Was all of Jazz from Hell
recorded on Synclavier?
No. There's one cut on
there, a guitar solo, that was done with a band on the '82 tour.
That's "St. Etienne." Everything else is 100 percent
Synclavier.
The Synclavier has
direct-to-hard-disk recording options that would let you, for
example, have somebody come in and actually play saxophone, and
it would still be recorded on Synclavier. Was anyof that done, or
was it all input directly?
No, it was all done
with samples and synthesis. It was all typed in or performed in
on the keyboard, or performed in using [Roland] Octapads.
Typing it in must be a
fairly slow process.
Well, I worked for
eight months on this album. So there's quite a bit of work in it.
It sounds like a real
breakthrough album, with the vocabulary you used before, but
distilled in a very new way.
Wait until you hear the
stuff that's coming up. When I first started with the Synclavier,
we didn't have a very advanced sampling system. We had mono
sampling with not a lot of RAM. Then, at great expense, I picked
up the rest of the new sampling gear. We were doing stereo
samples here in the studio before Synclavier even had stereo
sampling. We figured out a way to do it, and it changed a lot of
ways that you could write for the instrument. So the compositions
that are on Jazz from Hell
already sound old to me, compared to what I'm doing now.
There are some places where
we can hear that it's an acoustic guitar sample or a saxophone
sample or something quite clearly. But in other places it's not
so clear. On "Night School," for example, there's a
sustained sound that has a piano attack and something else
spliced onto it
.It's actually not spliced;
it's simultaneous. It's a stereo sample, a combination of trumpet
with pitch-bend and grand piano. The piano notes are not short.
They attack, and then as they ring off, you get to hear an
unusual noise, which is the acoustic piano playing bends. That's
a real easy thing to do on the Synclavier.
So even though you're
calling them stereo samples, they weren't always used to create a
stereo field.
Well, when I say stereo sample,
on the Synclavier you have four partials. You can have a
different sound on each partial, which means that when you strike
one note, you can have four completely different sounds come out,
or you can have two stereo pairs. Or you can have a stereo pair
and two other sounds at random. In the case of that particular
sound, it is a mono piano and a mono trumpet sample. But the
accompanying keyboard sounds are all stereo grand piano.
Have you ever sampled your
own guitar and used that?
I've sampled a few notes. I've
never plugged into the thing and said, "Now I'm going to
sample myself." We extracted them from digital tapes of live
performances. A couple of good feedback notes are plopped in. I
haven't really gone hog-wild with guitar samples, but Dweezil
[Zappa's son] did a whole guitar sampling session last year, and
the stereo fuzz-tone samples are just now being trimmed and built
into patches, so I'll have a whole assortment of characteristic
heavy metal noises.
Do you ever use a guitar
synthesizer controller with the Synclavier?
I've tried it, but because of
the style I play and the way my hands land on the guitar, it has
never felt comfortable to me. I've tried maybe three or four
different systems, but none of them drove me crazy.
In general, do you like
working with samples, or if you could get good synthetic
reproductions that eliminated all of the: associated problems,
would you prefer that?
I couldn't imagine that any
kind of a synthetic reproduction would be able to give you the
type of nuance that you get out of a sample. For string pads and
things like that, you could fake it pretty good. For bogus
globulant brass ensemble stuff, that kind of orchestral cheese,
you could get away with FM. And Minimoog bass sounds and things
like that usually sound best if they're actually coming out of a
Minimoog. What we've done to get those kinds of sounds is sample
the Minimoog. You see, with samples, not only are you getting the
sound of the instrument, you're getting the ability to capture
the instrument in different types of air spaces. For example, we
have both dry and ambient room sound percussion noises, and dry
and ambient wind. Even with the classical guitar, different types
of environ- men's make a big difference.
It also takes a lot more
work to get the multi-sample of the acoustic guitar laid out on
the keyboard, rather than just calling up. . .
. . . an E string, and
make it stretch as far as it can go? Well, you know, I'm a
dedicated guy. I like to spend the time to get the thing right
How much time do you spend
on that aspect of the musical process, us opposed to composing?
It's seasonal work. I'm not the
one who actually trims the samples. Bob Rice, my assistant, does
that. I build the patches. I'll tell him that I want a certain
group of sounds. . Our backlog of samples to trim is humongous,
because it's far easier to record the samples. We record them on
the [Sony) 1610, and then he puts them into the Synclavier, left
side first, then right side, and then lines them up to make
stereo samples. The easy part is recording the samples. The hard
part is transferring and trimming and cataloguing. He's probably
- let's be kind - eight months behind on the sample trimming. And
as the samples get trimmed and organized, I build them into
various types of patches, according to what composition I'm
working on. We have things called pintos, which are mix-and-match
patches. Instead of having a patch that is just a saxophone, for
example, you can have a patch that is a few notes of the sax, a
few of a clarinet, a few of an oboe, a few of a trombone, all
different instruments, appearing on different notes, all of them
on the keyboard.
