’s exactly what happened at Chestnut Cabaret!

GIBBY HAYNES: It hit the ceiling?

PHAWKER: It hit the ceiling and just spread across the whole ceiling. It was really, like, terrifying. And I guess there were always dudes on hand with fire extinguishers when you did this, but…

GIBBY HAYNES: No, no, no. There wasn’t.

PHAWKER: No?!?

GIBBY HAYNES: No.

GIBBY HAYNES BOOK RELEASE PARTY & CONCERT @ COLONIAL THEATER 1/17

 EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published on 9/7/18. We are reprising it here in advance of the Jesus Lizard’s performance @ Union Transfer on Monday December 30th. Enjoy.

BY RICH FRAVEL Jesus Lizard ruled the indie noise-rock roost in the ’90s releasing six albums of elegant psychosis before breaking up at the end of the decade. And now they’re back. I chatted up J-Liz guitarist Duane Denison [pictured, above left] for a bit over the phone. Hopefully I don’t sound too stupid. Duane sounds smart — I’m pretty sure he’s a smart guy. When he’s not Jay Lizzing, he’s a librarian in Nashville. We talked about his signature line of guitars, his memories of past visits to Philly, CD’s vs LP’s, how he saved his hearing from the damaging shrill of decades of rawk and role, and more. Sadly, I’ll be missing this Lizard show, I won’t be gettin’ no Yow sweat on me… I’m certain I’ve been to all their other Philly visits over the decades. They’re def a bucket list band… so stubhub that shit if you ain’t got tix yet…. I gotta play guitar that night at Connie’s Ric Rac in my rock combo, Mt Vengeance (mtvengeance.com) I’m certain there will be plenty of tickets left for our show. xoxo, Richie “dynamite hot flash” (thee FRAVE) Fravel

PHAWKER: Hey, this is Rich Fravel. I’m here in Philly. You got me okay?

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, yeah, hey. This is Duane. I’m here in Nashville.

PHAWKER: Right on. I’m recording this, so heads up.

DUANE DENISON: Okay.

PHAWKER: And just a heads up, I don’t do this. I’m a rock fan. Jon Valania [How many times do I have to tell you it’s MR. VALANIA to you?1? — The Ed.] who runs Phawker, the site, thought I’d be a good guy to talk to you for a few.

DUANE DENISON: Oh, that’s fun.

PHAWKER: I’ve got some questions written out, but don’t expect, you know, professional interview mojo from me.

DUANE DENISON: Okay, well, you won’t get professional from me either then.

PHAWKER: [laughs] Okay, I’m going to be kind of reading from my script and going through my questions, but you can go on any tangent you want. We can make this short and sweet, or as long as you got time for. Whatever works.

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, we’re just getting set up here, so yeah. I’m fine.

PHAWKER: Ok cool. Duane Denison from The Jesus Lizard you’re coming to Philly for a sold out Union Transfer show on September 8th. You’ve played in Philly at least a dozen times or more in various groups. I was working at – way back when – at The Khyber and at the Troc doing sound and stage work in the early ’90s. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen The Jesus Lizard play. What’s your favorite Philly memory, if you can remember one?

DUANE DENISON: Laughs There’s too many. Philly — I’ve always liked coming there. It’s a hip, cool, obviously old East Coast town. It’s just, you don’t get the — you don’t get the ego and the attitude that you sometimes get in places like, oh, I don’t know, New York.

PHAWKER: True that [laughs].

DUANE DENISON: Not that I’m dissing them. God, I played there with not just The Jesus Lizard, but Tomahawk and Hank3. Probably others. I like the funky, old venues. Obviously The Khyber, and then I love playing The Troc, and it was on the edge of what would have been Chinatown, right? Is that all still there?

PHAWKER: Yes, it’s in the heart of Chinatown, still doing what they were doing back then. Union Transfer kind of picked up the slack with — it’s kind of a much better room than some of the smaller venues with real deal sound, and professionals that show up on time. So I think you’ll have a little different than shows were in the 90s.

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, yeah. I just like it. I grew up just outside of Detroit, and so, you know, I’m used to that kind of a gritty vibe, kind of a funky, old school kind of feel to things, and I like that. No, it’s just we’ve got some great fans from there over the years, and it’s all just such fun. Some of it I can’t even talk about [laughs].

PHAWKER: Good! Jesus Lizard always seemed to be an unsustainable beast of a band, at least in my mind that would eventually just evaporate and disappear, but here you are on the road again. A lot of my friends have seen you tell their younger friends, you know, you’ve got to see them live. The albums are cool, but it’s a must-see-live event. Do you ask yourself often how much longer can you do this, or is that just not a question that comes up?

DUANE DENISON: It doesn’t come up. Well, none of us really do music totally full time anymore, which is kind of nice, so we don’t have to do it all year ‘round like I did for, you know, for 20 years or so. Not necessarily with just The Jesus Lizard, but with others, you know, 20-25 years of full time music. Which was great, and I’m lucky to have been able to do that, but as you get older the wear and tear of just traveling alone can be kind of tiring, and tiresome, and hard on your system. So to be able to do it this way, where, you know, maybe once or twice a year we go out and play a few shows and have a great time is really nice. I could do this forever. And it’s gotten to the point where like, you know, like, we’re rehearsing the next couple days at a nice, professional rehearsal studio here and, you know, I’m not giving myself a hernia carrying gear upstairs.

PHAWKER: [laughs] Right?

DUANE DENISON: You know all that kind of thing that when you come up from, you know, the independent or underground or punk rock world, you know, everybody does all that stuff themselves, and to be able to do it where you’ve got other people doing some of the heavy lifting, literally, is great. And other people are booking the shows and, you know, doing all that, so, and we’re flying into things, and, so, you know, we could do this for as long as we want really, or as long as there’s a demand. Obviously when it gets to the point where, you know, playing this kind of music— eventually you reach an age where it doesn’t seem real anymore. Where it doesn’t seem like how could you possibly seem either relevant, or how does it seem real when you’re that age and still doing that kind of things. That becomes questionable, but, I mean, look at other people. I mean there’s bands that are way older than us. An obvious an example is going to be the Rolling Stones, but other bands play and sound great, whether it’s Deep Purple or whoever, so, you know, I think some of the people who I considered heroes when I was young, like David Byrne for example. He’s out touring and playing and doing his thing, so, you know, if you’re a real musician and that’s what motivates you, and that’s what gets you excited and wants you to keep playing and developing, then that’s just what you do.

PHAWKER: I was at the last show in Philly and for me, it seemed like the early 90s. All the same faces from back in the day were there. All the pieces were there. Actually, the band was maybe even a little tighter than it was back in the day, but—

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, in some ways.

PHAWKER: When you look at the audience now what do you see? I’m most curious. Do you see that same guy from Philly who’s always in the front row? Is he still there, or is he that guy with his kid now, staring at you? Do you recognize people from days gone by? With a little less hair and a little bigger belly?

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, all of the above. But it’s a mix you know. In the old days it would be people who more or less looked like us: people in their 20s or 30s. Hipsters making the scene, or other musicians checking us out. That kind of thing, and now, you know, it’s a mix of young and old people. People do bring their kids when they can, and then people who didn’t see it the first time but they heard about it, and so it’s kind of gratifying, really. And good for them bringing your kids to see, you know, an honest to goodness rock band.

PHAWKER: I bring my daughter who’s 13 — no, she’s 14 now, to shows once in awhile and she stares at me like, ‘Why the fuck am I here? Why are we doing this?’ But it kind of sinks in. I took her to Paul McCartney a few years ago and now, well, now she saw a Beatle, and whether she gave a shit or not, she can say she did 30 years from now. So be it.

Alright, guitar gear. This is a long, rambling sentence I wrote here, so hopefully we can pick and choose what makes sense out of it, but I recall the early Jesus Lizard shows seeing you with a strange aluminum guitar. At the time I didn’t know what it was. It seemed to be a Midwest thing. I learned it was a Travis Bean with an aluminum neck and body. I picked one up at a thrift store and just dicked around with it a little bit, but the balance was awkward for me. I’m just a Strat player, so it felt awkward. You now have a signature model, Duane Denison Chessie made with— you collaborated with the Electrical Guitar Company. Tell me a little bit about that relationship and tell me a little bit about what guitar you’re bringing out on the road with you?

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, well, it’s pretty simple. You pretty much nailed it. Yeah, I play Travis Bean guitars for most of the time. Not always. I’ve played other stuff too but that was the signature one, and ones that I recorded most of the albums, like Liar and Goat, with mostly Travis Bean stuff. Yeah it was actually, those had wooden bodies with aluminum necks, and then the pick up was set in aluminum. But yes, they are kind of heavy and they are kind of awkward, and eventually when I moved to Nashville I sold those and played other things for awhile, and Kevin Burkett who runs the Electrical Guitar Company approached me about making me aluminum guitars, and he does all aluminum, and so I was able to collaborate on that. Yeah, and we got my model. Semi-hollows, and we tried to get the weight down and tried to get the balance improved without sacrificing any of the sound. He told me the characteristics, and so I think we did it. He also has, he now has the licensing deal to make Travis Beans again.

PHAWKER: Wow, cool.

DUANE DENISON: But I find as I’ve gotten older my back and my neck just can’t play them anymore. The weight and the balance just throws me off, so I prefer the electrical Chessies, and that’s what I’ll be playing on this tour. I’ll be playing a white one, and I have a yellow one too that I might break out.

PHAWKER: Cool, I know — I think your model had a Bigsby on it?

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, uh-huh.

PHAWKER: Is that your — I don’t recall lots of whammy action on your stuff, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

DUANE DENISON: No, but it’s just nice to have. It’s nice to have a kind of – you can kind of make a chord waver and do things you can’t normally do.

