Interview with the Red Krayola - 1968

This interview appeared in the 2nd issue of Mother: Houston's Rock Magazine, a short-lived periodical (three issues in all) put together by Larry Sepulvado.

The Third Eye video was put together by Jeff Hill.

Thanks to Paul Drummond for providing me with the scans of the article.

Reprinted here with permission of Larry and Mayo.

(Once an audible circumstance occurs, that material which will have been registered in memory may yield to executive and stylistic concerns; yet this static documentation of recalled impressions is necessarily subsequent to the continually changing instance of our music in relation to linear, sequential time. It is the case that we will make our music, period.)

The group as it is today was established in September, 1966. At that time most of the music (rock) was written by the group. By December, 1966, all of the group's material was original, including distinct sections of improvisation which in performances were begun freely by mutual assent. These "free pieces" were a definite part of any performance, and while at the beginning were rock derivative, they gradually became freer as the members began to question the concept of rhythmic structure as well as dependence on traditional rock instruments. By February, 1967, these "free pieces" were the staple of the group and had been extended by inviting all interested parties to participate in performance. A minimum of control was exercised over this now companion group (The Familiar Ugly), and all unrehearsed activity was encouraged and accepted. While working with this performance-group structure, the group was approached by International Artists Producing Corporation and contracted to produce their first LP. In March 1967, with the Familiar Ugly, the group recorded a three-hour "free piece" and this forms the base of the album, PARABLE OF ARABLE LAND. Currently, the Krayola has returned to using three pieces (the original group). The present preoccupation is with sound as structural element and system simultaneously.

N O T E S 

Rhythm deals with intervals which are set by duration of individual sounds. Indeterminate sounds, yielding to no directives in respect to length of the sounds themselves, are not concerned with honoring any correspondence with a recurring, designated beat. If a performance is actually a forward progression, correspondence is viewed only in retrospect. This has been true of all music and, in fact, of life itself. The distinction being that now the performer himself, aware solely of his presence, enjoys a disregard for any circumstance other than that which his presence addresses.

Rhythm deals with the arrangement of sounds, a regular or irregular "style" or "structure" which limits the number of possible products that may obtain. These limitations have occasioned the group's present disregard for a rhythmic base and have prompted a focus on the critical juncture that is proper. This focal change (accepting all products but not addressing them as determinate), leads to the recognition of all sound as unit, the integrity, all of which is preserved. The importance of this decision is that a new musical structure is implied, a structure based on sound in lieu of rhythm.

In the confrontation of one by a present circumstance, there is a de-emphasis on movement, a tendency toward immobility.

Music is that which is proposed as music.

We free the sounds and we free ourselves of responsibility to them or for them. Total irresponsibility (we possess nothing) allows music to be made in a measure of freedom.

What is not actual (physically current) is illusion. Illusion is born at the construction of a relationship between the present time and any other moment prior to the present time. It is reborn continually at each juncture of conscious necessity. Its food is literal sequence and asks only that is be questioned. Our concern is with that which is physically current.

Motion occurs as a mental process arrived at apart from the continuous now, which is the way the music occurs audibly. Audibility is then separate from motion. The music is heard now, and now, and now continually until it is heard no longer. Motion is an implication which is extra-audible, extra-musical.

Music is about itself. (We are not interested in portraying, conversing, filling, completing, interpreting, identifying, or conjuring.)

Music is made, sounds will continue, whether we perform or not. In this understanding, we produce that which we produce.

The music is made, desirous of a certain degree of attention. It can be dealt with an incidental sound, but the production derives from an intensity that the reception could emulate.

The primary characteristic of every production is its singularity and the attendant requirement to change, consistent with the intellectual-emotional process. The intensity of the process here is critical.

What follows is an interview conducted by Jack Villagomez and me on January 16, 1968. Below, left to right, Steve Cunningham, Mayo Thompson, and Rick Barthelme, who is at present absent. Tommy Smith is the new drummer.  -- Larry Sepulvado

L to R: Steve Cunningham, Mayo Thompson, Frederick Barthelme

MOTHER: Why was the chaos, the freak out, separated from the order, the structured music, on the album instead of being integrated?
MAYO THOMPSON: If you wish, the album tends to visually orient itself. It's like a continuous line where there are small blips like on a graph and these songs with simple structures appear in the more complex structures.
MOTHER: Who wrote the structured parts?
MAYO: Well, all three of us. Rick wrote the music and I wrote the words to "Pink Stainless Tail" and "Transparent Radiation". Steve wrote "Former Reflection Enduring Doubt", and we all worked on "Parable of Arable Land" while Rick and I wrote the words to "War Sucks" and we all wrote the music.
MOTHER: Will the Familiar Ugly and the free-form freak out be a part of your next album?
MAYO: Though they don't appear, we do have some good tapes which we might distribute if anyone is interested in hearing them. We have a new drummer, Tommy Smith, and he is good.
MOTHER: What is the name of your next album?
MAYO: One side will be called God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It and the other side will be called Coconut Hotel. It should be out in March.

MOTHER: What kind of effect will you be trying to create with the new album?
MAYO: We're not trying to create an effect. I personally am not trying to create visual effects. I'm trying to have sound exist by itself as sound which it does without my help.
MOTHER: Do you consider the first album a kind of evolutionary stage or is the second album completely different or just a natural progression from the first?
STEVE CUNNINGHAM: It is definitely a natural progression. We feel that we are now doing the right thing, having in the past done likewise.
MOTHER: How many songs will the next album have?
STEVE: So far we have twenty pieces to go on, plus several one second pieces. We have a lot of listening time planned for this album. As much as possible.
MOTHER: Why one second pieces?
STEVE: We came upon these pieces when we were trying the experiments in sound. They are compression of time with sound. They are just moments of different duration, all very short and of different composition than the longer pieces.
MOTHER: What idea are you trying to put on record?
STEVE: These pieces can be conceived of as part of another piece, part of the last thing you heard, or as the beginning of the next piece, or as an island in the middle of no sound. It'll come out with a position that could be changed and put into another position. It works from the outside in and its environment will depend upon where you want to put it.
MAYO: In the first album the songs appeared in the midst of more complex spontaneous pieces composed by over 60 players. This next album has more complex songs in barer structures.
MOTHER: How significant have John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Frank Zappa been in influencing your music?
MAYO: I've listened to them since we got into this thing. Steve buys some Cage, Feldman, Van Dyke Parks, and people like Stockhausen and Zappa. Rick is very familiar with Cage and knows him personally.
STEVE: So we are all aware of the work of these composers and we are therefore aware of several unique classical ways of thinking about music.
MAYO: As to how they have influenced us, I don't know. They serve as a reference point within the framework of music composition. We have been influenced by the sounds of modern day America as well as the sounds and music of other countries. But our music is a different thing because it is ours.
STEVE: We offer the term International Sound to be taken as a recognition of the way man makes a piece of music and sums up everything he is involved in.
MAYO: We are on a line with the intimacy with which jazz musicians play but without that manifested active consciousness of what the other is playing and those little improvisational things "that fit".
MOTHER: How much time was spent in the studio on the first album and how much will be spent on the second?
MAYO: About thirty hours on the first and as long as it takes for this one.
MOTHER: Where were some of the first places you played?