How would you use something
like that?
Well, that gives you instant
orchestration. lf you were to play an ordinary piano part on the
keyboard with a patch like that, depending on where you put your
finger, you'd get a different instrument coming at you from a
different stereo location. It turns what would ordinarily be a
mono-sounding keyboard part into a whole ensemble playing stuff.
Do you plan it out in
advance, so that you know that here you're going to want two sax
notes on these two keys, or do you just put a bunch of things on
the keyboard and wing it?
Well, you start off by winging
it, and then you refine it, depending on how the orchestration is
going to lay. You've got a lot of possibilities for laying things
under the keys. You can mix orchestral percussion with industrial
noises, like drills and hammers and saws and vacuum tanks and
things like that, all in the same patch. You can combine them and
do some wonderful stuff with it.
Have you released any music
yet that has the drills and saws?
Oh, yeah. That's on Jazz
from Hell. You'll hear a noise in there which is a sample
called TANK.REL. It's the release of a vacuum tank in a
woodworking shop. And there are some other things. Nail guns are
used in there.
Is that the stuff that
sounds like just a slightly strange drum set?
Yeah. That's part of our
industrial percussion setup.
What percentage of Jazz
from Hell was input by typing, and why would you choose one type
of input over another?
There are three different ways
to type in. One is in a language called Script, which I don't
know. I don't use that at all. Bob Rice can type Script. But
that's more like writing a computer program, so it has no charm
for me. Another way is with their Music Printing program. You can
enter or delete notes with the cursor while looking at real music
on staves. And if you want to write in tuplets - if you have 7
over 3 or something like that- it's real easy to do it that way.
You just make a couple of marks and then redraw the screen. You
now have edit blocks that correspond to a septuplet over three
quarters, or whatever you want. It could be anything. Then you
just enter the pitches. For that kind of stuff, that's the
easiest way for me to do it. The third way to type is a facility
called the G Page. The screen is split into three segments, and
you can display three tracks of data at the same time on the
screen. In each of those three units, you have three columns of
information. The left-hand one tells you the start time of the
note. In other words, the beginning of the piece would be beat 1,
and all the subsequent beats have numbers. This data reads out
either in seconds, beats, or SMPTE numbers; that's all
selectable. The center column gives you the name of the pitch and
a number which tells you the octave that the pitch lives in. And
the right-hand column gives you the duration. All that is
editable, so you can move the cursor around, add and delete
notes, change start times, which changes the rhythm, and change
the pitch and the octave and how long the note lasts. I divide my
time between doing stuff on the G Page and doing stuff in the
Music Printing.
Does it print out the
velocity of the key or tell you what voice you're addressing?
That's coming in the next
generation of software. They're going to have a facility on there
where you can type in velocity. But we've found a way to add
velocity to something that's just typed in flat. It's a little
complicated to explain, but I can put in dynamic information
after the fact.
So New England Digital is
still dealing with velocity in an after-the-fact way.
Well, you know, they
continually claim that they're understaffed and they can't do
everything all at once. They do ask users for their comments
about what they'd like to see on there. God knows, I've filled
out a batch of those comment cards, but I've yet to see any of
them implemented.
What kinds of suggestions
have you made?
Little things that really
shouldn't be that difficult. If you're looking at the Music
Printing, and you're in a certain bar, there should be a way to
hit a stroke on a key that would place a flag in the program, and
then when you hit the play command, you should be able to play
right from the point that you were looking at on the screen. And
vice versa: You should be able to listen to your sequence, stop
it at a certain point, and have it draw the actual music printing
data right from that point. That would make life a lot easier.
And that's still not
implemented?
It's not implemented. I'm not a
programmer, but to me it just sounds like a flag. There are a few
other minor details that need to be addressed, but they've got a
heavy hardware program going. That's where they make their money.
Direct-To-Disk recording and all that, that's high-ticket stuff,
and they've been working hard to make that thing practical.
In the abstract, an
instrument like the Synclavier is capable of doing so much, it
must be tough for them to figure out what to make their top
priority.
