Beck / Irrelevant Topics

Irrelevant Topics: Beck Hansen x Demetri Martin: Pt. 1

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 02:38:35 +0000

This is the first part of a conversation with comedian/actor Demetri Martin that took place last year. Subjects covered include music for water, the nature of wood and the Olympics of mustaches.

DM: I was thinking how strange it is that water is one of the best, simplest things on this planet, and still with a simple glass of water you can neutralize so many of the greatest technological advances that we provide. Like with my blackberry, I can get in touch with so many people, but if I dip it in a small glass of water I’m completely disconnected.

BH: It’s like the five elements are still the ultimate technology. Water is mysterious. I remember this little Japanese restaurant in Los Feliz I used to go to owned by this older gentleman named Shinichi who only spoke a little bit of English and he would sometimes come and talk to us. One day he ran over excitedly and handed us this book in Japanese about a Japanese scientist who did all this research on water and water molecules. Did you ever see this? He studied water crystals and the effect music had on the molecules, how they would change character…

DM: Yeah there’d be some irregularity…

BH: Yeah, sometimes some of the water molecules would look pristine and crystalline– other times like shattered glass. I don’t know what it was or who the scientist was, but there were pictures of giant speakers playing Chopin or Heavy Metal for a glass jar of water.

DM: Wow! It would be funny to write a song about water. It would just be in the shape of a question mark.

BH: Yeah or you could play it music about itself. Well, there was this other thing in this book where he was showing that the scientist had written messages and spoken to the water. He also had two jars of white rice, and on one bowl he taped the words “I Love You” and on the other he taped “I Hate You” and then left them sitting out for a month. The one that said “I Love You” was perfectly preserved. The other one had black mold all over it. It was completely rotten. The owner of the restaurant went back to the kitchen and brought out two jars of rice, his own version of the experiment. One jar was preserved and one was rotten.

DM: You know, have you ever heard of Richard Feynman?

BH: No, who is he?

DM: He was this physicist who was at Cal Tech for a long time, he passed away in the 80’s. He won the Nobel prize for something in like quantum electric dynamics. I’ve read books that talk about that for a lay person and you’d be reading a paragraph and you go oh, ok I get it. And then you get to the bottom of the paragraph and you go ok. I’m lost. Let me go back I’m going to get this. I read it again and its just a humbling feeling of like, alright, I don’t have a brain that can do that. I saw this thing on Youtube that was really cool. It was him talking about fire. And he talks about how fire works and he uses an example. He says, you know, take a log. Ok, if we have a log, before we talk about that let’s talk about where the log came from and then he talks about how it came from a tree, and what wood is. He goes, people think it comes from the ground and it does, but mostly from the sky. Wood has a lot of oxygen in it. You know, it’s a mix of how much from the earth and water from the sky and then what kind of makes it all work is sunshine. It absorbs sunlight essentially, this whole thing goes on, photosynthesis, or whatever, and it becomes wood. Well, he kind of gives that introduction, its just him sitting in a chair explaining that, and then he said, OK now let’s talk about burning the log. He says, you apply heat, it kind of shakes these atoms and they get really excited until finally they break apart, and all the stuff that was in the log that kind of came from the atmosphere is released, and he said, the more excited it gets the more until it causes a common bond to break. That causes the chain reaction. The chaotic chain reaction that happens to the wood, that’s fire. And the color of the fire, in a sense, is the sunlight coming out of the log. It was so cool the way he said it. He sounded so poetic. You just kind of get mesmerized by his almost child like description of this basic thing most people know about. But it was so cool, it sounded like magic when he said, “it’s just sunlight coming out of this piece of wood.” I was like, man, that is so cool.

BH: It’s been dormant and is waiting to be released…that there’s sunlight dormant in an inanimate object, does that make sense?

DM: Yeah.

BH: I wonder what dormant elements we are?

DM: I guess you just have to take so many things for granted. You would go crazy if you were walking around just trying to understand molecularly how the stuff works. “Think I’m just gonna get lunch and worry about how much sunlight there is in the log later… I was told about the June Gloom when I first got out here. When I first got here [Los Angeles], it was like every day was kinda grey, and then by the middle of the day it became sunnier.

BH: I think when you’re from here, a vacation is getting to go to northern Scotland where it’s going to rain for a couple of weeks.

DM: Have you done shows in Edinburgh or around there?

BH: I was in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, I opened for Radiohead and Deerhoof. It was the middle of summer but cold. I’m half Scottish so it felt good to me.

DM: I’m pretty much all Greek I think. I asked my grandmother once, what’s our deal? What’s our lineage? And it turns out that after doing the research its all farmers. I think on both sides, oh actually, I think on both sides, oh actually on my dads side there’s somebody from Crete, which is a little different, I don’t know what they did down there.

BH: When I was flying back from Japan, they had a BBC show about the oldest people on the planet. The people who lived the longest and were the healthiest were people in Okinawa or Crete.

DM: There’s this thing in Crete, I don’t know why, but Cretans like having guns and they have mustaches. It’s like a Cretan thing. Everyone likes to shoot guns.

BH: That’s what they are known as? Cretans?

DM: I think so yeah.

BH: I never put those two together.

DM: Yeah, I had the revelation–this is also kind of non-sequitur–but remember that show, Just Shoot Me?

BH: I don’t know if I’ve seen that.

DM: There was a TV show called “Just Shoot Me” that was in the late 90s or something and it was a fashion magazine, and I never really watched the show or anything but I was aware of it and it was several years into the shows existence, when I was walking down the street and I realized “Oh! Just Shoot Me!” like a double meaning. Just take my picture, it was such an unsatisfying revelation.

BH: Speaking of non-sequitur, you were mentioning mustaches, and I think for the first time in maybe 10 years I currently have a mustache.

DM: Do you?

BH: Yeah, just today!

DM: Wow!

BH: I was shaving and my son walked in and said “stop, its perfect.” I hadn’t shaved the mustache part yet, just the beard. He said don’t shave any more, just leave it like that. He was very emphatic about it. I said ok, but I actually had a little bit on the chin, which technically was a soul patch, so I got rid of that. But I do have a mustache as we speak.

DM: Does it go pretty far out? Like hanging down on the sides?

BH: No, it kind of looks like my grandfather’s mustache. My grandfather had a big thick mustache throughout my childhood. But it was weird, because my father can’t grow a mustache at all. I wonder if it skipped a generation?

DM: Yeah, so you got the big bristly kind?

BH: Yeah, it’s the big bristly kind.

DM: That’s great.

BH: Magnum P.I.

DM: Yeah, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to have to have that genetic configuration. I noticed today, because I wore a t-shirt that’s a little looser, that I’m not that hairy for a Greek guy…

BH: Maybe it’s the Crete.

DM: The Crete part of me–the longevity. I’ll have a really late puberty then. I had a mustache twice. And both times it was similar thing where the act of omission left me a mustache by not shaving that part.

BH: Yeah, you didn’t technically grow a mustache.

DM: Right, I just removed the surrounding area. I don’t know how many times you’ve had a mustache, but for me, you know I’ve said ok, I can see this is not a good look for me. But I figured, well, let me just see if I can go a week, and then I’ll shave it off. At least kind of undertake this exercise and see how secure I am in myself that I can have this mustache but not have to reference it every time I see someone I know. If I can show up and just have the mustache and not have to say something like, “Hey check out the mustache.” or make a joke about it.

BH: Yeah, I think this is the first era in history where mustaches can be ironic.

DM: Right, that’s true! That’s true. ‘He’s got an ironic mustache!’

BH: It’s interesting because I think at the turn of the last century, mustaches were expected. A man was naked without one. What was in the culture–what was in the air–that made having a mustache a given? There were these tremendous, prodigous mustaches that flowed down the faces of prominent figures, leaders of nations, captains of industry. Now people wouldn’t be allowed to hold positions of power and influence with mustaches like that. You would be automatically disqualified or marginalized if you had one of those kinds of mustaches. Before, it was required. One wasn’t allowed into certain echelons of power with out the accompanying mustache. There’s a mustache competition currently, I believe in Germany or Austria. I stumbled on it on a website. It has some incredible photos.

DM: I was going to say that the entries must be really impressive.

BH: Really impressive. Some of these actually, I think, take a special diet to grow. Special things you need to have in your diet like certain strains of fermented sauerkraut and deer antlers. When I first saw pictures of the competition 10 years ago it was legitimate Bavarian woodsmen. I checked it out a year ago and it was riddled with people with ironic mustaches.

DM: Sometimes when I see photos of those guys, those old photos, that have just crazy facial hair, I wish I could see the photo right after that with their wife. This surly lady who hates her husband’s facial hair shot.

BH: If the mustache competition world went mainstream, it would be something akin to body building. Who has the best mustaches, just off the top of your head?

DM: I think, well, Tom Selleck, is an obvious first answer. I do think Tom Selleck pulls it off real well.

BH: I wonder if he knew what he was getting into? I wonder if he knew how emblematic that mustache would be?

DM: Yeah, cause you’re locked in. I think Peter Sellers pulled off the mustache really well.

BH: I think of Yanni, but he shaved his mustache.

DM: Really?

BH: One of the next record clubs is going to be Yanni Live at the Acropolis. Maybe I’m unconsciously preparing for it, you know? That was one of those albums where I just decided we should do this record and then after I decided and was telling every body we needed to do it, I realized that I’d never heard it.

DM: Oh man!

BH: And what it was in my mind was far greater than what it could ever be in real life. It was really just music for gymnastics.

DM: I’d like to look at a diagram of his following and your fan base and there would be a very tiny overlap.

BH: Does anybody even in America own a Yanni record as well as one of mine?

DM: And if they had seen one other live act. What is it, what’s the missing piece of that puzzle?

BH: Well then that brings up another question of what lies between oneself and Yanni? What bridges those worlds? Maybe we should ask Malcolm Gladwell? You could always make it only a matter of mustaches. You know? I think if you’ve given up a mustache, then by a law of physics it has to appear somewhere else.

DM: It’s like a law of conservation of mustache.

BH: As if his mustache still exists in me. He shaved his so mine could exist.

DM: Like it some how just got transferred, the mustache never goes away. It just appears somewhere else. Hey, listen, I have a question, I think I have the answer but I don’t know specifically what happened when Paul, in the Beatles grew a mustache around, I guess around Sgt Pepper’s when they all had mustaches. Had he gotten into a car accident or motorcycle accident or something?

BH: I don’t know?

DM: I think I remember reading something like he had some sort of accident so he grew a mustache over it and the other guys were like, “hey! That looks cool.”

BH: That’s cool, we’re going to do the same thing…

DM: Yeah, but I saw this great American Bandstand clip, did you ever see this one where, the Beatles had recorded a little video for Strawberry Fields?

BH: Yeah, I’ve seen that with the piano?

DM: Yeah, and I saw it’s black and white its Dick Clark sitting in a studio with all these kids, these American kids, and they all look pretty clean cut, but some of them kind of have their mop top hair cuts coming in and Dick Clarks introducing, sitting amongst the kids on these bleachers, these kids, says “Ok, Here’s the latest from the Beatles the film” you know whatever he calls it “ Strawberry Fields Forever” and then you see it, and of course its so great and trippy yeah and that weird piano that’s hooked up to a tree and everyone had mustaches and everything. And then this clip comes back to the studio after you’ve seen the video and Dick Clark gets all the kids reactions and they all seem freaked out saying things like “I thought it was weird”, “they look funny, why do they have mustaches?”

BH: Yeah, I know, they had mustaches for probably 15 years after that.

DM: Yeah!

BH: I know, its funny and when you think that only three years before that they had the mop tops and the black outfits and the pointy shoes. It’s a pretty sudden change.

DM: Quick turn around.

BH: I think they were only putting out albums for like six or seven years, I mean now, the amount of ground they covered, if you transpose it to now, you know, to this decade, it would be like if they came out this decade Meet the Beatles would have come out in 2004 and Abbey Road would have come out last summer. That would be…

DM: Insane.

BH: Yeah, that would be insane. Like what the hell just happened? You know, if you transpose it to this time, it would be too much for people to digest in 6 years.

DM: Yeah, it’s strange to think about it because–

BH: –it’s so condensed.

DM: I always forget that and also the guys were so young, to be like 30 years old and have be done with that.

BH: I don’t think they were even 30 yet when they broke up.

DM: Unbelievable. One time I walked the museum of television and radio when I was in NY a bunch of times over the years, and there’s this place you can go where they have these little booths and they have a library that you can search around the computer and you pick different clips to watch and you go and write down on a piece of paper the number then you go say, I wanna see this please And they go pull it up on the computer and then they call your name or number or whatever and then they tell you to go to like viewing booth 25 and you go sit there and then you can watch these old television shows with headphones on and there are a bunch of these little booths in this room. And so I watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan once, but they had the whole episode. So you get to watch the Beatles but you can scroll back and forth through the whole Ed Sullivan episode that night. And its so funny, there was this comedian on that night, I can’t remember his name, but there’s a guy who was on the same night as the Beatles like debut in America. Its just the whole area thing to think of for a comedian, to just think about, you know, the comedian’s manager, saying I have good news and bad news, you got Ed Sullivan but you’re on with the Beatles.

BH: Yeah, when you see the context of what was happening around the thing then it really makes it stranger.

DM: Yeah, it’s like its hovering above stuff that’s right next to it.

