Episode 3: Trey Spruance (Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, etc.)
The Who Cares Anyway Podcast ·
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00:00:00
Transcript
SPEAKER_00
00:00:00
I think San Francisco has always been a place that tries to bury its ghosts and the ghosts are too recent to stay buried.
SPEAKER_01
00:00:24
Hello and welcome to episode 3 of the Who Cares Anyway podcast, and this time I'll spare you the introductory blather and just tell you that my guest is Trey Spruant. and Trey is a very special guest for a couple of reasons. One is that he had a hand in several of the albums, records, CDs that got me started down this path way back in the late 90s when I was a college radio DJ. Some of those albums would be the first couple of Secret Chiefs 3 albums on Amarillo Records, Mr. Mongols, Disco Volante, The Three Doctors, Back to Basics Live, also the early Neil Hamburger albums, which if you look at the credits you'll find that he is listed as producer on those, and then even the Great Phone Calls album which he talks about a little bit here. Also he was one of the very first people I interviewed when I first began working on this book or something resembling it Back in 2005 and then even before that way back in 2002
SPEAKER_01
00:01:30
He was one of the very first people I interviewed for a feature article in my role as a writer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and that article in turn is maybe the very first one in a sort of unofficial series that kind of got the ball Rolling before I even had the
SPEAKER_00
00:01:46
idea of working on a
SPEAKER_01
00:01:47
book So a big thank you to Trey for not only doing this interview but for all of his support over the years. Now, the idea for this interview was not to regurgitate or rehash what's already in the book, but rather to sort of connect what he is doing now or what he has been doing since old 1995 with his experiences in San Francisco during the early 90s. And I should clarify that the Becky that he refers to early on in the interview is Becky or Rebecca Wilson, incidentally, the female voice that you hear on the Great Phone Calls record, among many other accomplishments of hers. With that said, I'll get out of the way and let us get on with the interview. Here it is.
SPEAKER_01
00:02:43
I don't know, how do you think of those years in San Francisco and like that period in between the first and second Mr. Bungle albums when you were playing in so many other different bands and working with so many different personalities?
SPEAKER_00
00:02:56
Yeah, I mean, I liked how you characterized it. Well, one thing I think was really great is that you have Becky in there prominently because she was really important to. I mean, not just, you know, me meeting all those people that ended up working a lot with and becoming really good friends with but yeah she she was a real network or like bringing all kinds of creative people together. So my, you know, I was just sitting out there in the sunset, like Patton and myself were living in a house like way out in the fucking outer sunset. The only friend that we'd made was smelly, right? You know, and like, you know, he's no help when it comes to like, you know, he's in a fight with everybody in the punk scene or whatever. And he, you know, he knew Grux and he liked Grux, but that's because he thought Grux was the person who had the most potential to be a serial killer out of everybody that he knew. So lucky for me, you know, when I started to get involved with Becky, you know, that's, I had met Greg at our house actually before, but it was really only after spending time with Becky that I started to spend time with Greg Turkington and with Grux and all of them.
SPEAKER_00
00:04:14
And things just really naturally blossomed from there. As far as me getting involved, you know, I was out of my depth meeting, dealing with them on a musical and artistic level. Like, I felt like they were really nice to me, like. I mean, it's whatever I was bringing into their world wasn't defined yet at all, so I didn't really have any kind of recording studio up and running at that point. you know, all of that sort of developed over time. And so my honing my skills is like somebody who could capture things that were going on in recording was still kind of yet to come in the beginning there. So a way, like I feel like my.
SPEAKER_00
00:04:58
Feeling for for having some facility recording music really did come out of wanting to capture some of these. Things that were happening, you know, that first that I was involved with an end after a while things that I was peripheral to that I felt like should be, you know, should be recorded. That includes that fucking great phone call saying, because actually remember, we went down to Circuit City and bought a tape machine, not the one that we used at Becky's house, but the night before, because we there were two nights of recording. And the first night that we actually ended up recording it, which was I think the third night of the prank phone calls. It like some machine we just went to fucking Circuit City and went and bought. That was like my first
SPEAKER_00
00:05:45
production gig was hitting the record button on that shit.
SPEAKER_01
00:05:50
Yeah, it must have been coming out like fast and furious in terms of, you know, looking at what Amarillo was doing at that time, you know, they, you in 92, he had, you I mean, some people might scoff at this, but you know, the zip code rapist album, great phone calls, the first fax head stuff. Then you have, you know, let's say you've come off of the Mr. Bungle tours and you've got, uh, you've got, uh, you know, your involvement in, in those different things. And then you, I guess it was a little later that you joined in with the Papa pies.
SPEAKER_00
00:06:25
Well, the first, the first fact set is 1991 and it was stomach, stomachache records was pretty, pretty fucking early on 91 or 92. but at the latest, 92. Okay.
SPEAKER_01
00:06:38
And that was really the first thing, like a band that you did with those guys.
SPEAKER_00
00:06:44
Yes, for sure. For sure. And then, yeah, Plainfield was right around that time and Pop -O -Pies. But I mean, I was involved with like, there was Bob Madigan and his, you know, his bands that he was doing. And that was kind of a smelly connection, except Bob was totally around Carolina scene and all of those people too. Was
SPEAKER_01
00:07:07
Bob another Michigan guy like Smelly?
SPEAKER_00
00:07:11
He came from a band called Slaughterhouse, which was a really crazy kind of butthole surfers but scarier type of thing. And then he had Boom and the Legion of Doom. I believe he was involved in that. And that's a guy he was Boom was another person who was around. Maybe not touching down of too much in the scene that you were covering, but he's a Michigan, there was definitely like a Michigan contingent
SPEAKER_00
00:07:36
and it was Bob and Smelly and Boom.
SPEAKER_01
00:07:40
Do you think you would have wound up, I mean, sometimes people will speculate and say, well, and maybe I'm guilty of implying something like this, that, you know, if it hadn't been for Mike Patton, Faith No More, this other stuff wouldn't happen. But the thing is you all were heading in some direction and if you weren't gonna end up on Warner Brothers and in San Francisco, you might've ended up, you probably wouldn't have stayed in Eureka forever. But do you ever ponder what the element of chance involved in this bringing you and meeting, leading you to meet these people as opposed to wherever else you might've ended up?
SPEAKER_00
00:08:16
Yeah, I mean, it's so weird. Cause you remember I had that really old, I think 1987 issue of the wiring department magazine, maybe 86, I don't
SPEAKER_01
00:08:26
know.
SPEAKER_01
00:08:27
85 even, or I think that yearbook issue was 85.
SPEAKER_00
00:08:32
So yeah, I mean, I had that up in Eureka, like when it came out and the only band I knew in that was Faith No More, cause I had just seen them live with Mike. You know, little did I know like six years later, thumbing through it again, like, oh, there's Grux, there's Greg, you know, there's all these other people that I've met since being down here.
SPEAKER_00
00:08:53
And it was kind of a weird mid 80s premonition of all the people that I was going to end up playing with. Joe Papa pie is in there, too. I didn't know who any of those people were. I didn't pay attention to any of the other articles in that magazine at the time, but I mean, Mr. Bungles is kind of tangential to everything in the fucking world. It was I don't know that it ever would have found its home among those people, to be honest, like, you know, Trevor was in town. Danny was in town. Danny was doing some things, but he never really crossed over too much into the world except for the pop -up eyes. Little bit. But yeah, I don't think Mr. Bungle would have been really particularly accepted by that world is number one thing, right?
SPEAKER_01
00:09:42
You
SPEAKER_00
00:09:42
know? Yeah. Yeah, it's really a funny thing. Now to look back on that is very, it seems really strange. it, how turning the nose up was a was such a thing. But you know, it helped define things, the boundaries were quite good, I thought, for the time, like, I liked having a demarcation between, you know, I had a foot a little bit in the improv world, and certainly in the Zorn sort of New York thing. And you know, you couldn't have a crossover between that and like grux land. For sure. There was no, there was no conversation there. But this made me become like
SPEAKER_00
00:10:26
brothers actually with there's one person who I think is really parallel to my case, which would be Avon Kang, because up in Seattle, I mean, the way I see it is with tangential to San Francisco, little fucking insulated scene. There was Yeah, the influx from Michigan. But there was Seattle, Seattle, Portland, there was definitely New Orleans, and there was definitely Austin, Texas, like this is all kind of like a familial relations going on. But up in Seattle, even just a lot like me, like a person who studied music, and was, you know, had a lot of like musical literacy and all of this stuff, But then felt really small standing next to people like the Sun City girls who were gracious and welcoming to somebody like him. And then you just kind of find yourself as an artist going, you understanding that what you value is a little bit different than what you've been taught as far as musical literacy goes or what you think being a fucking improv artist in New York City is. you know, it's just, Avan and I are very parallel in dealing with this art world underground and then being, you know, drawn into it in a profound way.