PHAWKER: I gotcha. What amps are you bringing, and what are you practicing on?

DUANE DENISON: I’m just gonna use rented Marshalls. JCM 800s. There’s a consistency to them. In the old days I would play Hiwatts. I like a little more grind now. You can just overdrive the Marshalls at just a little bit lower volume. And then for practice I typically use PC electronics, their G force and a Midi controller. For somewhat of a different pre-amp and delay and chorus and tremolo.They’re very simple, but very high quality, great sounding rig.

PHAWKER: Okay, tell me a bit about battle wounds. From years on tour you always seem to be the stoic maestro overseeing the chaos of David Yow, but surely some shrapnel has come your way.

DUANE DENISON: [laughs] Oh God, everything, everything.

PHAWKER: Yeah? You name it?

DUANE DENISON: There was a tour in- we were in Europe. Probably in ’96 and I pinched a nerve in my back, and right before the show, right before a big festival in France, and I had to play, and I was hurting so bad it was making me nauseous, and I told them, keep a stretcher by the side of the amp in case I pass out. And I made it through the show. I hardly moved, and I was just sweating with pain the whole time, and then fortunately we had two days off in a row where I could just lay still, but I was just hobbling for the rest of the tour. But I finished the tour, and then, you know, came home, and got physical therapy and all that, and whatever. It’s manageable. It never goes away. That kind of stuff never goes away. So that was the first real thing along that line, and then about 10 years ago I got a hernia carrying a cabinet up a flight of stairs and it was the same thing. It was right during the middle of a tour. I kept going for a few weeks and eventually I was just limping, and so then I went to see a doctor on a day off, and he said, man, you really need to go home and get some surgery. And so I did, it took months to sort of recover from that, and it still aggravates me from time to time. I’ve had my knee kind of bothers me, well a lot of it is just aging, you know? As you’re getting older your joints bother you.

PHAWKER: I turn 50 this year. I hear you, you know. I hear you loud and clear.

DUANE DENISON: What you do for a living or what you do in your spare time. You know, my knees bother me. My wrist, elbows, joints sometimes bother me. Neck and shoulder pain. You work out, do your stretches, get a massage every so often, see a physical therapist if you need some more help and you get through it.

PHAWKER: How are your ears? Any permanent ringing?

DUANE DENISON: Ears are great, no, my ears are good. I’m always surprised at that, because we were a very bright band, and we were loud and bright. Lots of symbols. A Travis Bean through a Hiwatt is pretty bright and David [Sims]’s bass sound is pretty bright. But no, my hearing is really good. I think most of that is because I started protecting my ears back in the 90s. I wore earplugs and things. I don’t have any custom stuff. You know, just better quality over the counter, and then I almost never listen to music on headphones or buds. I almost never. And I think that’s what hurts people’s ears more than anything. Everybody’s got earbuds. Everybody’s in their own little world, listening to music by themselves, and I like to listen to it in the air. I like to hear it whether it’s in the car or at home, in my home in my music room, or whatever.

PHAWKER: Yes, if we didn’t have speakers in our house, old school speakers, I know my daughter would not know what they were.

DENISON: My daughter’s the same way. She’ll take a shower and she’ll be playing it on the Bluetooth. She thinks it gets better, but the sound gets worse.

PHAWKER: The laptop speakers are how people are fashioning their records for nowadays, which is a shame. When you’re not rocking, are you indeed a librarian?

DUANE DENISON: [laughs] Yes. I work for the Nashville library system. That’s been going on for a couple years. I was full time music for decades, and then I just kind of thought well, the time between projects is getting longer, right? And there’s no excuse for me not doing something else, and working, you know, 40 hours a week that much, really isn’t. And I still have plenty of time to practice. Plenty of energy left. Time and energy left to work on music. And, you know, I save up my vacation time and whatever else and then go play shows and the people I work with or work for are totally cool with that, and they know, you know. They know my background and what the deal is, so it all seems to work out.

PHAWKER: So they get it. Is it rewarding? Do you like working with the kids, and helping a person out that needs just a push in the right direction?

DUANE DENISON: Yes it can be tiring and stressful sometimes, you know. People can be difficult, you know. People, you know. It’s a free service that we’re offering and yet people. There are some people that just go through life looking for things that— I don’t know.

PHAWKER: My ex was a librarian, so I got some experience from her first hand.

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, so you know, and anyone who does any kind of job where you’re dealing with people knows what that’s like. A lot of the time I’m not dealing with people in that way, so I can just do other things. You know, looking through things, looking things up, going through donations, you know, that kind of library work where you don’t wait on people, so it balances out. It’s fine.

PHAWKER: And you get health insurance and all those must-have things?

DUANE DENISON: Oh yeah. A benefits package you can’t beat. For years, you know, when you’re a musician you’re basically a self-employed contractor.

PHAWKER: Right.

DUANE DENISON: So of course you’re paying all that yourself. And you know that going into it. But it’s nice not having to pay for that stuff.

PHAWKER: Right. After this September run of dates, are there any plans for the future?

DUANE DENISON: No. There are no plans beyond this. There are no plans. This kind of came up fairly quickly. We had an offer — what drove this — we had an offer to play the Riot Fest in Chicago which is a big thing, and that is kind of what pushed everything else. Well, if we rehearsed and get it together for that, we might as well play more shows, and so we put the word out, and everything’s just kind of fell into place from there.

PHAWKER: Selling out Philly, you know, may be a bit more of a challenge than it was way back when but that seemed to happen very quickly this time, so that’s all good. Most of the shows have sold out or doing well?

DUANE DENISON: Yeah, I think maybe Austin is a bigger venue, and I don’t know if that one’s sold out yet or not, but, you know, it’s getting there, you know.

PHAWKER: Yeah, no, it’s great — great to see that you’re still going strong and people wanting to see it live. Let’s see. A couple other kind of wrapping up questions for you. Your favorite Jesus Lizard song, what would it be?

DUANE DENISON: Off the top of my head there’s one called “Then Comes Dudley,” which is kind of one of our more signature songs. Kind of a very definitive Jesus Lizard song in that you’ve got this bass and drum line and the guitar comes kind of chiming in, and there’s some odd sort of guitar sort of turnarounds in it. That one’s kind of a classic, and then “Boilermaker” is fun to play. It’s fast and it’s got different parts. Single line chord stuff, some arpeggiated stuff, kind of a challenge to play. A couple songs like we just did that mash-up of Chrome songs. It’s just called “Chrome” and there’s a solo in there that I can cut loose a little bit.

PHAWKER: Are they a part of the current set?

DUANE DENISON: Oh yeah, and “Bloody Mary.” That’s one of our earliest songs that we ever even practiced together. I’d like to think of it as family distinctive arpeggiated things and David Yow’s vocal performance is really good.

PHAWKER: You probably hear this a dozen times a week, but I don’t even have to think about it, but at least once a month for an hour words from “Mouth Breather” just pop into my head for no good reason. It’s just there once in a while.

DUANE DENISON: [laughs] Well that one people just like to sing the words, “I like him just fine be he’s a mouth breather!”

PHAWKER: [laughs] Are you a record collector, yourself?

DUANE DENISON: No, I have an okay collection of records, and I have more CDs than albums. I think because for a long time I was moving around a lot, you know, from Michigan to Texas to Chicago to Nashville, and vinyl takes— I’m not really, like, a vinyl junkie. I actually think CDs sound better.

PHAWKER: I’m with you. I go to the thrift store once a week and I’ll buy 20 CDs for a dollar, you know, and I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. This is insane.

DUANE DENISON: I still occasionally buy CDs. I have a CD player at home and in my car and I use it. I also have satellite radio package in my car that I like, and I have the turntables also so, you know, it’s covered, but I’m not like, no, I’m not a collector. I have a fair amount of stuff that I genuinely like. I don’t collect things just to collect them to put it that way

PHAWKER: Is there anything current that you’re kind of grooving to lately?

DUANE DENISON: Lately I kind of go between what I’m hearing on my pet radio stations. It’s funny I’ve got a satellite radio package with 300 radio stations, but I only listen to 4 or 5 of them consistently. Classical stations, 40s swing stations, couple of rock stations, maybe the outlaw country station, and a reggae station. And that’s what I listen to. And then things come through the library, they catch my eye. A CD or an album. For instance, the other day there was a new soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead. I forgot, it was a new movie, I can’t remember… Daniel Day Lewis. I can’t remember the name of it.

PHAWKER: Phantom Thread.

DUANE DENISON: That’s it! Phantom Thread, yes.

PHAWKER: Any plans for a comprehensive retrospective everything-we-ever-did box set.

DUANE DENISON: No, we did that more or less in 2009.

PHAWKER: The singles, right?

DUANE DENISON: Well the singles, and then we reissued the whole back catalogue, and they had — it was remastered, and it had some improved packaging. It had a lot more expansive liner, notes, and photos and stuff, so I feel like we kind of have already been there. And then we did that book that came out on the Akashic called Book. So it’s all pretty well-chronicled at this point.

PHAWKER: That is kind of it, unless you got some parting words you want to share with the fine folks from Philly.

DUANE DENISON: No, I’m sure people in Philly are tired of hearing people talk about Ben Franklin, and the Liberty Bell, and Pat’s vs. Geno’s, and you know who’s from Philly who I like is Sam Fogarino from Interpol.

PHAWKER: Oh, he’s a Philly guy.

DUANE DENISON: Yeah he is, and I was with him one day in Philly, playing with his — he had a side project Empty Mansions and he took me to a different cheesesteak place that was neither Pat’s nor Geno’s. He said this is the real thing, and it was really good.