BH: I had some bootleg of Sly and the Family Stone playing on a TV show for a studio audience in the mid 60s and…Growing up with those records, I always had an image that people would be hearing that music and would be unable to contain themselves. Some of the most infectious music ever made, right? When I got this bootleg, the audience, they’re not moving at all, they’re not reacting. They’re completely stone faced and for the whole concert they just stand still and the band is, you know, dressed in full regalia, with this galvanizing sound.

DM: Like they’re from another planet?

BH: Yeah, I mean, there’s just this explosion of sound and visual happening and uh, no reaction.

DM: I saw something similar with Zeppelin, like on a German television show or something and you say, oh my god! There’s Led Zeppelin, and then they cut to the crowd and there’s a lady with a pocket book on her lap just looking at them like, what the hell is this? You’re like, YOU got to see Led Zeppelin?!

BH: I’ve sometimes wondered if music changes when the perception of it changes. I don’t know if that sounds too metaphysical or abstract, but a few times I’ve heard things before they came out and thought, “that’s a good song,” and then it becomes a massive hit and eventually becomes considered one of the greatest songs of all time and it doesn’t sound like the first time you heard it anymore. It’s suddenly has this weight or quality it didn’t have– it’s a different song.

Caetano Veloso x Beck Hansen: Pt. 2

admin — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 00:45:08 +0000

Here is part 2 of a conversation from last year between Beck and Brazilian music legend Caetano Veloso.

CV: Brazil is a funny place. It’s a crazy country, even now. Now any country or culture, you can find on the internet easily. I was reading 2 articles the other day about this guy who is a one man band, who’s name is Babe, Terror. The article was by a guy who writes for The New Yorker magazine, Sasha Frere-Jones. The critic?

BH: He’s a Brazilian artist, Babe, Terror?

CV: Yes, he’s Brazilian. He’s from São Paulo. And it was very funny because of his name. I already read an article in The Guardian that a friend of mine sent to me and one of them wrote some questions to the musician. This is a mysterious person, nobody knows him. He’s never done any public appearance or anything and he was explaining in English to the American critic that the word “terror” in Portuguese could be more or less translated into English as horror. I found it so funny and mysterious because it indicated that his name was Portuguese because it translates in Portuguese as well. It can be read both in English and in Portuguese. Most people, even in Brazil, assume that it’s in English, you know? Because most young groups would choose an English name. But he himself wrote the critic explaining the meaning of “terror” in Portuguese. Maybe he wanted to tell the guy that he chose the word being a Brazilian and terror for him doesn’t mean terror for an American. Like “terrorism,” you know? But like horror in horror movies. But he didn’t say that, that’s my conclusion. But I find it mysterious that he said anything about the meaning of terror in Portuguese. It’s funny because the English critic said his music is between Animal Collective and TV on the Radio. I saw Animal Collective in New York by chance. And then I saw TV on the Radio in Rio and I listened to their first album and part of the second. So I know them, I knew what he was talking about and he’s right. But it’s funny because this guy just uploaded his stuff to the Internet like millions of people, and for some reason, these American and English critics found something original in him. And they discovered he was a Brazilian guy on his own as a one man band in São Paulo and everything. (laughing) Even with the internet there’s some mystery kept by Brazil.

BH: Right, it still retains something of that remoteness to Americans maybe.

CV: Yeah, maybe.

BH: For years I felt like I’d run into this misunderstanding of Brazilian music, that it was this “easy listening music.” It was just this Bossa Nova thing, almost like lounge music. There was no idea of this varied, complex music. I used to mention your name or Jorge Ben or Gilberto Gil and people wouldn’t put them in the articles because it wasn’t part of their references. But there was a point where it started to turn around and the music, especially from the Tropicalismo period, began to become highly regarded. Suddenly it became fashionable. I think that was about the time that I met you. I had just put out Mutations and I had this song I wrote called “Tropicalia” which was a commentary on this cliché idea of what Brazil was– smooth music, girls in bikinis on the beach, exotic and jetset James Bond film images.

CV: And we sang it together in Los Angeles.

BH: Yeah, and then I got to come sing it with you. You sang and then we sang “Tropicalia” together and I think you said it was too fast, which I agreed with. It’s too fast on the record.

CV: Yes, it’s true.

BH: We cut the track and I remember when I had to sing it it was too fast and I had a really difficult time. I do it much slower now.

CV: I remember we also sang “Maria Betana” which you suggested.

BH: I love that song.

CV: I’m singing it now in my current show.

BH: I think we also sang “Baby” and there was this great moment where you sang a line that it was ‘time for me to learn Portuguese’ and there was a big response from the crowd. I think people here should open their ears to foreign sounds and languages. I grew up in neighborhoods where people were mostly from Mexico or El Salvador. I don’t know if that opens an appreciation for other music and languages. When I was growing up people would joke that the French had mastered cuisine but they couldn’t make pop music. And as I got older, I started to discover Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Fontaine and Jean-Claude Vannier– Francois Hardy. Eventually you start to question people’s cultural prejudices and wonder what else is out there?

CV: We are doing a tribute to Serge Gainsbourg next week in São Paulo.

BH: Really?

CV: Yeah! And Jane Birkin is coming.

BH: That’s great.

CV: She’s coming to sing with us. It’s Orchestra Imperial. My son belongs to that orchestra and they arranged this thing. They had the idea of having this Serge Gainsbourg tribute. I think it might be very beautiful.

BH: Were you aware of his music when he was around in the ‘60s?

CV: “Je t’aime… moi non plus” was a huge hit in the ‘60s. Because of that song we would listen to some of the songs by him.

BH: You went back to some of his older music?

CV: Yeah. And then later on there was, for example, for these young people who work with my son and some work with me, Serge Gainsbourg is something that appealed to them, you know? They looked for his recordings and they learned the songs and they talk about it. It’s a fashion among these people.

BH: It’s interesting that you were aware of him. Are you going to sing his songs in French?

CV: In French, yes.

BH: I would like to hear Serge Gainsbourg in Portuguese! (laughs)

CV: No, it’s in French.

BH: I just produced a record for his daughter, Charlotte.

CV: Ahhh, she is in that Lars von Trier movie, no?

BH: She is. She was doing the film while we were doing the record.

CV: I went to the movies with a friend and we saw that this movie has just started today here. I’m gonna see it.

BH: Well I’ll send you the record when it’s finished.

CV: She is wonderful.

BH: She came out here 3 or 4 times. We’ve been working on the record for about a year and a half. I think it’s coming out in 4 or 5 months. It was great to work with her.

CV: The guy who’s leading this Serge Gainsbourg thing is a musician and producer from Rio. He’s an incredible guy and he’s my son’s age. I’m singing “Maria Bethânia” again now at this new show and he saw me singing it and he brought me a recording of “Maria Bethânia” by Scott Walker.

BH: Really? Is it a recent one?

CV: No. I listened to it and I was like, “What is this?” It’s very much like my own recording of 1970. I was like “Who is this?” He told me “This is Scott Walker. I didn’t know he had recorded this song but then somebody gave me this recording.” I then Googled it to see what they had to say about Scott Walker and I didn’t find the recording of “Maria Bethânia” but I found a record that he made in 1973, when I had just left London, and I didn’t know that it happened. I found it three weeks ago! It was crazy.

BH: (laughing) That’s funny.

CV: And this guy told me, “Scott Walker’s a genius, but everybody says that this record is rubbish.” The record that “Maria Bethânia” was on! (laughs)

BH: That’s an interesting thing to discover after the fact. Were you aware of his music when you were over there?

CV: Not really. I became aware because this guy told me about him so I listened to one of the records I was told was very good. I thought it was very strange. I found out that David Bowie was a fan of his and he was very influential to him. I remember Arto Lindsay told me once that he was doing something with Brian Eno. I know Brian Eno from London because of Arto and some other people and Arto was recording something with Brian Eno. Then, David Bowie came to New York with Brian Eno and they were talking and Eno mentioned me because Arto, Eno and and I had done something together in London. Arto told me that when Bowie heard my name he said, “Caetano Veloso, Betha, Betha Bethânia?” I said, “Arto, how come he knew?” And he said, “I don’t know!” But now I know! It was Scott Walker! (laughing)

BH: Now you know. Were you aware of the Bowie thing and Roxy music?

CV: Yes, in fact I went to see Bowie at the Roundhouse. I saw a show.

BH: In his glam period?

CV: Yes. Glam was beginning. It was 1971. It was really the beginning of Bowie. But, you know, the guy that produced my records there, named Ralph Mace, he told me, “Caetano, you must meet this guy David Bowie. And you should write together.” It’s very funny.

BH: That would have been an incredible record.

CV: (laughs) “You must work together. You’re going to like his wife Angela a lot too.” Then he said, “I’m going to introduce you to him. They need somebody to work with them who has a poetic mind.” So he took me to the Roundhouse to see David Bowie’s show and then he briefly introduced me to him after the concert backstage. But briefly mostly because I told him I didn’t like it. (laughs) So it took me quite a while to really learn that Bowie was good. I’m old, you must understand. I am one year older than Mick Jagger, you know? I used to really like the Beatles. I only liked the Rolling Stones when I saw them onstage. It was so organic back then, the Stones, in 1970 and ’71. They were like flames on stage. Everything happened because it had to happen and at the same time every movement and sound and gesture, every little thing, looked intelligent. So when I saw Bowie it was so stylized, a little cold. It looked as if it were bad taste trying to be elegant, you know? This is my distorted vision. That first sight when I was living there. And I told that to my producer Ralph Mace. I didn’t like it! (laughs) I don’t mean that Bowie would have wanted to work with me, you know? He didn’t know that this producer who knew him wanted this.

BH: When you say that, I imagine that would have been quite a collaboration. That period of his is one of my favorites. But I wonder if later when you heard things like Low and when he went into some of the other periods, if you were drawn to them?

CV: Low is a great record. It’s really a great record.

BH: I remember when we had dinner once you were telling this story, which I thought, was such an incredible story. If you could tell me again about the TV show you were involved with in the sixties. There was a story about how you performed with a gun to your head and you were singing a Christmas song.

CV: It’s true, yeah. It’s THE Christmas song in Brazil. It’s a fantastic Christmas song. It’s very sad. It’s very, very sweet at the same time, which is very Brazilian to be sad and sweet at the same time. Everybody knows it. It’s like “Jingle Bells” in Brazil, even though everybody knows “Jingle Bells” too. And in the program I sang it. It was Christmas week when the program went on the air. It was 3 days before Christmas or something like that. The composer was a Bahian guy. He was a genius, a fantastic composer and he committed suicide. He killed himself. The song itself is very sweet but very said. The lyrics said, “maybe Santa Claus doesn’t exist or maybe he’s already dead.” It’s an unbelievable song. Everybody sings it sweetly but it’s unbelievable because it says, “I have always heard that everybody is a son of Santa Claus.” Everybody’s Santa Claus’s son. But this must be wrong or he must be dead because what I ask him he never brings to me. It would just be happiness. It’s a very sad song written by a suicidal genius. And he was gay. Nobody in the musical scene could know that he was gay. He wrote most of the best songs that Carmen Morella recorded. He was her favorite composer and he was kind of in love with her before she left Brazil. So the whole thing was full of meaning. So I took a real gun and I pointed it to my head and I sang the whole Christmas song pointing the gun to my head. I sang it slowly. It’s a little march but I sang it slowly. Back then they didn’t edit the programs much. It was mostly live, you know? So they were trying to hide the gun the most they could with different camera angles but in the end they couldn’t hide it or avoid it. It was very powerful but in a weeks time I was in jail.

BH: That was around the period of the military coup right? The military had already taken the control of the country, but a different faction had come in and taken over who were much more hard lined?

CV: Yeah, they took power within the military.

BH: Was there also some kind of commentary on what was happening in the country with that performance as well, perhaps in its confrontational nature?

CV: Well, yes. But we were not regarded as left-wing protest singers, because those existed in Brazil. They looked like Bob Dylan’s first phase of rock n’ roll. No long hair. No electric guitars. We were seen by the left as bowing to the imperialistic powers and we were trying to explain that things were more complex and what we were doing was basically more political than just political songs. But even the military didn’t take us as normal left wing singers. But at the same time we were scandalous because were wearing strange clothes and we had long hair and we played electric guitars AND we joined the left in parades to protest against the dictatorship.

BH: And they took note of that.

CV: Yeah, when the coup within the coup came, the hardliners took over. They put us in jail because we were left, we were new, and we were not easy to understand.

BH: There was no precedent before that because you were inventing a new thing. And that gun is like the military presence.

CV: It was strong.

BH: It was like there was a gun to the head of the country at that point.

CV: That is exactly what went on then.

BH: And a week later you were taken off to jail and you were locked up for several months, right?

CV: Two months in jail in Rio. Then four months under house arrest in Salvador.

BH: And was that just to quiet you down or were they just trying to kill time to figure out what to do with you?

CV: They were killing time. After four months they decided to exile us.

BH: If they harmed you they would feel the anti-military movement.

CV: Yeah.

BH: There’s a film I got to see when I was a kid that made a lasting impression on me. It’s about the dictatorship in Chile [Missing] when people were disappearing and being executed. It was a very brutal regime and when I saw that movie I was very young but it made just such an impact and when I learned about that period in Brazil I thought of that. So then you were sent into exile for a while?