SPEAKER_01
00:11:45
Yeah, that world is a lot more comparable to academia in the sense that it was all about your resume and who you played with.
SPEAKER_01
00:11:54
And there was a sense of like things being done correctly and a very dry, I don't know, some feeling around it. And whereas there's something a lot messier about, you know, the Sun City Girls and that kind of thing. And I noticed it the other night at the Phil Franklin or Sunburn show where, you know, they're tolerating a lot of wrong notes and mistakes and accidents, but it's in the course of possibly arriving at some other place where there's, it's more open to, you know, the magical kind of thing. And you got me to kind of reconsider Sun City Girls when I first talked to you, because that would have been kind of spring 2002. The term you used was engineering coincidences. Yeah, right. That's a whole different world that's much more intuitive or I don't really know what you would call it, but it's, I think it's fortunate that you were able to,
SPEAKER_01
00:12:54
you know, Grox has that, something comes from that. We were talking about the new weird America, Sun City Girls, Carolina, stuff like that, Sunburned, Avend, would all fit into that category. It's not necessarily what you do in your own music that much, but it's a different way of looking at stuff, of really approaching music than that.
SPEAKER_00
00:13:19
Yeah. If you had to confine it within jazz, let's say, there's really a difference between somebody like, I mean, even Coltrane, who's kind of a monster on every level, but there's a real difference between somebody like Coltrane and Sun Ra, for example. And the thing of Sun Ra is like, yeah, there could be a night where you went to see Sun Ra and be like, what the fuck is this? Like nothing came together, right? And there would be another time that you would go. And it came
SPEAKER_00
00:13:52
together in a way that is irreducible, right? You know, So it's, like you say, engineering of coincidence is some, you know, that those things aren't, you can't really engineer them, but if you create the environment for them to happen, if everything happens right, it's a different kind of improvisation. It isn't dependent on how much you practiced and how much you, you know, it's dependent on completely, like, extra musical things. So the musicians that open themselves up to things like that, you know, I would put Sun Ra and Brux kind of in the same category that way, because it's conjuring something, you know, it's conjuring something specific, but it's not something that reads on a musical literacy page, like really at all.
SPEAKER_01
00:14:42
Right, right. That's exactly it. And that's where, you know, say Mr. Bungle is interesting that it attracts listeners from different places, because I think, you know, I've listened to Carl King, you know, he hears in a very different way or appreciates very different aspects of it than I do.
SPEAKER_00
00:15:00
Yeah, no, he's a very kind of strict rationalist, but he's intrigued by things that are outside of all of his frames of references, which I wish everybody who had that rational ear had as much attraction towards imagination as he does, because most people who don't like that, they just don't want to hear any anything outside of that shit.
SPEAKER_01
00:15:35
You mentioned way back that, this might have even been in an email at some point, but that the most
SPEAKER_01
00:15:42
nervous you ever felt was at a Three Doctors gig. Now maybe that has changed since then, but maybe it ties in with the same sort of idea that, you know, because you had the, let's say the musical fundamentals and that kind of knowledge down. And I guess the idea is you're in this other environment where it's harder to prepare for.
SPEAKER_00
00:16:04
Yeah, because in a way that what it's about is musical personality, you know, you can't really, you can't really prepare much for that, for being in a moment. I mean, people, Well, that's another cliche in improvised music, like being in the moment, listening, not playing, listening and interacting. But in something like Three Doctors, it's yet another level removed from that because the level of listening is actually the level of personally engaging on extra musical levels as well, or at least expanded the idea of what music is at a Three Doctors show or a Bon Larvis show.
SPEAKER_00
00:16:48
It's pretty different, you know, than, I can't just call it role -playing or any of that. Like you have to be able to go, it's more shamanic than fucking role -playing. It's more like what somebody like Artaud would expect from an actor than like getting up there and playing a fucking character. To me, that's why it's intimidating. Nobody who's task mastering me like Artaud, but I also feel like I'm standing next to these people who are, you know, sort of, in my estimations, giants, you know, they're Brandon and Greg, you know, even though they're the nicest people in the world to me and have always been nothing but welcoming, they still scare the fuck out of me. Same with the
SPEAKER_00
00:17:29
Sun City girls, you know. So that sense of like, I have to engage with them on this kind of collective project and hold my own as a, as a personality and musical presence, that's a lot fucking harder than rehearsing for a fucking gig. Let me tell you, because you know, you can rehearse for a month and get your shit together and you can be ready and feel good about it. But with this kind of thing, how the fuck do you? Yeah, I mean, you can.
SPEAKER_01
00:17:57
Yeah, you know, you said shamanic Laura Allen said use the word channeling when I I think I asked her that was in a con in the context of something about Carolina. But I think I asked, I think the question was something to do with, you know, you know, some people would refer to these things as, you know, cons, you know, costume bands are acting. And then the idea of, you know, there's sometimes this fake binary between either, you know, you're authentic, and you're singing about your emotions, or you're acting and you're in a joke band. And I guess that earlier chapter I sent you had had a lot of stuff about that. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00
00:18:37
I love that.
SPEAKER_01
00:18:38
And it gets into these realms or these areas where, you know, thank goodness those interviews are not going to be aired in any audio setting because I would be trying to articulate these questions and I'm sure you can probably relate because I would fumble, trip over my words trying to get into these areas where you're trying to ask a question and see if they understand where you're going. but you're getting into these areas where, you know, it's not something that you really see a lot of musicians or music type people talk about because you're talking about levels or layers or sort of the frame around what you're doing.
SPEAKER_00
00:19:20
Yeah, it's inhabiting. Like Carolina, I think, is the best example to use because it's, you know, those musicians were inhabiting a world. They're not just dressing up in fucking costumes. And, you know, I mean, it's way deeper than that. And I think Lara mentioning channeling, like, even the setting that Carolina puts itself in is, like, completely saturated
SPEAKER_00
00:19:49
with spiritism, like, American spiritism at the turn of the century. And whether or not you know about that stuff, historically, It's almost like you get introduced to it musically through this experience of this weird time traveling experience. So just as a spectator, you're drawn into it as a world. You didn't have to sit there and construct it or read up about spiritism to know what was going on. I don't, to this day, don't know if that's what they're, what Gratz is getting at, but the signs of this kind of American spiritist realm or vortex opening up are unmistakable. That to me, Carolina is this giant psychic vortex of American spiritism, purely.
SPEAKER_01
00:20:42
Yeah, there's also a thread that kind of runs through, it's sort of a sub thread in the book and it's not, you know, just bands and costumes and masks, but there is a certain theatrical aspect. And then, you know, of course, you have to mention the residents went one way or the other,
SPEAKER_01
00:21:04
but there were also these seventies groups, like the Angels of Light that were coming out of this weird in -between period, like post hippie, pre, you know, like glam era, of really strange stuff. And then that fed into Tuxedo Moon and that influenced Factrix, which gets into kind of that world that's industrial -ish, but there was still a theater aspect or they would definitely be, they were definitely into Artaud and stuff like that. And
SPEAKER_00
00:21:37
you
SPEAKER_01
00:21:37
know, Grux would have picked up on at least some of this through either through osmosis or not,
SPEAKER_01
00:21:44
But in that sense, there's a sort of tradition. But at the same time, it's kind of like whatever it is that makes San Francisco kind of a hotbed or a place where that kind of thing evolves. You can also get lots of other stuff that is just people dressing up in zany costumes and stuff.
SPEAKER_00
00:22:04
It's just
SPEAKER_01
00:22:05
two sides of the coin or it's the double -edged sword.
