Plush—“Conversation with Schroeder”
by Jonathan Donaldson

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the work of Plush, let me begin with a little history. Plush is basically the work of Liam Hayes of Chicago, and whatever rock orchestra he can pull together for a given recording project. He began his career with a 1994 Drag City single, "Found a Little Baby" b/w "3/4 Blind Eyes," which was the best piece of sixties-style pop to bear the mark of a double A-side in years. Holding this single in my hand, I know that it's a pop classic. But is this Liam Hayes? I wonder, looking at the fuzzy haired cartoon caricature on the sleeve.

Hayes sings with the style and conviction of John Lennon and when he drifts into falsetto, as he often does, it evokes the sweetly feminine quality of Brian Wilson. Instrumentally, Plush's work could be compared to George Harrison's first solo record (think "I'll Have You Anytime") and The White Album (think "Dear Prudence") crossed with dead-on Wilson/ Bacharach style arranging. Plush has raised the bar for me on what I thought possible for orchestrally arranging rock music in this digital age where the life is compressed out of most every flat-sounding CD that hits the used bins.

With the delayed release of a follow up, 1998's More You Becomes You (also on Drag City), fans awaited the second coming of Plush as if he were George Martin himself in purple velvet hunched over a Gretch guitar, with the great ghosts of the past surrounding him for the session date. But instead of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Pet Sounds Band, we got Liam Hayes smacked-out on a grand piano, performing a solo song cycle. In the span of two releases, we went from grandiose to absolutely sparse. The songs on More You Becomes You weren't as strong as the "Found a Little Baby” single—but something of interest was happening here. We were seeing Hayes' pop smarts unfolding in a very raw form. One gets the impression that he's making it up as he goes along, finding a little groove and then going for a big, unusual chord change, waxing his most elusive as he goes for the odd Joni Mitchell- style melody. Hayes seems to be playing a game of challenging himself to keep the songs coming; being as daring as he can with his simple, but well defined color strokes, reaching deep into the well of his pop-consciousness for the most obtuse melodies he can find.

Hayes maybe have been attempting to deliver an anti-climax, much like The White Album was the opposite of Pepper with its blank cover, or how the greatest piece from the Beach Boys post-Pet Sounds project, “Surfs Up,” is basically a free-associative unaccompanied piano piece.

Notably on More You Becomes You, Hayes sounded depressed, with lyrics like "I didn't know life was so sad, I cried." I even heard some strains of classic torch-pop, ala Laura Nyro's New York Tendaberry, showing how easily Hayes is able to tap into the feminine side of his persona with his melodic moodiness and that falsetto. But, man, what is this guy so depressed about? That he has remained relatively unknown? That he just wasn’t made for these times? That he woulda been big time about 35 years ago? That he is a master of one tiny little style of rock that now just has a cult following? Probably all of the above. Or that he has to spend all his dough to make the recordings he knows he's capable of—recordings on par with other holy grail-sters like Ron Sexsmith, Fugu, Jim O'Rourke, Jon Brion, Louis Phillipe—and half of these other guys are producers, with all the time in the world to sit around figuring out how to make shit sound great!

Now I'm confronted with the big daddy of them all—another four years later—my little shy depressed wonderboy returns with Fed on the Japanese label P-Vine. Let me just say that Mr. Hayes' proper follow up to the massive single he launched eight years ago has big hairy purple velvet balls. Gone are the slightly smacked out longings. Gone is Brian Wilson cooing paradoxically, and come is the cocaine hangover of—Robert Plant?!? Hayes leads a laser-tight band on a 1971-sounding tour-de-force. We have a full-on seventies horn section—at times resorting to soulful hits and accents—plus winds on some tracks and, most impressively, a full-on string section. We're not talking “Eleanor Rigby” though. Think Shaft, straight up. Orchestrations also sometimes echo Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. The songwriting is tight, with echoes of Carole King and John Lennon. But it sounds like the Brian Wilson part of the persona has been exiled for the time being. Apparently he just didn't fit in at this party; too insecure, maybe.

I conducted this interview with Liam Hayes in August of 2002, via email. I sent him a list of questions which he answered on a jetset bumpy flight from Sydney to Tokyo. In general, our correspondence was extraordinarily friendly, and I found his answers to be pointedly funny, at times sarcastic, and intelligent. Perhaps what was most revealing were the questions that he chose not to answer, most of which dealt with my comparing his music to other artists. If anything, I felt like he was mocking me. To that end, I compare him to Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, who when asked by a fellow architect what he thought of his work, replied, “I don’t.”

Scram: between 1999 and 2002, you disappeared from the music scene. Where did you go?
Liam Hayes: Where the action wasn’t. Part of the time was spent putting this record together.

Scram: I know you appeared in a movie [High Fidelity].
LH: Yes I did. I got to pretend I was playing and singing while the main character pretended to listen.

Scram: Well, I am so glad to see you’re back! I’ve been waiting. Once I thought that I discovered a new Plush record on-line, only to discover it was a Christian band. Rats! Ever heard of them?
LH: That’s interesting. Doesn’t the bible say something about not taking a trademarked name in vain? Time for them to have a prayer session with the lawyers.

Scram: In the meantime, you changed labels, from Chicago’s famous Drag City to the lesser known Japanese label P-Vine. What prompted a move?
LH: P-Vine believed in it, made a serious offer, and were willing to make it a priority.

Scram: Were there issues with Drag City?
LH: They’re a good label. It just ended up costing more than they were willing to pay.
[I've since found out the cost of Fed was well into six-figures. Understandably, Hayes was looking for significant compensation from a label to help cover the costs of recording for which he scraped together claw, tooth, and nail, and mostly on credit. A longtime friendship with a higher-up at Drag City could do little to keep Hayes faithful, since a label of that size simply doesn’t have that kind of cash to give to artists with extravagant/ perfectionist leanings. Rhetorically, how much do you think it costs to make a Smog record?]

Scram: Do you have a fan base in Japan? They are notorious for their love of soft-rock—which your work up to this point has certainly touched on auspiciously.
LH: I don’t know… could be.

Scram: Plush is really just you, right?
LH: Yes, I’m the sole survivor.

Scram: But you’re touring with a band?
LH: We just finished a tour of Japan.

Scram: Any big differences you can mention about Japan?
LH: People don’t act like naked savages in public there.

Scram: Let’s talk about people acting like savages. I live in Boston! Any memories of your last show here? I think it was at TT the Bears in Cambridge with Rufus Wainwright?
LH: Maybe that rogue Christian Plush was on the bill, but we certainly weren’t. I’ve never played Boston. We were supposed to. I think it was in ’98. We had come from NYC and were booked to TT the Bears. I remember reading some piece in a Boston rag… some girl saying she’d heard all this hype on our band and was going to check out the show just to confirm her negative expectations. Namely, that it wouldn’t be up to the hype. I don’t know what she ended up doing that evening, but the venue was closed due to fire damage from an overactive tandoori oven next door. I was happy to drive home.
Scram: That's Boston. People are so negative here. Look at the Red Sox—the only cheer we have for them is “Yankees Suck!” It’s ridiculous. You don’t want to play here anyway, and if you do, I’d recommend The Paradise. It’s really one of the last great clubs here and the bills are usually pretty solid.

Scram: Let’s dig into this beautiful new album. Track one, “Whose Blues”: you seem to be exiting the sensitive role you played on More You Becomes You and reappearing amid a bashing brass arrangement with a bit of a cocky swagger, ala Robert Plant. Is Zeppelin an influence on you?
LH: No. (…uncomfortable virtual silence…)

Scram: Well, let me milk you for another comparison. The legato string interlude introduced after the three-minute mark has a very Curtis Mayfield, Shaft-like feel to it. In other songs I hear bits of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Are you conscious that you might be moving from a sixties-inspired sound into a more seventies-inspired sound on this album?
LH: It’s partly Tom’s influence [arranger Tom Tom 84 who goes way back to Earth, Wind & Fire]. I heard quite a bit of that music growing up. It was popular, so it was everywhere and left an impression.

Scram: Tell me about Tom Tom—what exactly does he do? Score and everything? Where it says in the booklet that you did additional arrangements on certain songs, what does that mean? Did Tom Tom arrange “Found a Little Baby” as well?
LH: Tom worked with me, took what I had written and cleaned some of it up, prepared it for performance. There are parts throughout that are mine that he kept. In many songs he just did his thing… horns and strings and really shaped the tune. A lot of the winds are mine. “Additional arrangements” are the songs that I arranged from beginning to end.

Scram: “Whose Blues” comes to a climax with the jarring lyric, “my creation has drowned me,” which suggests to me Dr. Frankenstein. You also talk about living for “something else”… this may sound corny, but are you talking about being Plush, or growing into a cog in society?
LH: Both. Nobody knows what to do with a wish giving tree. It’s not the tree's fault.

Scram: Going along with this sentiment, I wonder if the thing to which you assert: “it’s my time” in track two, “I’ve Changed My Number” is related to your involvement in the music business, or rather something involving a personal relationship or your relationship with society.
LH: It’s my time and how I choose to use it. One way not to spend it: getting caught up in other people’s trips.

Scram: Well, thanks for not changing your number in this case. Are you tired of people interested in Plush trying to contact you?
LH: No. I like knowing that people are listening.

Scram: I get a sense that you have an interesting relationship with the character that is Plush. Are you more “Plush” in real life, or more Liam Hayes—or are the two inseparable? Like the Other Music review of Fed states about you, are you are an international man of mystery, like the James Bond of music? Or do you have a real life that is comprised of a job, bills, a lease, pals, a goldfish? Or are you a really a rock star?
LH: Please don’t include the goldfish in all that nonsense. He’s the only thing that’s real, the rest isn’t.

Scram: The bizarre photo montage within your CD features you in a Superman-like stature, a grocery stock boy, and a billy goat knocking down a pyramid of cans in a sterile white installation setting. Is it just for fun, or is that linked to any particular art movement?
LH: Yes, advertising.

Scram: I think I remember reading somewhere that you are like a rock n’ roll vagabond, sitting on the park benches of Chicago as in your new single “Greyhound Bus Station.” Also I have heard that like Mr. Morrissey, you’ve never had a job because you’ve never wanted one—any truth to this, or a bunch of crap?
LH: Never wanted one and never kept one. For me music is the only thing worth doing.

Scram: Back to “I’ve Changed My Number,” the chorus is very Carole King, with the lyric, “They say, isn’t that the way that it feels…” Are you commenting on depression and dealing with people confronting you about depression?
LH: Look, most of the people I’ve met want you to do more than simply acknowledge them and their condition. They want you to empathize. Now you have two depressed people where there was just one before.

Scram: I make this assertion about depression considering that your first single contains lyrics such as “gonna be another lonely day” and “what’s so bad about dying.” Likewise, on More You Becomes You, one can’t be sure if you are laughing or crying when you sing the lyric “it took me so long.” Clearly, yours are not the lyrics of someone perennially happy, like Stevie Wonder for instance.
LH: Do you think that Stevie Wonder needs therapy?

Scram: Maybe he does these days. There is something a little sinister about “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and “That’s What Friends Are For.” Sticking with this Motown theme, I want to go back to my earlier comment about Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. The over-all sounds of the first two songs are very similar—they were obviously meant to go together, as are “No Education” and “The Sound of San Francisco,” and “Unis” and “Born Together.” Is this intended to get that What’s Going On effect, where the songs actually run together?
LH: I like the idea of a record that has a beginning, middle, and end as opposed to just a collection of songs.

Scram: Were they recorded at the same time as a suite? It’s really neat to see two different songs come from the same seed. If the songs were in fact recorded separately, you all did a very nice job putting it together.
LH: No they were not recorded at the same time. And thanks.

Scram: Incidentally, how long did it take to record Fed?
LH: Years.

Scram: Was it recorded on tape or with a computer, or both?
LH: Tape. Computers take too long to do everything.

Scram: I've noticed that Chicago’s finest turned the knobs on this record—Steve Albini, John McEntire, Bob Weston—so you must not have been living in Japan.
LH: Don’t assume.

Scram: Either way, does being in the Chicago music “glitterati” afford you to work with these engineers? Are they the greatest in the world or what?
LH: Being a seventh degree glitterati prohibits me from discussing what goes on in our meetings. I can however tell you that they certainly do know how to rock the mic collection.

Scram: A fringe benefit of working with McEntire (Tortoise, Stereolab) must’ve been his drumming talents, which he lends so nicely to the jazzy feel of track three, “Blown Away.” The song also has a really enjoyable, slightly obtuse chordal/ melodic structure. The “one man dies” section is really breathtaking—it really reminds me of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (Bacharach-David), which has that irregular waltz time feel as well.
LH: It didn’t start out that way. I originally wrote it for guitar and then moved it over to piano. I suppose the instrumentation (upright bass, piano, and drums) automatically puts it in some sort of jazz context.

Scram: What is your attitude towards chords? Are you pretty liberated with the movements that you make? Do you use them as the building blocks of the song and then impose the arrangements upon them?
LH: This is a hard question to answer. Chords. Can’t live without them. Chords move. They have to. Up and down they go. It’s very liberating, the movement, you know. Chords are imposing. You notice them when they enter a song.

Scram: Track 5, “Greyhound Bus Station,” is perhaps the happiest song you have ever released, a clear choice for a single, a relationship song for a relationship that didn’t quit get off the ground. Yet is the sun coming out here?
LH: I think it is a happy song. The other person that’s being addressed won’t sing along, but that doesn’t stop me from harmonizing.

Scram: But it's the happiest song and you still have to ride a Greyhound? What gives?
LH: Who cares if it’s a Greyhound? Sure, it’s depressing, but at least you’re out of the house having an adventure.

Scram: I really think that lyric is funny: “sitting in the park for lack of ambition.” Very Lennonesque, and the melody on the big chord change is bizarre in a Lennonesque way. You obviously don’t suffer from lack of ambition if you composed and produced this album together with some thirty people.
LH: It was a major undertaking. Everybody was challenged and we did what seemed impossible

Scram: Is that what you like to think of Plush, if you will forgive my pandering language: do you keep the rock star fantasy of Plush seated on a park bench too cool for school?
LH: Fantasy?
[I suppose I should acknowledge that I am projecting here. I think Liam is fantastic, so I must think he thinks he’s fantastic. Or something like that. Plus, I wouldn’t mind achieving his level of rock stardom, which to me, is fantasy.]