PHAWKER: Everyone’s got their hidden spot. At least in Philadelphia— got their own cheesesteak spot that’s the best.

DUANE DENISON: I remember playing the Troc one night, and I having nothing to do , and this is the only time that I’ve ever gone to a fortune teller and she gave me a stone. A special stone that would protect me from evildoers and people who wish me harm, and I swear to god I kept it in my flight case. I still have it, but I don’t use it. My little beat up flight case that I used for years, and I do think it did protect me, because nothing truly bad ever happened. The kind of catastrophic thing that often happens to musicians or people who travel a lot — it never really happened to me. So maybe I’ll go back there when I’m in town.

THE JESUS LIZARD + PLAQUE MARKS @ UNION TRANSFER MON. DEC. 30TH

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is interview first published back in July when Dave Alvin was touring in support of the 25th anniversary of the release of The King Of California. We are reprising this interview in advance of his appearance at World Cafe Live tonight as part of The Reverend Horton Heat’s Holiday Hayride, featuring 5,6,7,8’s and The Voodoo Glowskulls. Enjoy.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Americana standard-bearer Dave Alvin is a national treasure. His first band, The Blasters, formed with his brother Phil, schooled a whole new generation of young punks about the glories of early to mid 20th Century American music: Blues, rockabilly, country, Tex-Mex. As guitarist for X and The Knitters he continued bridging the divides between punk and roots music. He was always a hot-shit electric guitar player who let his brother do all the singing and songwriting, but by the end of the ’80s he struck out on his own and after a few albums of trial and error he found his voice as a singer and songwriter with 1994’s The King Of California, now recognized as a modern classic of the Americana/alt-country/No Depression scene. This year marks the 25 anniversary of its release. Alvin is currently on a tour in support of the just-released 25th Anniversary reissue of the album — remastered and re-packaged with bonus tracks — that brings him to World Cafe Live this Saturday (July 20th) Wednesday December 11th. Last week we got Dave on the horn to talk about the making of the album, some of the back story about the front and back cover art, his development as a singer and a songwriter, as well as a couple bonus questions about schooling The Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce in the sepia-toned rapture of early 20th Century rural blues music.

PHAWKER: The now-classic King Of California is celebrating its 25th anniversary. It was recorded the day after the Northridge earthquake, which was a pretty big deal Tell me, where were you that day or what was your experience with that quake.

DAVE ALVIN: Well it was actually– well, we recorded it the same day. And the quake came at like 4:30 in the morning, and we were due to be in the studio at 11 AM, and it– the effect that it had besides– basically a huge chunk of Southern California lost power with the quake, and then there was a lot of damage. The guy that was supposed to be playing bass on the record was a guy named Larry Taylor. Plays in Tom Waits’s band, and was in Canned Heat, blah blah blah. Larry’s house got hammered, so Larry was off the session. So we had to go scrambling to find a bass player and we couldn’t find anybody until the next day. So the first day of recording was done sort of without a bass player. The area around the studio was also hammered. Like a building right across the street, an old apartment building from the 1930s was devastated. And so it just had– the mood was kind of apocalyptic — sporadic power outages and crumbling buildings, you know? So it was, it just kinda had this mood of “Well, if we can get through this, then we’re meant to make this record.”

PHAWKER: In the press materials for the album you are quoted as saying ‘This was the album when I figured out to let the song tell me what it sounds like’ instead of the other way around — elaborate on that a little bit, explain what you mean.

DAVE ALVIN: Well, you know, when I grew up, professionally, writing songs for a band to play, a specific band to play, and for a specific voice — my brother Phil’s voice and the band was the Blasters– and whenever it, no matter what the band is, whether it’s the Rolling Stones or U2 or Soundgarden, you know, there are certain rules that bands have when it comes to the songs, every band’s rules are different. You don’t go into say, Soundgarden and say “Hey, I wrote a polka!” You know what I mean? And maybe the song is supposed to be a polka, you know? So with the Blasters what had happened was just basically I’d bring in a song, the band would rearrange it into a style or key that worked for them. What key is a good key for guitar playing as bass playing as opposed to singing, you know, that kinda stuff. So some of the songs on the King of California record were songs that I’d written for the Blasters that when I wrote them I thought of them as ballads, like sensitive ballads. And of course, you take it to the band and we turned it into rock and roll rhythm blues numbers. You know, loud.

And that’s fine, that’s all valid. But what I wanted to do on this record, because for a guy like me, I don’t know what record’s gonna be my last one. And I don’t mean that in a sense of mortality, I mean it in the sense of– in the business sense, you know, if the Rolling Stones decide to do an album of all polkas, their record label well let them make another record after that. You know what I mean? ‘Well, you know, Mick, we haven’t sold diddly of this Rolling Stones polka record, but what else you got?’ I don’t get that luxury. I mean, luckily I sell enough records now to guarantee that I will make more. But I still go in with the attitude of “well, this could be my last one because it may not sell,” and if it doesn’t sell then I’m at the Burger King asking you what you want on your burger.

So I wanted to get, when I did King of California, I thought, “Well this might be my last record and I wanna get these particular songs right. I just wanna get them recorded right so that when I’m dead and gone, somebody can say oh, that’s not a bad version.” You know what I mean? And so the way to do that, the way to answer your question, the way to do that is if the song says it’s a polka, then the song is a polka. If the song says it’s a ballad, then the song is a ballad. If it’s a blues song, it’s a blues song, you know? And on and on.

PHAWKER: Now the bulk of the album was recorded live in the room, with everyone sitting in a circle around the microphones looking at each other hootenanny-style. But because the band the band was able to play quietly, you’ve talked about how this was the moment when you kind of found your voice as a singer — how your voice was able to lead the songs, pull the songs forward. You finally stepped out of your brother’s shadow as a vocalist I think with this record.

DAVE ALVIN: Yeah, as close as I can get to being one, yeah. The producer, Greg Leisz, who was is one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever known — Greg’s on every record just about ever made, it’s easier to listen to records that Greg is not on, you know…he’s not on Sergeant Pepper’s and he’s not on Exile on Main Street, but just about everything else of note, he’s on. So he’s had a lot of experience in the studio with singers and this and the other. And he was a close friend of mine and was good at hearing whatever was in my voice that was a good thing, and how to access it. And sometimes when you make records– you can ask any artist this, any singer– the vocals usually what’s done last, and the producers tend to be more worried about bass and drums. So recording the way that I like to record, which is everybody in the room at the same time, when you’re playing electric the vocals can take a backseat to the drums, you know? It’s like “Whoa, I can’t sing over that.” But in an acoustic setting, and with the right musicians, then yes, the vocals could lead the band into “okay, we’re gonna get loud here, we’re gonna get quiet here, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that,” and you know, just like as if I was James Brown or Van morrison or something.

It’s just, you need the right musicians that are playing the song and not playing their instrument, if that makes sense. Most musicians, probably myself included, are like “Hey I’m playin’ good! I’m hittin’ the right notes!” You know, ‘I don’t care about songs, I’m playin’ good!’ And so you need musicians that play the song, listening to the song. I’ve had guys that are great musicians come into the studio and say “Well, I don’t hear anything on this song. I think it sounds fine, you don’t need me.” That’s a great musician.

PHAWKER: Like the famous saw about jazz: it’s about knowing when not to play. Let me ask you about the circumstances that inspired the writing of “Born On The Fourth of July.” It sounds almost like you’re just literally sitting out on the steps, smoking a cigarette, looking down, the Mexican kids are playing down below, shooting off fireworks, and the song just kinda writes itself from there. Is that kinda…

DAVE ALVIN: No, yes and no. The event– it’s based on a true event in my life, but that was like, it was like ten years or seven years previously, it was back when I had been a fry cook, you know. And my girlfriend at the time and I, she had her day job and I had mine and it was, life was pretty disappointing, you know what I mean? I remember that that particular Fourth of July I wasn’t a songwriter at that point, I never– I didn’t even think that I’d ever be a songwriter, but I remember sitting there going “This is memorable,” you know? “This is memorable, I will remember this.” And so then yeah, seven or eight years later when I was a songwriter, a musician and no longer a fry cook, I always carried that image around, and it finally dawned on me, ‘okay, this is how the song goes, this is how you do it.’

And then once I decided this is the song, then it did kind of write itself, I was actually with my girlfriend at the time– my other, my entirely different girlfriend and an entirely different life, but we were with some friends at a bowling alley and she and I were just sitting there drinking beer watching our friends bowl badly and it suddenly just popped into my head, and I turned to my girlfriend and said “Let’s go home” and about two hours later called her up and said “Okay, this is why I took you home,” and sang her the song. So it did come, once I decided, this is a song that came quick.

PHAWKER: Tell me about the circumstances around the cover shot and the back photo. All this time, I’ve always thought you were sitting in a box car, sort of hobo style…

DAVE ALVIN: [laughs] I can see that, I can see that, yeah.

PHAWKER: But that’s not the case at all ‘cause I just saw the uncropped version of that photo and you’re sitting in the ruins of a building or something at sunset– tell me about that.

DAVE ALVIN: Yeah, it was the photographer, Beth Herzshaft, and I were driving around Central California taking photographs for a possible album cover and then we were driving down this two lane highway in the middle of nowhere up in this area called Cuyama Valley that no one knows about, and I looked over and to my left and out on this ranchlands I could see this old adobe ruin of a house. So, you know, turned the car around, and we trespassed, we opened up the ranch gate, drove down, literally it’s just sage brush and hillsides, nothing else out there. Drove down a mile, half mile to the ruin, started taking pictures, and it just happened to be right at sunset. So it was like we got that perfect sunset shot. So you know, it was a little bit of that California history with the adobe and all that, and also, you know, it just had a certain magic.