CV: That lasted 2 ½ years but this is irrelevant. Let’s rest, no? It’s too late, it’s almost 4:00 am here.

BH: One more thing about the TV show before you go. Do those TV shows still exist? I would love to see them.

CV: If those TV shows existed it would be a treasure. We would have had documentaries and specials on television, but no, those have been erased.

BH: Speaking of documentaries, reading your book, there was so much Brazilian music I didn’t know about that you mentioned in your book. You should do some kind of documentary. Your book does such a good job bringing the sweep of all this music together, tying the correlations and connections together. You should do some kind of film that brings it into context for people and shows how it all adds up. It would be ambitious but somebody should do it.

CV: You know when I saw Dylan’s movie by Scorcese, that documentary, I was envying America so much because you guys have everything documented. Nothing is erased or deleted, you know? Every person that Dylan talked about they had a film or a tape or a good image. Of everything! All Dylan interviews back in the ‘60s when he was very quick in answering. He was so funny. Everything is there. Brazil is changing. Brazil is a lot healthier nowadays. It has been for many decades very incompetent. We used to forget things and lose everything and we don’t have a memory because we didn’t think we could become relevant in any way as a country, “So who cares? Just forget it. Let’s erase. Nothing is going to be important in any way.” This is one of the theme’s of the Tropicalist group. We were against that kind of vision and we had the feeling that Brazil was going to be relevant and meaningful. If it was not destined to be, we had the obligation to make it become! That was basically what the Tropicalistas wanted. This was the basic feeling. We knew it had to change but now I’m an old man and I can tell you it has changed and it’s going to change a lot more. The whole world balance is changing too and things might be different and we should all together really be courageous enough to dream. I mean, why not? Why should we not have a really different world.

BH: I was really struck by something in your book. At that time, the way you were dressing and the way you were living and making art, you were trying to imagine–I can’t remember exactly how you put it in the book–if history had gone a different way, you were trying to imagine if we hadn’t become this modern, Americanized version society, that instead we’d become this alternate thing. You were trying to imagine what that alternative would be. That was so interesting. What was it exactly? What had you imagined it was like? Maybe something more poetic?

CV: More poetic says all.

BH: More colorful and still keeping the strangeness of those old cultures and times?

CV: We must all transcend the Western stage of civilization. We all must do other things. And things are happening! They are happening. In my view, Brazil could make a great contribution because we are the most racially mixed of all countries in the Americas. We are the only country in the Americas that speaks Portuguese. Brazil is huge. It’s been third world forever! (laughs) It has the obligation of making some shifts that must echo worldwide. I really feel that. It has nothing to do with acquiring power the way we know power now, you know? No. It’s not military. It’s not technological or economical. It has to be a different thing.

BH: Maybe it hasn’t been completely corporatized and neutralized. America has metamorphosized in a certain manner, while Brazil has the possibility of an alternate evolution in a way.

CV: You know, nowadays you have Iggy Pop singing a Jobim song. Which is funny and different and it has to do with Lula being president and Obama being president. It’s a new time. And we must live up to it.

Caetano Veloso x Beck Hansen: Pt. 1

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:36:09 +0000

Caetano Veloso is one of the central figures of Brazilian music and a leader of the Tropicalia movement. His music spans over 4 decades with a body of work that stands along side that of the best songwriters of the era. We met and performed together in the mid–90’s during one of his rare tours in the States. I spoke with him last year about music, touring and Tropicalia. Here is part one of that conversation. –Beck

BH: Hi Caetano! So you’re well?

CV: Yes.

BH: What time is it there?

CV: 2 in the morning. 2 am.

BH: Are you a night person?

CV: I am a night person.

BH: It comes with performing?

CV: I couldn’t live in Los Angeles. I remember once I went out with you in Los Angeles and we went to a place that didn’t seem to be anything from the outside and then inside it was full of life and lights and good food and talking and we stayed there until late. But normally you don’t find things in Los Angeles if you don’t know people.

BH: The city doesn’t reveal itself easily. So what are you doing?

CV: I’ve been traveling a lot around Brazil with the new show.

BH: Brazil is a large country–vast.

CV: It’s one of the biggest. It was bigger than the United States, but then the United States kept on growing and growing and buying territory.

BH: How long does it take to go from one side of Brazil to the other if you were driving?

CV: I don’t know. For example, to go from Rio to Bahia by bus it takes 25 hours.

BH: And how many cities are you visiting on this tour?

CV: I don’t even know anymore how many state capitals there are in Brazil now because there are new states, you know?

BH: There are still frontier areas?

CV: Most in the Amazon. And they became states. There used to be 22. Now there must be 27– I don’t know!

BH: Is it like in America where you go to the smaller towns and you see more of the strains of older culture? In America, the bigger cities, especially in the last few decades, they’ve become more and more similar.

CV: I’ve noticed in Brazil cities are becoming more similar to American cities.

BH: How is touring there?

CV: It can be wonderful. I’ve come to the conclusion that Brazilian audiences have become very noisy. I mean, the very idea of loud PA’s that came with rock n’ roll has contaminated the whole show business in Brazil. I remember once when David Byrne came to play in Rio and the sound was perfect. It was some years ago now when he was doing this more electronic thing. It was a show that was basically electronic. He used computers and programming, whatever. And it was very theatrical too! And he was mostly alone on stage. The sound was perfect to my ears. But in Brazil they have taken the idea of having a Rock N’ Roll show with loud PA that some people were screaming “Sound! Sound! Louder!” in Portuguese. In Brazil they want the sound to be loud and if it’s an American group that’s presenting itself, people think that it should be even louder because they’re richer and more powerful.

BH: That reminds me of something I encountered when I went to Brazil for the first time. When we played on a festival it seemed like the bands people responded the most to were the heavy metal and the hard rock ones. Being so influenced by Brazilian music I thought there’d be more of a possibility for a connection there on that level.

CV: Some festivals have heavy metal audiences and they rule. (laughs)

BH: I wrote this song after that trip called “Girl from R.I.P.onema.” The cliché of the Brazilian beach girl was really a metal head.

CV: People told me it [the show] was very good. Very beautiful. But still most of the audience was waiting for something else.

BH: Bringing the influences of that music and the Brazilian rhythms there was probably naïve. But one of the aspects I thought was interesting about Tropicalia, that cultural mirror being held up back at the States and England.

CV: American music has become global since the 1920′s. At least. So, nothing American is local anywhere. You can do American things in Holland, in Brazil, in France, in Africa. Anywhere. Japan. You can have a jazz band or a rock n’ roll band or a rap group in Portugal or Spain. Anywhere. You cannot say that it doesn’t belong to them or that they are just imitating because people just grew up listening to those things. They were exposed to that kind of sound and feeling. American pop culture is international. It’s the only real world music. (laughs) So, it’s different. You cannot deny that it’s different if you are American or if you are dealing with American musical procedures. If an American tries to make Japanese music or Brazilian music, it can be beautiful, but it can sound as something that that special person is doing. It can be good or not. But it’s risky. On the other hand, if Brazilians or French or Spanish or Japanese play American things or imitate American things or make developments from American nuclear forms they just seem to be more natural. They are not even trying to be original because it belongs to everybody in a way.

BH: That’s true. And I think that there’s been a slow move here in some circles towards music from places like South America, Africa, Turkey, Thailand–bringing those influences in. Not as some form of cultural robbery, but as an awareness to other sounds or perspectives and their power to help push music somewhere it hasn’t gone yet or needs to go. These kinds of dialogues have always been around really. I agree about American culture being a global currency.

CV: Now I am doing this show and I was complaining of the noisy audiences in Brazil now but the thing is when I come to the quieter parts of the show they go on talking loudly! You know? Some parts of the songs are loud. I use loud guitar and rock n’ roll. It’s a power trio. But we make very quiet things too. In some places, audiences go from extreme sound stimulation to voids of silence and concentration, you know? But in many places, they just don’t go. They like the whole thing, but they go on making noise when you’re not talking through noise anymore. It’s funny.

BH: When I see footage of concerts from the fifties and sixties, when they cut to the audience, the audience isn’t moving. They’re completely frozen. The music could be riotous, but they’re sitting like it’s a recital.

CV: But it can change. A few months ago, Radiohead came to Rio. They played in a big, huge, open-aired venue. And the audience was singing along all the songs and making silence to listen to Thom Yorke’s voice when he was doing more lyrical songs. The audience was very connected to the shape and stage of the show. It was a good event. But, that depends on a band having become something that is a cult among a big number of young people and that happened to Radiohead.

BH: Yeah it did. I’ve toured with them over the years. I played with them when they first came out, then I toured with them a few years ago and their audience is now extremely reverential and connected to them in a way that’s almost religious.

CV: Yeah, it’s an international cult. So, this kind of clarity sometimes depends on previous approval that has been, for many reasons, and the quality of the band might be one of those reasons in many cases, but not in all. You know? On the other hand, there is a messier environment for the musical business in Brazil because in the mid and late 60′s what we did was, the tropicalistas, we included rock n’ roll procedures and language, you know? Because we had imitation of rock n’ roll and following of rock n’ roll in Brazil but not from a respectable area of creators. Of composers and musicians. When we did what was called Tropicalismo. We included rock n’ roll procedures in the thing we were doing and that created many reactions against it and everything, but basically it was successful. And it helped create new kinds of audiences that decades later would be wanting to listen to Marisa Monte. You know? In a very loud PA. Which is not that adequate to the music she does. Not necessarily. Sometimes you think, why do you use this loud PA for this girl who is singing? It becomes more in your face. Marisa Monte is an artist of nuances, of shades of tone.

BH: There’s a flattening out. You hear it in recordings now too. If you look at the wave forms on modern recordings, even recordings from 10 or 20 years ago, let alone 40 years ago, there are peaks and valleys. There are parts where it gets quiet and loud. And now they just make everything loud.

CV: Records are very loud! When we recorded the new record this year, I worked with young people, three young musicians and my son who was producing it and they didn’t want to compress the way most new records are and we found out that even very, very good records are too compressed, you know? It’s always loud! From the very first note it’s loud!

BH: On my recent albums, I’ve mastered them in a more traditional way and then in a modern way and played them sided by side. I personally like the traditional one that’s less compressed and less altered. But we end up putting out the one that’s more compressed because people now are so attuned to hearing music that way. I don’t know if they’d connect as much with something quiet and uncompressed. It would just sound like it’s not alive or something to ears that have been conditioned to a more exaggerated sound. There’s a need for a kind of stimulation. It’s hard to reconcile these elements. I know other bands have had the same problem. They say, “Well, I really like the naturalness of the instruments when it’s not over-compressed but the other one really leaps out of the speaker and gets peoples attention.” I guess some people think it’s harder to get people’s attention now.

CV: If I go around with just my acoustic guitar and just play, most people like it more easily. But it’s a different crowd. You have in Brazil and everywhere in Europe, everywhere you have people who just go there and keep very quiet and silent and they pay attention because you see that guy alone with his acoustic guitar and singing quietly. Joao Gilberto has gone so radically against loud PA’s that his latest shows in Brazil, I’ll tell you, I almost couldn’t hear anything. It was SO quiet. He demanded that his PA would be very quiet and he was asking for it to be quieter and quieter and he sang quieter than ever and he played even quieter. So it was beautiful because it was very radical. I took my 2 younger songs to see Joao Gilberto for the first time because he doesn’t sing every year, you know? It takes 7 or 10 years for him to come back on stage. So I took my two sons, one is 17, the other one is 12. And I was very proud to show him to them and very happy that they had the opportunity to see him. But they were not amazed the way I would have liked them to be. But not because it was not good. Mostly because it was too quiet. But for me, and for many people, it was kind of a statement. It was so scandalously quiet. (laughs)

BH: (laughing) That’s very brave. As a performer, sometimes you count on that volume for your confidence. I’ve played shows where there wasn’t even a real PA and it was so quiet that if somebody said hello to you from the audience you could hear them perfectly. And those are the hardest shows to perform.

CV: It’s a different kind of pleasure. If you have a quiet, concentrated, and clear message, you have a different kind of pleasure. You must learn to be able to know when one or the other is needed. Even at the same show.

BH: Yeah, you have to have those moments. I used to play a harmonium in the middle of the concert without the band. It was striking how that presentation could alter the feeling of the show.

CV: The guitar player who plays with me now has been a friend of my son since he was seven so I’ve known him since he was a child. Now he’s a very good guitar player. He told me that he saw one show of yours in the United States somewhere, maybe New York? I don’t know. Anyways, he had your latest record and he told me that the show was immensely better. I remember clearly the first time I heard somebody talk about you before I saw or heard your music. It was my ex-wife. She saw you on TV and she told me, “You’re going to like this.” It was some awards show I think. Like the Grammys or whatever. I don’t know. Something she saw on TV. I was recording and I came back home and she told me, “There’s this guy Beck. Don’t forget this name because you’re going to like him.” She was explaining to me the way you danced and moved and the suit you were wearing and you were very white! (laughs) She was very precise about that. “The fact that he’s so white is very important when he moves the way he does.” And I was curious so I saw you and I told her she was right. It was very revealing.

BH: That’s funny. At that time it seemed like any kind of dancing or ‘performing’ was slightly suspect. It wasn’t very fashionable to move and put yourself out there, at least when it wasn’t within some pop or R&B context. I think for bands at that time, ‘performing’ had become equated with show business. There was such a fear of things being slick or showbiz. Rightly so, especially after the 80′s.

