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.
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)