MAYO: The first place we played was the Living Eye and we got $75 for one hour and then we played at Mark Froman's club, Love. This was when we were playing rock music. Stuff like "Hey Joe" and "Eight Miles High". After the Familiar [Ugly] became a part of the act, we played the Catacombs and there were about ten people on stage with us and the Gentrys were there. We played "War Sucks" and a fight broke out on the dance floor...laughter...stuff like that.
MOTHER: What were the circumstances surrounding your invitation to play at the Berkeley Folk Festival this past summer?
MAYO: We got invited because we knew Kurt Von Meier from California. He heard these tapes we were doing for a second album then (still no plans to be released) which were very new. We had dropped the drums and were playing what he called classical music. Out there, we played a concert at the Venice Pavillion at the Angry Arts Festival. Then we went to Berkeley.
MOTHER: What happened after that?
MAYO: I was on this panel with Country Joe, Ralph Gleason, the leaders of the Kaleidoscope, and the Crome Syrcus... A dog wandered into the ball during one of our concerts and heard us. Some people covered its ears and walked it to this door where it collapsed, paralyzed and I heard they had to put it to sleep.
MOTHER: Any other anecdotes from the coast?
MAYO: One night we played with John Fahey at the New Orleans House, played twenty minutes and they asked us to leave.
MOTHER: Did they pay you?
MAYO: We got ten dollars to split three ways... laughter.
MOTHER: Generally what is the audience reaction?
MAYO: It's always mixed unless it's our friends or something. We've gone over best at art galleries. We played the Louisiana Gallery and the Dryer Gallery and at those places everybody was going like "that's good stuff". One night we played at the U of H and it was terrible. They didn't seem to like us.
MOTHER: Where did you play at the University of Houston?
MAYO: It was at the Jeffrey House; a dormitory dance for the girls there. We started playing our own material because we didn't want to play anybody else's. After a while they formed a half circle about fifty yards away and sort of looked at us for a long time. We kept playing and there was quite a bit of hostility exchanged and the girls kept pleading with us to play something they could dance to. We tried a bunch of stuff. We tried "Satisfaction"...laughter...and I didn't even know the chord progression. Later a lot of people showed up and we out numbered them and we had the dance to ourselves.  We played what we wanted to. When we left they were waiting for us outside and this police sergeant was staring at the clouds. Then the dormitory gave us our $100 and we said no. But we had amplifier payments and we took it. Someday when we can afford it, I intend to pay the Jeffrey House back their $100.
STEVE: Those were the days when we thought we could guarantee satisfaction.

Love Street Light Circus and Feel Good Machine.
Photo: 1960's Texas Music.

MOTHER: What were the circumstances surrounding your opening Love Street (Love Street Light Circus and Feel Good Machine - Houston's first psychedelic night club at Allen's Landing.)
MAYO: We knew David Addicks, the owner, and he knew Rick because he was in the art thing. We used to crash his openings and drink wine and stand around. He got us one time to play this happening. He did a little light show and impromptu number and told us he was opening this club and we hinted about being the house band. So the last time he saw us we were doing semi-rock music. The next time he saw us, we had dropped the drums and the Familiar Ugly. We were doing this three piece thing with clarinets, trumpets, guitars, razors on cymbals, phonograph turntables, and tapes etc. But he had already asked us to play this press opening for Love Street and we played our music. He hired another band.
MOTHER: Did you play opening night?
MAYO: We played opening night and he knelt down front, wanting us to get off stage. I'm not knocking him but I don't think he liked us too much. He has provided a certain class to Houston that it just didn't have before. Our first set that night was incredible.
MOTHER: Where else have you played?
MAYO: We've played at the Living Eye once, the Catacombs once, Love Street once...
MOTHER: You don't play anywhere twice?
MAYO: We rarely play anywhere twice. I can't think of anywhere we have played twice except Mark Froman's place, Love... laughter.
MOTHER: What happened at Gulfgate's "Battle of the Bands"? A friend of mine, Charles Isherwood, played Indian taxi horn with you that night. He also left for Vietnam that night.
MAYO: Yeah, I remember him. He was out there honking this thing and I asked him to come up on stage. He played next to Haden Larson who played the spoons. Our first night at Gulfgate someone in the audience pulled the plug because we were playing so loud and long. So we kept playing till they plugged us back in and we finished up. Lelan Rogers who is our excellent producer saw us that night.
MOTHER: In the finals in the tent, do you feel you fulfilled an obligation to the audience by playing "Hey Joe"?
MAYO: ...no...laughter.
MOTHER: I was going to ask you if you thought you had influenced the Fever Tree's ..laugh.. arrangement of "Hey Joe" that had everybody standing on their heads this summer.

Fever Tree, s/t 1968 UNI Records
Photo: discogs.com

MAYO: Well... we played it very fast ...laugh... when we first got started, we played Channelview High School and Smiley for K-NUZ. The Fever Tree were on the same show except they were called the Boswick Vine then. I think they are really an incredible group. They are very smooth professional people.
MOTHER: They are developing very well.
MAYO: I would like to hear them again. The last time I heard them was at the Jefferson Airplane show and they were very good then.
MOTHER: The group has really progressed to almost frightening proportions for a local band, especially their lead guitarist and the addition of the new guy who plays organ and flute.
MAYO: Yes, Rob Landis, he is one of my mother's former students.
MOTHER: As a performer, do you intend to entertain your audiences; because obviously more people are offended than pleased at your concerts.
MAYO: It so happens we are now doing material somewhat more suited to current tastes. As you know we have a new drummer, Tommy Smith. We like to play for people. We plan appearances for promotion of our new album.
MOTHER: Where will you be playing to promot it?
MAYO: We will play some places in Houston. We're with AMG, Artists Management, Mason Romans.
MOTHER: Where is the last time you performed as a group?
MAYO: Berkeley, this past summer.
MOTHER: What are your chances of getting booked now? Do you have to audition or does the agency set the bookings and then you show up and the people find out what you are doing?
MAYO: We have Mason who does that now. Mason gets on the phone and says, "I got the Red Krayola... oh no, no they aren't doing the kind of music they were doing... yeah, they are sort of playing more like rock music..." and then he explains that we have gone straight or something... laugh... and tells the kids we play music they can dance to or listen to... those conversations are really weird sometimes. We hope to be able to perform all of our music; both structured songs and instrumentals, the experimental structures and random compositions, all of it.
MOTHER: How much do you charge to perform?
MAYO: ...Mason should know.