PHAWKER: And tell me about the back cover photo.

DAVE ALVIN: You’re looking at the San Andreas Fault right there. That’s a road, a little road– that road leads into a thing called the Carrizo Plain National Monument. The little mountain range there is called the Temblors, you know, for the tremors of the earth.

DAVE ALVIN: Can’t get more California than the goddamn San Andreas fault.

PHAWKER: Yep, that plays right into the album title. One last thing on the album here and then I have a Gun Club question for you, because I’m a big Gun Club fan.

DAVE ALVIN: Sure.

PHAWKER: Hang on one second, my page of questions just blew away. On the 25th anniversary edition of this has some bonus tracks and one of them is the song, the beautiful instrumental called Riverbed Rag that for whatever reason didn’t make the album proper, and I’m looking at the liner notes here and it says that that’s inspired by exploring the San Gabriel River bed as a kid.

DAVE ALVIN: Well, because Greg Liesz, who produced the record, is doing all the dobros and lap steel and all that on the record, he grew up next door– well, the town next door to me, he grew up in a place called Santa Fe Springs, which is on the east side of the San Gabriel River in Downey where I grew up, so on the west side of the San Gabriel river, and when we first became friends that’s kinda what we bonded over — the San Gabriel river, basically this long river bed that goes from the San Diego mountains down to the Pacific Ocean, and so yeah I just kinda wrote up a little ragtime blues instrumental for Greg and I to play on. And the only reason it didn’t make it on the record– I wanted it on the record to kinda liven it up– some of the songs are pretty down, lyrically, and so then I wanted something to help bring things up, but the record was just too long with it included. But I think it’s a fine piece, we’re doing it live ‘cause it gives us a chance to play.

PHAWKER: This riverbed– both of you guys sort of played and explored there as kids,is that right?
DAVE ALVIN: Yes, sir, yep.

PHAWKER: Any interesting stories of, you know, did you find any buried treasure or a dead body…

DAVE ALVIN: Yeah, you could ask Greg about his. Mine was, when I was a kid that area was wild, you know? There were hobo jungles, as they used to call them, down there the banks were kinda lined with bamboo, real thick bamboo, so when you’re a kid you’d go into the neighborhood bamboo jungles, and there was, you know, jackrabbits and rattlesnakes and coyotes and all that kinda stuff, just kinda like “Great! This is the greatest place on earth!” you know? “And hobos? Oh my god, rattlesnakes, rabbits, coyotes and hobos? Where do I sign up?” It wasn’t the Mississippi, it wasn’t Mark Twain’s Mississippi, but it was my Mississippi.

PHAWKER: Excellent, excellent. So I just wanted to ask you to relay– there’s this great interview you did with TK [16:05] called Bored Out where you were talking extensively about Jeffery Lee Pierce and early… all kinda stuff, that I was just reading through that’s just fantastic, and you talk about how you and your brother were the ones who turned [Gun Club mainman] Jeffrey Lee Pierce onto the blues. That before that he more or less had zero knowledge of the blues.

DAVE ALVIN: Well, I wouldn’t say he had zero knowledge. He had knowledge– it was limited to B.B. King, that kinda stuff, sorta the obvious people you get into when you first get into blues. What we schooled him on was country blues. He had never really gone deep in that, and so a lot of people when they hear country blues for the first time, the first time they hear Son House or Skip James, people like that, yeah, they can flip because that’s just such amazing music. And he would come over to where my brother and I lived, and we had a bunch of old 78’s and we’d sit around and drink and shoot the shit and play old records, and say ‘Okay, now you gotta listen to this guy, you gotta listen to this guy, see what he’s doin’ here? See what he’s doin’ there?’

PHAWKER: Right.
DAVE ALVIN: And yeah, Jeffrey had been, you know, he was a reggae kinda guy for a while or was passing himself off as a reggae guy. And he was also a Blondie guy.

PHAWKER: Right. I believe he was the president of the Blondie fan club.

DAVE ALVIN: Yes he was, yes he was. A couple of the tracks on the first Gun Club album, “Preaching the Blues” and “Cool Drink of Water,” — you know, he learned those from us.

PHAWKER: That was a very seminal experience, I mean I think that really informed the beginnings of the Gun Club and the– to my mind, their greatest album, the Fire of Love album.

DAVE ALVIN: He wasn’t some technical wizard on guitar. But what he did with what he knew was great, he knew how to make it work. The Gun Club started using a thing that was in short supply in those days, which was dynamics. So that’s why especially that first album the dynamics were just excellent. Jeffrey Lee understood like James Brown Live At The Apollo was a favorite record of his, and that record is all about dynamics. And when to bring the band up, when to bring the band down. In those days, and strictly on that scene, it wasn’t a lot of dynamics. It was just ‘1-2-3-4- GO!’… and Jeffrey Lee figured out just not for the blues covers that he did, but for his own songs, he figured out whether it was “For the Love of Ivy” or “She’s Like Heroin to Me,” we can make up for the fact that we’re not the best musicians by playing the music really, really well. Really getting into, again, kinda what I was saying earlier about understanding the song, playing the song and not the instrument.

PHAWKER: To follow up on that, you mentioned this repeatedly in that interview that the Gun Club couldn’t draw flies in LA at that time, I don’t understand why?

DAVE ALVIN: Because they came along at a period of time– they weren’t punk enough for the hardcore kids. It wasn’t “ONETWOTHREEFOURONETWOTHREEFOUR,” you know, and in those days that was when– when the Gun Club, if they woulda come out two years earlier, three years earlier, it woulda been a different story in a way. But they came out when all the focus on the Southern California scene as far as punk rock goes, if it wasn’t strictly on Circle Jerks or Black Flag then it wasn’t punk rock. And so those kinda kids that were into those bands never latched on to the Gun Club. You know, The Gun Club would do gigs with those bands, and they would be — it would just be unappreciated, let’s put it that way. And then they weren’t rootsy enough or good enough musicians for the Roots Rock crowd, for the rockabilly crowd or the blues crowd or the country… so they had to find their own niche. And Jeffrey stood by his vision and that when it got to Europe and– it started in New York, where they had a little buzz in New York, but it was really in Europe because Jeffrey was enough of a madman — and the Europeans love American madmen. They don’t like normal Americans, but ‘Goddamn, that’s guys insane, you know, let’s watch him!’ In Europe by that time had already punk rock was basically dead already by the time the Gun Club got there they didn’t have to deal with that [punk rock snobbery] and the audience just kinda reacted to them just purely, “Hey that’s a really cool band.” LA was mired in that — you know, that’s one of those things that killed the LA scene was that cookie cutter thing of what’s punk rock, what’s not. Anyway, I got another interview coming in, so nice talking to you, brother.

THE REVEREND HORTON HEAT + DAVE ALVIN + 5,6,7,8’S + VOODOO GLOWSKULLS @ WORLD CAFE LIVE WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 11TH

Photo by DYLAN LONG

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Alex G, aka Alex Giannascoli, is like the red-eyed unshaven love child of Olivia Tremor Control and the Beta Band drunk on early Iron and Wine, Portland-era Elliott Smith and Guided By Voices circa Vampire On Titus: pretty/sad zig-zag bedsit folk-pop chopped and screwed until blissed out and chimerical. Born and raised on the mean streets of Havertown, an inner ring suburb of Philadelphia, and bottle-fed on the mid-90s’ indie-rock of his big sister’s record collection, he started making his own music on Garageband at the tender age of 15 and pumping it into the digital ether via Bandcamp where he garnered a cult-like following. After studying English for two years at Temple University, he quit school to pursue music full time, releasing five LPs of embryonic Alex G music on sundry micro indies before signing to the UK’s Domino Recordings 2014. His star continued to rise over the course of three fuzzy-wuzzy albums of high-end lo-fi, including the brand-new House Of Sugar, which dropped in September. In advance of his now-sold out show at Union Transfer on Saturday November 30th, we got Alex on the horn.

DISCUSSED: The autumnal glories of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon; Temple University; GarageBand; his sister’s record collection and using her paintings as album cover art; collaborating with Frank Ocean; his days as a disciple of Elliott Smith; loving the short stories of Argentinian poet Silvino Ocampo; the SugarHouse Casino of the mind; working with long-time producer Jake Portrait; the miniaturized lo-fi glories of Guided By Voices; knowing Unknown Mortal Orchestra; the importance of Dusk At Cubist Castle; hearing the White Album for the first time, like, two weeks ago and how it blew his motherfucking mind.

PHAWKER: Hello, this is Jonathan Valania from Phawker, we have an interview scheduled. You clearly know this because you called me.

ALEX G: [laughs]

PHAWKER: So let’s get this party started. Not that much is known about you or available to know about you on the Internet, so forgive me if I ask some questions that you answered a billion times. First, you’re from Philadelphia, correct?

ALEX G: I’m from Havertown.

PHAWKER: And then you went to Temple for two years?

ALEX G: Yes.

PHAWKER: And when did you start making music, not releasing it, but when did you start making music?

ALEX G: Well I think it happened around the same time, in my early teen years, just like fourteen or fifteen. My family got a Mac computer that had GarageBand on it, with the built in recording programs. And so I would just mess around on that when I had free time, and make little beats or songs or whatever and then I’d burn ‘em on CD’s and hand them out to people and I just like if you could consider that releasing music, you know what I mean? And then when I figured out I could put stuff online I started putting stuff online. As soon as I had the chance to put stuff out there I was just doing it. Well, as I was learning how to do it.