Well, I gave a suggestion to
one of their guys that they ought to give some thought to the low
end of the consumer spectrum. I have nothing but praise for the
device, except for the fact that it's as expensive as fuck. The
basic synthesizer system, minus all the sampling and the rest of
that stuff, is already so unbelievably expensive, and a DX7,
generally speaking, will make a bigger variety and cleaner
variety of FM sounds than the basic Synclavier. So I suggested
that they do something about improving their tracking filter on
the FM side, so that they might be able to come up with something
in the lower price range that will introduce consumers to their
way of doing things, because once you get one and realize the
different musical things that you can do with it, the chances are
very good that you will build onto the system. If they don't pay
any attention to the low end of the scale, they're excluding all
those beginners who are first- time customers, because all the
rest of the stuff is so expensive. Before you can make it do what
you hear on Jazz from Hell, you've got to spend a
quarter of a million dollars. And to go direct to disk, those
prices start at $50,000, going up to a quarter of a million
dollars. So if you were to get a Michael Jackson - size unit, you
could spend close to half a million dollars, and that limits the
number of units worldwide that you can sell. That's why they
ought to think about doing something less expensive, so that they
can stay in business long enough that they can repair it when it
goes down. I'm thinking 10 or 15 years down the road, because I
expect to still have this thing and still be making music on it,
and if there is no NED down the road, then what have you got?
Have you ever worked with
any of the lower-end gear that has some similar functions?
Well, I had a [Yamaha] DX5 and
a rack of [Yamaha] TX modules. I also use the [Axxess Systems]
Mapper, which is MIDIed to the Synclavier. We've been able to get
some truly frightening things out of that. I also have a [Yamaha]
CS-80, I've got Electrocomps, Minimoogs, Synkeys. . . . All the
heavy-duty hardware that a rock and roll touring band would use,
I've purchased and supplied to whoever the keyboard guy is who
does the tour. So I know basically what the consumer end of the
synthesizer stuff is like, even though I'm not a keyboard player
and never expect to be. I am a composer, and as a composer you
deal with timbre and other technical matters, and it pays to know
what's available so that you can write for it.
When you're preparing to go
out on tour, do you tell your keyboard players what patches you
want them to use?
Well, it depends who the
keyboard player is. Some things are real specific. If you're
writing a composition and it has to be the sound of a marimba,
you're not going to want to have the sound of anything else right
there. It's got to be a marimba. If it's supposed to be brass,
it's brass. That's what the composition calls for. You don't want
to stick a string patch where the brass goes, be- cause strings
don't go ta-da-ta-da. Basically, those are the kind of
instructions that I would give to whoever is playing it. We don't
use too many Mars music synthesizer patches. There are certain
points in the show where things get bizarre, and there are
strange noises in there, but generally there's a tune being
played. The timbre used for the tune tends to resemble a real
instrument from the real world.
So you don't have to do a
lot of programming for special effects that you wouldn't
otherwise be able to get.
Well, my main desire from
synthesizers is to provide orchestral-type textures, or
orchestral effects that convey a musical message in the midst of
a rock and roll context. One of the most elusive musical things
that you can try and achieve in the real world is an acoustical
balance between a rock and roll band blowing its brains out and
anything that resembles a symphony orchestra. It's just not going
to happen. You have to do that by magic. And synthesizers assist
in that magic. The other thing, of course, is multi-track
recording, where you can actually record symphonic instruments on
one date, and record the fuzz-tone guitar on another. In using
these tools, I'm just trying to bring to the public some replica
of what it is I hear in my head. As technology moves along,
that's getting easier and easier to do.
Has technology also made it
possible to hear more things in your head than you were hearing
before?
Well, let's say that a person
had never heard a bassoon in his life. And the day that he hears
one he's either going to say, "That's the ugliest thing I've
ever heard," or "That's God's instrument." Or
maybe something in between. But you're going to have a response
to an instrument. Every composer has some image in his mind of
what he wants his stuff to sound like - not just the composition,
but the overall tonal quality of what he's writing. In my head I
have an audio image, not just of the notes, but of the way the
notes will sound played in an idealized air space, which is
something you can't get in the real world. The closest you can
get to it is a digital recording with digital control over
imaginary audio ambience. When you can design rooms to your own
specifications with a Lexicon, and then place your music in that
space, that's getting pretty close to what it's really all about.
It's not just the notes on paper that matter, but what they turn
into when you start making air molecules move. If it's on paper,
it's roughly the equivalent of a recipe for something to eat. The
ingredients may sound good on paper, but how do you know whether
or not you're going to like it until you eat it? It also
resembles the blueprint for a building. A good composition will
take into account that you need to have toilets, you need doors
going in and out, windows, ventilation. You need all the basic
stuff, and then all the rest of it is interior and exterior
decorating.