Rick Barthelme on the cover of
Mother: Houston's Rock Magazine, issue #2
Credit: Houstonia

:Source:

Sepulvado, Larry. "Red Krayola." Mother: Houston's Rock Magazine 2 (1968): 22-26. Print.

All issues available (library use only) at the Briscoe Center, UT Austin.

Improvised Music Before 1970: An Incomplete Discography

Roy Eldridge was interviewed by Barry Ulanov for his 1952 book History of Jazz In America. Ulanov had lately been advocating for Lennie Tristano's experiments in improvisation, so he asked Eldridge what he thought of the idea. Eldridge described a session with pianist Clyde Hart: 

  

"Clyde Hart and I made a record like that once. We decided in front that there'd be no regular chords, we'd announce no keys, stick to no progressions. Only once I fell into a minor key; the rest was free, just blowing. And, man, it felt good." (p. 239) 

Eldridge's only known recordings with Hart happened between 1938 and 1940. They recorded together in Chu Berry's band in 1938, and with Fred Rich in 1940. And Eldridge hired Hart for a stint at the Arcadia Ballroom in 1939.

Perhaps the recording has been released. But I have not found it listed in any discography. If it was in fact recorded, there's the possibility that it was never released. If that's the case, the master was either discarded or it was put into storage.

I am, rather loosely, defining free improvisation as any music within which, as a matter of principle, the musician has complete freedom to do whatever he/she wishes. This presupposes that there is no composition whose directions are being followed: not a motive, not a graphic score, not a mode or scale, not a riff, and no conduction.

These criteria are probably too strict. But that's what I'm working with here. If you have suggestions for how to make this list better, please post a comment below. 

Additions have been made for the following artists:

The People Band (added Aug 2021)

The Fourth Stream (added Feb 2021)

Art Ensemble Of Chicago (added Sept 2020)

Clare Fischer (added May 2017)

Charlie Nothing
Malachi
Gruppo Romano Free Jazz
Mario Schiano
Chico Hamilton Quintet
Paul Horn

July 2020 - I took out the Paul Horn entry... The title track sounds like it's free, but then the band comes in. Chico is first, with a Charleston figure on brushes - then when Fred (cello) and Gerry (Wiggins, piano) enter, they seem to know exactly what to do harmonically and rhythmically. It's probably a very loosely composed piece or head chart, in sort of the way that Flamenco Sketches is - not exactly a "tune" but also not exactly a free improvisation.

 Improvised Music Before 1970 - An Incomplete Discography

A

AMM, “AMMMusic”, Elektra, 1966

AMM / Musica Elettronica Viva, “Live Electronic Music Improvised”. Mainstream Records, 1970

AMM, “The Crypt – 12^th, June, 1968”. Matchless Recordings, 1978
Amon Düül, "Psychedelic Underground"
Amon Düül, "Collapsing"
Amon Düül, "Disaster"

Art Ensemble of Chicago, "People In Sorrow", Pathé, Nessa, 1969

C

Charles Ives, “Ives Plays Ives – The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano, 1933-1943”. Composers Recordings, Inc. [Two, maybe three tracks improvised.]

Charlie Nothing, "The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing". Takoma Records, 1967.
Charlie Nothing, "Outside/Inside". De Stijl Records, 2011 [recorded in 1969]. 

Chico Hamilton Quintet, "s/t". Pacific Jazz, 1955. One track ('Free Form') fully improvised. They get into a i ii(halfdim) iii ii pattern for a while but I'm pretty sure 

Columbia Symphony Orchestra, “Lukas Foss: Time Cycle”. Columbia, 1962 [Featuring improvised interludes by Foss' Improvisation Chamber Ensemble.]
Clare Fischer, "First Time Out". Pacific Jazz, 1962. One track ('Free Too Long') sounds fully improvised.

D

Django Reinhardt, "In Solitaire". Definitive, 2005 [recorded between 1937-1950]

E

Erroll Garner, “Overture to Dawn, vol. 1”. Blue Note, 195? [recorded in 1944]

Erroll Garner, “Overture to Dawn, vol. 2”. Blue Note, 195? [recorded in 1944]

Erroll Garner, “Afternoon of an Elf”, Mercury, 1955. [One track improvised.]

F

The Fourth Stream, "White Field". Pioneer, 1968 [recorded in 1967]

Free Form Improvisation Ensemble, “The Free Form Improvisation Ensemble”. Cadence, 1998 [recorded in 1964]

G

Georges I. Gurdjieff, “Harmonic Development”. Basta, 2005 [recorded in 1948-49]

Group Ongaku, “Music by Group Ongaku” Seer Sound Archive, released in 1996/2011, recorded in 1960.

Gruppo Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, “The Private Sea of Dreams” [US title]. RCA Victor, 1967.

Gruppo Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, “Improvisationen”. Deutsche Grammophon, 1968.

Gruppo Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, “The Feed-back”. RCA Italiana, 1970.

Gruppo Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, “1967-1975”. Edition RZ, 1992.

Gruppo Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, “Azioni”. Die Schachtel, 2006.
Gruppo Romano Free Jazz, "1966-67". Vedette, 1977. [recorded in 1967]

H

Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, "Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids". Liberty, 1967.

J

Jean Dubuffet & Asger Jorn, “Musique Phénoménale”. 4 10''-record set, 50 copies, Edizione del Cavallino, 1961.

Jean Dubuffet, “Experiences Musicales”. Finnadar, 1973.

L

Lennie Tristano, “Crosscurrents”. Capitol Records, 1972. [Contains Intuition and Digression, recorded in 1949]

M

Malachi, "Holy Music". Verve Records, 1966. [Richard Barthelme from the Red Krayola plays on a couple tracks]
Mario Schiano, "Original Sins 1967/70 Unreleased". Splasc(h), 1992. [recorded between 1967 and 1970]

Musica Elettronica Viva, “Friday”. Polydor, 1969.

Musica Elettronica Viva, “The Sound Pool”. Actuel, 1970.

Musica Elettronica Viva, “The Original”. IRML, 1996.

Musica Elettronica Viva, “Rome Cansrt”. IRML, 1999.

Musica Elettronica Viva, “Spacecraft / Unified Patchwork Theory”. Alga Marghen, 2001. [disc 1 recorded in 1967.]

Musica Elettronica Viva, “Pieces”. IRML, 2004. [recorded in 1966/67]

Musica Elettronica Viva, “MEV 40”. New World Records, 2008. [disc 1 recorded in 1967]

N

New Music Ensemble, “Improvisations”. New Music Ensemble, 1963.

New Music Ensemble, “New Music Ensemble II”. New Music Ensemble, 1964.