PHAWKER: Yeah. So that would account for the fact– I was reading an AllMusic guide that you had like, twelve self-released albums before you signed to Domino? They’re probably combining a bunch of releases there, but is that roughly true? Is it there much music that you put out before you even were on a proper record?

ALEX G: I mean, I made a ton of music but I definitely wouldn’t brag about it because most of that stuff is pretty bad, you know? I shouldn’t say bad because some people like it, but a lot of that stuff is from when I was a kid, still learning how to, you know, write songs and make recordings and stuff. It was a whole learning process, and I’m still learning now, even, but a lot of that stuff is from early days.

PHAWKER: “Embryonic” may be the word for that early stuff.

ALEX G: Yeah.

PHAWKER: And you said you started out at fourteen or fifteen, and I’m guessing you’re in your early twenties now? Can I ask how old you are now?

ALEX G: Yeah, I’m 26.

PHAWKER: Duly noted. And can you explain to me the Sandy in parentheses thing? Why and what, and why Sandy?

ALEX G: So I used to just be Alex G., that’s what everyone called me and so I released music as Alex G., ‘cause it was my name. And there was some confusion with other people named Alex G. who are releasing music. And off the record I can’t really like, explicitly say or else I’ll get sued or something, but… [laughs] If you can leave that out, I’ll just explain it to you, why I’m being so vague. And so I had to like, change the name in some way and I really wanted to keep Alex. G. in there, so I just… one of the first songs I put online was called Sandy, and a lot of the URLs to like, BandCamp or the FaceBook page on music, that the URL had Sandy in the link, and I could put Sandy in parentheses and it would just be like a little tag. And I was hoping that people would interpret it as a silent indicator that it’s this Alex G. from Philadelphia, not the other Alex G. out there who… you know what I mean?

PHAWKER: Sure, sure. Okay, that explains it. So I’m curious, how do you write, how do you make music? My understanding is you still use GarageBand, but do you write songs, say, on a guitar, on an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, and then record ‘em, fuck with ‘em, produce them, arrange them? Or do you start on GarageBand and make everything from scratch?

ALEX G: I usually start with the guitar or a keyboard and come up with like the template, you know, like the structure and the chords. And then I record that and all the complementary instruments and stuff come after on GarageBand like during the recording process I’m writing the other parts, you know? But the core structure I write separately, just sitting down with an instrument.

PHAWKER: And you played guitar on two Frank Ocean albums, is that correct?

ALEX G: On Endless and Blond, yeah.

PHAWKER: That’s… okay, that’s kinda blowing my mind a little bit. How did that come about?

ALEX G: Yeah, I mean it’s actually not a very exciting story. When he was making those albums a few years ago and me and my band were on tour in the UK, while he was working in the UK in London, and I just got an email randomly from him, being like “Hey, you wanna play– come by the studio and play guitar?” And I was like, Sure. And I didn’t know him, but it was nice. It was a really laid back experience, you know.

PHAWKER: And you play on a number of songs on both of those albums or just a song each or?

ALEX G: Like, a handful of them, like a couple on Blond and a couple on Endless.

PHAWKER: Crazy, man. So it kinda reminds me a little bit of like Kanye getting Bon Iver to work with him on his album, has that comparison ever occurred to you?

ALEX G: You know, I’m not that familiar with how, like, what they did together, but I mean… What makes it similar, was that just kinda out of the blue, too? I’m actually not familiar….

PHAWKER: It is totally out of the blue. It’s just a strange pairing on paper: somebody from the top of the hip hop game calls up the weird-beard indie rock psychedelic guy to play on his next album. You just wouldn’t think it’d be a pairing, but it is, or that it would work but it does. But it’s very cool that he could hear your music and say, like, “I can connect with this somehow” or “I want some of what he’s got in my music on this project” or whatever.

ALEX G: Yeah, it’s flattering.

PHAWKER: Yeah. Oughta be. So, tell me, what is your personal relationship with the music of Elliottt Smith?

ALEX G: I just used to listen to him a lot when I was younger. I don’t listen to him as much anymore, probably because I listened to it so much growing up, but I liked it a lot. How he recorded himself too, I think, like I get a lot of comparisons with him and I think it’s because I had learned that he recorded his own music and that inspired me to try and make music like that and record it myself. I would listen to things he did on his songs, you know, I’d hear him singing two vocals at a time, or playing two guitar parts identical on top of each other, and I’d try and mimic that. So I think, I’d like to think I’ve started to stray away from that, from being so close to his sound, but he definitely kindled my interest in making guitar music.

PHAWKER: I actually knew Elliottt Smith, I adore his music. I always tell people that I miss him more than Kurt Cobain. But I think that you were right about that though, on your early albums I can definitely hear his influence in your music, but it sort of disappeared over the last couple of albums or so.

ALEX G: Oh, cool, I’m glad.

ALEX G: I can understand how you’d get tired of constantly hearing people tell you you sound like somebody else. I’m sure that gets old. Especially after you’ve made 12 albums.

ALEX G: Yeah, you know, I get it though. I definitely got it from the older stuff. Because it’s obvious, there are so many textures that are specific to him that I would use, you know?

PHAWKER: Yes, yes. I mean especially those early self-recorded records that he did before he got onto a major, for sure. While we’re talking about influences, not to question your originality, but I can hear a kinship with Olivia Tremor Control, especially on the last two albums. I’m wondering if those guys are even on your radar?

ALEX G: Yeah, I’ve actually never heard them before, but I’ll have to check it out.

PHAWKER: You should check out their album called Dusk At Cubist Castle.

ALEX G: [laughs] Cool!

PHAWKER: Yeah, it’s a really cool album title, and it’s a great psych-pop album. It’s one of the great albums of the mid-’90s. I highly recommend you check it out, but I can totally hear similarities. The other band that I wanted to ask you about is Guided By Voices — I hear them in your music, too. Are they on your radar.

ALEX G: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I should say, like, with Elliottt Smith and Guided By Voices and all these bands I listen to, like, I was never consciously trying to steal, but I did listen to them so much that they definitely bleed through. Guided By Voices was another one where…I think I was fascinated with bands that had a kind of, like, that kind of like DIY sound or something.

PHAWKER: Lo-fi.

ALEX G: I think because I was trying to do the same thing. Hearing them was inspiring because their recording sounds shitty, I have the option of making recordings that sound shitty, and I can still make it great in some way, or, you know what I mean?

PHAWKER: It’s a good shitty, though.

ALEX G: Yeah, right. It’s like a rawness that they all have, like them and Modest Mouse is another band I really obsessively listened to.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk about your new album. Why is it called House of Sugar? Is that related to SugarHouse Casino?

ALEX G: No, you know, people keep asking that. [laughs] It sounds like, ridiculous, but I truly wasn’t thinking about Sugarhouse when I named it. There’s a short story I read called The House Made Of Sugar by Silvina Ocampo. I like her stories a lot and I think that title sorta got lodged in my subconscious, and so I was just throwing names at the wall and somehow that one came to me, and I forgot that I had read it in the story, I forgot about SugarHouse Casino, and I was like ‘Oh, I came up with this great name, The House of Sugar!” But…

PHAWKER: [laughs]

ALEX G: [laughs] I think it probably is the result of all those different influences, you know?

PHAWKER: I’ll have to check out that story and check out her writing. Tell me about this Jacob Portrait fellow, I don’t know anything about him. He’s been mixing all your Domino records and produced the last two, if I’m not mistaken. Tell me who he is and how you got to working with him.

ALEX G: He plays bass in the band Unknown Mortal Orchestra. And he also has a studio in Brooklyn where he mixes bands and stuff. When I signed to Domino, they’re like, ‘Yeah, you can make records the same way you’ve always made records, but we have one requirement: you have to get it mixed. There’s this guy, Jake Portrait, we suggest you work with him.’ And I didn’t really know anything about him. They gave me a couple options and he just seemed like the most laid-back, I guess, and then I worked with him for Beach Music and he did a great job. You know, it’s kinda hard, I’m not used to trusting other people with the recordings like that, so now that I’ve found someone that I can trust, I keep working with him.

PHAWKER: Now did I read that you still record on GarageBand, including the new album, but you did rerecord the drums up in Brooklyn? Is that accurate?

ALEX G: Yeah, that’s accurate.

PHAWKER: So you play every instrument, you play ever part except for the violin or the female backing vocals on the recordings, is that correct?

ALEX G: Pretty much, but I feature my friends on a couple of the songs. Like, I’ll probably forget somebody, but it’s on the liner notes, like, “Walk Away” has my friend Sam Acchione playing electric guitar solo on there, and “Hope” has my friend Tom Kelly playing the drums. There’s other ones, too, I just, I… I’m kinda scatterbrained.

PHAWKER: How do you recreate all the crazy effects, digital manipulations and sonic textures that are on the new album when you play live? Do you just do a more stripped down version of it? Or are you kinda able to recreate it pretty much as it sounds on record?

ALEX G: No, they’re two different experiences, I think. The live stuff we kinda work as a band, for the live show. Once I’m done with the album we’ll all sit down and start practicing these songs, and try out different arrangements. There’s only four of us, so we try out different things like trying to get the essence of the song while obviously not being able to use all the instruments. So if there’s a part where a bunch of synths come in [on the recording], and since we don’t have a synth player we’ll just kick on extra distortion on the guitar, or I’ll do a weird vocal thing to fill in the space.

PHAWKER: Gotcha. You quit Temple after two years to pursue music full time, I’m wondering if music is supporting you, or do you still have to do a day job?

ALEX G: No, I don’t have to do a day job, it’s nice. We tour a lot and that pays the bills.

PHAWKER: Right on, man, congratulations. I’m all for musicians getting paid.