SPEAKER_00
00:22:10
But that's where that turning your nose up the demarcation kind of comes in, because there is a fucking line between the things. But yeah, it's nothing you could, it wouldn't be, it's not an easy thing to demarcate through, I don't know, from a social point of view, let's put it that way. It's rather antisocial in some ways. And again, as an outsider to a lot of it, because I really was only inside of it by proxy, I can also say, you know, that all happened very unselfconsciously. Specifically, an example of grux, like there was he never talked about any of this stuff. He never gave anybody motivation that was reference to any other precedents or anything like that.
SPEAKER_00
00:23:00
It was all coming. It's all pure pathos, like pure pathology, gruxian pathology. So I often think of it that way, too, is that maybe what demarcates some of this stuff from like, okay, we're going to dress up in costumes and the intensity of this pathology is, I mean, you could almost say like, where does the schizophrenic line get drawn? right? It's how far do you go down this road of assuming these different kind of psychic states and expecting people to inhabit them pretty far? I you know, I think that's how the line is drawn is just by how deeply people are willing to go down those roads. And they leave like the self -conscious part of dressing up in a costume way behind, like before they even get going on that stuff.
SPEAKER_01
00:23:59
Yeah, yeah. There were, you know, there are a lot of, not a lot, but there, I don't know how else to refer to them because they are people, but they become characters. And, you Grux would be one. Some of the people around Flipper in that world, Ricky Williams from the earlier era,
SPEAKER_01
00:24:17
Patrick Miller, Minimal Man. And there's a great line from Patrick Miller that was in a zine and I borrowed it and used it at the top of the chapter, but he basically said, you know, Minimal Man was this character I created and he describes the character a little bit and he says for a couple of years I basically became that character and went on a really bad drug trip and he was genuinely having hallucinations and several people told me stories about this. but there's a madness that is almost like, boy, I mean, that level of kind of commitment or investment is not really something that a casual listener really has any right to expect, let alone demand.
SPEAKER_00
00:25:01
Yeah, and that's what the whole environment is saturated with that because of people who are around it. There's a lot of like questionable mental health, just like people are right on the edge. a lot of the people who are participating or even just appreciating are pretty out there, you know, and it's not like a halfway there, but like all the way out there.
SPEAKER_01
00:25:24
Yeah,
SPEAKER_01
00:25:25
yeah, it is the, you know, it's something about, you know, I don't know, you know, chicken or egg, like how a place gets this reputation, unless now here's something that you might be able to enlighten me on is this idea of a situational, not excuse me, not situation, symbolic geography, like, you know, a place having a certain symbolic value and, and, or a symbolic quality. And then you mentioned, I remember this going way back to when California was coming out and you made a, there was a post on one of the message boards, and you were explaining a little bit about the motivation behind it and Cali and, and, you know, so California has its own symbolic sort of place in the order of things, but San Francisco within that, I don't know, does that, does anything come to mind there as far as, you know, what does this place represent? Why is it a magnet for
SPEAKER_00
00:26:20
these kinds of things?
SPEAKER_00
00:26:21
I'm totally obsessed with that at this point. I mean, I have my own thoughts on it, you know, that have to do with, you have yourself a terminal point of Western expansionism when you're hitting that golden gate when you hit the pacific ocean that's a wall um and western expansionism is something that begins arguably you know millennia before there's even european western expansionism so you have all of this kind of almost like a gravitational pressure but even just bringing it to the more recent history you have an aspiration of creating an empire the golden gate empire Like the United States interest was in making a conquest of the Pacific Ocean out of the Golden Gate. So I don't know, there's almost like an Israel -Judah relationship between Northern and Southern California, where you have a kind of a polytheism and a monotheism, which is a whole other subject. But I think San Francisco has always been a place that tries to bury its ghosts. The ghosts are too recent to stay buried. The dark side of it, the bad things that are all rolled up in it are too hard to tuck away. So they end up haunting things that are happening in the present. And I think there's a lot of that is just a lot like this geographical geopolitical compression, you know, but now we see playing out a lot more, I think, than we did even in the 90s.
SPEAKER_01
00:28:32
There's a quote that I pulled out of René Guénon, he says, there's a very significant correspondence between the domination of the West and the end of a cycle, for the West is the place where the sun sets, that is to say where it arrives at the end of its daily journey and where, according to Chinese symbolism, the ripe fruit falls to the foot of the tree. So this idea of some connection between the farthest point West and the end of something and then Cali and California and the end of something. And then, you know, you have the End Times on your 2004 album. And I think Bruce from Flipper talked about their music as the dance to the death at the end of the world. There's some sense, and again, I could just be attributing too much to these people,
SPEAKER_00
00:29:16
but I almost feel like
SPEAKER_01
00:29:17
these characters were kind, not characters, There's these musicians, artists who were like almost intuiting or sensing some end of something that we don't really understand what it is. But I almost feel like the reason some of these guys went so crazy or kind of put themselves through the wringer with drugs or mental illness or whatever it was, is that maybe they're
SPEAKER_01
00:29:42
the first ones sensing this whatever it is. but it's appropriate that that's happened at playing itself out in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_00
00:29:53
Yeah, because I think that now you can see it as in the 90s, I certainly was seeing, for example, when you come to that and the Western wall, you know, West, if you start in California, instead of starting in Europe, in your consciousness of the global coordinates, Japan is not to the east, Japan is to the west. And California is to the east of Japan. With the Muslims talk about the sun rising in the west, to go back to one of the things you're talking about, that's the day of apocalypse, is the sun rising in the west. And in Japan, you know, the sun rises in the east over California. And when you think about the atomic bomb, it was right, it was a different sun rising in the west. It was a very apocalyptic moment. And when, every time I see that rising sun image from that time in Japan, I was, I mean, it's kind of stupid and trite, but associating it with this atomic bomb imagery as this limit that Western civilization met when it hit the Pacific, all of that to me really like hit home when I went to Japan and with FaxTed and we played with those noise bands with Masana, Marysbo and Soulmania and Otomo Yoshida and got so many, so much good stuff,
SPEAKER_00
00:31:29
but it was so strong that this idea of tonality disintegrating or tonality going through the second Viennese school, I mean first being deconstructed by Wagner, being deconstructed more by the second Viennese school, being deconstructed into a micro tonality in the 50s and 60s, and then us having to sort of accustom ourselves to that and redefine our notions of beauty, take on this whole sort of Nietzschean project of acclimating ourselves to things that are totally dissonant, but trying to convince ourselves that it's a new sonority, that's beautiful, all this kind of bullshit, you know. And then you're ending up, I found myself ending up in Japan, like hearing music blown down to micro bits, just pure static at extreme volume and no longer feeling like that process was had anywhere to go like the process of so -called deconstruction or tonality getting smaller and smaller was over and it met this wall of static you know um so for me that that's actually in the 90s that's when I started to I mean even and I doing nt fan and all of that stuff was really kind of all wrapped up in in that like our maybe it was just me I'm not sure we never talked about any of this stuff but but yeah I think that what happens is if you're sensitive to this kind of stuff I'm only saying this stuff in retrospect if you're sensitive to it especially the people who became before way before me or what we were doing in the 90s it puts you in extreme extreme alienation from the rest of, I mean, I don't even want to say society, like nobody wants to hear this stuff. Nobody wants to hear it from a person because it's frightening. Artistic things are supposed to give you sort of a different feeling other than being this confrontation with this apocalyptic moment. Especially one that might not be what it seems when it's this sunny California thing, right?
SPEAKER_00
00:33:48
And now we're talking about like transhumanism and Silicon Valley and the transformation of human beings out of being human. You know, you can easily see that that transformation is related to all of this, but bringing it up in these terms, it's like, no one wants to hear it. So the way, if you need to get it out there, the way you're going to put it out there is in this, exaggerated way there's really there's no way to convey that sense that you have building up because there is no vent for it there's no other place for you to put to put it if you have those
SPEAKER_00
00:34:25
sensitivities so it's that extreme alienation I think accounts for a lot of the broken and personalities and stuff on the road to this moment.
SPEAKER_01
00:34:47
You mentioned a word that I hadn't heard before, Tetrico? How do you pronounce that?