Nihilist Spasm Band, “The Sweetest Country This Side of Heaven”. Arts Canada, 1967.

Nihilist Spasm Band, “No Record”. Allied Record Corporation, 1968.

P

The People Band, “The People Band". Transatlantic, 1970. [recorded in 1968]

R

The Red Crayola & the Familiar Ugly, “Parable of Arable Land”. International Artists, 1967. [Free-form Freak-out tracks are improvised, also the title track. Mayo Thompson, Fred Barthelme and Steve Cunningham.]

The Red Krayola, “God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It”. International Artists, 1968. (2, maybe 3 tracks improvised)

The Red Crayola, “Live 1967”. Drag City, 1998. [recorded in 1967]

The Red Krayola, “Coconut Hotel”. Drag City, 2005. [recorded in 1967]

Roy Eldridge & Clyde Hart, unknown title, unissued? 1939?

S

Stuff Smith & Robert Crum, “The 1944 Rosenkrantz Apartment Transcriptions”. AB Fable, 2002.

Stuff Smith, “1944–1946 Studio, Broadcast, Concert & Apartment Performances”. AB Fable, 2002.

T

Tangerine Dream, "Electronic Meditation"

Conversation with Mayo Thompson: Part Two

Continued from part one. Please do not distribute without first receiving permission from me

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Conversation with Mayo Thompson

Part Two

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What happened after Coconut Hotel was recorded?

We were invited to the Berkeley Folk Festival, on the power of it. A writer for some art catalog heard it and said “If I could get you all invited to Berkeley Folk Festival, would you play that?” “Well, yeah. Yeah we would,” thinking to ourselves, “No, but we'll do something.” Is it gonna be usual rock and roll? No, it won't be. This is rock and roll. And sure enough, we did. We played feedback. We opened … we played five minutes of feedback and drove everybody in the building out, practically. And then, Lost and Found, another band on IA came along and got everybody back inside, and got 'em all in a good mood by playing them some good time rock and roll.

A listing of artists at the 1967 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.
Image courtesy of Berkeley in the Sixties.

So when we got to California, we played. We set things up on the stage; the first thing I did was I walked out, leaned my guitar against [the amp], turned it on as loud as I could and walked off and left it there, then started doing some other stuff. That was in the 1960's, that was like “Woah! Look out!” That was our attitude. So when Hendrix freaked out at Monterey and set his guitar on fire with some Bunson cigarette lighter fluid [laughs]. We tried to get in there, we thought to ourselves, “Yeah, go ahead Jimi, set fire to your guitar. Now listen to this.” You're gonna hear apocalypse right now, the end of the whole fuckin' game. Ok? We're ready, and we got the soundtrack. Here it is.

We were feeling rather … I think the English call it “Bolshy”.

What does that mean?

You get into a crowd of hippies, it was easy to feel like “My goodness, come on. What's going on here?” It wasn't far from there to wanting to think in terms of being a revolutionary, politically. It belonged to that kind of attitude to the world. Eventually, you quote Marx: “Philosophy is meant to interpret the world, the point is to change it.”

Speaking of Marx, can you elaborate on the phrase you used earlier to describe Cage & Tudor's work, as working with the “means of production”?

If you wanna make music, you have to have a point of production. And there, you're liable to have struggle, if you want to put it in those kinds of terms. I met David Tudor and proposed various things to him; there was some piece where he was working on an island, and I suggested miking the island, and having some central headquarters. He looked at me like I had left something ugly on the table. So there's a politics of production, that inasmuch as there are ideas, and there is conflict among the ideas. And there's only so much money and interest to go around: production is a battle for inductive space; elbowing out inductive space: “This, here, now. Not that, this.” Or, “In lieu of that, this.” Or, “Against that, this.” “Instead of that, this.” Or, “To hell with that, let's kill that.” So there's a conflict of ideas.

So one is trying to get a hold of the means of production, which had been formed around the successful enterprises in that field, like Cage/Tudor, where you have programming prejudice: you come forward and your material's got to be relevant to the coin of the realm, and if it's not... “Next.” If we introduced anything successfully into it, it was a notion of extremism, as such. It is possible that you're gonna meet people who are playing the game exactly as it sits, but they're playing with different materials or or different attitudes to the same materials – that the other thing that one finds out: there is only one, there's no alternative material. You can turn a steam hammer into an instrument, sure enough. Luigi Russollo and George Antheil proved this: that this has all been done.

Musical Heritage Society's recording of George Antheil's
Ballet Mécanique (1924), recorded in 1927.

And that was the other thing for us. We looked at the world as a set of ideas, ideas which were exhausted. We weren't gonna work for them, we were gonna look for something else, that hadn't been done. That would have been another criteria: looking around, “Hmm, can't find anybody [who's done this], let's do it.” “I don't see anyone behaving like this. Hmm, maybe there's a reasonable way of going about it.” It's Machiavellian opposition politics, which is underwritten by a principle of commitment to truth: that something is the truth, and that it is reached in a mysterious way, perhaps. In a way that looks on the face of it contradictory. It may in fact not be; it may be contradictory through and through, because it represents some change in the way that this stuff is going to be dealt with. And those kinds of leaps are possible, and those are the kinds of things we were gearing ourselves for. Of course, maybe they don't even exist. They only exist in the eye of people who make them and those who hear them; you can get those people to appreciate the terms in which you made it. And that's, what I fear, is all there is.

When you think of these things in some detailed, analytical way, outside of “These are the conditions I'm operating my usual game in, and everything comes down to my usual game of survival”, it's awkward to find terms in which to operate where you're not just blowing smoke. And the quest is to find some. And this thing against blowing smoke also has to do with not wanting to be a part of the great celebration of human spirit, that music and art gets the job of: encouraging human beings, “Yes, we're special. We're the reasonable animal. Not mere animals, we're above the animals.” This feeds the illusory aspect.

Do you think this use of art as a celebration of humanity is naïve?

I don't think it's naïve, I think it's sinister. I think it's a form of manipulation used by people who want more than anything for music to be an instrument to their own ends. Lenin didn't like music. He'd hear Beethoven and say "Bah, that stuff makes me want to go out and pat people on the head. Get that away from me, that puts me in a good mood." The good mood that I need to be in right now is the one that goes along with doing the thing that I'm doing, not some generic equilibrium state which humans strive for in the evening when they put on their slippers and sit in front of the TV. Music is not a comfortable shoe, in my book. Music is a pain in the ass. I walk down the street, and I hear something somebody else [is playing]. It's got me by the shoulders and the bass is pounding on my chest and my pantsleg. I didn't ask for that. It's pervasive. Music pollution. Not that I care. I'm not going to go around trying to clean up the world; I'm not a reformer. I don't mind a little chaos, I've gotten used to it by now.

If you don't approach music in the way you described as “sinister”, how do you approach music in your life?