ALEX G: [laughs] Thanks.

PHAWKER: Last question. Tell me about the album cover. All your album covers are really cool, but this — it’s an ice skater painting, a figure skater painting, right?

ALEX G: Yeah, it’s a painting of a figure skater, my sister painted it, actually.

PHAWKER: That’s awesome.

ALEX G: Yeah, she paints all of ‘em. Rachel Giannascoli.

PHAWKER: Okay, that’s really cool. Is she a younger sister or older sister?

ALEX G: She’s older, she’s about nine years older I think. She’s kinda like the reason I know about all this music — like, the reason I grew up listening to Modest Mouse and Elliottt Smith, like all these different bands, like she was — I was kinda stealing CDs out of her room. Or she would play CDs for me, so I trust her taste a lot.

PHAWKER: That’s very cool. I mean is she like a full time painter, is she a professional artist? Or she kinda does it on the side?

ALEX G: No, she has another job. Or she has a job, a day job, but she paints I think, I mean I think it’s a passion, I don’t think I’d be out of line to say that, but she paints not just for me, you know, she’s painting for herself too, other pictures and stuff.

PHAWKER: Please extend my compliments to your sister, I really like her work.

ALEX G: Oh, I will, thanks, I’m glad you think that.

PHAWKER: Last question and I’ll let you go. I like to ask everyone this question. So hypothetical situation: you’re in bed at home, sleeping, middle of the night, there’s a fire, you have to jump out the window. There’s only time to grab one album, what is it and why?

ALEX G: One album…?

PHAWKER: Yes, one LP. I know no one really has albums anymore, or even physical copies, but let’s pretend.

ALEX G: That’s a good question. Right now…

PHAWKER: I wouldn’t think about it too hard, just whatever pops into your head.

ALEX G: I like that Neil Young album Harvest Moon. That’s something I’ve been listening to.

PHAWKER: Beautiful album. Okay, so second part of that question is, what is the last thing you heard that blew you away?

ALEX G: The other day we were driving to Brooklyn, and we put on… apparently there’s The White Album, The Beatles’ White Album outtakes, or something?

PHAWKER: Yes there is.

ALEX G: And I’d never heard it. I’m honestly not even familiar with The White Album or any Beatles record, but those were incredible–

PHAWKER: Yes!

ALEX G: You hear them talking and stuff, and they play this incredible song, but it’s real rough and you hear the creative process — it’s just awesome.

PHAWKER: It is really awesome, they’ve been reissuing and remastering all the Beatles albums, and the guy who produced all those albums was named George Martin– he’s dead now, but his son Giles totally has his father’s ear and he does the incredible new mixes of all the songs from the source material. Plus outtakes and demos and alternate takes. I highly recommend you check out the Abbey Road 50 Anniversary Edition, which is also incredible.

ALEX G: And it has all the outtakes like that?

PHAWKER: Has all the outtakes, weird stuff, yeah. I’ll tell you, what’s really interesting about the outtakes is that for years The Beatles never released any of that kinda stuff, so you just always thought of them as like Gods. Like, ‘Jesus Christ, these guys just like shit out brilliant music!’

ALEX G: [laughs]

PHAWKER: But you know, with these outtakes you can actually hear, like, that they had bad ideas too, or they tried out stuff that didn’t work. It wasn’t immaculate conception, it was trial and error.

ALEX G: Right!

PHAWKER: And they’re human, and it’s just, you know, I think it adds to your respect for the brilliance of the music that they eventually put out. There was a lot of effort put into it, but they always made it sound effortless.

ALEX G: Absolutely. Yeah, that was really cool hearing that.

PHAWKER: Alright man, well, promise me you’ll check out Abbey Road, I think it will blow your fucking mind. Thanks for your time, I wish you luck.

ALEX G: Oh, great, thank you. I gotta listen to Abbey Road.

ALEX G + TOMBERLIN + COREY FLOOD @ UNION TRANSFER SAT. NOV. 30TH

PETE YORN PERFORMS @ THE FOUNDRY ON WED. NOVEMBER 6TH @ 8 PM

BY JONATHAN VALANIA A way out West there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Pete Yorn. Now, above all things, Pete Yorn is a dude. He is, in fact, a dude’s dude. Same as there’s a man’s man and a songwriter’s songwriter, Pete Yorn is a dude’s dude. You can tell even before he opens his mouth, which is when it becomes really obvious. That hair, that denim jacket, those eyes — eyes that have searched soulfully through the racks of a thousand Jersey convenience stores for the perfect microwaveable burrito. He surfs. He lifts weights. He shoots hoops. He does bongs. And, most importantly, chicks dig him. Not just some chicks — all chicks. And he doesn’t even seem to care. That’s why he’s The Dude. That’s what you call him. That, or Duder. His Dudeness. Or El Duderino, if, you know, you’re not into the whole brevity thing. Now, when something makes The Dude happy — and, really, The Dude has so many things to be happy about these days — his voice raises an octave and he cries out, “Sweet!” He says this with a slight drawl, like a farmer calling a pig: soo-weet!

Now this story I’m about to unfold took place back in 2004, I only mention it ’cause sometimes there’s a man–I won’t say a hero, ’cause what’s a hero? But sometimes there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about The Dude here — sometimes there’s a man who, well, he’s the man for his time’n place, he fits right in there — and that’s The Dude, in Los Angeles. They call Los Angeles the City of Angels. I didn’t find it to be that exactly, but I’ll allow as there are some nice folks there.

R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck once mused to an interviewer that people would be surprised how far you can get in the music business by simply showing up for your appointments. The Dude always shows up. Even though he makes it look easy, The Dude works hard. Hell, he toured for 18 months straight to nudge his eminently lovable debut, musicforthemorningafter, to gold-selling status. He’s always worked hard at music, going all the way back to the time he was nine and his brother taught him how to play drums on a right-y kit, even though The Dude’s a lefty. By the time he was 13, he was playing drums and singing in a Replacements cover band called The Cheese. For its big debut, The Cheese was set to perform at the high-school talent show. With an eye for the obvious, even back then, The Dude had ’em work up a version of the Mats’ “Talent Show.” During the dress rehearsal, members of one of the other bands, Backgammon For Troubled Youth (which is quite possibly the worst band name in the history of amateur rock, with the possible exception of The Cheese), liked what they heard and approached The Dude afterward about sitting in on vocals when they performed “Rockin’ In The Free World” at the talent show. A Neil cover? Sweet!

The rest of The Cheese weren’t quite as excited about the idea, and needless to say, they were even less so when Backgammon For Troubled Youth took first prize. But, you know, whatever. All was forgiven when The Dude would “borrow” his mom’s car for a little joyriding and everybody would pile in. Until the day he got caught.

“I was hanging out with five of my buds,” says The Dude. “I had been slowly experimenting with taking the car out-I backed over my friend’s foot once-and that night I felt extra ballsy. I ordered a pizza at the best pizza place ever — I really love pizza — this place in Parsippany, Nino’s Pizzaria on Route 46, and they didn’t deliver. I was like, ‘I’ve been driving around the neighborhood, I’m gonna go get this pizza.’ We get in the car, and ‘Stairway To Heaven’ comes on. I felt a little foreboding, but whatever, so we start driving. And then it starts snowing. I got pulled over. Cop comes up to window and says, ‘Licenseregistrationplease.”

I say, ‘I left it at home.’

He looks at me and says, ‘How old are you, son?’

I go, ‘Uh, 17?’

He goes, ‘How old are you, son?’

‘Fiftee-‘

‘How old are you, boy?’

‘Fourteen.”

Cop turns around and says to his partner, ‘We got another one of these.’ I guess they caught a lot of kids stealing their parents’ cars that night.” When The Dude got out of jail, his mom was pretty mad. Like, F-word mad. The Dude, flexing his budding dudeness, was just like, whatever. That’s why he’s The Dude.

Fast-forward a few years to freshman year at Syracuse. It’s 1992, and The Dude is living in the dorms, jamming on an acoustic guitar with his buds, staying up all night playing Nintendo, smoking bongs and spinning records by Echo & The Bunnymen, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Stone Roses, Smiths, Ride and lots and lots of R.E.M. The Dude had been a heavy-duty R.E.M. fan since back in the day, when his brother made him get in the car and listen to “Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars),” like, super loud. “I remember I was blown away by the way it started real quiet and lo-fi, then got really big and loud,” says The Dude. “I did the same thing with my first album. I thought it would be cool.”

Freshman year was, as The Dude recalls, “a very emotional time.” He had just broken up with his high school sweetheart, his first true love, and his first taste of heartbreak. On top of that, he felt so guilty for turning his parents into empty nesters, he wrote term papers about it. “I remember thinking it was the end of an era, that things would never be the same,” he says. He wrote, like, 200 songs that year. He had just one rule for songwriting: the Five Minute Rule. If he couldn’t finish writing a song in five minutes, it wasn’t worth finishing.

After a lot of beer bongs and soul searching — then more beer bongs — The Dude discovered two things that would dramatically impact his songwriting: He loved Bruce Springsteen and hated Leonard Cohen. “One of my frat brothers was Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son,” The Dude recalls. “My buds were like, ‘That guy’s dad is this awesome singer, check it out.’ He gave me one of his dad’s later discs. I hated it, wound up throwing it out the car window.”

The Dude never liked Springsteen when he was growing up in New Jersey; quite literally, it hit a little too close to home. As anybody who’s ever been there can attest, Jersey is a lot more exotic from a distance. Besides, the Boss was going through his pumped-up, headband-wearing’ Born In The U.S.A. phase. But in college, on of The Dude’s buds told him to, like, check out the early stuff. “He was like, ‘Dude, do a giant bong hit, turn out all the lights and lay down on the floor and listen to a song called ‘New York City Serenade,'” says The Dude. “I was like, ‘That sounds cool.’ After that, I got into all that early stuff.

