Feeding back: conversations with alternative guitarists from proto-punk to post-rock

402 Pages·2012·6.836 MB·English

by  Todd, David

MUSIC
“David Todd’s Feeding Back is essential reading. And his conversations
with alternative guitarists are unfailingly fascinating. His approach is
not axe-ist, which is to say, he focuses on the uses of the guitar as a
songwriting tool, and rarely slips into gear talk or other muso-musings.
His introductions to each conversation are extremely well-written, and
he comes prepared to every interview, in some cases knowing more about
the artist’s back catalog than the artist him- or herself. (Refreshingly,
Todd doesn’t confine his interviews to players of one gender.) Feeding
Back isn’t just for guitar aficionados; it’s for anyone who loves music.
This is the best rock book I’ve read in many, many years.”
—James Greer, musician and author of Guided by Voices: A Brief History
“This collection of guitarist stories is well worth it just for the Michio
Kurihara, J Mascis, Bob Mould, and Glenn Branca spiels. Love Lee
Ranaldo’s too, as well as the James Williamson and Brother Wayne
Kramer ones. Great job with everybody here, David, and thank you
much for giving Robert Quine the respect I think he big-time deserves.
Interesting reading for a bassman!”
—Mike Watt, the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Iggy and the Stooges
rom the proto-punk of the Stooges to the post-punk of Sonic
Youth, from the Krautrock of Neu! to the post-rock of Tortoise,
this book of conversations charts an alternative thread as it makes its
way through rock guitar from the late ’60s to the present.
teaches English at Otterbein University in Columbus, Ohio.
His nonfiction articles have appeared in the Villager, Downtown Express,
and Chelsea Now. His plays have been presented in New York, DC, Port-
land, Chicago, and other cities around the United States.
An A Cappella Book
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Feeding Back
Conversations with Alternative Guitarists
from Proto-Punk to Post-Rock
David Todd
An A Cappella Book
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Copyright © 2012 by David Todd
All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61374-059-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Feeding back : conversations with alternative guitarists from proto-punk to
post-rock / [interviewed by] David Todd.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61374-059-0
1. Guitarists—Interviews. 2. Rock musicians—Interviews. I. Todd, David, 1971–