SPEAKER_00
00:34:52
Tetrico.
SPEAKER_01
00:34:53
It's Portuguese. Yeah. Okay. Is that a name for a genre or what does that come from?
SPEAKER_00
00:34:59
No, it's just, it's just a Portuguese word that means, I mean, superficially means creepy or, you something that has a quality of being haunting, but there's something foreboding about it, but maybe a little bit more menacing than that, yet it still has a kind of a, could pass for something beautiful or, you know, it's not necessarily this pure menace, It's just like the shadow of a menace type of thing.
SPEAKER_01
00:35:30
John Carpenter, Halloween, would that fit in that or?
SPEAKER_00
00:35:36
Yeah, I guess, maybe it's a little less. A little
SPEAKER_01
00:35:41
overt than that, okay.
SPEAKER_00
00:35:43
Yeah,
SPEAKER_01
00:35:43
yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00
00:35:45
You know, my wife is Brazilian, the of the, she always explains it as like, when she hears, actually, one of the secret chief songs reminds her of this, but she, she brings this up every time she hears music that has this quality, which is like the music that you would imagine somebody who just killed somebody and they're driving away from, from the murder scene and feeling good. Okay. But still, it's still like this. There's a still, there's a morning to it and there's a a respondency to it, but it's also a freedom of some kind.
SPEAKER_01
00:36:25
Okay, but but then you you said that there was an element of that on the that you hear an element of that on the the first Faith Memorial, but that they got it from Tuxedo Moon. And was, that's interesting. Where did you hear that? Did you hear that
SPEAKER_00
00:36:39
from Roddy? Well, I know that they listened to Tuxedo Moon. I don't know that they got it. I always thought that that music had that quality. It's what I loved about that first record. It's very technical feeling of, you know. Somewhere along the line, I think it was maybe Roddy made me some demo tapes when I was working with him
SPEAKER_00
00:36:58
and he had taped over, like on the B side of it was tuxedo moon tapes.
SPEAKER_01
00:37:03
Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00
00:37:04
Something like that, something oblique like that, like, oh, tuxedo moon. And that's where I first, I think, started hearing it. Maybe Grex had some tuxedo moon also.
SPEAKER_01
00:37:14
Okay, that's interesting, yeah, Cause they were Faith No More and some of that stuff happening in the early, mid eighties that has some of that, that gloom feeling, you know, it would, I could say, Oh, there's a continuum between, you know, Tuxedo Moon or The Sleepers and that. But honestly, when talking to them, a lot of what they were getting was coming from the UK.
SPEAKER_01
00:37:35
I think there's a certain affinity maybe between like the spaces, the climate, the fog, the warehouses and stuff out in that part of town where they were rehearsing.
SPEAKER_00
00:37:47
Yeah, for sure. And you can see it later in the early 90s when the rave music came over from England to San Francisco too.
SPEAKER_01
00:37:57
Can you say a little bit about the rave era? Like what your connection with that was as far as, I guess you were mostly an observer? or just kind of...
SPEAKER_00
00:38:07
I'm glad that I stumbled into it as I did because I guess in a way, it's a little bit just happenstance. When Mike and I moved out of the Outer Sunset, I was just kind of living in my car. This was probably 1990. And I had a few friends from up here, like up in Humble, I'm in Humble right now, who were sometimes living in San Francisco, and one of them had a girlfriend who was kind of important in the rave scene, like throwing the raves, and knew all the DJs, and knew all these British people and stuff, and I ended up living at a house. The house that I lived in in San Francisco was essentially these like kind of early raver people, and yeah, this, these are, that's a world that never crossed, right? Like this art world in the rave world. Definitely not. I was definitely in a bunch of different places simultaneously.
SPEAKER_00
00:39:15
So I went to a few of the, you know, I would go to these raves. And maybe more importantly, I mean, what impressed me what I liked about it was this idea that the music had become decentralized, there was no focus whatsoever on what the DJ wasn't even a thing. DJ became a fucking thing after that, but it wasn't a thing at all. They would have their name, you might know who they are, but you don't know where where in the building they are, you know, just nebulous, ephemeral thing. And that was kind of fascinating to me. It's like there's all these people together doing musical engagement with each other. But there's, there's no musicians, and there's no focal point at all. And then I started to like, talk to some people and try to understand their the ethos or the men top mentality that was going on, which, because I was like, really interested in reading about things like nanotechnology and sciences, I had a like, a small education in physics before
SPEAKER_00
00:40:21
that. You start talking to these people, and they're talking about this stuff that turns into what we now recognize as transhumanism and they're doing they're taking like smart drugs and all this shit and they have fanzines like i've subscribed to this fanzines called extropian the extropy movement which turns out was run by you know people who became the the most prominent transhumanists of today i would go to like a weird rave and fucking somebody like uh terrence mckenna would be giving a speech over top of some shitty, you know, house music, whatever. But you know, it was interesting seeing all this and seeing, seeing that culture and seeing the basically the Bay Area psychedelic transformative psychology culture in that moment, because it's so relevant now as far as like, being the backbone of Silicon Valley, the socio religious fucking heartbeat of Silicon Valley that this, that, that stuff was the groundswell of all of that, for sure. So I'm glad I didn't miss miss it. But no, the only I would say musically, the only thing that really mattered to me was later on when drum and bass and that kind of stuff started coming along and syncopated music started to just lose, like the ear was accepting all these ridiculous, crazy time signatures. And you know, people were not so locked into the four four beat and everything. It started getting pretty interesting, like around 95, 94. Before that, musically, it was totally boring, of course.
SPEAKER_01
00:41:55
Yeah, you mentioned that you were, you kept wanting it to turn, to turn evil, evil techno. And you wanted to, you were dabbling, not dabbling, but experimenting with that. But like, you got other stuff to do. You don't have to, the bandwidth to make evil techno, or to make techno into what you wanted it to do.
SPEAKER_00
00:42:19
Yeah, now it's been done pretty well by some other people. So I'm happy about that.
SPEAKER_01
00:42:24
I should get a list of recommendations,
SPEAKER_01
00:42:27
but those experiments, there is a little bit in there, a good bit in there about the Shotwell Bomb Factory days. And Danny told me a little bit too about that. That period of the Shotwell Bomb Factory, you were basically living there and that's where you had your first studio, so to speak.
SPEAKER_00
00:42:48
Indeed. Yeah, that's true. I had I had my ADATs, like when I finally acquired ADATs, which I think was ninety two, maybe ninety three. Yeah, that's all of that stuff went to Shawo, which was Mike Batten's house. But he had it was a compound of three different buildings. And the second building was our studio. And he was generous enough to to let me use it. I wasn't actually living there except for when I was being a fucking bum living on the ground in the studio, which was quite a bit of the time in the beginning. Okay.
SPEAKER_01
00:43:22
Yeah. Because Danny told me or when I talked to him about how you all, it was a lot of times the three of you, Trevor, Danny, and you would often like convene, let's say, I don't know, maybe say nine or 10 at night and then go to the point of delirium and recorded all kinds of stuff that didn't necessarily make it a, that wasn't necessarily meant to be a song or something that's going to go on the album, but just kind of led different places.
SPEAKER_00
00:43:50
Necessarily. I mean, I actually have a closet filled, filled with ADAT tapes from that stuff. And yeah, like maybe 0 .5 % of that turned into music that was on Disco Volante, but there's just mountains and mountains of stuff that we were doing.
SPEAKER_01
00:44:11
Is
SPEAKER_01
00:44:11
ADAT was a, that was a really brief window of time where that was a format that.
SPEAKER_00
00:44:17
It was pretty significant. It was a, yeah, the, you remember it's like a video cassette and you could record eight tracks onto a video cassette. But the, and the great thing, because, you know, before that all we had was four track tape machines. or if you're lucky, you'd have like an eight track with reel to reel, but we didn't have any of that. The consumer product that gave you the ability to record eight tracks, do overdubbing at all, was unbelievable in the early nineties.
SPEAKER_00
00:44:45
And the incredible things you could link them together. So you could have 16 or 24 tracks. And I ended up, I had 16 tracks from the beginning and started experimenting immediately. And then, yeah, that's why like all of the music I was recording of all these other people was learning how to engineer recordings, taking like some things that I've learned from real studio tracking, but then just tons and tons of experimentation. But with Trevor and Danny, that was about capturing kind of collective improvs, Sun City Girls style.