Despite all the jamming and songwriting, The Dude only did two proper gigs while he was in college. The first time was in a bar, and it was no big deal. But the second time, well, he had somehow gotten roped into performing at another talent contest. It was for a good cause, all the proceeds went to charity, so he’s like, “Fine, whatever.” And guess what? The Dude won first prize. Sweet! “I was like, ‘I might as well go for it now,'” he says. “I don’t want to be past my prime wondering what if.”

After graduating in 1996, The Dude relocated to California and moved in with his brothers — Kevin and Rick — who were climbing their way up the Hollywood ladder. After eight hard years spent taking down gang bangers for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, Kevin had turned to entertainment law. His first celebrity client was Benicio Del Toro. Rick had started working for CAA, a powerful Hollywood talent agency, and he got The Dude a job counting concert tickets. It seems like there were always movie stars hanging out at Casa Yorn. Matt Dillon was a frequent overnight guest; he turned The Dude on to Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes. One day, The Dude came home to find Jim Carrey sitting on the couch, smoking a joint. Sweet!

Though The Dude had two entertainment-industry insiders as brothers, breaking into the music biz was slow going for him. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna get signed within a year,'” he says. Four years later, The Dude still didn’t have a record deal. He had a couple of near misses. He had recorded an album with producer Don Fleming (Sonic Youth, Screaming Trees, Hole) for a label that Daniel Lanois was trying to put together, but the deal fell through and the record got shelved. So he went back to his day job, working as a production assistant for Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films. (“I thought it was fitting because I was from Jersey,” says The Dude.) He continued gigging (mostly at Largo, ground zero of L.A.’s singer/songwriter scene) and sending out demo tapes to labels. Finally, in 1999, Columbia took the bait and signed The Dude. Sweet!

Things only got sweeter when the Farrelly Brothers asked him to score Me, Myself & Irene, which he worked on concurrently with musicforthemorningafter. Columbia pretty much left The Dude alone while he worked on the album with his bud R. Walt Vincent in a “shitty neighborhood” in Van Nuys. “No air conditioning,” says The Dude. “It was like a hundred degrees in there.” The Dude took his time, and a year later, in May 2000, he finished his debut. Like The Dude himself, musicforthemorningafter is a lovable hunk of unshaven folk rock, with a strummy heart wrapped in denim vulnerability and the nostalgic ghost of ’80s college radio: the Smiths’ brittle sob stories, R.E.M.’s kidzu jangle, high-toned Joy Division bass lines.

Columbia used the same slow-build approach to market the album. musicforthemorningafter was released in March 2001 to light fanfare and very modest sales. But The Dude kept plugging away, opening up for anyone who would have him. Semisonic. The Hours, Sunny Day Real Estate. Bands that have long since eaten his dust. MTV2 started playing the video for “Life On A Chain,” and suddenly everybody wanted a piece of The Dude. For 18 months straight, he stayed out on the road.

“We were having fun with it, just watching it build,” he says. “I remember Christmas 2001, we sold 17,000 copies in one week.” The rooms got bigger. The crowds got bigger. The gossip papers were linking him with Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder, the ultimate sign of alt-rock ascendancy. One night, he was playing in Seattle at the Crocodile, the rock club owned by Peter Buck’s wife. The R.E.M. guitarist came out for the show and afterward went up to The Dude and told him he loved his song “Just Another.” The Dude told Buck that Columbia wanted him to record a more revved-up, radio-ready version of “Strange Condition.” (The Dude always abides.) Would Buck consider playing on it? “Love to,” said Buck. Sweet!

Back in 2004, this was a typical day in the life of The Dude in Los Angeles: He gets up, not too early, but when he does, he appreciates it. Maybe he goes for a run. Two-and-a-half, maybe three miles. Then it’s time for breakfast, which is usually scrambled eggs and lox at his favorite diner, Early World, near his home in Brentwood. Then maybe he’ll surf the net and log on to the message boards on his Web site. He uses the screen name Lou Reed, but all the regulars know it’s him. Then maybe he’ll boogaloo over to Poquito Mas or Baja Fresh and get a burrito. Never could get a decent burrito back in Jersey. They were always wet. The Dude hates that. Or maybe he’ll go surfing or just do a few curls. The Dude looks skinny in photos, but he’s got guns. “I don’t even lift much, like maybe once a week,” The Dude figures, “and my friends are like, ‘Dude, you’re bustin’ out!'”

And then maybe he’ll visit his grampa. He’s 94, and every moment is precious. The Dude loves the guy. Straight off the boat from Poland in 1919, he built a life for the Yorns in the New World with his bare hands. Sold vacuum cleaners during the Depression, then he was a mechanic. Had his own garage. And then he was a baker. Had his own bakery. Put his kid through dental school. Grampa worked hard, man. He got a shoutout on 2004’s Day I Forgot. “Old man in the kitchen/I think he’s part of me,” The Dude sings on “All At Once.”

Or maybe he’ll go bowling with Rick or Kevin. “I just hope I’m lucky enough to grow old with my brothers,” says The Dude. Maybe he’ll hang out with his mom and pop. Or maybe he’ll go over to a buddy’s house and watch The Big Lebowski. “Pretty much simple shit, ya know?” says The Dude. The only thing he won’t be doing, however, is nothing. The Dude is like a shark–he’s gotta keep moving or he sinks to the bottom. Always been like that. Used to get sent home from Hebrew school for being too hyper. He doesn’t get to services too much these days, but the basic tenets of the faith he was raised in still seem pretty solid to The Dude: “Be a good person, treat people well, have respect for everything, don’t wish ill of people even if they aren’t so nice.”

The Dude seems like a walk-between-the-raindrops kind of guy — and during my time with him he certainly made being Pete Yorn look easy —  but just like you and me The Dude’s got stress. Like, under pressure, from within and without. You see, there are people — his family and his record company — that are looking out for The Dude and they have big plans for him, plans that were set into motion long ago. “My dad had it planned all along,” says The Dude. “He encouraged Kevin to move out to California, Rich would follow and then he could move mom out there and retire. It worked.”

The Yorns are tight. Like, dynasty tight. And The Dude’s brother Rick — who taught him how to play drums, who showed him R.E.M., who even played in The Dude’s band when he first moved to Los Angeles — he’s got plans for him, too. Make him big, like, Ben Affleck-big. And why not? The Dude’s got the look. He’s got tunes, good hair, he works hard, chicks dig him. Sweet!

I mean, you really have to make an effort not to like The Dude. And some do. There’s a lot of bitter talk going around the biz. Real catty, sorority-sister, hair-pulling bullshit. His brothers used their clout to get him where he is, they say. And there’s some truth in that. But it isn’t what people think. It’s not like The Dude got off the plane in Hollywood and his brothers picked him up and drove him to the spotlight. “I wish it worked like that, because we love Pete and I wish I had that much power,” says Kevin Yorn. “Pete did this all on his own. People who think we pulled strings for him don’t understand how the music business works. Music either stands on its own or it falls.”

“You know what it is?” asks R. Walt Vincent, the man behind the recording console on musicforthemorningafter and Day I Forgot. “A fuckload of jealousy by not-so-successful artists. And I hope it makes them feel better. You might be able to buy an opportunity to get your music heard by people, but you can’t make them like your songs.”

When the Yorn brothers arrived in Los Angeles, they couldn’t afford furniture. It would be years before Matt Dillon and Jim Carrey started showing up. “I remember my brothers both slept on the same futon for, like, a year,” says The Dude, who spent four times that long trying to get a record deal. And when he did get his shot, he worked his ass off. Tour for a year and a half without interruption? He’s there. Smile for a camera? Cheese. In-stores? Not a problem. A Farrelly Brothers movie score? Sweet!

When it became time to make a follow-up to musicforthemorningafter he started recording again with Vincent. The Dude wanted to rock out more. No more loops, no more ’80s drum machines, no more holding back on the vocals the way Vincent got him to do on musicforthemorningafter, because, like, The Dude was feelin’ these songs. And when The Dude is feelin’ it, he yarls — which is fast becoming the mullet of vocal styles. “When I first met Pete, he sang much more, um, testosterone rock,” says Vincent. “My girlfriend teases him about singing like Eddie Vedder. He thinks it’s a huge compliment.”

The Columbia brass didn’t wasn’t a singer/songwriter record, they wanted a rock record. They were ready to push the button, to drop the big dime — AT&T even wanted a piece of the tour — but they needed something they could sell to the KROQ kids. This was album two, The Dude’s last chance to establish himself as a rock artist. Another quirky, romantic, singer/songwriter album would lock him in the triple-A ghetto and throw away the key. If he lost some of his original fan base with this record, the thinking went, he could always get them back on the third record. “We did a lot of blistering guitar rock, and there were a few slower, tug-at-your-heart songs,” says Vincent. “There was lot of pressure. You could feel the commercial elements saying, ‘Give us something we can shoot to the moon,’ and the fans were saying, ‘Don’t sell out.’ And the elements that wanted this record to rock a little more won out.” Andy Wallace, the guy who made Nirvana sound so cherry, was brought in to give it that patina of compressed sizzle that radio loves.