CV: Yeah.

BH: I was thinking about when I found your music. I was raised hearing several Brazilian records. My mother always played Jobim. I guess it was music from her childhood. I heard all those records playing in the house growing up and it became such a strong reference for me. Just as much as the Rolling Stones or the Beatles or the Ramones… We went to very few concerts growing up and actually the only concert that I can remember being taken to was Jobim with his family. I was very small but I was struck by the music. He had his whole family playing with him!

CV: Fantastic.

BH: So maybe it has the nostalgia for something from childhood. I’m so happy to have seen that music at that age.

CV: I’ll tell you, nothing since I heard Joao Gilberto has ever had half the force that that music had on me. It was in 1959. I was 17 and it was a big disaster and enlightenment. It was everything at the same time. It was so beautiful. So powerful. In fact, having seen and listened to so many things along the decades, I have never met anything that has become more important musically to me than Joao Gilberto. Still now when I listen to him singing I think, “There’s nothing like this.” But even Bob Dylan in Bringing it all Back Home, he wrote “People may like a soft Brazilian singer, but I have given up all attempts at perfection.” And in his chronicles, his autobiography, he mentioned Joao Gilberto, and doesn’t mention Jobim! (laughs) This is very Dylan-ish. He mentions Joao Gilberto, Roberto Menescal, and Carlos Lyra, who really were very important in Bossa Nova, but he doesn’t mention Jobim! (laughing!)

BH: (laughs) In what context does he mention them? That he was listening to them?

CV: He said this, “While we were doing those things in New York, I felt that we were creating a new environment, a new world. I knew that we were not alone because while we were doing those things in New York, in Brazil Joao Gilberto, Roberto Menescal, and Carlos Lyra were creating Bossa Nova.” Before “Like a Rolling Stone” and Bob Dylan become rock n’ rollish, the people who he lived with and hung out with in New York listened to a lot of Bossa Nova. They respected refined music and they even reacted against Bob Dylan when he put the rock n’ roll band together to play with him. So he quotes these people in his book.

BH: That makes sense because that must be where my mother picked it up. She was a teenager in Greenwich Village during the early ’60′s. That must have been part of the soundtrack of that time and place. She had those records well worn out. But I think that there’s something that he hits on the head in that there is a perfection in that music. There’s such a calm and strong quality to it because it is so perfect that it doesn’t have to be loud of forceful. It makes the same impact as much louder music with such restraint. I think that it’s something that slowly sank in hearing those records. It’s very powerful without a lot of effort, which is the hardest thing to do, to have that impact without a lot of effort being applied.

CV: No doubt.

BH: When I first started performing, I thought I would literally have to set myself on fire in order to engage or interest the audience. But I’m drawn to performers who can just stand there with a good song and don’t have to do anything else to create an effect on people.

CV: No doubt. But again, not only back then but even now, some people in Brazil would react to what we were doing, saying that we were just imitating cool jazz. And in a way we were. But you listen to Chet Baker, and you know that Joao Gilberto heard that, but what he really produced is so incredibly original and different from that. But the reaction that came to Gilberto and his peers was of enormous originality, something entirely different from cool jazz. The rhythm, the ideas, and the phrasing was so particular.

BH: Yeah, what he did with it and what he chose not to do. The things that are absent were a part of that music.

CV: It’s true.

BH: I first heard you towards my late teens. One of my best friends would do odd jobs and save up money, then spend half of the year traveling. One year he went to Spain. He had a tiny room in a rooming house and I used to take over the rent when he was gone. When I was 19 or 20, he went to Brazil. At the time it seemed incredibly far away. When he came back, he spoke fluent Portuguese.

CV: Fantastic.

BH: I think he went down there with little money but somehow managed to stay for 6 months. When he came back he spoke Portuguese, had stories and a bag full of cassettes he’d bought on the street. We sat listening to the cassettes while he told me the stories about his trip. Taking a boat down the Amazon, going to places way out in these rural areas. He gave these detailed descriptions. It was my introduction to your music. I think he had a cassette of Jorge Ben as well and a couple of others. He would translate the lyrics for me. We listened to those tapes over and over. It’s funny because back then there was very little information on what this music was, what the stories behind it were, the historical background… those are all things I learned about much later, but the music just hit me. I fell in love with it and absorbed it. At that time you couldn’t go on the Internet and get the stories. So it remained mysterious. Later on I tried to bring that influence in. I was so taken with those records. As I was traveling on tour, the only place I could find a lot these records was in Japan. I would get up early and go to record stores and every once in a while I would find one. I remember finding one of your eponymous records–I think there’s 3 or 4? I love that you have 4 eponymous albums.

CV: (laughs)

BH: There’s one with the white cover and it has The Empty Boat?

CV: Yeah, with my signature on it.

BH: Yeah, with your signature! I remember finding that and it was like when you find a record that you’d imagined existed but hadn’t known where to get it. Working on my first few records, incorporating this cut-up technique I’d heard in musique concrete and in hip hop, this idea seemed to pre date in Tropicalia as well . My grandfather was an artist involved with Fluxus and a little bit with Warhol. He did collage work with cigarette butts and Hershey bar wrappers. I was really taken with this idea of cutting up discarded styles of music and putting them together. When I heard an Os Mutantes record I thought “Wait, they already did this! (laughing) 35 years before.”

CV: It was the best.

To be continued in Pt. 2.

Shannon Theule x Beck Hansen

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:45:55 +0000

A few weeks ago we were filming a scene for the new Charlotte Gainsbourg video. In the last shot of the day I noticed a familiar face standing next to her. It appeared to be Will Ferrell, though it was unclear what he would be doing in a house in Canoga Park on a hot summer’s night standing in the back ground of a music video. The look-a-like turned out to be Shannon Thule, an extra working on the video. Coincidentally, I was planning to speak to Will in a few days time for the website. I took the opportunity to also speak with Shannon about his experiences living life as Will Ferrell’s doppelganger and growing up around the world. Here is the conversation.

Beck Hansen: When were you first aware of Will Ferrell?
Shannon Theule: Actually not until I first moved here about a year ago.
BH: Had you seen his movies?
ST: I had, but it really didn’t dawn on me who Will Ferrell was. Somebody said at Applebee’s, “There’s Will Ferrell.” I moved here about a year ago and now I can’t go through the mall without people following me.
BH: At first did you think they were following you for no reason?
ST: I didn’t understand at first. When I first moved here a friend of mine had told me, “You know what? Just go to central casting and just sign up, because I was looking for some work. So I’m sitting at central casting and I walk in there and sit down and everyone in there is looking at me, driving me nuts, making me feel really weird and eerie. I stand up and I look up and there’s this poster of Will Ferrell sitting right above me where I was sitting. And I look at it and am like “Oh my god.”
BH: When you saw one of his movies did you think, “He really looks like me.”
ST: Yeah, Semi-Pro. Talledega Nights was the first one I think. It just kind of hit me.
BH: Has he since then become a kind of unspoken, invisible presence in your life?
ST: Maybe a little bit. I’m not called Shannon anymore. I’m called Will.
BH: Do your friends call you Will now?
ST: Sometimes they do.
BH: I was reading about doppelgangers and it’s originally a German word. In some cultures it’s a harbinger of bad luck. They say that if doppelgangers meet face to face it will result in “immediate death.” I mean, how does that manifest? Does it involve some cataclysm of nature: lightning, avalanches, flooding or just some sort of metaphysical explosion?
ST: I guess we’ll have to meet and find out.
BH: You might want to use caution. Have you ever thought of changing your looks in some way?
ST: I tried one time cutting my hair because everyone seemed to place it with Semi-Pro.
BH: Right, because you have the curly hair.
ST: Yeah, the Afro-kind of shag. And sure enough that didn’t really work. My wife, she goes, “Man, you look just like Will Ferrell, even with short hair.” So, that doesn’t work either.
BH: I wonder what hairstyle could help you disassociate from the likeness.
ST: Maybe flat and greased back.
BH: I think he did that. He’s covered a lot of ground. He’s had a mullet. I think he’s had long hair. He’s had short hair.
ST: He’s done it all on Saturday Night Live. He’s done every character.
BH: A faux-hawk maybe? That might be a little too 2002 though.
ST: My wife would kill me.
BH: You could shave your head, grow a big moustache and shave your eyebrows.
ST: It’s really the nose and the eyes that kind of stand out. Overall, I’m pretty honored. Ever since all this started I’ve been thinking about sending in a script where Will Ferrell is the obnoxious father. Sassy and cocky. And I’ll be the good son. He will try to influence me and I’ll try to influence him.
BH: I guess part of the comedy would be hinged on the fact that you guys aren’t that much different in age. I think there’s something there though. An allegory about people’s relationships with themselves? The double goes back to Shakespeare, right? A Comedy of Errors? You and Will could do a remake.
ST: That’d be cool.
BH: Or you could just do a remake of Face/Off.
ST: (laughing) That’d be funny.
BH: Or you could just have a face off.
ST: Like a stare down?
BH: Whoever loses the staring contest has to abdicate ownership of the face.
ST: (laughs)
BH: In a stare off who do you think would win?
ST: Oh, definitely me man.
BH: You’ve got an iron gaze?
ST: Yeah.
BH: Is it like an ocular headlock?
ST: Exactly, it pins you down.
BH: What about an arm wrestling match?
ST: He would win on that one.
BH: Right.
ST: He’s a little bigger than I am.
BH: How about interpretive dancing? Have you ever worn a unitard?
ST: I took ballet for 6 months.
BH: So you would probably do well in a full body unitard against Will in his full body unitard from Capezio because you have studied ballet and learned the art of graceful body language..
ST: (laughs) Yeah, maybe. How about swimming?
BH: Pole vault. Who would win?
ST: I don’t know! I did some of that in track in high school.
BH: I’m going to give that one to you. Hundred yard dash?
ST: The discus. I’ll take him on that one.
BH: You think you could take him?
ST: I actually don’t know.
BH: He’s got that wild arm.
ST: Sure.
BH: So have you been cast in things?
ST: I’ve been doing a lot of extra work. Bar customers. Angry, psycho, real goofy. I get a lot of goofy calls.
BH: Where are you from?
ST: Me? I was born in Nigeria. I grew up with a habit of chasing baboons. And then Liberia. Then Japan. Then Costa Rica. Now here.
BH: Were you a military kid?
ST: Missionary kid. My parents were missionaries.
BH: When did you end up in America?
ST: I graduated high school in Costa Rica and then I came over here to the States. I’ve been going throughout the States. I’ve only been in California for about a year now.
BH: So you’ve been all over the world already.
ST: Like I said before, I grew up chasing baboons. That was my habit– chasing baboons.
BH: So you actually had baboons in your yard?
ST: Oh yeah, they would come sit on our windows. I mean, we lived in a hut with no windows. It was just open. When we’d take showers earthworms would fall through the faucets. So, I was chasing baboons for a while until they started chasing me one day. And then Dad said no more of that (laughing).
BH: They can be dangerous, huh?
ST: They can kill you. They can rip you apart.
BH: Meanwhile, your doppelganger was…
ST: (laughing) Drinking a smoothie.
BH: Watching Love Boat.
ST: And I’m being run down by baboons. I’ve been to 56 countries. That’s just normal to me. Cultures and people and all sorts of foods. When I was born in Nigeria, midwives birthed me. When my mother woke up she couldn’t find me. So she’s going around and she found me just leaning against the fridge on the floor in the corner, collecting cobwebs.
BH: You were by the fridge?
ST: Yes, a newborn! Because I wouldn’t shut up! I was crying and the hum of the fridge put me to sleep so they put me there.
BH: When a child is born they do that bonding thing with the mother where they put them on the mother’s chest. But your bonding moment was with a refrigerator.
ST: Yeah.
BH: Did you have any brothers or sisters?
ST: There were five of us actually. 3 boys and 2 girls.
BH: And do the boys or girls look anything like Will Ferrell?
ST: No, I do have a younger brother who might. He looks pretty much like me. He might have a resemblance also.
BH: So you guys could do a triple doppelganger. Or if you get the drummer from the Chili Peppers you can have a Quadrupleganger. I don’t know if that’s a word though…
ST: You gotta ask the Germans.
BH: You spent a big part of your childhood in Japan?
ST: Yeah, a lot of time there.
BH: I’ve been to Japan a few times.
ST: Where in Japan did you go?
BH: I’ve been all over. Mainly the major cities. Kyoto is one of my favorites.
ST: I love Kyoto, yup.
BH: It has many temples, it’s a very calming place. Also, there are geishas who walk around on the streets.
ST: Yes!
BH: I was there this year and I noticed a new phenomenon where normal young girls have themselves made up like geishas to be able to walk around and get attention from tourists who want to have their picture taken with them. I guess they were sort of like doppelgangers in a way. They were impostor geishas. The way you know is that the make-up is little bit off. You know how precise the geisha make-up is? I mean, it’s almost inhumanly precise. And usually geishas won’t talk to tourists because they’re busy. But these geishas were just standing around. What ultimately gave them away though was when we took a picture they started flashing the peace sign.
ST: No, they won’t do that.
BH: And where did you end up after that? Costa Rica?
ST: Yeah, I graduated high school there. We went to a little school on an active volcano.
BH: So, the school was on a volcano?
ST: Yeah. A few years ago actually it blew up!
BH: So, around the time you were under threat of having a volcano erupt on your school, I think your doppelganger was working as a security guard at a Bon Jovi concert. But I guess that’s sort of a different threat of eruption, more in a symbolic way. It’s interesting to track the parallel trajectories of your lives. Not a lot in your life mirrors Will’s life?
ST: Just the looks.
BH: It’s interesting what different lives you’ve lived in such different cultures, with different influences and yet you end up looking so similar.
ST: I know.
BH: It was inevitable then?
ST: Yeah.