SPEAKER_00
00:45:24
In fact, I remember talking to Scott Colburn, him giving me some really, really good pointers about how to, you essentially have to be ready. You can't fuck around with like setting up microphones and you're going to ruin the moment, you know? So you got to have something that's ready to go. I kind of wired that studio so that it would be ready to go.
SPEAKER_01
00:45:46
It was also ADATs that allowed you to sort of map out the recording of that album. Because I mean, there's really no way, I don't think there's any way that that album could have been what it was if you didn't have the ability to do that pre -production work.
SPEAKER_00
00:46:05
What happened was, is that because I had the ADATs, I had devised all of these ways to consolidate tracks. So the time we, we didn't use ADATs actually on Disco Volante, I don't think, but it was planned out, it was thought it was conceived production wise, the way you would can conceive of it from a more limited ADAT setup. So we did we had 48 analog tape tracks on that record. But there's, there's an awful lot more than that going on on the record, because we stack those tracks with a lot more information than you would traditionally do. Just because like, you know, these ways that I figured out that you can mix, you could double duty on certain tracks. Now in California that was taken to a completely insane level
SPEAKER_00
00:46:52
and we did use ADATs on that, on that record. Disco Valencia was more, it was, I guess it was approached with a little bit more of a music concrete kind of idea, at least as far as the, how the tracking would go, you know, and how things would get put together in the end.
SPEAKER_01
00:47:15
You know, coming back to that one and listening to it, in light of all of the things that have gone on since then, as far as, you know, bands that are, you know, interesting bands, but the idea of hearing an album that is so sort of saturated with sound and information, I mean, there's a lot more of that, but in the Pro Tools era, or whatever we call this era, and I almost feel like it was good that it took as much ingenuity as it did to make an album like that, because there wasn't so much of it. But sometimes I listen to stuff and it's like, maybe it would be good if it weren't as easy to record music so full of just saturation and, that's not the right terminology, but information, tracks, stuff. But at the same time, like making it when you made it, that wasn't, there were not other records that sounded like that at all at that time. Whereas, let's say in the era of Secret Chiefs, again, maybe it doesn't sound like that, but there's a lot of other, relatively
SPEAKER_01
00:48:37
many other groups or musicians making really densely orchestrated music that A, would have been impossible in the era of four tracks or even ADATs, but B, I don't know, it doesn't have the same impact.
SPEAKER_00
00:48:56
You know what it is? You're right on it, which is intention. Like you have to intend to do it. There has to be concerted effort, has to be coordinated. Everybody has to agree, this is what we're gonna do. You can't fuck around and see what happens. There's none of that on Disco Volante. There's no fucking around seeing what's gonna happen. It's all, we know exactly what we're gonna do. And furthermore, we all are in agreement on what that should be. So that intention is honed before you even hit the record button. That's really what's different about that era
SPEAKER_00
00:49:38
because you can't be casually throwing ideas out there. There's no such thing as that when you're working on analog tape and that's it. You what I mean? there's no, there's no, I mean, not to say there's no experimentation. There's, there is some, but you're, you know what you're doing and you, you mean it, you know, you, you have intended compositionally that very thing and not something else. I think with the, when you have infinite amount of tracks or whatever bandwidth you can, and it's just, you just pull up a virtual instrument and try that out and then try this out and try that out. It takes all of that intentionality away. Everything becomes a matter of trying things until they work, which there's plenty of great things that come out of that too, but the intentionality part of it is gone at that point.
SPEAKER_01
00:50:33
Have you struggled with any of that,
SPEAKER_01
00:50:36
given that you're recording your arc, Creative Arc has sort of followed these changes in technology that, for example, allowed something like a Forking Path Studio to evolve. You I remember one of the albums says Forking Path Studio is a such -and -such power book with two mics and two preamps or something. You're basically saying that Forking Path Studio isn't a place, it's a studio without walls. walls, like a museum without walls, a studio without
SPEAKER_00
00:51:12
walls.
SPEAKER_01
00:51:13
And
SPEAKER_00
00:51:16
was 1998, I think.
SPEAKER_01
00:51:18
And then you're able to, so you're able to record with this musician over here, this musician over here, they're not necessarily in the same room. And that in turn really, you know, reflects just a lot of changes in, it parallels the way the world has changed. you know, we are, we are talking over video. We couldn't have done this 20 years ago. We're all kind of not in a place. We're all kind of becoming virtual, becoming digital. And I don't know, I'll just throw that out there. Like the challenges that come with that.
SPEAKER_00
00:51:52
Oh, no doubt. Like I would put the other factor, like if we can, if we want to demarcate the real difference in process
SPEAKER_00
00:52:00
between something like Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs, It's not just that, okay, now I can record. I might not have the whole band in the room. I can go up to Seattle and record a event and then come, you know, go, I can go to them. The real question is why, why do that? And the answer to that is that I'm spending $2 ,000 maybe on a Secret Chiefs record, because that's all I have. And, you know, this is where the glory of being on Warner Brothers Records comes in, because with, you know, with Mr. Bungle, we were all in the room and we did bring all of the musicians to us and we were in studios together. And that costs, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that's the big difference there is, you know, the technology made me into a kind of a prosumer on the side when I'm doing low budget stuff with huge ambition, but with the Mr. Bungle stuff, it's big budget stuff that all has to be sort of coordinated and it's much more of a human effort, like a human social effort.
SPEAKER_01
00:53:12
Isn't that really sustainable? I mean, in a sense, there was a fluke that allowed it to happen and you made the most of it is kind of the thing where.
SPEAKER_00
00:53:19
Yeah, there's no other way that those records would have been made that way. No fucking way.