I do it professionally; she is a cruel mistress, but she's been good to me. We've had a lot of fun together, the ol' gal and I. I love her sometimes, hate her other times. I start sounding like an Italian movie: “She's my whore, priest, saint, goddess, blah blah blah...” I don't know how to talk about it in any sensible fashion that doesn't sound like cultural nonsense. All I can tell you is that it does play a role in my life, I like to hear a little bit. I don't put any on unless I have a reason. There was a time in my life when I processed music; I'd put it on and process the information, or because I enjoyed it, or because it had a strange working on me, and I wanted to feel that again and again. Why? Etc. etc. Music has had various roles; if I was throwing a barbeque, I'd know what to put on, to create a nice atmosphere. But unlike my artist friends who go into their studios, put on records and paint, it doesn't play that kind of role in my life. I'm fascinated by, interested in, overwhelmed by the amount of it that's being made; you can only hear a fraction of what's being made. And people ask me to make a top ten list; I will not. And don't ask me what record I'd have to have with me on a desert island, because I cannot make that list. There's no way.

This Frenchman wrote me wrote to me and he just had to know. So I wrote back to him, and said luckily I have a friend with some quantum sound accumulator, or something like that, and it is capable of capturing sound which has been transmitted as long as it hasn't been interrupted by a solid surface, or deflected or diffused in any way. This thing can catch 'em, so I can hear all the music that's ever been made. I like it all. All of it's relevant, or none of it's relevant. And that would be my philosophy, if you like. It's all okay, or forget it.

And that's a Cageian principle: you don't like something, so you listen to it twice, four times, eight times, and eventually you'll hear what's good about it. You can ruefully shake your head and say “I give up.” There must be something good about it. Point taken, professor, there's something good about everything. And it's certainly the case that if I'm drunk enough, “Mary Had A Little Lamb” may be just the right some for the night.

Was Coconut Hotel originally going to be released by International Artists?

The Red Krayola, Coconut Hotel. Drag City DC62, 1995

That's all vexed. My lawyer would tell me, “don't discuss anything about this stuff,” because it's still up in the air. In 2014 a lot of this stuff will fall out of contract. A lot of stuff that happened with IA is very dubious, meaning there's a considerable amount of doubt as to who owns rights to what, and why, and when, and where, and so on. That boxed set that you refer to, which was put out by Charly Records, or some arm of Charly Records, that's a bone of contention. But let's put it this way. When we made that record, Parable of Arable Land, Leland was sitting in the control booth. When we made Coconut Hotel, Leland sat out on the grass with Billy Joe Dillard, one of the owners of IA, and they picked grass like a couple of boys and talked about the business. There was nothing for them to do. And they didn't know what to do with [the recordings]. So it was just pushed to one side.

We fell out with them after the Berkeley Folk Festival because we recorded with John Fahey, and they were worried sick about us getting a management offer while we were in California. A record lawyer would have gotten us free in a New York minute. But we didn't know where we were, or what was happening, and we weren't paying any attention to the law part of it. All we were interested in was making that stuff. If somebody showed us a piece of paper and said “Sign this and we'll worry about everything; you're good to do what you want to do,” and down in the contract it said, like, “Your mother will have to work her fingers to the bone for us for the rest of her life,” we wouldn't have even thought about it. We would still have signed it and gone right ahead. Which is pretty much what happened.

So the thing was pushed to one side, and then we fell out with them. Nothing happened. They called me and asked me to make what they called a “second record”, which is where God Bless came from; the “climb-down”, shall we say, from the heights of extremism, by inching back along the limb toward the trunk. We'd gotten ourselves out on this limb and practically sawed it off. But there was no mention whatsoever of Coconut Hotel, it just sat there on the shelf. They didn't even know they had it; it never occurred to them. Then the company got into such disarray, that in the end, I had the tapes. Nobody knew about them, nobody cared about them. I was the only one who cared about what had happened. And all the other IA stuff, that was actually commercial product, was part of the package deal that Leland eventually finagled, he got control of it, and sold it around to this label and that label. But he did not have possession of that particular piece. I kept possession of that. As I now know, if we had been intelligent enough, we could have kept possession of all of our stuff. But it's alright; it never made a huge amount of money. It's not the money question. Not like the Elevators. Elevators made money. But even the Elevators didn't make money; you know what made money out of that catalogue, was the Maceo Parker track, where he's rehearsing the James Brown band. That's a stone groove; I'm down with that. That thing sounds like a loop. That band is so tight; that is as close as you can get to genuine repetition in music, as far as I'm concerned.

The One-Second Pieces present a formal problem. You can only play one of them, and then you have to dismiss the audience and the orchestra. Why is that? Because if you play two, they're related, immediately. And they're so related, if they're close enough together, they sound like they're part of the same piece. And if you play one, and you want to distinguish it in character from another piece, so you play a longer piece after, it still sounds like the introduction to that piece. If you play a longer piece in front of it, then play one afterwards, it sounds like a conclusion, or a joke. There's potential for that mishearing. So the only way reasonably to do it, is to play one of them, to give it a name, go through all the rigamaroll, set it all up, and on the downbeat... “Bop.” And then we all go home. And so on God Bless the Red Krayola, the only way to we could solve it was, “Listen to this.” Okay: the sound of the piano. And then the little ledger that comes between the tracks has a different acoustic quality to it than the rest of the “silence” on the record. Like, a silence within a tune has a different quality than a silence between two tracks. So you can create an acoustic space but even there, it's not really 100% satisfactory. It's really impossible.

So you can write a piece of music that's very difficult to realize, and it's the most compressed amount of music that there is.

Silence is the most compressed?

I think “silence plus one sound”. I think you have to animate the space somehow. I don't know how you could do that with just silence. [Pause] If you were in a situation where you could create two levels of absence, or two qualities of presence: one where there is nothing, and then one where an emptiness opens; a void opens, and you perceive a void. You gotta be able to wrap your brain around what you're hearing though.

God Bless The Red Krayola included some ideas from Coconut Hotel.

The Red Krayola, God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who
Sail With It, International Artists IALP7

Yeah, we tried to take some of those ideas forward. In God Bless it would be our embrace of song form, and also the genre; this is where our (by now) fairly “robust” sense of genre starts to come from; this is where it takes shape. We did not think of ourselves as playing this and that genre, but we made some genres there. That's the way I hear it. “Sherlock Holmes” – it's got a detective atmosphere, “Tina's Gone To Have a Baby”, each one of them is a little world. It was made as a record that you were to hear as a piece. You're not meant to be able to be pulling songs out, listening to this song, that song; you put it on and listen to the whole damn record, and part of the phenomenon is getting up in the middle and turning it over, and hearing the little girl at the end; there, you're in the recording studio, in the room with the little girl. The lights went off in there, trying to soothe the little child, making the little child feel comfortable, 'cause she was doing something so funny, “Gosh, turn on the tape recorder quick!” The urgency of human life is there, and it's got some community aspect to it too. There the Familiar Ugly play some formal roles, like we got some of them singing back-up.