Scram: Or too smart for education? As we see in the next song, one of my favorites, “No Education”—it really just has such a beautiful lyric—“Never read a book in my life, but I feel just fine, I’m alright/ Now is the time that I feel so inspired.” It makes sense that a creature of the soul would never read a book, but turn instead to song, for music is pure emotion. Comment?
LH: I’m not saying that I don’t read, never read, or that it’s not a worthwhile activity. At the time I’d just met somebody who was very intellectual, a brainiac, and they were applying that to their music. Maybe it’s interesting in small doses, but I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. Many do. This song is not for them.

Scram: I hate to bring them up again, I’m not even a big fan, but “No Education” kind of has the same subtle sexy power of “No Quarter” by Led Zeppelin—or maybe it’s just the chorus on the guitar. Do you think that effects pedals are coming back in for guitar players, or is that just you experimenting with that sound?
LH: I don’t know what’s in or out. I’ve been playing with the same set-up for the last twelve years.

Scram: This is in fact a different version of the "No Education" single that was released in '97, correct?
LH: Yes.

Scram: What motivated you to re-record it?
LH: I’d always wanted to do it with an arrangement.

Scram: “No Education” really has a fantastic outro—you dueting with the French horn (or is it English?). Also, the strings are splendid on the “feel alright” section. Really an outstanding track—very powerful. By now you must be starting to learn more about what the different horns and winds sound like specifically, how and when to use them in an arrangement. Can you impart some of your discoveries on me?
LH: What you are refering to is a French horn and a Flugel horn. It’s really just what sounded good. I can recommend a book: “The Study of Orchestration” by Samuel Adler. That’s what I taught myself with.

Scram: You must be happy with track seven, “The Sound of San Francisco?” (which along with the diabolical title track, “Fed,” will really reward fans of "Found a Little Baby" / "3/4 Blind Eyes" with lush strings and horns, prominent organ and a chugging chorus-driven guitar). The way you say those “yeah’s” really makes me feel good!
LH: Good.

Scram: There’s actually some Christ imagery here, am I right? Mention of bread and the lyric “Woke up today, said who’d gonna be my keeper?/ Said on the way, who’s gonna feed these people?” Any explanation for this? Is this designed to go along with some of the other spiritual/ philosophical references on the record?
LH: It was taken from a dream. San Francisco was and still is a weird place. In the dream it was even weirder. There is a Christ-type figure, yes, but he’s really just as disconnected as everyone else. It’s not really religious.

Scram: I want to mention track nine, “Born Together,” the ballad of the album. It's a lovely, bittersweet song that grows on me with each listen, as I am able to absorb some of the frightful originality of it bit by bit. It features an acoustic guitar with what sounds like a string trio. The feminine side of your songwriting really comes out here. I imagine Phil Spector arranging a John Lennon song like “Julia” from The White Album. All the little pieces, how it is put together, very unique. Do you have any special feelings about it? Did you arrange the strings here or did Tom Tom?
LH: I really like the song and always enjoy playing it. I did the arrangement

Scram: My last question: What is next for Plush?
LH: Breakfast.

Daniel Clowes interviewed by Steve Mandich

June 15, 2001: Daniel Clowes is at the Seattle International Film Festival doing press before the premiere of Ghost World, the celluloid adaptation of his well-received serial comic. Clowes, wearing a windbreaker over his button-down shirt, is booked for a busy afternoon of interviews. I was given my 20 minutes with him at 3:30. He is easy-going and surprisingly chatty. We speak in room 426 of the Sheraton Hotel.

SCRAM: Is Goofie Gus something you made up?
CLOWES: No, Goofie Gus is completely mine. It was a toy I had as a kid, actually, and we tried to get it in the movie originally. They have all these problems with clearances and rights and things like that, and they said, “We can’t trace this back to the original toy company, so we can’t let you use it in the film.” I was like, “But you don’t understand! It’s very important that we get this in the film!” So at the last minute they said, “Well, if you change it like 33 percent then you can use it.” So we put this ridiculous blonde wig on it. (laughs) It’s one of the most absurd things I’ve ever seen. In the film you can’t quite see it so it just looks like a weird doll of some kind. But I took the prop home, since it was my Goofie Gus in the first place, and I had it on display with the wig on it. People wonder, “What? Why did you put the wig on it?” That was the most ridiculous thing.

SCRAM: Enid’s record that was in the comic was the same record used in the movie?
CLOWES: That’s the same record. I wrote the script and I put in a scene where it said “Enid plays this haunting children’s record,” and I never identified what it was. [Co-writer/director] Terry [Zwigoff] is very specific about his musical tastes and I always thought, “He only likes jazz from 1931 or before. If I played him this song he’d think this was the worst song and he’d never go for it.” And he kept saying, “We need to have a song, we’re making the movie, we need a song for this scene.” And I just thought, “I gotta wait for the right moment to play this thing for him.” We actually shot the scene where she isn’t even listening to a record, so there’s no music. So I said, “Come on, will you listen to this? Maybe you’ll think it’s okay? I think it’ll work…” And he’s like, “Why didn’t you play this for me before? It’s great! It’s perfect!” “Oh jeez, I should have played this for him three years ago.”

SCRAM: Is that the same record you had in mind when you drew the comic?
CLOWES: Yeah.

SCRAM: What is it? Who sings that?
CLOWES: There were these two girls named Patience & Prudence, who were the daughters of some producer at Liberty Records, and their big #1 hit was “Tonight You Belong to Me.” They did two or three other singles, and “A Smile and a Ribbon” was the b-side to one. Only Prudence sings it, not her sister Patience. I bought it when I was a teenager for some reason. I was always embarrassed to tell people that I thought it was a really strong emotional song for me. I couldn’t quite figure out why.

SCRAM: It was touching scene in the movie.
CLOWES: It’s very hard to make stuff like that work.

SCRAM: The opening scene with that Indian dance video: was that something shot for the movie or was that something you found someplace?
CLOWES: It was one of those tapes that guys like me get from people, where you get like a 20th generation tape: “Hey, you gotta see this, man.” A friend of mine who was house-sitting for this guy--Peter Holsapple, who used to be in this band the dBs in the ‘80s--he has the great collection of video detritus like that, just stuff that he’s taped. And so my friend made a bunch of tapes of stuff while he was staying there and said, “Hey, you gotta see this Indian video.” It was a really grainy, horrible version of it, but it was the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my life! “What is this?” I showed it to Terry one day and he said, “Oh, we gotta get that in the film, it’s perfect for Enid.” We tried to figure out what it was, and we just had no luck. And so we wrote it into the film, just praying we could find it somehow. By pure luck, John Malkovich was one of our producers, and he had really championed some Indian film in like 1996, so the Indians in the film business were very grateful to him, so they said [in Indian accent] “We will find!” We sent them a tape of it and they said, “Oh yes, it’s from Gumnaam, 1965, directed by so-and-so.” It was a very famous film. Gumnaam means “nameless.” As all Indian films are, it’s a musical. It’s actually kind of a mystery, it’s based on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. It’s sort of a murder mystery on an island. And that scene really has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie. It’s the original music, and it’s actually the opening theme to the film. We met the sons of the guys who produced it, they actually came to the set the day we were shooting and watching that. They were so proud. [Indian accent again]“We remember being on the set when this was filmed! Our father would be proud to be in an American film!” So we got a perfect print. It was just the greatest thing.

SCRAM: It looks so sharp and vivid.
CLOWES: It’s too perfect.

SCRAM: You and Terry co-wrote the screenplay.
CLOWES: Yes.

SCRAM: How much input did you have on the rest of the film? Were you on the set, or did you have some say in the casting?
CLOWES: I had more input than any screenwriter ever is allowed. It was really amazing. I got to be there for all of the pre-production, which involves the casting and hiring set designers and things like that. So I got to do all the casting and help design the costumes and help plan out the sets. Then I got to be there for all the shooting. Terry pretty much conferred with me before every single take, and I really got to have a big say. Terry felt that those girls especially were my characters, and didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t approve of. You never get that from any other director. Most directors are like, “Ban the writer from the set--you can come to the premiere.” Most writers will be seeing their films for the first time tomorrow night [at their respective film festival premieres]. It was amazingly lucky. Although, then again, when you’re a writer you just get paid for the script, so everything I did was on the house for the last year-and-a-half.

SCRAM: But it’s got your name on it.
CLOWES: It’s got my name on it, and I figure a movie really does live for a long time, so you should do what you can while you have the chance. That was the amazing thing to me to be on the set and realize, “I could change something right here that will be in the film and will exist for however long this film exists, however long DVDs are around. I could move this piece of paper in the background…” It’s such an odd feeling. It’s cool.

SCRAM: There were a lot of scenes drawn from other Eightball stories, like “Art School Confidential,” and Feldman, the guy on the scooter who knew all the trivia. Are there any scenes like those that that didn’t make the final cut?
CLOWES: There was stuff from the comic that was sort of more verbatim stuff, that was really funny in the comic and then we filmed it and it just didn’t work as well in the film somehow. We learned during the making of it that the film had to be its own thing, and we couldn’t just copy the comic. We really had to re-think every single thing to make it work on film. Like, in the diner scene, when they’re with the Weird Al guy, the waiter--we had all the dialogue from the comic, where there’s page after page of them making fun of the songs and stuff. I thought it was hilarious when we were filming it, but then we watched it, it was kind of tedious, so we just dropped it. It’s weird what stuff worked and what didn’t.

SCRAM: There were scenes that I anticipated that didn’t happen. I kept waiting for the scene in the grocery store where the girls see the Lunchables in the Satanists’ shopping cart.
CLOWES: We actually had that in the script for a while, but we didn’t have room for it or time for it. I’m glad we cut it out because it later turned out you couldn’t ever get clearance on stuff like that. It would never have been funny with anything other than Lunchables. We would have never gotten it. You would’ve needed Kraft to watch the whole film and sign off of on it. They’d think “Oh, you’re making fun of us.” Which, of course, we would’ve been.

SCRAM: I thought the best line in the movie was when the art teacher says, “I thought maybe this was supposed to be your father.”
CLOWES: (laughs) That performance should get an Oscar. That kid, just the way he looks down. Clearly he’s got issues with his father. (laughs)

SCRAM: In Eightball you drew a nightmare scenario about “Velvet Glove” being turned into a movie. Did you have any experiences like that?
CLOWES: I had stuff that was just like that, except not while the film was actually being made. We’d have these meetings and I could just see that these people were really sleazy and disreputable but I was so intrigued by the whole process that I’d keep going to meetings and stringing them along, and then I’d always at some point stop answering my phone and blow ‘em off. I could so imagine how it would be to make a film and have no control and you don’t trust the people at all. But with this film, it was always me and Terry and this producer, Lianne Halfton. It was really just the three of us the whole time and we never had to face any of that kind of stuff. It just wasn’t an issue. If you get along with your producer and your director, there’s really nobody left to betray you. And it’s not a big enough film where the studio would take it away and re-edit it. They know the only value the film has is ours. There’s no point in them trying to change it.

SCRAM: You’re happy with how it turned out?
CLOWES: Yeah, it was miraculous how close it is to what I wanted to get on the screen. It’s that and much more. It was really a great experience. It was really long and drawn-out and tedious at times. Three years in writing the script just goes forever. We started in 1997 and the premiere is here in 2001. There were lots of ups and downs and heartbreaks along the way, where we almost got it made and then we backed out at the last minute because we weren’t too sure. Now that it’s all done I can forget about all those miserable days sitting by the phone that never rings, and now I’m very thrilled with it and really proud.

SCRAM: Any other comics that you have in mind for a movie?
CLOWES: Terry and I, we like that whole art school thing. We could do a whole art school film, that could be fun. I was telling somebody that, to me, my four years in art school were what Vietnam was to Oliver Stone. (laughs) There’s so much material that I could go on forever, just an endless fount of stuff.

SCRAM: I’ve never been to art school, but I showed “Art School Confidential” to an art school friend of mine…
CLOWES: That thing’s been xeroxed so many times and put up on walls on art schools. You can’t even tell it’s drawn by a human being. It’s 10th generation. (laughs)

SCRAM: When you drew Ghost World, did you have any particular city in mind, like Chicago? It is obviously LA in the movie…
CLOWES: We didn’t want it to be that much LA. We wanted to shoot there because we thought LA was the furthest along in America, sort of this degradation of culture, but we wanted it to read as Anytown, USA to some degree. I started drawing it when I lived in Chicago and then I worked on it for awhile living in Los Angeles and then I moved to Berkeley, so it’s a weird kind of conflation of the three. Chicago brick buildings with palm trees in the background and sort of a Berkeley feel to it, so it’s a weird combo of all the places I was living. Which is interesting because people always say that they think it’s wherever they live. They think, “Oh, were you in Washington? Were you in the suburbs of Minnesota?”

SCRAM: I always pictured Chicago in the summer, as Enid and Rebecca wore summery clothes.
CLOWES: That was my good excuse that it could be anywhere, so they don’t have to wear down parkas.

SCRAM: It would have to be a big enough city to have its own ‘zine shop.
CLOWES: Right. People always say, “It’s set in suburbia,” and I go, “No, they don’t have Zine-O-Phobia in suburbia.” (laughs) If you look hard you can see a Scram or two in the background.

SCRAM: I looked hard but I didn’t see one. I could only pick out the Monkey Rock ‘n Roll issue of Roctober.
CLOWES: There definitely is one. You have to freeze-frame it. It’s pretty tough to see some stuff, but there’s definitely a Scram in there.