But as you get more
involved in electronic instruments, do the things that you're
hearing change?
I was going to get to that.
Obviously, if you're dealing only with the instruments to which
most composers normally have access - in other words, the known
instruments - you will tend to think in terms of what to do with
a known instrument. The moment you get your hands on a piece of
equipment like this, where you can modify known instruments in
ways that human beings just never do, such as add notes to the
top and bottom of the range, or allow a piano to perform
pitch-bends or vibrato, even basic things like that will cause
you to rethink the existing musical universe. The other thing you
get to do is invent sounds from scratch. Of course, that opens up
a wide range.
One of the most intriguing
things about working with a Synclavier is what it lets you do
with rhythm. That's always been one of my favorite things to
investigate. It's possible to get accurate performances of the
most ridiculous rhythmic combinations. I'll give you an example.
I've been working in large tuplets recently. If you're in 3 /4,
I'd put in a tuplet - say, a bar of 3 /4 that has a 75-tuplet or
a 35-tuplet in it. You can hear that there's a waltz going on,
but when these things occur, it's like, "What is that? Where
do these things come from? Why does it still have a groove to
it?" It still relates mathematically to something else
that's going on in the bar. With this system, you can pick a
random number, then take any size bar of music and divide it up
into those components. You're going to have an 88-tuplet or an
87-tuplet. Or you can take a composition that has, say, ten bars
of 4/4. The first bar you start with an 88-tuplet, the next bar
is 87, 86, 85, 84, 83, 82, 81, something like that. You could
never hand that to a musician on a piece of paper and say,
"Here, do this."
Even on your early albums,
you were handing musicians things that were, if not quite that
difficult, at least going in the same direction.
Yeah, that's true. You can hand
this to the musician, but what you get back is the problem. The
spirit may be willing, but the flesh might say, "Uh-uh, this
ain't gonna happen." That's pretty much the rule throughout
the last twenty-odd years of my musical career. You can ask for
it, but the chances of getting it accurately performed are very,
very small. And now I don't have to worry about that any more.
So electronic media have
really freed you to get closer to your ideal, to what you're
hearing.
It's really made that possible.
The next question is whether anybody in the audience wants to
hear it. That's the big problem, because the further out I get
with these timbral combinations and the unusual rhythms, the
further away it gets from any possibility of radio play. And
without radio play or some kind of advertising for the album,
nobody's even going to know it's there, let alone pick it up.
Some people, when they hear it, they absolutely don't like it
just on principle because it doesn't have that boom, boom,
boom on the floor all the time. I'm delighted that I have
the opportunity to go wandering around out in the zones of this
thing. I would like it if I had some company out there.
You were talking about
creating a specialized ambience with digital reverb, yet Jazz
from Hell sounds relatively dry. What kind of processing, if any,
did you use on that album?
There's a lot of real subtle
processing. It is absolutely not dry. There are tricks to using
echo. If you want something to really sound like it's echoing,
then that's an obvious effect, like yelling into a cave, that
kind of stuff. That tends to make things get soft around the
edges. The way ambience is perceived in this album is, each
composition has to exist in some sort of imaginary air space, and
you don't want the air space to fight against the musical
content. You don't just pick an echo program at random, then turn
it on and say, "Now we've got air space." What we do
is, for each piece, depending on how much transient information
is in the piece or what style the it piece is, we tailor at least
three different rooms. In other words, we have a live echo
chamber and two Lexicons. And that gives you the possibility of
locating difterent types of orchestration in different types of
imaginary rooms, and then combining those things to make the
final stereo picture.
You're still using an
actual echo chamber?
The reason we do that is that
certain types of percussive sounds, when introduced into a
digital reverb program that may be a long program, don't sound
right. That program may be good for everything else in the
composition that is not so spikey. But the spikey stuff in there
tends to sound bogus. So what we do is use live echo quite often
for the percussion-type things, and use echo programs with more
harmonic content on the strings or brass or things whose duration
you want to increase. An echo prograrn actually increases the
duration of notes on paper. You can write an eighth-note and play
an eighth-note, and there's no reverb; the sample itself is dry.
What you get is an eighth-note. But if you put the eighth-note in
a 35-meter room, that eighth-note is extended. When you're
writing you have to bear that in mind. What you're going to do to
it in the final processing and how loud different things are
going to be in the mix changes considerably what your response is
going to be to the composition as a whole. We fuss over that very
much.