And that record gets to be called a “minimal” record. It was not like a punk record, like “we're gonna get back to basics, good clean rock n' roll, we're gonna run the river Styx through here and start over again.” It wasn't that kind of thing at all. It was not driven by an impulse to basicness. It was just schematic because we were used to working with the stuff we had in our hands, instrument-wise. I had a Fender and Steve had a fretless bass, and Tommy Smith had a regular set of drums. Part of our game has always been to make unusual sounding stuff with conventional instruments; to make electronic music with not-electronic instruments in the purest sense of the word. The logic is informed by the possibility of what amount to category mistakes. That brings the Man into the music, which is not always so nice. You know what I mean by “the Man” right? You're up there in Michigan.

"The Man”?

Yeah, the Man. “You're workin for the Man.” The Man is implicit – the dead hand of capitalism is implicit to all rock n' roll. The Man is implicit to all music which is African-American … by definition. It defines itself that way.

Can you talk about improvisation, and Corky's Debt to His Father?

Mayo Thompson's first solo album, Corky's Debt
to his Father, released by Texas Revolution CFS 2270

Improvisation plays a role there. I would claim a palpable commitment to improvisation, which is characteristic of the whole thing. And it came out of the sessions, but it also has to do with … Corky for example, those are really heavy-duty players, and they're bitching at me 'cause I don't have an arrangement. And I don't tell them the secret: I know what I can do by myself. What I want to hear is what happens when I do it with somebody else. So, I say x and they do y. So, I make them play it, and I've got the machine running, and they want to take the music home and work on the arrangement, get their part together just so, and I won't let them do it. They've had to think, while listening, and that's what I want the sound of. So that's what you get on that record. And in the one case where there is an arrangement, Joe Dugan was allowed to think about the horns on “Dear Betty” and went home with them and came back with them the next day.

So that improvisational thing – I have worked with people like Rüdiger Carl and his COWWS Quintet. The piano player from there, what's her name... [Irene Schweizer], she learned a lot from Cecil Taylor. You wouldn't say she's a student, but she's certainly a follower; she has to be seen as someone who appreciated a great deal what Cecil Taylor does, and in fact hammers the piano and fights the Man. We played in front of Cecil Taylor one night with that band. I was doing some vocal stuff like that, and whenever I wasn't playing, I'd leave the stage. Then, after the show, Cecil said “Hey man, you're the guy who kept leaving the stage.” That's what he noticed. [laughs] Also, when we were in Berlin, somebody said to him, “Oh Cecil, it's so great that you've come to town.” And Cecil said, “Man, I'm just trying to play a gig. Take it easy.”

So, that's what I think of as improvisation: that's Cecil Taylor improvising against expectations. And that's what improvisation consists in: you've got a set of expectations and you're a realist about what it's possible to realize, and what you play manifests your awareness of the limit. As usual, at the limit, one is operating at an extreme; either extremely lot, or extremely little, or extremely middle, you know what I mean? One time Rüdiger Carl said to me, … I've talked to Keith Rowe from AMM, “What is improvisation?” “What isn't improvisation in life?” This is improvised, I don't care about the given forms, it's still an improvisation on themes. Sometimes it's a lot of stuff made up for relations that don't exist anywhere else. So, this is my personal quest against people congratulating themselves for doing the obvious. And I've got a one-man campaign to de-mystify these relations. That is a motivating force in my thinking. Whether they can be de-mystified or not, maybe I'm making it worse. [laughs] It's possible.

Thompson in 2010.

(interviewed by Matt Endahl on December 26th, 2011)

Read part one of the interview.

Conversation with Mayo Thompson: Part One

On December 26th, 2011 I had a conversation with Mayo Thompson about the origins and early work of the Red Krayola. I was particularly interested in the musical "logic" used to record the album Coconut Hotel. I suspected that the Red Krayola was essentially exploring "free improvisation", contemporaneous with groups like AMM and Musica Elettronica Viva. I discussed the album in a presentation at the 2012 International Society for Improvised Music conference in Wayne, NJ, using information from this interview.

45 years ago today, the Red Crayola (Mayo Thompson, Fred Barthelme and Steve Cunningham) played at the Angry Arts Festival near Los Angeles, CA. On July 2nd, 3rd and 4th 1967 they played sets at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival in Berkeley, CA. (These performances were documented on the Drag City release Live 1967.) This seemed like an appropriate time of year to publish the interview. Mr. Thompson has agreed to this publication only; please do not distribute this interview without specific permission.

Special thanks to WCBN-FM Ann Arbor whose facilities I used. Thanks also to Alex Belhaj who
engineered the recording of the telephone interview.

Conversation with Mayo Thompson

Part One

What were some of the musical influences for the Red Crayola? The liner notes in the recent reissue of The Parable of Arable Land mentions the influence of modern art and philosophy.

Modern art and philosophy are large subjects. I'd like to know who isn't influenced by modern art in that sense. These guys – they write fluff, and it misleads people and there's nothing you can really do about it. There is no such thing as a straight-up story about what happened, because memory plays tricks on you; it's just not possible. All I can tell you is that, as far as influences, we listened to everything that was going on. If we got a whiff that they were ahead of us we ran to it to find out if it was true or not.

Can you give an example?

Albert Ayler, Bells, ESP-Disk 1010, 1965

Grateful Dead – the psychedelic band. We ran out and bought their album the minute it came out. Boy, were we disappointed. That was a trip to nowhere. We'd been there. We left there. Then, when we heard Hendrix on the other hand, that put [an end] to any question of our pursuing virtuosity as something we had to have in place in order to be able to exchange ideas with people. It was never an aim. One worked in relation to influences in various ways, that's the point I'm trying to get at. Albert Ayler was an influential figure. If you wanted to do something that had some intensity to it, you had to rise to the level of Bells. Or you had to rise to the level of [John Coltrane's] Ascension, where it starts out with like 9 of the heaviest tenor players in the whole wide world goin' [imitates Ascension]. So there were those kinds of influences.

If you're talking about music that one loved as a child, that's a different question; what shaped one in those kinds of ways. Can you narrow it down?

If someone listened to the first or second Red Crayola record, they may not immediately think of Albert Ayler or John Coltrane as an influence on it. They may however think of the 13^th Floor Elevators, for example.

The Elevators certainly would have come in for a look. We compared ourselves to the Elevators as far as innovation; we thought they were trying to innovate. We had no idea what they were really doing. We thought that everybody was innovating, and we were sadly mistaken. It turned out that very few people were innovating at all; that most people were interested in spilling their guts in terms that they were capable of, and that was the end of it.