SCRAM: I’ll check again when it comes out on video… Seymour’s character is totally new in the movie. Was he drawn from the Bob Skeetes character in the comic? Or someone else?
CLOWES: He was something Terry brought. Terry had these two characters, Seymour and Joe, the two roommates, basically based on him and a friend of his. Seymour is more sort of Terry. He said, “You know, is there any way we could just get these two guys in there? Like in a small vignette or something?” I kept thinking there’s something really resonant about crazy 78 collectors thrown in with these girls. There was something so funny about that, and the possibilities were so good. When I finally figured out, “Oh, he could be the guy in the ‘50s diner, and they could sort of just follow him,” that really was exciting. It seemed like such a great opportunity. Then as the character got more developed ,Terry was writing scenes and then I would rewrite the scenes, and I got so I was sort of to rewriting the whole thing, and so Seymour became sort of a weird conflation of me and Terry. It’s really more Terry than me, but definitely we both have that same sort of hide-in-our-room collector mentality. (laughs)

SCRAM: Seymour’s ragtime fixation brought to mind Chris Ware.
CLOWES: Yeah, [Ware] responded very highly to it. But all of that stuff is Terry’s. We brought up all his posters and all his junk and moved it to a set in Hollywood. Steve Buscemi plays that character so much like he’s just playing himself, but he’s not at all that kind of a guy, really. It’s really an amazing performance, but he’s much more sort of up-to-date. He liked all that music but he really didn’t know anything about it at all. He was always asking about it: “How do you pronounce ‘Lionel Belasco’? How do you say that?” It was always shocking, because we figured, “Oh, he’s Seymour, he knows all that stuff. How could he not know?”

SCRAM: He came closest to the caricatures around the fringes of Eightball, like the guy on the scooter. Panning across the apartment building in the opening scene, there’s that guy with the Jim Belushi haircut…
CLOWES: In the script he was “Man with hair on his back,” or something like that. [It actually reads: “A large, hirsute MAN, wearing only Lycra jogging shorts, watches the Home Shopping Network while eating mashed potatoes with his fingers…”] The extras guys--they read the script very carefully and they want to bring in exactly what you have in there--and so the extras casting guy came in and had nine Polaroids of guys photographed from the back, with hair all over. My God, who would to humiliate themselves like that? (laughs) So that guy had the haircut too, and we thought, “Boy, that’s an added bonus.” He was amazing. That was one of the funniest days, when we shot all those guys.

SCRAM: Though I didn’t see any characters with really big, pronounced teeth…
CLOWES: Except for Steve himself, with those giant fangs. We had a few we cast in the background, but you don’t really get to see it. I would’ve liked to have seen more walrus-toothed people walking by. (laughs)

SCRAM: A character who got a big response was Doug, the redneck guy who hangs out at the convenience store.
CLOWES: Yeah, that guy was the real thing. We had seen a tape of all this stuff he’d done where he played characters like that, these kind of dirtball characters. You could tell he absolutely understood that. He wasn’t playing down to it. We could tell he was totally from that world and understood every nuance of it so well, and we basically wrote that scene like, “Dave Sheridan ad-libs next five lines.” We just turned the camera on him and let him do all that stuff. He showed up on the set that day--we hadn’t seen him since we cast him five months earlier--he shows up with that haircut, which he had given himself. And he actually had those tan lines, he had gone out that weekend and had gotten sunburned with a tanktop on. Everything he did was so flawless. We didn’t have to do any work on that guy at all.

SCRAM: I like the outtake scene following the credits where Seymour beats him up.
CLOWES: He and Steve came up with that on their own. They came up to me and said, “Keep Terry busy for a few minutes. Tell him we need to do another take of this scene.” So I took Terry aside and just talked with him and said, “You know, I didn’t like that last take so we should do one more.” So Terry had no idea that was coming. If you watch that really carefully you can hear Terry shrieking with laughter in the background. (laughs)

SCRAM: Joey McCobb, the painfully bad standup comedian, was really true to the comic.
CLOWES: The reason that’s true is because the guy who played Joey McCobb is my best friend, who invented Joey McCobb. One day we were in a train station and he just said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if there was some corny comedian who made up all those jokes off the top of his head: ‘Take my wife, please.’” We were casting the film and we tried to get a real comedian to play it. We tried all these actors but they just weren’t that funny, and I said, “Why don’t we just get Charles [Schneider] to do it himself?” He came in and Terry was like, “Why didn’t we get him in the first place? He’s perfect!” So it’s a very rare instance of somebody playing a character that they made up themselves.

SCRAM: It looked like you did a lot of your own original artwork in the movie, like in Enid’s sketchbook. Did you do the Laugh Grotto backdrop?
CLOWES: Yeah, I designed that font. They have painters in Hollywood who can do anything, so I had drawn this little thing and said, “Make it like this.” Next thing you know it’s this 3-D, perfect, amazing thing. I did all the logos for the Cook’s Chicken as it changes into a more modern company, and the painters printed that stuff on stationery and everything.

SCRAM: I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but it got some crowd response at the screening I went to: the picture on the brochure for the Academy of Art and Design shows the campus of the University of Washington, where I go to school.
CLOWES: Oh, is that right? That’s great! (laughs) I had no idea! The prop guy just made that up! That’s hilarious!

SCRAM: A couple people in the audience were whispering about it to each other.
CLOWES: I can’t wait to see that tomorrow night. That’s funny.

SCRAM: So what’s next for Eightball?
CLOWES: There’s a new Eightball that I have three pages left on that I’ve been trying to finish for the last two weeks. I had to do all these interviews everyday and I can never get anything done. But it’s a 40-page, all-color issue. Twenty-nine stories in 40 pages.

SCRAM: Super.
CLOWES: It’s a wacky issue. It’s about this made-up suburbia sort of town.

SCRAM: Is this the beginning of a new serial?
CLOWES: No, it’s all self-contained, all by itself.

SCRAM: Any additions you wish to make to those you “hate deeply”?
CLOWES: You know, I need to start a new list. I can’t even remember some of the last ones.

SCRAM: Are you happier in Berkeley or Chicago?
CLOWES: I actually live in Oakland. Oakland is like the West Coast Chicago. It’s got all the decay and misery of Chicago, but nice weather.

SCRAM: Kim hates baseball…
CLOWES: (laughs)

SCRAM: …and I interviewed Peter Bagge for Scram a few years ago and I got him to talk about baseball. Reading Eightball, I take it you’re baseball fan?
CLOWES: I used to be, as a kid, and then when I went away to college I got away from it and stopped following it and I could never get back into it. So when I think of baseball, I could probably still tell you every member of the 1971 Cubs. I was so focused on that. But my knowledge stops at about 1980 or so.

SCRAM: With me it’s the same, except it’s about 1977. I can name all the Yankees and Dodgers from that year. It’s funny how much more I can recall from that long ago, like it’s yesterday.
CLOWES: I still think, “Is Rick Monday still playing centerfield?”

SCRAM: Did you by any chance go to Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park?
CLOWES: I remember it very well. I did not go, but I remember watching the news that night. I remember being sort of appalled, like, “They’re ruining our American pastime! How can they do this?” I went to school with Bill Veeck’s daughter. I used to be pretty good friends with his son. He was kind of a character, he collected old Edison Rolls.

SCRAM: [Realizing my twenty minutes are up] Okay, thanks!
CLOWES: Say no to drugs!

BEYOND A SHADOW OF USHER
by Dick Campbell

In 1971, the year Gary Usher gave this interview, his musical tastes were continuing to evolve from his hot rod/surfing roots of the early 60's. He had an idea for a concept album entitled "Beyond A Shadow Of Doubt" which would reflect his developing philosophical views on metaphysics, and he asked me to write the music to his lyrics. We had written some other tunes, such as "Good Ole Rock & Roll Song" recorded by the Cowsills, and had become great friends in the process. Gary had taken me under his wing since I'd come out from the Midwest where my "Dick Campbell Sings Where It's At" LP had been released on Mercury Records in 1966. He signed me as a writer to his L.A. label, Together Records, and later I moved with him to RCA, and then to Rip Music (BMI), a publishing company owned by Danny Thomas.

For the next couple of years we recorded several demos for the "Shadow" project in various L.A. studios, and Gary wrote a book to be included with the proposed album. But, for several reasons, the album never went beyond the demo stage and snuggled into hibernation for thirty years until it was revived by Gary's son in 2001. Gary Usher, Jr. dusted off the old reel-to-reel demos and released them, along with the book, as a "work in progress" on Dreamsville Records. Although the songs were in demo form, the excellent Usher production touch gave them a very finished polish considering that they consisted mostly of my acoustic guitar parts, lead vocals by Gary, and background vocals provided by Gary, Curt Boettcher, and myself. As Gary's latest release, some dozen years since his death, "Beyond A Shadow Of Doubt" presents an excellent indication of the direction in which he was heading, as well as proof of his enduring popularity among Usher aficionados.

As for why this project took so long to see the light of day, my opinion is that Gary was beginning to weary of all the perceived crapola he had endured through his first decade in the record industry. He was definitely tired of the commercial-vs.-artistic aspect of the business, and was exploring Eastern philosophy in his personal life. Then there was the horrific blow he suffered in early 1974 when his wife Bonnie died suddenly in her sleep from an apparent epileptic seizure. Bonnie's death was hard on us all, as my family and Gary's were quite close on a social level. After that, the wind just went out of Gary's sails for a year or two and he eventually ended up going to an island off the coast of Washington. Gary later remarried (to Sue Cypher, daughter of actor Jon Cypher of "Major Dad" TV-fame) and also dabbled again in music production, but he never returned to the level of interest in music that he had enjoyed in the beginning when his songs like "409" helped kick off the hot rod record craze.

Although Gary's name was not as well known to the general public as that of the man who's career he helped launch (Brian Wilson), his vast recorded repertoire continues to be collected by his fans. In addition, CD reissues of Gary's early productions and new CDs of previously unreleased material, such as the "Shadow" project, are becoming more available. The advent of the internet, and it's auction sites like eBay, are also a good way to find rare Usher nuggets. Recently I saw an acetate demo of a song we'd written, "California Way," sell for $241 to an unknown collector. This would have amused Gary since it's probably more money than we ever got paid for that particular song. Another interesting aspect of the internet is the proliferation of message groups on various subjects. There's one on Yahoo hosted by Ron Weekes which is dedicated to discussions of Gary Usher, and in the area of books an excellent five-volume biography on Gary has been written by author Stephen J. McParland.

When Gary died of lung cancer in 1990, his reputation in the record industry had long been secured. Even more importantly, his personal influence on his many friends is still felt to this day. He had a great sense of humor, but knew when to get to work; he was successful without being overbearing; and he was competitive without being unkind. Time and space does not permit me to relate the dozens of anecdotes which would illustrate these attributes, but I can leave you with at least one. When I first arrived in California, Gary and I would play a board game called Stratego in which each side would have forty army pieces. These pieces, of various ranks, were lined up against each other in such a manner as to conceal their ranks from the opponent with the object being to capture each other's flag. Since both Gary and I considered ourselves military buffs, the competition to achieve "the thrill of victory" was raised to a level usually reserved for important things like the Super Bowl.

While Bonnie worked on making us lunches, the battles would rage for hours. Every time we played Gary would whip me, and after half a dozen losses I was beginning to experience "the agony of defeat." But, like Gary, I'm competitive too--just not as kind. I bought my own Stratego game and studied it for hours. Finally I arrived upon a "corner strategy" of encasing my flag in a layer of bombs backed up by majors, so that when Gary's miners broke through the bombs they'd be killed before reaching my flag. The next time Gary and I played I beat him. Then I beat him again. Now here comes good part. On the third game he had become so unglued that he actually attempted to distract my attention so he could switch his flag, an unmovable piece, to a less vulnerable location. I caught him, we had a good laugh, and never had to play Stratego again--the novice apprentice "just off the boat from the Midwest" (as Gary used to kid me), had beaten the master, thus gaining a certain degree of parity.

In closing, let me just say that Gary usually acted calm and cool under fire, whether it was a game or a big budget recording session for a major label. One day in 1971, we were set to go into a studio for a song demo session, so I stayed overnight at his house for an early morning start. At 6:01 A.M., I was awakened by the sound of rumbling, the vision of window blinds flipping up and down, and the feeling of my bed violently shaking. Even "just off the boat" and without prior experience with earthquakes, I was immediately able to deduce the nature of this event. It went on for what I claim is 60 seconds before ceasing. I, and the Usher children, then beat it into Gary's room and up on his large bed where we joined him and Bonnie for assurance. The Sylmar earthquake had been 6.6 magnitude, killed 65 people, and caused 500 million dollars damage, but that morning the "Master" was in the studio without fail--and the "sorcerer's apprentice" was right there with him. One can live through an act of God, but not beyond the shadow of Usher.