Will Ferrell x Beck Hansen : Pt. 2

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:43:30 +0000

Last week we launched Pt. 1 of a conversation with Will Ferrell, which can be found below. Here is Pt. 2 of that conversation.

BH: Do you remember that TV show, or was it a TV movie about a bus? It was the longest bus ever made and it drives across the country?

WF: Oh yeah! Umm, Superbus.

BH: Was it called Superbus [The Big Bus; 1976]?

WF: I think it was. It had a bowling alley and a pool.

BH: And somehow a washing machine went berserk and made soap bubbles, and it got flooded with the soap bubbles.

WF: It was a comedy right? I should look into the rights of remaking Superbus.

BH: I know. You might want to keep that one to yourself. How long was that bus?

WF: (laughing) I don’t know but it had so many cool things on it.

BH: I actually haven’t seen it since it originally aired. I might need to see it again, because it might have some other things to teach me now that I’ve lived and experienced life (laughs), all the subtext that was lost on an 8-year-old.

WF: Now you’ll be like “I was so foolish. Look at what they were trying to teach us.”

BH: What they were trying to say to me is…

WF: That all men are equal.

BH: And I didn’t realize that that was what they were trying to tell me until now when you said it! Who is the person who you looked up to at that age?

WF: In the Superbus era?

BH: Yeah. Six Million Dollar Man, maybe?

WF: Oh, I love Six Million Dollar Man. Yeah. Huge.

BH: Fonzie?

WF: Fonzie. He was pretty great. Even though it’s kind of insane that a character’s big move was to go “Eyyyyyyyyy.” And that that elicited shrieks from the studio audience, but I was right there with them. We keep talking a lot about TV, but that was my favorite night of TV right there because it was Tuesday nights: Happy Days/Laverne and Shirley. Followed by Saturday night which was…

BH&WF: Love Boat/Fantasy Island.

WF: And then Battle of the Network Stars whenever that was on. I almost got nervous watching it because it was so exciting.

BH: (laughing)

WF: I mean, Lou Ferrigno on the CBS team and the tug-of-war?

BH: That was stressful.

WF: (laughing) Yeah! And I swear, I do have a memory of like David Letterman running the mile run. I swear. But I don’t know, I could be making that up.

BH: I remember going to my grandmother’s house in the summer at that time and David Letterman was on in the morning. I used to beg her to let me watch.

WF: Oh! He had the morning show. I was heavily influenced by the afternoon talk show as well: Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, all that stuff. And Merv Griffin. So, there. I’m not finding anything for Superbus.

BH: Was it a figment of our imaginations?

WF: (laughing)

BH: Was it a mass hallucination?

WF: Was it a government conspiracy thing? Did they knock everyone out for a day and implant the memory of Superbus?

BH: It was a Fata Morgana of 70′s TV. So you grew up in Orange County for most of your childhood?

WF: Yeah, the whole enchilada. I was born in Newport Beach, and we lived in Corona del Mar until I think I was five. Then we moved inland to Irvine. The mean streets of Irvine. Which I don’t know if you’ve ever ventured down there…

BH: I have. I have played down there actually.

WF: Look out. Did you play at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre? I don’t think that’s what it’s called anymore. I think its called Verizon or something.

BH: Yeah, it’s called the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre.

WF: Yeah, we snuck into a lot of concerts down there.

BH: Oh yeah? There’s access? We would sneak into concerts at the Greek Theater. We wouldn’t sneak in but you could hike up into the surrounding park and sort of watch from the bushes. Later when I got to play there I said “Hello” to the people in the bushes and you could hear them yelling back.

WF: You’re like, “People in the bushes, I know, I used to be one of you!.”

BH: I got the people to shout back things and suddenly you’d hear this massive response from the bushes.

WF: (laughing) Was there a scramble of security up there? To cuff ’em?

BH: I don’t think so cause I think they would need climbing equipment. I mean, it was a serious investment of time to get up there and once you got up there, there was some questionable activity happening. There was a whole other milieu of concert going tomfoolery happening. Security wasn’t getting paid enough to risk their necks.

WF: For Verizon Amphitheatre, previously Irvine Meadows, you had to go through what was the old shutdown Lion Country Safari [wild animal park]. You had to do commando style. They had teams of security on fire roads on ATVs patrolling with big flood lights, so it was like a real…

BH: And you have to watch out for that kind of security because they’re even more committed to their job than any border patrol.

WF: Anyone! You put a yellow jacket on a part time police officer, look out! They’re ready to go. But here’s the irony, we used to sneak in and then I found myself years later during college being one of those yellow jacketed security people.

BH: Really? And did you feel a….

WF: I was not very effective.

BH: Did you feel empowered?

WF: I did a little bit because you just had the jacket and a little flashlight. They had no idea that I was a previous renegade. And I worked a Bon Jovi concert and my job was to keep like the center aisle of the orchestra clear of people just sitting or hanging out and it was pretty easy, you’d just flash your light and they’d get back in the row, until…Who’s the guitarist of Bon Jovi?

BH: Uh, Richie Sambora.

WF: Richie Sambora on that song Wanted Dead or Alive, he flew out on his guitar solo on a wire and everyone just ran into the center of my aisle. I was like “Back in your seats! Back in your…” and it was like 1,000 people and I just realized that I couldn’t do anything. So I just let â€˜em do that.

BH: Yeah, the flashlight was…

WF: The flashlight was NOT EFFECTIVE at that point, yeah, when they’re trying to reach for Sambora as he flies above them.

BH: (laughing) Some Peter Pan maneuver…

WF: (laughing) Even I got wrapped up in it! I didn’t realize it was going to happen, but…

BH: But it stirred something.

WF: It did!

BH: See that’s the thing when you’re playing a show. As a performer, if you connect with the security guards, you know you’re playing the show of your life, cause it’s very difficult to move the security guards.

WF: Yeah, they cut through that night. Bon Jovi cut through to me.

BH: And was that mid-80’s Bon Jovi period?

WF: That would have been late ’80s.

BH: Have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot?

WF: No, I didn’t see that.

BH: Oh, you haven’t seen that!?! It was a Judas Priest show somewhere on the east coast, I’m gonna say Maryland? Somebody went with a video camera and documented the people in the parking lot before the concert. It documents what they’re wearing, what they’re saying, what they’re doing, how they’re feeling…

WF: And does it follow one person’s journey?

BH: No, it just goes to a whole bunch of different people hanging out by their cars. It’s a document of a specific time, which, if you were in junior high at the time you appreciate because that was what most people looked like at school.

WF: I went to a Dead show in college in Carson once. That was kind of the closest thing to a festival type crowd and I remember I was just extremely hot and I had to kind of lie down near these tennis courts and I must have had 20 people come up and be like, “You okay man? You having a bad trip?” and I’m like “Oh, no no no! I’m just tired. And I think a little dehydrated.” “Alright.” Then, “You okay man? You’re gonna be okay. I’m right here.” I’m like, “Oh no no. I’m just…” Once again. And then I just anticipated people as I saw them come up.

BH: Yeah, I think it’s nice when there’s a support group built into a concert going experience. WF: (laughing) Remember Cal Jam?

BH: I didn’t go to Cal Jam.

WF: There was Cal Jam and then there was Cal Jam 2.

BH: (laughing) I know somebody that went to Cal Jam 2.

WF: (laughing) Let’s organize Cal Jam 3– 25 years in the making. And we announce all these acts and basically go on stage and say. “No one could make it. We’re sorry. But here’s, ladies and gentlemen, Kudos.”

BH: (laughing) “And special guest…” Wait, what was the name of your Cirque du Soleil act?

WF: Simpatico.

BH: Simpatico, yes!

WF: We were a performance art troupe from Winnipeg, Canada. So we would have people come up and go, “Alright! Winnipeg!”

BH: My dad’s family is all from Winnipeg.

WF: Well we kind of felt bad because we got people really excited to like “Great to see fellow Canadians!” and we’re like, “Oh, no no. We’re just kidding.” But what can you do?

BH: Yeah that’s why I think I was connecting with it on a certain level because I have that Winnipeg connection somewhere down the line.

WF: (laughing) Did you spend summers going to Winnipeg?

BH: No, I’ve never been there. What’s your background?

WF: I don’t really know, we’re kind of all over the place. Ferrell’s an Irish last name so we’ve been to Ireland a fair amount of time. I think we like to pretend we’re more Irish than we are, so there’s some Irish in there. We were there a year ago. Me, my dad, and my brother. And my dad had researched, I think its County Longford ,where the Ferrell’s are supposed to be from even though almost every Irish Farrell is spelled F-A and we’re F-E. So we pulled into this town and we were gonna, I forget, he had a name of someone that we were gonna try to find, I forget the guy’s name, John Ferrell’s Pub or something. And we almost didn’t go. We were like, “Yeah maybe we’ll stop by there tonight, go for a beer” and by the time we got there, there was over 1,000 people waiting to meet us.

BH: (laughing) Really? Your family tree to welcome you back!

WF: (laughing) Yeah. So we just sat there and never bought a beer the entire night. It was kind of fun though. And then we ended up in some people’s houses that we barely knew who invited us for a nightcap. Which was, uh, we should’ve shut it down at that point.

BH: Anything happen?

WF: No, it was just, we were REALLY hung over the next day. But everyone had a good time! I couldn’t find my brother for a second when we got back to the hotel and the night porter was like, “Is he a big guy?” and I go, “Yeah, yeah! About 6’5.” And he goes, “Yeah, you might wanna keep an eye on him.” And I looked across the street there and there was a 24 hour burger joint with all these college kids in it and I just see my brother sitting there talking to strangers, but wildly gesticulating with his hands. And I’m like “Ah, he’s fine!” (laughing) So, he was just holding court with the youth of County Longford.

BH: I was thinking about Ferrell’s, the children’s theme restaurant.

WF: Oh the ice cream! Yeah…

BH: Was that a favorite place? Did it have any feeling of pride?

WF: No, I should’ve probably had more. I only went to it a couple of times. But it was pretty magical. And when you had your birthday there they would hang this drum. I actually went there for the, I think it was homecoming dance, my sophomore year of high school, with my date and the other couple we were going with. We went to Ferrell’s all dressed up. It was a little bizarre.

BH: It had old time décor.

WF: Yeah, old timey, right.

BH: Old time America.

WF: Did they wear boater hats? Straw boater hats? Like a barber shop quartet type look?

BH: Yeah, I remember amusement parks during that time had a lot of that going on. There was this real fascination with the early 1900’s. There was a real nostalgia during that period for that time. I remember, what was the amusement park? Magic Mountain? They had an area called Spillikin Corners which is where you could go to make your own candles and learn the ways of our American Heritage.

WF: You could actually shear sheep there, I believe.

BH: Really, you could shear live game?

WF: And do animal husbandry. I remember helping to give birth at Spillikin Corners.

BH: Really? To a sheep? Or to a horse?

WF: I think it was both. Yeah. You really got your money’s worth. “I gave birth to a horse! Can we go back again? I love it!”

BH: Spillikin Corners.

WF: Great name!

BH: Yeah, like “What should we call it?”

WF: Yeah, in the marketing meeting, “How about Spillikin Corners?”

BH: “How about Dangleberrys…”

WF: “No, our market research has shown that the name Spillikin people like. It feels down home.”

BH: Yeah, it evokes that era. And I remember also Disneyland was running rife with old time brass bands and that kind of old timey thing.

WF: A lot of Americana.

BH: Hey, when we did that benefit for the Tsunami Relief, I saw you and Sacha Baron Cohen doing a secret hand shake which I always wondered about.

WF: Was it our thing? No, obviously not. I don’t even remember what it was.

BH: I remember there was a lot of hand interaction. And then elbows. And then I think shoulders got into it. And at one point I believe he tried to bring the pelvis’s into it. Or is it pelvi for the plural? Anyway it was a sort of a pelvis to pelvis move. And I think you blocked that. You were saying you don’t do that.

WF: Obviously it was never to be repeated again.

BH: Oh, okay. I thought that that was maybe the way it goes on a regular basis and I wanted to be privy to the inner workings– And then later I think Chris Rock and Jack Black were huddled with you both and there was a quadruple force there. I wasn’t sure if that was a formation you guys were making that was sort of a “Wonder Twins activate” formation. Maybe you could form into animals or something? Like a giant ice porpoise?

WF: No, the only thing I remember was Rock was like, “Look, you’re famous. People like you. You don’t have to work this hard.” Pertaining to my full body unitard. He was like, “You can just go out there and say a few things, you don’t have to work this hard.” And I was like, “It’s the only way I know.” (laughing)

BH: It’s the Simpatico way. Yeah that was a good night.

WF: I was about to say I hope another Tsunami happens where we could do that again, but that’s a terrible joke, yeah.