So you saw yourselves as separate from most of what was going on?

We found that the concerns that we began with had little to do with the concerns that other people began with sometimes; in greater respect when it came to the form and stuff like that. We were certainly shaped by the “zeitgeist” or some crap like that, but we felt our difference, and we insisted on it in those days. I don't anymore, I'm looking for inclusion these days. [But] that was also going on at the time. That's how we “found each other”, shall we say. But we didn't run it like an elite, like make fun of other people and act like they were stupid or something. We were rather in pursuit of some stuff that it turned out not too many other people were in pursuit of. If any. We met those who understood. John Fahey understood that we were pushing it around and trying to find out what novelty there was left in the form, if any. He had gone back and gotten the very beginnings – he represented “American music”; we called him “the Master of the American rolls”. When we met him, there was agreement that the tradition played a role, and we saw ourselves as coming out of something, and on our way, taking material as we found it and trying to do something with it. The classic confrontation.

In a 1996 interview with Richie Unterberger, you describe Coconut Hotel as "the most extreme version of the logic that we could conceive of at that time". Could you say more about the "logic" of the Red Krayola?

We found that logic played a role in our thinking and in nobody else's. It was very simple to operate within parameters; to set up formal problems and work the logical parameters as they appear. Say you want to put some scrutiny on the idea of instruments. You find that on that record. So we start with, “This is a guitar. It has six strings. They are usually not tuned like this. They're played like this, but they usually don't sound like this.” [“Free Guitar”] is an exploration of the guitar as a set piece, as a trap, as an instrument: a thing that produces a certain kind of sound. There is no generic commitment to anything on that record. Idiom is deployed … not at all. There's no quotation in it, as such, there's merely instantiation. And so, expectation and anticipation become quite abstract. You don't sit there and wait for a chorus. If you're waiting for the chorus, you'll find out after so many minutes, "Doesn't look like there's gonna be a chorus here." That kind of stuff; that's what I mean by logic: creating a logical environment in which you set up a number of operators, you specify relations between them, and the results are what you might call facts. Where logic itself is turned into a kind of score.

I'm not claiming we were doing something no one else on Earth was doing. People were being more perspicuous about it. There was a bunch of stuff that came up called “process art”, where people focused on the art of blah blah blah. But we were not proceduralists in any strict sense. What we were interested in was the sounds that came out of those situations; the physical sensations that they generated. This stuff was played as music, it was not played as a technical notebook.

So these were not just manifestations of some concept or idea; you were consciously making music?

To me, those are one. I don't have to be holistic about my content part of it to recognize that that's just how that thing works. Even if I set out to be the most technical, dry-boned person in the whole wide world, someone's gonna say “Oh, a Beckett play.” Or something like that. Let's say I set out with some kind of concept in mind, that the work is an illustration; I might try to do that, [but] it's not illustration in the purest sense of the word. I'm not sure that that's even possible, because it's been my experience in music that the materials are resistant. You don't always find what you're listening for. What you find is what you hear. And then what you do about what you hear … is where it happens for me.

How does form play into that?

Say I've got a song in E. I know that the fifth is a B, and I know that every blues song in the whole wide world has been played this way, and I know that there's been a blues man who said “We don't flat our fifths, we drink them,” and that the Bb is “the Devil's chord”. I am fascinated by this effect, because it's against the grain. Precisely because everyone says “That's a cheap trick man, don't do that.” Me, I love a cheap trick. So I want to find it there's anything in a cheap trick. Because it sure as hell jazzes me. So I've got a problem: I've got something that jazzes me that everyone else says is against the rules. So that kind of stuff comes into it too. It's personal.

I don't have Mozart's problem; nobody's gonna sign off on my score. I don't have to modify it because I've got a temperamental soprano who wants some extra stuff in her Don Giovani aria. That's fun; I've clawed my way into that world where I've worked with that kind of stuff. But I don't have something that is a “sonata”. I don't have something that is an “etude” or a “prelude”. I'm not really familiar with the terms and where they come from. I know the music, I've been listening to it for a long time, but I don't really recognize forms as definite things. I could maybe say … hang on a second. [pause]

I don't really know how to answer your question. Form plays a role, I've seen that it makes a difference. But I've approached it rather by “structure”, let's put it that way. Where other people have form, I have structure. And in that structure might be something that's linked, acoustically, historically, with something that is formal; something that sounds like a blues. I've built my own structures.

Would you consider Coconut Hotel to be “free form” music?

It is formed, but it is free of historical form. It is not driven by an organized will to express something definite; something pre-existent; something scored; something notated; something that can be done again and again and again provided you have the means and the people. Free form means “this ain't never gonna happen again. We're about to have an experience that will not be [had] ever again. I'm not making any claims about form. It's an oxymoron at best. We didn't coin it, it was coined by Leland Rogers, [the producer for The Parable of Arable Land]. The guy was looking for an advertising slogan. That was his form; that was his description of what we did. I just clung to it because I'm a nominalist; kinda like Hobbes says to Aristotle, “That's very good professor, we can work on that when we come to the induction effect, but what I wanna know is, what are we gonna call it today?” So I'm just going on what we're calling it historically. What it winds up being called, I leave to posterity.

What is the relation of the Familiar Ugly to the Red Crayola?

The Familiar Ugly was an organization that accompanied, or enveloped, or just happened while we played. It was part of the phenomenon then. They were undirected. Open-numbered; any number above one. If you had the Red Crayola plus one person on stage, that person was the Familiar Ugly. If there were five, or fifty, up to an indefinitely large number. When we started the band, Barthelme and I and we looked around to see if we could put together a “band”, to take it to the level where we could actually see if it worked. Both of us could see that it had assonance – people liked it, liked the “noise” we made. When we met Cunningham, we also met Bonnie Emerson and Danny Schacht, and we played as a five-piece. It was alright, it could have gone on, but we were becoming a regular band: doing covers, the things driving the formal expressions were idiomatic, and genre-ridden. That was getting problematic. We were trying to write material, and felt that the only forward was to generate fresh material, which had some sort of novelty to it so that we would be satisfied and remain interested in the problem, in the hopes that there would be some popular assonance there and see what would happen. And eventually this conversation led to somebody else joining the band, and then somebody else joining the band on one night, and we looked at each other and thought, “Hm.” So when you start a conversation, people who can participate will.

And here they were, my goodness, what are we gonna do? this band could get to be … if you pursue a notion of culture along the lines of family resemblance, pretty soon everybody in the world will be in this band. That's … okay, but we want to be able to direct the thing to some extent. So we withdrew to a trio: Cunningham, Barthelme and I, and told the rest that it was over as a band. That we were gonna pursue this other line, which was that we were not gonna be bound by conventions. We didn't actively say this, but it turned out that we were not gonna be bound by conventions. We weren't gonna make the same record twice. With the first record, we felt that we had proven what point we felt there was to prove about chaos, organization within it, and its relation to chaos; how it demonstrates chaos, and at the same time can be counted at an interval as some … later we discovered the notion of “data”, and some data take the form of information, which is a better, easier way of explaining it.