When Edwin Letcher asked if I’d be interested in helping him interview Phil Sloan, I was delighted to accept. We’re both big fans of his work as a songwriter and artist, but conveniently Edwin’s interests skew more towards his early career and mine towards the later part. We made two visits to Phil’s sylvan estate in the heart of West L.A., the first a social call that gave him a chance to check us out (and tell some amazing off-the-record stories about rock and roll and his fascinating spiritual practice), the second a formal interview. Once that was on tape, it was easy to split it down the middle, with part one running in issue #10 of Garage & Beat and the conclusion appearing here. If you want to get the full experience, including a mystical audience with Elvis Presley The Sun King and how Phil discovered the Beatles (and the Stones), visit www.garageandbeat.com for ordering info. Or just dive in below. It’s 1964 and Phil is working as staff songwriter and underpaid A&R man at Screen Gems and recording groovy genre-rock under a slew of fake band names, including Willie & the Wheels, the Trash Cleaners, the Wildcats and the Fantastic Baggys. Soon he’ll form the Grass Roots, write “Secret Agent Man” and release great Dylan-inspired protest pop under his own name. But for now, he’s still a sideman… -Kim Cooper

Kim: And where do Jan & Dean fit into the picture?
Phil: Jan & Dean were already in the picture. Jan & Dean were like major stars for me. They would come into Screen Gems to talk to [Lou] Adler, who was their producer. Of course we never got to talk to them or see them. When they came in they were pushed in another room. And eventually what happened was when Jan & Dean had done “Surf City,” the Matadors had fallen apart, they had their own record deals, and they were sold under different names. So the Matadors decided to go out on their own, because Jan never paid any money. I don’t mean to give Jan a bad rap, 'cause to be honest with you it was a privilege to work with him, but, y’know, you still needed some money! Apparently, whatever the reason for the break up, the Matadors broke up, and (sighs) Phil and Steve [Barri] were there to take their place. And we became Jan & Dean’s back up group. And eventually I became Dean, I took on Dean’s part, and then singing all the background parts, and then eventually Jan wanted me to do his part! So on some records I’m singing Dean and doubling Jan and doing the middle parts.
Kim: Where did you do all that?
Phil: “Little Old Lady,” “New Girl in School,” all the hits right after “Surf City,” I’m on “Drag City”—
Edwin: What about “One Piece Topless Bathing Suit”?
Phil: I’m on that.
Kim: Did you write that?
Phil: Yeah. (laughter)
Edwin: That was one of my favorite songs when I was a kid.
Kim: I assume you were inspired by all the kerfuffle about—
Phil: Chuck Berry.
Kim: —Rudy Gernreich—
Phil: It was Chuck Berry and it was the hoopla at the time.
Kim: He was designing down on Melrose.
Edwin: I’ve seen pictures, but I think it was probably just a model wearing it in the studio. It could be that it was worn in France, I don’t know. There are plenty of beaches where the folks are a lot less uptight about that sort of thing. I didn’t think it was very flattering.
Kim: No, the only girls who looked good in it are really flat-chested. (Phil cracks up over all the attention we’re giving the roots of his tune’s title)
Kim: Did you go out on the road with Jan & Dean?
Phil: Yeah, one time they let me out of the office. I went to Hawaii. The Baggys had a Top Ten record. I went over there with the Beach Boys. Jan & Dean, Bruce Terry, Glen Campbell, Hal Blaine and me were the backup band. Someone didn’t tell me that Glen Campbell was going to be playing guitar, so I wound up playing bass. They just stuck a bass in my hands and said, “Here.” I had to play bass for forty bands. Grateful.
Edwin: That was probably quite an education.
Phil: I had never been on stage. I had been waiting to get on stage and there I was. Playing in this backup band for me was getting to see the musicians up close. I was really into seeing all these guys and girls up close. Why, I don’t know.
Edwin: It seems to me we are just about up to the point of the Grass Roots. Did the Grass Roots seem demonstrably different than all the Willie & the Wheels, Baggys and others, or was it just another studio band?
Phil: Well, it started out to be. That’s the reason I had to leave Dunhill. At that time Dunhill had connections with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Barry McGuire… and P. F. Sloan? This was a joke with them. They wanted to promote P.F. Sloan, but not really, because if P.F. Sloan happens to leave the office and go out on tour, they felt they didn’t have a company anymore.
Kim: You were their hit man.
Phil: I was producing, doing A & R, writing, arranging, doing all the records. They wanted me there, and yet they wanted to make some money.
Kim: Were they the ones pushing you to do stuff on your own?
Phil: The first album they did because Steve Barri was begging them to do an independent project. They said, “Okay, then produce Phil.” So I was doing “Eve of Destruction” and Steve was in there with Chuck Britz, the Beach Boys producer [editrix’ note: Britz was an engineer who worked with the Beach Boys from 1962-66], and they weren’t even listening to the songs. They were talking about things like Brian’s new recording and they’d turn around and say, “So are you done with that song?” I’d say, “I guess so. Can I listen back to it?” “No, we haven’t got time. Let’s go on to the next one. What’s the name of this next one?” “Take Me For What I’m Worth.” “Okay, so Chuck, how did you get that Beach Boys thing?” I was doing the whole album by doing a guitar track and overdubbing another. And I talked them into letting me put drums on a couple of them. Basically they put it out as P.F. Sloan and “Sins of the Family” took off. Like “Eve of Destruction,” it escaped. They didn’t want P.F. Sloan; they wanted a kid that they could sell to all the different markets. They didn’t want something to all of a sudden stick to this kid. If something stuck to this kid, they were stuck with it. They didn’t like “Eve of Destruction.” They said they wouldn’t publish it. They didn’t like “What’s Exactly the Matter With Me.” They didn’t like “Sins of the Family.” They didn’t like “Take Me For What I’m Worth.” They didn’t like all the songs I had written. They wouldn’t publish them. They said, “These are not songs that are up to the standard of this publishing company.”
Kim: Were they troubled by the topical nature? What do you think the problem was?
Phil: The head of the company said, “This is communistic crap. We can’t publish a song which has the words ‘prostitute,’ ‘liquor’ and ‘schizophrenia’ in it.” These were real life experiences, unfortunately. But anyway, they released it and I’m on billboards all over town. People would call the office and ask if they could get P.F. Sloan to play, and they would say, “No, there is no P.F. Sloan.” They’d say, “Well who is that?” and the office would say, “That’s just a made-up person.”
Kim: There’s the problem. You were doing everything else; you should have been the receptionist too.
Phil: I was in love with the receptionist.
Kim: We’ll get to that.
Phil: I think that’s how I became successful… because I was in love with the receptionist. Make that a note to any of your readers who want to go into the music business: if you happen to fall in love with the receptionist at the record label, you are guaranteed success. Those people run the business. They are the only ones that the head of the label would come out to and say, “Hey, do you know this group called the Kinks?” “Yeah, they’re fantastic.” “Okay, I guess we’ll sign them then.”
Edwin: How did the Grass Roots enter the picture?
Phil: Well, we have to talk about Bob Dylan a little bit before that. The Grass Roots started because of Bob Dylan. Basically, Bob Dylan called Dunhill records and said, “I want to talk to P.F. Sloan.” The receptionist, who I was in love with, was used to me calling up and doing imitations, saying I was Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson and what have you. “Hello, this is Elvis. I want to talk to P.F. Sloan, please.” “Oh Phil, get off the friggin’ phone. Call me later.” “Hi, this is Rick Nelson—” “Get off the phone, Phil!” So she hung up on Dylan five or six times. Finally he got through to the head of the label and they said, “Bob, we’d love to have you come up, but you’ll have to leave Columbia Records and sign with Dunhill if you want to have a conversation with Phil.” Then they called me into the office and said, “If Bob Dylan calls you and you have a meeting with him, we will take you to court, strip you of your royalties, keep you under contract and you will never record ever again. We’ll keep extending your contract, but we will never record you. If you try to sue us, good luck. Don’t talk to Bob Dylan.” So Bob Dylan comes in to see Phil Spector one afternoon. This is another example of seeds of the beginning of the end. Bob comes in to Phil’s and they write out a two million-dollar check. They went to Dunhill and said, “Here’s a check; we want to buy Dunhill Records. Now, where’s P.F. Sloan?” The guy ripped up the check for two million dollars and says, “You’ll never talk to P.F. Sloan.”
Kim: What were they afraid of? What were you going to say to them?
Phil: Bob Dylan was the biggest entity in the world. Even greater than Beatles or at least equally on that level. For that level of person to want to talk to me, the kid in the little tiny room with a piano, working for forty dollars a week now, for him to want to talk to me tells them: “Oh shit…”
Edwin: You’re going to find out that you’re getting screwed.
Phil: Exactly. He’s going to find out that getting forty dollars a week is not the end all to beat all. They wanted to keep that where that was at. So Dylan calls me up at home and I go and see him. We meet and he plays me his new album, Highway 61 Revisited. We’re both sitting on the floor, listening to his little tiny masterworks, and he puts on “Mr. Jones.” I fall over on the floor laughing and Bob falls over on the floor laughing. He’s so happy that someone got it. He said, “Columbia is trying to kick me off the label because of ‘Mr. Jones.’ They don’t know what it’s about. They think it’s a communist song. Obviously you get it. No one who’s heard it understands it, not even my producer. They don’t want it on the album. Is there something wrong with me? Have I lost it? No one understands any of these songs.” Then he plays me “Highway 61” and I’m rolling on the floor laughing. These are like the best jokes I have ever heard. And he’s rolling on the floor laughing because he’s so happy that someone has finally got it. Then in comes David Crosby. Let me back up. I had worked with Terry Melcher on “Summer Means Fun” and the Rip Chords. Terry was given a new group called the Byrds, but he only had one more month to go on his Columbia contract and they wanted him out. They considered him Doris Day’s boy and they figured he came into Columbia because of Doris Day and Marty Melcher. They didn’t think he was a viable music person, so they gave him this unknown group that no other producer wanted. Terry calls me up at twelve o’clock at night and said, “I’ve submitted a song called ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ to Columbia and they rejected it. I want you to come over to Columbia and tell me what’s wrong with the record.” I go over. He’s only got five hours and then they’re going to lock him out. We listen to “Mr. Tambourine Man” and there’s no echo on the record at all. It doesn’t sound very good, to be honest with you. Terry and I started talking about “Summer Means Fun” and how we put the guitar ending in triple echo and I said, “Let’s do that with ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’” He plugged into all the echo chambers in Columbia and by four o’clock in the morning, we had mastered “Mr. Tambourine Man” with all the echo on it. They locked him out at five and that was supposed to be it; Terry was supposed to have been gone from Columbia Records. But he submitted the record and for some reason they put it out. They didn’t expect it to be a hit. Neither did Dylan. Terry told me the Byrds had gotten a gig at El Monte Legion Stadium following Don & Dewey.
Kim: That was a big gig out that way.
Phil: Yeah, but it’s all Don & Dewey fans, fifties people. Up come the Byrds on stage. Terry had asked me to go to El Monte and keep an eye on the guys and help them because it was their first gig. There’s McGuinn and his glasses and Crosby with a purple cape. Michael had an actual set of drums. He didn’t own his own drums and was playing on orange crates up until then. And there was Chris Hillman and they’re on stage and they’re doing everything except “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the crowd is booing and booing. The manager comes up and asks if these are my boys. I tell him yeah and he tells me to tell them to get off the stage right now. I jump on stage and whisper into David Crosby’s ear, “The manager said get off the stage, but fuck him! Do ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ now or you’re going to get kicked out.” They went into “Mr. Tambourine Man” and it was like the song, “Whiter Shade of Pale,” where the roof completely disappeared. It left these poor people, stuck in 1959, it left them homeless, forever. The universe and all the planets and all the rays of light were there in the Byrds. Crosby never forgot and he said to me, “If you ever interrupt my set again, I will have you killed.” So here I am with Bob Dylan and David Crosby walks into the room and yells at the top of his lungs, “Why do you have this piece of shit here?” Dylan excuses himself, walks over, grabs Crosby and takes him in the other room and I can hear him slapping him around. At that point I’m sitting on the couch in this hotel room on the fourteenth floor of the Sunset Plaza by myself. The door opens and in walk two topless girls wearing pink pantaloons with bells and rings on their toes. They’re twins, blondes, and they sit down on both sides of the couch. I’m there with these girls on either side, waiting for Bob and I hear him slapping Crosby around. Crosby’s going, “Jeez, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. Bob, how would I know?” And from out on the balcony flies a man on a rope. He is also topless and is wearing a Zorro mask, a Zorro hat and black silk pantaloons. He signals to the girls and he takes them by the hand and they do a little dance in the middle of the floor and then they go out the door. Crosby walks in and says, “Jeez, I didn’t know” and he walks out. Then Bob comes in and says, “Jeez, I don’t understand these people” and we go back to listening and he says, “Y'know, I’m so glad you get it. Nobody gets it, but you get it. Maybe you can help me out here.” He said, “I really like your sense of melody, man. You’re a better melody writer than me, man. I really wish that you’d help me with some of my melodies, man.” I said, “Yeah, like maybe ‘Girl From the North Country’? Where the melody is just like one of the greatest melodies ever written?” I said, “Maybe I could help you learn how to screw up a couple of your B minors.” He said, “You really think I can write good melodies?” I said, “Bob, you’re the absolute best.” “Naw, you’re a much better melody writer than me, man. I could learn a lot from you, man.” Then I started naming off five or six of the greatest melodies that he had written. Even some of his throwaways. He said, “You really think I have good melodies?” “Yeah, they’re timeless, fantastic.” He gives me “Mr. Jones” and I go over to the record label, after they had fired me and rehired me, and they said, “Okay, why don’t we get a group and do ‘Mr. Jones’?” I flew to San Francisco and I meet the Grateful Dead and the budding Jefferson Airplane and I get to hear Jerry Garcia’s vision of the future, which expands into the year 2050. He knows what the world’s going to be like up to the year 2050. I’ve been told what the world’s going to be like. From writing “Eve of Destruction” until the year 2020. I was told that communism was going to fall and this whole thing has been prewritten. Here’s Jerry Garcia telling me about the Internet and how people are going to be putting music out for free and that people will send them a penny or a nickel or a dime and that will keep them going and this way there will be no record labels. This was back in like 1965. They turned me on to a blues group called the Bedouins. I go to the Bedouins and say, “Hey, I’ve got this song that Bob Dylan wrote, nobody’s got it, how would you like to come down to L.A…?” They do, the song’s a hit, they go to the record label and say how about some money? The label says no. “But we got a hit.” “No.” “But we’re on tour.” “No.” “But our manager…” “He’ll be dead in a week.” They show them pictures of bombs and people without arms. Any manager that came into Dunhill Records and said, “We need some money’ they get shown pictures of dead people. They left. They ran. I ended up being the Grass Roots. I wound up doing all the follow-ups and filling in the albums and stuff like that.