When you're starting on a
very percussion-oriented piece, do you write the rhythm groove
first, or the sustained material, or what?
It depends on what kind of
cotnposition it is. I work it all different ways. Sometimes I
start with a picture of a completely finished event in my head,
and then just go about achieving the event mechanically. Other
times I might start with just a little beat, then I decide to lay
something on top of it, and that grows into a monstrosity. Or I
might hear three or four notes that would represent what you
could call your hook, if there is such a thing in these tunes.
And I build out from the hook.
Can you give us an example
of each of those approaches on Jazz from Hell?
Well, "Night School"
started off with just eight chords that I played in on the
keyboard. Everything else came after that. And "While You
Were Art II," that's really got a strange story to it.
There's a song on the Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar album
called "While You Were Out." A group at Cal Arts
[California Institute of the Arts], led by a guy named Art
Jarvinen, came to me and requested an arrangement of "While
You Were Out" for their ensemble, so they could play it at a
concert that they were giving in Los Angeles. So I had David
Ocker, who was my assistant at that time, type into the
Synclavier the actual transcription that Steve Vai did that is in
the guitar book [The Frank Zappa Guitar Book, published
by Hal Leonard ]. That just gave me the chords and the melody
line, which wasn't suitable for the instrumentation of their
ensemble. Once the data was in there, then it was a matter of
arranging it so that they could play it. So I put it through a
bunch of permutations. For one thing, 1 squared off the rhythm to
the nearest 32nd- note, instead of having all the tuplets and
weird stuff going on. Then I hocketed the material, so that the
line was bounced from instrument to instrument. And did a bunch
of other stuff to it.
To aid in their performance,
since it was already typed into the Synclavier, I produced a
little practice cassette for them to play the piece by. When Art
came to pick up the rnusical parts, he listened to it and he
said, "There's no way that we can learn this in time for the
show. It's too hard." So I said, "No problem. We'll
just have the machine play it. All you do is go onstage and
pretend that you're playing your instrument. You'll have wires
coming out of your instruments, leading to some speakers, and
play a cassette, and nobody will know the difference." Well,
they did it. And guess what? Nobody knew the difference! The
music critics of the Los Angeles Times didn't know, the
music critic from the Herald-Examiner didn't know, the
man who was in charge of the concert series didn't know. The only
person in that audience who knew was David Ocker, because he had
typed it in. Nobody knew! We've seen rock and roll videos where
you have a model pretending to play an instrument. In this case,
you have musicians pretending to play instruments. They were
actually looking at the sheet music, and moving their hands the
way you would normally do it.
But to make matters worse, the
version that is on Jazz from Hell is not the version that they
played. The version that they played had no samples. It was only
FM synthesis. And even at that, nobody knew. It doesn't even
sound like the version played with samples that's on the album.
This is quite deluxe.
What kind of reaction did
this performance draw?
It caused a scandal, to the
point where three members of the group actually apologized to the
musical community and swore that they would never do anything
like that again. Instead, they should have been going,
"Yeah, look at this! People who write about and criticize
classical music can't even recognize a cheesy cassette." It
wasn't even a digital tape that they played. It was a normal
audio cassette played through a little P.A. system in this hall.
And nobody knew that these people weren't playing the
instruments. That, I think, is the real artistic statement of the
piece. That's why it is called "While You Were Art."
Let's turn to the Francesco
album, which was done before Jazz from Hell.
Right. There are no samples on
Francesco. It's all straight Synclavier.
What inspired you to do
that project, other than the fact that the l8th-century composer
Francesco Zappa was your namesake?
It was just mere curiosity. I
obtained the music and David Ocker typed it into the Synclavier.
Then, on the first day, after he typed in Op. 1, and we listened
to it, I thought, "Hey, that's a nice tune. I wonder what
the rest of it sounds like." He spent about a month typing
in a huge amount of these string trios - they were all string
trios, by the way. They sounded nice, so I thought, "Why not
make an album out of it?"
Your approach to
orchestrating it seemed quite restrained.
Well, I didn't want to go mondo
on it. Basically, you're dealing with three-voice compositions.
It's two melody lines, usually in harmony, plus the bass line.
That's all I really had to work with. I didn't want to add any
other data to it. It was written for two violins and an upright
bass - not exactly the world's most appealing audio combination.
Even if I had suitable synthesizer replicas for those
instruments, I'm not sure that would have made the most
interesting album. So I just added a little Technicolor to it and
let the music speak for itself.