BH: I wanted to talk to you about SNL a little bit because I did SNL a number of times when you were on there.

WF: I remember when you came on. Didn’t we do a sketch together in a medical room? Examining room?

BH: Oh yeah, right! It was for medical marijuana and I was a delivery boy or something. I was very nervous. It was the first time I had been on the show and I was already trying to deal with the fact of…

WF: (laughing) Of performing on the show, mixed with, now you’re on a sketch…

BH: I enjoyed it though.

WF: And I remember we did the “Bobby and Marty” sketch where one of our songs was “Devil’s Haircut.”

BH: That’s right! That was a good night. The host was Kevin Spacey.

WF: Oh! That was a really good one!

BH: It’s funny. When I first went there I was struck by how small it was: the studio and the dressing rooms in comparison to the amount of activity that was happening. It’s heightened that way.

WF: It’s a tight little fit. You get in there and its less than 300 people in the audience.

BH: I didn’t even think it was that many. It felt like 75. It was surreal. I got the feeling that I was inside the TV. You know, when you’re a kid you have this weird concept of the people that are inside the TV, they’re in a different world from the rest of us? That was the closest that I’ve ever had to experiencing actually being in the TV, because it was so enclosed and hermetic.

WF: Yeah, it’s pretty intimate.

BH: I think one of my favorite things on the show was where you play this family man and you’re yelling at your daughter during dinner, you’re trying to reprimand her in some way. But you’re also trying to illustrate your altitude by yelling that you drive a Dodge Stratus.

WF: A Dodge Stratus, yes.

BH: How did you come up with, of all car makes, a Dodge Stratus? Its a small detail but it made the whole scene.

WF: (laughing) I just stumbled across that somewhere. In like an ad, like a really puffed up ad for a car dealership and they were just really trumpeting the new Dodge Stratus and when I was writing that sketch it was just an ultimate symbol of, “Listen to me! Do you know I drive…” It was just a perfect symbol of the lamest kind of car you could think of and that this guy just struggling for control, tries to throw that out and its like, “What are you talking about?” And it sounded funny. Dodge Stratus.

BH: It almost sounds like Status.

WF: I wish I could say that I thought of that as well. I did not even think of that. It was just one of the lamest car names. Plus a Dodge is just a completely unsexy car make. They I’m glad you like that one! That was one of my favorite ones because I kept drawing out the moments of silence with the silverware clanging against the plates. I just kept drawing it out because there was always such a kneejerk reaction on that show to make sketches louder and fast and just energy driven. I think a lot of people in comedy are afraid of the silence. I kind of love it because it puts the audience on the hook and creates kind of a tension. When we did the actual live show I’d drag it on as long as I could (laughs). But yeah, Dodge Stratus.

BH: Dodge Stratus, it’s from the same era as the Aspire. They were these cars that weren’t quite the real status cars. They were the step along the way up the ladder of success, you know? “You don’t have to wait. You can have it now. You can have what you want now.” It’s not quite the apex, but it’s something in the meantime.

WF: Dodge has another one out on the road now called the Dodge Magnum, which is pretty good, too.

BH: (laughing) There’s a lot of masculine power in that name.

WF: A lot of stuff going on with that one.

BH: A lot of undercurrents. Because it’s a gun, right? But its also…

WF: It’s a magnum of champagne. It’s excellence.

BH: Its protein and indefatigable.

Will Ferrell x Beck Hansen : Pt. 1

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:34:56 +0000

Irrelevant Topics continues with a conversation featuring Actor/Comedian Will Ferrell. I met Will in 1997 when he was a new cast member on SNL and I was a musical guest. Somehow during rehearsals I got asked to participate in a skit with him. Over the years I got to watch him work several more times during his tenure as a cast member, undeniably a comic genius. We got to perform together once again at a benefit for Tsunami Relief in 2005. Here we got to catch up and talk about unitards, cirque du soliel and local 70′s TV commercials. Here is Pt. 1 of the conversation.

W: Hello?

B: Hey this is Beck calling.

W: BECK!

B: Hey.

W: How are you man?

B: I’m good, how are you?

W: I’m solid.

B: Great.

W: Do you use the term solid in your life?

B: I do. I do use solid.

W: As an adjective?

B: Sometimes. I use it as sort of…

W: I’m just starting to use it more and more.

B: I think I need to work it in.

W: You should think about it. Give it a little test drive and see if you like it.

B: Yeah… Do you have any other good ones for me?

W: Umm… I, well, I’m tapering back fantastic cause I think I overused it too much.

B: Yeah.

W: “I’m Fantastic.”

B: (laughs)

W: And then later I realized, “No, I’m not. I’m not bad, but I don’t know if I’m fantastic.”

B: It loses its luster if you overuse it.

W: Yeah, it’s like too many exclamation points in emails. I do that a lot too.

B: A word struck me the other day that made me laugh. It’s the word “kudos”.

W: Kudos. I wonder where that’s even derived from? Kudos? In context it’s supposed to be, “kudos to you.” Like, “great job?”

B: I know, somebody came up with it and it just perpetuated somehow. Unless it was master minded in a meeting— a kudos meeting.

W: Well, there’s also Kudos milk chocolate granola bars.

B: (Laughing) See I was thinking of starting a jazz-fusion ensemble called Kudos.

W: (laughs)

B: And maybe tying in a sponsorship.

W: From the bars?

B: Yeah.

W: Oh, that’s a great idea. And would you wear t-shirts that say “Kudos”? Or do you just come out in kimonos? For some reason that’s kind of a—- “the guys in Kudos wear kimonos.” I don’t know? That could be kind of fun… You know I was driving home in anticipation of this phone call thinking about when we did the benefit for the Tsunami Relief (benefit at the Wiltern Theater in 2004), and I came out in the middle of your song, gyrating against a—- what’s that instrument?

B: The harmonium?

W: The harmonium. Yeah. And that might be, our little exchange, might be one of the highlights of my career right there.

B: I was definitely impressed by the pneumatic motion of your lower extremities towards my harmonium.

W: (laughing) Right, but you—

B: And your pelvic thrust ability…

W: Right. But your delivery was perfect as to how, kind of, slightly annoyed you were with me but yet you still committed to the song.

B: (laughing)

W: What’s the song again? Because it’s such a beautiful song. (humming the song) It’s one of your more heartfelt songs.

B: It was, “Lonesome Tears” maybe?

W: That’s it. Yup. You were performing it very earnestly. It was the perfect setup.

B: You know, I think I retired the song after that.

W: Oh no! (laughing) I kind of ruined it for you…

B: No, actually it was missing something after that, because you were dressed in that red spandex unitard. I’ve seen unitards but I’ve never seen one that actually goes over your head as well.

W: Well that’s because you’ve gotta get the special skull cap edition. They make them for speed skaters and stuff.

B: And where did you come upon a speed skating uniform?

W: Capezio.

B: Capezio?

W: Capezio dance stores. Yeah.

B: It was an especially good color.

W: The red. Yeah. It’s a speedo. I still hold onto it because you never know when you might need a red unitard with matching cap. It was from an act we used to do, me and two buddies of mine, called Simpatico, where we were like a bad Cirque du Soleil group. And we came out with a lot of presentation, but our tricks were unremarkable. That’s where I got it originally.

B: There’s a lot you can do, I think, with a unitard. Well shit, I mean, if you ever get that back together I think Kudos could provide some music.

W: (laughing) Or we could open for Kudos.

B: That’s right. What is it about the aesthetic of that whole Cirque du Soleil thing? It just sort of sprung up and it was so completely evolved as a strange manifestation of entertainment. And I think the ’80s had some molding factor to its character.

W: (laughs) I think so too. And it was such a special experience and now there’s like 10 of them. They’re in Vegas. I love that there’s like 20 traveling versions of Cirque du Soleil.

B: You know, to me it’s almost like the avant-garde for Vegas, when it’s your moment to step out into the avant-garde. Then you end up getting those blown glass unicorns from the gift shop. Not to diminish their value. I’m talking more of the aesthetic of the presentation—-which is great in its way—

W: Umm… I’m going to be honest with you, I will have to mention this in my blog, this little blog that I run, that you were kind of disparaging. ‘The Cirqus’, we call ourselves.

B: I was trying to, I don’t know, ascertain an obvious truth. But then it veered off into a kind of disparaging direction.

W: Right, and then you checked yourself.

B: Then I checked myself and you put up a little traffic cone for me, because I didn’t realize I was going onto the other side of the road there. So thank you for that.

W: Well, You could give me kudos for it if you wanted to.

B: I could. Or I could just give you a back rub.

W: I actually auditioned for Cirque du Soleil at one point.

B: You did?

W: I’m just having a memory. Because they were doing the current version of whatever the current traveling show is down at the South Coast Plaza in Orange County and that’s when I was living back at home in Irvine post-college days and they had an open call for clowns and mimes (laughs) which I had no experience in but I thought “Let’s just get in there and see what happens” and they already had the big tent set up and then I can’t even remember what? They had people go up in groups and pretend to kind of do whatever they thought they should do but I never got a callback so… oh well.

B: What did you do? Did you have to dress up?

W: No, no, no. I think that they were just trying to teach you some basic Commedia kind of moves and…

B: Dell’Arte?

W: Yeah. But I never got a follow up call so I guess I did not have what they were looking for. (laughing) That certain unspoken European, French-Canadian…

B: Pizzazz?

W: Yeah, yeah.

B: Pizzazz. See. That’s another word that I would put into the category with kudos.

B: Oh, Can you hold on one second? I have a technical…

W: Glitch? You have an old cassette recorder don’t you?

B: Yes. Radio Shack.

W: Did you have that phase as a kid? “Uh, let’s tape record ourselves.”

B: (laughs) I had an entire era of my childhood where I was obsessed with cassette tape recorders.

W: Yeah we did too. Because you have the microphone and then you do fake shows. You do funny voices. You’d also just log hours of strange conversation as a kid and just play it back. But I remember that was a common theme: “I know, let’s tape record ourselves.” “Great!” But what a simple joy! (laughing) It’s like what, exactly? Why was it so fun?

B: I know. And there are probably many, many kids that were doing the same thing. Whoever invented the cassette technology was not developing it for the purpose of 9 year-olds to create their own imaginary radio stations, which is what we did. Me and my friends were obsessed with the Muzak station. They don’t really have Muzak stations anymore and I was mourning the loss of that recently. I was remembering that when I was a kid they had these Muzak stations which were straight orchestral instrumental arrangements of pop hits of the day. There were no vocals, it was all instrumental. But they did have a DJ and we thought the DJ’s were great because they were really mellow. They were really, really sedated, really relaxed. And there would be Muzak covers of the most inappropriate songs too.

W: (Laughing) Like “Hot Child in the City”.

B: And “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” but it would be an oboe doing (both simultaneously make sound of oboe playing “Hit me with your best shot”) And then all the typical power ballads…

W: (laughing) A little Pat Benetar.

B: Some Juice Newton. We used to use the songs as a little musical bed for us to sing over.

W: That’s a great idea.

B: And our station was called “K-Mellow”.

W: (laughing) And you’d sing the lyrics?

B: We would make up lyrics over the music, which, unfortunately, I don’t have any tapes of. But there were some good lyrics. You know, gratuitously obscene and mostly pretty random, but I think that was probably the founding of a lot of my songwriting right there. Did you guys do any radio station kind of thing?

W: I’m trying to think. I think we did more like “This is the Jerry Davis Show” and “Hi, I’m Jerry Davis and my guest here…”. We would just do, I guess, radio plays in a sense. I guess they were shows that were supposed to be, in our minds, be on the radio. But we wouldn’t say “Hi, I’m a DJ, yeah.” So yeah, we would just go right into the show that we assumed people would want to listen to. But yeah, we missed out on the radio thing.

B: We did a thing where we would do the back announcement, “This is K-Mellow. This is Todd Thompson here with guest…”

W: You were really committed to that format.

B: Oh yeah. “We have in-studio guest…” What was that magician’s name?

W: Doug Henning?

B: Yeah. “We’ve got in-studio guest Doug Henning. Where did you get those suspenders Doug?”

W: “Well thanks for asking. Uh, just picked ‘em up the other day…”

B: (laughing) “Can I see if that moustache is real? I love the way it tapers by the way.” (Both laughing) So you grew up in Southern California right?

W: Yeah.

B: Do you remember the TV commercials for, I think, it was a place called Schick Shadel? I don’t know why they were always playing them during the afternoon cartoons and during all the kids shows, but it was a treatment center for, I think, addiction and they would electrocute you as a cure. I seem to recall that was part of the thing.

W: Oh wow, I don’t remember that at all.

B: “Come to Schick Shadel…” We were terrified, because some day, if you got a beer or something you might end up at Schick Shadel and you would have to get the treatment. We used to do commercials on our fake radio show where you would get ‘the treatment.’ “Hey, step right in here. Put this thing on your head. Okay, we’re going to press the button now.”

W: (laughing) Yeah. The commercials that come to mind for me as a kid were Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather, I don’t know if you remember that? It was up on Wilshire, or in Beverly Hills somewhere. I was an Orange County kid so I would never go to LA other than like an occasional field trip to the La Brea Tar Pits or Natural History Museum so Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather just looked amazing. And also Zachary All clothing.

B: Zachary All! I remember that.