Kim: I wanted to ask you about the Grass Roots’ name. The band Love was using that name before.
Phil: Originally, yeah.
Kim: Was that just a coincidence?
Phil: Yeah, it was. Jagger had called me up and he said, “I want you to give a message to Jim Morrison for me.” I said, “What’s the message?” He said, “Tell Jim that he’s a turn on and that the Rolling Stones dig him, but...” [Jagger’s comments on Love are deleted at Phil’s request] I went to see Jim and he was already drinking very hard. I gave him the message from Jagger. You have to understand that the Doors were considered third-rate Rolling Stones. Even though they were having hits, they were not considered artists. Jagger considered them to be artists and he wanted me to tell Jim for fear that he’d kill himself. That the Stones, who they were imitating, considered them to be artists. I gave the message and then I went to see Love, who were playing at Pandora’s Box on the night of the Sunset riots. I was there with Steven Stills.
Kim: They were still having shows at Pandora’s Box? They had instituted the curfews and the kids had to be off the streets by ten.
Phil: The night that Steven wrote “For What It’s Worth” we were together at Pandora’s Box. I was delivering a message to Arthur Lee. The riot happened outside. Steven and I were walking outside as they turned over a bus and they drew a line out there. Steven says, “Look, they’re drawing a line. There’s something happening here, Phil. Look, there’s a man with a gun over there.” He was just speaking the lines which became the song. At the time I was living with Richie Furay. He needed a roommate when I was trying to get out of my house.
Kim: Where did you guys live?
Phil: Near Turner’s [liquor store].
Kim: Around Hillsdale and Clark?
Phil: Yeah. Every night I was at the Whiskey Au Go-Go watching the Buffalo Springfield. They had been turned down by every record label in town. Finally Neil Young says to me, “Phil, I’m leaving the band. I’ve given it a year and nothing’s happening.” I say, “You guys are going to be as big as the Byrds.” He says, “Yeah, Phil, right.” I say, “Look, I was right with the Beatles. I was right with the Stones. I worked on the Byrds’ records. You guys are going to be as big as the Byrds.” He says, “Well, here’s our demos. Take them over to Dunhill.” I took them and played them to the head. He listened to “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” and “Mr. Soul” and tells me that if I think that is music, I don’t belong on Dunhill Records. They fired me for bringing in Buffalo Springfield. I took them over to Sonny and Cher. I had a friend who worked at the office there. I gave him the demos and he gave them to Sonny. Sonny doesn’t like them, but he sent them to Atco as a favor. The head of Atco turned them down until some kid listening outside the door said, “Hey if you let me remix this, I think you have a winner.” The word gets back, I get the tapes from Neil, they go to Sonny, they go to Atco, they go to the kid who mixes it and boom, they’re signed to Atco. I was then reinstated after their first hit. The Grass Roots. A new group comes in to take their place. Warren Entner, who had gone to Fairfax High, where I had gone—
Kim: Who were the Thirteenth Floor, right?
Phil: Yeah, they were working in town. I was at Gazarri’s, the Au Go-Go, the Trip and that’s how the Roots got signed. The point where it was getting close for me to be leaving was when the group had had a number of hits, but still had no money. They were on tour calling me in the middle of the night, saying, “Phil, we don’t have any money for food or for getting anywhere.” I’d go into the big man and say, “Hey look, these guys are out there working their asses off. Their instruments are breaking and they don’t have food.” He’d simply say, “They’re a dime a dozen. We can get the next group at Gazarri’s for nothing and send them off with nothing. What do you care? Why are you attached to them? I thought you were with us. Why do you care about these people?” That’s how I wound up leaving the Grass Roots. I wanted the group to have integrity. I was forcing them to write their own songs. I wanted to, eventually, not write any songs for the group. I wanted them to be their own musicians and the company was fighting me tooth and nail. “How dare you let their drummer play on their record.” But “Where Were You When I Needed You” was recorded by Bones Howe, not Hal Blaine, the professional hit drummer. Bones Howe was an engineer, who was a hobbyist drummer, but I wanted a drum sound from a guy who loves to play drums and Hal likes to play drums sometimes and loves to play drums sometimes, but he’s a professional and he can’t get the feeling of a passionate person who will play drums for nothing. Hal plays drums extremely well, but I wanted somebody who would make a mistake. I grew up listening to “Angel Baby.” Remember that song?
Edwin: Oh yeah.
Phil: “What key, what key?” The piano player actually says, “What key?” because he didn’t know what key to play and you can hear that, and the record went to number one. And Jerry Lee Lewis, if you remember “Great Balls of Fire,” the drum riff, he plays a double drum riff. Instead of playing a typical drum riff, the drummer was so passionate about what he was doing that he made a mistake. The song went to number one and that mistake inspired Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac. It’s mistakes that turn people on if they’re passionate and real. He said he became a drummer because of listening to the mistake that was made by the drummer for Jerry Lee Lewis. I wanted a drummer that wouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes. It was just the opposite of what Capital wanted for Brian Wilson. They wouldn’t let Dennis play because they said he made mistakes. I was telling Brian he’s the best, he’s up there with Ringo or anyone you could think of, because he makes mistakes. There’s something about a teenager who listens to music that is passionate because he’s supposed to take risks. He learned to do that instead of being perfect. It’s like yeah, that’s perfect, but I’ve got zits.
Edwin: It makes all the sense in the world. Without taking the risks, you aren’t going to expand the art form.
Phil: They’re not interested in the art. They’re only interested in the perfection of sales. That’s all they ever care about.
Kim: So you must have really dug punk rock when it came out.
Phil: Yeah, they dissed punk rock.
Kim: What about you? How did you feel about it?
Phil: My uncle had called me a punk when I was fourteen.
Kim: But it had a different meaning back then.
Phil: No, it was the same thing. It means anti-establishment. It means a person who is out to destroy society in their minds. The difference between destroying society and changing society and building society is that you first have to take down what needs to be repaired and build it up and that was a punk. Corporate rock had already taken over when punk came in. One of the first songs I ever did, “That’s Cool, That’s Trash,” was a garage band record that they sold…
Edwin: Was that the Kingsmen?
Phil: We did the record and then the Kingsmen covered it for their album.
Edwin: That’s a great song!
Phil: If you listen to it, it’s three chords punk. I liked punk because they knew what they were doing. They were trying to destroy the corporate message of rock, saying, “It belongs to me. It doesn’t belong to you. Rock and roll is what I feel, not what you can sell. It’s what I think, what I feel.” Corporate doesn’t like the fact that music belongs to the artist. It should be able to be cloned, manufactured and sold. They don’t like the idea of someone saying, “Music is this. It’s one chord with a broken string.”
Edwin: One of the biggest changes that the Beatles brought to music was the idea that this group of musicians would write the songs and perform them and do the whole thing.
Phil: The Beatles were never accepted in Los Angeles. The record labels never accepted them. As a matter of fact, they tried to sell the Beatles to Dunhill.
Edwin: They didn’t get the concept.
Phil: They got the concept. They were out to destroy it. They didn’t want the concept. They were biding their time. They tried to get rid of the Beatles after their fourth number one. Columbia turned them down for $50,000 because they said they never had a group that made more than two number ones. Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Capital. They didn’t know number ones. They thought the group was over at three number ones and tried to sell them for $50,000. Nobody would buy them. It was in Variety. “Beatles Are Through.” Fourth number one. There was nowhere to go but down.
Kim: I want to ask you about the song that Jim Webb wrote about you.
Phil: What about it?
Kim: Were you acquainted with him? Was he a fan of yours?
Phil: Jimmy Webb was turned down by every publisher in L.A. He was a kid from Oklahoma and Los Angeles doesn’t like people from Oklahoma. Los Angeles doesn’t like people from England. Los Angeles doesn’t like brown skinned people. They don’t like Japanese people.
Kim: Who do they like here?
Phil: They don’t like anybody here except L.A. people. He’s from Oklahoma so he was turned down. He met a woman who ran a recording studio called Harmony, where I had recorded when I was fifteen. She told him that he should talk to me. Jimmy was staying with this woman in the Hollywood Hills. I went in to see Jimmy and he played me “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Up Up and Away.” He was working on “MacArthur Park” and he said, “I have to cut down the instrumental section. It’s way too long right now.” I asked him to play me the whole thing and he did and said he could cut it down and I said, “No, keep it in.” Tears were rolling out of my eyes while I was hearing these songs. He says, “So Phil, what do you think?” I said, “Every one of those are #1 records.” He just breaks down and cries and I’m crying and he said, “You’re the only person in the world that can hear this.”
Kim: When was this?
Phil: I was gone [to New York] by ’68 so it must have been ’67. It was at the time of the 5th Dimension that Jimmy got signed, I guess, by Johnny Rivers. They put out “Go Where You Wanna Go,” which was not a hit by the Mamas and Papas. At this time Barry McGuire’s next single after “Eve of Destruction” was going to be “California Dreamin’” with the Mamas and Papas singing background. The head of the company claimed that when he first heard the Mamas and Papas that he knew they were going to be as big as the Beatles. He didn’t like them and he said to me, “Phil, you produce them.” Barry had brought them in and so they became Barry’s backup group. John had written a song called “California Dreamin.’” I said to John, “Do you know ‘Walk, Don’t Run’?” He said, “No. I don’t.” I said, “I think that’s the way ‘California Dreamin’ should go.” We rewrote the song for Barry McGuire. It was supposed to be Barry’s next record. “Go Where You Wanna Go” stiffed so Dunhill didn’t think the Mamas and Papas were anything important.
Edwin: Did “Go Where You Wanna Go” become a hit later, like a second time around sort of thing?
Phil: Fourth time around. First the 5th Dimension did it and they hired Jimmy Webb to do the arrangements even though he was still an unknown songwriter. He called me up and said, “I’m working for the 5th Dimension. Why don’t you write a song for them?” I wrote “Another Day, Another Heartache” for them. He produced it on that session. After “Go Where You Wanna Go” stiffed came “Up Up and Away.” Then, boom, it was one thing after another. Glen Campbell and hit after hit after hit. Like I had said, all of these were #1 records. Jimmy had gotten to be a major mega-star, but he always wanted to be P.F. Sloan. In other words, for some reason or other, in his mind he associated me with the singer/songwriter that doesn’t get listened to. He considered himself a singer/songwriter, but no one was listening to him sing.
Kim: He’s a terrific singer too. I love his stuff.
Phil: He kept saying, “If P.F. Sloan can do it, I can do it.” In ’67 I left Dunhill and that was the end of a big part of the universe. Jimmy’s star was rising and mine was falling. I had come back from New York feeling broken spirited, working in the Village doing shows there.
Kim: Was that the pink loft?
Phil: Yeah, pink piano, pink loft and a beautiful blues singer girl. I came back to L.A. and had to recover and he invited me up to his house. He owns this huge house and I have no money. All of my money had been taken away by Dunhill under threat of death and suit. I’m living at home and Jimmy’s living in a mansion with the most beautiful woman in the world and he’s got an entourage of beautiful people. I open the door and they’re all sitting on the floor. Some guy jumps up and says, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m P.F. Sloan and Jimmy wanted to see me.” “You can’t just walk in. Get out of here. Who do you think you are? Hey Jimmy some guy just walked in.” Jimmy comes walking in like Marlene Dietrich, down the banister and he’s like, “Holy shit! Don’t you people know who this is?” and they’re like, “No, we don’t give a damn who this guy is. You’re the king.” Jimmy starts to cry and takes me over to a corner and says, “Jeez, what am I doing? I’ve got all these people and they don’t even recognize you. I thought these people loved me. If they love me then they love you.” They basically didn’t care. They just wanted to be around the money and Jimmy. This is a great movie story. I’m walking on Hollywood Boulevard, I don’t have two quarters to rub together, I just love it. I’m at this little hot dog stand at Vine and I’m having a cup of coffee for 25¢ and the Association are singing, “Looking For P.F. Sloan.” I don’t have the money for the cup of coffee and I’m wondering if I should tell this guy I don’t have the money for the coffee but I’m the guy in the song. No, it wouldn’t change anything. It’s like that and a quarter will get you on the bus. I thought, jeez, my day had come back. So I go and see Jimmy at the Troubadour to ask if he could help me, because I was going nowhere. Jimmy says, “Sure, just follow me and my car back to my place and we’ll talk about reestablishing your career.” Then I get lost. It’s like twelve o’clock at night and I never showed up and Jimmy was like, “Jeez, whatever happened to P.F. Sloan? He was supposed to be here.” And that’s where the song came from!