Was Francesco the first
thing you had done with the Synclavier?
No, the first thing I did with
Synclavier is on Thing-Fish. Listen to the
"Crabgrass Baby" track, which opens up Act II. The
background vocals are a repeated vocal chant with this computer
voice singing over it. The computer voice is done with a little
card that fits into an IBM computer, and the stereo background
vocals were our first attempt at stereo sampling using the mono
system. The people from Synclavier are always accusing us here at
the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen of taxing the system. But
we've managed to do things that go beyond what was originally
planned when an the Synclavier was put together, because my
musical needs and my desires are probably different from those of
the other people who buy the thing. You wind up finding ways to
hot-wire the machines to do what you want to do.
Since you're not primarily
a keyboard player, what do you use the Synclavier keyboard for?
Well, I use it in a lot of
different ways. I couldn't sit down and play anything that really
resembles a piano part. However, if you understand how sounds can
be assigned to the little black and white things in the
Synclavier, you'll understand how I play on the keyboard. On
patches for drum sets, for example, every key is actually a
different drum set stereo sample. But you can make combinations
of things occur. There's one line on Jazz from Hell that
is somebody blowing into a bottle of beer to get this low noise,
which is then slowed down even more and run simultaneously with a
big bass drum. When those two sounds are hit together and split
in stereo, it sounds kind of like a gong made out of wood that
exudes dust after you hit it. You can get combinations of
percussion noises that wouldn't happen in the real world unless
the entire percussion section was unbelievably psychic and could
count their butts off. You can make a whole bunch of guys hit a
whole bunch of stuff all at the same time.
Is your technique good
enough that you can play these rhythms pretty exactly on the
keyboard as the piece is being recorded?
No. If I'm playing a funk track
or something like that, I'll square it off. I'll use the
resolution factor in the machine to square it off to the nearest
sixteenth or 32nd or whatever. That keeps me honest. But there
are advantages to playing it in. Usually drum parts have a lot of
notes in them, and although you can add dynamics after the fact
on the Synclavier, it's a real chore. So even if you have to wind
up editing your drum track after you've done it, it's better to
play it in. The other way to play it in is through the Octapads,
because with that you can play rolls. One of the things that
seems to be inconvenient to do on the Synclavier is to make their
keyboard respond fast enough. Repeated notes are one of the
harder things to do, whereas they're one of the most simple
things to do r on an Octapad. A simple roll will yield a whole
string of pitches with different dynamics on each pitch. It gives
you a much more textured drum part.
How else do you use the
Synclavier keyboard?
Well, let's say you want to
comp something. You want to have some sort of chordal aroma going
on. Even though I can't play a keyboard, I got rhythm. So by just
doing punches with a patch that has pressure and velocity, you
can stylize a sketch of where the chord ought to hit in order to
accompany a part. You can hit all wrong notes, and then go back
in and change the pitches. On Jazz from Hell, that's how
a lot of the keyboard parts were entered.
Throughout your career
you've experimented with combining rock and roll with, for want
of a better term, serious instrumental music. And now it seems
you're doing more totally instrumental albums. Are you moving
away from weasely Fifties rock, or is that still very much part
of your thought?
To tell you the truth, I still
enjoy certain types of Fifties rock, but I hardly ever listen I
to it anymore because all I do is type. I feel that in a pure
musical sense - I mean, forget about whether or not you can sell
any records or whether anybody likes it, but in terms of pure
musical experimentation - there are answers to be obtained to
serious musical questions with this machine, and as long as I'm
thinking about 'em, I'm going to go in there and do that. But in
a way, you put yourself in a box, because you're answering
questions that the average guy never asks. I'm having a real good
time with what I'm doing right now.
At what point would you be
putting rock songs on an album, not because you cared about them,
but because you were trying to sell albums? And would that be
right or wrong?
It depends on whether you want
to be a purist or whether you want to be practical. The fact of
the matter is that if I do an album that has any kind of a vocal
on it from now I on, the chances are that vocal is going to be
about a sociological or political topic. For example, I thought
of one that I want to do just the other day called "Lie to
Me," which would deal with a catalog of everything that the
Reagan administration has been able to get away with for the last
six years. That would be a worthwhile thing to stick in there.
I'm not in the mood right now to generate a bunch of fun-time
songs, and it seems like every time I do, all the music critics,
who have absolutely no sense of humor, despise it so much that
whatever else in the album is of a sturdier musical merit gets
ignored, while these guys go on rampages about the text of my
songs.
It's easy to focus on that
stuff, particularly if it offends you.