SPEAKER_00
00:53:46
I guess I'm always trying to figure out what the best approach is. Since it is, you know, it's a matter of economics, pure and simple. Technology can help survival of certain musical approaches to doing music production. It can help you bring things to life that you wouldn't be able to do because you don't have a $200 ,000 budget. But that's like where it ends as far as saying something good about the technology. Like everything else about it since then has been a struggle to get... I mean, honestly, like the Forking Path Studio with my CS60 and a Hammond organ and a couple of 414s is the best. like it's the fucking best setup. And it's not an easy thing to get back to that
SPEAKER_00
00:54:45
when, let's put it this way, like the paradox of technology goes along and we're supposed to be expecting greater and greater things, better speakers, right? Our experience of listening to music should improve. You have the hi -fi comes in the 50s, 60s, you get stereo, goes from mono to stereo. So now everybody's got home hi -fi systems, everybody cares about what it sounds like. It's a super long story,
SPEAKER_00
00:55:15
but just to speed through a part of it, somewhere along the line, it became okay not just to listen back to music on like shitty computer desktop speakers, but it became okay to listen to it on shitty laptop speakers. And then it became okay to listen to it on a phone, like through a little tiny hole, or with earbuds, like, you know, and those, like the expectations have not been going up, they have been going sharply down, or at least the reality has been going sharply down. And I would say the same for not so much for recording technology. I think all of this is human. I don't think it's about fucking recording. Recording technology is fine. And whether it's digital or analog, there's all these great merits to both, but the human psychological part of it is the part that's gotten fucked because we've somehow conditioned ourselves to be okay with, you know, also think, you know, it goes from the analog source to the SD2 file to the wave file, 16 bit or whatever,
SPEAKER_00
00:56:22
you know, down to the MP3 and bubble, you know, we're slowly like going down into a lot of streaming, you're like really shitty, starts to come back up a little bit where it's a luxury to have like a little bit better than an MP3. All of these things are just downward spirals, but it's not, that's human. It's human expectation has gone down. Maybe humans have gotten more conditioned to hearing robots making music too, or the robot content of music, which is not, you can't blame the robots for it. You can blame, like I told you, there's the economic factor, right? I might be musically literate, so I'm not gonna have robots write my fucking music, but to somebody who isn't musically literate, it's perfectly viable for them to get the program, to have the robot provide the content, like the chord changes and that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00
00:57:23
Right. These things are all happening because of human decisions. It's not really because the technology is at fault, it's because humans are sort of at fault. We're letting all of this, all of our potentials go down the toilet. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01
00:57:42
but it also, you know, that technology that's enabled things to become distributed or decentralized, I'm using a lot of buzzwords here, but has, I guess it's just gone hand in hand with the idea that a scene or the place doesn't matter as much as it used to. And then in terms of like the kind of density of stuff happening in say San Francisco of the early 90s or late 70s, early 80s, it's hard to even conceive of something like that happening now. Even if San Francisco isn't the best example of like localism because it's a kind of an international type place It's hard to even imagine regionalism or localism being that kind of a Factor that it was for good or bad. I don't
SPEAKER_00
00:58:34
know. I hear you so loud up there No, it's very true. And I mean I can tell you without any equivocation like I have been
SPEAKER_00
00:58:44
And I've been so blessed, like I hate to use that word, but it's like we have, you know, I started here in Eureka with very close friends of mine who I'm still playing with now. But I had this, the time in San Francisco when such a scene did exist that I was able to touch down in. And then from there with Secret Chiefs, I've had my pick of like the greatest fucking musicians musicians from all over at least this country, you know, and I've been able to put together all of these ensembles from all, you know, New York and Seattle and San Francisco, mostly Oakland, LA a little bit. So I've been able to assemble my own sort of pseudo scene through the musicians and then go on tour and go all over the place and see, you know, audiences and musicians and that kind of thing all over the place, so it hasn't really like, being decentralized hasn't affected me negatively. However, I am now absolutely to the point where I don't want to make, I mean I'm not making, the records that I'm making now, the recordings that I'm making now are not these piecemeal affairs that they have been for the last like 15 years for 20 years. Because now I'm entering into a period where I actually have, I won't say the means, but I have the will to bring musicians together. And it's a little bit less expensive than it used to be to do that. So relying a little bit more on the actual human chemistry than on like, I got really good at music production, you know, in the sense of when the magic is missing from a live show, finding a way to sort of put it back in there through a lot of complicated shenanigans. You know what I mean? Yeah, but that takes that's the shit that takes years and years and years and years. But now I have like, so much music, so much written and so much recorded. There's there's a no time and be no will to wrap my hip arm around my head to bring a sandwich up to my face just to eat it. You
SPEAKER_00
01:01:00
know, I don't I don't want to do waste all of that time. Because there's no fucking reason to anymore. Actually, the technology is better. And I can bring people together and there can actually be human interaction again, which the music benefits from greatly. But yes, the arts is the worst fucking time for music universally. And you know, I just feel like I
SPEAKER_01
01:01:23
did the late arts is pretty particular
SPEAKER_00
01:01:26
late late arts. And I did my best to like make it through that period without financially collapsing. And then a little bit after that, you know, for me, the finance has just been getting worse and worse and worse and worse, but trying to keep the music up to a certain level. Um, thank God, like I've made it through that now. And I feel like I, I'm really glad that I withheld most of the, the music that's really close to me so that I can release it in the proper form now.
SPEAKER_00
01:01:56
Like, I'm sort of like, I made it through that fucking really, really bad period with some records that are still okay, you know, they didn't get ruined too badly by the processes of those times. But it could be better than that, that's for sure.
SPEAKER_01
01:02:15
Well here again is where the strange aspect of time passing is maybe a benefit in that, I don't know, we talked, when we talked in 2002, you played, I remember you playing on the car stereo, some stuff, I mean, you playing tapes, or maybe they were CDs, I can't
SPEAKER_00
01:02:35
remember. It tapes.
SPEAKER_01
01:02:36
Tapes, okay. But I'm quite sure that you played me music that hasn't come out. And I imagine it's still in progress. And only what's come out so far is just pieces of a puzzle.
SPEAKER_00
01:02:50
Yeah. And mostly variations, like the themes haven't come out yet, but the variations have come out.
SPEAKER_01
01:02:58
Right, and so this has mostly been about the past, but what can you tease as far as things that people can expect, or not expect, hope for, hope for?
SPEAKER_00
01:03:13
There's, I mean, I've been saying for a while now, there's like a whole bunch of metal stuff. That's the stuff I'm overdue on because I promised it a long time ago. But this is stuff that requires a choir. It still has production stuff that I have to get funding for basically. As that's been coming together, I've been finalizing a whole bunch of the other music, which I'm not going to say what it is, but it's not the metal. That's what I've been working on the most the last two years. And now I've realized that, no, what I'm really doing here is getting all of the releases up to a point where, I mean, to me, time is simultaneity. I don't care whether something is old or new. That has never fucking mattered to me. And the fact that I had like demo tapes from 2002, I mean, anybody can see,
SPEAKER_00
01:04:13
I actually documented pretty clearly, like, you know, the whole time I've been releasing music that was written 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it's, to me, it's like growing a vine, you know, having a wine aged the right amount before you really put it out there. And now it's sort of like, I have a lot of different vintages that are getting there. And the satellite bands are essentially the different categories of musical inspirations that have been growing, you know, on those vines all of those times. And I've just been picking little pieces of them and putting them out there
SPEAKER_00
01:04:51
because this phase of Secret Chiefs, meaning the last 20 years, has really just been about making it a real band touring. Like, to me, it's a proof of concept. Like, if you can actually do this music live and tour, we played like 750 fucking shows. It's not like a small amount of touring. And now I sort of put that aside a little bit. I mean, we probably will tour, but the focus in the last few years
SPEAKER_00
01:05:20
and certainly in the next few years is the releases, getting the record so that when I release something, then there's a reason to tour because there's a release and then I can do yet another release on top of that. So essentially just, you know, my goal now is once I release the first one, I won't stop releasing records until I'm fucking dead basically.
SPEAKER_01
01:05:50
Well, that's good. It's good to hear, because I sometimes would get this picture when I would sometimes go, let me see if there's any updates.
SPEAKER_01
01:05:58
and look at Web of Mimicry or something and say, I wonder if I could picture you, probably incorrectly, but you know, up in, you know, cause you don't live in the cabin anymore, but I could kind of picture you there spending forever on, because there's just infinite possibilities with this technology as opposed to, you know, if you have a four track, you just sometimes you just gotta be done with it. And how much of like the infinite can become a paralyzing
SPEAKER_01
01:06:27
or it might just be that there's just not much music you're working on.
SPEAKER_00
01:06:31
Yeah, there's been maybe a little bit of that on some of the record productions I've done, but as far as like recent times when I've just sort of taken releases off the table, it's for a number of reasons. The number one being the amount, the avalanche, just the sheer quantity of music, getting them from the skeletal point to putting some meat on their bones with recording to then refining them with performances and then finally mixing them. I know for sure that there needs to be a coherent plan for releasing and touring records. After touring so much, you know, there's a lot of squandered time or a lot of squandered effort that you can do when you when you tour without releases or if you release and don't tour. I just realized It's like, who am I, like, why should I feel pressure to put something out just to put something out? No, like, yeah, I have to build momentum again. And the way to do that is to actually just put my head down and finish all this fucking music.
SPEAKER_01
01:07:35
I can only imagine the sort of like visualizations or the flow charts or the diagrams that are kind of like, you're filling them in over time and there's a
SPEAKER_00
01:07:48
certain amount
SPEAKER_01
01:07:48
of patience that has to go with that, or yeah.
SPEAKER_00
01:07:52
Yeah, and in a way, it's like you're, you know, you start with one idea and you realize it isn't as good as it could be, but it's not like I'm sitting there tweaking arbitrarily. I there's a very healthy interplay between you'll have a plan, but then, you know, a better musical idea will come and it needs a place. You know, that's maybe that's the most important thing in way is instead of trying to force everything into this big overarching scheme, things come up in the meantime that demand attention, that demand space. So those also often create their own place in the scheme. So then the scheme has to be revised a little bit, but that's all a very natural process. To me, that's kind of the easy and the fun part. The flowcharts are there. You're right about that.
SPEAKER_00
01:08:46
But that, you know, I feel like that's just kind of personal creative stuff. It's nothing I have to bore anybody with.