Discovery is not always an endeavor of looking to the future. Time is modeled in such that it can sometimes allow us to look into the past or the future with the same clarity, like a reflecting pool. So whether you’re looking left or looking right, you’re bound to find things to see--depending on what you’re looking for. Something new? Something different? Or, as a music lover, are you merely looking for something that follows a kind of continuum? Buddy Holly to Beatles to Nick Lowe to Nik Armstrong? Who is to say that anything happening NOW is really modern? Especially since modernity really only refers to one specific type of art. So what exactly are you looking for…? These are all ideas that came to mind while speaking with Sean O’Hagan about his latest record Beet, Maize & Corn (Drag City, 2003). If you think that I’m talking about something old here, then start the introduction over.

What you probably should know is that Sean O’Hagan has been for fifteen years the heart and soul of the High Llamas, and before that a member of Microdisney. Sean has survived the classifications of alternative-, lounge-, retro-, orchestral-, indie-, electro-, international-, and pop-rock. He has been dubbed things, and he likes dub. But none of that has really lasted. There are fans that thrill in seeing where Sean is going to out-out them next. Then there are others that only know him as well as the last review they read. Meanwhile Sean, with his thick reddish-blond hair and kind, weathered face is somewhere; following his muse through haunted hallways of time.

Scram: Perhaps when you listen to some Jazz music there’s an oddness that you perceive—
Sean O’Hagan: Yes.
Scram: --that you want to bring into Pop music?
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah absolutely, and there were artists in the sixties and to some extent in the seventies who did that, to a certain extent. In the seventies it all gets a bit confused. There were in the sixties artists like the Free Design, the Fifth Dimension, people like that who did the fantastic little moves and changes and just you go oh that’s fantastic and it’s working in within the genre of Pop music and you go, God they’ve really reached out there.
Scram: Was it more rooted though in aspiring towards beauty or towards sophistication?
Sean O’Hagan: Beauty, I think.
Scram: Earlier you were talking about jazz harmony…
Sean O’Hagan: And ‘jazz harmony’ is a phrase that my friends who have been to music college use. When I was doing Gideon Gaye, I never would have used that phrase. I only use it know because I’ve realized that it’s kind of a cliché of language that people can pick up on. I interrupted you, I’m sorry.
Scram: That’s quite alright. You were talking about jazz harmony and Brian Wilson. When he was a teenager in 1962 or 1963, he was at a record store in a listening booth and he picked up the Four Freshman. And he thought, this is the new sound of music.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah.
Scram: My impression of that is that here’s a guy who’s basically living in a bubble, and no criticism towards him, but here’s a guy that doesn’t know that all of this Jazz has been happening in New York for the past ten years and he’s saying that this is the new sound.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah.
Scram: Basically what I’m trying to say is that something that is new to you isn’t always new to somebody else.
Sean O’Hagan: I freely admit that and its kind of an interesting experience that you’ve described there. As I said to you before, I didn’t have a Classical education--as a kid, it was something that you avoided, I would have thought it was a posh thing, it’s for certain kind of people. That it had nothing to do with the way I was brought up. I was brought up in this very much sort of, you know, Beatles, Monkees, blah, blah, blah…
Scram: Mmm hmm. Now are you Irish?
Sean O’Hagan: My family are Irish, and I lived there for a number of years. Yeah and you know now, now, here I am in my early 40s, you know, I heard in the last three years Delius for the first time.
Scram: Who’s this?
Sean O’Hagan: Delius---he’s a British composer.
Scram: Don’t know him.
Sean O’Hagan: Oh! Oh, astonishing stuff, it’s just like—and it was weird. He was playing music in 1900 which I was trying—I’ve been looking, when I was making Beet, Maize & Corn, I was trying to find that music, you know?
Scram: Mm hmm.
Sean O’Hagan: It’s a very strange mixture of kind of the European school of the late 1800s and Spiritual music—American Spiritual music--the kind of music that became the Blues. Literally, the Spiritual music from the plantations.
Scram: Spirituals?
Sean O’Hagan: He was a strange guy, he left England in the 1860s and worked in an orangery in Georgia.
Scram: I see.
Sean O’Hagan: And he heard Spiritual music. And instead of going down the route that maybe Stephen Foster did, he actually went back to Europe, studied at Leipzig, and started writing symphonic music that maybe had the flavor of Spiritualism. To me that’s amazing!
Scram: What I hear from--and that’s a remarkable story--what I hear from that is that there’s kind of a cross-pollinization that happens with a figure like that, and in the modern world, in the age of information, it’s harder and harder to find. That’s something that you might be saying in the chorus of the lead-off track from Snowbug…
Sean O’Hagan: “Bach Ze.”
Scram: Right, “There must be something worth seeking out.”
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah.
Scram: And you know there’s also a track on the new album, Beet, Maize & Corn, I don’t exactly remember the track, but the sentiment is somewhat similar, where you say, “does somebody else know this? Does somebody else feel the same way? We need to be looking for something new.”
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah, that’s “Rotary Hop.” You’re right, but the trick with lyrics for me is to create a story, and out of that you can extract little nuggets like that that where you think, “oh great, that’s actually true!” And the Snowbug example (“Bach Ze”), was “there must be something”… you know…God, I’ve forgot the lyrics, they’ve slipped me! God, I sing it all the bloody time, but that chorus is about, we’ll it’s about how there must be something out there to find, and there is. But, it’s also about how Johnson--and I don’t know if you realize this, and God I hope I’m correct in this--but Lyndon Johnson, brought the space program to Texas because basically there was a political move to bring it down there instead of to New Mexico, or wherever, And uh, he had this kind of whole scenario where he was like ‘there’s something out there, and we’re gonna find it, and it’s gonna—and in those days Texas wasn’t Bush’s Texas, you know, it was a poor Texas--and it was we’re gonna bring something of the future to Texas. And I just thought it was a great story, but it was very much--you’re right—it managed to create a situation where you were actually talking about space travel and sort of looking for something that might be out there. And “Rotary Hop” is about Beefheart. It’s just about Captain Beefheart, how he sat himself up in the desert and he was always looking for new people to play with, and new places to go to. Because he could never settle anywhere because he had a certain madness within him and within his music.
Scram: And even the title of the song, “Bach Ze,” is itself kind of similar to this Delius idea. Guy from the 1900s, European school, goes to work in an orange plantation Georgia, and you know, hears Spirituals in a new way—hears them for what they bring intellectually to the big picture of music.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah
Scram: I kind of see it as, when I listen to your music, you’re kind of a conduit living in the age of information. You’re able to listen to Bach fugues, or music influenced by Bach fugues, and harpsichord music, and basically music that is free of tonal center and kind of flows and is kind of dulcet sounding. And then you’ve got Ze, is that how you pronounce it, Tom “Zee?”
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah.
Scram: Who’s this kind of fringe Brazilian figure.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah.
Scram: And you’re kind of this person who’s able to say, “Well I think this is beautiful, and I think this is beautiful.” And I’m not necessarily saying that you marry the two elements.
Sean O’Hagan: Well, I did. You’re quite exactly spot on, that’s exactly what I did. It was just like when I was writing that song, you know, the kind of sedate feel of the nylon string was for me sort of like Bach’s music for the guitar, and the slight oddness of the chords, on the chorus where there’s just like these chromatic chords, it very much reminded me of Tom Ze, I was into Tom Ze at the time, it’s as simple as that, and I don’t need to--
Scram: Right!
Sean O’Hagan: And you’re spot on—it’s self explanatory to an extent, obviously to you but not to most people they’re like—where did you get that from?
Scram: There is a certain kind of canon feel to a lot of High Llamas songs, where you kind of find yourself coming full circle, , such is the nature of Pop music and the journey of the song is kind of introspective and moody. You’re not always very sure where your footing is. You know what I’m saying?
Sean O’Hagan: Absolutely yeah, yeah—well, you’ve got a choice in a lot of music. You can give people a situation where they’re gonna know what is going to happen—and most successful Pop music is successful just because of that very thing, because people know exactly what’s gonna come around and they’re waiting for it and here it comes and thrust a fist in the air and there you go. Or you can go, well you think that’s coming around the corner, well it’s not, it’s this. But then it does revert to the Pop music format somewhat in that you’ve got that unpredictability for maybe 8 bars, but that 8 bars, you know, is gonna happen as the second verse, and so you’ve familiarized yourself with that slight, unsure footing, as you’ve put it, and that’s an odd experience, it’s a sort of unfamiliar thing that’s become familiar very quickly, and it’s sort of like getting people used to sort of altered musical conditions…. A lot of the brass on the new record was very much informed by Carla Bley.
Scram: Huh. Interesting that you mention that, I keep hearing that name.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah, She’s fantastic, just like her husband Paul, she’s just a great compositional Jazz arranger. She was influenced by Charlie Mingus and Kurt Weill, and she really made these records in 1968, 1969, the finest of which I think is called Escalator Over The Hill. It’s just that lovely loose brass, and this is very indulgent as well, it’s got that loose brass as well, I really love that, I really just wanted to capture that on Beet, Maize & Corn. I’ve been totally into it for the last couple of years. You know, there is a certain familiarity to everything from Gideon Gaye right up to Buzzle Bee, if you think, and for me Gideon Gaye, Hawaii, and Cold and Bouncy were all connected. There was a certain way of working that carried through very crudely from Gideon Gaye and I had perfected it by Cold and Bouncy. I stopped that, and I sort of jumped to another horse on Snowbug--that was the sort of loose feel and that was when the Brazilian influences came in. That carried through to Buzzle Bee, and on Beet, Maize & Corn, the big thing I wanted to do, the Big Big thing was to not reference--apart from Carla Bley who’s from the seventies--was to not reference the sixties or the seventies in any big way. Because you know, it’s still the cool thing to reference in music, whether it’s Beck, Tortoise or Matmos, referencing a little bit of the sixties but then, they’re very much cutting edge sort of digital electronics.
Scram: Mm.
Sean O’Hagan: And it’s, well one week it’s Serge Gainsbourg, and the next week it’s going to be um, you know, Tim Hardin.
Scram: It’s what you’re talking about--the Record Collector mentality of creating music.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah, it’s Other Music, it’s people who love Other Music--well I love Other Music-- but you know, it’s that kind of thing which everyone in the states seems to refer to. And I just wanted to say, how are you going to make a different record? And the two things were: don’t reference those decades the way that everyone else is, so I said I’m going to reference 1958, 1959, and that really lovely odd little period of American music. And the other thing I’m going to reference is where the root of Jazz, as it is used in Pop music comes from, and that’s Ravel, Delius, and they informed Gershwin and Cole Porter. But I wasn’t going to go Gershwin and Cole Porter, I was going to go one beyond Gershwin and Cole Porter, go back fifty years. Where did they get it from?
Scram: I haven’t really picked up on so much of what you’re talking about, the ‘58/59 US period--
Sean O’Hagan: OK, it’s “Leaf and Lime,” it’s on “The Click and the Fizz”--
Scram: Okay, that’s a great song.
Sean O’Hagan: Strings, how those strings just kind of wander in and out of each other, it’s the reverb on those strings, on “Leaf and Lime,” that kind of dreamy beat box feel without a beat box, that’s very much in Bob Lind style—Bob Lind, who was just making music in 1959--and it’s a few of the sort of little moves with the arrangement.
Scram: The chromatic coming out of the chorus.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah, just the ones that the guys in the fifties used to produce—everything was kind of--
Scram: Syrupy.
Sean O’Hagan: There was kind of an unnaturalness about it. I mean, if you listen to Doo Wop, Jesus, that is just the strangest music that you can listen to, It’s stranger than anything Hendrix ever did, The strangest Doo Wop is absolutely out there—and there was an unnaturalness about it. And it was all happening in the fifties. And when the sixties came along, everybody said, because they’d discovered feedback and fuzz-boxes, they thought they’d cracked the universe open. And they hadn’t cracked the universe open. You had to go back one decade, and these street corner singers were doing more unusual things. Go back two decades and Charles Ives was writing, you know, balmy, balmy music.
Scram: I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I think in your presskit that you mention Moondog. I don’t want to make too much of a departure but I remember when I first became familiar with Moondog--it was canticles that he had recorded, a series of rounds—and I thought, these are very brilliant and these drums are amazing, and it was all very modern. Modern because it fit my perception of what was “modern.”
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah.
Scram: Because I think that when you go on a musical journey listening to stuff, your next big thing is what’s the next-big-thing for you. And it’s what’s modern for you—you know what I’m saying?
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah.
Scram: Because if you discover Kurt Weill, that’s gonna be really modern for you at that time—or if you discover Moondog at the right time, or Beefheart--
Sean O’Hagan: And that’s a good thing isn’t it—you’re saying that’s a good thing?
Scram: Yeah.
Sean O’Hagan: It’s like I was saying, I didn’t have a Classical upbringing. I heard Stravinsky and the “Rites of Spring” at school and I was forced to listen and I thought, Jesus Christ, this guy. And I’m not very big into the Germans, Mozart or Hayden, whatever. And Beethoven used to bore the pants off of me until somebody said you’ve gotta listen to his string quartets, to his trios--and they’re absolutely crazy, they’re wonderful things. And Classical musicians, when you’re doing recording strings, you interact with these people who’ve been to music college, and they’re you know they know it all. And when you talk excitedly about something they’re completely familiar with, I think they’re looking at you slightly pitifully, or “yeah, so, didn’t you know?” And the answer is no, I didn’t know. And so, it’s something that’s fresh and exciting that you can use, and you can use it.
Scram: Well, you see it through the eyes of a child.
Sean O’Hagan: Yeah, exactly.
Scram: You see, and I think a lot of what art means to me is clearing away the perceptions of the world. I look at something and I say, I think it’s beautiful, and it could be a book that maybe somebody else thinks is trite, and you say, well I see a lot of beauty in this book, and that’s a very personal thing.
Sean O’Hagan: And it’s—the result is that it inspires you, and you actually go out and do something quite unusual because of it. That means that something good has happened. There’s been a good interaction.

This interview originally appeared in Scram #15

Brute Force Speaks! An Interview with Stephen Friedland by Michael Lucas

When presented with the contact information for Mr. Stephen Friedland by Scram editrix and amateur gumshoe Kim Cooper, I was somewhat daunted. Would the story behind the Brute Force legend (as captured on the Columbia LP Confections of Love, an album which has fascinated me for upwards of a quarter of a century) be worthy of the superhuman notions I'd developed around this enigmatic creation?

When I finally worked up the gumption to face the challenge, I was relieved to find that not only were the missing portions of the Brute Force saga anything but prosaic, but that Mr. Friedland was himself an extraordinary individual and extremely gracious to boot.

Brute's appearance at the Scramarama was, for me, a special highlight in an already stellar lineup. I don't feel that my life would have been complete without witnessing his awe-inspiring performance, which exceeded all expectations.

I could blather on indefinitely, but let's get to the main event instead. Ladies and gentlemen... Mr. Stephen Friedland... Brute Force!

SCRAM: What was your involvement in the music world prior to Confections of Love?
BRUTE: When I was 24 I had a girlfriend, Bunny. Her father was Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer Billy Gussak, who played with Bill Haley. Billy had a piano in his house and took a liking to my songs. We collaborated on "My Teenage Castle (Is Tumblin' Down)." Billy introduced me to record producers Hugo and Luigi at RCA. They recorded "My Teenage Castle" with Little Peggy March. They had also worked on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh)" with the Tokens, and they turned me onto them. I went to the Tokens' office and played a few songs; they hired me as a songwriter and soon I joined their group, and became a Token.

SCRAM: This was after "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and the hot rod album?
BRUTE: Yes, 1965. I was about twenty-five years old at the time.

SCRAM: You also wrote the classic "Nobody Knows What's Goin' On (In My Mind But Me)," which was recorded by the Chiffons. My editrix promised to flay me alive if I didn't get the scoop on that song.
BRUTE: What is a thought? Where does a thought come from? How does a person feel about their thoughts? About secrets? These are some of the questions which might prompt an understanding of "Nobody Knows What's Goin' On (In My Mind But Me)." Texturally, it's a love song: a person loves another person, to everyone's disapproval, and because of societal pressure (who knows: parental, peer group, cultural), everybody says, "Give it up." But what do they know? This leads the person to realize that, "Nobody knows what's goin' on in my mind but me," a flat out declaration of independence, of individuality and of privacy of one's thoughts. Freedom of thought. The song is very concerned with this larger issue of privacy of one's thoughts, and to that extent is courageous in this day of Big Brother. There is a point, however, which the song doesn't explore: the point when not expressing one's thoughts can be an unhealthy thing to do and all the energy, whatever it is, just keeps building up and can become too much to bear for the "thinker of thought." Secrecy is a subtextual element in the song. Keeping secrets, obviously, is a must when nobody else knows what's going on in one's mind. As a songwriter at that time I was exploring the workings of the human mind and, through a lovestory lyric, expressing my own feelings about love--interracial love perhaps--and the invasion of one's mind by friends, family or government. The melody, I remember, during its creation, as being especially entrancing in the chorus, almost hypnotic in its repetition, enhanced by the lyrics, floating over the chord pattern, which are concerned with the mind. The mind singing about the mind. The song was produced by the Tokens while I was a member of the group. It was a chart record, which was very exciting, and I still receive royalties. Years later, I recorded "Nobody Knows" as the b side for the Apple single "King of Fuh." I produced this with the Tokens: the cellophane wrapper from a box of Kool cigarettes, which I was chain smoking at that time, was used to produce a sound effect while I played piano. My rendition was very much more agitated and frenetic than the Chiffons' rendition. I haven't seen any of the Chiffons since that time, except on TV ads for compilation CDs, but I feel very lucky to have known them and to have had our paths cross and come out with a hit. And if you want to know any more, all I can say is..."Nobody knows what's goin' on in my mind but me." But you can always ask!