Well, the thing is that a guy
who writes usually is a. word-oriented guy, and the chances of
his knowing about music, especially if he's a rock music critic,
are nil. None of the people who have reviewed my albums, with
maybe two or three exceptions in the last 20 years, had a broad
enough knowledge to know that what they were listening to was
more outrageous, in terms of how it was flying in the face of
music history, than any lyric or any individual story idea in the
song could ever be. They weren't historically equipped to
understand what the references were and to see why the music that
was being done based on those references was either utterly
hilarious or completely outrageous. You've got to know a certain
amount of stuff in order to derive the maximum impact from those
albums. That's just the way it works. I hate to be a guy sitting
around saying, "I'm misunderstood," but it's not even a
matter of being misunderstood. It's a matter of being
uncomprehended. But what do you expect? I do it because I like to
do it, and if I write "Dinah Moe Humm," that's what I
want to do, and it's done. That doesn't mean that every album's
got to have "Dinah Moe Humm" or "Montana"
[both from Over-Nite Sensation], and it also doesn't
mean that every album has got to be with the London Symphony
Orchestra. I have a lot of different musical questions, and I'm
looking for a lot of different musical answers, and if the
audience is similarly disposed, then they can take the course
with me, because I'm learning stuff as I do these things.
That reminds me of
something that one of the members of Kraftwerk once said - that
they were like scientists working in a musical laboratory, and
when they found something true, they put lt down on tape.
Well, I don't know whether I
would go that far, because to say that it's true is pushing it.
But the albums do in a way represent a catalog of the various
experiments. Whether or not the experiment is successful or a
failure, you be the judge yourself. But before you judge, you
really should ask yourself whether you have enough data to make
that judgment. For a guy who has never heard Anton Webern or Igor
Stravinsky, or Edgar Varese, or Takemitsu, or Ligeti, or
Penderecki. . . . If you don't know what that stuff is, where it
comes from, what it sounds like, and what the intention of it is,
how can you even attempt to take a guess at what extrapolations
you may be hearing? For example, in the song "Brown Shoes
Don't Make It" [from Absolutely Free] most people
hear only the words. They don't realize that there is, in the
middle of that song, a completely academic and rigorous 12- tone
string quartet going on in the background. The other thing that
was funny about that song was that by playing "God Bless
America," "Star-Spangled Banner," and one or two
other patriotic songs at the end, all at the same time, I was
making a musical joke about Charles Ives. So I've been doing this
stuff for a long time, but the people who write about it are
usually more interested in their bylines and the way they can
diddle their words around. If they're in the word business, they
concentrate on the words that I've written, and the results
haven't been all that enthralling. But I think that this album
and the next couple of albums are going to raise some eyebrows in
different parts of the musical world. Even if you don't
understand what it is that's going on, I think you have to
appreciate that the sound quality of what's on there is truly
exceptional.
Do you have any plans to
take the Synclavier on the road?
If I ever go back out there,
I'm definitely going to take the Synclavier.
Will you play it yourself?
Well, I'm not a keyboard
player, remember. I would have an operator who sits at the
Synclavier and, on cue, hits the start button to provide those
parts of the orchestration which would be impossible to replicate
onstage any other way, and to kind of edit back and forth between
live musicians and the machine, where sometimes the machine is
playing all by itself and sometimes the machine is playing the
accompaniment and the soloist plays over it, or the machine is
playing the whole orchestra part and the drummer and the bass
keep going. Things like that. There are ways to do it.
It's a massively complicated
rehearsal problem, in order to make it work invariably night
after night. That's the main thing that concerns me about taking
it out, because I know other people have had them out on the
road, but I don't think anybody else has asked the machine to do
what I want it to do, and to do it without fail in a hostile
environment. When you take things on the road, they do break.
Guys do drop them, and that's a big worry. If you build your show
around the machine like that, and the machine doesn't work one
day, you're going to have a lot of dissatisfied ticket holders
out there. That's one of the great things about live music in its
pure sense. If one guy gets sick, or you have some kind of
mechanical problem, a creative band will find a way to make the
show entertaining, and keep it going. If you have a very
technologically oriented show, you have to carry spares. And the
problem about carrying a spare Synclavier is it's a quarter of a
million dollars.
The musicians you recruit
are of such a high caliber that syncing with the Synclavier
shouldn't be too much of a problem.
I've already done tests. My
guys can sync with it, no problem. They latch right on there. But
that was in a studio. You take it onto a stage, and you've got
monitoring problems to deal with. What the drummer needs to hear
is vastly different than what the keyboard player or what the
bass player would need to hear. So now you're into multiple '
monitor feeds. It's endless. It's a massive headache. And the
solution to each headache is in increments of five figures.