SPEAKER_01
01:09:23
The whole idea of bands that are, you know, that they're virtual, it reminds me of two things that you connect to in different ways. One of them is Amarillo and Greg's way of doing these bands or putting, you know, the Code Rapist album has these fake albums on the back cover, you know, ask your record dealer for these. Or you look at the whole thing from the outside and you're like, wait, which of these are real people? Which of these aren't? And you can't really tell which is which. But then the other is, you know, Borges and Lim, who you suggested to me. And that style of writing, you know, instead of having one writer write eight novels, like he can take the idea for eight novels and write a review as if that existed. But that,
SPEAKER_00
01:10:12
I
SPEAKER_01
01:10:13
know, there's something there that I've always found really intriguing as a way for playing with these levels or layers.
SPEAKER_01
01:10:23
And so on.
SPEAKER_00
01:10:24
I'm so, so pleased to hear you say that. I yeah, and, but the other, like there, there is another, yet another aspect to it, which is, okay, they're virtual bands, but I also just told you that Secret Jesus played 750 fucking shows, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so there's a proof of concept here too. Like I'm not just dicking around making up phony bands. It's the same as what you were talking about before about the costume rock thing. Like, yeah, if you think I'm just like making up fake bands, some people see it that way and say, oh, you know, true. Just put it in sync. But it's not the same people. It's not even it's not the same process, even not album to album, even song to song. You every song has its own completely different process and a, you know, different set of recording, even studios that went into them. So everything is respected like musically. each idea has its integrity, that's respected the whole way through. And I dare say, meticulously crafted. So that those, the virtualness of those bands, it's essentially the ground floor of the idea. You know, it's really the basis of the whole, the whole musical expression the same way. The same way like a beam of light goes into a prism and comes out in six different colors. You know, each of those bands really is, you know, that color this color is this bucket band. And that's because of these very, very specific things that go along with it. Now, I can't tour six different bands with those kinds of extreme differences. That's a practical impossibility. But what's amazing is that I can find musicians that are malleable enough to be able to visit each of those kind of – pedagogy for how to understand some of the rhythms that are really strange. So the social part of it is that actually these bands become real, because I actually have to teach people how to do this stuff. And the net result, the end result at a
SPEAKER_00
01:12:50
live show of that is actual fucking live musicians, you know, in interpreting all of that stuff in their own musical way and harmonizing together with it. So it actually ended up ended up being the antithesis of a virtual thing, actually became a very like social entity, which is strange to me, but it's the truth.
SPEAKER_01
01:13:17
Well, the ideas become real. It's become like Talan, Akbar, Orvis, Tertius, or this thing is written about, and then somehow it sort of makes this incursion on reality where maybe it's one of the best metaphors for any of this kind of creativity is, you know, that there's an idea that then becomes real. And whether it's, you know, the very first San Francisco punk band, Crime, I mean, they made this single that really had no business existing, that they really didn't, you know, there's some funny stories about what the studio engineer thought when they're recording this thing in 1976, and putting out what is essentially a vanity pressing that now is worth hundreds of dollars. And then it comes full circle to, you know, Back to Basics, where, as everything does, it, you know, comes to Back to Basics. But,
SPEAKER_01
01:14:11
you know, Greg and Brandon telling me these stories about how they took copies of this LP and placed it in thrift stores. And so then you would have somebody around the country in some remote town. So somebody could come across this record that is this kind of imagined vanity pressing and then that fictional thing becomes this real thing and who knows what kind of ripple effect it's going to have in the same way that you know who knew what kind of ripple effect that this crime record would have and as far as getting people that you know people would talk about how they heard this record and it was so shitty it was like I realized I should I could do a band. Or another example would be these, like the first song on the Three Doctors record that Leaving Has Hurt that came from these tax write -off records that Greg wrote. The guy who wrote that song wanted to be a country and Western songwriter or artist. And he put this thing out there in some sense, even if it wasn't, it didn't come out in the way he expected, copies got pressed, left in a warehouse, but somebody found it. And then here, here
SPEAKER_01
01:15:26
I am, you know, I come across this record and it leads me down this pathway. And Russ Saul then, who wrote Leaving is Hurt, you know, as a country and Western artist would be a failure. But here we are talking about this because in a lot of ways of the obsession that was sort of set in motion by that weird record. And these ideas cause these ripple effects. So to call something virtual is not to any kind of knock on it because it's like the idea starts and becomes real and manifests itself. And that's a very mysterious thing.
SPEAKER_00
01:16:04
It is, and even at the same time, people can still feel ripped off in the sense that, you know, a band is supposed to be like a bunch of guys, maybe a girl or two, you know, guys and girls get together, have some ideas, you know, share ideas, live a little bit of life together, you know, put out a record. and, you know, the whole the whole romantic thing. And then they go on tour and, you know, like I'm robbing everybody of that because that's not what any of this is that with the Secret Chiefs is zero of that. It's it's a composer basically putting putting conceptual things together, but then leaving. Since it has to be live music, genuinely speaking, there's no other way to do that than to actually create a fucking band. And, you know, otherwise it's really, really, really, really boring, right? So that's, that's what I mean, like, about there being paradoxes everywhere on it, because I sort of like the idea of when people feel cheated and think that Secret Chiefs is just this bullshit band, because the satellite bands aren't really the bands that they appear
SPEAKER_00
01:17:21
to be. I just, there's something to make that really makes me happy. like I get fulfilled by that frustration for some reason it makes me happy because it it's like uh I don't know if it's like a devious thing on my part I don't think so I think what it is is I resent the idea that that these things are supposed to be a certain way and like when you go to a venue and the house sound guy says okay guitar drums bass vocal you know Like he's expecting roots rock, reggae, guitar, drum, bass, vocal. Something about frustrating that is so good. It's so good for the world. It's not just good for me, like getting off on defying it. It's really good to break these stupid fucking crusts off. You know, we end up with a gerontocracy until somebody breaks these crusts apart. And I think that band, the idea of a band, can be so much more flexible
SPEAKER_00
01:18:22
than what it gets backed into as a, I don't know, romanticized entity. Having been in real bands, I feel qualified to say this. You
SPEAKER_01
01:18:34
Real bands, yeah. No, there was a quote. It might've been in one of the chapters I sent you where Brandon said, you know, people talk about a concept band. Well, a band is sort of a concept from the get -go.
SPEAKER_00
01:18:44
Exactly, exactly. Couldn't say it better.
SPEAKER_01
01:18:47
But yeah, there was so much of that. A couple of different eras, but I'd say specifically in the early 90s, this really interrogating or playing with the idea of what a band is. And I think it was timely in the sense that people might get upset with this, but in a sense, that was kind of the end of the band era, because they're not, they're not as, it's not the kind of basic entity of, you know, the way music is done in the same way that writing letters is no more the way people communicate, you know.
SPEAKER_00
01:19:27
And virtuality takes all these weird forms, like today I was at a store and I saw, you like the cards people give each other like you know you're the best or you know fuck you girl this one had like a big uh like a lightning bolt on it and said you're a rock star and sometimes you hear this kind of shit you know or you hear people saying like you're a badass ass. And I'm like, Well, I've been thinking that, you know, people being bullies and all of that is, finally, it's gotten through that being bullied, you know, bullies are assholes, you don't want to give them all the rope. But for some reason, it's
SPEAKER_00
01:20:10
like really great to be a badass. And it's really great to be a rock star. You're a fucking rock star. Like, who's a rock star anymore? There's no fucking rock stars anywhere. What are they even talking about? That's a very strange one to me. Like, what is that ideal? That ideal is so far away from us now, like rock stars died a long, long, long, long time ago.
SPEAKER_01
01:20:35
But as soon as soon as Dave Grohl became a rock star, that the idea of rock star itself had become obsolete, maybe,
SPEAKER_00
01:20:45
as it should have, like, you know, I think,
SPEAKER_01
01:20:47
no offense to him, because if it hadn't been him, it would have been somebody equally unremarkable as such. I mean, he's a drummer, but...
SPEAKER_00
01:20:57
And I think a positive force in lots of things, you know? But yeah, like, probably Secret Chief's first record, we got it about right when it said, rock and roll is a thing that needs to die, like, 95, was it?
SPEAKER_01
01:21:12
Yeah, 96, yeah.