W: Yeah, where they would go through the list of all the suit sizes? “We’ve got portly short, portly tall, full breasted, double breasted, triple breasted. Like racks and racks of suits. So Zachary All and Carpeteria…

B: Oh Carpeteria! I remember that!

W: (Singing the jingle) CarpeteriAAA…

B: (Joining in) CarpetiriaAAA…

W: Like a big genie with his hands on his waist.

B: And they used to roll out the carpets really violently on the commercials.

W: (laughing) And then, of course, there was Toyota of Orange and they had a jingle “Well you won’t get a lemon…”

W: (singing together) “At Toyota of Orange!”

B: I remember that one. And of course Cal Worthington. That’s just a given.

W: Almost not even worth mentioning.

B: “This is Cal Worthington!” I don’t even know where he was from? He had a really specific accent and a great cowboy hat.

W: I think he was from somewhere like Texas or the Midwest.

B: Yeah, Texas probably. And he would just list off the cars endlessly. “We got a ’73 Ford $1479.99 and we can get you…” He’d list a hundred cars and you’d just be waiting for the show to come back because the commercial would go on forever. It’s funny about California, maybe more so during that time, since there was such a great influx in the ’30s and ’40s of people from Texas, Oklahoma, that whole dustbowl influx, that it really left a mark. I remember a lot of Western type people being around then. I think unconsciously we grew up with a little of that that western accent. There’s a little twang that got passed on.

W: I think even a little bit through the ’60s, because my folks are both from North Carolina and they came out here in 1964.

B: I don’t know if its been ironed out by now.

W: It might have.

B: I think it has been.

W: Thank god!

B: (laughing) Hopefully my kids…

W: How many do you have?

B: I have two. How about you?

W: Yeah, we have two.

B: You have two as well?

W: We’ve two, and uh… I don’t like it.

B: You don’t like it?

W: I don’t like it one bit. It’s too much time to have to deal with them. With just their needs, you know?

B: (laughing) They’re needful.

W: They’re completely needful.

B: I think that’s the one thing they should tell you about parenthood beforehand.

W: That you’re gonna have to carry a lot of stuff.

B: And you’re gonna have to go into training. You’re gonna need to train as if you’re going into elite…

W: Elite Special Forces.

B: Elite Special Forces. Special Ops. Cause that’s the level of rigor invovled.

W: They also don’t tell you, I mean, it’s obvious on the one hand but you kind of don’t believe the accumulation of stuff you’re gonna take on between toys and supplies. No exaggeration it’s easily triple what we probably had. So we’re in the process of planning…

B: An intervention?

Pt. 2 continued next week.

Tom Waits x Beck Hansen : Pt. 2

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:30:38 +0000

Last week we launched the new section, Irrelevant Topics, with Pt. 1 of a conversation with Tom Waits, which can be found below. Here is Pt. 2 of that conversation.

BH: So how long ago did you leave Los Angeles?

TW: Oh god, 20 years ago. I haven’t been there in a long time. Like I was telling you my dad taught school at Belmont. We lived on Union Ave.

BH: Oh, that’s down in McArthur Park. Pico Union?

TW: Yeah this was Union between Temple and Beverly. Like, seven churches on this street. Parades.

BH: What kind of neighborhood was it then?

TW: Well, split. Latino, Central American, Korean and…

BH: Yeah I was born near Union, couple blocks from Union. Near 8th or 9th street down on Burlington.

TW: Yeah, I remember Burlington. Yeah, well you’re still there. You must be getting something out of being there. It’s a tremendous amount of energy. It’s like a battery. It’s always plugged in. When you move away, when you go to a small town, the first thing you experience is being an unplugged appliance. You think of the town, you know. I used to go back to LA just to get a charge, but after a while…It’s an exciting place for me to go now, just because its so alive. In your windshield, everywhere you look there’s a word. At all times, in every direction. Advertising is everywhere. Everywhere you would think to look, someone would put “Buy This!”

BH: Yeah, they turned them into TV’s now. Don’t know if you’ve seen that? The billboards are TV’s.

TW: No I haven’t.

BH: Yeah. So you’re looking up and it’s a billboard and about 3 seconds later it’s a different billboard. So you’re driving down the street and all these billboards are changing.

TW: Oh, I’m out of it.

BH: Yeah they just started doing that in the last year or two. I was wondering when you come back now, is it more dramatic, the change? Or does it seem the same old place?

TW: In some ways. ‘Cause you see the stuff you remember. But it feels like a hundred cups of coffee. You look for certain landmarks and you say stuff like “Hey! That used to be a barber shop, and before that it was a coffee shop and before that it was a bank.” You remember everything the way it used to be.

BH: Yeah, someone gave me a book Ed Ruscha did in the 60′s where he drove down Hollywood Boulevard and took pictures of the entire street and connected them. And then he did it again a few years ago. The pictures were side by side.

TW: What streets?

BH: It’s all Hollywood Blvd. I think it was from Silver Lake up through Beverly Hills.

TW: You know Western Ave is one of the longest streets in the world?

BH: I’ve always heard that. I’ve wanted to take a trip from one end to the other, see what’s on the other side.

TW: Yeah, I never did that, but I’ve seen pictures of Western Ave when it was just a dirt street. Looked like a street out of an old western town. With horses, a delivery stable, a saloon. A guy standing around on a wooden sidewalk.

BH: Yeah I have a few books with pictures. There’s no trees. Very few Trees. Just all flat. Just dirt.

TW: Yeah, all dirt. You must get charged being there as far as song ideas. Driving around, do you get stimulated by the environment.?

BH: I do. I guess there’s always been a plastic quality to LA. But it’s always had something underneath it. I find myself writing songs questioning where this is all going? Songs about everything turning into the ‘faux Mediterranean stucco retail living unit.’

TW: Yeah, it’s amazing we’re all responsible for its being built. The whole town is kind of like a folk song. It’s like public domain. You do have a hand in the building of it. It didn’t get built by one guy. This is what I envisioned, we all work together. Even in your house, the things you do to your house, well, someone will be living in it, and its what you did to it. And someone after them will be living in it. I get bothered by all the people you see every day that I’ll never see again. We’re surrounded by strangers. Millions and millions of people you see every day that are just like fish. They’re just extras in the movie starring you and you’re an extra in the movie starring them. It’s just peculiar. Then you’re really aware of it in a city ’cause there’s so many people and you’re just pushing through. You’re just like a sperm flipping your flagellum around, you know, trying to make your way through the city.

BH: Who you know and whatever situations you find yourself in with whatever people—it’s all sort of arbitrary. There are an infinite amount of doors you could’ve opened.

TW: And walk right out and walk right into another door and start another life six blocks away.

BH: I wonder if you could really do that anymore? I just went to Japan and they scan your eyes when you come into the country now. They have a computer that reads your finger print.

TW: At the airport?

BH: Yeah, when you’re going through customs.

TW: They read your eye? Oh, man!

BH: Yeah they read your eyeball.

TW: Japan is the home of the $700 orange.

BH: It’s the best orange you’ve ever had. It’s gonna be a religious orange experience. (Laughs)

TW: It’s supposed to be. Yeah, you…you’d want a room. Just with you and the orange, I think. (laughs) They take all the blossoms off the tree except for one, and that’s the one that becomes the orange. All the nutrients are going to one orange. And they have a square watermelon, you know? It matures inside a wooden box, then they cut the wood off and they have this square fruit. Slice it like bread and stack it in a warehouse.

BH: Have you been to Japan many times?

TW: I haven’t been there in a long time. I remember being able to buy underwear in a vending machine. That was pretty exciting.

BH: When they name their cars, they have names like the Toyota President or the Nissan Cedric.

TW: Oh, I like that.

BH: I don’t know if when you were there – all the taxis have doilies. The doily industry dried up out here probably a good 70-80 years ago, but it’s still alive there.

TW: Where have all the doilies gone, long time passing.

BH: They’re all in Japan. And the taxi doors open by themselves.

TW: You’re joking? Yeah, in Mexico they found out the only Chevy that was doing the worst business was the Nova. In Spanish Nova means it doesn’t go. So they weren’t buying it. No one wants a car that doesn’t go.

BH: But I thought maybe there was some reverse psychology they could do, you know? Like use some different car names, like the Dodge Apocalypse or the…

TW: The Sleep Walker. The Viking, or The Zipper. I don’t know. Yeah, Dodge Neon. I couldn’t drive the Neon.

BH: The Aspire, the Aspire is another one. You’re not quite there… You’re making the effort. (laughs)

TW: The Aspire! Yeah. It’s better than No Va.

BH: When I first got my license, you could get a car second hand from an ad in the Recycler [classified ads]. Nobody wanted them; maybe because it was in the early 80’s. You could get a car from the 50’s or 60’s for $200 – $250.

TW: It’s still a new car. They don’t say ‘used,’ they say ‘previously owned.’ I can’t remember when I last saw a car pulled over on the side of the road with the hood up and a guy with his head under there. You just don’t see it any more. It was very common. Underneath, you know, with a wrench. Now it’s all computers. People don’t know what to do when their car stops.

BH: I bought a car once– I didn’t know the battery was under the driver’s seat. I had taken it in to get an oil change. When I showed up, the mechanic…his pants were burned off. The metal in the seat, it hit the battery and it went up in flames.

TW: Burnt his pants off?

BH: Yeah. He had been a master mechanic in Germany. But when he came to America he didn’t have the same credentials and was working out of a Salvadorian tire shop. He was a genius mechanic. I showed up one time and said I only had $15 and the car was on its last leg. We had become friends, so he said he would see what he could do. I came back later and he had taken a piece of string and a matchstick and re-rigged the stick shift. It would have another good month in it. But when it burned his pants that was the end, he wasn’t having it. I called the car Jaws because the front of the hood had been smashed in so the hood was slightly open. It was a station wagon so it kind of looked like a shark. I painted some teeth on it at one point.

TW: That could catch on…that’s what Einstein said, if it has a flaw and its irreparable turn it into a feature. If you’re always burning the pancakes, put it on the marquee. Burnt Pancakes, 99 Cents. People who can fix anything with string are disappearing. I think most things can be fixed with string, but we need to be reminded of that. Except if you pour a fresca into your computer, I don’t think that will work. Or if you pour a coke in the back of your television the string won’t work. It’ll turn into a coffee table immediately.

BH: There is a photographer, Chris Jordan, I did a video with. He takes pictures of landfills. One that has tires valves, one that’s just plastic bottles, one that’s just cell phones. He some how figured out how to take the picture and alter it to where it’s the same exact number of that object that’s being thrown out every day. They’re beautiful photos. Gigantic. When you stand back you don’t know what it is, it’s kind of abstract. When you get closer you see what it is. I don’t remember the numbers. 350,000 soda cans a minute. This was just in America, too. One that was amazing was like 400,000 cell phones thrown out a day.

TW: Well you know space is already getting crowded. They’re planning on blasting up all the trash up in space. There’s things in contracts about that already. Disposing of certain materials. You have to promise, in order to get rid of it, you’ll put it on a rocket and blast it into space.

BH: Won’t it be more expensive to put it in space than what it costs originally? I guess you’ll have to buy space on the rocket for the thing you buy. It’ll be in the cost of the microwave.

TW: It’ll be on the spaceship…

BH: Space cartage fee… So how long have you been doing photographs?

TW: Oh, a couple of years. Some of them are pretty wild. I don’t know if anyone is as interested in them as I am. The shapes are just bizarre. [Photos of oil stains found on the ground]. I don’t think they’re going to be the next big thing. “Look Honey, Look, there’s Jackie Gleason; he’s got a Horse coming out of his head. It looks like a bird is eating his chin. There’s a camel, see the camel? The camel is disappearing into the pond right here and now there’s a fountain coming and Richard Benjamin is launching.” I see stuff that nobody else sees. I think they’re just for the home. Just for my own peculiar amusement.

BH: Thank you for doing this. It was a good excuse to call you up and bug you, pull your ear for a while

TW: You only live once, this is good. I would like to continue this. This is very interesting to me. Maybe I’ll make some notes next time. You know, the yo-yo is a sixteenth century Philippine weapon. It weighed 4 pounds and had twenty feet of cord and only came to the US in 1929.

BH: I’m wondering what’s going to show up in 2029 from the fourteenth century? Maybe there are other possibilities in the wings.

(end of conversation)

Tom Wait’s website
For more Tom Waits in conversation, here is a great interview he did recently.

Tom Waits x Beck Hansen : Pt. 1

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:09:49 +0000

Irrelevant Topics is a new section featuring conversations between musicians, artists, writers, etc. on various subjects, without promotional pretext or editorial direction. For the first in this series of conversations, the legendary musician and performer, Tom Waits agreed lend an hour of his time to talk about anything and nothing in particular. Here is Pt. 1 of that conversation.

Tom Waits: How you doin’?

BH: Good, I’m good.

TW: Are we up and runnin’?

BH: Yeah I think so. Hey, I wanted to ask you about being from Los Angeles. You grew up there…

TW: Yeah, Whittier, La Habra, Downey, that whole area. Yeah, Los Lobos, they’re from Whittier. So is Nixon. I remember Nixon’s market. He had his own family market.

BH: He was? For some reason I thought he was from the Midwest.