The problem with Day I Forgot is it makes you do something no second album should: It makes you miss the first album. On musicforthemorningafter, you might be able to hear The Dude’s record collection in his songs, but you could also hear The Dude. Day I Forgot isn’t a bad album, it’s just not a very good album — and I still think he has it in him to make a great one. The early reviews have been polite, purchased or downright dismissive. Rolling Stone gave it a two-star review that could be summed up in one word: blah. Not that The Dude cares. “You know, somebody told me a long time ago that if you are going to believe the good reviews, you have to believe the bad ones,” he says. “So I just stopped reading them.” No biggie: The Dude’s not much of a reader, anyway. And besides, reviews don’t really matter — at this point, he’s critic-proof. The first week out of the gate musicforthemorningafter sold 2,000 copies. Day I Forgot sold 73,000. Sweet!

Well, that’s pretty much the story of The Dude in Los Angeles circa 2004. He loved his parents (probably still does), his brothers were well-connected Hollywood insiders (they still are), his record company wanted him to sell a lot of albums (they still do) and AT&T wanted him to sell a lot of phones. Whatever. It could’ve been a lot worse. The Dude knows this. He’s always known this.

That’s why The Dude abides.

_______

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since the release of musicforthemorningafter  and The Day I Forgot, Pete Yorn has released five albums, two live albums and seven EPs. His latest release, Apart, an EP of duets with Scarlett Johansson, dropped in July. Yorn is currently in the midst of a career retrospective solo acoustic tour that stops at the Ardmore Music Hall this Thursday, September 27th. Phawker’s Henry Savage got Yorn on the phone yesterday. DISCUSSED: His just-released duet with Liz Phair on a cover of The Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man”; Serge Gainsbourg; Brigitte Bardot; Guided By Voices; Howard Stern; Bruce Springsteen; David Bowie; his three year old daughter’s love affair with vintage Madonna; Iggy Pop; the Butcher Brothers; Mick Ronson’s guitar Ziggy Stardust; his favorite ScarJo movie.

PHAWKER: What prompted the decision to do a solo acoustic tour? Any hints about what people can expect?

PETE YORN: I started doing these solo tours in about 2014, on and off. At first I wanted the challenge of forcing myself on stage with just my guitar and see what I could do with that. It ended up being a fun thing for me and the fans, so I’ve been doing them on and off for a few years now. The main thing about it is that it’s a really spontaneous show, when it’s just me I have a lot of material I can go to that I’ve been messing around with since I’ve been 13 years old, a lot more than I’m able teach my band. It’s a lot of requests, there’s really no setlist, it’s an intimate, fun sing-along kind of night. It’s a way for me to get out and play songs, sometimes I just want to sing these songs and play music.

PHAWKER: I wanted to say very nice job on “Here Comes Your Man.” Do you remember the circumstances to first hearing the Pixies and what your reaction was?

PETE YORN: I can’t remember when or where I was when I first heard that song, but I do remember it affecting me. There’s only a few songs I heard for the first time that stopped me in my tracks, and “Here Comes Your Man” was definitely one of those songs. It might’ve been the video on 120 Minutes, it very likely might’ve been that. I used to love 120 Minutes on MTV and I would stay up after my bedtime to watch it because it was on at 11 o’clock on Sunday nights. I would sneak downstairs to watch it or tape them on VHS and watch it the next day over and over. That song just the melody of it and everything about it I loved. I also felt the same way about “Gigantic” when I heard that song. Thank you for giving it a thumbs up, I appreciate it.

PHAWKER: How did Liz Phair get involved with this cover?

PETE YORN: Liz is an old friend from when I first started making music. We had the same producer for both of our debut records, this guy Brad Wood, we might’ve met through him. He became friends with other friends of mine and one of them is this guy Doc Dauer who recorded and co-produced this whole covers record I did and one of those songs is “Here Comes Your Man” and the rest are kind of sitting on the sidelines right now. I think I was on tour and Doc is friends with Liz too and he just called her in and got her over to the studio, and she sang on it when I wasn’t even there. Then he sent it to me and I was like, “Oh my god, this is so great,” it was like a nice surprise. Thinking back I had worked with Liz before, I played drums on a few songs on her record and she sang on a “Suspicious Minds” cover that I did a few years ago. She’s awesome, she’s out on tour now too.

PHAWKER: Scarlett Johansson has duetted with two people: you and David Bowie. That’s pretty good company. What’s your favorite David Bowie song and why?

PETE YORN: I just saw yesterday, I think it was like the 40th or so anniversary, I think of his song “Heroes” being released. When I heard that song for the first time it really stayed with me. I went to summer camp in the Catskills in upstate New York and I remember I was probably 11 or 12, and I used to go the canteen which was like where the kids would hang out at night. They had a jukebox and I used to go in there when I was too shy to talk to girls or anything like that, but I would go up to the jukebox with limited songs, but they had Modern Love. It was brand new at the time, and I used to just put a quarter in and play that song. I loved hearing that song and it always just gave me a good feeling.

One thing I also love is “China Girl,” I did a cover of it a few years ago. I recorded it on a very stormy night in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania at a studio by these guys, The Butcher Brothers. I wanted to cover it because I always loved Bowie’s version, but I had never heard Iggy’s version and when I heard his version it inspired me to cover it because I thought it had a real rock and roll vibe. So that song was very influential to me and I loved “Blue Jea” too. I remember as a kid seeing that video and years later I rediscovered it and it’s just such a cool song. Then there’s earlier Bowie stuff like Ziggy Stardust and the Mick Ronson guitar, it was one of the first things I learned to play on the guitar. There’s another song “Ashes to Ashes” and that song is killer. He couldn’t really mess up, he was great.

PHAWKER: You’ve collaborated with Scarlett Johansson twice, there’s the   just released Apart, an EP of duets that came out back in June, and The Break Up, an LP’s worth of duets with her that came out in 2009. How did the ScarJo collaboration originally come together?

PETE YORN: Scarlett’s an old friend, I’ve known since she was probably 15 years old, maybe even younger. She knew my brother’s first, and I met her in a club in New York I think maybe like 2000-2001. She came up to me and said, “Your Pete!” I guess she had maybe seen a picture of me or something. I was like “Hey! What’s up?” and she said, “I’m Scarlett, I know your brothers,” in her New York accent. The whole thing working with her in the first place was I had gotten into the idea of wanting to make a record sort of like Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot, like having a beautiful starlet sing on a song. I remember thinking “Who is the Brigitte Bardot of today?” and it’s Scarlett. I hadn’t talked to her in a year and I texted her and called her at the right time. I said, “I have this idea for a record, do you want to sing some songs?” She said sure and we got together and made some music, then years later we got back together and made some more music.

PHAWKER: It was almost a 10 year gap between recordings, did it come together that way or did you plan to take time off before the next project?

PETE YORN: There was no plan at all, just kind of timing I guess. We actually recorded The Break Up in 2006 so it was even longer than 10 years if you really want to know the truth. When timing works out I can get together with her and make some music.

PHAWKER: What was the inspiration for the cover art for Apart? It has a retro capital logo and an old-style feel to it.

PETE YORN: I’m a fan of old records and that kind of aesthetic. So I have a lot of albums where I love the old logo on the album art and I always ask for it like, “Can you get me one of those stereophonic, old rectangle boxes you see on old record sleeves?”

The cover came together when we were shooting the video and the director, Sophie Muller, she just started taking some stills while we were in our clothes for the video. She got these really great pictures where she had a screen behind the car with our faces projected onto it, and she took a series of pictures and afterward she sent them and they just looked really neat. I thought it had an interesting vibe and I thought it really highlighted the whole “apart” concept where we’re not really with each other at all in the photos, we’re kind of looming over each other in the back, in the rear view. I like the colors of it a lot as well, the greens and reds popped a lot.

PHAWKER: It’s well-known you’re a big Springsteen fan — favorite Boss song and why?

PETE YORN: Oh wow. Springsteen, it’s so hard to pick a favorite. I’ll say, right now, going mid-era Bruce, “Bobby Jean.” As a disclaimer there, that’s just today it could change tomorrow, but I love that song.

PHAWKER: So I have it on good authority you’re a big Guided By Voices fan — favorite GBV song and why?

PETE YORN: GBV is one of my all time favorite bands, Guided by Voices was a very big influence on me. For GBV, I’ll throw Big Boring Wedding, I love that line: [singing] “Pass the word, the chicks are back.” I always used to love that.

PHAWKER: What is your favorite Scar Jo movie and why?

PETE YORN: Oh maybe, Match Point! which I always loved. I’ll go and stick with that for right now.

PHAWKER: What was the last album or song that made you change the way you look at the world’ Or if that’s too grandiose, what have you been listening to recently that makes you happy?

PETE YORN: [laughing] I’m sad to say mostly Howard Stern on SiriusXM. I listen to a lot of Howard interviews when I’m in the car! Frankly, because I have a 3 year old little girl, she loves Madonna, especially early Madonna. So we’ve been listening to like Get Into the Groove. I’m kind of rediscovering some stuff because of my daughter and what she’ll let me listen to because she’ll start whining if she doesn’t want to hear something. Ironically when I drove her home from the hospital when she was born, the first music she ever heard was Madonna just because by coincidence we got into the car and the radio turned on and maybe Ray of Light was on the radio or something like that. Two and a half years later she kind of likes her voice, so it’s kind of funny.

PHAWKER: What can people expect at Ardmore Music Hall on Thursday?

PETE YORN: There’s a lot of new music coming. I kind of hit a creative spurt in the first half of 2018 and I created a lot of new music that I’m going to start dishing out pretty soon. I’ll probably be playing some new songs that nobody’s heard before on this tour. I don’t want to send everyone to the bathroom at once, but I’ll pepper ‘em in, in a respectful kind of way of course. It will be tons of old stuff, fun new stuff, and tons of requests. It should be pretty cool, so please come!

PETE YORN PERFORMS @ THE FOUNDRY ON WED. NOVEMBER 6TH @ 8 PM