SPEAKER_00
01:21:14
Yeah, it's about about the moment that it started to become more evident, you know, but the thing of that whole sentiment comes from like, you know, rock star, what is what is all this? How can this be good?
SPEAKER_00
01:21:30
And I don't know, here we are 25 years later, and it's on a card like you're a fucking rock star. Yeah. Like the pep talk, you know, it's got this weird hollow pep talk thing behind it.
SPEAKER_01
01:21:44
Well, there's, you know, there's school of rock, and as much as I love seeing my nephews play, you know, getting into guitar and liking the same music that I listened to in high school, which is kind of weird, but the idea of a school of rock for kids, it's like, well, So there's got to be something else then. And who knows what it's going to look like or what it'll sound like.
SPEAKER_00
01:22:10
I mean, maybe is there a Gigi Allen School of Rock?
SPEAKER_01
01:22:15
See, I want them getting on that path. The one other thing I wanted to ask about, because this really would bring it completely full circle because I put that quotation from the Zaheer at the very front of the book. The Zaheer being one of Borges' quasi fictional stories that reads like nonfiction. I was stretching it a little bit because he talks about this idea of maybe a kind of a disgust or a sense of revolt at this coin, which you reminded me earlier, inadvertently says N .T. on it. Right. What the Zaheer meant to you, or whether the idea of something like another disc -like object, an LP, could be interpreted as being something like a Zaheer, this sort of thing that encapsulates this, as he says, what concatenation of causes and effects that I mean, it's probably overstating it to say that that one record led to this, but in a sense, I'm thinking, gosh, you know, in a sense, like half of my life, I've been thinking about this idea. I mean, I had some detours and times when I wasn't working on it, but I almost feel like I fell into this story the same way that some of his characters start investigating some phenomenon or something, and then they kind of fall into the story and become like a character, but I don't know what you saw in the Zaheer and what the impact was that had on you.
SPEAKER_00
01:24:07
The story, you mean?
SPEAKER_01
01:24:09
Yeah, what was your, what is your interpretation of the Zaheer and what it represents?
SPEAKER_00
01:24:16
Yeah, I mean, it's, I always go back to the, you know, to the Arabic, the thing between the Zahir and the Batini, it's the two faces of the same coin, I suppose, because Zahir being the outer, the apparent covering on an interiority that for some reason seems to be obscured, so the esoteric interior, the Batini, as distinct from the Zahir, the process of the unveiling or peeling the layers of the apparent back, like whether that's interpretation, I mean, that's what you would call a hermeneutic or an alchemy. It be, you know, burning surfaces away. That process, yeah, that ongoing process, everlasting process, perhaps, maybe there is no ending to it. Because there's always another surface, you there's always another, the next level down became apparent to you. Is that the ground of the whole question? You know, you're always burning these surfaces away.
SPEAKER_00
01:25:41
So I feel that, I don't know that Borges went to this point with the story, actually. But there's a third term because the first term in the Arabic thing, like the Zahiri, has been associated at least in some Shiite esotericism. has been associated with the sharia, the law, the most apparent part of the Islam jurisprudence and this kind of thing. And then the batini is associated with the esoterics, like the Sufis and this kind of thing called tarikat. It's like a path, it literally means a path. so like a walking a path from the exterior to the interior. But the third term is the Hakka path. And that's the truth, the big, like the fulfillment of everything, let's say. But it's so surprising. It's always so surprising what that is. You can never really get to the kernel of that other than when you see what the sages have to say about that it's always it's always about how you esotericists got so full of yourselves thinking that you were getting to the essences of things that you never really you didn't really get it until you realized that the law or the outer and most obvious part that you started with is the whole thing. Not that it's a paradox that led to nothing, but you had to go through the whole journey of seeing everything before you came back to that. And if you can't see that it's in the proper place, then there's something wrong with you.
SPEAKER_01
01:27:49
Well, this makes me feel better
SPEAKER_01
01:27:51
about the ending to the book, which I won't spoil, spoil, but let's just say I was, in lieu of a grand ending, there was an ending that was sort of, let's say in a sense, inconclusive, but I was also kind of mindful of the fact that I felt in some sense, and I don't know why, it's a completely unreasonable feeling, but that somehow I was going to, you know, through this path, through this particular era of music and personalities and characters, you find, you know, some kind of holy grail or there was going to be something. And it was kind of like when we talked back in 2005, we were talking about the unspeakable and sort of triangulating and the idea that, well, there's a reason these things are unspeakable, but you have to have something that you're kind of working with to try to get to it. And for me, it just so happened to be this odd world of music, you know, for someone else, it could be maybe something else that could play the same role. I don't want to make this book about like my quest for meaning or something like that, but less to say I was bouncing this idea off someone else and he had a very good reply that
SPEAKER_01
01:29:10
without having read any of, studied any of what you've studied almost sort of intuitively said something very similar in that. Yeah, it's the idea that you that you peel away the layers, but you never really get to that. I don't know, there's no way to say that doesn't sound cheesy, some kind of journey that didn't really have a destination.
SPEAKER_00
01:29:35
There's nothing wrong with it with the cheesiness of it, like think of it this way. Think of What is it, what is a historian that doesn't get obsessed with something right, they get obsessed with something and then they learn a bunch of things that are peripheral to the subject. If you get lost in all of those things that are peripheral to it, you become a competent historian, and you can teach people about different periods of history. If you're somebody who has an insight about something, it usually means that you're obsessed with something and you're going to keep going, keep going down that path. I feel like you're a person who is sufficiently obsessed so that insights become your trade, not the ability to recite what happened here, what happened there, but you know insights about the importance of or lack thereof of the things that you're seeing you know like I feel that you're you're a qualified commentator because of all of this obsession that you you've invested in this thing but you weren't right you know at the beginning no right
SPEAKER_01
01:30:47
well okay
SPEAKER_01
01:30:49
and and I've been very fortunate that really the insights I think come from from a lot of people rescuing me, when like you have tonight, I talk and I'm like, wait, I'm not sure I have a question. And they'll say, I think I see where you're going. And then they take it from there. And -
SPEAKER_00
01:31:06
One thing I will say on behalf of this whole, all the people that you've talked to is like, at least the ones that I've encountered, they are definitely, the word minch jumps in my mind all the time. Like there's so many minches, they're the best people I've ever known. So it's like, it makes sense. They saved my ass like every step of the way. And maybe that's part of the attraction or the allure here too, is you're not dealing with a bunch of jerks.
SPEAKER_01
01:31:35
Yeah, no, you compare the quality. I mean, that's a pretty direct way of saying it, of the people I've talked to in the course of doing this versus what I'd spent eight years in graduate school academia around some very high IQ people. And in terms of insight into the human condition or such, there's no comparison.
SPEAKER_01
01:32:04
And was kind of, it was at the end of graduate school when I was finishing up and just feeling really like I'd been taken for a ride, even if I took myself for that ride, that I felt like, you know, the way it crystallized in my mind was there's more wisdom in a Pop -O -Pies EP than there is in a whole shelf of these philosophy books. And still kind of, I still
SPEAKER_00
01:32:31
think it's true. I'm so with you.
SPEAKER_01
01:32:35
Even though, even if they're going to be, if people aren't gonna be quite as upset about the space I give to the Pop -O -Pies as they might be to the Three Doctors or how could you leave this band out? But
SPEAKER_00
01:32:46
it's probably going to get a lot of that
SPEAKER_01
01:32:48
stuff. It's definitely not a record guide. It's not a, you should listen to this record and this record and this record. It's really more, it's really an exploration of these ideas through a lot of really extreme, no, not extreme, but extreme in a sense, but really fully self -actualized, I guess, kind of.
SPEAKER_00
01:33:09
You've had your personal engagement with it, know, which I think is you shouldn't shortchange yourself and be like, no, I don't want to make this all about my, but it is, you know, it is your personal engagement with it, which is what I'm trying to tell you is a value because of how fucking obsessive you are.
SPEAKER_01
01:33:26
Well, it was, if nothing else, it was been a great excuse to talk to a lot of really interesting people. Thank you again to Trace Bruins for doing this interview. For all things Secret Chiefs and Trace Bruins related, go to webofmimicry .com and to learn more about the book, go to headpress .com or whocaresanyway .online