Is this kind of trend going
to become so major that it will curtail a lot of live performance
by a lot of different musicians?
Take a look at what happens at
a live performance now. When was the last time you went to see a
band, and what you saw was a band? Basically, all of the big
groups, so-called, are out there faking it with half the show on
tape and people hopping around, kind of lip-syncing to the track.
This is because people see acts on MTV and they go to a concert
and they expect they're going to get the same result, and of
course the only way to do it is to fake it.
A lot of that music may
have been put together one track at a time, and the guys may in
fact have trouble playing a solo with any sustained intensity for
32 bars at a stretch.
Well, it's not just the solo.
It's the whole way the orchestration sounds. What you hear on
television is very, very freeze-dried. The resemblance between
the modern-day rock and roll record and what a band actually
sounds like is . . . well, there is no comparison. I mean, kids
have grown up to imagine that a drum set sounds only a certain
way, and what they're hearing as a drum set probably isn't a drum
set anyway. It's a machine. So it often comes as a shock when you
find out what drums really sound like, and what a bass really
sounds like, or what anything really sounds like, because they
haven't been exposed to the real deal, which is not to say that
they would even like the real thing or prefer it to what they get
on MTV.
I think there's room for both
things to exist, but the young person who is just starting to go
to concerts in the '80s has already missed out on some of the
most exciting live music that has ever happened in history, which
is what's been going on for the last 15 or 20 years. There have
been great live music events happening onstage that will only
happen that one time, in one place, and it happened because guys
were playing instruments, and they were really tearing it up that
night. Those kinds of moments are getting fewer and further
between, because of the economics of the touring business and
because of the expectations of the audiences that have been
raised by video music. People expect a different thing when they
go to a concert. If you took the most wailing band in the world
onto the stage and got up there and everybody played good, there
would be a certain number of people in the audience that would
go, "Yeah, but where's the drum machine? Where's the
boom-bap?"
The other problem is that the
audience who still likes live music of a daring sort, as they get
older, they're less inclined to leave their homes and go to a
hockey rink and have a 15-year-old person puking on their shoes.
So the base of support for that other kind of music is mostly
gone, and the younger ticket buyers don't know what that other
kind of music is, so they don't go to it, and they don't request
it. So what is being served up to them as music? Just I take a
look at what's happening in the world of guitars. It's people
playing gymnastic doo-dads. Half of the things they're playing
aren't even in the key of the song, you know? It's like,
"Give me a scale I can play right here, and let me whiz up
and down it a couple of times."
Maybe we could segue to
another question of unusual Synclavier applications. On The
Mothers of Prevention you use recorded excerpts from the Senate
hearings about slapping warning stickers on rock albums with
questionable lyrics. Were those excerpts sampled on the
Synclavier?
Yes.
You've been very outspoken
on issues related to efforts to ban controversial lyrics from
rock albums. What concerns should musicians have on these
subjects?
The first thing that they can
do is to remember that art in the service of politics usually
makes for boring art. The way that I think people should deal
with this situation is to have some courage to resist the
pressure of the record companies, because the record companies
are more than delighted to sell out the First Amendment or any
other historical document in order to increase their quarterly
bottom line, usually at the expense of the rights of the artist.
Let's face it, you're just a piece of meat when it comes to a
record contract. And today, most record companies are not all
that interested in building your career. They figure if they've
got one album and they can make a bunch of bucks, they're
delighted about it. Then they kiss you goodbye and pick up the
next guy with a weird hairdo and some diagonal zippers on his
body. You should fight that. People who are in the music
business, when they do interviews, instead of plugging their next
album or whatever, should actually have the courage to speak out
about what they believe. A lot of them seem to have been given
the word by their managers to keep their mouth shut.
Perhaps many musicians
simply aren't concerned with political issues.
Well, I think it behooves them
to have political thoughts, but let me make a definition
clarification here. I say politics is the entertainment branch of
industry, and government is what we need. We have a diverse
population in the United States, with all kinds of different
needs that have to be taken care of. That is the righteous
function of government. Politics is bullshit, basically. Politics
is involved with salesmanship. Government is involved with
statesmanship. And I do make a distinction between those things.
If you are making political statements, remember, you are not
addressing the real needs of government. You're just talking
about the Madison Avenue aspect. So think about that difference.
Just a friendly reminder, in case somebody does decide to speak
up.
F Z
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