So with the first record, we generated musical data; we made data under the premise of music, and asked the question, “Is it?” Then we put some stuff in there by convention, and traditionally we'd say “Yes, this is at least a try at music.”

Can you clarify the difference between “data” and “information”?

The Red Crayola, The Parable of Arable Land
International Artists, IA LP-2, 1967

“Data” is input, and what happens in the black box turns data into information. And that's the output. You process the world as it occurs to you, including unconsciously, and every other way, all the way up to the point of processing information like, “President Obama is on his way to Chicago.” At the same time you're also processing: “The sky is blue,” “I love you dear, I'm gonna be at lunch tomorrow”, millions of things are going on at the same time. Little differences make all the difference in the world, and those are the kinds of things that we would treat as forms. The tiny differences, the nuances between this and that. So the first album demonstrates that there is something that is song, and there is something that is organized “chaos”, and Free Form Freakout is put into the realm of “Freakout”, so that the people who are performing will know what it is that people will be listening to it under the rubric of; that it belongs to a cultural sort of thing so it gets a free pass, to some extent. You don't have to organize everything from the ground up, like they do in abstract art. There's a lot of money in that, and it's all a lot of fun, but we didn't really care to pursue that way of doing it. We liked the colloquial and the vulgar.

So the Parable takes care of that business. And then it was like, “Okay, what next?” And then we took what logical point had been made: sound as music, sounds of musical instruments, played not in musical ways; treated as instruments for expression. The only organizational principle is that people see what's happening and hear what's happening around them. It's always music minus r plus 1; you're listening to some phenomenon and you think “Listen to that. I wonder what I contributed to it.” Well there's one way to find out for sure: stop playing. That's the only way I know to find out. Stop playing. And that's demonstrated also in Parable: you make one sound, that's fine. You can isolate one sound, but you can't do like you can on a painting. On a painting, you put one mark here, and leave a little bit of space and you put another mark. In an acoustic space, if you put two sounds, those sounds are already interfering with each other if they're simultaneous. You can play one and turn it off; you play another one and then turn it off. Then you add those two sounds differentiated, then you play one and then you play the other one at the same time; then you have a different kind of relation. All of that stuff comes into play.

Then we go to a recording studio. Recording studios are kinds of museums in a way, technological museums. They have sound making devices and recording devices that go back to the beginnings of our ability to do these kinds of things. If they're a good recording studio. And we happened to be at a really good one, run by a first-class guy Walt Andrus. And he knew right away what was up with the acoustics of it, and put up 8 microphones. We only had mono capacity in those days, there was no possibility of multi-tracking. That's live, the sound of all that stuff on Parable.

The Red Krayola, Coconut Hotel. Drag City DC62, 1995

So when it came to Coconut, we had the idea, “Well, let's stop the drums. Let's get rid of the pulse, the beat, as such,” acknowledging all the while of course that there is a beat implicit to music, no matter whether somebody's pounding on it or not. Because the stuff happens in time, and duration naturally plays a role. Morton Feldman: you can sit there and put the stopwatch on and if you could figure out how he was counting the seconds, you could predict that piece eventually. Any one of those minimalist pieces you could work it out.

We were also constrained by what we saw had gone on. We saw Cage and Tudor and those people as having exhausted the potential of smartypants farting around with means of production. And we thought, “This is the end of it, there's nothing after this music-wise.”

Were you frustrated about this?

No, happy.

Why was that?

To us, we relished midnight because it meant the day was over; you never had to live that motherfuckin' day again.

So what came next?

There's also no singing. There's only two uses of the human voice on [Coconut Hotel]. I sing in there some nonsense metaphysical line about “There is no reason why not”, you know, pretentious stuff, and Frank Davis moans into the headphone, [imitates moaning], he's got on a pair of headphones, not over his ears – one of them it over his mouth, and as you know a headphone is a microphone. The speaker is a microphone. He was yelling down this headphone line, sending it to a tiny little Fender amp which he's got in his hand, and he's walking around between these to microphones, back and forth. And something is going on in his mind – I don't know, and it turned out to be some strange drama when you throw in the koto and the water pouring.

And then we confronted the issue of repetition. That piece [“Water Pour”] is just duplicated; it happens twice. That's Mozart: he writes you a section, and he plays it to you twice. Then he goes onto the next section and plays that one for you twice. So that the stuff is imprinted in some way, and the second time through, you have a different relation to the anticipations and expectations and so on, and what you have is very satisfying. That's at the level of … the brain's love of symmetry and pattern. He delivers it like nobody's business, synthesizing Bach and baroque with one hand, and with the other hand making himself a cheese sandwich or pouring himself a glass of champagne.

So all that stuff was done for us; all we had to do was just add to the sounds, which were built into the instruments; we didn't have to do much there either. There were a bunch of keyboards there, so we got going on them. There was a pump keyboard, an electric keyboard, an amplified keyboard, and so on, so all the permutation aspects were at work. The musical qualities of the sounds they produced are the overarching criteria of expression. Not monkey business. And where there is some figuration, it's not worked to thematic ends, merely [as] individual events. So you take the guitar going [sings steady quick rhythm], playing these 16^th notes. Then there's another guitar which is free, to play something that simulates a melodic relationship of something over a rhythmic ground. So it sounds like “guitar music”. Lo and behold, it is guitar music! It's as mundane as that.

So we thought that “Everybody's thinking about these kinds of problems. Everybody's thinking about the fact that everything has been done. Everybody's thinking about how the material that Schoenberg founded was handed off to Cage and Stockhausen and they handed it off to us, and here we are, and this is about all that's left.”

Do you feel like music is still at that state?

No, I don't think anybody cares about that kind of thinking. That's what I found. Endgame is an end in itself, and it only counts to the people who are prepared to play it. Otherwise, nobody gives a damn. We all know that life goes on. Ob-la-di oh-blah-blah. Bloody hell.

I think that these are still interesting structural facts. One can mediate one's production in more and less thoughtful ways and come up with stuff that has novelty to it; the novelty doesn't depend on “I am unique and nobody else can do this but me, and I did this and that's new. And that's genius because nobody else could do this.” It's not a dependency on the primitive. And that's the fly in the expressive ointment for me: the boring fact is that I can't do anything other than what I do. I wish I could. If I could be somebody else, boy I would have been. It's only projective, that's all. There's no escape. The aim in the 60's from my side was, “Is there any way other than having to do this the way that it's usually been done up 'till now?” Gee, no. There's no way out.

(in conversation with Matt Endahl on December 26th, 2011)

Part Two coming soon.