SCRAM: Was your split from the Tokens an amicable one?
BRUTE: Yes. We were still friends. They produced the second Brute Force album--

SCRAM: A second Brute Force album exists?!?
BRUTE: Yes, Extemporaneous.

SCRAM: Whoa, whoa. I've heard extremely vague rumors about a second LP, but since I could never find any real evidence of it, I thought that it was just someone's confusion of Brute Force with the Brute Force Steel Band.
BRUTE: No, produced by the Tokens in 1969 on BT Puppy Records, which was run by the Tokens and their manager at the time. It's a piano/voice and spoken word recording made at Olmstead Recording Studios in N.Y. City with approximately forty people in attendance. It's called Extemporaneous because many of the songs I sing when I perform are extemporaneous. The format of the album I planned in advance: I then added a lot as we went along. It was an electric evening during which everyone had lots of fun.

SCRAM: It's an extremely difficult record to find.
BRUTE: Yes, it was distributed in a limited manner. I've actually included it in the new version of my Tour de Brute Force CD. [Which is recommended in the strongest manner possible as an essential addition to any music lover's library, and also serves as an excellent introduction to Brute, if needed. -ML]

SCRAM: Were the songs similar to those on Confections of Love?
BRUTE: It was in what I'd term the Brute Force genre, "Heavy Funny" songs." Peace songs. Comedy songs. Spiritual songs.

SCRAM: Now, back to Confections.
BRUTE: That was made shortly after leaving the Tokens. It took about three months to record, as I recall.

SCRAM: The Brute Force persona seems to combine qualities of beat poet, suave romantic crooner, and holy fool trapped in a world not of his making. Did the character of Brute Force arise out of the songs which you happened to compose for the album, or were the songs written with Brute Force in mind?
BRUTE: The characters that you mention have appeared, Zeliglike, from time to time. If a songwriter becomes anything during the writing of songs, it is another degree of being a songwriter. This is the way I put it:

A FEATHER FELL, A TALE TO TELL.
A TALE TO TELL, A FEATHER FELL.

Here we have two ways to understand the phenomenon which is presented to us, to decipher half the truth...(We, the living, alas, can understand but half of what this reality is.)... Seeing the feather fall we can describe it in any of the ways available. Both descriptions are secondary to the phenomenon anyway, the seeing of the real feather, and the mental seeing of the feather, as one would write a story. One may be called fact. One may be called fiction. Take your pick. This is the fulcrum upon which the media matrix see-saws, back and forth, creating a delerium of confusion, of artsy, slick, award-winning confusion: blistering the eyes with impossible editing not meant to be understood by the eyes; puncturing the eardrums with commercials spoken too quickly for the ears to understand; ripping off the public's face with in-your-face moviescreen egomanical sex/sport/violence/playgames.
Now... the naming of the person, the ego who describes a truth or a fiction, compounds the illusion of communication and description. Should I have only been called Stephen Friedland, perhaps the whole trip would have been different. But the pseudonym was perceived as false by anyone and everyone, although people go along with the projection of the ego, for they themselves have an ego trip and are basically kind to accept Brute Force. However, my work and the appreciation of my person would have been initially appreciated in a more serious manner... young, Jewish songwriter. "Brute Force" incorrectly avoided that.

SCRAM: Many of the songs on Confections have a certain subversive quality, especially in the way you make social commentary through playing with cliché and convention.
BRUTE: Well, look at the liner notes. It's heavy stuff, although comedically spiced. "Mistress Peace sleeps with soldiers" might be considered a bit subversive, although my political view of the world is decidedly spaced out: observing space and understanding that conflicts on Earth are always in relation to the phenomenon of the Space Mission, the colonization of the Solar System and the creation of earth as a supply station for the Space Mission.

SCRAM: I'd like to get your impression of the individual songs, if I might. "In Jim's Garage."
BRUTE: Secrecy of younglove from their parents. "He may be greasy and dirty, but that's just the mark of his honesty" says it for Jim and I hope most of the blue-collar class.

SCRAM: "The Sad, Sad World of Mothers and Fathers."
BRUTE: Still applies to the gap between parents and their children, and the lack of communication between spouses who'd rather watch TV than find out what's happening with their daughter in a car outside with... him! I guess if the daughter was loved at home she wouldn't be in such a... position.

SCRAM: "Tierra del Fuego."
BRUTE: Love song, Latino, transcultural, fun with words.

SCRAM: "No Olympian Height."
BRUTE: Straight-ahead lovesong, extolling the lover, "Do what you will, I am yours." This was a poem written about a girlfriend, Abby. The line in the song about Grecian urns is a reference to "Ode On A Grecian Urn" by John Keats, in which we read:

"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.
That is all ye know on Earth,
And all ye need to know."

SCRAM: "Cuddly."
SCRAM: Dixielandish lovesong. Everyone, well almost everyone, likes to get cuddly with their love-mate. Singing of the lyrics, "Baby, dey don't make 'em like dat any more" was inspired by the great Jimmy Durante.

SCRAM: "To Sit on a Sandwich."
BRUTE: Absurdity of the world: we might as well go sit on a sandwich in our "advanced civilization." This song contains perhaps the most onerous pun of the last half of the 20th century: "Prepares for the wurst."

SCRAM: Brute's Circus Metaphor."
BRUTE: Love lost, the characters metaphorically played by circus characters.

SCRAM: "Brute's Party."
BRUTE: A sarcastic description of the boredom of parties.

SCRAM: "As Long as my Song Lives."
BRUTE: Our Art survives us. Long after I am gone
Will Friedlandishemusik live on and on.
So would it be with a love, with a friend
that knowledge of them need never end
should they be remembered in song
as words and melody play e'erlong,
and as long as your craft gives
then too my song in your work lives.

Long after the creator passes, the song lives on, and who does the song immortalize? The lover. See, it's as long as my song lives, which is forever, for a song is inanimate and not as frail as our flesh. A song doesn't die. It is embodied in a device, etched in marble, written on a page, a CD UFO zooming into the unknown to be enjoyed by a new generation.

SCRAM: "Tapeworm of Love."
BRUTE: I wrote "Tapeworm of Love" while I was still in high school. It was an authentic fifties song with piano triplets. When I played it for John Simon at Columbia he liked the lyrics very much, but felt that the fifties feel was not in sync with the year we were recording, 1967. Nostalgia for the fifties had not yet occurred, so I wrote another melody. I endeavored to bring the intensity of the whole metaphor of the internal gnawing and adventurous biting of the tapeworm inside the gut through the use of the sitar and an ancient Indian raga played on marimba. The song is a paradigm of Brute Force absurdism. Yet, a love song...

SCRAM: "Making Faces At Each Other."
BRUTE: Here's a new face I've just learned, it's called "making you happy baby" and is pretty self-explanatory. Making someone happy is wonderful. It's giving. To give. This song is pointing to the ability of people to respond to their genuine inner feelings rather than responding to the outer image, the face. "Love is the most beautiful thing on the face of the Earth. I wanna make the face of Love..."

SCRAM: Was it difficult getting such an unusual album released?
BRUTE: It wasn't difficult getting Confections released. Columbia released a lot, and what stuck to the wall they went with. My stuff was just too ahead of its time.

SCRAM: There were no problems from upstairs?
BRUTE: Sitting at a conference table with the executives was, as I remember it, uncomfortable, because they played some songs and I was sitting there, in this conference room at a big oval table, and I was probably high on amphetamines. I would know how to speak with them today. Exactly what to say.

SCRAM: But there wasn't any resistance to your lyrics, as being too "cerebral" or "intellectual?"
BRUTE: There was resistance and the album was ahead of its time. Now the story is changing. A trans-generational reality, occuring. There is a nine-piece band in Birmingham, England, Misty's Big Adventure, personnel averaging 23 years old, playing "Tapeworm Of Love" and "Hello" from Extemporaneous (email grandmastergareth@hotmail.com). At Scramarama, I met BF fans of all ages. Advertisements for BF are attracting fans from all over the world to write to Brute's Force, the Brute Force fan club, at brutesforce@aol.com, in order to obtain BF music. The buzz is exciting and facing the situation, becoming less anonymous, has combated the resistance. Kind of a guerilla in the war of consciousness.

SCRAM: Any comments about the poetry on the back cover?
BRUTE: Yes, the couplet, "Mother Nature washes our genes, in her worn out washing machine." When I looked at the back cover, I wondered why the next two lines were omitted. It's really a quatrain which continues, "They're hung up on the line to dry, by that old grouch, Father Time." It would have made sense in the context of the album: you know, Mother, Father... lovesongs.

SCRAM: Are there any other Brute Force recordings besides Confections of Love and Extemporaneous?
BRUTE: At Columbia, I recorded a song I wrote in Russian and English titled "Hello Moscow," a big band/ rock fusion. The session was catered, like a party, and attended by many invited guests, Leonard Cohen among them. The thread of the message was, "Hello Moscow, how are you doin'?" This was in 1967, the Cold War was in effect. In July 1968, with my lifelong friend Ben Schlossberg, I participated in an expedition to swim the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia. We made it half way to the Diomede Islands. It was documented in Life magazine, 9/20/68. The song itself, as was the expedition, is a natural extension of my weltanschauung. We live on a sundrop.

"There is one borderline, really, and that's the edge of Earth: that roundness, that fullness, that mountained and vallied, water filled edge of Earth upon which we all live."
(Copyright 1969 Stephen Friedland)

I make Pledge of Allegiance to the Planet plaques. I burn into redwood the words:

I pledge allegiance to my planet.
And to the universe,
all around and within me.
One Spirit indivisible.
With Eternity for all.
(Copyright 1980 Stephen Friedland)

The synthesis of business relations and trade treaties is the modern day approximation of planetary nationality, what the military-industrial complex/media-matrix calls "globalism."

SCRAM: And you recorded a single for Apple Records. How did that come about?
BRUTE: I had a girlfriend, Joanna. We were both at Monmouth College (now University) in West Long Branch, NJ. Around 1965, I moved to NYC. Joanna also moved to NYC, and by that time had met and hooked up with Tom Dawes. He was a member of the Cyrkle, who toured with the Beatles in the mid sixties, and were managed by Nat Weiss, a friend of Brian Epstein. I wrote a poem which turned into the lyrics, then composed a melody around 1967. Through Joanna I met her then-husband, Tom. Tom and I got to be friends and he said some good words about me to John Simon, who had been recording the Cyrkle for Columbia. I went to Columbia, played some songs live for John and that led to the, I, Brute Force, Confections of Love album. When I recorded "King of Fuh," late '68, I got the idea to bring a tape to him and see if he could get it to Nat and, who knows, maybe the Beatles. Well, that's just what happened. A 1/4" mix of the multitrack session of "King of Fuh," recorded at Olmstead Recording Studios, was given to Tom. He brought it to Nat, who, I have learned, played it for George Harrison. George thought it was great, and he added strings from the London Philharmonic and kicked up the drums a bit. They released Apple 8 in May 1969, but Capitol/EMI censored it.

SCRAM: Why?
BRUTE: Basically, language taboo. It was a very nice song about the land of Fuh, which was ruled by a benevolent King. Since he was the King of Fuh, he was also known as the Fuh King.

SCRAM: Ah, I see.
BRUTE: The latest twist is that Ken Mansfield, in The Beatles, the Bible and Bodega Bay, makes it clear that John Lennon also had a hand in championing the record and pushing for its release in the U.S.A. Incidentally, "King of Fuh" has been added to the censored song database of the First Amendment Project at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Writer and software developer Antonio Caroselli, in Italy, is currently writing my biography, and a detailed account of the Apple experience will be included.

SCRAM: With what sort of projects are you currently involved?
BRUTE: To take my music around the world. To write songs and record them. To manufacture state of the art formats of my music and performances. To advertise and sell these products, and to stay centered amidst all the conditions: WORK, FAMILY, FRIENDS, MONEY, SURVIVAL, SEX, FEAR, WAR.

SCRAM: What is your act like these days?
BRUTE: I perform an off the wall, non-traditional musical variety act. Songs, jokes, props, characterizations and improvisational songwriting, and philosophic exhortations. Additionally, I perform my straight music, lovesongs, spiritual songs, along with pure melody, playing keyboard, and guitar."

SCRAM: Where can we catch your act?
BRUTE: I play comedy clubs and music venues nationally. Visit http://www.brutesforce.com/

It is possible to see me,
Look, at night into the sky,
see there the farther shore.
When you wake
to start the day
again a vision forward draws
you on to see me.
A need to go on.
A drive to pursue.
All that and so much more
within the orbs of your eyes
shall who I am filter through.
Think not this is fame driven.
Nor quest for moment's adulation.
For you shall see me everywhere
And not the censors of Capitol.
Nor the censors of EMI
shall stop
the "proclamation of Truth is Fearless."

This article originally appeared in Scram #15

A Night of Musical Board Games by your host, Vern Stoltz

There are many sad things one notices about the world as it moves further along the path of technical progress. Sure, CDs may sound clearer and be less vulnerable to scratches, but one loses the pleasure of holding a beautifully designed record cover in one's hands. Likewise, the evolution of computer gaming has allowed for incredibly realistic scenes to appear on a video screen, but at the expense of the visually appealing board game box. Many people have forgotten or never experienced the joy that comes with opening a box to discover a world of plastic pieces, dice, spinners, cards, multicolored play money, and best of all, the board that opens to display an exciting design.

Recently I gathered six friends to re-create that era where music and board games met in pop culture heaven. The goal: to play four long-deleted music-themed board games to see if they were still enjoyable today. This was not a scientific experiment, as the increased level of alcohol infusion through the evening may have resulted in biased results.