ML399.C66 2012
787.87'1660922—dc23
                                    2012002144
Cover design: Jeffrey Scharf
Interior design: Jonathan Hahn
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
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“Question the heroic approach.”
—Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt
“Take the only tree that’s left and
stuff it up the hole in your culture.”
—Leonard Cohen
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Contents
Introduction: The QuIne MAChIne 1
1 . . . If You Dug It: LennY KAYe 17
2 The Individualist: RIChARD ThoMPson 33
3 Don’s secret: ZooT hoRn RoLLo (BILL hARKLeRoAD) 45
4 Doing the Work: WAYne KRAMeR 61
5 Riff Appeal: JAMes WILLIAMson 77
6 Forst exposure: MIChAeL RoTheR 95
7 Infinite Delay: RIChARD PInhAs 107
8 Love Theme from The Twilight Zone: ToM VeRLAIne 119
9 They say the neon Lights Are Bright on the Bowery:
CheeTAh ChRoMe 137
10 Gun, Guitar, Bullhorn: LYDIA LunCh 149
11 Meta Box: KeITh LeVene 163
12 Purloiner: RoWLAnD s. hoWARD 179
13 The shi(f)t: FReD FRITh 193
14 The shakespeare squadron: GLenn BRAnCA 205
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15 starting with Thunders: BoB MouLD 221
16 Infinity suitcase: Lee RAnALDo 237
17 The Believer: JohnnY MARR 249
18 Purple sparkle: J MAsCIs 263
19 Reverend spaceman: JAson PIeRCe 277
20 Furtive Gestures: DAVID PAJo 289
21 The Joy of Despair: KIM DeAL AnD KeLLeY DeAL 299
22 The Radiant Guitarist: John FRusCIAnTe 321
23 Psychedelic sound Freak: MIChIo KuRIhARA 335
24 Fennesz + not-Fennesz: ChRIsTIAn FennesZ 347
25 Black Wolf, White Wolf: Ben ChAsnY 363
Acknowledgments 380
Index 381
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Introduction
The Quine Machine
Robert Quine was born in 1942 in Akron, Ohio, into a middle-class family
and prospects of a straight life. He grew up on Link Wray and James Burton
and played guitar eight hours a day, yet by the mid-1960s he found himself
in a St. Louis law school “just out of inertia.” In 1969 he drifted farther west
to San Francisco, but instead of the local strychnine, it was the death-meth
of the Velvet Underground he sampled during their visits to town. “When I
first heard the V.U. . . . I thought it was the worst,” he told Perfect Sound For-
ever. Nonetheless, “I became a total fanatic.” After following the Velvets to
New York City, he suffered there for years writing tax law and being received
on the music scene “very condescendingly.” It wasn’t until 1975 that he met
a relative youngster named Richard Hell and fermented his strange mix of
Albert Ayler, Chuck Berry, and the Stooges in a group called the Voidoids.
Robert Quine didn’t look like a guitar hero—he looked like a deranged
Doonesbury character—and he didn’t play like one. “Quine’s fixed idea was
brutality,” his collaborator Jody Harris said in the oral history No Wave. But
Quine’s was a particularly deep brand of negativism that encompassed the
stranglebilly of the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation” and the severed nerves of
Lou Reed’s “Waves of Fear” and the noise-pop of Matthew Sweet’s “Girl-
friend,” to name but a few of his excursions. If one premise of this book is
that the alleged “alternative rock guitar tradition” can be encapsulated as
what funnels into bands like the Stooges and then funnels out of bands such
1
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2 Introduction
as Sonic Youth, Quine is at the center of the intervening pipeline. “From my
own selfish point of view, it was perfect for me,” he said of the Voidoids’ early
days at CBGB. “I happened to have all these influences that were suddenly
hip and fit into what was going on. By many people’s standards, my playing
is very primitive, but by punk standards, I’m a virtuoso.” Thus Quine, as
he was known even to his wife, was an anti-saint in a lineage that stretches
from the neon Beat jazz of the Magic Band to the gothic punk of the Birth-
day Party, from the Krautrock of Neu! to the un-rock of Public Image Ltd.
to the post-rock of Slint. Within the larger world we call alternative music,
a more specific tradition runs back and forth among these groups and their
guitar conceptualists, as evidenced by a series of connections inscribed in
invisible ink. The point to this book is to shine a black light on their infor-
mal but vital exchange.
But what filters into the Stooges? Out of Sonic Youth? And what else
does Quine have to do with that? With so many different ways of looking
at the big picture, you just have to start by throwing a dart somewhere. The
first lands on John Coltrane, just one notch away on this particular board
from John Cale. Along with other free-jazz wildings such as Ayler and
Archie Shepp, Coltrane and his counterpart Miles Davis represented music
as a high sonic art—that is, a virtuosity not for its own sake but matched
with ambitious ideas. As Miles famously put it, “The difference between a
fair musician and a good musician is that a good musician can play anything
he thinks. The difference between a good musician and a great musician
is what he thinks.” These alternative guitarists saw free jazz as a figurative
Carnegie Hall, but recognizing that they needed some other way to get
there besides practice, they dug their own subway tunnels. “I found that if
I played my best Chuck Berry solo as fast as I could, with as much veloc-
ity—if you just moved what he was doing over an inch—it started to turn
into those sheets of sound that Trane was playing,” Wayne Kramer of the
MC5 recalls herein. In true Warhol fashion, the art-punk guitarists probably
did a better job on the frames than on the paintings themselves, but even
with their shortcuts they achieved the dark magus potency of their heroes.
“That’s right, Iggy and the Stooges were every bit as good as Archie Shepp,”
Lester Bangs proclaimed in his 1979 article “Free Jazz/Punk Rock.” “And
John Coltrane could have played with the Velvet Underground.”
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The Quine Machine 3
The influence of the Velvet Underground on alternative music has been
well documented, as has the impact of other seminal bands such as the
New York Dolls. This book gathers plenty of the usual suspects, but another
part of its goal is to pick up where previous treatments of alternative rock
leave off. Looking at the Velvet Underground that way, one of their main
contributions to these guitarists was the link they presented, via John Cale
especially, to the minimalism of composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad,
Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Just as free jazz and wild punk converged as
shared noise-on-sound, so did Reich and the Ramones meet at the vanish-
ing point where all overtones become indistinguishable—again, respective
training be damned. This fusion led to the work of direct descendants such
as Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (basically New Music with rock gear)
and the next-level guys such as Sonic Youth (rock in just intonation), and
even trickled down to Bob Mould (and his “bag of dimes” sound). Cale
and Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music is perhaps the true prehistoric source
for all of this music, by virtue of being the first ensemble to cross serious
art with rock electrification. Also known as the Dream Syndicate, its low-
flying-plane drones echoed through the guitar of the Stooges’ Ron Asheton,
who rode them into his own shimmering trances. Different dronings leaked
into this scene from the folk music of Davy Graham and the ragas of Ravi
Shankar, just as different approaches to noise filtered in from improvisers
Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe. Still, it made karmic sense that it was John
Cale, sent by fate to produce the first Stooges album in 1969, who banged
out the famous one-note piano line on their repetitive classic “I Wanna Be
Your Dog.”
Cale also produced the debut album by the Patti Smith Group, whose
guitarist Lenny Kaye assesses how songs such as “I Wanna Be Your Dog” dif-
fer from garage rock, the genre he codified with the 1972 anthology Nuggets.
The garage aesthetic is another major strand in these guitarists’ DNA: the
songs were fun to play and reproducible with cheap gear, and as a whole the
movement composed a proto-DIY circuit to prefigure later undergrounds.
Almost as important, Nuggets helped hold down the fort during a lull period
within this lineage, that tenuous phase in the early 1970s when stadium
shows and prog rock drowned out the Dolls in the United States and the
Krautrock bands that were emerging in Germany. However, somewhere in
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