TW: No, California, and we used to get a visit every year from the Oscar Meyer wiener mobile, which was an enormous vehicle shaped like a hot dog. The driver was a Dwarf, and the wiener mobile would broadcast music while he sang the song “I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener.” He drew quite a crowd. Pretty exciting for a shopping center.

BH: That car is still driving around. I see it from time to time.

TW: You see the Oscar Meyer wiener mobile?

BH: I’ve seen it parked.

TW: They used to pass out little whistles that were about two inches long and it had three notes available. (Laughs.) Whittier lore.

BH: I was born in the McArthur park area.

TW: You remember when they drained McArthur Park, the lake?

BH: I do, yeah…

TW: They found unbelievable things: Cars, human bones, weaponry.

BH: They should have done an exhibit.

TW: I don’t know why they didn’t. I thought that’s why they drained it.

BH: I’d always heard that when they drained the Echo Park Lake they found an amateur submarine.

TW: Oh, my God.

BH: I don’t know if that was lore.

TW: You mean a homemade submarine?

BH: Yeah, I think it was older too, from the early days of “home submarine building.” I don’t know if that subculture still exists?

TW: That was the East Kids.

BH: There’s so many different versions of the city.

TW: It is pretty international. Drive over here and you’re in Russia. Here, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America. It’s pretty wild that way.

BH: I think of the city as a sort of mirage. If you look at pictures of the city a hundred years ago it’s just a bunch of weeds and desert dust. Its not really supposed to be here. I was always fascinated by the city it was meant to be. I guess it was a place created by developers. It’s not really like a city where some people roam around and then they find a good piece of land, and then they test it out for a while and make sure there is water so they don’t die, and then they decide to make a city. I started looking at some pictures…Beverly Hills was originally supposed to be called Morocco Junction. I started thinking, if they’d gone with that name we’d be in a whole other situation. I was wondering if there were any things that you remember? It seems like it’s shed its skin so many times.

TW: Well, cars choked everything. I know originally there was a red line that ran from San Bernardino all the way to the ocean and for 35 Cents you could ride a streetcar you know from…

BH: Yeah I heard you’d get there in 20 minutes.

TW: And in one of those red car buildings, dispatch is right there where Epitaph records is right around Sunset and Silver Lake. You remember the Continental Club in Silver Lake? That big Latin Club in Silver Lake. Burned down.

BH: Yeah I remember that.

TW: It was lightning.

BH: Lighting?

TW: Yeah, a form of lightning.

BH: I played at this benefit concert where I was about to go on stage in 45 minutes. It was a clear blue sky and a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere. I don’t know if you heard about that? It was about twelve years ago.

TW: You got struck by lightning?

BH: No, I didn’t. I was inside, but someone in the audience did. I heard this crash, and looked outside and the whole venue was streaming out with people.

TW: You lost your crowd.

BH: Yeah, they had to cancel the whole thing.

TW: That’s what I hate about playing outdoors.

BH: Yeah right? I’ve had more outdoor shows canceled from natural disasters. I was playing in Mexico once and some kind of hurricane came. Turned into chaos. One time I was in Japan. I was going to play on Mt. Fuji and a typhoon hit.

TW: A typhoon hit? Wow. I haven’t really played outdoors much. I played in Japan once; I played in an abandoned temple. The roof had been torn off. They thought it would be a cool place for a concert but it was 30 below. All I remember was my sax player making a fire out of chop sticks and holding his horn over the flame to warm it up before we went on. Everyone was dressed up in moon gear. It was pretty cold out there. It’s hard to compete with the natural elements. It’s captured better in a theater. I’m probably a little old fashioned and a little backward.

BH: I’m always interested in how the whole festival thing evolved. Those pictures from the 50′s, the early rock ‘n’ roll people playing at the state fair.

TW: Opening for super markets.

BH: Yeah, exactly.

TW: Stages that were built in a few hours out of scrap wood.

BH: I’m always curious what it sounded like?

TW: My bass player Larry Taylor toured with Jerry Lee Lewis in the 50′s. They toured all over the US in a Cadillac and all their gear was in the trunk. The amps, the bass… the speakers in the hall they played at were no bigger than an encyclopedia. But there was still wild enthusiasm and energy created out of the performances and the crowds went out of their minds. But it wasn’t done with volume. It was the odd sight of a man possessed at a keyboard, with hair hanging down. The other thing: the mics for the piano – they just used a violin pick up wrapped in a hanky and stuffed it in the hole of a baby grand. Standards were lower.

BH: But it does make you play a different way. We did this thing a couple years back, we were on a tour in the South. After the show we’d find a bar and we’d play there with little practice amps. Maybe the bar might have a PA with two little speakers. Usually we were singing through a guitar amp. I remember one time we were in El Paso. We had the day off and we were just going through town, and we found a coffee house. They didn’t have any equipment. We just had a couple of those little 15-watt practice amps. I think my guitar player found a dorm or something down the street and started knocking on the doors and people lent us the equipment. You know, when we got in there and started playing, probably 100 people crammed into this café that didn’t even have a stage; you couldn’t hear anything. So the performance had to rely on whatever kind of feeling you could put out.

TW: People had to be quiet so you could be heard then. That’s just a basic human thing I guess, right?

BH: There’s something about that awkwardness of being bereft of a sound system and that volume you’re used to. You’re stripped of that and suddenly you have to make due with almost nothing. And the people were crowded in there. They were about two inches from your face. That’s another thing. You’re singing right into people’s faces, which is another interesting thing. (Laughs.)

TW: You’d like to be raised up a little bit. I played the Roxy with Jimmy Witherspoon a long time ago, and somebody hit the telephone pole in front on Saturday. Knocked out all the power – this was like 5minutes before we went on. Place was in total darkness. People were lighting candles. Jimmy Witherspoon went and did a killer show. He just put his organist on a piano, and he has this big big, huge voice any way. Got right on the lip of this thing. I was freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. He killed. I guess you have to get reduced to that to find out the origin and basic building blocks of what you do are still in tact. Look under the building, make sure the supports are still there and haven’t been eaten through. (Laughs.) But, yeah, you can do a lot with a bullet mic and a wah-wah pedal. But before that there was changing your voice and raising your volume. I guess we’ve all gotten very lazy with all the toys that are available.

BH: I wonder, in a way, if it’s good to put yourself in those positions where you don’t have the equipment, you don’t have those crutches. But I think we’re so attuned to hearing it at that volume and having to feel that impact? There’s something maybe uncomfortable now to just hearing somebody’s voice in a room singing.

TW: I guess it’s like when you make dinner at home. You shove the bowl across the table and you throw a fork and you drop the napkin.(Laughs.) You make due. I don’t know if it’s all cosmetic. I guess you can tell when something is primarily cosmetic and lacks the structural integrity. I think we all have an instinct about that. Where does this “Best” thing come from? Is that human? Is that American? Is it all over the world? Everyone wants the best eye surgeon, the best babysitter, the best vehicle, the best prosthetic arm, and the best hat. There’s also the worst of all those things available and they’re doing rather well. (Laughs.) Denny’s is doing great. It’s always crowded. You have to wait for a table.

BH: Also this obsession with ranking. All the “Best of” lists. I get asked to write “Best of” lists occasionally. An emphasis on ranking things. Having a hierarchy and having it be written in granite, written in stone.

TW: It’s economic. So you can charge more.

BH: Yeah, it must be. But maybe it’s just a need to have some order that’s been established, and that everybody has been notified. I don’t know.

TW: There’s too much of everything.

BH: Maybe it’s a millennial thing. It started around the millennium. “What are the best movies? What are the best songs?”

TW: Well, then there’s the pressure of feeling that you need to have what has been already rated the best. A lot of people are afraid to explore their own peculiar taste for fear – that it would be uncool. Just like when you’re a teenager you don’t want to be caught with the wrong sports shirt, the wrong socks.

BH: I think there’s a bit of that. Certain things haven’t made it to the “List,” so then they go into the category of guilty pleasure or something.

TW: My theory is that the innovators are the ones that open the door to things, and then behind them there’s a huge crowd and they are trampled by the crowd behind them. And then you have to peel the innovators off the ground like in the movie, The Mask. Like a Colorform.

BH: I was thinking about influences and people who jump on a train or a trend, follow something. I was reading about the Greek playwright, Euripides, and a few others. He had written 105 plays and two of the plays survived from antiquity. I was thinking, “Can you imagine writing 105 plays, and you had to write 105 for one or two of them to survive?” I was thinking maybe in a way that the people who were influenced by the lost plays are the ones who are going to help them survive in some way. It’s not really about what you’re doing originally, it’s about the transmitting of the thing to the next person. It mutates along the way and turns into other things.

TW: You leave a little map for somebody. Maybe the others were lesser works. Or maybe the two that survived were lesser works.

BH: Maybe they were the throwaways? You never know. Maybe there’s things in there that were lost that would’ve changed everything?

TW: That’s very possible.

BH: The throwaway ones that he wrote to make the deadline are the ones we have.

TW: It’s like they found one of those van Gogh’s at a garage sale. This woman bought it and she was using it to block out the sun in her kitchen. She was using it as a window shade, so it was getting all faded from the sun. And she cut it because it didn’t fit the window. When they finally discovered she had a van Gogh as a window shade, they brought in all these experts from the museum and they were all filling in her living room and they said, “How can you cut off the top off this painting?” And she said, “It was just a little piece of the sky.” Sometimes it’s the value you attach to things. It’s subjective. And we record on stuff that’s going to disintegrate. Just like films are made on celluloid that’s going to vanish, it’s going to be gone. It’s like drawing on wax paper or something.

BH: Yeah, I think I read that only twenty percent of the films made before 1930 have survived.

TW: It’s the way of all flesh. Even in the world we’re down to the last of 20 percent of all animals that were originally here on earth are left. There were millions of other species that vanished. You really have to fight. Only the strong survive. Whose song was that? “Only the Strong Survive”? Your songs have to wind up being used as soundtracks to jump rope. Tapes will go, but people will still be jumping rope. They’ll need tunes for jump rope.

BH: It’s true. I think the last song standing will probably be “Happy Birthday.”

TW: I’m sure it will be. It’s terrible, but I guess songs are just interesting things to do with the air.

BH: There’s sort of a planned obsolescence or something. That’s just part of it.

TW: Yeah and we have every generation making a whole bunch of new ones. Even though the generation before says, “What’s wrong with these tunes? We’ve got plenty of good tunes lying around here. What are you making new songs for? We’ve got cool songs about everything you’re writing about. We’ve got plenty of songs about girls.” “No, no. That’s all right, Dad. We’re doing something else, something cooler over here. You go ahead.” And the dad says, “Do you know Jimmy DURANTE? Have you ever heard of Jimmy Durante?”

BH: I think its gold panning. You know? They’re just holding out. They’re just gonna get some little piece of something. Some little piece, even if it’s just a crumb.

TW: Yeah, that’s what every body does. That’s what Alfred Hitchcock said when he saw Ginger Rogers in a gold lame dress at a movie opening on Hollywood Boulevard: “There are hills in them gold.”(Laughs).

BH: There is probably an alternate endeavor that can be engaged in and everyone can take a hiatus from “The Song.”

TW: Look. There were heavy metal bands whose music was being used to torture prisoners in Iraq. They played it real loud to get information. Well, they deprive you of sleep and they play these bands. And that’s all you get to listen to. It’s one particular song from this band. In the same way that they use it now in the parking lot of 7-11 when they play classical music. It keeps all the hoods away. They blast Beethoven. No one hangs out now, drinks beer in the parking lot. Changed everything.

BH: Yeah, so you may be an unwitting instrument.

TW: You don’t know how you’re going to be used. You could be a doorstop or paperweight or maybe a national anthem. There’s no way of telling. Once we’re gone, the whole promotion thing is over. Now we’ll see if it can fly on its own now. Like some tunes do, you know?

BH: I think they are also some kind of ephemera or reminder to give some impression of what it was like. You know, if we just had pictures of the 1920′s, 1930′s and 1940′s; it would be one thing. But some how, when you can hear the music?

TW: Yeah, people really did listen to the song and it really captured their imagination. You could hear a song about “California, Here I Come” and you would actually decide based on that song to move to California. That’s what people did to San Francisco.

BH: There weren’t really many songs about moving to Northern Finland.

TW: Yeah, or even Needles or look at Lodi. Not a good advertisement for Lodi, ’cause you say, “Stuck in Lodi Again.” Who’s gonna move to a place that this guy told the whole world he felt “stuck in”? Not every town gets their song. Actually, Sinatra tried to do a song about Los Angeles. It was really lame. Really lame. It embarrassed the shit out of me.

BH: That was in the 80′s right?

TW: “LA, You’re a Lady.” It was one of those lame, awful… Maybe it’s the rhyme or the rhythm of the name Los Angeles.

BH: Yeah I don’t think anyone has written a definitive LA song.

TW: Maybe it’s the rhyme or the rhythm of the name Los Angeles.

BH: Yeah, I don’t think you can…

TW: But Chicago or St Louis, such cool sounding names. New Orleans. So many songs about New Orleans.

BH: I’m trying to think, I don’t know if I’ve written any place-name songs? Oh no, that’s not true. I wrote one called “Modesto”.

TW: The city itself was named because the two guys who founded the town didn’t let them use their names in the name of the town. They were too modest and they didn’t let them use their names, so they called the town Modesto.

Pt. 2 continued next week.