The Players:
1. Abigail: a collector of old advice books, and the personality behind the Miss Abigail advice column for the London Times. Miss Abigail’s Time Warp Advice website can be found at http://www.missabigail.com/
2. Ani: a painter, artist, and dedicated thrifter, newly relocated to Buffalo, NY
3. Jeff: the writer behind the often funny Wit Memo website http://www.geocities.com/~witmemo/
4. Jen: a school teacher in the Washington, D.C. area
5. Ray: a magician in his spare time, residing in Washington, D.C.
6. Suzanne: wife of Jeff (they met at a screening of the documentary I Created Lancelot Link)
7. Vern: collects old vinyl LPs and board games, and sometimes even plays with them

The Games:

1957—Name That Tune

This game was a form of musical bingo. Each player received a card with columns headed with the letters M-U-S-I-C, and a small pile of red wooden markers. These looked suspiciously like those red tablets they used to hand out in grade school—the ones you chewed, after which everyone laughed at the kid who had the reddest teeth (and the worst brushing habits)

The Name That Tune game came with a record album, containing the voice of George DeWitt, host of the television show. Mr. DeWitt would announce a certain letter/number combination (eg. S/42), and then an organist played a five-second segment of an unnamed musical selection. If the title of the song was on your MUSIC card, you placed one of the red markers on the appropriate square. Should you achieve five in a row, you've won and must yell out “Stop the Music!”

This 1957 edition of the game included no rock and roll songs. Instead the game centered around selections like "National Emblem March," "American Patrol," "The Merry Widow Waltz," and the "Triumphal March (from Aïda)." Soon after placing the needle on the record, I became concerned that the disk would play out to the finish without anyone being able to identify five songs in a row.

Fortunately, two things prevented this. The first was the large number of standards that are still well known today—"Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Yes We have No Bananas," and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" (aka the alphabet song). The other element speeding play was the irresistible urge of my guests to yell out song titles once they recognized them. You might never have heard "Sweet Rose O Grady" before in your life, but having the player next to you yell out its name permitted you to mark it on your own MUSIC card.

The game was much more enjoyable than I had envisioned. And the record, though comprised of cheesy organ music, was actually quite fast paced.

Name That Tune Player Comments:

Jeff: B+ A great game—if you were born in 1930. A lot of fun… great to "break the ice" at a party.

Suzanne: We’re gonna party like its 1949!!

Abigail: I won!! I won!!! And I didn’t even cheat too much!!

Jen: ‘A’ grade. I was inspired to shout out the names of the tunes and sing along with the rapid tempos. We are concerned about the red dye on our hands from the tokens

1967—The Monkees Game

This was a more traditional game, the type where one spins an arrow, then moves that number of spaces forward. The winner is the first person who advances through a path of musical notes to reach the Monkees car. Although the cover of the box is quite impressive, with its images of the Monkees in their souped-up wagon, the game-board is a bit disappointing. The four Monkee markers looked too much alike, and they were out of proportion with the tiny musical notes on the gameboard.

Recognizing that just spinning and moving ahead would be boring, the game designers introduced a little plastic guitar with a rubber band for strings. When a player landed on a whole note, he had to pick up the guitar and start strumming and singing the “Hey Hey, We’re the Monkees” theme song. Each time the verse was completed, that team could advance eight additional music notes, until either it was their turn again or some other team landed on a whole note, snatched the toy guitar, and started singing.

As an observer, it was quite amusing to see the players singing, and I enjoyed the fast action as the guitar was rapidly passed from one set of hands to another. For the participating players though, the experience was less satisfying.

The Monkees Comments

Ani: Monkees suck. Gameboard lacks aesthetic qualities. The notes are too close together.. This is like school. I was no good in music class

Abigail: C-, too humiliating and confusing. Thank God it sped up at the end and was over faster.

Jen: D. Evil!!! It was stressful and panicky when singing.

Jeff :C+. Just move by spinning with some awkward, embarrassing, and pointless FORCED SINGING! Big disagreement, over whether having to sing, or getting to sing, is good or bad. I think this game was rushed to market without sufficient R & D, to take advantage of the Monkee craze.

Suzanne: B, exciting, but utterly trivial.

Ray: I was told there wouldn’t be any singing.

1971—The Partridge Family Game

This was another "racetrack" game, where one shook the dice and moved ahead, with the winner being the first to reach the Partridge Family bus. For added excitement, one could land on a Partridge square and draw a card. These cards were quite amazing, with each having a bit of Partridge trivia that appeared to have no relevance to the instructions it gave. Some examples:

Laurie has a great curiosity about everything—Move back 2 spaces
Chris has a great appetite for pancakes—Move ahead 3 spaces
Laurie belongs to the "Now" generation—Lose one turn
Danny has gone off zipping on his bike—Move ahead 4 spaces
‘Danny enjoys eerie horror movies—Lose one turn

There were four markers in this game, representing Keith, Laurie, Danny, and "Mom." Chris and Tracy were not represented, nor was Rueben, the group's manager. There was a brief pre-start skirmish, as most players wanted to be Danny.

The game itself went relatively quickly, as one only had to travel a path of 61 squares while using two dice. Mom started this game with a huge lead, but Keith, with an exact role of 11, ended up reaching the bus ahead of everyone else. Overall, this game was the one geared to the youngest target audience, with several players noting the similarity to Candyland. It was very simple, yet oddly enjoyable, perhaps because of the cheerful, early '70s graphic design.

The Partridge Family Comments

Ani: Better than the Monkees

Jen: I like making fun of the characters—each has led such a colorful post-Partridge life

Abigail: B+. Cards were entertaining, even though they made no sense. Helps to listen to "I Think I Love You" and dream of Keith. So cheap that they only used one photo for box, board, and pieces

1973—K-Tel Super Star Game

Yes, K-Tel actually produced a board game in addition to all those budget compilation records that were heavily advertised on television. This game was unique among the four played, as it was the only one to address the role of business in the music world. The goal of Name That Tune was to identify five songs in a row. The Monkees and Partridge Family games required you to race along the path and become the first to reach your vehicle. The goal of the K-Tel Super Star Game was to amass a fortune by game's end.

This was the only game to come with play money, unfortunately of an inferior quality, without any fake famous people on the bills. The game was very similar to the popular Game of Life. Players progress along the track, and follow the directions of whatever square they landed on. One has the option of buying insurance (for protection from stolen musical equipment), and instead of collecting money via regular paydays, one earns increasing dollar amounts by passing special concert squares.

By purchasing a record company, player have the option of releasing singles and LPs into the marketplace. When this happened, one went to the stereo and placed the needle onto a special multi-tracked 45 RPM record. The record would then announce either "It’s a Hit," "It’s a Flop," or "Break Even." If the result was a hit record, the player would collect a special miniature plastic record token—perhaps the coolest thing about this game—which was redeemable for more play money when you reached the end of the track.

But even with the introduction of cool golden records, this K-Tel game bored everyone stiff. The game track, although very brightly colored, was 153 squares long, and took forever to traverse—especially since the game came with only a single dice. The instructions on each square were boring, simply instructing the player to collect or pay money. Even playing the hit-predicting 45, which should have been entertaining, ended up feeling quite anti-climatic.

Sample instructions on the board game and the various "Fortune" cards:

Pay motel bill $100
Bootleg album, lose $10,000 in sales
Swindled by phony guru, pay $10,000
Sell life story to teen magazine, get $1,000
That’s a no-no, pay $30,000

Near the end of the game is a square that says "You’re chosen musician of the year—Congratulations," and oddly enough, there's no mention of monetary reward at all. Perhaps that was what was wrong with this game. With the constant focus on money, it felt like you should have a calculator nearby to keep track of your financial status. You'd think a game based on rock 'n roll would have been interesting, but the lack of famous rock celebrities, or even fictitious characters, meant that the emphasis was on money, money, and money.

In an ill-fated attempt to increase the excitement level, I went down to the basement and brought up an old color organ project made in junior high electronics class. But even those swirling colors from the '70s were unable to excite the players. This game was so boring that everyone decided to quit before even making it through the outermost ring of the track.

K-Tel Super Star Comments

Ani: Records are cool; K-Tel game drools

Jeff: This game promises to go on as long as Monopoly, or Risk. Much too ambitious for its own good, or ours. Cries out for two dice, instead of the one it comes with, to PICK UP THE PACE.

Suzanne: B+, a bit long, but engaging, like Life for deadheads.

Jen: Too many rules for a simple concept. Too long and tedious. Much like Monopoly. Yawn. The accompanying record sucks and is pointless. Just wanted it to end

Summary:

Oddly enough, everyone agreed that the oldest game, Name That Tune, was the most enjoyable. A bit of research showed that this was a very popular game in the late '50s, and a second edition was created with a new record.

The Partridge Family and Monkees games were fun, but this seemed partly due to the joy of having people sitting around a brightly colored board-game, conversing and interacting. Half the attraction of these games is the pop culture fascination with musical celebrities. The K-Tel game, lacking the celebrity aspect, was much less interesting.

Overall though, everyone agreed that board games are still entertaining, especially when played with a bunch of fun people. Most importantly, almost all boardgames can be played late at night, under candle light, during the next power outage. Your computer might be dead, but as long as at least two members of the Partridge Family are able to travel around the board, there will be hope in the world.

Book Review: All For A Few Perfect Waves, The Audacious Life And Legend Of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora

David Rensin, 2008, HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-077331-1

-

Very well then, the short review is “Get this book and read it,” ok?

The short review with a little bit extra tossed in is “Get this book and read it, and while reading it, try to keep the transcendent meanings of ‘good & evil’ always in mind, and watch in amazement as they morph from one thing to another, and even trade places with each other, shrouded underneath a nimbus of time and circumstance.”

Ok, that’s enough right there for those of you with dull sensibilities, sound-bite sized attention spans, or dogmatic world views that cannot admit to the existence of equally valid alternatives, other than your own constricted visions. You probably won’t read the book anyway, and even if you do, you’ll find a way to take the wrong message away from it after you’re done. You may go now, you are dismissed.

Now, as for the rest of you, now that we’ve gotten rid of the idiots, let us perhaps see if we can examine things in somewhat greater detail, shall we?

Ants reap all the benefits of life in the colony, and succeed mightily as a result and have taken over the world, but in the end they must always remain ants.

Edward Abbey did not think very highly of ants, however. Go read Desert Solitaire sometime. Might just do you some good. You never know.

Dora shared many of Abbey’s approaches, although I’m none too sure that either curmudgeon would have approved of the other. But I could be very wrong here, since I do not really know wherefore I speak.

Dora seems to have approved of very little, actually.

And he was a lying thief with a spiteful mean streak, too. A real small-timer. A bum. A failure.

And yet…

And yet again…

He somehow rose above it all to truly ethereal heights where few have trodden, aside from a very few saints and madmen.

And this of course is both the problem and the solution, all at the same time.

Surfing is so overburdened with counterintuitiveness and self-contradiction, that it would seem that it could not stand another log to be thrown on to that fire, lest the entirety of it self-immolate and disappear in a cloud of smoke, leaving a bitter residue of ashes behind in the mouths of those who would seek to understand it.

Dora seems to have thrown the entire forest into the blaze, and yet he got away with it somehow.

His story is allegory, and it enfolds and encloses no end of substories and branching paths that lead off into the murk with nary a street sign to show the way.

Some of these places are pretty nasty, but others seem to shine from within by their own ghostly light.

This review is already turning into the worst sort of bullshit.

Considering the subject matter, could we have expected otherwise?

Probably not.

I’ve been long convinced that there is a book the likes of which few have been written, lurking within the Dora cloud. A book that could use this impossibly fertile ground to nurture and coax from the black and fecal substrate, a grand tale that examines the core issues of what it really means to be human being.

I’m not quite convinced that this is the book, but I may be wrong. Right or wrong, this book is a thunderclap of a good effort, and may even provide the launching pad for an as yet unknown or unborn Shakespeare to really sink their teeth into things and extract that which needs to be extracted and distill it into a Worthy Thing.

And, as with its subject matter, it presents one face even as it hides other faces in plain sight.

It’s easy enough to let this one pass through your fingers as a mere recounting of things that were, things that were said, and things that were done, and no more.

But there’s a lot more than that going on underneath the surface, for those with the time, patience, and eyes to see any of it.

Up on the surface of things, this one is drop-dead simple: A tale of the man’s life, from start to finish, as told by those who were around at any given time, as well as the occasional cryptic snatch of prose from the man himself, with a few black & white photographs tossed in for good measure.

Easy, yes?

Of course it is.

And yet…

And yet again…

Patterns self-assemble and evanesce with their own sentience, as the story minds its own business, plodding forward in time.

Dora took the measure of those and that, all around him, and found nearly all of it wanting.

At which point he very reasonably decided to keep his own counsel, and veer off on a path of his own choosing, opportunistic, never permitting anything or anyone to dictate terms to him.

Except for the waves.

The waves dictated his entire life, and he was content to everlastingly dance to their tune.

But the ways of waves and men run counter to each other, and following one will cause grave problems with the other.

Dora had no doubt whatsoever as to which one was worthy. Which one was real. Which one was the Right Way.

And blast and damn any and all who might seek to interfere.

Which is the entire nub of the matter, in similar fashion as a single molecule of DNA is the nub of each of us, one and all.

Much flows from this deceptively simple premise.

Dora, perhaps more than anyone ever has, and perhaps ever will, in a world of proliferating security cameras, biometrics, secret databases, and jackboots, took this disarmingly simple premise to its furthest logical conclusion, paid dearly for it, and yet never looked back and never reconsidered his choice, once it had been made. Despite the Gordian knot of falsehood that he partook of, surrounded himself with, and promulgated, he remained true in the most adamantine definition of the word true that can be imagined.

All of this is woven into the heart of this book, at sub-basement level, and illuminates all that happens within it.

David Rensin presumes his readers to have sufficient intelligence to work things out for themselves, and mercifully assembles the tale with a feather-light hand. The story itself can do its own talking thank you very much, and it’s a breath of fresh air to encounter a writer who has tackled such a profound subject and yet dispenses with the pedantic, the didactic, the morality tale and the fable, and instead simply lets things speak for themselves.

Like I said before: “Get this book and read it,” ok?

Gary Fields was gracious enough to create this pitch for a future Scram cover, not realizing the print magazine is on indefinite hiatus. The design was too nifty not to share, so here 'tis.

Go visit Gary's blog to see more of his work.